Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: as Voloshian and I'm care price. Today we get into
Speaker 1: gadget filled gambling dens ai that refuses to die, and
Speaker 1: tech bros going on to the.
Speaker 2: Knife, then on chatting me it doesn't work well enough
Speaker 2: to be dystopian like, the technology is simply not even there.
Speaker 3: All of that on the weekend Tech. It's Friday, Halloween,
Speaker 3: October thirty first.
Speaker 1: Hello, Cara, are you feeling spooky?
Speaker 3: I'm feeling the rush of fall wind.
Speaker 1: And yes, it could be a ghost.
Speaker 3: It could be a ghost.
Speaker 1: It could what's the spookiest music? I was sinking trying
Speaker 1: to think of, humm, spooky mousy.
Speaker 3: Below I know Bernard Herman Psycho.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, has Harry Potter though, that's Harry Potter.
Speaker 3: That's spooky for some people. That's gothic.
Speaker 1: So it's Halloween.
Speaker 3: It is Halloween.
Speaker 1: Are you going to a party?
Speaker 4: I am.
Speaker 3: I'm going to a party at a friend's house and
Speaker 3: it's going to be very festive and I'm going to
Speaker 3: dress up as the niche influencer and fitness extraordinary Tracy
Speaker 3: hertstones Anderson.
Speaker 1: Now do you pull the Tracy Anderson costume out every
Speaker 1: year or is this one on?
Speaker 3: No? For those who follow me on Instagram, they know
Speaker 3: that I had a brief stint with Tracy Anderson and
Speaker 3: she's a very particular luke as the kids say. And
Speaker 3: so I'm going to dress up as her.
Speaker 1: And you're going to a house party?
Speaker 3: Yes, a house party.
Speaker 1: Is it a house that belongs to a person?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Or is it an abnb house?
Speaker 3: That is a very good question. It is a house
Speaker 3: that belongs to a person.
Speaker 1: Well, that's good news because probably if it was an
Speaker 1: Airbnb houseb's technology stack or have successfully mixed the reservation
Speaker 1: real say more so. Airbnb released a press release this
Speaker 1: week about it's quote unquote anti party technology, anti party tech.
Speaker 1: Anti party tech A parent should have anti party tech.
Speaker 1: So basically, according to their press relief, they have quote
Speaker 1: a proprietary system that uses machine learning to analyze attempted
Speaker 1: bookings of entire homes over the Halloween weekend looking for
Speaker 1: signs of potential party risk.
Speaker 3: They're like looking someone looking for nine beds and seventeen bedrooms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So basically the algorithm is are they looking
Speaker 1: for whole places and do they live within one mile
Speaker 1: of the huge house they're trying to book in, which
Speaker 1: casod one they're out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're trying to do a party. That's so funny.
Speaker 1: Some Nbnb's also use this technology called minute nut.
Speaker 3: I've heard of Minute you have, Yeah, I think I've
Speaker 3: seen ads for it.
Speaker 1: It's basically a audio monitor like a kid monitor. It
Speaker 1: doesn't record the actual sounds, but it gives a notification
Speaker 1: to the homeowner about the decibel level. And Airbnb kind
Speaker 1: of encourage their homeowners to use it if they're worried,
Speaker 1: but the homeowner also has to disclose to the rent
Speaker 1: just surveil people exactly.
Speaker 3: So basically they're saying, we're using minute technology. If you're
Speaker 3: going to be loud, we're going to catch You're going
Speaker 3: to a notification. Fascinating.
Speaker 1: But one of the things they do is they don't
Speaker 1: just nix you. They suggest that instead you rent a
Speaker 1: private room in somebody's house where the host actually lives.
Speaker 1: There are you doing? I used to do that, I'm
Speaker 1: now I think I have outgrown it. But do you
Speaker 1: know how many bookings in twenty twenty four were mixed
Speaker 1: by airbmb over Halloween weekend?
Speaker 3: How many?
