TWiT 1090: Flock of SQLs - Apple & Microsoft Grapple With Soaring Hardware Prices

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT. This Week in Tech Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is here from The Verge, Dan Patterson of Blackbird AI, and Daniel Rubino, Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. Microsoft's extending the deadline for Windows 10 yet another year. The Apple prices are going up and it's not just Apple. Are people going to blame AI for this? And it looks like Mythos is out of jail. All that coming up next on TWiT.

[00:00:29] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1090, recorded Sunday, June 28th, 2026. Flock of sequels.

[00:00:51] It's time for TWiT. This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Hello everybody, great to have you here. Great to have our panel here, starting with Dan Patterson, AI guru at Blackbird.ai. He's Senior Director of Content at Blackbird.ai. Hi. Which is dedicated to ferreting out disinformation wherever it lies. Your job's getting busier by the moment. Yeah, it's been an interesting year to say the least. It certainly has.

[00:01:19] I've got an allergy frog stuck in my throat, so forgive me. Oh, hello, allergy frog. Yeah. Also here, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. You see her every month, of course, on Tech News Weekly and you see her probably every day on The Verge where she's a Senior Reviewers specializing in smart homes. Hello, JPT. Hello, Leo. Lovely to be here. Any robots fall on you lately? Yeah, I've got these little sort of fluffy ones in my house at the moment. Oh.

[00:01:48] And yeah, they're very annoying. Are those the ones that purr and gurgle and like that or? So at CES this year, there was, it was Ecovacs, the robot company, and Switchbot, the smart home company, both released like robot companions that are like, they're like teddy bears. And one's like a teddy bear and one is like a little puppy, puppy dog. And yeah, they, well, actually, it didn't fall on me, but it keeps falling over.

[00:02:15] But it's not 180 pounds, which is what happened with the last one. And it's furry. It's fuzzy. And it's furry and it's cute, but it's really annoying. Is that the kata friend? Yes, kata friend. Oh, it's so cute. 700 bucks. Does it wash your dishes? No, it just wanders around. And it actually, you can turn this off, but one of its features is it'll just wander around and take pictures. So it's like a little spy in your house. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Great. It's cute though. That's thoughtful. Cute though. It's a cute spy.

[00:02:44] I still have not figured out what these, who these are for. I've, I've been trying. That's sort of been my mission. Um, cause it's definitely not for me. I had like the neighborhood kids come over. Nope. Nope. Uh, so yeah, I haven't figured it out. So. Kids are smart now about AI. They're not, they're gonna be fooled. Also with us from a Windows central. It's great to see Daniel Rubino editor in chief there. Hello, Daniel. Hello. Thanks for having me. Uh, you're going to buy the new, uh, steam machine.

[00:03:11] Um, no, it's a little too expensive. It is. I appreciate valve and, uh, you know, they're, they are in a pickle these days, but they'll, they'll survive this. They're not alone. The pickle is everywhere. Apple this week announced that they were going to have to, they of all people were going to have to raise prices, uh, due to memory shortages. Tim cook kind of telegraphed it a day or so earlier in the wall street journal, uh, which

[00:03:41] Mark Gurman, uh, from Bloomberg said, well, that means you're gonna do it right away. And he was right. They did it in a couple of days later. Uh, and I tanked ankles ankles, tanked Apple stock, which is not quite to my ankles, but it is down a little bit prices up as much as a 200 bucks on all the Apple devices. Jennifer, you said you were lucky. You bought your kid's college laptop before the price hikes. Yes.

[00:04:07] I was very excited when Neo was announced because my son is just about to start his first year. And I was like, this is going to be perfect. I says, what I will get him. And, but I obviously deleted and dallied. I couldn't decide whether to get the touch ID or not. That was, I was going back and forth. And then when the rumors started before, you know, I guess he started like about a month ago that this was going to happen. And I was like, I'm just going to bite the bullet. I can always return it. Now I can always return it and make a profit. Oh, I don't think it works that way, but that's a nice idea. It would be good.

[00:04:36] It is now 699, which, you know, I mean, that was the whole thing about the Neo. It was, oh, it's only 599 for a Mac. And yeah, but it's only a student discount. Yeah. A hundred bucks off for the students. Um, so yeah, it's a, you were lucky. You got it for 500 bucks. It's now 700 bucks. I texted my friends. Yes. The day it was announced and prime day was still on who kids are about to go. And I was like, just go on Amazon now and buy it. I said, don't worry about whether you actually need it or not. Cause you can always sell it.

[00:05:06] Um, but you're going to, if you, if you decide this is what you want, you're going to be spending a hundred dollars more very soon. So yeah. Yeah. And like you said, um, before we started recording, I think that Amazon prime day was still going on and they had all, they had discounts very much. I think it was like $10 off, but as soon as the price hike happened, it was now $110 off. So that was the day to grab them. 210 in some cases. It's right. So yeah. Um, people were rushing over to Amazon to get remnant inventory.

[00:05:34] I imagine the same thing that Costco and target and all the other places that had Apple hardware and the prices hadn't gone up yet, but they're up now. Yeah. Tim cook said the price increases were unavoidable. This is Apple statement. The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory. Oh, and storage by the way. Yeah. Actually you, uh, Dan, you were saying, uh, that the memory companies have announced that

[00:06:04] they are booked solid, not just for this year, but for years to come. Yeah. You know, just before the show, I looked up the major suppliers for Apple and, um, you know, including talking about the steam machine, um, a number of the gaming consoles, but a lot of the consumer electronic devices are powered by, um, I just three companies, right? SK micron and Samsung micron just pushed 16 different companies into five year deals.

[00:06:34] SK is pushing for a five years deals for almost all of their providers. And Samsung has three year deals for all of their providers. This is just for Ram and SSDs are the same type of deals. Uh, Apple said that the hikes are, are global, but do not include the iPhone, the Apple watch or AirPods. And that's because I think they've, you know, they bought up everything and made them and, but they hinted there'll be more price adjustments in the future.

[00:07:02] And I would expect come September when the new iPhones are announced, we'll see expensive devices. Microsoft's been bit by this too, right? The Xbox went up quite a bit again. Yeah. Again, that was the second time in Apple. This was the second time Apple raised prices. They raised prices in March too. Um, they went up by a hundred bucks. Uh, and yeah, the Xbox is, is went from 499 and then went up to, I think it was 629. Now it's going up to, I think 799 or 750 around there.

[00:07:30] Um, and same thing, uh, we expect that there could be another price hike in 2027. So this is not ending the earliest we could expect any relief would be 2028. And that's just maybe, you know, that's like, you might start to see prices start to come down a little bit, but this is going to go on for a long time. And it's really unfortunate because as we all know, tech evolves quickly and we're actually

[00:07:57] in a really exciting period for technology with amazing power chips and everything coming out and no one can afford them now. Yeah. Uh, so it's really kind of unfortunate. Why aren't these Ram companies and storage companies increasing capacity? Why aren't they just building plants? This is a chance for them to make even more money. Well, I think it takes, I mean, in, in the reading I did just before the show, and you know, we talked about this and we've been talking about it for a year, but, um, in January,

[00:08:26] you know, we anticipated an increase in the foundries. Uh, but I, I think it takes a significant amount of time for them to increase capacity. And with the amount of money that they're making, there's almost no incentive. They don't want prices to go down. Right. You know, interestingly, you know, to the, to the valve, uh, steam machine, um, high prices valve issued a statement, you know, they're not a massive buyer, uh, but they're not small

[00:08:56] either. And they have, uh, some clout. They issued a statement saying that we either the, the Ram companies quoted us a price and it was take it or leave it. Either you took that price or they wouldn't talk to us again. Wow. Yeah. And the smaller the company, the worse off is. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, that's like a, that's like a mafioso. Take this price or we're not going to ever talk to you again. Yeah. That's a, it's really bad.

[00:09:26] And yeah, the fabs take years to put together. Okay. This is the world. And by the way, they're not making any move to do it either. It's not like they're breaking ground on new fabs. Well, they, I mean, yeah, Intel is, uh, in the U S and stuff, and there are a few coming online, but they're not for Ram or are they? I don't know for. Intel's making processors. Yeah. But like, I know like Intel's fab took, um, cost $10 billion. Right. They're very expensive. Yeah.

[00:09:54] And it took like five years to put together. You're talking the world's most advanced technology lithography, which is some of these machines, there's only one or two that exist on a planet. And it's really incredible. I've, I've been to the Intel, um, fab in Israel and got a tour of it. And it's just, I mean, it's absolutely incredible, but there's very few companies on a planet that make this technology. And so that's why it's just, and to ramp up will take many, many years.

[00:10:23] And then, yeah, there is sort of less incentive, but at the same time, you know, between AI gaming and computers and phones, there is demand out there and consumers won't be able to buy it at these prices. And so I think there is incentive for them to build out, but it's just not something that they can do overnight. So. Apple told Bloomberg, we know this is not welcome news and we are working tirelessly to find solutions. What?

[00:10:51] What like, oh, there's some Ram and Tim Cook's cushions. What, what, what, what do you, what does that mean? I, I feel like they are asking the federal government to lift restrictions on a Chinese chip maker. Uh, they, they, they actually, uh, because you can't buy chips from this Chinese company. They tried to do this a couple of years ago, Congress thwarted them.

[00:11:17] Uh, but I guess they're saying, well, if only, um, Mr. President, you would allow this, we could bring prices down. Of course it only would only benefit Apple and it is not Ram. It's, I don't think, I think it's like, uh, it's processors. Yeah. Yeah. So I find the, um, the most egregious thing here though, from my angle is that they've increased the prices of the Apple TV and the HomePods. For no good reason. Really old devices. And they're very expensive.

[00:11:46] Updated in years and they're very expensive already. So you're now paying so that, well, the mini, the HomePod mini has gone up $30. The HomePod has gone up, uh, $50. And then the Apple TVs like have just gone through the roof, which I guess because I know they have more memory in the world. And then, I mean, the minis, the HomePods don't really have much to all them. The Apple TVs, you can buy different levels, but yeah, it's crazy because these are really old. Um, and there's, they say, well, they don't say, sorry.

[00:12:14] The rumor is there was about to be new ones like in the next four, three or four months anyway. So it seems like why do this now? Um, yeah, I, and it's just, it, when you're buying, like if you're buying a new MacBook Neo or a new MacBook Air, that's like a modern recently updated device. Okay. You can't, I mean, it's miserable, but you stomach it, but, but for something that is very old and really not actually, I wouldn't say worth that money. It's really, it's a real kick in the pants.

[00:12:45] $139 to $200. It really, I think it really, I think it's a good thing, but I would not sure I'd want to spend that much. No, they're great devices. Yeah. I mean, they do work. Especially if a new one's coming out. Don't mean to imply they're bad devices. They're just old and there's a new one coming soon. Yeah. That's, that's the kind of push and pull here. It's like, I just would have thought you just leave these ones. I mean, but who knows what's going on in Cupertino? Because they, the, apparently these have been, according to Bloomberg, these have actually, the new models have been ready to go for a while now.

[00:13:15] They're just waiting on the new Siri AI to sort of catch up and then that, that will come to the home because to date, none of the new Siri has come to the home devices. And that puts more pressure on Apple because the Siri AI requires more RAM. Right. You did a review in, on Windows Central of the MSI. I love the name Claw. Yeah. This is a handheld or should I say a claw held gaming device, which you loved. Yes. But.

[00:13:45] Handheld gaming is one of the fastest growing areas right now in gaming that we see. There's a lot of interest and all started with Nintendo switch and then steam deck really set the bar. And now we're seeing these windows handhelds and Intel has a brand new chip for this called the G3. Isn't that ironic? Cause Intel, which struggled with mobile made the scale processor, which was a huge flop and basically lost the mobile market. Yep.

[00:14:13] Now they're back in, I guess you'd call this a mobile market. I mean. Yeah. It's smaller than a laptop. It's priced like a laptop. $1,800. It was probably at least $500 more than it was supposed to cost. Yeah. You know, cause we see these things usually topping out at $1299, which isn't cheap, but this is the top tier handheld on the market. Based on processor screen size. What makes this so good? The processor is so AMD really set the bar here. They're the ones that making all the chips.

[00:14:42] They make them for Nintendo and they make them for the steam deck and they were making for Windows devices. And only MSI stuck with Intel and they were just using laptop chips. And now they came out with a custom chip for handhelds. This is the G3. Yeah. And it's between 35 and probably 45% faster than AMD's top chip right now. I mean, it's like night and day difference.

[00:15:06] And so for the first time with handheld gaming, you can play like you can play Steampunk, not Steampunk, Cyberpong 2077 around 90 frames per second on this thing. Like it is. I can play that on my Nintendo Switch too. Not probably as 30 frames a second. But now that's resolution at this frame rate. My eyes are only 28 frames a second, so it's okay. And the, you know, the claw is really, I mean, it's almost a PC.

[00:15:36] It is a PC. People I know who've been, who've taken it home have really, they plugged it in and it's been a functional PC. Wow. Yep. Yeah. You can dock it and act as a mini PC. It's got Thunderbolt 4 on it. It runs Windows, right? So it's a, it's the handheld device we've been waiting for, or at least I've been waiting for, because like I said, you can play true triple A, top tier games at least 60 frames per second. But now we're heading over a hundred frames per second.

[00:16:04] Part of that's because of Intel frame gen, the XESS, their upscaling technology. It's really just amazing technology that we have in this thing. But because of RAM and the storage costs, like I said, it's about $500 more than what it should. 1299 already wasn't cheap, but 1799 isn't, you know. That said, if you go to Best Buy, at least when I checked yesterday, they were already sold out. Now, how many do they have in stock? I don't know. But at least on the subreddit, a lot of people are buying it.

[00:16:33] So, boy, there's a market for these things. That's really interesting. Is this replacing the console market? It's definitely impacting it because you can just, with a Thunderbolt 4 dock, connect this up to your TV and just do, that's like an antenna switch. Yeah, you do 4K gaming and all that kind of stuff. You can connect an eGPU to it. Like, it's really endless what you can do with this thing. You can connect an eGPU? Yeah. Wow.

[00:17:01] And this is the Arc graphics that Intel has been. It's interesting. Intel, we really, like a year ago, counted them out. Down and out. Yeah. Their new chips are the Core Ultra series, which is this, this is based off of with the B390 GPU. They're in the game. They're, they're pulling ahead of AMD, who I think is a little bit more focused on server and desktop right now. They're still doing well there.

