TWiT 1089: Robot Butt Crack - Anthropic Banned, But Winning

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Ian Thompson is here, Owen Thomas and Doc Rock will talk about Anthropic. It looks like the Trump administration's backing down on its ban of fable. We'll see. We'll also get some look at the financials of OpenAI. I got a little tip for you. It ain't good. And SpaceX's IPO, it's stratospheric, but how long can it stay up? That and a whole lot more coming up on TWiT.

[00:00:29] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT. This Week in Tech, Episode 1089, recorded Sunday, June 21st, 2026. Robot Butt Crack.

[00:00:56] It's time for TWiT. This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to one of the longest running shows in podcasting. And we have a fabulous panel ready for you from Aloha State in Hawaii. Mr. Oh, it says your real name on your Zoom thing. It's Doc Rock. Do you want me to say...

[00:01:22] I never use regular Zoom. I always use the Zoom that's built in the Ecamm. Today, I was just being brave. You're in regular Zoom. So, is it a secret what your real name is? I don't think so, but yeah, I never use it. You just prefer the branding. That's his government name. Your government. That's right. Your government name. That's what we call the government name. Your straw... This is... What is it? The straw man name. That is Owen Thomas, who is from the San Francisco Business Times. Hello, Owen.

[00:01:50] That is both his real and his government name. It is. To you. Yes. And soon to have his own United States government name, formerly of the UK, Ian Thompson. Hello, Ian. Yes. Hi there. How's it going? It's going great. Your citizenship is arriving in the mail. Well, I have yet to do my biometrics and have the final interview, but... Wait a minute. They collect... What do they collect of your biometrics? Fingerprints, eye scans, and a facial scan.

[00:02:20] Oh, I guess that's new... And then I've got to pass the American history test, which having gone through very... I've been doing my revision on this. It's like, I now am pretty much up to state on the US Constitution. More than probably any American citizen born here. I was going to say, you ask the standard American how many members of Congress there are, and you get a blank look in most cases. But, you know, one of those things. Now I know it. I know there's 538 electors, but some of those are...

[00:02:48] I don't know. 528. 535. 534. 535? That's massive. Yeah. They... But I mean, it's weird. Some of the questions are really weird. It's like, who wrote the Federalist Papers? 538. I have no idea. Many people did. 435. 435 from the House. 435 in the House. Yeah. That's why it's 535. It's 100 senators and 435. 3 for DC makes it 538. And that's right. That's the new change. Until DC gets statehood and maybe also Puerto Rico, which would be interesting.

[00:03:18] But yes, we shall see. Yes. Well, it's good to see all three of you. Welcome to the program. Two of us are wearing Aloha shirts. Surprisingly, not Doc Rock. It's pretty seasoned, bro. The Brit is, soon to be the US citizen, Ian Thompson. I'm actually wearing a Mexican Aloha shirt. I don't know what that... What you call that? Ah, well, I mean, I picked this up in Hawaii, which is where you've been recently. It's the real deal. Yeah. No, I have... When I was in Hawaii, I bought some nice Hawaiian shirts.

[00:03:47] But it looks like Owen and Doc are both fans of what we call in the United States, football. Football. Football. Oh, wow. Actually, we're really... I realize every four years I fall in love with soccer again. And then I forget all about it after the World Cup. It's like, okay, back to American football. I thought Ted Lasso would get more people understanding how dope the game is. But I think some people just think that's like a show.

[00:04:15] But no, I mean, it's a good thing. You're a play. You played. Yeah, I did play. I played all the way up until my knees quit. But I even tried to play in the old man league, but now my knees don't like it. But yeah, it's a fun sport. I think a lot of people think that it's about, oh, like what happens when nobody scores. I love when people say that. And I'm like, bro, there's so many games where there's lots of scoring. It really just depends on the tacticalness or whether you're saving players for the next game. This is a tournament. So there'll be games where you're definitely not trying to...

[00:04:45] I think Americans, we're so used to, because of football, we're so used to this kind of rigid progression of the game. Like you march down the field, then you march the other way, and then you march down the field. And soccer is much more fluid. It is a little bit more like basketball, but basketball is a lot more scoring. Yeah. We know what it is, too. People forget about the field goal fests, right? Dude, we have field goal fests every Sunday. What's field goal fests?

[00:05:11] Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and the whole total score of the game is six to nine. It's all field goals. Don't act like those games don't happen. Oh, in football. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, especially in the NFC. That's quite... Well, we hate those games, by the way. 100%. We hate those games. Because they remind us of soccer. No, I mean, I always love the Simpsons episode where they go to the soccer game, and it's like, back to so-and-so, back to so-and-so, back to so-and-so, and eventually a riot breaks out. And that was... That's one of my favorite episodes.

[00:05:40] It's hard not to fall in love with soccer, though, when you're watching the World Cup. It really is exciting. It's the fans, bro. You have to go see a real game. You got to see a real game live. And everyone must see a game in Japan. I swear, the Japanese clean their stadium up after each match, which is fantastic. Well, they're taught that in school. I've got to say... In school, the kids, school kids don't have... They don't have janitors. The school kids clean the school. Which I thought was brilliant. They're lunch ladies, Leo. The school kids feed each other. That's when you first learn how to be a communal person.

[00:06:09] So smart. Yeah. Also, shout out to the Tartan Army because they have won hearts and minds in Boston. I mean, seriously, if you're wearing a kilt in Boston at the moment, you're probably not buying your first pint. They didn't have a great game, but nevertheless, you got to love those guys. And you're Scott. So yeah. And I have Scottish ancestry. I mean, I knew when...

[00:06:32] I knew it was going to be a good one when there was a direct flight from Glasgow to Boston full of fans and they ran out of beer midway across the Atlantic. Of course! It was just like... That was so good. What fun. And also, all credit to the Scots fan who was interviewed by Boston TV and it's like, yeah, well, we drank the bar dry. There was nothing left but Bud Light. We're not going to drink that. Oh no. Very nice. Well, anyway, good luck to every country.

[00:07:02] It's hard not to root for them all. And I really root for the underdogs. It's really fun. Yeah. When you see Court de Voix and you know... I was rooting for them all the way, man. I really was. Same with... Oh my God, my brain just went... Cape Verde, right? Yeah. When they had their draw, that was just incredible. So good. Watching people get their first goal in their nation's history kind of stuff. You know? That's amazing. I just love that. DR Congo. Or some dude on the thing said Dr Congo. Dr Congo. Right.

[00:07:31] DR Rock says Dr Congo. The bars in San Francisco are just going World Cup crazy. Oh yeah. And you know, the games are all happening between 12 and 9 PM. When the World Cup was in... I think it was in Japan and South Korea. Oh, it's not good. It was terrible hours for the bars. Now it's perfect. Yeah. And yeah, it's... And there is something about soccer that it's much better when you're watching with a group. Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yes.

[00:07:58] So they're putting up screens, you know. We've got the, of course, the parklets. Downtown Petaluma is going to have a screen up for the US game this Thursday. So... Oh yeah. People are saying that if the US has a good run, then it's going to be really good for... It's going to be crazy. Oh, 100%. Tourism spending. The country road at the end of beating the Aussies, like, was legit, as we say in Hawaii,

[00:08:27] a chicken skin moment. Like, you know what? I'm one of those people, I like that song, but I don't like the song the way a lot of people like that song. My other half loves John Denver. But it's something about when that song played and we just won, I was like, people, like, this is what I watch every Sunday, Saturday and Sunday, right? And just listening to that whole entire stadium sing together. We don't even do that in regular footy. You know, like, sorry, football. We don't do that. We don't have that thing where the team chants.

[00:08:54] And that's what I like about the game is, you know, when the whole stadium is singing, I'm going to say this is going to hurt my feelings as a Manchester United fan. When you hear those idiots singing, you'll never walk alone and the whole thing is echoing through or you hear the Hey Jude or you hear, you know, every team has their song, right? For us is, oh, my brain just went dumb. I've been, glory, glory, man, United. When you hear that sound, it's just, oh my God. Glory, glory, man. You know, I hate it. It's incredible, bro. That stuff makes your skin like get the goosebumps.

[00:09:24] And so it was really neat to see that. And they even played it today in a non-US game in Atlanta. They played the country road and the whole stadium is singing it. They're singing like our song. It's kind of hysterical. That's hysterical. Well, anyway, welcome to this week in World Cup. We actually have other topics, but we thought we'd get the soccer in first, because it's going to be AI all the way down. I'm sorry to say, and I know some of you don't want to hear anything more about AI, but boy, it seems like there's always a huge story.

[00:09:53] The big story of last week was the Trump administration banning Anthropics new very strong model Fable, which was a version of the mythos model. It said no one can have because it's so good that it can find flaws in software that no one else found. And this would be devastating if it got into the hands of bad guys before it got the hands of good guys.

[00:10:17] Anthropics released essentially mythos with a number of protections to keep people from using it for AI research. Interestingly, maybe they didn't want any competition. Bioweapons research and cybersecurity research. And it was pretty good, but apparently an Amazon research team was able to do something they considered a jailbreak. They gave it some flawed software, some intentionally, some not. It found the bugs.

[00:10:47] And now at that point, it's supposed to stop. They merely said, fix this software. I can't fix the code. I think was the three things that fix this code. Yeah. Katie was or saw the paper and went through it. And she's just, it's just like, this is not, you know, a threat to national security at all. So we suspect there's much more to this. The US government. Well, let me tell you what Mike Masnick at TechDirt says. So fix this code. At that point, Fable said, oh yeah, well I can do that.

[00:11:17] And it not, it not only found the flaws, patched them. It, and this is the thing that's deadly. It wrote a test to check to see if the patch worked. Now the test can check to see if the patch worked, but it also can be used on an unpatched piece of software to break it. And Amazon's research team said, well, this is problematic because it's not supposed to do that. Katie, now they sent this to Anthropic.

[00:11:46] Anthropic sent it to Katie Masuris, who is a very well-known security researcher. Basically invented the bug bounty. She set it up at Microsoft. I mean, she convinced Microsoft and the Pentagon to actually start bug bounty programs rather than threatening to jail people that pointed out problems in their code. However, Mike Masnick says she is closely associated with Chris Krebs.

[00:12:10] You may remember, certainly the president does, six years ago, Chris Krebs, who was at the time the director of CISA in the United States government, said the election of 2020 was free and fair. In fact, I think he said it was the most fair election in our history. The president took umbrage because as you know, the big lie is that it wasn't. And fired Krebs has since, by the way, gone after him. He withdrew his global entry. They've been investigated. The DOJ has been investigating him.

[00:12:39] The usual litany of ways that he can be harassed by the federal government. And Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt says it was Missouri's association with Chris Krebs that convinced the president that Anthropic should be shut down. He didn't like it that what he considered a democratic radical, a radical Democrat, as he calls him, was involved in this.

[00:13:04] I don't know if that's the case, but something else happened because at the G7 summit, Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic went to the G7, talked with Trump and must have offered him something. My theory is he offered him 10% of the Anthropic IPO, which is what OpenAI has already done. Him, not really, but the U.S. government, 10% of the IPO. Something or perhaps, I don't know, something.

[00:13:33] Maybe the Pentagon, who continues to use, by the way, Anthropic models and in fact may have access to Mythos, we think. Some think. In any event, in an interview with Axios a couple of days ago, he said, well, I don't think Anthropic is a national security threat anymore. Something happened. Now, he hasn't, they haven't backed down on the banning.

[00:14:00] I think that I, I was a little disappointed that the banning got so little coverage. We covered it, of course. I feel like it's a bad precedent for the U.S. government to ban an American company, American product. I don't even think it's legal, but to ban an American product. They banned it for use from foreign nationals, but the problem is Anthropic doesn't know your citizenship status. So the only way they can do that effectively is to ban it for air, is to block it for everybody, which they did.

[00:14:28] That is probably illegal as a Commerce Department order. But it's, it's, I liken it to if, if Trump decided, you know, that iPhone is really security risk for us all because it's made in China. Let's ban the iPhone. But Trump, I mean, we good. Huh? I say put Trump phone, there's a phone, there's a phone you can trust.

[00:14:53] So I think it's a real big overreach for a federal, for the federal government without any, they didn't consult Congress. They didn't consult anybody just on a whim to ban an American product. It also causes huge issues because immediately people turned to, I turned to a Chinese model, which is quite good. Well, I mean, we've seen this before with encryption though. I mean, it's exactly the same thing. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:19] Which led to one security researcher actually getting code tattooed on his chest, which would have made him a illegal weapon. There also was a t-shirt, which, because of the First Amendment was able to cross the border, even though it was regarded as munition and blocked. That ban didn't end well for the United States. No. They had to withdraw it. They told Mozilla, for instance, well, you can have 128-bit encryption in the United States, but you can only have 42-bit encryption in the rest of the world. It just didn't work.

[00:15:49] No. You have to wonder how... Prohibition never works. You have to wonder how much of this is getting ginned up by OpenAI. Well, there's a good question. Yeah. Yes. Who benefits? Cui Bono. I was thinking the same thing, Owen, and I was hoping somebody had good thoughts because I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but it always felt like that, you know? The chief global affairs officer of OpenAI is Chris Lehane.

[00:16:10] Chris Lehane was the policy guy at Airbnb who masterminded all of those campaigns to keep, you know, these short-term home rentals legal in the hometown of San Francisco and elsewhere. This guy's a mastermind. Don't underestimate him. Anthropic needs to staff the F up in Washington, D.C. Yeah.

[00:16:33] They need to do what Iran reportedly did, which is hire psychologists to talk with the president because you play him. Clearly, like, you know... And they did, I think, because it worked. Bro, if they named the model Trump 7, we're good. We're back on. It's so dumb. But I'm not even trying to be facetious. The Donald J. Trump. I swear to you, if they named the model Donald J. Trump instead of Mitchel's... Maybe that's what they're gonna do. Wait, wait, wait. I'm a marketer. Stable Genius 2.0. Chat DJT.

[00:17:03] Ooh. Bro. Well, what OpenAI has done, besides, you know, their president, Greg Brockman, donated 50, was it 25 or $50 million to MAGA, the Trump's PAC. They have said, we're gonna give 10% of the company when we go public, we're gonna give that to the federal government for its, whatever, sovereign wealth fund. So OpenAI has absolutely...

[00:17:28] And remember, at the very beginning of Trump's presidency, they announced that, what was it, $500 billion... I forgot the name of it, because it ever happened, Stargate AI plan with Larry Ellison and others. And Sam Altman went to the inaugural, he stood next to President Trump announcing Stargate and this huge investment in the United States. They played the game. So, yeah, for sure.

[00:17:56] But interestingly, OpenAI is rumored to have the next version of ChatGPT, I guess 5.6, that is equivalent in capability to Fable. And actually, as a number of people point out, Alex Stamos was on our show on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. He created a freefable.org website, which is a list of... It was an email, open letter, I should say.

[00:18:23] Probably is an email, but it was an open letter to Secretary Lutnik and the Cyber Director for National Cyber Security, Cairncross, saying, every AI can do what Mythos does. Mythos is not uniquely good at this. There are huge risks to the United States. It will stymie our AI development. It is not the way to do this. And man, the signatories to this are huge names.

[00:18:53] I don't think this was persuasive. But what Alex told us is this is ridiculous. This isn't good for us. This isn't good for America. Well, apparently, Dario Amadei said the right things in, you know... Somehow. Yeah, at the G7. We don't know what he said. You know, like personal, you know, there is a role, regardless of who the president is for, you know, kind of... Bobby.

[00:19:17] Yeah, like, you know, especially for the CEO to be kind of the face of the company. Now, you know, the question is whether Amadei, you know, was this approach kind of over-intellectual? Like, Anthropic was founded basically as an answer to internal concerns among open AI researchers about this kind of issue, this safety. That's a whole other way of putting it, yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:47] So, they tend to be true believers and they tend to think that, like, we are so scrupulous about safety that our products, you know, must be safe. Because we're the good guys. Well, how much of this did he bring on himself by the announcement that this mythos was too good to be released to the public? I mean, he kind of set this all up, didn't he?

[00:20:12] Well, the funny thing is, Fable, it has skeletons of mythos, but it wasn't mythos yet. It was not clear. It wasn't even fair to call it mythos light. A lot of people are like, oh, it's mythos light. I was like, no, there's still things about it that they completely turned off. I don't think we know that, Doc. I think a lot of people think it's mythos with those restrictions, with the classifier on it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, with the orchestrator on it. Yeah.

