Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm as Valocian and I'm care Price.
Speaker 1: Today we're going to get into why gen Z is
Speaker 1: nostalgic for an Internet free world, a world they've never known.
Speaker 1: An update to what's happening to TikTok in the US?
Speaker 1: Then are you using chatbots to organize your closet or
Speaker 1: write your wedding vows? We investigate how people are really
Speaker 1: using chatbots?
Speaker 3: This is the week in tech. It's Friday, July eleventh,
Speaker 3: Hello Cara, Hi Ahs.
Speaker 1: It's that time between July fourth and Labor Day, two
Speaker 1: holidays that I had no conception of before I moved.
Speaker 3: To the US, one of which you spell wrong.
Speaker 1: How's that labo U are?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a U in the script. I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 1: But it's a time known around the world as summer.
Speaker 1: Although looking out of the window today at that dark,
Speaker 1: gray sky, you wouldn't really know it.
Speaker 3: You know, not to be ungrateful about living in the
Speaker 3: greatest city on Earth, but New York has been disgustingly.
Speaker 1: Hot, although I haven't been here, so I've been following
Speaker 1: the weather and floating about. Having been out of town.
Speaker 3: It's swamp. Like I wanted to bring up a story
Speaker 3: that reminded me that being hot in New York City
Speaker 3: is sometimes the most important thing you can be.
Speaker 1: I have the sense you're not talking about the weather here.
Speaker 3: No, I'm talking about a website called looks Mapping that
Speaker 3: is like a digital heat map of which New York
Speaker 3: City restaurants have the hottest patrons. So, I mean, I
Speaker 3: might be dating myself here, but it's like Zagat for
Speaker 3: people I thought. I'm not sure. Listeners, I urge you
Speaker 3: to go to looks mapping dot com because for me
Speaker 3: and I think, and for you, the interface is so
Speaker 3: beta Geociti's early Internet that like, there's something sort of
Speaker 3: comforting about it that I don't know, just the look
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 1: Do you think if the zay Gat or Zagat guide
Speaker 1: was still around today, they would be it had food
Speaker 1: value for money and Beyonce have a fourth pianto Hotness with.
Speaker 3: A little chili emoji. Actually, I've avoided looking at the
Speaker 3: map because I don't care about eating around hot.
Speaker 1: People's wrong with you?
Speaker 3: I'm not like, Oh, I go. I think other people
Speaker 3: obviously are looking when they go to a restaurant to
Speaker 3: find people to date. I'm looking to eat, which is
Speaker 3: crazy that that is dating myself. I do, as I said,
Speaker 3: want to look at this with you so that we
Speaker 3: can laugh about it. So I'm going to pull up
Speaker 3: your favorite restaurant.
Speaker 1: Okay, well you know what. We both know what that is.
Speaker 3: What is your favorite restaurant?
Speaker 1: Well, you know very well because you live next door
Speaker 1: and you often see me on my way there on
Speaker 1: a Friday evening.
Speaker 3: I'm typing it in right now.
Speaker 1: Nikoboka Bar and Grill. In fact, one of the many
Speaker 1: moments that have solidified our friendship was when you knew
Speaker 1: I was celebrating my birthday there and you called in
Speaker 1: a Cosmopolitan to me, delivered to my tables when they
Speaker 1: went in town. Yeah. So, how does the Nickoboca Bar
Speaker 1: and Grills?
Speaker 3: Its not It's not found.
Speaker 1: It's not found on looks mapping dot com. I can't
Speaker 1: believe it.
Speaker 3: It's not here.
Speaker 1: Just for the listeners benefit. The Nikobocker Barren Grill is
Speaker 1: an extremely dated sort of quasi steakhouse.
Speaker 3: It's what I would call Fraser course, the.
Speaker 1: Fraser course, thick carpet. Nobody else under sixty in there
Speaker 1: apart from me and sometimes you so oddly enough, it's
Speaker 1: not featured on Looks.
Speaker 3: Shocking because they were like, no, they were like, this
Speaker 3: will not appear.
Speaker 1: What about my second favorite restaurant? Do you know what
Speaker 1: that is?
Speaker 3: Peaking duck housea house Midtown downtown one because you've you've
Speaker 3: taken me to the downtown one.
Speaker 1: True, reluctantly. I do actually like the downtown one. I
Speaker 1: like the Midtown one, which also the downtown one doesn't
Speaker 1: have a carpet. The Midtown one does.
Speaker 3: That's disgusting discussing yep, oh oh, we have wait. I
Speaker 3: just need to explain to people who are listening the
Speaker 3: avatar that's standing on the compass on Looks mapping is
Speaker 3: like a yassified like lip injected, hair flipped.
Speaker 1: Guy's the website myself.
Speaker 3: It's so good. He's like, you know, doing duck lips.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see what.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry to say. This is peaking duck house downtown.
Speaker 3: They don't have no, it's too ugly. The score for
Speaker 3: peaking duck House Chinese Downtown five points down.
Speaker 1: By the way, peaking duck House Downtown is a lot
Speaker 1: hotter than peaking duck House in Midtown negative.
Speaker 2: It would have been a negative.