[00:17:27] But when it comes to handhelds, they just lost the crown and it came to laptops until still crushing it. Yeah. So I would not. So you say get an Intel Ultra processor over any of the other. Yeah. The Ultra 3 is like finally found the middle ground where the first generation was a lot of performance. The second generation was concentrating on efficiency. And now the third one combines both into a really stable platform. That's just really efficient and fast. Interesting. Yeah. Boy, the worm has turned.

[00:17:56] That is really amazing. Yeah. I mean, Intel's chips were always did do well when it came to their quarterly earnings. It was the other stuff that they were losing money on. So, you know. Is it Liputan, their new CEO, that's, that's turned this around? Yeah. They're really focused on gaming right now. And they're integrated graphics is the big story because AMD used to beat them left and right when it came to integrated graphics.

[00:18:23] But now you can buy one of their, you know, Ultrabook laptops and still do 60 frames per second on AAA games just through integrated graphics, no Nvidia. So it's, they've come a long way. So it's, they've come a long way. But it's just so inappropriate, you know, for timing because you have the MSI claw, you have the Steam machine. And they're both extraordinary devices, but they're just priced out of people's, you know, it doesn't make sense anymore for most people.

[00:18:49] So, isn't Microsoft though moving away from Intel towards ARM processors, the Snapdragon? I wouldn't say they're moving away from, they're definitely embracing. Yeah. But they've always said that they were going to welcome all but not treat anyone specifically, you know, better. Apple, of course, clapped their hands and said, we're done with x86. Right. That's the end of it. And, you know, Microsoft can't do that because of legacy, enterprise, hospitals, government.

[00:19:17] So, but now that Nvidia is on board with the RTX Spark, it actually helps Qualcomm because it's just going to make the ecosystem that strong, much more strong. So it's really, again, fascinating to watch Nvidia and Qualcomm are kind of on the same side now. And then you have Intel and AMD on x86 on the other side. And they're all honestly doing some crazy, really good technology. It's just not important anymore. What happened that suddenly chips got so good? Is it EUV? What is the technology that changed all this?

[00:19:45] I think that definitely plays a part on it. You know, they keep going down to the nanometer. I think Apple, you know, honestly caught a lot of people off guard. They kicked them in the butt. It's yeah. Yeah. And so like, you know, when I would talk to Intel about this, they're like, there's nothing inherent about x86 that makes it inefficient compared to ARM. Like they said, it's not that. It's not RISC versus CISC?

[00:20:12] No, I mean, it's just that they come from different pedigrees, right? Right. So x86 came from desktop. And so it was always optimized for desktop. And then they had to back it down for laptop, where they built the M series for mobile smartphones and built it up to desktop. Right. So they came from different points, but there's nothing inherent about x86 that supposedly it can't compete with ARM. And we're starting to see that I would still say Qualcomm is still more efficient than Intel's x86.

[00:20:41] But I can't deny there's a there's a point of diminishing returns, right? If your x86 laptop is getting 10 hours a day of real world life, you know, usage, does it really matter? Do you need 22? Right. Yeah, exactly. You know, so it's like, okay, you know, how many people aren't going to not charge the laptop when they get home? So, you know, what's really changed, though, and and this is what's driving the component shortage, too, is AI, and people wanting to, or maybe they don't. Actually, Microsoft has kind of learned its lesson.

[00:21:09] They they're backing down a little bit on putting co pilot everywhere. Do people right? Are they looking when they're looking at laptops now? It sounds like they're looking at gaming. Are they looking at AI also? No, but you know, for gaming, it's interesting because when you have like Intel X ESS, their frame gen and upscaling technology, that's AI, right? That's using that kind of technology.

[00:21:33] And there's a definite kind of correlation between that's why you can use GPUs for both gaming and AI, right? It's it's it's it's matrix transforms, it's mass movement of data and transformation of data. So the GPU can do it for games, it could also do it for AI. Yeah. So there's some similarity. But now we also see these what Microsoft calls NPUs, which are a different part of the processor. It's all very confusing.

[00:22:03] Should we are people reasonably blaming AI for this chip shortage? Is this one of the components creating this AI kind of mass AI hatred among the general populace? Dan? You know, we actually in fact, I was just loading our research on this. We just did a ton of research on the AI backlash and the data center backlash.

[00:22:32] And there are a few components at play here. Yes, the primary backlash is organic. But look, there is a significant amount of Russian and Chinese inauthentic. Oh, disinformation. Yeah. Well, you know, it's challenging that the differences between disinformation and misinformation are nuanced, but there's certainly a large amount of activity in the anti data center market.

[00:23:01] So where a conversation might hit, let's say X velocity, it is then amplified by a number of inauthentic voices and it hits more communities faster and it seems louder than it actually is. So that's very interesting to me because I was, as an AI fan, I was starting to worry.

[00:23:23] We just had a big rug pull from the federal government on Anthropics most capable model, the best model I think most of us agree we've ever seen, Fable and Mythos. And it concerned me that maybe the federal government, the Trump administration was putting its finger to the wind and saying, oh, you know what? People hate AI. So we can do this with impunity.

[00:23:48] There's definitely that feeling polls say people, you know, 71% of people say they don't want a data center near them. 18% of people, only 18% of people trust the AI search results they're getting. And I can go on and on. There's a real fear of AI out there, but you're saying this is being amplified somewhat by bad actors. Yeah. Sorry, I was just going to say that the technology is coming top down. Yeah, there's also a tech lash going on. Yes.

[00:24:18] Yeah. Because we're old enough to like smartphones that came from a couple of nerds with BlackBerry's pocket PCs and it developed kind of organically. And then like Apple came and sort of really set that category off. But a lot of technology starts off with a few early adopters and then integrating it, becoming enthusiasts. And then eventually gets pushed to the mainstream. The garage model. Yeah. And this feels very much like we're, it's being forced upon us from other people. This is the opposite of that. Yeah.

[00:24:48] Like no one's asking for data centers. These frontier models require huge amounts of capital. Right. Sure. You have to be able to afford thousands of Nvidia GPUs, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. All right. I need to take a break. I think there's... Go ahead, Jennifer, go ahead. I was going to say, I think there's the fear of the unknown too. Absolutely. Like the difference from, you know, the ground up technology that's tried and trued and tested and this AI that the companies that are developing even themselves don't seem to know what it's capable of. And that is sort of...

[00:25:18] We're going to get to that. That fear. Yeah. It's something I think people are rightly concerned about, but I can definitely see... Your son's going to college. Is he nervous about his job prospects in the AI era four years from now? No, but that's because he's not really focused on four years from now. But he wants to be a pilot, which I'm like, well, I did the research and it's going to be a while until we have planes that... I mean, I know planes can fly themselves, but it's going to be a really long time until people are comfortable being in planes without pilots. Yeah.

[00:25:46] They often do land themselves, but you still want to see a good looking fella in a uniform up front. Exactly. Poor gal. All right. We're going to take a little break and come back. Let's talk about this, the AI rug pull and what it's spawned, which is I think very interesting in the tech world. We've got a great panel. Jennifer Patterson-Tui is here from The Verge. We have some home automation stuff to talk about with you as well. Daniel Rubino from Windows Central.

[00:26:15] He's the editor in chief there. And Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI, where he's the senior director of content. And you were listening a couple of weeks ago. Larry Maggett was on when we had the little wake for the end of CBS radio news. What a sad moment that was, Dan. It has been a moment. Well, it's part of a, you know, the world is changing and it's, what's interesting is it's changing faster and faster and faster.

[00:26:45] And I think that's upsetting to some. And then there's some of us, and I think a lot of the people who got into technology, we're got into technology because we were change junkies. Cause we liked, we like to have a vision of, oh, look, it's all changing. It's like sci-fi. And so some of us embrace it. I think the vast majority go, oh no. Our show today brought to you by simply CX.

[00:27:11] We've reached the point where having AI is no longer a competitive advantage. The advantage comes from what you build with it. That's the focus of simply CX, a podcast from Microsoft hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader. The show explores how organizations are applying emerging technologies in ways that are creating real business impact today.

[00:27:38] If you're looking for a place to start, check out their recent episode featuring Jess Lauren, founder and CEO of Global Objects. It provides a fascinating look at a technology you may be hearing a lot more about in the coming years, photo real digital twins. Nicole and Jess discuss how these highly realistic digital replicas are being used across industries from entertainment and education to energy and cultural preservation and why trust accuracy

[00:28:05] and emotional connection are becoming just as important as the technology itself. It's the kind of conversation that helps you see beyond today's AI headlines and get a glimpse of where digital experiences may be headed next. New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Find simply CX wherever you get your podcasts and tell them this week in tech sent you. Thank you, simply CX. So, how long ago has it been now? Three weeks, four weeks.

[00:28:32] The White House abruptly pulled Anthropics Fable model so abruptly that many of us were in the middle. It happened to me. I was in the middle of a big, big job. I was rewriting software we've been using for 11 years. It's the core of our operation. I thought, this is a chance. I finally got a model that can handle this giant complex. And all of a sudden it said, this model no longer available. And I thought, crap, did I forget to pay my Anthropic bill?

[00:29:01] But no, it was true for all of us. I was more upset, I think, than a lot of people. Maybe technologists in general, AI users were more upset than the general public. I don't know if the general public was even that aware of it. They were so much more concerned about the green reflecting pool than they were about this. But I saw this as a really scary precedent where without consultation with Congress, without

[00:29:26] really any research, as far as I can tell, the federal government blocked an American product. This wasn't even a foreign product, blocked an American product from its users. Now, what was the reasoning here? Was it like, this is too powerful? Wasn't it, this is too powerful, it could like cause chaos and damage? I think Anthropic kind of hurt itself because they did promote that heavily. That does feel like something a government should be concerned about, honestly.

[00:29:55] I mean, I get your point. Like if the US government stopped Apple selling its iPhones, okay, for no... And you could make the same case that all the iPhones made in China. So it's a huge security threat, right? It's the interlateral. Go ahead. Yeah, sorry to interrupt. No. It's a unilateral top-down mandate. That's what scared me. Right, right. Whether the public knows or cares is almost irrelevant. It's an American-made product where an executive branch issues an order and can shut down a product.

[00:30:25] I think that's what scared a number of technologists and if not the public, a number of people in the business community. Yeah. Well, there was an interesting impact, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but I should mention that Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropoc flew to the G7 summit in France, met with the president and in an Axios interview shortly thereafter, the president said, you know, I like these guys, an anthropic.

[00:30:54] They're okay. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, tweeted, aha, you see what happens? You see what happens? He's the one who called anthropic a supply chain risk. Again, a designation usually reserved for foreign actors, not American companies. Well, apparently the United States has now lifted the ban a little bit.

[00:31:24] Semaphore had the scoop, Reeb, Al Bugatti and Ben Smith. U.S. releases powerful anthropic model Mythos, which is, Mythos is basically the same as Fable. It's just an unrestricted Fable, as far as we can tell, has allowed anthropic to release it to more than a hundred U.S. institutions. Remember, originally that's what anthropic did with 50 companies and said, okay, this thing is so powerful. We're going to give it to you, Microsoft, for example, to fix any flaws before it gets

[00:31:52] out to the public and bad guys use it to attack you. So now this is called Project Glasswing. Apparently it's still on. The Trump administration on Friday, just two days ago, said Anthropoc could release Mythos to more than a hundred institutions Friday afternoon. It didn't say anything about Fable. And it didn't say anything about open to the public either.

[00:32:22] Nor did it mention the original restriction was that no foreign nationals should be able to use these models. That was the pretext the Commerce Department used. But of course, since Anthropoc doesn't know the citizenship status of anybody using its software, they had to block it for everybody. And then the government, the government, said that they had had significant progress in the

[00:32:49] intense daily talks between Anthropoc and the government. Anthropoc has committed to work with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases. The other shoe that dropped, same day, is that OpenAI had decided to release its latest model, which also has a cyber security component, to a short list of government approved partners. What has essentially happened is the Trump administration has done a complete about-face.

[00:33:17] When Trump came into office, he decried President Biden's AI regulations, said we're going to have no regulation. This is how we succeed in the United States is, you know, just compete, make the best models you can. We're not going to regulate AI. Completely reversed that with the Fable block and now is saying, we want to approve every model before it's released to the public.

[00:33:47] So, Jennifer, you make an interesting point. If this is so dangerous, I mean, shouldn't the government protect us from it? I mean, the government's protecting our kids from social media, right? Like there is such a fine line between what we think the government should protect us from and what it shouldn't. And it also depends on who you are, whether you think they should or shouldn't. But this does, you know, yeah, to my point about the fear, there is a fear amongst regular people about AI.

[00:34:17] Whether it's founded or not, there is a concern that this technology is going to go somewhere scary. I mean, we've all seen the movies and we've seen that these, that the tech companies, I mean, just from in my space, when I talk to tech companies about LLM powered smart voice assistants, and I'll ask them questions like, would it be capable of doing this or this? And they're like, that's a good question. Why don't you try and we'll see.

[00:34:45] So you don't know, like, you don't know what this is going to do in my house. Yeah. You know, I get that this is a powerful and exciting technology. But before we unleash it on people, it need we need to know as as the technology companies need to know what it's going to do and what it's capable of and be able to control it. And it feels like we're in a moment. And Dan, I mean, you're much better, you know, position to speak to this than I am.

[00:35:09] But I would love to know, like, is that a moment that we need that's ever going to change or just technology always always always going to be a step ahead of us that I think. Yeah, I think to your point, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, Jennifer, but I just want to agree, especially with something you said earlier, that there is a top down and a tech clash. We saw this, you know, with untested technology, just like you've experienced with consumer products in the home.

[00:35:35] We saw this with consumer products like social media, where they began as fairly simple news feeds. We saw this algorithmic testing on the general public and the expansion of social media into ways that the public is generally or appears to be generally uncomfortable with. And now perhaps we are seeing a very similar effect happen with the advancement of artificial intelligence, where these products are incredibly powerful.

[00:36:03] And the effect that they have are very similar to what you said about smart home devices, where will this be good? Will this help? I don't know. Here's my issue with this for one is let's assume that, you know, like, I don't know, atomic bombs that AI has. It has all this potential for danger. And so that it's not unreasonable for any government to put some restraints on it.

[00:36:32] The question, unlike an atomic bomb, AI is very amorphous, you know, and the question is, well, who is going to judge it? And how are they going to judge it? And there's also the issue. There's also the issue. This is raised by Dean Ball, who teaches AI policy at Yale Law School, is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Society.