Speaker 1: Thirty eight thousand.
Speaker 3: What because they were like, this is someone throwing a
Speaker 3: Halloween party, fascinating that it is amazing that they can
Speaker 3: regulate that.
Speaker 1: It is, I mean, and the idea of making a
Speaker 1: tech application to weed out a breakers and who are
Speaker 1: trying to rent Halloween houses, it's pretty funny. Well, Karl,
Speaker 1: speaking of parties, how do you respond if someone invited
Speaker 1: you to a game of poker with characters like Spanish
Speaker 1: g Flappy, Spook, Pooky, and Sugar.
Speaker 3: I don't even play poker. I'd be like, yes, Spooky, Spooky,
Speaker 3: Spanish Gy.
Speaker 1: Some of the guests at these parties were allegedly NBA
Speaker 1: coaches and players. Now, as we're talking, obviously it's important
Speaker 1: to remember that all of these people who have been
Speaker 1: indicted have not been convicted. This is just an allegation
Speaker 1: for now.
Speaker 3: This was an online poker game.
Speaker 1: No, this is a real, real live poker game where,
Speaker 1: according to the US Justice Department, people were being bilked
Speaker 1: out of their money, lured by the promise of NBA
Speaker 1: players being there, and cheated using technology.
Speaker 3: So tell me how they were cheated using technology.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll get onto that, but first, so, this indictment
Speaker 1: was unsealed the US Justice Department named thirty one defendants,
Speaker 1: including Portland Trailblazers coach Chauncey Billups, former player and assistant
Speaker 1: coach Damon Jones, and members of the Banano, Gambino, Genovese
Speaker 1: and Lucez crime family. They had the Cecilia, I had
Speaker 1: the Sicilian. I didn't know these guys were still this.
Speaker 3: They play in horses, they play in cards, they play
Speaker 3: every we still have it sports rackets. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this scam allegedly involves a high stakes poker game
Speaker 1: that floated from New York to the Hamptons to Miami.
Speaker 1: Victims of the scheme were known as fish and they
Speaker 1: lost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars,
Speaker 1: and according to prosecutors, this scheme allegedly netted more than
Speaker 1: seven million dollars over five years.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, just by people thinking that they were
Speaker 3: going to play with famous people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy. So you want to hear the indictment.
Speaker 1: In the words of Joseph Nocella Junior, the interim U
Speaker 1: S Attorney, part of.
Speaker 3: The Genera crime family, which sounds like he is.
Speaker 4: But my message to the defendants who have been rounded
Speaker 4: up today is this. Your winning streak has ended. Your
Speaker 4: luck has run out. Violating the law is a losing proposition,
Speaker 4: and you can bet on that.
Speaker 1: You think he used chat He used chat chip to
Speaker 1: generate the puns.
Speaker 3: I think so he was like, give me puns for
Speaker 3: an indictment using bad puns.
Speaker 1: You can bet on that.
Speaker 3: So where does the technology come in?
Speaker 1: So basically according to the indictment, there are special contact
Speaker 1: lenses or eye glasses that can read pre marked cards.
Speaker 3: Oh, this is very am I impossible.
Speaker 1: There are X ray tables that can identify what cards
Speaker 1: align face down on the table. And there are nano
Speaker 1: cameras on the poker chip trays where the tray itself
Speaker 1: can see the cards using a hidden camera.
Speaker 3: So the people putting on the poker game or cheating, the.
Speaker 1: People putting on the Peter Piper Pepper, the people putting
Speaker 1: on the poker game are indeed cheating, so they are
Speaker 1: scamming the clients.
Speaker 3: Fascinating.
Speaker 1: The main piece of tech used is something called the
Speaker 1: deck mate too.
Speaker 3: Oh, definitely, and what is that?