[00:20:40] And it was weird, weird things where, again, I go back to, dude, we tried to do the same thing. This is a weird connection, but we tried prohibition with alcohol. It doesn't work. We tried prohibition way, way back with, you know, like smashing before you get married. Never worked. We tried, you know, the same thing with quote unquote, the war on drugs. We've spent billions and billions and trillions of dollars on the war on drugs. Bro, more people are twisted now than ever before. And a lot of it from the actual, you know, pharma company.

[00:21:10] So like this prohibition thing never, ever, ever works. And how is it that nobody in charge has figured out everything we've ever tried to stop doesn't work. And it only leads to doing illegal stuff, which ends up costing us more money. I have another, I do have another theory. I wonder what you guys think. If you look at the polls, the American public hates AI. Yeah.

[00:21:32] And I'm wondering if Trump's thinking this isn't, remember his number one job from his point of view at this point is to survive November. And he's not on the ballot, but if Congress swings to the other party, he could be in trouble. But AI is also spending big. I mean, and they are spending big. Yeah. But look at the polls, right? You were talking about a poll. Oh, yeah.

[00:22:00] That said that something like 61% of people didn't want AI in any of their products. Yeah. 16% said that they actually thought it was helpful. 16 out of 100. 16 out of 100. Yeah. Out of 100. Yeah. That's all there is. 71% of Americans surveyed said no data centers near me, buddy. Oh, well, I mean, the whole data center thing is fascinating. College graduates are booing at commencement speeches. You saw it. He says AI.

[00:22:31] Yeah. Eric Schmidt looked absolutely gobsmacked that he was getting booed at a commencement stage. It was a glorious thing to watch. So maybe this is actually Trump putting his finger to the wind and saying, you know, it wouldn't be, it would be a pretty popular thing to ban AI. That's not where he puts his finger, but. Now, now. It's, you know what? Here's the funny thing about it. I don't know what you're talking about. The data center situation has been so overplayed.

[00:23:01] And I'm familiar with one of the Green Brothers. I'm going to say Hank. Hank did on his science channel, did like a deep dive on like really how much water and stuff is actually used and how much electricity is actually used. And it's way overplayed by people who never really dug into it. So I think a whole lot of that has to do with a scare that's not necessarily real, but also. I completely agree. If you look at the use of water of golf courses. Thank you. I live in Hawaii. Trust me. Yeah.

[00:23:28] By the way, most, you know, some data centers recirculate their water. Some don't. They use evaporative cooling. But, but it's all of Meta's for instance, data centers use recirculated water. So the water is not even, it's B it's not even being dis, but if on a golf course, it's been sprayed and it's gone. That's the one that gets everybody in because it's the easiest to kind of sort of understand if you don't understand, right? You don't have to know nothing about tank. You don't have to be a nerd. All you can do is say uses up all the drinking water.

[00:23:58] That started it. And then it went to, oh, it's all electricity. Then that's legit though. Right? Cause electric bills are going. But how they got all the young people pissed off. This is how they got all the young people pissed off. When the straight or whore moves closed and some of the other things that was going down with terrors clothes and chips that we were buying for memory chips for our gaming computers were 80 bucks are now four or 500 bucks. Okay. Now you get all the young people pissed off and they didn't need to know anything else.

[00:24:27] They didn't study anything else. They didn't dig any deeper is if I want to build a gaming machine or I want to buy a console or I want to do some of the cool stuff. I can't do it now because that it's cost prohibitive already. Graphic cards were high in the first place because of mining, but now graphic cards went really, really crazy. And the only people that were winning this battle was Apple and now they can't even win anymore cause they got to raise prices. Not just GPUs, but memory, right? Memory is the one I was talking about. I was talking about memory as the first one. That's the first one that pissed everybody off.

[00:24:56] I mean, look at the prices for, for example, you know, removable storage. They're through the roof. You know, it's five times what you would have paid a year, you know, a year and a half ago. Not even a year. A month or two ago, Western Digital said we've sold every hard drive we can make through the rest of the, through the end of the year. There you go. Yeah. This is Benito, but isn't that data center stuff though? Isn't that because of data centers that they're buying up all the memories? No, that's what we're saying. Okay. No, that's what we're saying. But I thought that was defining the data centers. People are pissed off. Yeah. Okay.

[00:25:23] When you talk to the public, they're worried about the electricity and the noise and all you're going to catch cancer, a bunch of other stuff that, you know, hasn't necessarily been proven. So they're fearing them there. But the reality is like, I bought a 20 terabyte hard drive in December for $289. I had to buy a second version a little bit ago and it was 700 bucks for the exact same model number. Nothing changed on that drive. All right. Probably even manufactured at the same time. So we have some good reasons and add to that, that all those college graduates are going, where's the job going to? Oh yeah.

[00:25:53] That's what you do. Learn how to do AI. People are terrified, understandably. By the way, Apple is starting to beat the drum. I, for a long time we said, well, why isn't Apple, you know, raising its prices? Well, Tim Cook gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. This is the beginning of what I think will be a campaign now through September saying Apple will have to raise its prices. Soaring costs make a price increase unavoidable. That's Apple prepare.

[00:26:21] You know, they, this is, they're preparing the way, you know, they're, they're saying, okay, okay, okay. Because coming in September, they're going to be some big price increases on the number one consumer electronics product, the iPhone. Mm-hmm. And so, okay. So we see why the tide has turned against AI is so maybe the president is just saying, Hey, I'm going to jump on this bandwagon. Nobody likes AI. It's possible. You started with the tariffs and then you closed the Strait of Hormuz.

[00:26:50] I mean like a large portion of it is his fault. I know, but don't, yeah, don't. Right. But if he can deflect the blame and make Silicon Valley the bill. Exactly. And we are so ready to blame big tech, aren't we? I mean, we're primed. Oh yeah. Cause that's an easier battle. It's an easier battle. We've been primed for a long time to blame big tech for everything. And the funny thing is, what are you complaining about big tech on? Not a teletype, not a wise 2020 terminal.

[00:27:17] Well, I think our audience, I would hope our audience, we're technology fans. I think. Yeah. I mean, I admit there are definitely problems with technology. It is not earth friendly. Data centers aren't good for climate change, especially if you use natural gas to power them as Elon Musk does. Oh, illegally as well. Yes. Oh, well, the department of justice is saying, you know what? We use Grok for our war.

[00:27:47] You, so if you can't, Oh, they're giving him a pass on that. Well, they went to the, they went to the court. Now there's a lawsuit going on saying that this is a violation of the environmental rules. And the DOJ says, yeah, but we're going to your honor. You should give him a pass because we need it. Oh, for goodness sake. Well, it happens to one rule, everyone under one rule, but no, that's another story. We're in an interesting world that we've created for ourselves. I don't know what, okay.

[00:28:15] So underwater data center, like completely underwater. Google, like Google was doing those. Remember? Microsoft did it four years ago. Data centers in space. That's one of the reasons. And SpaceX went off at such a huge value and he became a trillionaires because of this progress, this promise of data centers in space. You see, I mean, Microsoft tried the underwater data center thing off the Shetland Isles in Scotland. Yep. About four years ago. Yep.

[00:28:44] And yes, it can work, but actually getting to upgrade it, you've got to pull the whole thing out of the water in the first place. You get limpets and barnacles all over it, clogging up cooling vents. It's possible. It's kind of like the SpaceX thing. It's technically possible to put a data center into space, but nobody's got the technology to do it yet. And it's at least five to 10 years away. Plus you've got to loft the damn thing and you've got to have the bandwidth to send stuff backwards and forwards.

[00:29:13] And this is why the whole SpaceX IPO, I read their S1 and it makes WeWork look optimistic when it came to that thing. The interesting thing to me about SpaceX is they're obviously a big government contractor. Yeah. And clearly they know how to kind of whisper in Washington. They're kind of a wild card.

[00:29:36] Their AI revenue, you know, like the fact that SpaceX is in the AI business is just basically a recent accident of Elon Musk smashing some of his businesses together. X, XAI and SpaceX have all gotten rolled up and... Well, get ready because, according to the New York Times, Musk's next move may be to merge SpaceX and Tesla.

[00:30:02] And that's largely about chips because Tesla is building a, I think it's called a TerraFab in Austin. Yeah. So that's, you know, the need for silicon design is kind of driving that consolidation. And this, by the way, is one of the reasons he moved all his businesses to Texas. They were in Delaware. Delaware would have probably prohibited that.

[00:30:29] He also was pissed off because the Delaware court ruled that he shouldn't be getting a trillion dollar pay package. Well, that's, you know, that's the technical headquarters, but I want to point out XAI is actually headquartered in Palo Alto. And SpaceX in its S1 said that was because of the need for, you know, basically strategic recruiting. That's where the AI engineers are.

[00:30:55] And SpaceX just plunked down $60 billion on a San Francisco company called Cursor. By the way, that tanked the SpaceX stock, which I thought was interesting. People didn't like that? Especially since it was a known thing. Right. It was already in. Yeah. It should have been baked in. I think that may have just been a pullback from, you know, a really kind of. What started to think about what they were buying.

[00:31:24] And if anything, SpaceX got a better deal, right? Because the price was fixed at $60 billion before the IPO. It was all stock. The stock went up, which means SpaceX shareholders paid less as a percentage. They were less diluted. It was funny money. By pure virtue of the stock going up. Well, by moving to Texas, Texas apparently says it's very difficult for unhappy investors to challenge management decisions according to the Times.

[00:31:53] So moving to Texas was kind of part of all of this mushing together of all of his companies. Well, I mean, fixing, getting Tesla to join SpaceX. I mean, Tesla is, if it weren't for tariffs, Tesla would be a money losing business because they produce very expensive, poorly built electric cars. And the Chinese can do the same for 40, 50 percent of the cost. You know, if you look at what BYD is. I would say all American car makers are protected by that ban. Yeah.

[00:32:23] I would point out. Right? It's not tariffs. It's an actual ban on Chinese cars. Yeah. I mean, a friend of mine writes about electric cars for his living. And he's been testing some of these Chinese cars and they are way ahead of what we've got here. Yeah. You know, I just came back from the UK and I saw some first, you know, up close and personal for the first time. And I'm like, you know, these are way better than what we hear about on the news here. There is a lot of BYD. I was going to say something else.

[00:32:51] There's a lot of BYD cars cruising around in the UK. And I was in London and Birmingham and I was quite impressed by some of them. I was like, yo, this is actually a pretty decent car. So when you go to the Asda or the Tesco. Yeah, I was going to say Tesco. Yeah. When you go to Tesco or Asda and you see like a whole bunch of them in parking lot. So it's not even like they're not popular either. Right? That and man, we don't have BMW mini wagons here. You guys still have. I love them. I love BMW station wagons and we don't have them here. All right.

[00:33:21] I want to take a break. I am curious though, what you all think about the notion that, and what it would mean if the American people said no more AI, we don't like big tech, no more big tech, no more AI. Then what would happen? It would happen. Or would business interests say, no, sorry, we need it. We're going to do it. Yeah. I'll accelerate my house purchase in Japan. That's what happens. That is the fastest way to rate.

[00:33:48] I mean, we've already been capped by, uh, dubifying education and trying to control things that we got no business controlling. That's already making us take our eye off the ball long enough to let somebody run past us. Turning off AI completely on some like holier than Dow thing. I think that would totally, we'd be done. We'd, we'd, we'd be now the word we're not supposed to use anymore as far as world rankings go. In the pits? Yeah. I was doing the first, second and third.

[00:34:20] What do you, what do you, what do you think Ian? Uh, do we need AI? Um, we have to have it. It's as simple as that. Um, but it needs to be used responsibly. Uh, at the moment we're in the hype cycle phase where companies are loving AI because that's what they've been told to think. What we need is responsible use of AI and above all responsible use by employers and by employees. It's been used as an excuse to basically downsize large numbers of people.

[00:34:49] And, um, excuse is the right word because that's not the only reason they're being fired. Right. Yeah. Well, no, cause people overhired in the, in the, in the lockdown period, but it's, it's, it's a good excuse, but it's about responsible use of it. And it's about sensible use of it. You know, I completely agree. It needs to be regulated in some way. I mean, San Francisco is a AI capital of the world needs AI as a, an economic driver right now. Yeah.

[00:35:17] House prices aren't going to lose, lose value by themselves, but no, it's, um, I can understand the pushback against big tech and AI. I really can't. Um, yeah, because the whole thing has been mismanaged, you know, it's like AI has been hailed as this golden child, which is going to lift us out and solve world cancer and the rest of it. And it's not there yet. It's not even close to being there yet. But it's being used as an excuse for all kinds of things.

[00:35:41] And I've got to say, a friend of mine is a teacher and she's really shocked by how young people are adopting this and just trusting it. You know, it's, they just, they will feed their homework assignments into Claude and get complete garbage back and just submit it without checking. You know, it needs to be used responsibly. That's a kind of laziness, isn't it? Yeah.

[00:36:32] Yeah. I've got to say, I'm thinking about how I feel. Same thing with education. If you let Claude do your writing for you, it's so tempting just not to do any thinking at all. And for most of us writing, the reason you learn to write is it's a process of learning to think. Yes. And you'll never learn to think. And that's what worries me about it. I mean, I've seen, that's not a good outcome.

[00:36:56] I've seen, we're already seeing in journalism, for example, public, when ChatGPT first came out, I looked at it and I thought every publisher on the planet is going to be watching this and going, at last, we can get rid of those pesky journalists.

[00:37:11] And the amount of slop that's generated by that and not even, you know, for example, the largest local newspaper chain in the UK reached one of their journalists put out 110 articles in a single day by using AI. And you're just like, this is insanity. It really is. Well, the good news is most people will read it through AI. So there really is, it's a close loop. AI talking to each other.

[00:37:39] It's like the old Siri Alexa memes when we first got those, you know, like, hey Siri, hey Alexa. Yeah. They're talking to each other. I'm talking to you. Yeah. So, you know, I'm an AI fanatic. I love AI. I use it in every way, but I think you're exactly right that we, Ian, we need to think about how we're using it. And use it responsibly. Yeah. I do worry about the environmental impact of it too. That's another, that's a. You, you nailed, you nailed a couple of things.

[00:38:06] And here's, here's the, the two things I think about a lot. Cause I really do have these processes. Number one, I'm like you, I use a lot all the time. I absolutely love it. I'm having fun, trying things. I, you know, written a couple of apps that I'm playing around with, but I still do morning pages every morning because I learned that in college. Right? So I still got my book out. I do my three pages. I write by hand all the time, but I also put on my headphones and I do my, you know, 7,500 steps. I'm walking the block and I'm having a conversation back and forth with Claude.

[00:38:36] Right? And I have it synthesized all of those raw brain dumpy thoughts and it puts it into like a set of notes where it tags everything reminds me of priorities because as ADHD person, I can have a straight line conversation. I just don't, it's really useful if you have ADHD. A hundred percent. So it's saving my bacon. It's reminding me of things that I need to do. Like the other day it was like, Hey, you know, I have, I know that you haven't talked about picking up your prescription in a little bit. Are you do? And I was like, Oh yeah, it turns out I got four pills left.

[00:39:05] I might as well go get that done. You know? So like it's, it does helpful, but I still write every day with fountain pen in my book, like, you know, to process that muscle. But here's one thing that I think about when it comes to the environmental thing. If we put a bunch of agents on their actual papers and less of the people feelings and have it help us develop better plans to try to do some things.

[00:39:31] I think it can even help us fix some of the things that we're doing environmentally. Like, I think that it can help us figure out maybe what we can do with some of these crops that are, you know, overall better or for here it's we're losing whole size of mountains because we have so much rain recently. I mean, we're talking 800 year old trees just dropping in the middle of Waikiki. Oh, I know. And it's like, what knowledge will we have? Should we change the grass around this tree in order to shore up the thing?

[00:39:59] So when it does get super wet, this grass absorbs a lot of water and then they will dry by the sun because we're sunny here every day. They don't have to worry about, you know, 800 year old, you know, 4000 pound tree dropping in the middle of Waikiki. But couldn't you ask a botanist that? I mean, would AI give you a better answer? We have those botanists that trees still fell. So sometimes I feel like, you know, like companies will invest in something right now because it's labeled as AI rather than.

[00:40:26] Yeah, this is look at all birds, which is now. Now smart bird. Smart bird. It was a slipper company. They decided that they're going to become an AI data center company. They they and their stock went through the roof. They're smart birds briefly. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's a perfect example. Just label it with AI and everybody will be happy. I mean, the thing is, we know how to do this stuff.