[00:36:56] He, in his hyperdimensional substack, says there's also the issue that there's a side effect when you do this. For one thing, if you take a month to approve an AI, this is moving so fast, you may have actually killed that AI. You know, they need to get to market fast and build an audience because the next AI is coming about a month later.

[00:37:24] So you're throwing a monkey wrench into a very fast moving machine. There's also a much larger issue, which is that you might do this in the US, but China and other countries are not holding back. One of the results of the fable rug pull, and I'm going to call it a rug pull, is that France with its mistral, China with DeepSeq and ZAI's GLM model released better models.

[00:37:54] GLM is very, very good, GLM 5.2. All of a sudden, people are saying, oh, well, you know, if the American government can just stop any model, I guess I better not use American-made models. There's plenty of other choices. It's also taught companies to not count on American AI. Like, well, just like many other things in the United States, we don't know what's going to happen next.

[00:38:23] So there's a real risk this I it's a it's a very difficult thing to answer, because I agree with you, Jennifer, you know, maybe these things aren't dangerous. I just don't know how we can count on a government, especially this government, which doesn't really seem to think much of science to determine what's dangerous or not. It almost feels as if it's an economic restriction as opposed to a technical restriction. I don't know. What do you think?

[00:38:52] What if this is a hard one to just to solve? Ball writes frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the first few post released months that they're broadly available after that period elapses. As the models become sub frontier competition emerges and margins compress every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work. So that's problem number one. You're undermining this entire industry.

[00:39:21] Now, maybe if you think and as many do, A.I. it's B.S. We don't need A.I. will be better off without it. That's you don't see that as a problem. I would submit that A.I. is a very significant technology and its advance is very important to us. And we don't want to let others do what we could do better. Leo, are you making I?

[00:39:47] I hear this argument frequently and I don't know where I come down on this argument, but are you are you aligning with the argument that if we don't allow our models to be the frontier models and. Leo, are you aligning with the frontier models and the cutting edge models, then we see that to China and other competitors? Yes. Leo, are you aligning with the frontier models? OK.

[00:40:17] That's exactly. You're basically undermining an American industry. Right. It's kind of the opposite of what they're doing with the auto industry. They're protecting the auto industry by banning Chinese cars. Well, what would happen if you banned American cars? You would have a lot of Chinese cars in the United States. We're that's what we're doing. We're banning American models. There's also a larger question of can you even prove a model safety? No one has yet made a model. It's not jailbreakable.

[00:40:46] So let me ask, you know, something else. Much of our conversation is centered around consumer AI or at least B2B in the way that when we talk about AI right now, we think, you know, it evokes companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and others. But earlier in this conversation, we also talked about another use of AI in frame gen in gaming. Right.

[00:41:15] And AI has machine learning applications. We use artificial intelligence at Blackbird in a number of ways that are not consumer focused at all. So. So. Is this conversation about AI simply around these somewhat consumer facing and business facing frontier models or is there a broader conversation to be had? Well, there is absolutely.

[00:41:42] I mean, this is a very intractable problem to go back to the garage model of technological advance. Unlike anything we've seen before, AI requires huge capital investment. And you've got to, you know, make all these GPUs and you've got to build all these data centers. There's nobody developed. Well, maybe there is. But so far, there's nobody in the garage creating the latest frontier model. It's not like business of coding Twitter.

[00:42:12] Right. Using Ruby on Rails. Right. It takes it takes billions. Some might even say trillions. The Fable model. We don't know how much it costs or how big it was. As it's estimated, it might be 10 trillion parameters, which means it probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars to create. And they don't stop by the way. It's like you don't just make it and now it's done. You got to make the next one. It's a.

[00:42:40] That's also that's the weird issue with all this, which is fundamentally is the architecture, even the correct approach, because all this is is large language models. And you just keep throwing more and more power at it. And this is idea that like somehow if we keep doing this, we'll reach AGI, but we haven't defined AGI yet. We don't understand consciousness. We don't understand intelligence at that level. And so there's a lot of questions about, you know, is this even the right approach? Right.

[00:43:08] There is different views of A.I., including more semantic analysis. There is visual analysis. Absolutely. There's all these other components. Yeah. Because it is weird. People like Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li say, oh, no, you've got to do, you know, you've got to do physical world stuff. And all of that should happen. I'm not saying that shouldn't happen all of that. And some of that may end up in somebody in a garage coming up with this great new way of doing it.

[00:43:31] But we haven't reached the end of what I, by the way, I don't, you don't have to stipulate that we're going to achieve AGI or anything. It's just that as we have continued to make these models bigger, they've gotten better and better and more and more capable. And they, and I think they've changed a lot of things. They've changed how chips are made. NVIDIA is, who is it, isn't just announced that they're releasing a chip that's designed by AI.

[00:44:00] And that as that gets better and better, it will get better and better as it develops better chips. Business processes are changing. People saying the SaaS marketplace for business tools is going to die because all of a sudden everybody's writing their own. Every business I know of is implementing an AI strategy of some kind, rightly or wrongly. This is fairly important to the economy. And this is another thing Ball points out.

[00:44:24] You might be, you might actually be bringing on this AI bust that everybody's so worried about. Simply by undermining a mark, you might be creating a market panic. Well, the prices will go down at least. Hey, here's the good news. I think that consumer B2B business and like conflict is very real though.

[00:44:46] And I think that, I mean, my generation, my children's generation is the sort of loudest voice right now against AI. Like we saw all of the college commencement speeches with people booing the tech CEOs. And my daughter is like violently opposed to anything AI, mainly because she's very creative and she's very opposed to the sort of artist, the way it's potentially stealing artistic jobs.

[00:45:12] And she, you know, there is, I think there needs to be a distinction here. And I don't know how this comes about, but it's important to, I think what's happening in business and technology in terms of how this is helping with processes and helping us develop and create more powerful, more useful tools for technology and business is very different from how it's being unleashed in the regular world.

[00:45:39] How it's affecting people's regular jobs and what they're doing on a daily basis and how they're interacting on a daily basis. Like use these, these LLM chatbots that people are now relying on for all their information.

[00:45:53] And, you know, some becoming like friends and this is like their main connection to, to, to society is, is those types of things that are a different, that consumer focus, focus, that consumer facing implementations of this AI is feels very. I'm not, not well thought out yet. Right. Um, and that's, and we're unleashing on people who don't understand it and who are like, wow, suddenly I can do all of this stuff.

[00:46:21] And where is it going to, where is that going to lead us versus companies and businesses that are, you know, implementing this as tools for creating a better workflow. So those are two very different use cases of this technology. I can hear people, uh, some of our listeners, I get emails every week enough with the AI who cares. I can hear people saying good. I mean, your average consumer has not seen any improvement from this, right? They see AI slop on Twitter. Right.

[00:46:51] They see a lot of fake news kind of stuff happening. Like when, when AI solves cancer, and of course that's a, you know, broadly speaking, isn't going to happen, of course, but once it starts solving diseases, right, which is what's the promise, then people, I think will start to come around to it. When it starts to actually make your life easier and solves problems for your regular consumer versus, oh, by the way, everybody's going to lose all their jobs in like five, 10 years. We don't know what we're going to do.

[00:47:20] Like that's what, you know, from your average consumer standpoint, this is happening to them, not with them. They haven't seen any benefits. And all they hear is, you know, oh my God, these models are so strong. They're going to completely undermine everybody's jobs. And, you know, we don't need radiologists anymore, right? That famous example. Which didn't happen, by the way. We need more radiologists. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, but I think that's the concern. It's like, wait, are we supposed to be believing these people, right? Or should we not believe them?

[00:47:50] No one knows how to react. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of confusion, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah. And these companies benefit from hyping up their models. Like it is, it's so powerful. It's too dangerous. We need the government to like regulate it. A movie trailer. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the super intelligence AGI hype, right? That we are going to achieve some sort of like, no, what we've really done is build Adobe Creative Cloud.

[00:48:18] Like it can replace some tasks and make them a little more efficient. But like it's not going to cure cancer, at least not yet. It's not going to do a lot of the things that it was to your point, Daniel. And yours too, Jennifer. It is simply happening to people and there is some utility. But the hype certainly exceeds the capabilities right now. And if you look at it realistically, it's Photoshop.

[00:48:43] I would say we've seen a lot of evidence that some really amazing things could happen, which we may never get now because of this fear. And that it, you know, there, we won't, we may never know because we're just going to end up shutting this whole thing down. Do you really think we will? I don't know. I think your point, Daniel, about how it's a peak and drop, like where people are scared because it's happening to them is very true.

[00:49:12] Like, I mean, this is a big tangent, but it's interesting. Like, what would you say is one of the most hated companies in this country right now? I would say drug companies have often been at the top list of like, we don't like drug companies. Interesting you say that because that's a similar situation where it takes huge amounts of capital to create new drugs.

[00:49:31] So there was a really interesting article, and I want to say it was in the Wall Street Journal, and it was about the history of Eli Lilly, which is the company behind Zipbound, one of the GLP drugs, GLP-1 drugs. Which I am on, I should say, so I will shut up. Well, and the interesting thing was the CEO is saying, you know, we have gone from being, from getting hate mail because there was a big issue around diabetes, around insulin at one point where they had a really low, short, they had a shortage.

[00:50:01] And it was hard for people to get this life-saving medicine. And so they were getting hate mail from people. And now he says, we get literal love letters from our customers who are like, what you have done has saved. You hate big pharma until it makes the drug that saves your life. Until it does something that really works. Yes. And I feel like that's where we will probably go with AI on an individual basis, like as individual people find real value from it.

[00:50:25] But, you know, that will slowly, there'll be a groundswell, if that happens, a groundswell of more popular opinion. And then on a broader scale. That's been my experience. I've used, as part of my job, I've gone heavily into using AI in a lot of ways. And it's found it incredibly useful. And it constantly impresses me by doing things I never would have thought a computer could do. And I'm not saying it's alive or conscious or intelligent.

[00:50:53] I'm just saying it's very, very effective. It's the same. Big pharma is a really good example because it does take, you know, you could invent a new drug in your garage. It happens all the time. But you could never release it because you have to test it. You have to manufacture it at a scale. There's all, it is a capital intensive industry. There's negatives to that. Salt, which turns out to be a really good disinfectant, isn't widely promoted because nobody makes any money on it.

[00:51:23] That's a simple example. But there are many examples of that, you know. So, but at the same time, I don't think we want to shut down pharmacological research. We might be scared of it, but we don't want to shut it down. Maybe the solution is to regulate it in some way. But I don't know how you regulate AI. Right, which brings us back to our point. What we started here is the government was trying to stop AI.

[00:51:51] But in a ham-fisted way, which wasn't really helping. Oh, well, we haven't solved anything, but we had a good conversation. And that's what I hope for. And we'll watch with interest. I mean, it's all complicated because we have an administration that really is anti-intellectual, very anti-science. And so it's complicated by all of that as well.

[00:52:15] And also, it seems to be that any company that kisses up to the presidency sufficiently is going to be favored. And the big mistake that Anthropic made was saying, no, the military can't use our models for autonomous killing machines or spying on Americans. And that pissed off the administration so much that now we are, six months later, basically shut down. Yeah.

[00:52:42] So is this political or is this a smart technological move? I mean, it's political, right? But it sure looks that way. It doesn't mean that there doesn't need to be some portion exercised. It might be the right thing to do. Yeah. They might have done the right thing for the wrong reason. I don't think so. Yeah. I want my fable. I want my fable back.

[00:53:05] We've had, in fact, I interviewed Alex Stamos last week, a very highly respected security guy who says fable wasn't and isn't doing anything that almost any other model couldn't do. That this particular horse has already left the barn. We already have models that can find security flaws. And this is, that's technology, that's the biggest problem with government and technology is they're always two years behind what's actually happening. So it's impossible really for them to, for the government to regulate it.

[00:53:34] It sounds very Star Trek-y, but ultimately I think this has to become a global solution. This has to be something that needs to be managed by all of the countries, not individual countries. Because it is, like you say, if one country regulates it, it's not going to stop another country. I mean, someone was mentioning this in the chat, comparing it to like the atomic bomb. If it's really that dangerous, you know, this needs to be something that has a global answer, not each country.

[00:54:03] It really, yeah, I agree. It needs to go through the UN, but then to, you know, Leo's point, like it's going to kill, it's going to slow down everything because government is really, really bad when it comes to technology in general. And it's going to be even worse with this, right? Because it's so complicated and so technological. And then you have things like, would China, you know, we're so skeptical of China, right? Would they really develop this and abide by any agreements? You know, how do you enforce that, right?

[00:54:33] At least with nuclear, it's like you can, there's centrifuges, right? There's uranium. There's like, there's physical. Peaceful uses of atomic energy and non-peaceful. And we've attempted to, not very successful, but we've attempted to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the same time as we've encouraged the proliferation of atomic energy. That might be a good, that might be a good analogy for this, that there are safe uses of AI and unsafe uses of AI.

[00:55:02] I think it's a little clearer what the unsafe use of atomic, of fusion and fission is. That seems a little clearer. AI, it's a little bit more, a little bit more muddy. I don't know. You know, it puts me in an awkward position because I agree a lot of technology is dangerous. Technology, I would say itself is agnostic, but it can be used by humans in a dangerous way. I would hate to see the American government decide which chips American companies could make and which they couldn't.

[00:55:30] That would be a mistake. Do you guys think that there's going to be some sort of AI catastrophe? Like the AI does something where something happens because of AI? AI will never do anything bad by itself. There will always be a human actor who either said, hey, maybe we should let AI control atomic weapons. I don't know.

[00:55:55] I mean, the whole thing with the terrible situation with the young man who killed himself because his chatbot basically told him how to do it. Like the anthropomorphization. Yeah, that felt pretty awful. Like felt like that was, you know. Well, it's a terrible outcome. Yeah, but it was. He could have done a Google search too. No, but this, but there was, I mean, he really was focusing. I know we've talked about it on the show, but it was, it was escalating the situation. Yeah, I understand. And that was AI doing that. Not, there was no human behind that doing that.

[00:56:25] But, you know, Daniel, it might be like frog in a pot, much like climate change, where a number of smaller, seemingly innocuous components stack up and we find ourself in a challenging situation. But, you know, Jennifer, to your point, that is a tragic occurrence. And we can maybe find analogs in the social media world.