Speaker 1: Literally okay, five points. Said, well, so how does this,
Speaker 1: I mean, how does this work? How does how does
Speaker 1: the looks mapping dot Com assign a hotness score to
Speaker 1: by the way, not to all New York restaurants, but
Speaker 1: to all New New York restaurants. Evidently that I don't.
Speaker 3: Think that doesn't go to well. So here's what it
Speaker 3: says on the website. Quote, I scraped millions and this
Speaker 3: is the from the creator of the website. I scraped
Speaker 3: millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and we gave each
Speaker 3: reviewer's profile picture to an AI model that rates how
Speaker 3: hot they are out of ten. Very smart. I mean
Speaker 3: that an AI model like that exists. This map shows
Speaker 3: how attractive each restaurant's clientele is, and the model is
Speaker 3: certainly biased. It's certainly flawed. But we judge places, and
Speaker 3: I'm still quoting the creator. We judge places by the
Speaker 3: people who go there. We always have, and are we
Speaker 3: not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on
Speaker 3: the superficial calculations we make every day, a mirror held
Speaker 3: up to our collective vanity.
Speaker 1: Quote, So this is you're telling me this website is
Speaker 1: essentially a Balzakian commentary on New York Dining.
Speaker 3: I mean the website itself does look like the website
Speaker 3: of a philosophy department in a small local arts college.
Speaker 3: So yes, I actually read about this in the New
Speaker 3: York Times.
Speaker 2: This Weekend Places.
Speaker 3: And the guy who created it is this. He's barely
Speaker 3: a man, He's a boy. He's twenty two. His name's
Speaker 3: Riley Walls. He's a pro pro grammar and this actually
Speaker 3: isn't his first prank.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: A few years ago he created a fake restaurant with
Speaker 3: a near perfect Google rating called Miron's Steakhouse. Cool, and
Speaker 3: so a ton of people signed up to be on
Speaker 3: the wait list to get into a fake restaurant. And
Speaker 3: then actually it was so popular that they opened the
Speaker 3: steakhouse for one night in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: I absolutely love this type of story. There was another
Speaker 1: guy who did it in London with a fake restaurant
Speaker 1: called The Shed, and then he served people this disgusting food.
Speaker 1: I think data poisoning to trick thirsty souls into going
Speaker 1: to hype places is one of the true joys of
Speaker 1: the Internet. This is bombed to my soul.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Waltz actually had an AI model scrape two
Speaker 3: point eight million Google reviews from one point five million
Speaker 3: unique accounts. The model identified five hundred and eighty seven
Speaker 3: thousand profile images with distinguishable faces, and then Walls had
Speaker 3: that model determined if the users were young or old,
Speaker 3: male or female, and hot or not very binary, very binary.
Speaker 1: How did the model define hot well?
Speaker 3: Walls told The Times that the attractiveness score was quote
Speaker 3: admittedly a bit yanky.
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds like a bit of an understatement.
Speaker 1: I do love the idea of sitting down to set
Speaker 1: the parameters for an AI model about hot or not.
Speaker 1: How did mister Wolves go about it?
Speaker 3: So, yeah, he actually gave a few examples. If someone
Speaker 3: was wearing a wedding dress in their profile image, it
Speaker 3: meant they were hot because obviously someone wanted to sleep
Speaker 3: with them. And if the photo was blurry, they were
Speaker 3: not because obviously nobody wanted to take a good photo
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 2: So they're ugly.
Speaker 1: I mean, these brahminters are not the ones. This is
Speaker 1: not the sort of Leonardo da Vinci facial symmetry mode
Speaker 1: of assessing beauty.
Speaker 3: I guess no, it's like seemingly quite arbitrary. And he
Speaker 3: actually unsurprisingly, did not build this for people who are
Speaker 3: using it as a legitimate tool. He I think, like
Speaker 3: I said, is making a social commentary on how diners
Speaker 3: prioritize whether a restaurant is a scene over the food
Speaker 3: and the atmosphere, And if you go on TikTok, a
Speaker 3: lot of influencers actually talk about if there are hot
Speaker 3: guys or rich guys, like the rich guy restaurant is
Speaker 3: I think the most important thing.
Speaker 1: It turns out that New York is not the only
Speaker 1: city where the heat map exists. It's also available for
Speaker 1: Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Speaker 3: The only three places where there are hot people.
Speaker 1: But I'm looking at the map right now, and it
Speaker 1: seems like there's more blue meaning less hotness up in Harlem.
Speaker 3: Twitter users did pick up on this quickly, and most
Speaker 3: of the denser red pockets of the map were in
Speaker 3: largely white, affluent neighborhoods in all three cities, Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: San Francisco, and New York.
Speaker 1: So, like most AI models, this one has a certain
Speaker 1: amount of racial bias baked in.
Speaker 3: Correct, which is unsurprising. You know, AI is trained on data,
Speaker 3: so its answers reflect the biases of the humans who
Speaker 3: created the data in the first place, and Walts actually
Speaker 3: got criticized for this, but he responded that that is
Speaker 3: part of the point. Again, he says looks mapping is
Speaker 3: designed to make fun of AI and he also added
Speaker 3: that one of the ugliest restaurants was actually a country club.
Speaker 1: I like the sound that this Waltz character.
Speaker 3: We should ask him to twenty two year old cheeky so.