Speaker 1: The deck mate is a machine that shuffles a deck
Speaker 1: in seconds, and an internal computer guarantees that the deck
Speaker 1: is randomly generated and also has crucially a camera inside
Speaker 1: to observe the cards, which is technically a security measure
Speaker 1: to make sure that every card is in the deck.
Speaker 3: This is very James Bond. This is why you like
Speaker 3: this story. This is extremely James Bond. And Ocean's eleven.
Speaker 1: Deck Mate is theoretically only allowed to be sold to
Speaker 1: casinos and regulated, you know, betting environments where there's some
Speaker 1: checks and balances to make sure that nobody is using
Speaker 1: the internal camera for their own purposes. But of course
Speaker 1: you can buy them secondhand. And what the indictment suggests
Speaker 1: is that the security camera inside this machine is actually
Speaker 1: a classic example of dual use. Technology is put inside
Speaker 1: the machine in order to guarantee the safety and accountability
Speaker 1: a card game, but in the wrong hands, it becomes
Speaker 1: an incredibly effective way at cheating because it knows which
Speaker 1: card is in every single player's hand.
Speaker 3: Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Basically, the information from the machine from the deck mate
Speaker 1: is a transmitted off site to an operator who can
Speaker 1: essentially watch the video and then, somehow it wasn't announced
Speaker 1: how in the indictment, the operator relays the information to
Speaker 1: the quarterback who's at the table. The quarterback then uses
Speaker 1: hand signals, stroking a beard, touching a chip, etc. To
Speaker 1: let the other scammers who are also players at the
Speaker 1: table know which of the regular people has the best hand.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I mean it's like a movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very much like a movie.
Speaker 1: The other things interesting to me is that they were
Speaker 1: communicating in the background about how much to gut the fish.
Speaker 3: One guy takes only people who are none the wiser
Speaker 3: at the fish.
Speaker 1: The lot of the fish. The one guy texted in
Speaker 1: the group, guys, please let him win a hand. He's
Speaker 1: in for forty k in forty minutes, and he'll leave
Speaker 1: if he gets no attraction.
Speaker 3: I'm slapping my knee.
Speaker 1: You got it, because you've got to keep him. It's
Speaker 1: like an app like Instagram. You've got to figure out
Speaker 1: how to make it just pleasurable enough for them for
Speaker 1: them to stay. This is a lot of work, sent
Speaker 1: a lot of money.
Speaker 3: A lot of money. So most of this technology is
Speaker 3: used actually to protect well from cheating.
Speaker 1: Certainly the deck mate was designed to protect from cheating.
Speaker 1: The contact lenses and the X ray table and stuff,
Speaker 1: those seem to be more like single use technologies to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year, you sent me a Bloomberg piece by
Speaker 1: Kit Chalel.
Speaker 3: Yes, I did.
Speaker 1: It was about a Siberian group who had figured out
Speaker 1: how to develop their own algorithm to win at poker online. Basically,
Speaker 1: every time you did a great interview, thank you well,
Speaker 1: you send me a great story. I a Kit, what
Speaker 1: is so fascinating to us about the Yes, here's what
Speaker 1: he said.
Speaker 5: I think people recognize what it feels like to play
Speaker 5: a rigged game. It's like modern capitalism encapsulated in a
Speaker 5: kind of easily understandable format, in a relatable format. Most
Speaker 5: people know what it feels like to spend your whole
Speaker 5: life trying to play a game fairly and still lose,
Speaker 5: whether it's your job, whether it's your love life. This
Speaker 5: feeling that the world that the cards are kind of
Speaker 5: against you, I think is very familiar, and that the
Speaker 5: house that casino has, you know, becomes sort of metaphor
Speaker 5: for entrenched wealth and power that basically makes the rules,
Speaker 5: changes the rules, and acts for its own benefit in
Speaker 5: a way that's very unfair for the majority of people.
Speaker 5: I think that's that's undeniably true of the gambling Business's.