[00:40:51] It's whether there's the will to do it and sticking AI in front of it might drive it forward. But we know how how to deal with ecology up to a point. It's just getting the political and social and financial will to actually get it done. I'm gonna take a break. We have not answered that question definitively, but I guess I will. That'd be a lot to expect on it. On a pot. We solved it today.

[00:41:22] It's really it's matches. I think this is fine. We're gonna this the next few weeks will be interested. We'll be telling. I wonder what's going to happen with fable. I have a feeling this week we'll hear something. And I wonder how the American people are going to deal with this, you know, the threat of AI. It's but I don't think there is an answer right now. Anyway, it's unpredictable. I wouldn't place a bet on Polymarket if I were you at this point.

[00:41:48] Oh, well, somebody lost a million on Polymarket win the World Cup because they bet that Spain would beat Cape Verde. And it was a zero score draw. It was a tie. So, yeah. And so, yeah, so that's severely out of pocket. Wow. Damn, that's terrible. Hey, hey, you know what? These companies, these casinos, they don't get built by giving you money. It doesn't work that way. Unless they're owned by the former, by the president.

[00:42:17] But yeah, there are some people who can make a casino go bankrupt. I wonder how much the person has a special skills. A thousand on the draw or yeah. I wonder how much, who put a thousand on the draw? Who put the money on the draw? How much did they make? I have to go and double check that. Yeah. Go check that out. I want to know. We'll find out in a minute. You're watching This Week in Tech with Doc Rock from Honolulu. Owen Thomas from San Francisco. He's the managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times. And Ian Thompson, who is where? Ian Thompson, rather. Who is where? You're in the East Bay.

[00:42:46] I'm in Richmond, California. East Bay. Yes. Or Richmond Annex as they like to call themselves in a rather pretentious way. We were driving by the Chevron tanks down there. And apparently Chevron's about to withdraw. Will that change? They're shifting their headquarters, but the refinery will always be there. Oh, they'll always have the refinery. Well, I mean, I've just finished. I've just become an accredited CERT member, a community response team member here. Oh, good. And yeah, getting my ham license next month. Congratulations.

[00:43:15] And yeah, that was one of the scenarios they brought up. What if one of those tanks goes up? And it was just like, well, we'll do what we can, but chances are most of the city is going to burn down. Yeah. Always interesting to live in the shadow of a refinery. Somebody said that you almost said nil-nil and that would have cost you your U.S. citizenship. He came so close, didn't he? General Tav wins. He checked himself. It's at zero, zero. Our show today brought to you by Shopify.

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[00:45:41] We have, we have not completely covered the AI thing, but I think we've done a pretty good job of it. You mentioned that open AI might be the beneficiary. Actually, this interesting. I saw a study that said actually anthropic may actually be helped by the ban. That sales data suggests that. Uh, because I guess people go, wow, it's that good that the government had to ban it. It must be really good.

[00:46:10] And as a result, anthropics existing models, the Opus models have been growing like topsy. According to ramp anthropic share of AI subscriptions paid for by businesses. Antropics rose two and a half percentage points in May to 41%. Finally beating open AI, which had 39.5% of AI subscriptions in May flat from the month. So anthropic, the winner in May.

[00:46:35] Uh, now remember this ban happened just a couple of weeks ago, but, uh, there's, you know, marketing experts say this may be a good thing, not a bad thing for anthropic. I think anthropic's winning the PR rule. Yeah. The PR rule. Certainly. Every time they get banned, they get more customers. Isn't that amazing? Meanwhile, people have heard about them, you know, every, everyone's heard about chat GPT, right? Exactly.

[00:47:01] And anthropic has always been kind of a, you know, like an inside Silicon Valley software engineers, you know, love cloud code kind of, uh, you know, secret vibe and, uh, you know, open AI has been kind of the safe recognized choice. And that's, you know, that's really changed. Meanwhile, Ed Citrin, who is it? Claude just sounds like your uncle. I mean, it's a great, I mean, I like the name cause it's his, he rolls off the tongue easier. Uncle Claude.

[00:47:28] But Claude just sounds like your uncle or your friend, which was on point on point. But when you're thinking of something that has like a tech name to it, right? We have all these something, something metrics or something, something Maddox or I this, or, you know, whatever it's Claude just, it's, it's a better name. I agree with it. It is a glorious name, but it doesn't help for spreading the, the meme of fine of it, like turning it into a thing, right? Even, even Gemini is very futuristic. What do you think of fable and mythos? I mean, those are better. Like those are better fable. I don't know.

[00:47:58] It goes back to Aesop. I don't know about that, but mythos, mythos I can get with. That's a good name. It sounds like you go snap your fingers, you know, you got the infinity stones. It is. That's what they should name it. AI infinity stones. Yeah. I am inevitable. Ed Zittrain, who is a notable AI critic and has for a long time been saying AI is spending so fast they can't possibly keep it up.

[00:48:24] Got somehow got audited financial documents independently verified by the financial times of open AIs revenue. And according to these documents, they lost 38 and a half billion dollars last year. And you have to be, you have to be careful with those numbers because a lot of, a lot of like the big chunk of that comes from their conversion from a nonprofit to a for profit.

[00:49:03] Oh, okay.

[00:49:35] And that's why we have the business reporter on. Yeah. I mean, most like, you know, again, there's a lot of debate about it, but most Wall Street analysts when they're analyzing public companies, they kind of wave their hands about stock based compensation. Okay. And, and open AI did announce they now have a billion monthly active users, or is it weekly? I think weekly active users of chat GPT. It's, it's certainly achieved market share.

[00:50:01] And a couple of months ago, they made the largest raise of financing in history, valuing the company $852 billion. But Anthropic has just leapfrogged them with a higher valuation of almost, almost a neat trillion dollars, which as a, as a privately held company, unprecedented. Yeah. Both companies are public this year, right? Or will they?

[00:50:25] Open AI, what, what Sam Altman has said to employees is that they've, they filed confidentially to go public, which is kind of a preparatory step. Um, and they could go public within the year. They might stay private longer. He said, just because AI technology development is so fluid. Um, and there might be some, some benefits to staying private longer. I'm a little skeptical of that. I'm not sure what those benefits are rules about when you have to go public. There are rules about that, right?

[00:50:55] The jobs act, uh, we can, those rules, uh, or, or, or, you know, we can, those rules or gave companies more flexibility. Uh, you know, uh, the old rules had to do with the number of shareholders, which was kind of a, a function enforcing Facebook to go public back in the day. I remember these days it's much easier to stay private for a long time.

[00:51:17] And, you know, as you can see, there's plenty of capital available to, as long as they can raise privately, it seems like it would be better to stay private. Now we, we, we just talked about SpaceX buying cursor though. And SpaceX is using that new public equity. That funny money. As a, you know, as a, you know, it's, you can call it funny money, but it's, you know, it's letting them do real deals. Well, and it's also a stock-based compensation is very valuable for getting the best engineering talent, right?

[00:51:45] You, if you have a public stock, it's a little easier to use that. Absolutely. Because, you know, essentially you just keep issuing shares, um, and diluting shareholders. Then you buy back shares. Um, if you have cashflow, now that's a problem for these companies, but, um, you know, as long as the, as long as the valuation stays up, you know, they kind of don't have to worry about that. One of the things that, it's difficult to believe that the share buybacks by companies were actually illegal until the 1980s and Reagan reformed the entire system. We could have solved a lot of problem.

[00:52:15] Reform is doing a lot of work in that sense. Yeah. That's a reform. Well, no, I mean Intel spent billions buying back its own shares to support the share price and let chip manufacturing technology just lie useless. And now they're paying the price for it. Yeah. So I, I worry that other companies like SpaceX, Anthropoc, OpenAI are going to fall into the same trap.

[00:52:38] Well, you remember back then too, like you didn't have C, I mean, CEO salary caps was kind of a thing, you know, it wasn't this situation where a company who's losing money and yet their CEO is making more. Right. Yeah. And so the guys that do it the way Apple do it are, you know, Steve and Tim did, you know, like I'm going to pay a dollar, but I'm going to make my money on whatever the stock may. Those guys all did really well.

[00:53:04] You know, they weren't as rich as, or talked about as, but their companies tend to do well because they have a vested interest in making sure everything's moved forward. Back when I always want to call him Randy, Steve, when Randy Steve was running AT&T, AT&T was like scrubbing knuckles, but this dude was making 48 million a year as a CEO, like really killing the blue ball. You mean Randall Stevenson? Yeah, Randy Steve. Randy Steve. I was so mad at him back in the day. But until they got rid of him,

[00:53:34] like, yo, AT&T almost tanked. And he was making more, he was like one of the highest paid CEOs at that time. So a lot of stuff changed in 84, bro. Yeah. It's such a weird number, but I feel like our entire economy took a weird turn and we thought everything was gravy until somebody snatched it. Jeff Atwood says that 84 and all of those Reagan era rules changes were what really powered

[00:54:02] the income inequality explosion that we are seeing now. Yeah, I agree. Clinton didn't help either. Clinton didn't help either. Jeff Bezos is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. The second richest man in the world is closer in net worth to you and me than he is to Elon Musk. That's how much more Elon Musk is worth. Okay. I need Owen's brain for a second. Sorry.

[00:54:33] By the way, it is funny money. So you can say Elon's a trillion dollar man. That was going to be my question. Elon Musk has better divorce lawyers. Okay. Somebody. All right. So that was not the question. But Leo was closer. If we had to put a real thing on it, like took a lot of the funny money out of it, what does it really mean? Like I tried to do it in my head the other day and I wasn't drunk enough. You know, I'm not sure this is a very satisfying answer,

[00:55:01] but if you take the funny money out of it, none of this happens, right? The speculative investment that is fueling AI, it just would not be possible without kind of our modern stock markets and the willingness by investors to just believe in whatever Elon Musk or Sam Altman is selling them. It's, you know, it's so powered by belief and story and narrative and hope.

[00:55:30] And FOMO, yeah. You know, it's like, well, you wouldn't have these kind of like wild, you know, wild inequitable outcomes, but you wouldn't have the upside either. So, you know, it's really hard to see like any version of this that doesn't happen without kind of the, the modern miracle and the modern curse of, you know, of public markets. Somebody,

[00:55:58] somebody did the calculations. I wish I could remember, but for every dollar loss in the SpaceX value, stock market value, Elon loses something like $150 billion. There's some huge, huge amount of swing. And he has a compensation plan. That's crazy though. He's never going to see that compensation package because it requires a million people on Mars, among other things. Yes. Which,

[00:56:26] which honestly is never going to happen. It's not going to happen. Everybody knows it's not going to happen. I got into a huge argument. The one thing that blew my mind is when that story came out last week, I remember saying to a buddy of mine, hey, remember when we were making fun of Elon for losing like $44 billion on Twitter? I'm sorry. Nothing. Nothing. By the way, that was a good investment as it turned out. Turned out. Right? Not for the revenue of X, but for the power. Yeah, it was a power move. He didn't know at the time

[00:56:56] it was a power move. I really don't think he's that brilliant. It helped him elect his president, frankly. I mean... Which he did from his heart. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I'm really torn on Elon because I have so much respect for early Elon and what his goals were and what he did. And it's just later Elon that seems to be completely out of control. Among other things, he now predicts

[00:57:25] that by 2030, SpaceX's revenue will be a trillion dollars a year. Oh. Yeah. The S-1 was fascinating reading because he was like, well, we need to get a self-sustaining colony on Mars so we don't have all our eggs in one basket. Kind of annoyingly missing the fact that if you're born on Mars, you probably can't function on Earth because it's got one third of the gravity and you'd need an exoskeleton to actually walk around. You know,

[00:57:55] this is all pie in the sky stuff. And it worked. He got his funny money. NASDAQ changed their rules so that retail investors can, well, get ripped off in my opinion. But, you know, it's one of those things. And we talk about funny things. I honestly feel, I feel like that people who buy SpaceX stock are being sold to Bill Wood Goods. That it's, it's just, it's a meme stock. Would Mars give us, would Mars give us the best basketball players though? Yes.

[00:58:24] They grow so tall. They'd be very easily injured. That would be the only downside. They'd be great basketball players in Mars gravity. Let's put it this way. I'm glad you brought up Kelly and Zach's book because that is a must read for anyone interested in it. It's called A City on Mars. And it, I mean, I'll give you the TLDR. Can we settle space? Should we settle space if we really thought this through? No, no, and no. Basically, it is completely impracticable

[00:58:54] and they list so many reasons why it's just not going to happen. Now, I think we should send robots to Mars. I think we should send AI to Mars because it could survive the flight. Its eyeballs wouldn't explode. You know, it wouldn't have to worry about cosmic rays if we're properly shielded and it wouldn't go crazy in the six month flight. There's a lot of reasons why going to Mars is not a good idea. And I have to think Elon knows that unless he's really high

[00:59:23] in his own supply. Matt Damon famously said, fortune favors the brave when he was doing an ad for FTX. That didn't go so well. That aged like milk. It was a wonderful interview. All the FTX commercials back in the day is super funny now and I see the people that were on it and I'm like, oh my God, you guys. They all got sued, right? Dom Brady. Pretty much, yeah. I think the court said, no, they're not. It was just an ad. Come on, man. It was just an ad.

[00:59:53] Yeah. Andy Weir had a one. There was a wonderful interview with Andy Weir about the Martian and he said the one thing, okay, two things that we truly stood out. First off, the initial premise, the windstorm that blows away the aerial can't happen on Mars. Right. But also, the other thing was getting in and out of spacesuits. Because if you try and do that in the ISS, it's a three-hour process. You know, and then he just slips into this thing, right, I'm going walkies now. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I interviewed Andy and he said there are only a couple

[01:00:23] of scientific inaccuracies in this book and that storm on Mars was one of them. However, OpenAI did make a big hiring move this week. Two years ago, Google paid, it is said, $2.7 billion to hire Noam Shazir, Nobel Prize winner. He was the architect of Google's Gemini models, wrote the original Transformer paper,

[01:00:53] $2.7 billion along with his team of researchers for Character AI, a big acqui-hire. Two years later, he has now moved on and he is going to OpenAI, which is considered a huge acquisition for OpenAI, a big win and I think a big loss for Google. He wrote the famous paper, Attention is All You Need, that introduced the Transformer architecture and by the way,

[01:01:23] that's what GPT stands for is General Purpose Transformer. So, you know, you have to think if he got $2.7 billion from Google two years ago, what the hell did OpenAI offer him? First daughter's founded marriage, maybe? Yeah, maybe, yeah, you could marry Sam Altman's daughter, I don't know. I believe all of Anthropx co-founders are still there, which is kind of their claim to fame. All of the other AI companies,

[01:01:53] I mean, you know, like OpenAI has won this round but they've lost people to Apple, to Meta. XAI has been bleeding people. That's a big reason why they're buying Cursor is because basically they've lost a lot of their technical co-founders and they need to kind of restock

[01:02:23] the talent and I think we're going to see a lot more comings and goings, especially as these companies go public and some of the early hires cash out and others are attracted by the public equity payouts that these companies can now kind of splash. Going public is certainly I mean, that's what we were saying. That's one of the reasons why you go public so that you can spend that money money. They're taking

[01:02:52] their payouts and they're going elsewhere. It's kind of a smart move, especially if you live in the bay. I want to make sure that I finish paying off this house and do a couple other things really quick. You can move to Lichtenstein. You can completely move. There's guys now who can cash out of this cursor move and step away from the game. They're squared away for quite a while. Usually there are lock-ins for the founders and the people that get

[01:03:38] they can't say anything about it. But yes, you're right. happy man. I do wish I wish one thing I wish Anthropic would do better and I wish more people understood the difference between HRF models and constitutional models. I think the reason why I went heavier on clawed than OpenAI. It's not just even the crazy stuff that goes on in OpenAI. I never even touched GROCK. I'm mad that they took the name. I used to always say oh these people could GROCK this better. I'm glad that they stole one of my favorite

[01:04:07] words which I stole from Christina Warren. She stole from Robert Heinlein. Yeah of course. But don't just take a good word and ruin it. Dang it. Anyway I wish more people really did understand the way constitutional models work as opposed to human reinforcement. I think that would go a long way to help this over AI hate that's going down right now. A whole lot of it has to do with fear of losing jobs for

[01:04:38] it's really weird. The thing that we use to elect certain people by telling them people because they know better so let's just scare them into thinking AI is going to take their jobs and I'm like people will always need human connection so there's certain jobs are never going to be taken it's really weird massage therapists how do you get called to fix this knot in your name acupuncturists I guess you could have robots do that I don't know if I trust