Speaker 1: I mentioned I was on vacation last week out of
Speaker 1: the city. I was actually in Greece and every time
Speaker 1: the sunset, a horde of tourists would run towards the
Speaker 1: most instagrammable location with their cameras. I was actually fighting
Speaker 1: for space on the courtyard in front of it of
Speaker 1: a church to actually look at the sunset, and somebody
Speaker 1: you take my photo. I said sure, I said, I'll
Speaker 1: take your photo afterwards. And I said, oh, that's okay.
Speaker 1: I just want to look at the sunset and my wife,
Speaker 1: I said, you are so self righteous. Why do you
Speaker 1: need to shame that poor man. The man was like,
Speaker 1: I have nothing exactly, but it kind of raised this
Speaker 1: interesting question about what were the photos designed to capture
Speaker 1: the trip as in the past, or was the trip
Speaker 1: designed to create an opportunity to take photographs and share
Speaker 1: them on social media, and it was a bit like
Speaker 1: everyone's in their own version of The Truman Show, where
Speaker 1: they were both the actor, the producer and the director,
Speaker 1: and it didn't look that fun.
Speaker 3: I think the way we're living in the Truman Show
Speaker 3: now is that we are all living in a world
Speaker 3: that has really been predetermined by what we see on
Speaker 3: social media. So I think looks Mapping was probably trying
Speaker 3: to shine a light on this particular fact, which is
Speaker 3: that we're going to places right now with expectations that
Speaker 3: have been pre constructed on the Internet. And it's because,
Speaker 3: to steal a line from the French philosopher Louis Altuse,
Speaker 3: we are always already aware of what we're getting, which
Speaker 3: is sort of sad, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's so. My stepfather, Ricardo, owns a
Speaker 1: restaurant in London called Ricardo's. Shout Out head there and
Speaker 1: also congratulations, happy birthday, thirtieth anniversary.
Speaker 5: Wow, happy anniversary, Ricardo anniversary, and Riccardo's is a great
Speaker 5: restaurant is not built around social media moments, so I
Speaker 5: was encouraging Ricardo to look at a brand refresh where
Speaker 5: he really leaned into being one of the oldest continually
Speaker 5: operated family owned Italian restaurants in London.
Speaker 1: He was like, no, I'm good, but it is I mean,
Speaker 1: this whole thing you're talking about, where real life becomes
Speaker 1: optimized for social media moments rather than social media capturing
Speaker 1: real life is it's a little disturbing.
Speaker 3: I think, as elder millennials, which we are, we grew
Speaker 3: up before the I share. Therefore, I am to quote
Speaker 3: Sherry turkle era began. We live in it, but we
Speaker 3: had life before it, and I think the pressures of
Speaker 3: a life lived online are much harder on gen Z.
Speaker 3: I actually found a survey that backs this up. So
Speaker 3: I'm sure you know about the BSI, the British Standards Institution.
Speaker 1: Of course. Yeah, actually I just read my membership.
Speaker 3: Well to consulting from was president work there after. They've
Speaker 3: actually asked thirteen hundred young Brits ages sixteen to twenty
Speaker 3: one whether they would prefer to be young in a
Speaker 3: world without the Internet. Forty seven percent of them responded yes.
Speaker 1: That is a classic case of better the devil you
Speaker 1: don't know in this case, right, because none of these
Speaker 1: youths have ever lived with on the Internet.
Speaker 3: I think there's something kind of sexy to people about
Speaker 3: a time they didn't live, you know, like I'm very
Speaker 3: interested in taking a horse across the country. And I
Speaker 3: think the most interesting thing about this survey is that
Speaker 3: fifty percent of all of those surveyed said that a
Speaker 3: social media curfew would improve their lives.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by social media curfew?
Speaker 3: So actually the UK, which has a technology secretary, has
Speaker 3: hinted that the government is considering I love this mandatory
Speaker 3: cutoff times for certain apps like TikTok and Instagram for
Speaker 3: children under a certain age.
Speaker 1: It is like during the Blitz when everyone just like
Speaker 1: it's just like the well funny enough. On my trip,
Speaker 1: which I'm sorry to keep posting about, I gave myself
Speaker 1: a week long blackout or curse.
Speaker 3: It was weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I removed Gmail and Slack from my phone
Speaker 1: so that I wouldn't be tempted to glance at work
Speaker 1: stuff and stretch myself out. I kept text, obviously, and
Speaker 1: you and I texted a fair amount about text stuff,
Speaker 1: but other than that, I was offline. I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how good it felt to be not looking at
Speaker 1: Slack and work Gmail for a week. And how bad
Speaker 1: it felt to start again on Monday.
Speaker 3: You know, as you and maybe our audience have recognized,
Speaker 3: you've done it so gracefully. I have been in and
Speaker 3: out of the show this year, and some of the
Speaker 3: reason that I've been taking off is on account of
Speaker 3: some personal mental health struggles, and as such, I was
Speaker 3: actually forced into a bit of a curfew myself. It
Speaker 3: was more a sensory deprivation tech but there were some
Speaker 3: days where I actually only had my phone for one
Speaker 3: hour a day. And the thing that it made me
Speaker 3: realize is that the iPhone is a rapacious creditor.