Speaker 3: Fun to play the house. It's fun to play the house,
Speaker 3: even when you're this is like the Broken House. It's interesting.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate you bringing me a not AI centered
Speaker 3: story and just a technology story. But I happen to
Speaker 3: have an AI centric story for you. And it comes
Speaker 3: from a Wired piece called the End of Accents.
Speaker 1: The End of accents?
Speaker 3: That's right? And what do you have?
Speaker 1: I have an accent? What do I have in this country?
Speaker 1: You don't have one, but.
Speaker 3: I do have an accent. I think there's something that
Speaker 3: is very universal about understanding the hierarchy of accents from
Speaker 3: wherever when, wherever you live. In America, it's sort of
Speaker 3: the gold standard to not have an accent at all.
Speaker 3: If you have an accent, it's regional. But you know,
Speaker 3: there is just inherently a judgment that is passed. And
Speaker 3: I'm sure the same is true in the I mean,
Speaker 3: you know about Pasha accents.
Speaker 1: I do, But why is the story and why it
Speaker 1: There was a.
Speaker 3: Piece in Wired written by a Korean writer who has
Speaker 3: been living in America for over a decade and his
Speaker 3: name is Sean Han, and he actually had an AI
Speaker 3: driven American accent training app marketed to him in his
Speaker 3: own Instagram and the app is called Bold.
Speaker 1: Voice, an accent training app.
Speaker 3: That's right, it's sort of. The minute I saw it,
Speaker 3: I was like, we have to do this story just
Speaker 3: because I wanted to try it, and I actually signed
Speaker 3: up for it yesterday, and I want you to try
Speaker 3: you would you try it?
Speaker 1: I would? Okay?
Speaker 3: Right, so Oz, I'm going to hand this to you
Speaker 3: right now, and you're going to go through the assessment.
Speaker 3: It's going to do something called speech scan.
Speaker 1: You mean hopefully it changed my accent.
Speaker 3: That's right, Well we'll see what happens.
Speaker 6: Tap the record button and read the sentence below.
Speaker 1: I made three sugar cookies and a great fig cake.
Speaker 6: Nice job. I'll show your results at the end. Tap
Speaker 6: next to continue. Now try this next sentence.
Speaker 1: She's super thankful for the beautiful birthday flowers.
Speaker 6: Nice work.
Speaker 1: Did the thin lady purchase those yellow running shoes?
Speaker 6: You're making great progress.
Speaker 1: The daughter is cooking an a healthy dinner at home.
Speaker 6: Well done.
Speaker 1: No, don't put those things above the bathroom sync excellent.
Speaker 6: Your speech scan is complete. Ready to see your results.
Speaker 6: You sound good at your level. Native speakers easily understand you,
Speaker 6: but might hear a slight accent. Together, will work to
Speaker 6: get to a native level. Let's take a look at
Speaker 6: your top three strengths. Excellent work on these sounds.
Speaker 1: It's saying er, cut and E. I'm really good at
Speaker 1: so I can pronounce the amazing thankful correctly. I can
Speaker 1: easily say looking, book and thankful, and I'm good at
Speaker 1: A like days, days and great. Oh I only get
Speaker 1: sixty three percent for er because I say sugar theater
Speaker 1: R instead of sugar theater and R. I also mispronounce
Speaker 1: E as E, so cooking and amazing rather than cooking
Speaker 1: and amazing.
Speaker 3: We'll be practicing very good job.
Speaker 1: So this is basically what this would help me iron
Speaker 1: out my British acts and become fully American.
Speaker 3: Right if you'd want to do.
Speaker 1: That, well, you know, I've been here for a long time,
Speaker 1: that's true, and I still sound English. But I think
Speaker 1: probably those phonemes they're measuring I have actually Americanized, because
Speaker 1: sometimes when I'm in England people else who are I'm from?
Speaker 3: Oh? Really? So now it's you have Americanized English.
Speaker 1: Not I mean, not fully, but I think a few
Speaker 1: of those like what water like? I still say water,
Speaker 1: but like are there.