[00:56:54] In fact, some of the recent rulings about social media and the obligation that social media companies might have in terms of regulating access to it. And here's the question. Do you regulate a technology because of the edge cases? Yeah, right. To protect the edge cases and by doing so defang it for everybody else.

[00:57:24] It's like, okay, let's eliminate children's playgrounds because some people hurt themselves on them. You can try to make them safer. That would be a reasonable thing. But you don't, it's, it's, it's, it's a dangerous precedent to regulate based on the edge case. We wouldn't have cars if that were the case, right? We wouldn't have a lot of things we have in modern life. The problem here was that it wasn't, there were no guardrails.

[00:57:54] There was no safety in place. And, and I don't think that this is the problem. I don't know if you can create safety. This is right. Which to my point is like, they don't, we, even the people creating this don't know how powerful it is. And that, that is a reason to be scared of it. For every zipper, there's going to be some guy who gets his penis stuck in it. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't have zippers is all I'm saying. Right? There's the title of the podcast.

[00:58:22] No, it's definitely not the title of the podcast. Let me take a break before I, before I get myself in any more trouble. I'm not saying it necessarily ever happened to me. I'm just saying it could. Okay. But we shouldn't ban zippers because of it. It does feel like everything about AI is inevitable. Like we just have no choice. Like we're technology has always felt like that. Hasn't it? Like even weapons development, things like that.

[00:58:51] As soon as we could figure out how to do it, we're going to do it. We can't stop it. Yeah. And I don't know if that's true. Yeah. It does feel that way though. Like if it's, if, if we, if man can invent it, woman can't prevent it. I'm sorry, Jennifer. Let's take a break. That's okay. I will be the lone female voice of reason. That's what I'm saying. Boys and their toys. That's all I'm saying.

[00:59:22] Actually, along that, along those lines, along those lines, I think a better analog here would be guns because like guns are readily available, easy to make, but you know, around the, around the world, around the rest of the, the rest of the world, it's harder to buy than it is in America. Right. Right. Yeah. Let's take a little break. Jennifer Patterson-Tui, senior reviewer for The Verge. We're going to talk home, home automation, something a little safer. You cannot hurt yourself with in just a little bit.

[00:59:52] Well, maybe you can. We'll find out. Don't make any promises, Leo. Okay. Daniel Rubino from the editor-in-chief from Windows Central. Great to have you. And of course, Dan Patterson of Blackbird.ai, our show today brought to you by Box. This is really, it's talking about AI. This is a really interesting technology. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your organization with AI, you are probably facing a very common challenge.

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[01:03:17] We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Box.com slash AI. Okay, we're going to move on from AI. Enough AI! Let's talk about the smart home. Now, I have to say, my little AI buddy, Quicksilver, is connected to my Home Assistant green server. And I can tell it to open shades, turn on the lights. I can have it, you know, when I get home, do things. It's very nice to have an AI connected to your home. Yeah. And actually, you know, to your point earlier about the different use cases here,

[01:03:46] as this is so true with technology, it's not that AI bad. It's that some elements of AI could have concern, but some elements of AI have great use cases. And actually, the smart home is one of them where I think we've already seen some really interesting innovations. Yes. That help run your smart home. Because the key one is cutting through complexity, because the smart home is complicated. What you just said is not a sentence that most normal people would understand. I know.

[01:04:17] Running on my HA green and yeah. But you did though, right? You speak Home Assistant. I do speak Home Assistant, yes. And I've used my, I used Claude to help me. Exactly. Code my Home Assistant instance. And that was super helpful. Incredibly helpful. Yes. Because yeah. It actually might be the missing link. Because all this time we've had this Home Assistant, it's like the Tower of Babel. Nobody can talk to it. It doesn't, one thing doesn't talk to another. Maybe AI is the solution.

[01:04:47] Or maybe Matter is the solution. Matter. Yes. Love that segue. Thank you, Leah. Well, I will say this. I've been lobbying. Everything I use should have an AI interface. We were just talking about Box, how it has MCP servers and SDKs and CLI. Home Assistant has an interface that an agent can use and understand. Everything should have that. Maybe Matter is that layer. I don't know. There's a big Matter conference going on. So a couple of weeks ago, well, a week ago, I was at this conference. It's called Unify.

[01:05:17] And actually, to our previous conversation about how maybe technology companies need to work together to figure out how to control and responsibly deploy AI in the world, Matter is actually a great example of how competitors are coming together and working together to make a better solution. There is no risk of the end of the world through home automation, but it's definitely been interesting to watch. And this was what this conference was.

[01:05:46] That's because home automation isn't as powerful as it ought to be. It should be good enough to end the world if necessary. But it is a good example of a technology that has so much value but has been so hard for people to use because of competing standards, competing protocols, confusion, complicated setups, having to have little boxes running AI in your house to get anything to work.

[01:06:15] And Matter is a newish interoperability standard that's basically designed to make all of your smart home devices work with each other rather than being in like siloed ecosystems or ward gardens. And what this conference was, was put on by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, who runs Matter and Zigbee and Allero and a few other open standards.

[01:06:42] There's, by the way, there's the problem right there. There wasn't enough just to have one. We had to make more. So you hear this all the time and it's not. So it's a misnomer, but I get the joke. Like it's the XCD, XKCD comic. Am I saying that right? Sorry. The comic, you know, there's 14 standards and none of them work with each other. We need one standard to make them all work together, protocols to make them all work together.

[01:07:10] And then that protocol comes along. And now, yay, we have 15 protocols. So we've been talking about Matter for, it feels like years. How many? A couple of years now. So it launched four years ago. Four years. Three and six months. And it's, but it had been announced in 2018 by Apple, Google, Amazon, and then quite quickly after Samsung. So all of these companies have been working together. They all had their own walled gardens, didn't they? Yes.

[01:07:40] They all had their own standards. And everyone used different protocols, different ways of connecting devices, different radios, different hubs. It was confusing. It was complicated. And this, but it has Matter launched, but it has had a bumpy road. And what this conference was all about was really sort of bringing everyone together. I mean, they all talk with each other. Apparently, this is what they say. They have these meetings, but, you know, three or four times a year where all the companies come together.

[01:08:09] But this was their first public-effacing event where they were like, look at what we've achieved. Here's where Matter is. Now, it's still not where they promised it would be day one, which was you just buy a smart home device, you plug it in, set it up, and it will just work with any smart home platform you want. We're not there yet. But what I saw at this conference was really quite inspiring, not to be too sort of twee,

[01:08:38] but that these companies actually have been working really hard to make this standard better and to fix the problems that we've seen. And most of those problems are that just it's still complicated and it's still confusing. But what came out of this is the launch of Matter 1.6. So we're getting, I mean, and standards, you guys, you know, you've been in this industry for a long time. Standards are very hard.

[01:09:05] They're not, it's not easy to move an industry. It's not easy to get rivals to agree on anything. It's not easy to get them to implement something that could potentially mean that their product and their service could be superseded by their competitors. But I think that what has transpired over the last few years is that it's really clear that the smart home is at an impasse because of how complicated it is. And sorry to bring this back to AI,

[01:09:33] AI, but AI coming to the smart home has suddenly opened the monetization strategy for these companies, which wasn't there before. But we are now, you know, we heard about Amazon losing billions on its Echo smart home division over the years. And Apple has been very slow in this space. Google has also had kind of a bumpy ride with its Nest and speaker, Google Home speaker division.

[01:10:02] They just launched their newest speaker, which is all focused on Gemini AI. Oh, is it? Oh, interesting. Yeah. So it's built for, so Gemini for the home is their AI model for home automation and the smart home. And what does AI need? What does AI need more than anything else? It needs good data. And what are you going to get good data with? Well, interoperability.

[01:10:27] If everything can talk to everything else, then you can use and build a more reliable smart home system that's potentially going to start doing the sort of the holy grail of the smart home, which is being able to actually manage your home for you. So you're not the one with the Raspberry Pi on the shelf trying to fiddle and all the different apps and trying to,

[01:10:55] you know, home assistance, very great and powerful, but you can spend a whole month diving into it. I still haven't connected everything to it. I've had it for a couple of years now. So, I mean, and the idea, and so one of the other things that the Matter 1.6 came up with this, which should have been there at the beginning, something called joint fabric. And basically what this means is when you buy a device from a smart home company

[01:11:21] and you add it to your smart home platform of choice, say Apple Home or Amazon Alexa, prior, each ecosystem would set up their own network in your home called Fabric. So you'd have your Apple Home fabric and you'd have your Amazon A fabric. Now with joint fabric, you're just going to have your own smart home network that every ecosystem you would like to control it.

[01:11:45] So if you want two or three, because say you use a Google Pixel and your spouse uses an iPhone, they will now talk to that fabric, but they won't own that fabric. And that sounds like a sort of small change, but it's a significant shift for the standard because it means that these companies have all agreed to give up control. So they don't own the fabric. Have they really though? Have they really?

[01:12:11] Well, that's, this is the, so everyone says they are on board with this, but the other problem with standards is you get a new spec and then when, when does the spec actually appear in the product? So this is wait and see. But it is, it's, it was an exciting sort of, there was a lot of momentum, I guess. That was what I saw at this conference. I mean, I was talking to the engineers.

[01:12:36] I was talking to the people developing this rather than, you know, the PR and the management people. But if, if, if engineers rule the world, this will work. Yes. But that's a big if. That's right. Because engineers want it to work. They're the ones using it. Yeah. So what's the takeaway for a consumer? Is there, should you not buy anything that isn't matter certified at this point?

[01:13:01] So it's a hard one to say because there are not enough matter certified devices, I would say to be able to do that at this stage. But yes, if you're looking at a device that, if you're looking at buying smart home devices, I would highly recommend exploring the matter versions over. All other things be equal, look for the one that has matter. Because, and this is the point of my next story that I wanted to touch on. One of the great things about matter is it is a local protocol or it's a local standard

[01:13:30] and it uses local connectivity protocols. So thread and Wi-Fi. And if you buy a cloud dependent device and that company goes out of business, your cloud dependent device no longer works. And we have seen this time and time again. Well, yes. So the level lock, to be clear, the level lock has not gone out of business, but it has been, had a significant restructuring,

[01:13:57] which causes some concern about the long-term business model of the company. And also level lock is, they recently did an upgrade to matter. So if you're, if you have a level lock that has a matter upgrade, if in the future something happened to level servers, your device would still work. And this is where matter becomes a very important, excuse me. It's okay.

[01:14:26] This is where matter becomes a key part of the smart home experience is that it is local and you control it. If your company goes out of business, that... If you weren't watching the video, Jennifer's son just walked through and unplugged the router, it looks like. I know. I just froze. Sorry about that. She froze in horror. Yeah.

[01:14:52] It wasn't quite like the BBC presenter whose kids rolled in, but it was a moment. But yeah. So the level lock is an, is, is, is so level... You shouldn't freak out. Did Asa Abloy buy them or did they, was it their product to begin with? So ASSA ABLOY bought them. Level lock was actually made by a couple of iPhone, of Apple engineers originally. Oh, it was a startup. Yeah, startup. And I don't know if anyone, if you're familiar with it, but it's a really cool piece of technology.

[01:15:21] They basically, if you've ever seen a smart lock or if you've used a smart lock, they're normally big, kind of techie looking, giant batteries on the back of your door. Or they're a little cumbersome. Smart locks are great in general. Like, I love them as a concept. They're really good. But they don't look great. The level lock goes, basically, puts all the technology in the, the battery goes in the little deadbolt there and all of the smarts are built into the deadbolt mechanism.

[01:15:49] So it looks like a totally normal deadbolt lock. So it looks like a completely normal lock. That's so cool. It's such a neat concept. I'm glad I didn't know about it or I would have bought it. It's very expensive. That's the other downside. Like $350 for that lock that we were looking at there. So, and so this, there was a startup similar to like August, the August lock you might be familiar with. Yep. And both of those companies were bought by Assa Abloy at different times in their process.

[01:16:16] If you're familiar with Assa Abloy, it's one of the largest multinational access control companies on the planet. Like they own. They were famous for their excellent deadbolts though, right? They're not a cheesy company. No, no. I mean, it's, it's a very well-established Swedish company. And so they also bought, they bought Yale and they bought August and then they wanted to buy Quickset, which is the other large lock maker.

[01:16:45] And the government said, uh-uh, that's too many, that's too many locks. And so then they sold their stake in Yale in August and then bought Level. So this company's been kind of on a lock buying spree. But what happened this last week, sadly, is they basically laid off the majority of the staff at Level. Oh, that's too many.

[01:17:08] And so the concern amongst the staff and for customers of the lock is that without any engineering, an engineering team there anymore. This is a high, this is a very technical, uh, very technically advanced lock and will, will the lock continue to be made? Hopefully it'll continue to be supported. Um, but there is a concern that it may just go away, which would be very sad because it's

[01:17:38] a great piece of technology. And they were just, they were working on a, an ultra wideband version. And I think I've talked about this on the show before, but this is the next, um, innovation that's coming to smart locks is complete hands-free unlocking. So you use using UWB radios that your phone will chat, will, um, transmit to your lock as you walk up that you'll, you've come home and it will unlock the door for you. I love this by the way. I don't have one because I bought a Schlage just before they came out, but, uh,

[01:18:08] So Schlage just launched its newest UWB lock. I'm sorry. But I love that idea that you just walk up to the door and it's unlocked. I mean, it might be great. It's a really nice. It's the same technology. Yeah. Same technology. So if you're coming or going, like if you're walking towards it or walking away, so it's not as you're walking away. I mean, just really kind of cool. It's, it's a great technology and it's much better than the current that. So if you have a smart lock, you may already have this experience.

[01:18:36] And there's some like Bluetooth GPS sort of magic that some use, but that's not very reliable because you're using a number of different radios and there can obviously be a number of failure points. Whereas this is a local direct radio to phone technology. And, um, really I've used, I've tried it and I've been very impressed with it. I have the new Schlage lock actually somewhere right here. Um, I'm going to be testing hopefully this weekend on your teenage boy. Yeah.

[01:19:05] I think I've talked about how he doesn't, uh, he's never used a key. I don't know how he's going to do it. I don't have, I don't carry keys anymore. The only thing I carry a key for is my post office box. Cause of course the U S postal service, they're never going away, never stop using keys. But, but I don't, I used to have a key ring. I don't have a key ring anymore. It's just a weird experience, but I'm going to make it, I'm going to make a bet here. We got two other high tech guys on the show. Daniel, do you have a smart lock? Yeah.