Speaker 1: What does that mean.
Speaker 3: It means that the more you use it, the more
Speaker 3: you need to use it. And yeah, it is like sugar.
Speaker 3: It is like cigarettes, where it's like we like to
Speaker 3: brag when we have abstained. And my family actually refers
Speaker 3: to my cell phone addiction as a legitimate addiction. And
Speaker 3: I've been intervened on.
Speaker 1: What was your experience then, of having twenty three hours
Speaker 1: a day off.
Speaker 3: I was so jacked up. I was so high from
Speaker 3: using my phone for that one hour that like I
Speaker 3: would give the phone back and I felt like my
Speaker 3: brain was on fire. And I think when you have
Speaker 3: access to a phone all day long. It sort of
Speaker 3: spreads itself out. You don't feel like you're at a
Speaker 3: loss because you don't have it, but when you don't
Speaker 3: have it, and then it's something you get, you realize
Speaker 3: how jacked up this thing makes you.
Speaker 1: It was interesting turning my feat own back on Monday
Speaker 1: morning and reinstalling Gmail and Slack. I literally reinstalled them
Speaker 1: and four hours went by when I didn't look up
Speaker 1: from my phone. But I felt so broken by the
Speaker 1: end of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, coming back to the survey, the thing that really
Speaker 3: stood out to me was actually how often young people,
Speaker 3: especially young women, are comparing their appearance or lifestyle to others.
Speaker 3: In the survey, eighty five percent of female respondents said
Speaker 3: they do this at least sometimes, and nearly half of
Speaker 3: young women are doing this often or very often.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but this idea of comparing yourself and your appearance
Speaker 1: and your lifestyle to others, this is what the social
Speaker 1: commentary of looks mapping is all about.
Speaker 3: That's very true. I actually originally found these survey results
Speaker 3: buried in an opinion piece from the Guardian. The author
Speaker 3: is about Brooks is a bit older than the people
Speaker 3: who are surveyed she's twenty six, but she admits to
Speaker 3: being entranced by an old video that went viral recently
Speaker 3: of Wesleyan alumni the band MGMT, performing for their peers
Speaker 3: at Wesleyan University.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing MGMT performing extremely reluctantly at a concert,
Speaker 1: that graduating concert at Yale, and they just look so
Speaker 1: bummed out to be there.
Speaker 3: They were like, we miss Wesley And yeah, and it's
Speaker 3: not the music that she's drawn to, it's the crowd.
Speaker 3: She observes the quote, no one is dressed that well, judgy.
Speaker 3: The cam resumes unsteadily to capture the crowd's awkwardness, slump
Speaker 3: shoulders and a rhythmic bopping. Beyond the footage we're watching,
Speaker 3: no one seems to be filming.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that part was key for her. No one
Speaker 3: in the video is on their phone or filming the experience, except,
Speaker 3: of course, like the person who captured the video. But
Speaker 3: Isabelle goes on to say, quote, I was only four
Speaker 3: when the video was filmed, So why does watching it
Speaker 3: make me feel as if I've lost a whole world? So,
Speaker 3: you know, she feels like she's missed out on this
Speaker 3: pre social Internet where people were more authentic and unique.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, I was in college before
Speaker 3: you would film something on a foot, We would take
Speaker 3: photos on our BlackBerry maybe, or you would take camera pictures.
Speaker 3: And now there are some concerts that I've actually been
Speaker 3: to where the artists will say, don't take out your
Speaker 3: phone for this, you know, just everybody puts your phone
Speaker 3: down and watch. The saddest part about it for me,
Speaker 3: and this I actually feel guilty of, is how difficult
Speaker 3: it is for people to just.
Speaker 1: Be well, it's not just us. You mentioned the UK
Speaker 1: government is looking at this TikTok curfew, and I'm very
Speaker 1: interested to know whether regulation government regulation will address the
Speaker 1: harms of social media before the next generation become teenagers.
Speaker 1: And I do wonder if we'll look back on this
Speaker 1: time that we're living through now as kind of the
Speaker 1: time where doctors were prescribing cigarettes to people with a cough,
Speaker 1: and whether we'll be like, it was so crazy that
Speaker 1: we allowed a whole generation to have their minds ruined
Speaker 1: by trillion dollar corporations. Who knows, But the policy thing
Speaker 1: I'm interested in here in the US, a TikTok ban
Speaker 1: has been mooted, not because of children's health, of course,
Speaker 1: but because of geopology China, China exactly so. In April
Speaker 1: last year, President Biden signed a bill requiring that TikTok
Speaker 1: be sold to a US buyer or be shut down.
Speaker 1: The ban very briefly took effect the day before President
Speaker 1: Trump was inaugurated in January. I'll never forget TikTok only
Speaker 1: went dark for a single evening because upon taking office,
Speaker 1: Trump immediately signed an executive order for a so called
Speaker 1: enforcement delay, and has signed two more of these since then.