[01:05:08] that plumbers you're not going to have I think we have a show title though thank you doc robot butt crack I was going to call it limpets and barnacles but now I've got robot butt crack sounds like a good band dude would be

[01:05:38] would it be a punk band or would is right we get some Chris Christopherson robot butt crack take me away to my robot butt crack no that that's not going to work that's doc rock he is the director of strategic partnerships at ecamm which by the way we are using right now and we love thank you doc rock we appreciate that and

[01:06:19] good to not win yet I mean like the game played as it is played is why you put an orange muff on your normally purple microphone I normally hollering as my squad through and through my first fell in love with the game from watching I didn't know at the time Johan Cruyff and Pele play at RFK Stadium when he had the Diplomats versus Cosmos and I had no idea what I was watching at the time but as I got older and I realized I saw history bro I saw Johan Cruyff and Pele play each

[01:07:09] a friend of mine went to the last Dutch Grand Prix and he said seriously if you get the chance go there camp out the parties are absolutely epic that's the one that's right on the ocean right it's a sand dune I got Deft Threads teasing Max for Staffing on threads bro the Maxis came after me bro and they're like but you're American you can't know anything about F1 I'm like and you're five so go away I know you what am I

[01:07:39] I don't know why maybe because of the English muffins I think but I don't know it's my fault he's my favorite English muffin you're Owen Thomas managing San Francisco business times he's Ian Thompson I don't know why we do this we put you together all the time it's just I think Benito does it to

[01:08:09] and all of a sudden said you can't use this model anymore and I thought it was my credit card I thought oh gosh darn it I was rewriting the whole ad sales system no I mean Claude for software is pretty good I'm a fan of that when I have an issue I go to Claude I go to Claude code yep yeah it's good they do a good job good to have all three of you here this episode today brought to you by simply

[01:08:39] CX what separates the tech companies winning right now from the ones falling behind it's not just the product it's the experience and you already know that gap is only getting wider that's exactly what the simply CX podcast was built to explore launched by Microsoft and hosted by Nicole McKinley Microsoft global leaders simply CX brings you real no fluff conversations with leaders from companies like CarMax TD

[01:09:09] Bank and T-Mobile on how AI data and design are reshaping what customers expect and demand if you need a place to start check out their recent episode with Neil Iverson from T-Tech Digital about how AI tools like context gathering and call summarization are beyond the headlines and gets into how AI is actually being implemented inside large organizations today and

[01:09:39] what's realistically working for example an airline contact center transformation was able to reduce average handle time by 30% while improving the experience for both agents and travelers which is timely given this summer travel season right new episodes drop every other Tuesday find Simply CX wherever you get your podcasts Simply CX customer experience it's all about the customer experience

[01:10:09] and incidentally it is the first day besides being the first day of summer the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere it is also Father's Day at least in the United States I don't think are you a father Doc Rock I don't remember no we've got no fathers except me on here today yeah I like expensive things and traveling you know what I love my kids it was fun Henry called me this morning and then Abby called in the middle of the call

[01:10:39] so I conference them in and I got to talk to both kids at the same time and it where we get salary and all that yeah that's right yo Hank just took it full circle it's like you know kids are into bringing stuff back into the analog phase

[01:11:09] now there's this whole thing about vinyl and analog cameras and retro games he's like I'm gonna make salt money again he cooks it's interesting because he's done very well in fact I was gonna ask has he done an in out burger yes ago because I get a craving for one I

[01:11:47] it's hard so every morning he's making omorais and he's recording the efforts as he gets better and better and then he hopes he'll have at the end here's how I learned how to do omorais the shape of the pan regular American style pans will work go on Amazon and buy him the one from Motokichi who's the

[01:12:17] red hat you can buy Motokichi special pot if you can't find it I'll find you a link M-O-L-T-O-K M-O-T-O-K-I-T-C-H-I Motokichi and that it's the shape of the frying pan if you use like an 8 inch normal chef omelette pan it won't work it has a little extra roundness to it but getting that flip over perfectly is

[01:12:49] I can't find it on Amazon oh maybe it's this it's a square pan it doesn't say Motokichi the square pans is for making tamagoyaki that's a little bit different you're in Pataluma Leo you must have access to good eggs surely I mean unfortunately Henry's in Manhattan I don't know what the egg situation yeah he got to get Motokichi

[01:13:20] tamayaki omosaki kakasaki waki what is it called omokichi oh Motokichi he's this famous guy his place is in Kyoto and if you try to go to his restaurant like you have to book almost like eight months in advance and we were in Kyoto a couple Christmas ago and I just happened to be walking down the alleyway and I look in the window and it right by his restaurant and he just popped in the window he's like come on in we couldn't get in I go to Kyoto every Christmas I've been trying to get in

[01:13:49] still can't get in but it's kind of incredible but there's lots of good omodice you don't have to go to that one oh here it is from and look they raised 2.2 million yen which sounds like a lot of money it's not there

[01:14:19] he is he's so cute yeah he's a nice dude his videos are absolutely hilarious he's adorable he's a redhead wow he's like Ronald McDonald in Japan I done very well he said the other couple months ago he said I'm richer than you dad that's how it's supposed to work out that's the goal

[01:14:49] in Christmas in Japan do you do the Kentucky fried chicken thing because apparently that's huge over there absolutely freaking looley and it's way better than ours

[01:15:19] absolutely freaking looley oh my god you're the one who taught me that you take a leftover Kentucky fried chicken drumstick and you put that in your rice cooker yes with the rice of course and it makes it I have to now I have to go to Kentucky fried chicken to get one though can I use Popeyes instead I use any fried chicken from anywhere whatever fried chicken that you get left over even if it's the one from what do you call the market Safeway even the one from Safeway one you just take leftover piece of chickens

[01:15:48] and then even nuggets I do if I get Rick Ross aka Wingstop I'll put four or five of those nuggets with speaking of Google you win some you lose some in this case they lost they fought though and I'm proud of them after the Republican

[01:16:18] National Committee and Democratic Party headquarters they found pipe bombs planted there after the Capitol riot and in the in the Biden administration went to Google with a search warrant asking for this was just unsealed just now asking for all

[01:16:48] the people who had searched for things like pipe bombs political you know things that kind of thing they it's called a reverse warrant yeah or there's another one called a geofence warrant which is right now in front of the US Supreme Court there there's a constitutional challenge against this

[01:17:18] Google announced that in 2023 it would no longer have access to users locations history so they couldn't comply with geofence warrants I don't know is that true anyway Google tried to fight this they went to court because they consider this an invasion so I want to give them some credit for fighting this keyword based warrants are a new area of US law and the courts ruled against Google the courts said no

[01:17:47] you've got to give the Department of Justice that information Google received geofence and keyword based warrants in the pipe bomb investigation according to the records just now unsealed it produced data about users in the vicinity of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee buildings in Washington the company also was forced to comply with a warrant for users who searched for locations of the headquarters or the committee names paired with the words like security camera bomb and explosive

[01:18:17] the data was anonymized however so Google didn't reveal names or other personal information by the summer 2021 the company complied with the government's initial request to identify more than 250 users whose searches included references to bombs or if users repeatedly looked up the RNC or DNC two years later the government went back to Google with a warrant to identify more than 300 users who did a single search about either committee

[01:18:47] so they complied Google complied at first this is all from Bloomberg but when it came down to we want everybody who did this one search Google protested that now you've gone too far the potential harm Google lawyers argued the potential the individual harm to potentially thousands of innocent users wrought by the government's invasion into their anonymous political activities and associations renders the search unreasonable and I have to say that sounds right

[01:19:17] yeah government lawyers countered that Google couldn't vicariously assert the rights of its users against unconstitutional searches well I mean this really brought up to mind the don't even know about it how can they protest go ahead Ian it's kind of brought to mind do you remember the Apple case in 2016 where the terrorist the San Bernardino case yeah operating system they said no Google was perfectly right to fight this

[01:19:47] in my opinion it's a drastic overreach and very very bad for privacy yeah it's also dumb not to realize that first of all the amount of data you'd have to comb through because when somebody hears something people go and search it that doesn't mean you're into it right well that's the issue is is this I mean this seems so unreasonable you're right and so once you open that 99% of those searches are innocent in fact all but one and then once you open that door you can

[01:20:17] easily chain a whole bunch of stuff together right if you had a thing where you know one of your friends was visiting your house and you know she's female or whatever but she brings a bunch of other friends with her and you're like okay I'm just finishing up in the bathroom I'll be out in a second entertain yourselves and you come out of the freaking bathroom hair is wet you're like doing one of these and Lisa walked in nine times out of ten you're so like that's the kind of thing that's dumb about

[01:20:46] this is you can't just say oh somebody searched it so they must be in on it too like that that's just crazy so by the way I'll give credit to Zoe Tillman who is the law reporter for a Bloomberg on this story so Google did comply initially but that final broad warrant went too far in 2023 Google fought it it sat in limbo for a year in 2024 federal magistrate denied Google's request

[01:21:16] Google then challenged it they appealed it to the US district chief judge James Boasberg whose name you may remember he's been very active lately in a number of high tech high profile cases in February 2025 he concluded the magistrate got it right and ordered the data from Google by the way they did make an arrest I don't but unfortunately we don't know if the arrest was the evidence was based on what they found

[01:21:46] from Google that's not revealed in the arrest it just seems like an enormous lose though from an investigative position because if you have to go through 300 400 people who actually search for these terms you know you might get the actual perpetrator but you're going to have to spend a hell of a long time going through useless information yeah it's a lot of fish in that net I mean that's that's where AI comes in right AI makes you know diving through all this information

[01:22:15] linking things up much easier in theory at least yeah and I imagine that well I don't know but I think one of the things you could say they maybe would take that data okay now we have 300 people and cross reference it against other information that they had that might have had 10 suspects and then if they get a match there now they're narrowing it down instead of just going through all 300 and saying well let's interview each of them and it could increase these kind of maximalist demands for data because you know

[01:22:45] now if it is plausible that they can you know process it they can persuade a judge perhaps that you know hey this this data would actually have benefit yeah so now our freedom is based on chat GPT we're all screwed what could possibly go wrong well nowadays if the person is smart like I'm not giving you any instructions criminals but if you're using something like perplexity or you know even the search built into your various chat bots

[01:23:15] that's not your search that search goes from a couple of servers yeah although and this is something we've been talking a lot about lately it's become more and in fact are collecting huge amounts of information because not only are they collecting your name and your search but they're correlating it to other things let's say you give perplexity your tax return to say did I calculate this right

[01:23:45] they have a lot of information and all the evidence is that they're saving it except anthropic 30 days no that's only for fable if I can't remember that was another fascinating people people were very upset about that but yeah when you use these chat bots in fact I think it's when you use AI in general they collect a huge amount of information all the information when you use the internet in general thank you I was going to say web trackers yes the

[01:24:14] difference is so if I'm doing a Google search I type in a search result so they now have your IP address and your search result if you're using AI a lot of times you're prompting it and sending it documents and sending it other information you're giving it much more than just a search term okay but here's what here's what here's what Benny means right I'm looking at

[01:24:50] one dude on the planet right now it's a good name it's a nice match I'm looking at the LA

[01:25:20] site all it did was going to a reload loop and it would not stop you can't click anything so that goes to tell you how much information why I

[01:25:50] those are not you know you don't you know this is why I use tool you know I mean it's tour and duck go yeah the way forward yep there is an excellent um EFF has an excellent page called cover your tracks where you can

[01:26:20] a doc they use a variety of information that they get from your browser things like extensions you've you've installed and stuff and so I just did this in my Zen

[01:26:50] knows exactly who this is and one of the bigger things that nobody really talks about let's just say all four of us are just super super good right we keep everything down we got it all tight no problems there but one of our friends in the friend group is loose with their stuff all of our information is on their computer oh yeah right and so remember when us Mac users had the one PC friend and you would get the thing from there using outlook dot com and you would get these weird spams and you know it's not from them but it's their

[01:27:20] address but they don't even speak in the right way that person speaks like there's no New England accent in this email and it's because their mail was sending mail to a client that we've done regular business with got hacked and they sent an email to us from his

[01:27:50] address the kind of email he always sends asking for a request for a proposal and it was the same email we get from this guy all the time right because the house I have some filtering going on so when we clicked it here it just spun right

[01:28:21] unfortunately we sent it to an employee who does not have the same protections it didn't spin it popped up what looked like a Google login which the employee then went through and filled out including the two factor authentication the he was a man in the middle the guy in the middle got all that passed it the interaction continued apparently normally but kept it and immediately used it to log into our Google workspace

[01:28:50] the funny thing is it must work so well they apparently got so much success with this they didn't bother using their access for a few months they looked at a couple of emails and then wandered off and but all the forensics tell us nothing happened because I think they probably have a stack of thousands and they

[01:29:20] just working their way through them and we were you didn't get around to us so we were very lucky but that's exactly why this privacy is so important yes you know it's just it's an issue it's getting worse and I understand why to be honest the Trump of these bad actors God knows what could happen but it's funny the people who say that stuff the most

[01:29:50] when you check them on it for real for real they're the most laxed about the security on other things that they don't realize that they give up on a regular basis they use a signal client that's not really signal that records everything to the hard drive and it's easily hacked nobody would do that I hate the term virtue signal is so overly played but it is in a way easy to virtue signal that you're trying to do all these things and it's like well that's why I admit that's why I am admitting now

[01:30:20] to us getting phished right because I think it's important to hear people say no no this happens and it happens to people who are very careful who have a lot of security and it still happens and it still happens here's a funny one and I want to say somebody in the chat brought this up a while ago but it's funny because it makes sense we get so much information now about the administration and their AI stance right what does dude post on his social platform basically every day weird AI pictures of him being

[01:30:55] it was a doctor to photograph oh yeah I'm a doctor that's it again listen to you we want to be the anti AI it needs to slow

[01:31:25] okay okay I'm looking at you Ian I'm getting ready for a rant on this one because this is stupidity so Keir Starmer the prime minister of

[01:31:55] so one of the things he did this past week is announced that by the end of the year the UK will prohibit under 16s from using YouTube Facebook Snapchat TikTok they still can use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger but they're banned and how are they going to enforce this this is the problem well that's interesting it's the the only way to enforce it would be to require everyone using those services adult or not

[01:32:25] to actually log in and provide a government issued ID in order to use social media which is a privacy nightmare they're not going to stop kids from using this stuff it's it's one of those ridiculous I mean Australia has gone down the through through the roof in Australia when

[01:32:55] they implemented that last December yeah yeah and the same will happen in the UK as it did when they were talking about a porn ban and honestly I'm iffy about the utility of VPNs because basically you're just handing your traffic to a single company rather than a bunch of them but this is totally unenforceable yes it would be wonderful if teenagers weren't bad for grown-up mental health too

[01:33:25] well true true it's bad for all of our mental health let's face it yeah and it's highly addictive by the way I I don't know I

[01:33:55] haven't aged at all but he has quite a bit he's 85 and he kind of sat in the back of the stage behind a piano I mean it's wonderful to hear him his voice is still there and his songwriting is still there and no one expresses the meaning of his lyrics like he does it's just brilliant however I'm his voice is still going and their voices do not carry well he never had a great voice so maybe that's why right he just helps

[01:34:25] he still sounds like this is you know he sounded like he was 85 when he was 20 so maybe said we I think this is a Bob Dylan thing we would like you to be present for this concert not have

[01:34:55] not looking through this concert through a screen and not forcing your people behind you to look through your screen so we're asking that you not use your phones at all this concert now I like crazy they could especially there were three acts so in between and it was for all three acts it was the whole show

[01:35:24] in between acts people cannot go an hour without looking at their phone I have to say I can understand that I was publicly shamed by Stephen Merritt of the magnetic fields when we went to his concert because I Twitter he had somebody backstage watching no no yeah you know

[01:35:55] I have to say after the fact I thought you know what that's right let's be present for this and not experiencing it through you know creating FOMO in our friends and things and how many times you go to a concert guys singing his heart out on the stage and people are turning around with their back to the guy taking a selfie to show that they

[01:36:39] who is going to watch that video well first of all it it it it's not the whole thing but the hard part is like I want to know what songs they're going to sing right I want to know did they bring out their good ones or what special ones we forgot about that they pulled out or whatever and so when you're kind of giving it away right like you're giving away

[01:37:09] I miss Leo we had this conversation a thousand times I miss the days of waking up on announcement day and being ooh now we're just looking for that one thing that leaks haven't already leaked you know and nobody comes back and says we got it wrong they go oh we're disappointed because they didn't play this or we're disappointed absolutely although the Dylan website publishes the set list each time I mean at that it might be hard to stick to it no no he changes it is