[01:19:34] Do you have one, Daniel, a smart lock? Yeah. I have a UFI. He has a UFI. Okay. How about you, Dan? Do you have a smart lock? Um, so I live in Brooklyn and we have less choice about this. Yeah. And, and right. There's a number of security concerns with that. However, the, the, the apartment complex I live in. Yes. We have a smart lock. We have that option, but I think almost everyone opts to use a key and I, for my apartment, I use a key.

[01:20:04] Um, however, excuse me, were I to not live here? Yeah. I almost certainly would have a smart lock. Sure. All right. Well then I take it back. They make life. It's one, it's like the video doorbell. It's one of those things that a lot of people use. Everybody gets. Yeah. Yeah. But I should just mention on the, on the Asa Abloy level thing, Asa Abloy has said level lock is stay in business and not, no worries. Don't, don't be concerned. Don't look behind the curtain. The fact that there's no one left at the company.

[01:20:35] So we'll see, we'll see what happens. Um, but it's, it was a great, a really great piece of tech. And I really do hope that the innovations that level developed and brought to the market will continue because I, for one, do not like ugly, big smart locks. I want sleek, nice looking smart locks that don't, that don't look like a smart lock. Um, but still will automatically open my door for me as I approach. Well, with any luck, uh, they'll fold it into quick set and it will be in every hardware

[01:21:04] store and it'll be everywhere and it'll be lower cost. And, and that technology, I mean, they must've bought it because they liked the technology. You hope, you hope. I mean, one of the concerns is that Asa Abloy has been having, um, is North, North American residential sales have had taken a big dive because no one's spending any money in this country anymore. It seems no one's buying houses because the, uh, interest rates are still so high. Um, so yeah, I think they're having some financial problems.

[01:21:30] So that could have been related to why this had happened, but yeah, they haven't, we, we don't know for sure. So it's all speculation at this point, but fingers crossed the technology continues, but it is really sad that the startups basically all, all 80 employees, um, and the founders were, were laid off. So, um, we will see what happens in the future here and watch this space, but they did, they did the same to some extent to August. I mean, we, I think most of your listeners and viewers will be familiar with the August

[01:21:59] smart lock, which was one of the early smart home sort of babies, darlings. And, um, that was bought by Asa Abloy and there hasn't been a new August lock in six, seven years. I don't think we're going to ever see another August lock. It's not the first company. There've been quite a few companies, former Apple engineers. That seems to be a common thing. The Apple engineer, you know, get some design skills, some engineering skills, and then starts their own company.

[01:22:26] Tony Fidel very famously, uh, was one of the designers on the iPhone who went off to start Nest. You have, speaking of Nest, have a very good podcast. Yeah. That you are part of. If everyone, anyone's not gotten bored to tears by my smart home chats, um, there's lots more where this came from. Um, we have a new podcast at the verge called version history. Well, new that we're in our fourth season, but, uh, this, this season is all smart home.

[01:22:54] And we have a episode that went out today, all about the history of the Nest thermostat. Oh, what a great story. It was, it's a very fun story. Um, a lot of, you probably would be surprised by, by a lot of the, the background there. And then we also, last week we did, uh, the Roomba, which was fun one. And then we've got Phillips Hue light bulbs coming up. And of course the clapper, everyone's favorite. The clapper clap. The original home automation device.

[01:23:23] And we did the Logitech Harmony a couple of weeks ago too, which I think. Oh, another good one. There. So lots of fun stuff. Oh, I'm gonna have to listen to this. If you want, if you want some more smart home law, um, please. Can I ask you an inside baseball question? Sure. So, uh, Vox is being split up into little tiny pieces. Uh, the Vox podcast company got sold is, but the verge got, it's very confusing. It's confusing.

[01:23:51] I like your new owner, by the way. I think the verge is owned by Penske now. Are they going to keep version history? Who gets version history? So it's a bit of a misnomer and understandably confusing, but the Vox Media Podcast Network doesn't actually, as far as I understand it, make the podcasts. Oh. They are, they are like a platform to help market and advertising. See, I couldn't understand it because verge cast without the verge isn't, is cast. Right.

[01:24:20] So like, I know famously Kara Swisher and her podcast is part of the- Hugely valuable. Yeah. But she owns her own podcast, as far as I understand it. And like, but they have like a partnership with Vox Media Podcast Network. For sales primarily, right? Primarily sales. I think infrastructure, that kind of stuff. So our, our verge cast and version history and decoder, which is the other podcast from verge. Yeah. That is all staying with verge. Good.

[01:24:46] And no longer part of Vox Media Podcast Network, which is going to a Murdoch. Which one? I can't remember. Is it Lachlan? I think it's going to Lachlan. I think, no. Is it? I think it's the other one. Yeah, I think it's Lachlan. It's Lachlan. I think so. Yeah. It's not the other one. I get confused by, by the Murdoch. Definitely not Rupert. Yeah, it's very confusing. Not Rupert. Yeah. But yes.

[01:25:14] So, and we're going to Penske, which was that was, this was just announced last week, a week ago. Penske, which owns all the Hollywood magazines plus. And the Golden Globes. So I'm like, if I get tickets. You get tickets to the Golden Globes. On the Golden Globes. It's going to be a very exciting time. Jennifer, I have a quick question. What happens to subscriptions? Maybe you don't know, but. Yeah, I'm a subscriber. I care about that. I subscribe to the Verge.

[01:25:38] Everything, as far as our fearless leader, Nilay, has explained to us, it's everything will stay exactly the way it is. Like we are, our company is The Verge as a company, which The Verge founded with Fox Media originally. Like it was The Verge and Verge was like, oh, we need a company. So they created Fox Media. Right. So, and that, now that Verge, which has always been its own business within Fox Media, is just staying its own business with a different owner. Yeah.

[01:26:06] Nilay and Josh and everybody were regulars on Twitter at the time. And I remember when they started my, what was it called? My next, my next thing. This is my next. This is my next. That's what it was. Yeah. And I remember when they, they left, was it Engadget? I can't even, I think it was Engadget. Yes. And they started that and, and they've had great success and I'm really glad. And as a result, we don't get them on the show anymore because they're far too big. I'm sure. I'm sure. Nilay would love to be on the show. I would love to get Nilay on, but all right.

[01:26:33] I'll, I don't even, you know, I, I act like they're saying no to me. I'm too embarrassed to ask. To ask. I'm sure he would love to come on. It's like, oh, you're a big shot now. Same thing with Kara. Kara used to be on the show all the time. She's too big now. Now you just get me. I'd rather have you. If you give me the three people on right now, the people who are on the show are the people I want to have on the show. Um, but I do admit that sometimes, you know, people get, you know, big time and we don't,

[01:27:03] you know, you don't get to have them on anymore. They're just too big for us. This little program. We're glad to have you. Don't worry about your subscriptions and keep subscribing. Yes, I will. I love The Verge. We quote The Verge constantly and especially Jennifer Patterson-Tui and her smart home coverage. We also quote Windows Central all the time. Daniel Rubino, editor in chief there. Great Windows coverage, Microsoft coverage, really.

[01:27:29] And of course, Dan Patterson of Blackbird AI doing his best to stop the Ruskies in there. So you have to at some point explain the difference between disinformation and misinformation. Yeah. Yeah. What is misinformation is wrong. It's a disinformation is intentionally misleading contents or narratives. We call it a narrative because it's not just one deep fake content. It's not the fact.

[01:27:58] It's the story around it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, but it is intentional. Misinformation could be like, well, my neighbor said it's going to rain tomorrow and everybody's saying it's going to rain tomorrow. Right. Gossip. Or, you know, one great example. We've been spending a lot of time looking at the World Cup because at least in Brooklyn, everybody's looking at the world like it's huge. It's fantastic. It's a great event. But there have been some narratives around, let's say, empty stadiums. Right. Right.

[01:28:28] Nobody's going to these games. That's not true. Is it? It's not true at all. You're all sold out. Right. Oh my God. I would like to complain vociferously about the World Cup. Can I do that now? England won. What are you worried about? They're going on. So I dropped this in the notes right down the bottom. I tweeted this. I went, I was like, yay, England won. Yay. They're playing in Atlanta. I'm just going to see, because I live in South Carolina. Yeah. It's just up the road a piece. Maybe I could go watch. Yeah. England, Congo. Ten.

[01:28:58] Yeah. Ten thousand dollars for two tickets. Well, that wasn't the face value. Who is responsible for that? I'm sorry, but five hundred dollars for a ticket was ridiculous. Ten thousand dollars is insane. Jason Snell went to a game. He went to like the dumb game or whatever. He said a game nobody wanted. It was still five hundred bucks. But you're looking at the real resale price. But that's. Why? And who do I. But no, this is all through the four more channels.

[01:29:27] Like this is the this country is the only one in the world that does this. And is it technology's fault? Who do we blame? I know we blame Ticketmaster. But is it because of tech? I feel like. So here's what happens. It is scalpers, by the way. Yeah. Somebody buys it at face value and then goes to the same site. Sometimes they go to a third party site and says, yeah, I'm not going to make it. So sell it for me. But by the way, it's going to be four thousand dollars more than I paid for it. That's I think that's still scalping, isn't it? Maybe they maybe there.

[01:29:56] Maybe their aunt got sick and they can't go. Maybe why are there no laws against this? I went to a Taylor Swift concert in London and I paid 60 pounds. Yeah, I should. 60 pounds. Taylor hates the whole thing, too. I know. Let me point out on your on your Blue Sky post. The price is nine thousand. There is then a one thousand three hundred fifty dollar fee on top of it. I know that's I mean, it's insane. But why? Why? Why?

[01:30:26] The answer is we don't we don't enforce antitrust here is the answer. We need regulation here because this is this is ridiculous. Who's going to is someone actually going to pay that much for a ticket? I bet it was an eye opener for a lot of people come to this country to see their their country play in the World Cup. And then not only they have to pay that for tickets, but they have to tip the waiter. This is insane. How does this country survive? Have you seen the memes on online? It's been wonderful.

[01:30:56] It is really fun. How much that? Yeah. And people sort of discovering that America is actually really cool. Yeah. Yeah. The guy that guy who's been flying around. Who? I can't remember his name. Something or other. It's wonderful. He's like, yeah, his eyes wide open. Wow. And I love every four years this happens, but normally not in America. The whole world comes together. I agree. And it's just a great example of how we really can all come together.

[01:31:25] There's something, you know, it's not the people that are the problem. Perhaps it's the politicians that are the problem. I don't know. But as a global society, we exist in harmony. The people are fine. And the World Cup is a great example. You have Iran playing in the World Cup. Finally woken up. Yeah. America's finally paying attention because you finally are doing okay. Every four years. Only because, may I point out, you have an English striker. Oh, yeah.

[01:31:52] Who is here, is only playing with you because of birthright citizenship. So, do you know that story? It's fantastic. So, he's English. His parents were English. Uh-huh. But they were living in the United States when he was born. No. No. His mother is Ghanaian, I believe, or Nigerian. And she was visiting family or friends in New York. And she tried to get on the plane to go home to England where she lived. So, she's Nigerian but lives in England.

[01:32:22] And she was – and this is something that does happen. If you're too pregnant, they won't let you get on the plane. Sure. They don't want you to go and labor on the flight. So, she had to stay in Brooklyn a bit longer. And so, she had her baby before she went back home. So, he was born in New York, went back home with her when they let her fly back. Grew up in England, went through all the English soccer training, football training.

[01:32:47] Played for one of the big, like, development teams for – I don't know if it was Arsenal. My football law is a little fuzzy because I'm living here now. But, yeah, he played – he was, like – he played for the England under-21s. He was a big star. And then he could also have played for his – I think it's Nigeria that he was – his family is from. One of the African countries. And then he was going to play for England because why wouldn't you play for England? We're the best soccer nation in the world, football nation in the world.

[01:33:16] I'll be rooting for the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that match. But apparently, the American fans got, like, in his DMs on social media and were like, we want you. We want you. And he was like, okay. Okay. And he decided to go play for America. Yay. And now you finally have a good soccer team. So, you're welcome. By the way, if you are born on a flight, birthright citizenship to American Airlines? What is your –

[01:33:44] I think it depends where the plane is when you were born. I love – There was one – Did they still do the thing where if you're born on a plane, you get free flights on that airline forever? I doubt it. Very, very. That's probably why they don't let you go on the plane. That's right. Very, very pregnant. My favorite response to your blue sky skeet about the ticket prices is Wonkish who said, Matter fixes this. He knew me. He knows my thing. He knows. He knows. It's all going to be fixed by Matter.

[01:34:14] All right. Sorry for the diversion there. Oh, it's a good diversion. No, no. And I don't know, though, if I'll be rooting for England. I might be rooting for Congo. Dr. Congo, as people keep calling it. They've had such a rough time lately. This is something that gives them hope. I hate to say it, and I shouldn't because it'll just wish it into existence, but this is exactly the type of game that we're going to lose. I mean, you just know it. The underdog. I know. I know. I shouldn't have said it. I'm sorry. Don't put that out in the space. Thanks.

[01:34:44] We'll have more with our fabulous panel in just a minute. I did see, I have to say, I was watching the F1 last week. Or no, I guess it was the qualifiers this week. And there were Norwegian fans doing the row in the F1 stands, which cracked me up. That's my favorite new move. They row in unison in the stands. That beats the wave by a lot. I just love that. Everything beats the Vuvuzelas from five World Cups ago. Do you remember those? I happen to have. Those were terrible.

[01:35:15] America needs to come up with something, though. Signature. South African World Cup. You have one? I hate to do this to you, but brought me back. No, no. All right, we'll have more. Oh, my ears. We'll have more this week in tech. I'm sorry, I shouldn't do that. But, you know, I don't get to play the Vuvuzela very often. So I might get a chance. It's like Beetlejuice. You mentioned it. Now it has to happen.

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[01:38:06] With Meter, you get a single... This is why owning the stack makes such a difference. You get a single partner. One phone number to call for all your connectivity needs from first site survey to ongoing support. Without the complexity of managing multiple providers, juggling tools. Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility. Reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online.

[01:38:34] Meter's built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. We thank them so much for support in TWIT. And we invite you to go to meter.com slash TWIT and book a demo now. M-E-T-E-R dot com slash TWIT to book a demo. So here's some interesting news about Elon Musk's brand new, very successful on the stock market anyway company. Starlink.