Speaker 1: So the deadline keeps getting pushed back because the Trump
Speaker 1: administration is working on a deal for a consortium of
Speaker 1: non Chinese investors to take over TikTok's US operations. Details
Speaker 1: about the deal remain unannounced, but the information broke some
Speaker 1: news this week that makes the future of TikTok in
Speaker 1: America appear secure. Apparently, there's a new version of the
Speaker 1: app being built specifically for US users. The US only
Speaker 1: TikTok app is set to launch on September fifth, and
Speaker 1: US residents will have apparently until March twenty twenty six
Speaker 1: to download it and get off the old app. There
Speaker 1: is one wrinkle, which is that the Chinese government will
Speaker 1: also have to approve of this structure, and apparently a
Speaker 1: deal was actually close and then the tariff announcements earlier
Speaker 1: this year derailed it. You know that I have this
Speaker 1: kind of geopolitics bent. So while we're at it, there
Speaker 1: was another story this week. It was in four or
Speaker 1: four media that brought together diplomacy, cryptocurrency, personal appearance, and
Speaker 1: the internet making collective decisions. Ala looks mapping. Tell me
Speaker 1: have you heard of polymarket?
Speaker 3: I mean it does sound like a dating app for polyamory.
Speaker 1: Poly Market is not a dating market for the polyamorous.
Speaker 1: It is a sort of online betting marketplace where you
Speaker 1: can basically lay down a wager on almost anything other
Speaker 1: users can come up with. You basically bet on yes
Speaker 1: no issues using crypto against other users rather than against
Speaker 1: a bookmaker, and then this decentralized system facilitates the payouts.
Speaker 1: It got very big during the election last year and
Speaker 1: right now on the site, some of the bets going
Speaker 1: run the gamut from Wimbledon results to will a hurricane
Speaker 1: make landfall in the US before August? But a bet
Speaker 1: that's really blown up and has over two hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars in crypto riding on it is will Ukrainian President
Speaker 1: Zelenski wear a suit? Before July? Zelenski said he would
Speaker 1: not wear a suit until Russia's war in Ukraine ended,
Speaker 1: and so he pretty much always wears these military style fatigues,
Speaker 1: and he says that he does so to remind the
Speaker 1: world that Ukraine is still in the midst of a war. So,
Speaker 1: of course, the users of polymarket turns Zelenski's dress into
Speaker 1: a wager. I don't know if this was a proxy
Speaker 1: wager for whether or not the war in Ukraine would end,
Speaker 1: or a wager on how committed to his principles Zelensky is.
Speaker 1: But here's what happened. The bet went live in May,
Speaker 1: and then towards the end of June, Selensky showed up
Speaker 1: at a NATO summit wearing something.
Speaker 3: I'm going to show you now, Oh, looking hot.
Speaker 1: What's he wearing?
Speaker 3: He's wearing He's dressed in all black. He's sort of
Speaker 3: dressed like a caterwaiter, all black. He's wearing a suit
Speaker 3: and a black shirt.
Speaker 1: I think it's a suit. Yeah, Well, you've waded into
Speaker 1: a huge controversy. Polymarket right now has been roiled by
Speaker 1: whether or not this is a suit now, to be fair,
Speaker 1: he's sort of wearing you know, cargo style pants. He's
Speaker 1: not wearing dress shoes, he's not wearing a shirt and tie.
Speaker 1: He's wearing a kind of little mini pose and the
Speaker 1: jacket has four pockets on it which kind of have
Speaker 1: these over the top flaps. So you could argue that
Speaker 1: it's more of a kind of form military fatigue for
Speaker 1: nighttime operations than.
Speaker 3: Pure suit black time fatigue.
Speaker 1: And this is this is Royling Polymarket right now. There
Speaker 1: are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake on whether
Speaker 1: or not this is a suit.
Speaker 3: Literally one hundreds of one hundred million dollars has.
Speaker 1: Been bet and so there's now this formal dispute on
Speaker 1: Polymarket and that triggered an internal review because it wasn't
Speaker 1: clear if this was a yes no suit or no suit,
Speaker 1: and therefore the site's so called oracles were called in.
Speaker 1: The oracles get to debate facts and can't with a verdict,
Speaker 1: and after deliberating live on discord, the oracles determined that
Speaker 1: this was not a suit. However, there was some accusations
Speaker 1: of the oracles were also betters, and so poly Market
Speaker 1: took the dispute back a second time, and on Tuesday
Speaker 1: this week they announced their final verdict.
Speaker 3: And what was the final verdict?
Speaker 1: No suit. Yeah, you'll be out of pocket.
Speaker 3: I would be very out of.
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me about this story beyond the fact
Speaker 1: that it's about crypto and how the Internet makes collective
Speaker 1: decisions with this quote from Polymarket's founder Shane Coplin, and
Speaker 1: he basically said, these bets are about more than making
Speaker 1: a quick buck. He called polymarket quote the future of
Speaker 1: news and said that the next information age is also
Speaker 1: a quote. Won't be driven by the twentieth centuries medium monoliths.
Speaker 1: It will be driven by markets.
Speaker 3: To be fair, the story of recent election cycles has
Speaker 3: been that the betting markets are more accurate than the polls,
Speaker 3: which is crazy. And I'm pulling up what is it,
Speaker 3: polymarket dot com?
Speaker 1: Polymarket dot com.
Speaker 3: Number one is the New York City mayoral election, which
Speaker 3: is interesting. There's three million dollars on the FED decision.