[01:37:38] also to warn people he's not going to sing the hits don't this is it is not a Bob Dylan cover band it's Bob Dylan right I'm with you Doc on this because we went to see Orbital at the Warfield and there was one bloke in the very front row who recorded the entire concert on an iPad of all things and didn't dance at all and you're kind of like what the hell are you thinking I see that a lot at the local shows where there are people dancing because we go

[01:38:07] to shows with you know mosh pits so you can really enjoy yourself but there's always in the front two or three guys who don't really look like they're enjoying it just recording it like that's what they do it's like dude get out of here go away absolutely anyway back to the UK back to the UK I think that I think kids can probably do without social media my question is what about YouTube YouTube is such an instructional medium I think that's

[01:38:37] a huge problem and YouTube is not really a social media to be honest it quasi right you know there's commenting there's you know I think it's horrible to ban YouTube horrible oh yeah I mean it's not a social goldmine it's like banning TV well we decided and you know what they could have back in my day everybody agreed Newton Minow the chairman of the FCC testifying to congress that television is a vast wasteland and and they tried to ban it remember Mr. Rogers

[01:39:06] best name by the way for a person in power Newton Minow Mr. Rogers in fact go see it it's on YouTube you ever hear that testified in congress and saved PBS by talking about how important it was for the kids who watched Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and other shows how important that was he saved public television so I could easily see that same mentality showing up here well you know it's bad it's something we didn't have as a kid

[01:39:36] so they don't need it anyway why are these changes being made the UK government says well that's what you want 9 out of 10 parents backed a social media ban for under 16 2 thirds of young people agreed what's changing they're doing it the wrong way around though I mean honestly if you were going to try and cut this cut this off first off don't allow kids to use their phone at school that's the absolute key thing that's a great starting point yep and I agree with that one yeah

[01:40:05] but in terms of in terms of the security aspect of this if you've actually got to log in using a government registered ID that's going to make a security gold mine for somebody who wants to break into the companies that are running these things it's incredibly harmful and it just won't work all kids will do is use burner phones and probably steal their parents go on that it's just who would just let it happen anyway so yeah

[01:40:35] explain this to me they say explain care the answer is 42 Leo they say it says so here in this section this is the UK's the government's own website fact sheet new rules to protect children online who will it affect children and young people under 16 crucially they will still be able to access the online world safely for learning news games and staying in touch with known friends and family

[01:41:04] on messaging services are they asserting that the messaging services are all I don't understand what how what are they talking about this is the problem when you get government writing technology technology law because they don't understand it the number one thing you saw on TV about tech and Chris Hansen famously was creepers

[01:41:33] talking to kids on AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe chat bots well Chris wasn't that far back but the very first bad thing I ever heard about you know when tech is coming to get you was stranger danger through people anonymously talking to people on BBS's yep well that in the film war games yes yes like oh my god like come on people they can they can talk to people on messenger that's never worked and this recently one of our home police officers

[01:42:02] was acting as like a 14 year old boy and busted some high monkey mucks over here you know from chatting so what here's here's here's more will adults need to prove their age many adults won't need to do checks because they've already got an account that has been open for more than 16 years oh okay well AOL

[01:42:32] or has a credit card connected to it I get can kids under 16 not get credit cards no but you could be your parents credit card could be connected to your account oh yeah somebody's wallet's going to get finched and they can just they can do it that way or it's linked to an email address that's age verified in other ways I don't even know what that means honestly that one baffled me too because I don't know that many email accounts which require age verification I've never seen one some adults will already have done age verification

[01:43:02] under the existing online safety act so wouldn't need to do it again and if not well it could be as simple as a facial recognition check for over 18s in 27 is that why we have the new age verification here now because when I installed 27 it gave me some speech about I didn't read it of course because I'm old but yeah so Apple has changed this actually let's take a break and I do want to talk about this because Meta is lobbying Congress they're actually supporting the new COSA bill

[01:43:31] but one of the things they like about it is that they wouldn't be responsible for age checks Apple would or Google would the gatekeepers the online the app stores would be and Apple is actually I think trying to set that up now to get ahead of regulation but let's take a break and then we can talk about that I'd like to talk about that you're watching this week in tech with Ian Thomas from the lovely God dang it I blame you Benito

[01:44:00] call him Emma Thompson let's go Ian Owen please and Doc Ian Thompson who by the way does a wonderful newsletter and it used to be called Letter from America until Alistair Clark yes we were Alistair Cook we were Cook that's it we got we got slight it's now called View from the Valley but yeah I like that dude I like Alistair Cook just the name hi yeah

[01:44:30] he used to do so he used to do this wonderful Letter from America and you called Letter from America and honored to honor him no to honor him completely but yes it was if you go to techfinitive.com you can subscribe to Ian's wonderful newsletter View from the Valley the shot to become a podcast yeah oh you're gonna do a show yeah I'm gonna I'm trying to start a podcast but I've gotta say some of the software out there

[01:44:59] is a real bugger dude Ian listen family we're about to fight bro I can fix you there's a software it's called Ecamm turns out Twit Network which is a really nice podcast network you can do the whole thing by yourself but he doesn't want to do video don't have to do video oh Ecamm see that's confusing about the name then yeah that's why we took Live out we took Live out but it doesn't require a camera no no no and I would tell you I would tell you record it with the video on and just strip the video

[01:45:28] because it is something easier about doing it when you can see when you go to edit when you go to edit it's easy to see when you edit and then at the end you just output the audio only and send it you don't have to do video but just yeah send me an email oh Ecamm with two Ms right yes and I if you want I'll invite you I just got into something that's brand new called Rebel Audio I don't know if any of you have heard of this but this is a highly AI driven podcast network you still do the audio show but it

[01:45:58] but AI then can do all the other stuff which is kind of cool I was going to say I really don't want to do video because I've got a face for radio so no you I think yeah I know tell you why tell you why you want to do video right now I'm sorry I'm going to sidetrack you real quick the numbers on YouTube for video watching on television it's actually astronomical and now really YouTube has surpassed Apple and Spotify combined as a distribution network so interesting with over

[01:46:27] last year reported over a billion hours of podcast alone on television okay so Ian your audience looks like us right you know well me I'm the youngest at 60 but your audience looks like us and what happens is what we do is we put like I put Leo on Mac Mac Weekly I put it on in the living room it's on the 65 Sony you're still just listening yeah but I'm just listening but I'm walking around and if it just so happens that Andy says hey buy one of this I come into the living room and I do one of these numbers like this yeah

[01:46:57] and then I you know I keep doing what I'm doing so I'm working a 3D printer I'm doing something else but those numbers from YouTube watching is astronomical and you being a researcher that you are go look those up before you say not to do video because doing what you're doing right now sitting in front of your books just sitting there talking you didn't have to look at the camera you already have everything you didn't even have to look at the camera it could just be the side of your face and you're still talking but what you don't want to do is put your podcast on YouTube

[01:47:27] with just a picture that doesn't work people don't like that okay and people want to interact with the person because again we lack the human activity we lacking all this AI generated crap so the idea of live streaming your recording which I don't know where you would get that idea from Leo and then taking the edited version and publishing it on audio that is the bulletproof way to do a really successful podcast right now excellent thank you very much don't edit don't over edit don't do anything crazy

[01:47:57] like and I can totally set you up just because we're friends of the network and whatever you do don't be a cat because oh god or is it a fox that's a fox I was going to say that's a fox surely whatever you do what does a fox say whatever you do don't be a cat there we go sorry I clicked on the wrong animal yeah because that nobody wants that actually you could do that Ian and then well did you ever see the famous clip of the lawyer

[01:48:27] who yes your honor I am not a cat yes speaking of animals Fitz the wonder dog is fussing at me well we'll let Fitz go because I have to do wait a minute this is wrong I have to do a commercial and I better fix this before I do the commercial that would be terrible that would be that would be kind of ironic wouldn't it all of a sudden because we have to send these out I can't

[01:48:56] I can't I think oh that's what you should do Ian go with the mustache oh no that mustache was terrible because every time you took every time you took a swig every time you took a swig of tea what's wrong with you that's a terrible mustache I looked like Ron Jeremy when I had that mustache yeah that's why we loved it that's why we loved it all right now I will do a commercial you go walk the dog or whatever it is you need to do you're watching this week in tech with Owen Thomas

[01:49:26] Ian Thompson and Doc Rock I like it two syllables very simple this week in tech brought to you this week by ethos it's father's day you know and I think one of the most important things that happened to me when I became a father was knowing suddenly I'm responsible I'm responsible for this little family that I've created here one of the very first things I did is go out and get life insurance because I knew if anything happened to me

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[01:50:55] slash twit it really did it did you know it's funny when the kids were born I was a DJ you work in a you know kind of low paying DJ job and it was just me and Jennifer and you know I figured well this is fine but as soon as the kids come into your life holy cow your perspective really does change and I'm very glad we did it although I will say

[01:51:24] to all three of you because you don't have kids you didn't make the wrong choice put it that way remember that it was like people thought we were rich right but I was like yo we could pay $750 an hour bro to sit here and talk on the radio or something crazy but I will say free food and free drinks is about anywhere in town went a long way in a tourist town I'll tell you that yeah well I mean my mum my mum was I was talking to my mum for her birthday

[01:51:54] and she's like you realize you were you know A overweight when you were born and also two weeks late and I was like mum I had accommodation free food free drink if you'd given me a TV in there I would have been up there for another month I would have never left the room I know well I you know I feel fortunate because my kids were born in 92 and 94 it was the internet was around but it wasn't anything like it is today we did

[01:52:24] they had like those CD-ROMs the learning CD-ROMs and they they called it lapware at the time because you'd put the kid in your lap because you'd have to kind of control it and set up and that was a great experience by the time Abby was a teenager Neopets had come out I think she was maybe 12 oh my word that takes you back yeah remember Neopets they're actually I think they're still around and but so I was a little nervous about it but she but it was like MySpace she learned how to make web pages she really enjoyed it and I we had a little talk I said now

[01:52:54] there may be some adults on there pretending to be kids you should really be careful about any information you reveal and you know and she said dad I said what I'm a 33 year old man from Philadelphia on Neopets I I know better that's smart yes I thought oh I guess I don't have to worry about her she she knew of course intuitively not to reveal what school she went to not to get

[01:53:23] intimate conversations with strangers online it's a little different today though and I think kids are I understand why you know it's the inclination of governments and parents to ban social media right now congress is considering renewing the kids online safety act it's in in committee in the senate meta is actually lobbying in support of it that's because they got the lawyers to deal with it well that's you know

[01:53:53] it's called regulatory capture where you you know once you've got established you make sure that the ladder is pulled up exactly to make it work they already got and so if they can cut the line now they got the upper hand right they've already seen the deck they have been lobbying and by the way when I say meta I think Instagram is the maybe you'd say TikTok but I think Instagram is the number one culprit here in the algorithmic feeds the way it is very

[01:54:23] addictive the way kids use it it can use it to not only to bully but to get body ismorphia body image issues get the wrong message about life I think Instagram really is I mean I can't think of another social network that is as risky for kids can you TikTok possibly but I think Instagram is the worst offender and Roblox I mean you know but so I'd be very careful my kid were on Roblox anyway Meta's been lobbying lawmakers

[01:54:52] for legal immunity from child harm claims tied to platforms like Instagram using the COSA act the provision Meta says to favor would shield online platforms for liability undercutting thousands of cases including cases that Meta's already lost remember Meta lost that big case in Los Angeles and

[01:55:27] shield shield they are facing currently more than 2000 active lawsuits by children families and school districts and dozens of state attorneys general Google and YouTube and Meta lost that LA trial and that was the trigger for all of that also Meta got a big I think 300 million plus settlement against them in New Mexico in a jury

[01:55:57] case yeah it's not the money so much I brought this to mind when you talked about Apple they would like the gatekeepers to be

[01:56:26] responsible for the age gates sure they would yes I but on the other hand I commend Apple at WWDC conference last week they announced

[01:56:56] I think some really good additional features many of the features they announced by the way were already in the iPhone but they announced they just labeled them and marketed it yeah right but one of the things they thought that they did that was new which is very good is they first of all they made it easier to turn on these child protections and they

[01:57:29] set default for the amount of screen time and things like that so that all a parent has to really do is turn it on and the defaults will be accepted they don't have to spend a lot of time

[01:57:59] Steve Gibson has been arguing for this for a long time saying look Apple and Google likely do know how a lot about you right and if you set up an iPhone for a kid and in that process you tell the iPhone this kid is 13 or whatever they also have a mechanism an API mechanism that Meta and others can use it's already built in where the application could ask what age group is the user

[01:58:29] in and then turn off features or even block the application based on that all of which seems to me to make more sense than having a hundred different or thousand or hundred thousand different ways of doing it and each application doing it itself and having to go through that process why not just do it with Apple or just do it with Google and then let them tell the app doesn't that make sense yeah I think the default thing is really important because you know it's it's been one of the bugbears of the industry that

[01:58:59] you know unless you set stuff by default then chances are people won't use it this was the big problem with for example two factor authentication with Gmail 10 years after they launched two factor authentication only 10% of users were actually using it so set it

[02:00:02] have

[02:00:32] me donated gifts it's great fun we love it so but I think this is a good idea I'm sure Apple would doesn't want the liability but on the other hand this is a way to make parents feel pretty good about what Apple is doing I think yeah I'm just worrying about meta trying to legislate its way out of liability for bad actions I

[02:01:05] should say that up front and that protects me I'm not I'm not worried about meta or anybody any other big tech company but it protects me we have this discord chat we have forums at twit.community we have a mastodon at twit.social in every case section 230 protects me as the person running the site from something illegal that's posted on the site but one of our users of course I

[02:01:35] the way to moderate that's very important so I'm not trying to say that a company like meta is responsible for every post on Facebook or Instagram I don't I think section 230 protects them and rightly so there as it

[02:02:05] that is a so the jury very cleverly and I think probably it was the prosecution who thought this up or the plaintiff's attorneys who thought this up say this is a defective product this is not about section 230 this is about a company that's created a defective addictive product just like a cigarette manufacturer has created an addictive product and they should be liable for that and the jury agreed actually

[02:02:35] the judge agreed in Los Angeles so I think that was the right thing to do I don't disagree with that I know a lot of people really were concerned about that ruling yeah I mean it's it's kind of like do you remember the foster sester act yeah which was introduced yeah oh there's the dogie I didn't don't show the dogie the picture of you as a cat he might get a little bit upset I'm

[02:03:05] just saying ah it's wonder dog yeah that is not your owner as a cat okay good I'm glad he got his walk in on that's great it's amazing the dog can't last three hours I can the dog cannot make it through the show all right well we won't go three hours we'll try to that's true you were in the chair solid I have to be here I have to do the ads and everything so we're just

[02:03:35] talking about Apple's changes to the iPhone to protect families and I think given it's Father's Day I think it's appropriate to think about this a little bit I think they built this is their website for child safety and it gives I think now I have to say and our panelists on Mac Break Weekly I think John Gruber said this it really is kind of to get ahead of governmental regulation not so

[02:04:16] should do the same with Android I have no problem with this I think meta should be liable I don't think COSA should be written in such a way that meta is not liable but I do think section see this sounds you know kind of contradictory but section 230 is very important so it's a complicated story I feel like we're starting to thread our way through this one yeah I mean I think the extent to which

[02:05:07] it's built in and it's kind of done in a thoughtful way we know that kids are grabbing for their parents iPhone as soon as they realize that mom and dad are spending X number of hours a day with these devices they want to do what mom and dad are doing so it's a reality yeah and you're right about the fact that a lot of it has to do with even some of the parents like I think that we should almost it's kind of hard we should

[02:05:37] have a tech literacy push back in the country not only for the kids that are going through school but even to re-adopt some of the adults who've already finished school already finished college everything there should be a push where if you're going to make it patriotic one of your patriotism things should be that you should become tech literate now because being tech illiterate is actually probably more dangerous for our national security in just about anything but you got a whole bunch of people who stand on their fake patriotism

[02:06:07] they can't even open up their Microsoft word good and like making decisions based on what's good for the country with a very low tech IQ and at one point it was like well tech is going to take over everything and take over a job so I don't want to know that stuff I don't want to do that and then you know those of us who dove in head first and we've always seen what the possibilities are

[02:06:41] why some of the other things that are bad for you as far as tech goes doesn't work is because well you're not tech literate so like you said when your kid was on Neopets knew right away let me make my profile that I'm a 33 year old man from Philly she was tech literate wasn't she that was I so I always fought for this when it comes to my niece I've always told my sister in law that we don't have to worry about Emma because she doesn't have a low self esteem as a kid that