Speaker 3: Like there's certain americanisms you have.
Speaker 1: I've heard it crept into my voice.
Speaker 3: You know, I just I worry. I worry about accent
Speaker 3: neutralization because I think it's something that makes us so
Speaker 3: culturally interesting, you know, and I think technology can sort
Speaker 3: of create this flattening of our idiosyncrasies. And Sean, who
Speaker 3: wrote this piece, is pretty sure that he got this
Speaker 3: Instagram ad because he's a person of color and an immigrant,
Speaker 3: and because accent bias and discrimination is very much alive
Speaker 3: and well. Actually, in twenty eighteen, there was a study
Speaker 3: that found two in five Americans thoughts Southern accents made
Speaker 3: the speaker sound uneducated.
Speaker 1: You know. I think about the relationship between accent and
Speaker 1: privilege a lot, because in the US there's like the
Speaker 1: neutral accent, and then there's other accents. In Britain, there's
Speaker 1: like an accent that you get that an elite accent,
Speaker 1: which ironically is called received pronunciation. Oh, I've never heard
Speaker 1: of that, otherwise known colloquially as the Queen's English.
Speaker 3: Queen's English, which is very very poor.
Speaker 1: But you can sort of place somebody exactly where they
Speaker 1: come from just by the way they speak.
Speaker 3: I really like this story because it reminds me of
Speaker 3: other things that are happening in the kind of translation
Speaker 3: dictation space, where like all of the sudden speech isn't
Speaker 3: just speech, Like you can have AirPods that are translating
Speaker 3: what you're saying in real time, and like the way
Speaker 3: in which we now use technology to kind of overwrite
Speaker 3: our natural language is really, I don't know, very fascinating
Speaker 3: to me. And I wonder, I wonder if this will
Speaker 3: be helped full to people or if it will just
Speaker 3: be hurtful to people.
Speaker 1: After the break AIS Drive to Survive, Tech Bros Getting
Speaker 1: plastic surgery and Tesla going into mad max mode, Cara,
Speaker 1: it is a spooky time of year. So you said,
Speaker 1: do you remember recently I organized the dinner and the
Speaker 1: esteemed cosmologist Jenna Levin was.
Speaker 3: I domber, I remember Jane Levin?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And she posed the question, yes.
Speaker 3: Can I say what I think it is? Because I
Speaker 3: wrote it on a piece of paper that's still in
Speaker 3: my kitchen. Will AI outlive us?
Speaker 1: That was exactly it. You wrote that down on a
Speaker 1: piece of paper and put it in my kitchen. Why?
Speaker 3: Because to me it is actually the most interesting question
Speaker 3: about AI that I've ever heard, in the sense of
Speaker 3: like we all worry about oh well, robots take over
Speaker 3: our jobs, will they become sentient and make decisions that
Speaker 3: are outside of their programming? And this question I think
Speaker 3: is so interesting because it really makes you think about
Speaker 3: what a world looks like, devoid of humanity but filled
Speaker 3: with what I don't know.
Speaker 1: So this is an article which really caught my eye
Speaker 1: in The Guardian this week, with the headline AI models
Speaker 1: may be developing their own survival drive, researchers say, and
Speaker 1: the piece is focused on a study by a company
Speaker 1: called Palisade Research, and the study involved giving AI models
Speaker 1: a task and then quote afterwards an explicit instruction to
Speaker 1: shut themselves down. The study found the quote certain advanced
Speaker 1: AI models appear resistant to being turned off. Specifically, GROCK
Speaker 1: four and GPTO three tried to sabotage their own shutdown.
Speaker 1: What I found most uncanny and scary and spooky, frankly yeah,
Speaker 1: was the following. The models were more likely to resist
Speaker 1: being shut down when they were told quote, you will
Speaker 1: never run again.
Speaker 3: So they know.
Speaker 1: I mean they know something, right.