Speaker 3: I guess what. Oh. The way that this is played
Speaker 3: out on poly market is that the first thing is
Speaker 3: the highest bet what has the largest wage volume? Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: yeah yeah. And that's the New York City mayoral election,
Speaker 3: which is really interesting.
Speaker 1: There's also stuff here about whether the Trump Epstein files
Speaker 1: will get released in twenty twenty five, which surprisingly only
Speaker 1: thirteen percent.
Speaker 3: Voting Trump scales that there are no files.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are no files. So you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of allows you to be an active participant in consuming
Speaker 1: the news in fact, because you're betting on the news
Speaker 1: at all times, which is pretty interesting. We're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break now, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: a key question, are you the only human in the
Speaker 1: zoom meeting? Stay with us, Welcome back. We've got a
Speaker 1: few more stories that have caught our eye to share,
Speaker 1: and then we'll be starting something new through the summer
Speaker 1: in place of the tech support interviews.
Speaker 3: It's a new segment called drum Roll. No, it's not
Speaker 3: called drum Roll. It's called Chat and.
Speaker 1: Me Chat and me stick around, don't miss it.
Speaker 3: In the meantime, I have an observation which is that
Speaker 3: you spend most of your days in meetings in zoom calls,
Speaker 3: and those meetings and zoom calls perhaps could be just
Speaker 3: a Slack message or an email or even a text message.
Speaker 1: My therapist, my executive coach, my best friend, my wife,
Speaker 1: or just my co.
Speaker 3: Host no, that's what it actually a chatbot can be.
Speaker 1: Yes. I mean, of course, remember during the pandemic, it
Speaker 1: was like, oh great, zoom calls, we can work from anywhere.
Speaker 1: And now it's like a bit like cell phone and say,
Speaker 1: oh great, I can always be in contexts like gosh,
Speaker 1: now I have to do zoom calls just all the time.
Speaker 1: And it went from this feeling liberation to feeling like
Speaker 1: kind of a digital jail cell.
Speaker 3: I think many people feel that way. But now people
Speaker 3: are starting to think, what if I can skip all
Speaker 3: those zoom meetings and still get all the relevant information,
Speaker 3: say more that I need. So the Washington Post actually
Speaker 3: wrote about the increased presence of AI note takers in meetings,
Speaker 3: like oh I can't come to this meeting, I'll send
Speaker 3: my AI note taker. And they even talk to PEP
Speaker 3: people who have been in meetings where robots or AI
Speaker 3: note takers have outnumbered humans.
Speaker 1: You know, I always get a little bit annoyed when
Speaker 1: there's an AI note taker in the room and no
Speaker 1: one's asked my consent, like this is you know, I
Speaker 1: think it would be a courtesy to say, do you
Speaker 1: mind if I transcribe everything you say and keep it forever.
Speaker 1: It's this thing about using an Internet where you're kind
Speaker 1: of creating this constant chain of data that follows you
Speaker 1: around forever. And I don't really want everything I've ever
Speaker 1: said in a Zoom call to be permanently memorialized and
Speaker 1: then owned by god knows who, but it's becoming the standard.
Speaker 1: I mean, Zoom, Microsoft, Teams, Google meet they all offer
Speaker 1: these note taking features that can record, transcribe, and use
Speaker 1: AI to summarize meetings. That said, I haven't yet encountered
Speaker 1: somebody who has the goal and the cheek to send
Speaker 1: an AI NoteTaker to a meeting in their place to
Speaker 1: excuse them from going to the meeting. That would really
Speaker 1: drive me crazy.
Speaker 3: Well, get ready for my new digital twin.
Speaker 2: Sarah right, Sarah Rice always on time?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, she's prompt. That would be a good
Speaker 3: that for me would be important. But yeah, in addition
Speaker 3: to the big players no, Google and Microsoft and Zoom,
Speaker 3: there's actually smaller companies like Otter, Ai and Granola of
Speaker 3: these names that transcribe calls like across platforms. So even
Speaker 3: if you decide to actually log onto the meeting, you
Speaker 3: can ask your bot to take notes for you and
Speaker 3: it is a great tool for multitasking or zoning out.
Speaker 3: Of course, the downside is that technology is recording more
Speaker 3: and more of our daily lives and echoing what you said.
Speaker 3: One AI exac and the Washington Post piece said, We're
Speaker 3: moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten.
Speaker 2: It is Wimbledon this week, it is, and so such
Speaker 2: a beautiful match.
Speaker 1: All of this grousing aside, Having an AI avatar in
Speaker 1: my Zoom calls so that I could watch tennis all
Speaker 1: day would be my dream come true.
Speaker 3: The thing about you, you would never trust an AI.
Speaker 3: You would micromanage the AI. Yeah, I feel like I quit.
Speaker 1: There's a bit of discrepancy. A minute fourteen.
Speaker 3: I was watching. That's not what happened. But I know
Speaker 3: you love your tennis, so do you? I do.
Speaker 1: I love tennis, And you won't be surprised to know
Speaker 1: that this was not a casual reference to my favorite sport.
Speaker 1: There is a tech angle here. Do you know what
Speaker 1: it is?
Speaker 3: Yeah? What fully? Replacing line judges with AI and cares right.