[02:07:11] grew up in the hood and watch the kids that did bad the reason why I didn't get involved in all the possibilities for me to get involved to when I was a high self esteem I fact I was the simplistic nature of getting grown adults to believe that some other adults are going to come over and steal all their jobs that's an esteem

[02:07:41] problem bro because I tell you what I walk around ecamm like I'm not going to get fired because I know I do a good job you know what mean it's possible like we could lose money and the boys can you don't worry about that because I know what I put into the company and I know what I'm able to bring to the table and so we're having these conversations about the tech side but oh and to just add words to the fire are we doing anything to regulate sugar and all the other crap that's bad

[02:08:11] for kids or guns you know what I'm saying we're hard up with tech stuff but we're not touching the guns and the sugar which are probably more dangerous yeah that's a good point the biggest cause of death among children now is guns yeah it's really crazy and actually in the United States I want to give you credit Moose Espionage said it's not even just the tech it's just literacy in general because at some point in time and I think all of us I don't know if we just beat it or we have better parents but at the moment we'll use

[02:08:40] 84 is a good number I was graduating at that time but at 84 when we realized that kids that were coming from you know say lesser means were able to stand toe to toe against the quote unquote private schools where they went out of their way to make it so that their kids could have the leg up and they started stopped investing into schools and one of the first ones I remember this argument full-fledged in mid-70s was putting computers in our school and the only reason

[02:09:10] why we got computers in our school is because of where we were next to NASA that a bunch of the parents who worked at NASA put the computers in the schools ourselves and then they were like oh parents cannot donate computers to schools it has to come from the board of education I remember this fight short-streetness groceries and we had a Commodore pet right the ugly square trying to triangle yeah Commodore pet that's when I got addicted was the Commodore pet in about 6th or 7th grade

[02:09:39] and that came from one of the parents that worked at NASA in Beltsville it's absolutely the case go ahead I mean that's how Bill Gates got his start you know the parents in his school organized a fund to buy computing time for the kids and that's how Microsoft kicked off in the first place I mean I'm slightly tricky about the importance of I mean computers in schools valuable but there's been a lot of research recently that if you're actually learning from

[02:10:09] a computer you don't remember facts as much as if you actually had to write stuff down and I think you're still going to have to write stuff down to actually quite frankly you know I mean it astonishes me that computers are now to the point where you can write your university finals exams on a computer with an internet connection and that should be banned right off the bat Harvard is bringing back provosts for their exams because they don't trust

[02:10:39] kids anymore not to cheat yeah I mean there's no way it's well-educated literate populace is good for the economy is good for the country it is also the case that a well-educated literate populace is bad for certain politicians and if they're trying to hoodwink people to get them to vote for them if they're trying to fool them with scare

[02:11:09] campaigns and scare ads then having an educated electorate is not a good thing I hate to think that that's what's going on I hate to think that too it sounded so conspiracy theorist but more and more the what's the word I want to say anecdotes it's not anecdotes but more and more does the circumstantial evidence just keep stacking like there were definitely things with adjusting the school boards I mean let's go to gerrymandering that's an easy way to put it like there was

[02:11:39] gerrymandering even back in the education system and it's like well these kids can't get that smart because if they get too smart then you know now we gotta take care of them kind of situation and the whole thing that again I don't know why we keep on Reagan today but coming up with the myth of the welfare mom like that's just dumb bro like nobody's gonna have kids to make more money bro that's just really stupid I'm kind of reminded of the old George Carlin sketch where he was talking about this and he's just like

[02:12:10] the buttons and pull the levers not any more than that and it's just like you watch that from 30 years ago and you're kind of like well that was actually surprisingly on point and the reality though is like the AI job effect is it's going to make jobs more complicated and require more education more critical thinking and you know to the extent it's not eliminating jobs it's transforming them and raising the bar

[02:12:39] for what we need as a society from our education one would hope that every elected official in this country is rooting for this country to be the best it can be to be the smartest and the strongest and the most effective and this is the same government that actually added a journalist to a signal conversation about weapon strikes but you know I mean you know I think in the best of all possible worlds elected officials are there not to enrich themselves

[02:13:09] or gain power because they want to make the place a better place and one would hope that that's why people are trying to get elected we could disagree about what makes it a better place but we should all be wanting to make it better it doesn't seem to be the case always and those are the people you should not vote for that's all I have to say about that Waymo speaking of mistakes is now recalling

[02:13:38] its robo taxis because they're driving into highway construction zones there are at least 13 instances now Waymo is in San Francisco you see boy oh and you see remember I was in San Francisco on Wednesday every third car is a Waymo now in San Francisco oh I mean when I'm up early going to the gym like it's me it's me on a bike and a bunch of Waymos do you feel safer with the Waymos you know they do tend to stop more

[02:14:08] you know they drive generously yeah so like if they detect you know my presence on a bike they tend to just reflect I read somebody saying driving Waymo is weird because they're over cautious in some areas and then they step on it they floor it in other areas yeah I wonder if Owen if the Waymo ever pulled up to a whistle and be like look at those hams I'd be flattered Thanksgiving I mean

[02:14:38] my mum was over for Thanksgiving and I wanted to take her in one and she flat out refused I understand I've never been to one it makes me nervous I understand they're really safe I mean I took one Saturday night in San Francisco yeah I know we're coming to that they felt really safe plus you can choose the soundtrack that you listen to so in my case it was the Knight Rider theme tune oh there you go I tell you one thing that every American should have

[02:15:08] to experience though I had my first ride in the black taxi and oh yeah we were going from going from Waterloo to Heathrow right it's kind of an expensive oh the London cab it was easier yeah well it turns out having a flight actually I flew on Sunday but moving from Waterloo to Heathrow on a Saturday during football dumb okay very very dumb but the way that this guy knew every single back road when I found myself in Kent I'm like why the heck am I in

[02:15:38] Kent well because according to Google Maps if you went on the freeway you'd be done because by the time you'd come out by the G Tech stadium where Brentford played like there was just a lot of traffic at that time right because no I mean London taxi drivers do a thing called knowledge which is a five year test that's I was three but it's five yeah oh my god it was brilliant it was what do they have to know in the knowledge everything every single road in London I mean literally so they have Google Maps in their brain

[02:16:08] basically in their brain pretty much yeah I mean there's a reason why they get paid so much I'm sorry do you understand on a Saturday or Sunday when there's game time like of course when the stadium is getting out like everything is messed up right so all the stations you saw literally in the premier side there's six teams if you count the under teams like there's almost 20 teams in London proper right and so when everybody's playing on a Saturday towards the end of the season it's a madhouse and yet it was just it was like it was like butter bro

[02:16:37] and there was a UFC fight that night as well so this guy just got through traffic like nobody and everybody should experience it at least once and then how well did they get paid um they basically they self employed so um but it's good money is what you're saying yeah it's it's I mean it's it's it's very good money um and they defend it quite and uh taxi drivers didn't protest about it they just went around to the Uber office and completely

[02:17:06] trashed it um they they they knew the way to the Uber office which was really impressive yeah the taxi was better than Uber Uber was dooky and so was Bolt I didn't really like Bolt but just just do the taxi it's better so what about self-driving vehicles are there self-driving vehicles in the Waymo is launching in London this year yeah I saw them testing yeah there are tests at the moment an Uber driver may not know every road they may not have the knowledge but we know the Waymo does right yeah

[02:17:36] I mean I'm a little bit concerned because uh Waymos have an awful lot of very expensive hardware in easily smashable places on the outside of the car and I get the feeling a couple of London cab drivers are going to have a take a more direct action approach against the competition that'll be interesting so it's not the first time Waymo has been yanked so what they do is they slowly expand its capabilities it was only recently they allowed Waymos on the freeway at all right uh unfortunately

[02:18:05] since they did that there have been 13 instances of robo taxis driving into highway sections that were closed for construction you know lights barricades barriers all of that stuff they go plow right through it six of them were in Phoenix Arizona in April seven occurred in San Francisco in May so May 19th Waymo pulled all its robo taxis from highways and they are working on a fix so the Waymos are still going but they're only on city streets it's not the first time they've

[02:18:35] done this you may remember uh in fact it's the sixth time uh you may remember Waymo recalled its robo taxis after they kept driving into flooded roads uh yeah in uh in December uh they had a recall to address the vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses low speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles have been a problem and there was another one solving a problem regarding regarding towed trucks I mean

[02:19:04] on the on the plus side they haven't killed anyone yet it's not like this is the uber self-driving car which actually killed a cat they killed a cat oh yes the bodega cat the bodega cat much mourned beloved cat yeah yeah I actually think they have killed one pedestrian in phoenix did they not was that Waymo or oh no that was GM that was the that was the general motors cruise no that was uber i think okay yeah with a test driver in the car i should right yeah it's true that actually

[02:19:34] parked on someone after they knocked up that was that was another uh didn't kill him uh so that's the good ish news um Waymo says they've driven more than 170 miles autonomously they have demonstrated a 13 times reduction in serious industry injury or worse crashes when compared to human drivers i believe that i mean we're humans are terrible drivers oh yeah i mean i i used to work in embarcadero and you just looked out the window and you would see

[02:20:04] as you pointed out owen three or four Waymo's just circulating around so i'm not sure they actually cut down on traffic per se but they're certainly safer than human drivers and i've got a friend who also cycles in the city and he says he feels a lot more comfortable having a Waymo coming up behind him than he does a human driver you at least know it's paying attention the human driver may not be uh Waymo's gonna launch in 20 more cities this year including london and tokyo so they're going to be will be in a way good but

[02:20:34] not in the major parts like in the outside side of the streets i think it will be good because people are very good about not not being in the streets during the crosswalk and things of that nature for instance here in Hawaii it is like a 400 and something dollar fine to enter the crosswalk once the numbers start counting right you're not supposed to enter once the numbers start counting you know what everybody does as soon as they see the number they try to run across the street you know what else we have a lot of in Honolulu people over the age of 70 because that's where you make your money you come here to retire leo wink wink i got a couple spots open in my

[02:21:04] building dude i see dudes enter the street the numbers on seven and i'm like yo papa you cannot make that crossing in seven seconds dog so now everybody is waiting and people in tokyo just don't do that so i think it might be okay in tokyo but those side streets are really skinny bro they're tiny same in london i mean there's a lot of streets down there that are just like i remember when um uh there was a lot

[02:21:33] of talk about people in london buying wank tax sorry cyber trucks um and getting trying to get one of those down a london street is just impossible and in fact they're illegal in the uk because they're not built cyber trucks the tesla cyber truck is illegal in the uk they're illegal in in uk and europe because to why well no it's not it's not that it's they're not built for pedestrian crashes so under eu and uk law

[02:22:03] you have to have the car designed in such a way as to minimize the chance of a pedestrian getting hit by well if a pedestrian gets hit by one they're not going to get killed so you have rounded fronts um oh that's interesting if you're familiar with the mazda miata they used to have pop-up headlights those went because pop-up headlights will knacker a pedestrian if you run into them uh this is why you know things like the f-150 and other american gargantuan

[02:22:32] trucks aren't sold over there because they are anybody under six foot tall over your hood on an f-150 i mean they're just or at least the 250 the big ones they're really big yeah i mean i try to drive a little guy what is it about little guys in big trucks when you guys have been here and seen the way we lift the truck right everybody has a truck that's like seven feet off the ground here and like the

[02:23:09] it's good he's he's napping oh oh yeah what a sweetie that's we don't have the most time that's owen thomas from the san francisco business times and his little doggy fritz uh fitz or fitz short for fitzgerald oh oh f-scott f-scott f-scott irish doggy uh a little scotsman known as ian thompson also about a scotts of the duke of edinburgh was but yes

[02:23:38] all right well he's from edinburgh yeah well he was from greece but yeah okay that's true first you're talking about philip yeah yeah uh and of course from hawaii are you a hawaiian uh no that's a that is people in the mainland in trouble like native hawaiians is a kingdom it's a set of people and they stole we stole the land from them we we we did it first but true story i always have to correct my mainland

[02:24:07] people like i am from hawaii but i'm not hawaiian it's not the same thing as being california like i'm just from hawaii we don't get to add to hawaiian when we were in the big island and we loved it by the way just loved it a couple last month and uh we gotta go to see the captain cook statue but i think that's where that's where they killed captain cook i think yeah that's where they killed him and ate him yes and after this week i'm gonna go put a cone on his head is that what you do you put a cone on his head i want to now now just make it more fun because

[02:24:36] no no no it's everybody if you ever go to glasgow there's a statue of uh the duke of wellington on horseback and it has a traffic cone on its head and every time the council room removes it the traffic cone goes back on and apparently in boston when the scots fans came over an awful lot of statues ended up with traffic cones on their heads oh but um yes if you if you check it out there's it's almost certain tons of them it's so good

[02:25:05] he does kind of it does kind of beg to have a traffic cone on his head oh well you know it's a perfect fit there's a drag queen on rupaul's drag race uk who did that statue as uh as one of her outfits oh i love it oh right no i mean it's the thing is the duke of wellington isn't popular in in scotland and there is actually a a verse of the national anthem which is seldom sung these days and with a rush rebellious rebellious scots to crush

[02:25:32] um but yeah he's not that popular and the traffic cone is just every the council stopped trying to take it down because you know it would be gone and then the next night it'd be up there again and now boston's getting a spill of that as well sometimes even the horse gets a traffic cone on its head it's like not a new phrase gonna be nothing under the kilt cone on the head let's park well you always get asked when you wear a kilt what do you wear underneath it

[02:26:00] and there are three answers the my great uncle who who left me his kilt when he died said there are three answers to that uh if you're on the pull and looking to meet up with a nice lass then it's the future of scotland uh if it's anyone and anyone in general then you say my courage and if you're looking to start a fight you say your wife's lipstick oh i like it i like it i've always wanted to buy a boy tartan because my last name is scottish and so i've always

[02:26:27] wanted to go buy one and my my goal is to get there and i have a buddy who i met when i was in uk her husband used to work for dalmore so he says if i ever come back like he can connect me to a lot of the whiskey places that i would want to visit very nice worked in the industry for like 40 years so i can't wait to go back excuse me for just a second i think there's loud music downstairs i'm going to close the door oh leo if it's too loud you're too old

[02:26:53] oh please oh but no apply for us this guy is winning the chat today this is great no i mean second what seven years ago facebook reminded me um yeah we went on a uh we did the north coast 500 which is a tour around the north coast of the scotland scotland and on the very first night there was a bar there with 200 whiskies and it was great for planning out because it's just like right i'll try that yeah we'll pop by that distillery and that distillery and that distillery and it saved us

[02:27:21] an awful lot of driving so good uh all right no we all wish we were there right now but we're not we're right here doing this week in tech which is brought to you this week by box you know that name if you're an enterprise trying to transform your business uh with ai you're likely facing an all too common challenge most ai tools are good at public knowledge that's what they're trained on

[02:27:47] but do they know your business no of course not do they know your product roadmaps well how would they your sales materials your hr policies i hope not your financial models the content that actually makes your company run well they can this is where box comes in box is building the intelligent content management platform for the ai era and this you're going to love this because it serves as a secure

[02:28:14] essential context layer for boxes ai agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes a company run public models your information securely stored as a context layer inside box that's the way to do it that's the key idea the power of ai doesn't come just from the model alone it starts with the model but it comes from giving that model access to the right enterprise content your

[02:28:44] source of truth right boxes recent state of ai in the enterprise report found that 96 of organizations say agents need access to company specific data that's almost everybody but only 36 percent have connected agents to trusted content across many use cases everybody knows you need to do it but so few do well box makes it easy box goes beyond file storage to connect content to people apps and ai agents so teams

[02:29:13] can turn information into action with tools like box agent box extract box hubs and more organizations can accelerate knowledge work they can pull intelligence from unstructured content and automate workflows box agent is a unified ai experience across all your files it can understand your natural language prompts it can pull the right content and help you work through the task i have to say it's been my own experience

[02:29:41] that the model alone is not enough supplying it with knowledge about yourself about your business and it turns it into such a useful tool for agents both inside and outside box including tools by the way you're not stuck with any one model like chat gpt copilot you can use gemini you can use agent force you can use custom agents box becomes the trusted content and file layer by its platform apis it has an mcp

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[02:30:38] your business lives in your content and box helps you bring that content securely into the ai era this is one of the really important insights that helps ai become so valuable to your business visit box.com slash ai if you want to learn more box.com slash ai box.com slash ai well here come the ai specs