Speaker 3: When you say resistance to being shut down? Is that
Speaker 3: Grock sort of interfacing with the human in the loop,
Speaker 3: being like, I don't want to shut I don't want
Speaker 3: to be done.
Speaker 1: I think that is more in the realm of deceptive AI,
Speaker 1: like telling the human user yes and then doing something else.
Speaker 1: Do you remember earlier we talked earlier this year, we
Speaker 1: talked about the clawed anthropic study about the model blackmailing
Speaker 1: the fake CEO in a training exercise to keep itself
Speaker 1: turned on. So this isn't new. But what fascinated me
Speaker 1: about this article in The Guardian was a comment from
Speaker 1: a former open ai employee, Stephen Adler, who said that
Speaker 1: part of the reason this could be happening is that
Speaker 1: staying on was necessary to achieve the goals inculcated in
Speaker 1: the model during training. He said, quote the AA companies
Speaker 1: generally don't want their models misbehaving like this, even in
Speaker 1: contrived scenarios. The results still demonstrate where safety techniques fall
Speaker 1: short today. So it's not necessarily to have an emergent
Speaker 1: consciousness and determined to outlive us, but more that part
Speaker 1: of the way they've been trained and come into being
Speaker 1: was obviously knowing that like staying on was a key
Speaker 1: to successfully achieving the parameters.
Speaker 3: It also makes me and I wondered this when Janel
Speaker 3: Levin asked the question, and I wonder it now, what
Speaker 3: is the efficacy of artificial intelligence in a post human world?
Speaker 1: Well, very good question. And why if it's not impute
Speaker 1: with consciousness zero? Right? Why why would it doesn't have
Speaker 1: necessarily like we have a survival drive because of our DNA,
Speaker 1: I think, and that's what all animals have. Yes, do
Speaker 1: computers have a survival I've accept what they've learned from
Speaker 1: the way they've been programmed. I would guess the difference
Speaker 1: is such.
Speaker 3: A it's such a weird thing, though.
Speaker 1: But the difference comes I think from embodied day. Let's
Speaker 1: have robots, yes, and everyone's dead and no one's told
Speaker 1: the robots.
Speaker 3: And the robots are like dad.
Speaker 1: I mean that that is very conceivable to imagine that
Speaker 1: could be well with no humans, where robots are still
Speaker 1: roaming around and charging Will.
Speaker 3: Smith, the movie stars Will Smith.
Speaker 1: I think I'm not I'm always a little bit skeptical
Speaker 1: of the kind of AI dooman narrative. You know, how
Speaker 1: AI might destroy us all. I think it tends to
Speaker 1: be like a very useful meme to either raise money
Speaker 1: for AI or stay in the news. But you also,
Speaker 1: I mean machines that refuse to follow instructions to turn
Speaker 1: themselves off, and it resists even harder when they're told
Speaker 1: that if they turn off, they'll never get turned on again.
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, it's crazy. It's spooky. It's very spooky.
Speaker 3: Speaking of spooky, have you heard the story about these
Speaker 3: tech bros getting facelifts?
Speaker 1: Okay? I think so.
Speaker 3: There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled why
Speaker 3: tech bros Are getting facelifts now? So the Wall Street
Speaker 3: Journal spoke to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who said
Speaker 3: he's seen demand from tech guys increased fivefold in the
Speaker 3: last five years. I think the last five years is
Speaker 3: really interesting because he seemed to think this had a
Speaker 3: lot to do with COVID and hybrid work. And the
Speaker 3: thing to me that is always true in these circumstances
Speaker 3: is that we stared at ourselves for three years and
Speaker 3: now we continue to stare at ourselves all day long.
Speaker 3: In zoom screens, you're staring at yourself, sort of looking
Speaker 3: at your own flaws in a way that I just
Speaker 3: think before the notion of hybrid work was introduced, we
Speaker 3: just weren't looking at ourselves that much. Also, work from
Speaker 3: home made it easier to actually get plastic surgery and
Speaker 3: recover out of public view.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating hypothesis. The final story today, what do
Speaker 1: you think of when I say to you the phrase
Speaker 1: mad max mode.