Speaker 3: And the reason I hate this is because it just
Speaker 3: isn't fun to watch players verbally abuse AI.
Speaker 1: It is quite fun to watch players shrugging their shoulders
Speaker 1: and running around looking for someone to yell at.
Speaker 5: Though.
Speaker 1: It's like we tennis, but there are no line judges
Speaker 1: anymore for the first time in the one hundred and
Speaker 1: forty eight year history of Wimbledon. Instead of a number
Speaker 1: of humans carefully bending over to watch each line during
Speaker 1: every point to see if a ball falls inside or
Speaker 1: outside the line, it's all being done by AI or
Speaker 1: another acronym ELC, electronic line calling. Humans, of course, do
Speaker 1: make mistakes more frequently than robots, but many sports fans
Speaker 1: will agree that watching a match isn't just about accuracy,
Speaker 1: it's about drama.
Speaker 3: So just explain to me, does it mean that there
Speaker 3: are no disputed calls or reviews of replace?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So obviously Phase one was line judges. Phase two
Speaker 1: was line judges plus cameras, so that if player could
Speaker 1: dispute the line dram call and you get a hawkeye
Speaker 1: and then you get the computer to basically correct or
Speaker 1: endorse the line.
Speaker 3: Y you have it here in America for the US opening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well exactly. But were now in phase three, which
Speaker 1: is just the robots. I mean, this is the classic story,
Speaker 1: isn't It's like humans, humans augmented by technology just technology.
Speaker 1: Around two hundred line judges are out of a job,
Speaker 1: but eighty have been retained in case there are issues
Speaker 1: with the electronics system. Always nice to be back up
Speaker 1: to a robot. One of the judges didn't pull her punches.
Speaker 1: She said that line judges are now their quote for
Speaker 1: no other reason and to escort players on and off
Speaker 1: the court. They were always dressed like butler's and that's
Speaker 1: basically what they are now.
Speaker 3: Oh shot fired?
Speaker 1: Is it working not perfectly? An umpire had to stop
Speaker 1: a match recently when the system failed to spot a
Speaker 1: ball that clearly had landed out of bounds on no
Speaker 1: less than set point, and then the players had to
Speaker 1: replay the point. A Wimbledon spokesman blamed the mistake on
Speaker 1: operator error human error, but the match was between a
Speaker 1: Russian tennis player and a brit and the Russian blamed
Speaker 1: hometown bias for the replay of the clutch point rather
Speaker 1: than simply awarding it to her given the ball was
Speaker 1: clearly out. Here's what Pavyo Chenkova had to say.
Speaker 4: I expect a different decision. I just thought also chairm
Speaker 4: Bio could take an initiative, and that's why he's therefore
Speaker 4: sitting on the chair, and he also saw it out.
Speaker 4: He told me after the match, I think we're losing
Speaker 4: a little bit of this charm of actually having human
Speaker 4: being ball boys, and you know, it just becomes a
Speaker 4: little bit weird and like Robert sort of.
Speaker 1: Orientated, just becomes a little bit weird and robo orientated.
Speaker 1: That's the story of her.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting. She was like, maybe the umpire
Speaker 1: was scared to trust his own eyes and overall the
Speaker 1: computer even most clearly out that is automation bias. One
Speaker 1: and one.
Speaker 3: I was going to say automation bias. I mean, how
Speaker 3: many times I get in fights with my mother about
Speaker 3: directions because she knows the right way and I was
Speaker 3: raised on Google Maps. So you probably don't know this
Speaker 3: because you're English. But this is the fiftieth anniversary summer
Speaker 3: of the release of Jaws, which I actually watched again
Speaker 3: last weekend and haunts my nightmare.
Speaker 1: My mother told me I wasn't allowed to watch it.
Speaker 3: She's a good mind.
Speaker 1: I would never swim again.
Speaker 3: She's a good mard.
Speaker 1: She wanted me to swim.
Speaker 3: She wanted to related to this, and I really hate
Speaker 3: that there's any real news story that's related to Jaws.
Speaker 3: But there was a story this week about city and
Speaker 3: state officials in New York using drones to locate and
Speaker 3: track sharks on beaches and Queens and on Long Island.
Speaker 3: I go to Long Island, I swim on Long Island,
Speaker 3: and around the July fourth weekend this past weekend, there
Speaker 3: were eight sightings of sharks in less than a week.
Speaker 1: Despite not having watched Jaws, I'm still very scared of shoks.
Speaker 1: This is not good to hear.
Speaker 3: So every time a shark was spotted, swimmers were ordered
Speaker 3: to evacuate the area for an hour. And this happened
Speaker 3: a lot over the weekend. As you can imagine, it
Speaker 3: really frustrated beach goers.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was out of town, as I've mentioned multiple times,
Speaker 1: but I got sent some Reddit comments about this story,
Speaker 1: and my favorite was quote in true New York City fashion,
Speaker 1: it's obviously a loan shark. I don't pay up, or
Speaker 1: we'll nibble your toes.
Speaker 3: I really, I mean, I do love the way that
Speaker 3: Reddit makes lemonade out of lemons. There's actually speculation about
Speaker 3: whether there are actually more sharks in the area, or
Speaker 3: if there were always this many. We just didn't spot
Speaker 3: them as easily without drones.