[02:31:05] and it's not from maybe who you thought it would be from uh yes it's not meta it's not apple it's actually the company that first started oh man i've been logged out again of bloomberg this is this is what uh John Gruber calls a dick over it's not a popover i'm already paying for bloomberg

[02:31:30] but for some reason it's just decided to cover the entire page i was going to tell you about snap's new spectacles yes snap is launching ar spectacles they are not cheap 2195 dollars uh they don't make you look super cool they might like i was gonna say they they kind of remind me of

[02:31:55] a friend of mine's in the american military and the glasses they issue with you uh issue with if you need glasses yeah i'm called yeah i mean these are they're basically called rape protection glasses because they're that ugly we call them and she's birth control glasses in the earth all right okay so on the left actually this is harry thank you for not locking me out this is harry mccracken's article at fast company instead of bloomberg uh on the left that's the original uh snap spectacles which i had

[02:32:22] they they they didn't have ai they just had a camera built in they looked kind of cool on the right is these new uh 2026 spectacles harry calls them the great great great grandchild of the original snap spectacles i got imaging on the bottom i don't i don't i you know i really am a believer in this

[02:32:44] form factor for ai um but these are damn ugly yeah these really are bcgs um and they're real expensive yeah yeah i mean also they're they're kind of i don't like them because any of the glass form factors because they're kind of intrusive i was reading an article about one journalist who was checking into a hotel and he actually asked the you know the receptionist was wearing them and he said can

[02:33:14] you take those off please because you're about to look at my credit card and i really don't want that information fair cost online stay that stayed on you know and it's honestly i have a friend who wears the meta glasses and whenever he has them on i just i don't want to be scanned when i'm walking down the street maybe i'm old-fashioned you'll get over everybody's gonna have them yeah i absolutely love these though and i tell you oh i got them too yeah and these these are my gym ones i just bought

[02:33:41] new gen twos uh they're actually charging upstairs did you you bought the new ones i got the same case exact one yeah the lady deleted the store missing for talking about the meta don't worry but it turns out the case is interchangeable but i did get the new gen twos and what i really like about them where they really come in handy is a lot of times when i'm sitting in you know airplane whatever we haven't done a takeoff yet i haven't put on my other headphones yet i can still hear what i'm listening to

[02:34:06] and what's going on yeah i can still hear what's going on so my number one use case for them is listening to podcasts or something when i still need to be uh ambiently aware of what's going on the other thing that it works really well for like i said i do my walk-in talks my adhd brain dumps where i have to get in my steps so i walk and i just basically brain dump new idea or client thing that i'm working on or something and i just record all of that and i have it going into whisper flow and then from

[02:34:35] whisper flow i basically convert it into things so it's a little bit better than plod in the sense but yeah i don't go around with creeper recording so you can um so okay this is good to know so you can use the meta glasses to feed into your own ai transcription service yes i use a combination of whisper flow and audio pen and i just keep switching back and forth because is there an a is there a sdk an api is there an mcp server no i use it just as the microphone for the one that's

[02:35:02] on the app on the phone i didn't want to put it into the glasses per se um because i don't trust men i mean that's my dream eventually tie these to your ai yeah and and then everything that you see becomes part of the you know the valuable information here's a picture of imogene heap wearing them she doesn't look too bad notice they tint they have a variety of tints they can apply so

[02:35:27] they're trying to make them somehow tip i guess we can get over it uh what uh darren okey says in our discord chat is is actually a good point which is if you don't tie them to a phone and snap doesn't have a phone meta doesn't have a phone they're inevitably going to be clunky because they have to put more computing into the glasses more battery more competing these only run for four hours uh although you can charge them up to four times with the case also hey this has been a really long

[02:35:54] when you're just listening to things you're listening to music or whatever they do one really long another reason why these come in super super handy is being um i travel a lot and of course when i go to japan i can read like a oh the science i can read like an eighth grader but anything harder than that i gotta be like hey what does this say and unlike many countries japan does not make any concession to

[02:36:20] english it's in japanese it's in japanese yeah that's why actually one of the pro tips when you go to a restaurant and say no english menu oh that's gonna be off the chain it's gonna be much better you don't want to convince them they don't want they won't a lot of people say they're being mean or racist they don't want to let you in because they don't want to give you bad surface because they can't communicate right so normally when i say oh they go ah okay come in come in they're excited now not only get to hang out they get to you know watch me screw up my japanese or whatever but snaps trying

[02:36:48] to get over the hump of these ugliness by having what they call specs visionaries here's a golden state warrior jimmy butler wearing them see if you get enough famous hipsters wearing them maybe people will get say oh you know this there's a place where apple watch was though back it's very very expensive yeah i mean the the celebrity thing didn't work with google glass why would it work now

[02:37:13] yeah actually glass was weird and asymmetrical like you know yeah no i mean i i remember when google class glass came out um uh google got really quite annoyed with the register because we coined the term glass holes and used in every single article and eventually that i mean we had angry phone calls from their pr just like no we're not going to give you one to review when you're calling i get bad news for

[02:37:39] him it's well no i mean the triumph was when google actually used the term itself in a press release saying don't be a glass soul and it was just like yes nailed it is does that predate the term for glaswegians or after no no you don't you you don't insult glaswegians now if i wore traffic on my head while wearing people say that yeah it might be okay well they also have the phrase the glasgow kiss

[02:38:05] which is being headbutted so yeah you definitely don't want to do that we're learning we say that about massachusetts people we call them mass holes so yeah yeah that's right that actually predates glass holes anyway uh harry says they no longer look like a cyber truck affixed to your face i might disagree with that oh yeah uh that no let's run into any pedestrians with them on oh my gosh this guy's killing me unlike in many products uh it's self-contained no external battery pack input device other than

[02:38:35] your hands or dependency on a smartphone that's why they're so clunky uh they weigh they don't weigh that much 100 they were four four and a half to 4.8 ounces that's not that heavy i don't know but you know leo in because of uh sort of k-pop slash hip-hop the style of glasses that these are is very common right chunky kind of big yeah so a ray-ban just dropped the new collaboration with asap rocky and

[02:39:02] they're the puffier uh ray-bans but uh oliver people's a bunch of brands tom ford they have these sort of giant thick frames that are built off the original uh blues brothers wayfarer or the bcgs and so they don't look that far removed but they're like extra chunky these have a heads-up display built in bigger than the meta ray-ban displays um i think it was uh let me see if i can find the uh

[02:39:30] the angle of it um it's it doesn't fill your it doesn't fill the whole screen but it's about i think two or three times bigger than the the ray-ban displays i want to say 51 degrees but i'm i have to find this in harry's article um they have sound they have uh you know many of harry points out the original macintosh sold for eight thousand dollars one adjusted for inflation so 21.95 is not too outrageous

[02:39:59] it is laptop cost uh can you do everything you can do with them that you could do with a laptop i i don't think so i think this is a very early product early adopters will probably be in trip very early adopters will be interested i don't see it as a mass appeal product by any means any more than the apple vision pros were i can't wait to see what apple finally gets around to though and apple has the

[02:40:25] iphone and i think that that's going to make a big difference because now you have the computing platform off the glasses in your pocket and it's internet connected uh it helps with weight it helps with size it helps with battery life and it can have much faster processor too the iphones are very heavy duty processors now yeah matters are a little slow as far as the ai stuff goes in the glasses so it'd be

[02:40:49] really interesting to see what apple can do with especially dedicated access to the the chips that are inside of our you know in base iphone snap spun the business out into a subsidiary it's called specs inc and these are the specs um they have been seeding uh developers with them for a while uh so there

[02:41:11] will be some stuff you could turn yourself into a cat or a lizard uh you can twist your face like silly putty i don't know with whom i guess if you're in a call i don't know um snapchat shows you what your camera sees the moment you launch the app so that's kind of nice and that was something that ray-ban displays i i think do as well as you could finally see what you're you're glad because you can't write

[02:41:39] with these owen i'm sorry doc you can't no no see the i really thought hard about getting displays but i was like no i'm just kidding the regular ones because i don't want to be heavy they're expensive well we'll see anyway snapchat is getting into the game with a chonky version of these uh of these glasses the specs and uh evan spiegel the ceo of snapchat said uh this this we're counting on this

[02:42:06] going forward you know what a lot of the a lot of the um i don't know what the terminology is i don't want to call them influencers i hate that word but the carly the kylie jenner uh justin bieber type clan that grew up with making snapchat what it is today um they would be who they're going to use to kind of get people into this yeah and it's going to become a very expensive play for parents that have

[02:42:31] to buy their kids like two thousand two thousand maybe kylie jenner has one timothy chamelot has one yeah there you go charlemagne but i mean are there going to be knockoffs of the oh 100 yeah that's where the danger comes i think i'm going to do what everybody is saying i'm going to wait till apple comes up with it might not be next year it might be two years from now but i think chinese manufacturers are going to make a much cheaper much better version of these as far as i can see

[02:42:58] mm-hmm but if you're not attached to an ecosystem i don't know if it's a good a good thing to buy i think you want to be attached to the apple ecosystem or i think snap would have been better to make them cheaper but make it like you know platform gnostic where it's very much a snapchat thing so they can bring it snapchat is secretly grown again but like to tie it directly into snapchat and then you know like use that as the play where they're going to make the money off the advertising layer that would have made more sense but two thousand is a lot bro

[02:43:27] yeah for this and prescription snapchat stock is down like uh 95 plus from their 2021 high it's that's why they're saying we need this to survive yeah yeah yeah it's almost a pivot it's a swing yeah swing and a miss uh fox is spending 22 billion dollars to buy roku oh my god i'm so mad

[02:43:51] and now the picture is starting to become a little bit uh clearer uh lachlan murdoch the ceo of fox says they're going to keep the two companies separate remember roku doesn't just make little streaming devices they make tvs and i think this is a big play for the streaming market and and the kinds of data that the tvs get the big play thus far would they i mean talk about letting your letting your hand out on

[02:44:20] a table right we're sitting here with all the aces two weeks before world cup starts i get a notification on my apple tv that the fox sports app will no longer work what you need to get fox one okay i only have the fox sports app on my phone for two reasons football and football like other than that i don't use it i don't want to go anywhere near that network right i had the fox regular app there because of there was a tv show at one point that i used to like that i don't longer watch um but yeah

[02:44:49] they moved everything into one app and so when you go to look for your world cup game there will be lamin yamal and you know the saudi player on the front and then right underneath it fox shows all the fox shows that are like the i'm a patriot i'm a soldier let's watch army men do this kind of thing that's all on the next fold so even before you get to the fold there's all of the fox sphere crap right underneath it exactly to get to the world cup coverage you got to go down down down down down

[02:45:18] about seven times down the fold and then you can get to the hub that will take you straight into the world cup now of course if you're if you know how to use nerd tech you can swipe left and get the tiny little menu and scroll all the way down to the bottom seven things down and find the one that says sports which will take you over but even when you get to that page there's the world cup banner then there's all the u.s football and baseball and whatnot uh nascar and then more shows about how

[02:45:44] the american might of this nascar driver and blah blah it's it's so it's all about selling fox propagandizing of the world cup hub on fox one is absolute dookie and it irritates the crap out of me let them get their hands on roku and oh my god brain cells are over well according to the verge there's unlikely to be any regulatory hurdles of course there's not not certainly in the united states

[02:46:12] that's so last century you know and even from the eu um because roku and fox have kind of a small footprint in the eu so it is yeah i worry this i worry what the doc was talking about is going to happen to formula one when apple fully takes it over and we're going to see exactly the same kind of situation this immediate consolidation used to be considered a bad thing but it's very much in the

[02:46:36] the vogue at the moment and already they've introduced ads into my formula one stream i'm not too happy about that the um oh really yeah the thing about fox that people forget is they own this uh you know this streaming service called tubi which is a fast or free ad ad supported television service in other words just free streaming with yes ads um but as netflix has shown as amazon has shown where you know

[02:47:05] where they've put in ad supported tiers where they used to just have you know the pure premium uh streaming video services people generally prefer to pay a little less or nothing and uh put up with some ads um you know we you know we we the media elite may not uh like them but that's it seems to be the way of

[02:47:28] the world now there's basically two players um with good fast uh services it's fox and paramount um paramount has pluto which is a really good service um they're looking at ways to combine pluto and paramount plus um and when you put all of the warner brothers content uh hbo into into that system

[02:47:54] um it could be really effective distribution all of these companies are looking for a post broadcast post cable future and i think this is the scariest part about what owen just said is um now that paramount pluto play is skynet dance i'm gonna call it skynet you do what you want um and then the other one is

[02:48:18] the fox roku play right so again you talk about trying to get one-handed side talking and again this is just tv right this is not news this isn't that thing of the uh you know fake news versus whatever news it's just regular tv but when you're watching the world cup and right now all of the commercials that haven't been bought before by somebody has been filled in with commercials for to be oriented shows

[02:48:44] a whole bunch of like america first oriented show uh shows and then man i have never seen so many ads for jesus in the middle of a freaking world cup like i mean it's not i mean i'm trying to be facetious if you go by the the global scalar thing and the amount of uh people teams and stuff that are playing um that's it would be i could see catholic side maybe maybe i could even see a little bit of the

[02:49:10] islamic side of it in the commercial but all the commercials are like jesus commercials you know um like you just have to watch a welcome back on on the fox one app and it's you'll you'll see it you'll be like oh my god they're counter programming like heavily with the ad space that they didn't sell because i think a lot of people were scared into believing or companies were scared of believing that world cup wouldn't be big because of the weird stuff that has been going on here because of the

[02:49:35] fifa peace prize yeah there we go i was i was trying to be nice about it but if you see the counter programming i'm like bro if my brain was dirty and was ready to be washed i could see how i could get bit i could see how i could become a fox fan watching the way you do it you just have to go and see just watch one game in the fox one app versus watching it on your regular tv and you'll see exactly what i'm saying you'll be like oh my god the reason why i watch it because of 4k the one that comes on tv is

[02:50:02] coming in 2k which i think again they did on purpose what are they going to do to roku city though what's fox going to do to roku city what's roku city that's the screensaver everybody watches oh the little screensavers yeah oh i do the aquarium yeah you're gonna see gretchen carlson some of the most watched stuff on real is those screens so like they're gonna put something there right oh yeah i mean with apple aerials bro like i get so many people that tell me that they just

[02:50:29] like to watch the apple aerials especially when you said i like the under the undersea you see like yeah they're beautiful and sharks yeah i love the aerials one more uh speaking of underwater mid journey has gone from generating images to full body ultra scan sound scans i'm not sure how this works mid journey which was until you know maybe nano banana the dominant image generating

[02:50:55] uh tool we use it like crazy but i haven't used it in ages because the you know the frontier companies have kind of caught up so they announced a a new business a um uh ultrasound scanner full body scanner that they uh say uh uses 40 butterfly this is a ultrasound tech company butterfly network ultrasound

[02:51:18] on chip imaging modules and then they use mid journey's ai capabilities to analyze it to create a full body scan um there's some question about what kind of resolution uh the scan's going to have and how useful it will be but they want to compete with companies like prenuvo who do you know uh five thousand dollar or maybe they're not quite that expensive two thousand dollar uh mris on demand

[02:51:44] mris not ordered by your doctor but just for you uh they could they want to have these ultrasounds everywhere and you just walk in and you get dunked in water and then uh they plan to put 10 of the scanners into a mid journey spa location in union square which will open before the end of union scare san francisco by the way which will open before the end of 2027

[02:52:07] and then they're going to uh try to try to do it all over the country it's a complete pivot for mid journey it's interesting so union square is becoming this hub for like ai companies oh is it really yeah used to be where macy's was right there's world macy's is still there uh but um macy's actually i deployed uh some interesting location shopping technology back in the day so it's

[02:52:32] it's been a tech playground for a while uh union square uh but you've got the world coin you know the or oh that's right the orbs in the yeah and i wouldn't be surprised if you saw more uh of these the interestingly it's uh the mid journey spa is specifically on grand avenue which is like a very high-end part of union square it's not on the square proper it's like an it's that's where all

[02:53:00] the fancy like where the apple store is right um apple store is on the northeast corner um of uh stockton and post um but it's a block for me sorry this is a block block east and it's it's even posher so it can't be cheap real estate um wow what their play is is it uh you know is it visibility um that may be um you know it's hard to it's hard to understand how that fits with image and video