[01:39:04] SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the United States. Would you buy a Starlink-based cell phone? I don't think it would be just satellite. Obviously, it couldn't be because if you're inside, it wouldn't work. So they'd also have to have terrestrial. I think they'd have to have terrestrial wireless as well.

[01:39:28] Gwen Shotwell told investors during a recent IPO roadshow the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial U.S. mobile network. The move would require Starlink, this is from Ars Technica, to build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers. Now, I use Starlink. It's my backup internet for these shows. And I think Starlink's great. It's not cheap.

[01:39:57] I don't know if it would be better cell service or not. Analysts caution. Go ahead. Wasn't he also supposed to be doing his own phone at some point? It was a couple years ago, right? Yeah. That sounds familiar. Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder if it would be tied to that. Yeah. But it seems an odd move to launch a smartphone. Unless it's like an Android-based phone, of course. But if it's not, I don't know how that would work.

[01:40:25] I think the analysts say the biggest sticking point is going to be terrestrial radio. Because you can't just, like in here, I can't see the sky. I couldn't use a sat phone. So this will be interesting. Of course, remember a lot of what Elon has been saying is just to, you know, become a trillionaire, to get a good stock price, which it worked.

[01:40:50] Won't iPhone customers become satellite and Starlink customers at some point? Well, sort of. So right now, most modern iPhones can get satellite connectivity if they lose cellular connectivity through GlobalStar. But GlobalStar just got sold. And Apple's stock, its stake in GlobalStar went along with it.

[01:41:20] So there has been some noise that maybe they'll switch to Starlink. I don't know. And what does T-Mobile use? Because you can add satellite service. It uses GlobalStar right now. I'm using GlobalStar right now. Yeah. So who did, GlobalStar was bought by, who bought them? I forgot. No. Boy. It's funny. It wasn't that long ago, wasn't it? Oh, Amazon. That's right.

[01:41:48] So Amazon, I don't know. I don't know. I have a feeling that Apple's not going to do an Amazon deal. So I've, and since they lost their 20% stake in it. So yeah, it makes sense. I've heard rumors that they were going to use Starlink for the future. But that doesn't replace your cell service. We're talking about full cell service from Starlink. Which presumably you could use on any phone. If it's like a regular cell service. Let's talk about Windows.

[01:42:16] Because Benito wins his bet. He said, oh no, I'm going to hang on. I'm playing chicken. I'm going to hold on to my Windows 10. Microsoft had said last November, okay, one more year. Actually, it was October, wasn't it? October 14th, 2025. When they ended support for Windows 10. You better explain this to me, Daniel. So are they extending it another year?

[01:42:46] They are. And part of it, honestly, is the RAM stuff again. It might be different if you could buy a new computer with Windows 11 on it, I guess. Yeah. I mean, part of the, I guess you could say problem with Windows 11 is that there are hardware requirements with it based around security. And so a lot of companies would need to buy new laptops or desktops that meet the security standards.

[01:43:12] And this, of course, has angered people, but you can't have both ways. Because if they don't have this security built in and people upgrade and all this kind of stuff and they get attacked, you know, it's a whole issue. So, but obviously buying laptops now and PCs has become very cost prohibitive. Right. And so they're extending it by another year. Although I don't know how much that just gives companies an extra year to save money, I guess, to buy new computers.

[01:43:39] Because we don't expect those prices to necessarily drop. But that seems to be a part of this. As well as, you know, they are involved in the K2 project right now, which is this effort to address a lot of concerns and complaints that people have with Windows 11. So what do I need to do if, like Benito, I'm still running Windows 10. Come October, what do I need to do? Do I have to do anything to keep it alive?

[01:44:09] Am I just going to get updates without doing anything? Yeah, actually, I'm not too sure about that. Previously, you had to just register and just make sure. Yeah, you had to pay, sort of pay for it with Bing points. Right, right. That's right. Or had to use OneDrive. There were some weird little things. I'm looking at your article, not your article, but I'm looking at the article on Windows Central Insider by Kevin O'Kamua, who says all you have to do is sign in with a Microsoft account.

[01:44:39] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it looks like it's just a basic extension without any loopholes to jump through, which is good because Microsoft gets a lot of flack for that, obviously.

[01:45:16] Yeah. They're going to do it with your fingers and make everybody jump. Microsoft tries to do it and everybody loses their mind. So it's- Well, Apple makes its money in hardware. And so they can give you a free operating system because, you know, you bought their computer to do it. Microsoft, you know, you didn't necessarily buy a computer for Microsoft to be using Windows. In fact, most people don't. Yeah. We were talking earlier about a mythos. Microsoft has its own model, M-Dash.

[01:45:45] And last, I guess it was this month's Patch Tuesday had the largest number of fixes ever. Microsoft said at least 10 of them were generated by M-Dash, its own security model. And I would suspect that Mythos, which it also had access to, had some of those patches also could be attributed to it. That's a huge- Oh, more than 200 fixes. That is probably one of the more interesting aspects of AI in terms of software, right?

[01:46:14] It's its ability to find weaknesses in systems, find bugs, and actually do advanced work. And I think that's- But conversely, of course, it could be just as dangerous if it's in the wrong hands because it can also be used in probe networks. Finding the bugs is the first step to exploiting the bugs. Right. That's the risk, right? And that was what people were complaining about with Mythos, is it would write, it would find the bug, patch the bug, and then write a proof of concept to test the patch.

[01:46:44] But any proof of concept that tests to see if the bug is still there can also be used to exploit the bug. It's the, you know, you're getting the code for exploitation. And the fact that it could do that in a single prompt reasonably is a little bit scary. I don't think Anthropoc overhyped that. I think it really is dangerous. But on the other hand, if you can do it with other tools now existent, what's the point in stopping it? There's going to be a big update.

[01:47:12] We were talking about this on Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot on Wednesday, coming July 14th. Huge number of updates coming to Windows 11, so you might want to upgrade. Is this to celebrate America's 250th? No, it's not. But, yeah, this is part of that K2 project I was talking about with, you know, introducing features, the ability to move the taskbar, right? Whoa, wait a minute.

[01:47:43] Yeah, it seems trivial. And, you know, I think only 1% of users probably do this. Microsoft took that feature out in Windows 11. So they didn't really take it out. It's a little more complicated than that. They rewrote the taskbar for Windows 11. It uses a different technology now. It's written differently. And so they recreated it. And so to the end user, it feels like the same start system almost from Windows 10. Looks the same, yeah. But they completely rewrote it.

[01:48:13] And they didn't write into that feature to move it because very few people actually do move it. Most people do keep it on the bottom. Probably less than 1% actually want to move it to the size or the top. But those 1% are loud. They're very loud. And, you know, you can make a good argument that, okay, they didn't have it on launch, but, you know, maybe they'll do it later. But they never said they were going to do it at all. And they were sticking to their guns for a long time. But now new team is in place.

[01:48:43] And they're addressing and, you know, delivering a lot of fixes and improvements. For instance, you'll be able to pause Windows updates basically indefinitely. What? Yay. Yeah. So that's been another thing that people have, you know, talked about because it is annoying to get that pop-up saying you need to restart your computer now because there's never a good time for it, right? But people will be able to pause it now. There's also the point of time restore.

[01:49:09] Basically, this is almost like an older system where it does a snapshot. And so if something goes wrong with your system, you can roll it back to the previous version. Oh, we used to have that. That's, didn't we? Yeah. Yeah. System restore. Yeah. Yep. They need to take some tips from the smart home here because now when you get a smart home device, when you set it up, it says, would you like to have automatic updates? And you say yes, because you do. It's slightly different with smart home than your computer. You do. You absolutely do. You absolutely do.

[01:49:39] And then it'll do it. And then it sets the update time and it'll say, okay, I will update between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. every, whenever this happens. Oh, you can do that in Windows. I know you can kind of do that, but. Yeah. I don't think most people go ahead and do it. It's always at the wrong time. Like it pops up at the wrong time. Do you want me to do it tonight? Well, I do, but then I'll, but yes, just stop. Just don't tell me and just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Do it when I'm not using the computer. And speaking of, and it's also the AI models.

[01:50:09] Like the chat GPT and the claw desktop apps constantly wants to update. Every day, it seems like. Yeah. You know why? For those curious. Sorry. We have a hands-on Windows episode to show you how to do all of this if you want to do it yourself. And also all the new features, I believe. If they haven't done it already, that's coming. That actually is get ready going to be the new normal because AI is so fast.

[01:50:37] And the reason these AI is updated every day is because they're using AI to develop it. And as more and more software is developed by AI and maintained by AI, the updates are going to come fast and furious. Sorry. And I can't get away from AI. AI is with us. Well, you could try. There is a huge backlash now against these flock cameras. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every community has people saying, no flock cameras.

[01:51:07] I understand why the police want them. So this, I think it all started with red light cameras where people were running red lights. So they'd have a camera take pictures after the red light came on and people went through it and it stopped that. But then they thought, well, you know, what we could do is put these automated license plate readers in and we could catch all kinds of malefactors. Well, the problem is these databases are getting bigger and bigger and it's essentially a way of tracking.

[01:51:36] And now there's new companies coming along that can be attached to your flock camera, which the flock camera is an automated license plate reader. It just keeps track of all the license plates going by. You're using public thoroughfares. You know, I mean, you know, I guess that's part of the deal. But now they're also putting Bluetooth sensors on there so that they can capture, you know, as you drive by, they capture your phone's name, your car's name.

[01:52:02] They capture all the Bluetooth because our Bluetooth devices are always broadcasting their names. They're getting more and more sophisticated. And there's this issue of flock having a nationwide database of license plates and of law enforcement from time to time using it to stalk people, to track people down, have broken a law in their state as they go to other states. So there's a big backlash.

[01:52:31] There's a big backlash against Ring cameras, too. Ring cameras. Yeah. That was it. I mean, so Ring had announced a partnership with Flock and then they had their Super Bowl ad, which caused an awful lot of consternation, which was advertising their pet.

[01:52:47] They had their pet finding feature, which actually showed this still image of homes with sort of radar, like searching rings coming out from ring cameras. And that one look just said, that one shot just said surveillance state and they just flashed it in front of everyone. If you can find Fluffy, you can also find me, right? Yeah. And then like an email leak that basically said that that was their next step was.

[01:53:18] So he's always, Jamie Siminoff has always said that his, his goal with Ring pretty much since its inception is to, you know, prevent crime as much as possible. Create safer neighborhoods by, and he has, he is passionate about this. And he really does feel like the more, more cameras equal more security.

[01:53:40] There are lots of evidence that more cameras does not necessarily equal more security, but does equal more surveillance, more of what people knowing what everyone is doing. And then the biggest concern with this was it was so before Flock, they had a partnership with another, they have a partnership with Axon as well, which is the company that does all the body cameras. Yeah.

[01:54:06] But what happened with the Flock issue was because during this, so before, just before the Superbowl, this was when the, all the DHS, the deportations were happening. There was all the unrest in throughout the country. And the, the, the, the reporting was, and I think it was 404 media that broke the story was that the DHS was using Flock cameras, was tapping into Flock cameras to find potential illegal immigrants.

[01:54:34] And Flock cameras, Flock safety was saying, no, they're not. We only have partnerships with individual jurisdictions, local police. We do not have, we do not have partnerships with ICE, but, but ICE could come. And there, there was actually recent reporting about this where it was shown that ICE did actually access some Flock safety cameras through a local authority.

[01:55:00] So, you know, ICE comes to your local sheriff's department and says, show me your cameras. Right. They, they do it. There's a subpoena. Yeah. I don't know that there was even a subpoena. I think it's more like partnerships between police. And, and so. People aren't stupid. They know if the cameras are there, they will be used.

[01:55:18] And so whilst Flock and Ring and Axon say, you know, we had no partnerships with the federal, with federal agencies, that, that the concern is you have partnerships with the local police and local agencies. And then what about the partnerships that they have? Or what are they willing to, what do they, are they going to do with the data that they receive? So Flock and Ring and Flock and Axon, their partnerships were not about these cameras.

[01:55:47] Their partnerships were more about back-end integrations. But the fear, of course, is, and it comes back to AI, you know, if you can identify something in, with a camera, you can identify a dog, you can identify a person. And at the same time, Ring launched facial recognition for its cameras. What is the next step?

[01:56:08] And while Ring may be very clear in all its messaging that we do not use, we do not access your cameras without your permission, this one feature did allow the cloud to process your camera data to look for this missing pet with your permission. But that tool now exists.

[01:56:29] And we, you know, can it be, could it be misused in the way that the ice apparently, allegedly was misusing it, the access to cameras like Flock Safety. So you can connect all those dots, even though everyone was saying we're working by the books. It rightly caused a lot of concern. Can I show you what my Ring camera told me earlier today? It says... Oh, you've got the AI descriptions, have you? It says, not that one, this one. It says, a cat is walking on the wall.

[01:56:58] A cat is standing on the wall. A person is walking on the porch. A cat is walking on the porch. A cat is sitting on the wall and looking around. A cat is walking on the porch. A cat is walking on the wall. This is all today. Yeah. Two people are bending and moving at the entrance. It needs AI to sort all that. You need to turn on, they do actually have a really good new feature called, oh, off the top of my head, I've forgotten the exact phrase for it. But it is only urgent alert.

[01:57:25] So it uses AI to determine whether you actually... Unusual events is what it's called. So that would get rid of all the cats. An Amazon delivery person is delivering a package at the entrance. Sometimes it'll say a guy in brown short pants is delivering a package. It's really funny. I love it. The problem with that stuff is... It's quite useful, this stuff. This is where AI is actually useful in the smart home, but better than motion alert, which is what you got before, right? Right. Yeah. All it said... Yeah, we just go, somebody...

[01:57:55] Something's going on out there. So do show this, Benito. You showed this article earlier. Peter Diamandis, who is a former Google guy, he was the founder of XPRIZE, you know, widely considered a genius, says, humans behave better when they're being watched. I think we all know that. The problem is, is we've been conditioned for the last 20 years that China, as a surveillance state, and when you walk around there...

[01:58:22] And anyone who's been in China, I've been there before, you know, as soon as you go through security and you check in, like, they take your photo, and it's just cameras everywhere. And we're told that's bad. There are bad people over there doing that. But if we do it... And now we're doing it. But it's like, well, it's not the government. It's just private corporations who end up making deals in the back, too. And the thing is, the whole history, going back to the Patriot Act, is about private companies colluding with the government behind people's backs and giving them information.