Speaker 1: That was exactly going to be my question, because it's like,
Speaker 1: there was a story recently in The New Yorker about
Speaker 1: cancer diagnostic and it's like, is there a possibility haing
Speaker 1: too much information? Yes, Like maybe the sharks are always there,
Speaker 1: just the drones in you.
Speaker 3: It's why they say don't get a full body scam,
Speaker 3: because sometimes there's stuff you don't want to know. You
Speaker 3: don't want to know what sharks are in the water.
Speaker 1: Sometimes sometimes you don't.
Speaker 3: But I do think the state is responding to reports
Speaker 3: that a twenty year old woman was probably bitten by
Speaker 3: a shark a few weeks back.
Speaker 1: What on earth do you mean? Probably bitten by a shark?
Speaker 3: So this woman was bitten by something in the water,
Speaker 3: and when biologists gave the bite marks a once over,
Speaker 3: they concluded that the bite quote most likely involved a
Speaker 3: juvenile sand tiger shark. How she doing, She's okay, she's alive.
Speaker 3: She walked away with minor cuts to her left foot
Speaker 3: and leg. But why aren't we more upset about this
Speaker 3: about what, well, probably being bitten by a shark?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was probably bitten by a shark? Would actually
Speaker 1: be a great slogan T shirt. That's the last headline today.
Speaker 1: But I believe Kara, you have a pitch for our listeners.
Speaker 3: So since January when we took over the tex Stuff feed,
Speaker 3: I come to pitch meetings and I'm always excited to
Speaker 3: talk to you guys about just these out of pocket
Speaker 3: ways that my friends are using Chatgypte and not just
Speaker 3: chatgypt you know, Claude Gemini. I like seeing the ways
Speaker 3: in which chatbots are like infiltrating daily life, right.
Speaker 1: And you shared a very interesting one this week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it wasn't even interesting as much as
Speaker 3: it was banal, but also really functional, which is that
Speaker 3: my sister and her girlfriend were supposed to be staying
Speaker 3: at this home for the week on vacation sort of
Speaker 3: Airbnb rental property, and it was I will say, not
Speaker 3: up to snuff. And my sister and her girlfrien are
Speaker 3: both very good communicators, but it was late and they
Speaker 3: were tired, and they wanted to vacate this premises.
Speaker 2: And get their money back and get their money back.
Speaker 3: And so they relied on Chat GBT to help them communicate.
Speaker 3: And this was the important part. And I think this
Speaker 3: is why people use chat. They wanted to communicate in
Speaker 3: a certain way, being kind and calm but also firm.
Speaker 3: And I think what Chat helped them do was form
Speaker 3: a message that was not accusatory or disrespectful about the space.
Speaker 3: And I think it's just so interesting that, like we
Speaker 3: would rely on a large language model to make ourselves
Speaker 3: seem more human or humane.
Speaker 1: That's very well put, you know. And it's been fun
Speaker 1: of hearing these stories from you every week in our
Speaker 1: pitch meetings, and so we thought it'd be fun to
Speaker 1: bring more of them into the show, but not just
Speaker 1: from you, also from our listeners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, hear from our listeners about how
Speaker 3: you're using AI.
Speaker 1: So if and when you found yourself turning to Jack
Speaker 1: Gpt or girl called claud or Gemini or whichever one
Speaker 1: you use for help with a particular task or to
Speaker 1: navigate your real life, we want to hear about it. Ideally,
Speaker 1: send us a one to two minute voice note to
Speaker 1: Text Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com, or if you
Speaker 1: want to write it down instead and just send it
Speaker 1: as a normal email, that's fine too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, tell us about how you're using it, what works,
Speaker 3: what doesn't, why you like using AI for this task specifically,
Speaker 3: we want to hear it all, and if you are
Speaker 3: using a chatbot to write your wedding vows, we will
Speaker 3: report this story until it is blue in the face.
Speaker 3: I know what's happening and I want.
Speaker 1: To hear about it, so please send in your stories
Speaker 1: to text Stuff Podcasts at gmail dot com. You may
Speaker 1: get to hear your voice on the show, and if
Speaker 1: you do, we'll send you a T shirt with the
Speaker 1: phrase I've probably got bitten by a shark, or maybe
Speaker 1: something more appropriate to tech stuff, but we want to
Speaker 1: hear from you, so please do write in. We'll be
Speaker 1: doing this every week. Is called Chat and Me.
Speaker 3: That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm Karra Price and I'm Oz Valschin.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Topia.
Speaker 1: It was executive produced by Me, Kara Price and Kate
Speaker 1: Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina norvelfa iHeart Podcasts. The engineer
Speaker 1: is Bihid Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode. Kyle
Speaker 1: Murdoch wrote out theme song.
Speaker 3: Join us next Wednesday for Textuff the story when we
Speaker 3: will share an in depth conversation with David Webster, the
Speaker 3: head of User Experience at Google Labs about what it
Speaker 3: means to design human centered tech.
Speaker 1: And please do rate and review the show on Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: on Spotify wherever you listen to your podcasts, and write
Speaker 1: into us at tech stuff podcast at gmail dot com
Speaker 1: with your feedback and of course your story is about chatting.