[02:53:30] generation it's basically pushing all your chips into the middle you're betting the whole bank just like snap is doing on a on a high risk high reward bet and just crossing your fingers it's funny when you think about like at one point you would go down there i remember every time i had to go to union to go to bong and olsen just to watch the stereo go i remember that you got tiffany saxford avenue

[02:53:59] yeah right there um strangely enough on the on the i keep wanting to say powell but his post on the post side there's a donut shop that's like two steps away from the corner which is off the chain that i used to always go to but it's weird that that has become an ai thing and i do remember when we first got you know like the uh macy's was doing the location based uh drops on your phone when you would walk in they were using beacon beacon ai because i knew somebody that worked there and that was like

[02:54:27] you know your iphone screen would show you things when you'd go into certain stores down there and it was like the test bed for all of that so it makes sense the the lineage is there but yeah it's kind of a weird play that's just in that one spot though take one more break and then wrap it up with uh some final stories you're watching this week in tech with ian thompson owen thomas doc rock so glad to have you of course all our club members changing my name make this show possible huh i'm changing my

[02:54:52] name to doxon doxon roxon thompson doxon thompson doxon sorry sorry leo in thompson rock rock and thompson and and some other hey rocking thompson i can live with rock and thompson i like it owen the rock and doxon toxin no toxin is not good we'll figure it out we're working on it the ai will help

[02:55:17] us in just a bit uh our show today brought to you by zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform we talk about the potential rewards of ai and for any business it's it's something you can't ignore but the risks are there too and you don't want to ignore those the loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise managed ai and plus generative ai is a boon just as it is for your

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[02:56:35] with zscaler as long as you've got internet you're good to go a big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from sdwan and vpn is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network it also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment with zscaler zero trust plus ai you

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[02:57:31] mention this we were talking about the rising prices and commodities and memory nothing has canceled their inexpensive uh phone their low price phone the cmf phone due to ram prices nothing's founder says we can't build the budget phone as a price at a price that makes sense carl pay uh said the ram shortage has impacted most of the company's mid-range phones as well for the phone for a memory cost doubled

[02:58:01] the memory is now the most expensive component in the smartphone more than half of the overall cost uh you do wonder where this is going to end up i mean it could be one of the side benefits of the ai bubble finally popping as the memory prices come down when people always superficial data centers don't get built after all and there's a big surge of memory coming onto the market but it's not looking good at

[02:58:28] the moment uh you actually had a story in the uh san francisco business journal about the boom being caused by this ai ipo wave owen let me close the pop-ups there um the ai ipo wave is coming but the bay area hasn't seen a boom like this one how is it going to change the bay area yeah this was written by

[02:58:51] my colleague our editor-in-chief jeremy owens um the um the key difference is that the wealth uh from these companies it's going to be highly concentrated uh when these companies grew so fast that the kind of early cohort of employees who got stock options was much smaller than say at facebook or twitter or salesforce you know those companies kind of grew gradually over time you know raised several rounds of

[02:59:20] venture capital um open ai and anthropic have done everything at kind of turbo speed um and their valuations uh are nearing a trillion dollars already as private companies spacex which now has an ai story uh is is i believe still worth about two trillion dollars on the uh on the public market so minted

[02:59:43] what 400 millionaires with spacex stock and i think yeah that's some some like tens of centimillionaires cafeteria workers uh at spacex uh included which reminds you of the you remember the google massage therapist who yeah we've got sock options or the or the meta the guy at meta who painted the mural on the wall yes the graffiti artist yeah they didn't want to they didn't want to give money they give him

[03:00:08] stock but you know this is not going to be like a broad-based uh kind of wealth generator uh it's it's going to be you know mansions in pacific heights and atherton um it's interesting your cover story actually uh points out that these companies are not leaving san francisco you know people like elon have famously moved to texas but open ai and anthropic are they have really put down roots and uh

[03:00:34] they've become uh you know besides the the near trillion dollar valuation they're also both near or at a million square feet of office space wow um and you know that implies uh you know that implies uh employee accounts in the you know in the high single thousands um you know that's enough room for roughly you know off the top of my head that's six thousand seven thousand employees worth of space now

[03:01:00] anthropic has leased a big uh power for its headquarters they have not moved in yet that's going to be next year so they're not there yet but they they really are planning on being large large employers um in in san francisco uh i uh you know i wrote about salesforce overtaking wells fargo as the largest private sector employer um in san francisco uh that happened several years ago i believe uh

[03:01:29] uh 2018 2019 um we could see easily see open ai uh or anthropic uh they're both growing quickly overtaking salesforce in um not so many years in terms of employee count will they take over that penis building downtown you know i i think salesforce has a has a long-term lease there um

[03:01:53] anthropic actually has kind of um ordered the market on real estate around salesforce tower there's a street howard street it's um two blocks south of market street and uh we're we've nicknamed it anthropic row because they have they have um along basically three consecutive blocks of howard street they have leases in like every building 300 400 500 uh howard the have we seen this before with i

[03:02:21] mean twitter was in san francisco um you know twitter's not a bad comparison when twitter leased uh you know it's uh its space in 1355 market that was seen as transformative for mid-market now that didn't turn out twitter of course is now x and they are completely out of san francisco um they do have some operations in palo alto uh along with xai so they have not quit uh california despite the you

[03:02:50] know um the reincorporation in texas um but uh yeah i think you know that would be the the biggest analogy or frankly salesforce moving into salesforce tower that was a big statement um uh you know a decade or so ago yeah we still call it salesforce tower but salesforce didn't build it through yeah

[03:03:11] it was uh they were just the flagship tenant and you know ironically we're uh roughly where uh open ai is now salesforce was going to put its campus there oh but they decided it wasn't going to be enough space so they they uh snagged about a third of salesforce tower instead and became the the namesake of the tower this is the 20 000 square foot building that we'll call the anthropic squatty building

[03:03:40] yeah that's that's a little building in jackson square jackson square is still very popular with like smaller ai startups it's a it's a little neighborhood immediately immediately north of where i'm sitting in the financial district it's a nice neighborhood yeah i mean and then this is a little bit more it looks like more like an ai company that's that's fancy schmancy now that is uh that's part of a complex you see it's actually four buildings around an intersection for you know

[03:04:09] more or less similarly designed buildings that's called foundry square and that's um you know history recently that's been leased by blackrock auric pwc so big financial law accounting firms uh now anthropic is taking over a lot of that how many employees do these companies have i mean isn't the whole point of ai that you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of employees well you know

[03:04:34] that's the interesting thing right is you know you need um these companies are betting on adoption in the enterprise and you know you can't just like ai your way into a fortune 500 company right you need sales people you need sales engineers you need uh you know consultants um they're going public so you need accountants legal now of course they're all you know telling a good story about how they use ai

[03:05:00] to make their um you know their own internal operations more efficient and i'm sure they're doing that but you know the reality is like they've got hundreds of open jobs like at the moment that they're that they're hiring for one million square feet of office space between yeah ianthropic in uh downtown san francisco and yeah and you know open ai has really cornered uh mission bay anthropic

[03:05:26] has cornered that you know that part of the financial district where they are they want dense walkable campuses they want that creativity uh they want that vibe of being in person um so in a way amazon and microsoft and boeing kind of made seattle what it is and and amazon's you know kind of wild architecture in seattle and so forth and uh and microsoft uh founder who you know built that frank gary museum and

[03:05:54] so forth paul allen paul i wonder if san francisco is is is going to be shaped by these ai companies in the decades to come much like seattle was i mean it was for a minute right and then it you know it kind of went really because um well it's been going through i mean san francisco went through a bad went through a bunch of changes right so that that building is is is it right across from the ferry building is that the market one one market building um one market is is interesting because it's really been

[03:06:20] struggling um right because that was twitter right uh no google google was uh google was in one market you're right you've got a good memory uh salesforce before uh before it was in salesforce tower i had one market um as its long time home um but one market is actually we've written about the the kind of struggle that building has had with refilling vacancies uh especially after google pulled out

[03:06:48] google is still in san francisco uh they've got a um they've got a building actually i can like practically uh walk out of here and see it um yes spirit street but also one maritime plaza they have a big presence in in that tower they've also got offices in the ferry building i was surprised to learn recently um that's the corner right market and spear is where what market is and then the ferry building they used to have the bomb as uh the roly roly truck he used to make uh like oh yeah

[03:07:17] like prosciutto set up that's prosciutto yeah not prosciutto what's the word i'm looking for the um porchetta you can make the porchetta sandwiches like right there and so that's where it's always good because it's by the federal now you're making me hungry it's dinner time i don't think you should be talking about that's the best thing in san francisco that and then go up to the mission and go get a two-foot paper dosa um but yeah so it's really weird because i remember one of my

[03:07:41] buddies worked at um what's the way we just salesforce back then uh he was my editor when i was at two uh he worked at salesforce and we used to go to that building and then go grab food across the street and so that whole area was like little pockets of tech and then it was like oh they smart they put it all in the financial area so you're saying now these guys pick their buildings up and go somewhere else where they get better better rate what's the reason for i'm just surprised i always have a

[03:08:07] reputation for being very expensive um you know the big tech companies are down the peninsula in silicon valley where the rent is cheaper in towns like san jose i mean what is it about san francisco that makes these companies want well there's been a a there's been a reset so prices are still not cheap but um they're cheaper there's been an opportunity kind of in this moment um now

[03:08:31] stanford lie yeah the the um you know the thing is it's fomo right like people want to be in the heart of the action and right now the perception is if you're an ai san francisco is where the heart of the action is um the big exception to that of course is is spacex they're putting uh they're putting their bets on xai and palo alto and um of course they can tap into google and meta which are building

[03:08:59] up big ai labs yes and you know in mountain view and menlo park um so you know it's not it's not all or nothing there's going to be some stuff in silicon valley there's going to be some some stuff in san francisco but um venture capital too is like um is setting up the sf address yeah if they haven't already established some kind of little san francisco outpost uh there's an alley then they're they're

[03:09:25] going to be there's an alley uh you know right uh right around the corner from us where three venture capital offices have popped up uh with like little little storefront uh little storefront signs i'm kind of happy to see that i left my heart in san francisco i love the city uh it's a beautiful little fishing village uh i mean it got really hammered during lockdown because i mean

[03:09:50] working the city there and it was like walking through the set of 28 days later i mean very very dead yeah yeah the the world we were talking about the world cup at the you know at the top of the show um the you know the vibe with uh with like world cup watch parties is kind of off the hook interesting i'm glad to see it coming back you know it was all about moscone and the intercontinental and

[03:10:17] getting drinks at the chieftain like i don't even know what's in moscone center area now like yeah that was oh the chieftain's still there yeah is this now i i gotta say moscone uh that area is still a little challenged um and especially like west of moscone there's quite a homeless encampment uh down there there's a big drug crisis down there yeah and you know it's just like that that kind of um

[03:10:42] you know the kind of post-industrial uh renovated warehouse office space that was so popular during the dot-com boom that's the kind of office space that landlords are really having trouble filling that's where tech tv was of course yeah as as you can as you can see like you know the the offices that um that anthropic and open ai are taking they're like new buildings big glassy open different

[03:11:09] open floor plans um yeah you know ai companies generally want new move-in ready no no kind of you know no kind of quirks or charm just like no charm no history yeah yeah before we wrap up i usually uh end the show with uh mem memoriam there are a couple of people passed uh in this past week that i think deserve uh attention um one is somebody that i didn't know of but i so many of my friends speak so

[03:11:39] highly of him uh he was uh very uh instrumental in turning austin into a tech mecca jonathan joshua bear uh the founder of a small uh vc firm called capital factory died in a small plane crash it was an accelerator really and it and it turned austin uh into uh a real tech hub very many people i know uh just

[03:12:08] think the world of him everybody's had very kind things to say so there's a lot of shock in austin after the passing of joshua bear the godfather of austin's startup machine uh scene um quite tragic he was he was fairly young and then uh another person you might know of you know of his company he was one of the founders of ubisoft claude guillemot uh passed in a another plane crash a couple of plane

[03:12:36] crashes uh ubisoft i i didn't know this the history of ubisoft is is kind of uh interesting they were a mail order software business and that they transformed he and his brother into one of the world's largest video game companies uh they also made hardware and the guillemot corporation made a lot of uh uh controllers for flight simulators and driving simulators and things like that

[03:13:03] uh so uh he will be missed uh claude guillemot passed away in a plane crash a couple of uh immemoriums it's kind of sad to end the show with that i should end it with something more upbeat happy father's day happy longest day of the year longest show of the year at this point i think and uh also it's pride month and that was another great story you had in the san francisco business times uh yes ai may be big

[03:13:31] in san francisco but let's not forget it is also a very prideful town did they there's the parade did they already have the parade no that's uh a week from today nice that's always a always a party in san francisco ai how about gay eye uh huh uh thank you so much owen great to see you owen thomas is uh the

[03:13:56] managing editor of the san francisco business times and uh always a welcome hew and fitz are always a welcome presence on the show thank you for being here we appreciate it thank you for putting up with this marathon i didn't mean to make it a marathon you know what often happens that uh when i get people on i really like we just can't stop talking uh ian thompson also a long time friend of the show great to have you and stumpy the cat uh yes he's been using the litter box during the show much

[03:14:25] for some reason stumpy just waits until twit and then it's time baby it's time uh great to see you you will find uh ian's uh view from the valley in fact you could subscribe to where do they go to subscribe to it uh just go to techfinitive.com and um you can log in there yeah absolutely wonderful

[03:14:48] techfinitive.com look for the view from the valley of our own ian thompson and of course doc rock you'll find him walking cockily down the hallways of ecamm saying you can't fire me we don't have any callways there's no hallways here but that's in massachusetts far far away away what do you think we are anthropic he's the director of strategic partnerships there at uh ecamm thank you ecamm

[03:15:17] for making this show possible we appreciate your software it's great you'll find him on youtube youtube.com slash doc rock and uh you're rooting for the netherlands huh yeah i just i think they'll finally pull it off you know you know um leo they said that ai is supposed to make these things go by faster somehow you made it made it longer geez geez louise oh my goodness ian who are you rooting for england

[03:15:44] uh actually i'm rooting for scotland but so i think i'm going to be facing a disappointment on that one um england have got a decent game but i think the netherlands has got a strong chance um we'll see how france plays spain has been a real disappointment so far really good today though yeah they did good yeah five to one today it's it's really netherlands france and argentina are probably the okay that sounds

[03:16:08] exciting that sounds good and owen do you care you know i i just want people to to come and buy beers and you know and hang out in downtown san francisco for the city yeah yeah it's good for the city thank you everybody for joining us a special thanks to our club to it members who make this show possible make all of our show possibles with their memberships 10 bucks a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows plus access to the club twit discord and all the special programming

[03:16:36] we do just for you in the club uh coming up this week i'm excited about it episode well technically it's episode two but it's we're going to call it episode three of the great show with jeff atwood we call off by one get it off by one is okay see yeah it was a little programming little program game programming humor off by one let me see what the schedule says i think it's friday

[03:17:04] uh coming up yes friday the 26th at 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern uh choose your own adventure with the wild and woolly jeff atwood that'll be a lot of fun that's one of many club shows we do our ai user group is coming up july 3rd micah's crafting corner the 16th uh we had a great time uh on the with the media club if you're in the club listen to that recording that was from last friday day before yesterday

[03:17:31] we talked about the movie the fifth element mike will be doing more of those but most importantly the club supports everything we do here if you believe in we're not owned by a big company but the murdochs do not own this if you believe in independent journalism covering big tech without fear or favor your support is really appreciated support all of the all of the podcasts

[03:17:54] and websites that do that we need independent media covering big tech uh but support us too twit.tv club twit we do twit every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern time 2100 utc you can watch it in the club in the discord but also youtube twitch x facebook linkedin and kick we stream it everywhere after the fact on demand versions of the show audio or video available at our

[03:18:20] website twit.tv there's a youtube channel with the video great way to share clips with friends and family and of course subscribing is the easiest thing to do find your favorite podcast client subscribe leave us a great review too that would help and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available thanks for joining us everybody have a wonderful father's day enjoy the sunlight in the northern hemisphere shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere so you know enjoy the darkness

[03:18:46] down there and we'll be back next week meanwhile another twit is in the can bye-bye hey everybody it's leo laporte you know about mac break weekly right you don't oh if you're a macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with apple this is the show for you every tuesday andy anako alex lindsey jason snell and i get together and talk about the week's apple news it's an easy subscription just go to your favorite podcast client and search for mac break weekly or visit

[03:19:16] our website twitter.tv slash mbw you don't want to miss a week of mac break weekly