[01:58:51] And, oh, we didn't know about the subpoenas. And, oh, we just let people, you know, the government tap into people's phones and datas and all this kind of stuff. So there's just no trust here. And sure, these companies may have good intentions. And you can sell fear. But that's what this is. It's selling fear to people. But, of course, it can be quickly turned into some of the, you know, most draconian systems. Panopticon. Well, it's the panopticon. I grew up in London, where we are surveilled every minute of the day.

[01:59:21] But to be fair, and I hate to be the sort of... There's no crime in London, right? Well, no, but I grew up during the IRA war. And we had, you know, a lot. I mean, that was why we got the mass surveillance in London, was because they were putting bombs in garbage cans. Right. And it was, you know... That's always the reason, though, isn't it? Yeah. Fear is the reason. And that is what we've got.

[01:59:51] We've got to go back to the love that the World Cup brings. Let's all be happy and kind to each other. But, you know, there is... The surveillance state is a terrifying concept. We don't want the government watching everything we do.

[02:00:05] But the fact that, you know, cameras and recording devices can help when there are, you know, significant concerns or incidences like someone planting bombs. You know, you can track them and you can find them. Things like, you know, there is... It's like all technology. It's how you use it. The technology isn't bad. It's how you use it that is, you know, it's got to be well implemented. And there's got to be a very valid reason.

[02:00:35] I'm, you know, searching for people in neighborhoods is probably not a valid reason. It's not a dragnet. There shouldn't be technology used to surveil us just in case. But when there are issues, when there's something happening, being able to tap into the technology is a good thing. I mean, unfortunately, it didn't pan out well. But this is what we saw at the same time as the whole Ring Flock Safety case was the Nancy Guthrie case and Savannah Guthrie's mother who went missing.

[02:01:04] And they were able to use doorbell camera footage to try and, you know, to get some idea of what happened. They never caught the guy, though. They never caught the guy, no. So it didn't work out. But it could... It was better than nothing at that point. So, yeah, there's always... We need more cameras. Should have had more cameras. That's why we need more cameras. Peter Diamandis, I would point out, is a wealthy man and probably can figure out how to hide. But he says in his ex-post, a trillion sensors in space and the air on the ground will allow us to know anything, anywhere, at any time.

[02:01:33] There will be no hiding. Humans behave better when they're being watched. He says it's a good thing. I won't disagree with anything he said there except that it's a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing. So, again, it comes back to, you know, especially with the Flock camera, this is why a lot of jurisdictions and people are kind of fighting back. It's not something people agreed to, right? It's something that's, again, happening to people. These things are just going up. Towns are deciding to do it.

[02:02:01] And then it's only after the fact that people are like, wait, where are these things coming from? And it's just covered under that, well, it's security. It's normal stuff that we do with your tax money. But I think, again, that's why there's that pushback is that people don't feel like, you know, it's like, all right, if we want to have that conversation in our town about putting up cameras everywhere, let's, you know, have that discussion. Yeah. And it's always weird that we live, you know, people like, oh, we live in a democracy unless you get the Constitutional Republic nerds.

[02:02:31] But, like, we do have democratic mechanisms in this country. And it's like we can put stuff like this to vote, right? We do can do referendums. That's all possible. But we don't have that discussion a lot of times. These things just happen to us. Yes. And so that's why I think people, you know, it's a double-edged sword. You can be like, well, but people are safer. But at the same time, you're going to foment this idea of, you know, being against technology and fighting back against this stuff.

[02:02:58] Even though you could make reasonable arguments about having these cameras in certain places. There are two themes emerging in this episode. And one is technology top down and the other is regulation. I mean, everything that you just said, Daniel, is correct. And we could have discussions. We have democratic mechanisms. And we can easily implement regulation that allows technology to flourish while protecting civil liberties.

[02:03:28] The same thing with artificial intelligence. And the same challenges exist with top down tech. But we don't use those mechanisms. We choose not to deploy those mechanisms. We're going to take a break. Very smart panel. Love having you on. Dan Patterson, Blackbird.ai. Jennifer Patterson-Tui from The Verge. We're not related. We're not.

[02:03:56] Oh, Patterson Patterson. Are you related, though, to that guy from The Hunger Games? No, the vampire guy. That's Patinson. Oh, see. That's another variant. They only probably came from the same people, though, right? It's the same name. Probably. I think it's something to do with baking. He's patting his cake. Patty cake. Patty cake. I don't know. I just made that up. Oh, I think you're right. He's the son of a baker. He's a second name at some point.

[02:04:25] He's a need, need, need, need son. And Daniel Rubino of Windows Central. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter. According to CNBC, nearly half of hiring managers say a candidate's enthusiasm about the job is the most important factor when considering them for a role. I mean, of course, you don't want to hire somebody who doesn't want the job, right?

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[02:05:49] And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. Meet your match on Zip Recruiter. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Oh, I have so many more stories and only a little bit more time. Let's see. I'm going to have to do some story triage here. We didn't mention that Samsung is going to start charging for API access to smart things. We should have mentioned that earlier.

[02:06:19] Yeah. So it was, see, this is what I'm talking about. Your AI needs to have access to that API, but to charge me, I'm not, I don't know if I want to do that. Yeah. This is, this was, people are not happy about this. It is a, they sort of dressed it up and it's like, we're going to, we're making vast improvements to our API. It'll be so much better, but yeah, it's $4.99 a month for developers to access the API now. But this Samsung goes, smart things goes way back in the smart home.

[02:06:48] It was one of the original smart home hubs and it's always been a real tinkerer device, like great for setting up. It was all mainly based Z-Wave, Zigbee, used a lot of local radios. And then when smart things was bought by Samsung, they slowly kind of transitioned it away. And in fact, the most recent smart things hub does not have Z-Wave radio in anymore, but they do, it does support matter.

[02:07:17] But Samsung stopped actually making the hardware itself and it has a third party that makes their hubs now. And Samsung has put radios into all of its TVs and appliances and such. So Thread radios and Matter controller radios are in most of its hardware. And it's moving much more towards AI driven features, much less sort of focus on Zigbee, Z-Wave,

[02:07:46] those local protocols, although it does support Thread. Anyway, for some reason, this API is now going to cost you $5 a month to access. And if you use Home Assistant to access, to connect your smart things connected devices, if you have a smart things hub that's connected to Z-Wave or Zigbee, that will now cost you $5 a month, which is not going to go down well with that community. And Paulus Shoutson from Home Assistant actually messaged me actually just today.

[02:08:13] And he was saying they have an estimated of 50,000 smart things users that use Home Assistant. And that's over. So he says we always estimate at least four times the number of actual users. So it's more like 200,000 people that will be affected by this. Individuals that are just running their smart home, not developers. So yeah, that's going to be a lot of very, that is a lot of very annoyed smart home. And it doesn't just have to be Samsung products. I mean, one of the points of smart things was it was...

[02:08:42] You could connect lots. Hub for everything. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you've had a hub for many years and you use it to run lots of different devices like Zigbee, Z-Wave, NowThread and Matter. Yeah, that it will... I predict that this will push a lot of people off of the hub platform, which to be fair, it might have been their whole purpose behind this. Oh, maybe they don't want to... Yeah, good point.

[02:09:09] They have been dragging the legacy smart things community into very slowly over the decade or so since that... I don't know, when did they buy smart things? Smart things have been around about 15 years, I think. So, and I think they bought it maybe six or seven years ago. So during that time, they've slowly been sort of pushing out the old legacy style of smart things and moving it towards their new... You know, it's the platform when you buy a Samsung fridge that you now download the smart

[02:09:38] things app. It's completely unrecognizable from what smart things was when it first started. And I think they've... It would behoove them in many ways to sort of slowly lose that part of their audience and really just focus on their main smart home goals, which are very AI powered. And it's a huge user base. I mean, smart things probably has one of the largest user bases of the smart home platforms

[02:10:05] to date because you buy a Samsung appliance, you get the smart things app. So, which is, you know, much, I think much larger chunk of the smart home pie, but those people aren't necessarily doing what people who had a smart things hub are doing. Yeah, it seems like there's two categories of smart home users, the ones that want to have it all local and the ones that want to connect to the cloud.

[02:10:30] And the advantage of the cloud is that you can keep the hardware on its own network and isolated, which is for security reasons, a good thing to do. Yeah. If you have a local hub, you have to have it on the same network because... Or local devices, because you have to be able to talk to it. But that's an insecure thing. So I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I like the idea of having an HA Green server here and everything's local, but it's a security

[02:10:58] issue for me because I can't, I shouldn't really have it on the same network segment as the rest of my stuff. So I don't know. And there's, there's a, I mean, the most people who are really into the smart home will tell you, you just want everything local, but you do. And this is again, just to go back to the Matter point. That's what Matter does. It does make everything, it gives you the potential for everything to be local. Not every platform uses it locally, but the potential is there. You do need the cloud for the smart home. There's a lot of benefit of the cloud.

[02:11:27] You just do not want to be dependent on the cloud. That's where things can go wrong. And, and SmartThings now has hubs in all of its hardware, as it mentioned. So your TV, your soundbar, your fridge, a couple of other, so they've got the audio frame thing, like the frame TV, lots of everything that SmartThings, Samsung now manufactures has hubs in it. Not your washing machine and dryer. The TVs do.

[02:11:56] The TVs, the soundbars, they are the SmartThings hub. But though SmartThings is very cloud dependent, even though it uses Matter, it's very cloud dependent. So if that, the SmartThings hub was the original, was the original SmartThings hub, which is now in Gen 3 or 4, was the main way you could use SmartThings locally. And now, you know, using your Z-Wave and your Zigbee devices and Thread, now you don't have,

[02:12:27] you're not, well, you have that option, but you're going to have to pay $5 a month for it. So I think it will push people away from that hub. And I think ultimately they're going to get out of that space entirely and just want you to be using your fridge as your Smart Home hub, which just seems silly. But that's the way the Smart Home, if you're going to move the Smart Home mainstream, the hub has always felt like a roadblock.

[02:12:52] People are like, why do I need to buy this little white box that costs $150 and stick it in my house? But when you, for tinkerers and for people that really understand the technology, because the reason you do that is because you own that device and you've got that control over these local devices, local connectivity protocols. So, but for the standard regular Samsung customer who's buying a appliance and they're like, oh, cool.

[02:13:20] I can get a notification on my phone that my washing machine is done. I can get notification on my Samsung TV that my dryer is done or my fridge door was left open. That's all they're really, they're like, oh, that's cool. They're not really thinking about the larger sort of implications there. Okay. I'm sorry. I asked. Every time it's just so frustrating. It's so complicated and frustrating. It shouldn't be so complicated. Maybe AI will solve this.

[02:13:48] I can just talk to my AI and say, you figure it, you figure it out. We did figure out who was responsible for the Jaguar Land Rover hack. Turns out Russian hackers. This is the one that the damage is so severe that the Jaguar had to shut down for a month, more than a month. It was so severe that the UK government had to bail out the company with a $2 billion loan cost the British economy $2.5 billion.

[02:14:17] Russia's at it again, Dan. What? I tell you. Australia has, of course, passed and now many other countries are considering passing a ban on social media for under 16s. Studies say it's not working. Four out of five, 80% of under 16s in Australia are still using social media. Shocking that. What a shock.

[02:14:46] This is an observational study by the University of Newcastle. The legislation has resulted in, quote, limited implementation and incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions. You're just teaching. This is what Harper Reid told us when the law was passed. You're just going to teach these kids to be hackers. Australians are going to have the best hackers in the world. Now, Norway's going to do the same thing. The UK just announced it, right?

[02:15:14] And then immediately Keir Starmer resigned. I don't think they were related. But the UK is going to implement that later in the year, early next year. It's just another example, back to our very first topic, of how hard it is to regulate these technologies. Well, banning YouTube seems like a really dumb thing to do. I can understand maybe Instagram or Facebook. But YouTube? That's like saying you can't watch TV to people under 16, right?

[02:15:43] That's how they, that's what they watch. But TV was very regulated for a very long time. In the UK it was. Yeah. Speaking of which. I had three channels when I was growing up. That was all I could watch. Did you, did your family pay the license fee? Yeah, you had to. They would come and like knock on your door if you didn't. They were very scary. Trucks. Yeah. Did you see? Yeah, the long wave radio. BBC. What are you going to say? Is going silent. Oh, so sad. This makes me sad.

[02:16:13] The BBC stopped broadcasting radio 4 on the 198 kilohertz long wave frequency after a century of transmission. We don't do long wave here in the United States, but in the UK it did. Yeah. Was BBC 4, what was that? Was it music? Was it information? No, it was information. It was, the long wave radio was like part of my childhood. My dad used to just listen to the cricket scores on it all the time. It was like lulling me to sleep. It was like my lullaby.

[02:16:43] But yeah, it was the great thing about it was, you know, I mean, it's like smart, like smart home verticals. The long wave radio had such reach that you could get BBC Radio 4 anywhere in the world, I think almost. Wow. Because of the skip. Wherever you were, you could listen to it. And it was a very powerful tool. In fact, it was used during like the French resistance during World War II, used long wave

[02:17:12] radio, used this transmission to help to communicate. Like it has, it's got such a fascinating history, this radio band, but it's basically fall and foul to technology. And I think the reason they're actually shutting it down is because they can no longer make the tubes. Tubes? No one makes the tubes that keeps the antenna going? Something like that. Oh, so it wasn't they wanted to shut it down. They just didn't have a choice. And it wasn't financially viable to keep running it.

[02:17:42] Like, and because you couldn't manufacture the tubes that were needed anymore. And no one uses it. Everyone's moved to digital radio and or FM is still, I mean, radio in England is still a very... Did you listen to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on BBC4? Yeah, they used to. It wasn't that old. I'm not that old. But yes, originally, it was one of the first sort of radio books. Douglas Adams.

[02:18:11] People know the Hitchhiker's Guide. They think maybe it was a book or a movie, but it started as a BBC radio play on BBC4. I know. Radio 4 is still around. That's how you can listen to it around the war. So you'll still... But it'll be, what, an internet or will it be... Will they do broadcast? Radio 4 is a station, like BBC Radio 1, Radio 2. So it's not going away. It's just the long wave. It was broadcast on the long wave, so you could listen to it anywhere. And it was a special feed, I think. It wasn't the main Radio 4. I could be wrong.

[02:18:39] But yeah, Radio 4 is all talking, no music. So it was always... It was very low bandwidth. Yeah. Yeah. So you could get it anywhere. I like it. But it's definitely an end of an era. It was an incredibly important piece of technology for a very long time. This may not look like an ancient book. It sure doesn't look like an ancient book to me.

[02:19:02] But that is the Herculaneum scrolls that were ancient, scrolls from the Roman library of Herculaneum, carbonized by a volcanic eruption. This is all that was left.

[02:19:19] This is all that was left.

[02:19:52] The Roman library of Herculaneum, the volcano, the volcano. The volcano. This is all that was left. This is all that. it's made up vp of vehicle hardware engineering mistakenly we thought that just by introducing

[02:20:21] artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had that would produce a high quality product how do you make that phone call like who drew the short straw to like look you gotta kill them i know we fired you but uh no i bet you a lot of those engineers are like said yeah yeah told you so haha and the people who made that decision probably still have a job right

[02:20:45] oh yeah they're gonna stay yeah notion had created a gmail client uh but they're going to cancel it because so many people use bots to handle their email that mail wasn't getting through ai uh powered gmail client on notion notion mail will shut down on september 22nd notion said uh as notion agents have gotten more capable we've seen more users

[02:21:15] hand off email flows uh to agents uh today more than half of notion mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox so i guess you didn't really need us after all so that we're going to shut it down how do you do that i want to learn that oh i do that's what i do i have my agent read my email

[02:21:37] for me if you ever get an email from uh from me that sounds a little mechanical no i actually don't have a email that i really wouldn't want to do that i don't think uh meta you may remember was uh tracking its employees mouse movements for ai training now they've stopped it not because it was immoral or

[02:22:02] wrong or bad but just because they're afraid of data that the data is going to be uh exfiltrated the model capability initiative which they rolled out in april captures the mouse movements clicks and keystrokes of us-based employees with occasional screenshots feeds them into the meta models for training but but meta real realized that uh sensitive employee data was inadvertently accessible to

[02:22:28] everyone else all meta staff including private conversations performance data and transcriptions uh well yeah you harvest everybody's keystrokes put it in the database shocking uh just a reminder you don't own anything you don't actually physically hold playstation is deleting 551 movies from your account i never bought any movies in the playstation store but uh

[02:22:58] if you bought rambo first blood you know what you're not gonna miss it bridget jones diary oh the deer hunter now that's a good movie how far away are they from removing games though and i'm sure they've already done that yeah as of september 1st due to our content licensing arrangements you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased studio canal content and it will be removed

[02:23:21] from your video library so just a reminder you don't really own anything you buy the best part is there you don't get any money back it's just oh no yeah god no and if you look at the license agreement you never really owned it it was just there we're gonna take one quick break and then uh some final words including a farewell to one of our favorite uh people who passed away uh this week but before we

[02:23:49] do that let me tell you about our sponsor superhuman go a lot of us are promised that ai would make work easier but somewhere along the way maybe you've experienced this it just started to feel like another thing to manage another tab open another app to check another place to copy and paste information just to get a simple answer that's why more people are turning to superhuman go superhuman go is an ai

[02:24:18] chat that's always there when you need it already aware of what you're doing you don't have to start from zero instead of forcing people into another app or another workflow it works where you already work goes ai chat sits on the side of the browser and is always ready to help draft emails and messages maybe i will use this summarize long threads and documents and search across apps without leaving the page you're on no new tabs no switching apps no losing your place it's designed to help people

[02:24:48] stay focused and work like the best version of themselves without friction content switching and busy work that can drain time and attention throughout the day now i'll tell you how i know about this because we are very happy users of grammarly we've been using grammarly for years now part of the superhuman family superhuman go from the makers of grammarly works across the tools and sites you're already using your browser your inbox your docs your project tools just like grammarly it

[02:25:15] fits naturally into the way work already happens it handles the repetitive tasks so people can focus on the work only they can do check it out find out more at superhuman.com that's superhuman.com we're so glad they decided to support this show superhuman.com we love grammarly we use it all the time i think i'm gonna have to install go see see what i can do with it a few final uh thoughts before

[02:25:45] we wrap things up uh on the show today let me see uh we had a whole oops segment planned all the things ai did wrong this this week let me see i have a few more here um u.s auto now i don't know if this is a good idea u.s auto regulators want to eliminate the brake pedal in your robo taxi why

[02:26:15] um that's a good question they say uh that's a that that requiring manually operated methods of stopping driverless vehicles is a barrier to innovation just go into someone's oh no that that was i had a person in it i'm sorry there was the tesla crash right yeah there was a now your test but the robo taxi or or the waymo or whatever yeah actually

[02:26:41] there's always a big red stop button isn't there it's like get me out of here button nitsa published in one yeah me neither so i don't know and it's uh is that they have them in atlanta don't they oh yeah south carolina yeah i'm gonna charleston i don't we have horses and they'll never have them in charleston never i doubt it nitsa uh the u.s national highway traffic safety administration published a notice of rulemaking on friday to modify federal brake safety standards i have to

[02:27:10] think elon had something to do with this for light vehicles by eliminating the requirement for vehicles equipped with automated driving systems and no manual controls to have foot operated service brakes or manually operated parking so there would still be a some kind of stop though it just wouldn't be a brake i get i think i see that like they're saying this is a completely different type of you don't have a steering wheel there's no one sitting there with their feet on the pedal so as long as

[02:27:38] there's some way of stopping it please yeah yeah you gotta go into your app yeah go into open your app stop please another technology regulation metaphor yeah one million passports have leaked online a database of a million passports not just u.s passports um people were using guess why people

[02:28:06] were using passports for age verification this is the problem one of the problems one of the many problems with age verification uh the person who wrote the book careless people which was an excellent book sarah winn williams it was an expose uh on her years uh working at meta and it was i it was wow uh meta is now going after her she says they're punishing me even though i'm a whistleblower

[02:28:35] they're punishing her for disclosing its illegal and indefensible workplace conditions and corporate misconduct to federal regulators uh she did write a book and probably made some money on it uh she says meta is doing this to strike fear into the heart of anyone else who dares to consider speaking the truth about meta's unlawful and abusive practices in the public interest

[02:29:03] beta of course went after her in court and is suing her finally uh we uh are so sad to have learned of the passing of Om Malik i don't know any of you know om yeah it was impossible to work i mean i did not know him well but he couldn't work in technology he was amazing in the aughts and 2010s without knowing him yeah uh he was on our show i think 14 or 15 times i i was a huge fan he was a deep philosopher

[02:29:32] a great artist he a master with the leica camera he loved his leica and took amazing pictures started the tech blog giga ohm many of the people you know who've been on this show besides ohm worked at giga home stacy higginbotham kevin toffel uh yanko records a lot of the best journalists in tech

[02:29:51] uh started at giga ohm he started that in 2001 uh semi-retired uh i think 2014 uh to to become a venture capitalist uh had investments in a lot of the companies you know um let's see 2015 Gigaom shut down with 6.4 million monthly readers um was really one of the one of the great places to get

[02:30:20] tech information um he was always a welcome visitor to the show he once called me the yoda of tech i said no no you're the yoda of tech i'm the i'm the jar jar of tech uh he he had this deep understanding and you know what's really sad is that his blog which is om.co some of the best articles

[02:30:42] he'd ever written were just came out this month for instance uh june 7th his article about mythos just just just brilliant writing his writing was better than ever uh he'd had heart trouble for years passed away uh this week uh wednesday at the age of 59 very very young um but we are very happy to

[02:31:08] have known him and we will miss uh the man uh if you go to our site twitter.tv and search for omalik o-m-m-a-i-l-i-k you'll find uh many shows that he appeared on i think his last appearance here was around 2015 uh when his health problems began but i i brought up uh this article i think a few weeks ago that i would recommend everybody read if you want to get a sense of whom omalik is we are living

[02:31:34] in pinocchio's world in which he writes about one of his favorite pens a mont blanc uh that commemorates pinocchio but the article takes a little bit of a turn when he talks about the true meaning of pinocchio and the fact that we are all living in pinocchio's world today um one of the greats

[02:31:59] really really one of the greats and we will very much miss him uh that is it for this week in tech for this week i want to thank you jennifer pattison tui your wonderful see i will say nice things about you when you pass away senior reviewer no i'm much older than you senior reviewer the verge.com she writes about all kinds of things but especially home automation what do you what do you what tell me

[02:32:25] some of the doohickeys you've got around the house today oh well next week i have lots of reviews coming out i've been reviewing the new google home speaker um and the new schlake sense pro smart lock that you should have waited to buy should have waited to buy yes um and then there's weird robot things that i can't wait to get rid of and um like the switch bot i can't i can't wait to read

[02:32:49] review of that yeah because i'm normally quite nice but even the kids didn't like this thing not really that's what surprises me i mean isn't it supposed to be all cute and cuddly that's the thing it's not cuddly you want to pick it up but it's it's it's hard plastic and it's on wheels and it's taking pictures of your house and the two yeah there's so many things i love switch bot switchbot is a great company they come up with all sorts of crazy and wonderful ideas but

[02:33:15] this one i'm i'm not sold on um and then the robot lawn mowers in my backyard you were talking about not getting injured well getting in you don't get injured in home automation but my robot lawn mowers beg to differ do not lie in front of your robot lawn mower it hasn't it hasn't hurt you has it no well it hurt my husband but it was what it was technically his fault so but just like not badly i hope no no just just you know permanent scarring but oh my god it nipped him

[02:33:44] it was again his own fault but there are days it's a dangerous job i'm just telling you oh my gosh which which one do you have right now i'm testing one from dreamy one from huskavana and one from motion oh so you have the best mode lawn in your neighborhood you'd think you'd think is this because you're the only verge reviewer who has a lawn yes this is the real reason it's so nice to

[02:34:14] see you jennifer also pops up every month with micah sargent on tech news weekly and we always love having you on the shows thank you uh dan patterson's in brooklyn so he neither has a lock nor a lawn but he has a lock i have a lock there's a lock old-fashioned yeah he probably has many locks actually uh senior director of content blackbird dot ai uh tell me what's going on a blackbird you last time

[02:34:39] you were on you made an offer people could sign up for your disinformation detector is that still out there yeah yeah we have a number of tools uh most of them are not consumer facing but we do have one called compass that's compassed at blackbird.ai which it it is made for journalists um um and i mean everyone else uh it will detect deep fakes or claim like if you see a post on the

[02:35:07] social web and you wonder is this bs or real just paste it into compass and it will tell you not just true or false but it will tell you the context we call it a context checker not a fact checker um and far more than you know just generative ai links it'll give you real deep context and let you find and read more about what you're finding also of course deep fakes and others i get bit

[02:35:32] all the time now especially on x yeah that are many recent searches that just sums up the world right now social media bans and they put yeah right is taylor swift breaking with trevis calc no they're getting married i found out they're getting married donald trump won the election like those are the two most important things yeah yeah type of claiming but uh but i saw this uh video i'll have to find it and i can feed it into the because i you do vision which is fantastic that's great i can feed it in

[02:36:01] it uh it um it was a picture of a cat and a tube and the cat would jump down the tube and slide down it and just form two i thought oh that gotta get one of those and then lisa said you dummy that's ai there's you can't cats don't slide down tubes are you nuts so i guess i have a way i have compass it's my wife yeah but there are times even even lisa might be fooled that i could use uh compass dot

[02:36:28] blackbird dot ai and uh it's really nice to have that thank you for doing well thanks thanks for having me it's great to be here i'm sorry about the frog voice it's no you sound fine our discord chat our club chat says leo you're such a boomer i saw it it was a video the cat went down the tube and it i saw it i didn't believe it did were you even for a moment fooled by that i am fooled by the the

[02:36:57] stairs though they're showing in the chat but i can imagine a cat doing that oh well let me see now okay this is it's this is a test for everybody to see the slide oh yeah that looks real sure that's ai i don't know that's real that looks quite real to me but who knows these days you can't believe your eyes exactly if you're smart you make it kind of like low quality fuzzy yeah well anyway

[02:37:26] we've got damn to save us here's what happens when a cat jumps down a tube i think that one's real cats do get it do get up to the darndest things i think and then there's daniel rubino he is the editor-in-chief of the wonderful windows central it's always a pleasure to see you daniel i am sorry

[02:37:50] that you're not into uh fifa soccer or f1 sports but i'm glad you're into microsoft and windows thank god somebody is they weren't playing here at foxborough so i know you're just up the road a piece and everything yeah could you hear the cheers no no but they got the signs on the highway so i love it how they say what did they say like new york new jersey stadium or something i mean it's like it's not even in new york it's where the giants play but it's oh right yeah they did give it

[02:38:18] it's in massachusetts yeah it's the same thing with this so the they're using the old the 49ers stadium down in santa clara but they say san francisco it's not sanford it's 50 miles away it's like foxborough it's like every place in boston it's like i mean massachusetts is basically just boston right right now scotland it's now scotland officially right right oh yeah right yes was it true that the scots

[02:38:45] drank all the beer in boston is that true south boston that's the rumor but uh i think it was just from one pub but it was a good story though so you're telling me that a cat a cat couldn't cat videos okay that is what ai is for but this is the tube and i swear to god i think that's real i think that's real

[02:39:13] don't you think a cat could do that no i built the data center next to my house for this exactly do you live next door to a data center no i live no no you live in brooklyn no locks okay let me get this straight no lawns no data centers but the best pizza thank you all of you for joining us thanks especially to our club twit members who make this show possible we really appreciate your support

[02:39:38] if you're not yet a member please twitter tv club twit for ad free versions of all the shows the shows in club to it now have chapter markers so you can jump past all the cat videos that's very handy uh we also have a wonderful club twit discord special programming on friday we did our second episode of off by one with jeff atwood has so much fun um all of that because you support

[02:40:04] this podcast uh it's i think so important to support independent journalism of any stripe uh you should support all the ones you use and we appreciate your support here at twitter.tv club twit we do this week in tech every sunday afternoon uh two to six uh two to five make it two to five pacific um that would be uh five to eight pm eastern 2100 utc you can uh watch uh the show uh live

[02:40:32] as we do it uh at uh well then our club twitter discord but also youtube uh twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website um that's twitter tv there's also a youtube channel with the video and you can subscribe to audio or video versions of the show in your favorite podcast client i hope you will do that we thank you so much for stopping by

[02:41:00] as i've said for now 21 years at the end of every show thanks for being here another twit is in the can see you next week this is amazing summer is here and fred meyer is your destination for hot savings find unique items at low prices with our exclusive brands fire up the grill with cookout classics like

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