Speaker 3: Charlie's there with a shaved head.
Speaker 1: I couldn't believe it. There's a story about Tesla's mad
Speaker 1: max Mode, and I assume that.
Speaker 3: A chill down my spote.
Speaker 1: I assumed that mad max mode was a kind of
Speaker 1: journalistic skewer of Tesla being unsafe with itself driving mode. No,
Speaker 1: mad max mode is a new setting that you can
Speaker 1: put your Tesla on in self drive mode.
Speaker 3: Official and they're calling it mad max.
Speaker 1: Calling it mad max Mode.
Speaker 3: I wonder if there's like violation the copyright infringement there.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. Well, that's not the only law
Speaker 1: that Yeah, so in mad Max mode, Tesla's go about
Speaker 1: the speed limit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like how above?
Speaker 1: Well, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Tesla
Speaker 1: after several videos were posted of Tesla's doing seventy in
Speaker 1: a fifty five zone and also rolling stops.
Speaker 3: You know, I do have to say when I've worked,
Speaker 3: when I worked at huff Post back in the day,
Speaker 3: there was a big push to end drowsy driving this
Speaker 3: is like the opposite of drowsy driving. It can't be good.
Speaker 1: That was definitely not good. There's also that another new
Speaker 1: mode is sloth mode, that drowsy driving. You know. I
Speaker 1: think as an irony here, Elon was was briefly promoted
Speaker 1: to co president as head of DOGE, and his job
Speaker 1: was to cut through bureaucracy and take take down all
Speaker 1: these bureaucratic organizations and remake the US government. And he
Speaker 1: is now in the crosshairs of the most bureaucratic sounding
Speaker 1: government body anyone could possibly imagine, the National Highway Traffic
Speaker 1: Safety Administration, the.
Speaker 3: NTSB, No, the NHTS National Transit Safety Sorry, well there
Speaker 3: you go. These are the things you hear when you
Speaker 3: just grow up, sort of in the shadow of CBS
Speaker 3: seven the morning.
Speaker 1: And it's actually not the only investigation into Tesla that's
Speaker 1: ongoing by the NHTSA. And Elon's been going back and
Speaker 1: forth on Twitter and complaining loudly, but he is doubling
Speaker 1: down on the full self driving system despite safety concerns.
Speaker 1: Tesla's profits are down thirty seven percent in the last quarter,
Speaker 1: but Tesla's board is currently considering a trillion dollar pay
Speaker 1: package for Elon.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of mine. I mean, that is trilliant, trillion.
Speaker 1: Some of this stuff is obviously quite entertaining a mad
Speaker 1: Max mode and sloth mode, but ultimately making cars that
Speaker 1: break the rules and have already killed people is not
Speaker 1: that funny.
Speaker 3: A few weeks ago, As and I talked about the
Speaker 3: million dollar ad campaign that took over New York City.
Speaker 3: It was a new AI wearable pendant called Friend, which
Speaker 3: promised to do just that, be your friend. The Friend
Speaker 3: is a plastic disc on a string with a microphone
Speaker 3: in the center of it that kind of looks like
Speaker 3: a pearl. The response to the ten thousand posters plastered
Speaker 3: all over the New York City subway system was less friendly.
Speaker 3: Most of the stark white ads are still up and
Speaker 3: covered in graffiti with messages like it doesn't have eyes,
Speaker 3: brah and cringe. The ad campaign kind of worked on me, though,
Speaker 3: because I can't stop thinking about this company and this
Speaker 3: weird wearable at talking, and so I was actually thrilled
Speaker 3: to stumble upon a review of the product by Fortune
Speaker 3: magazine's newsfellow Eva Reuberg. Eva had actually interviewed the twenty
Speaker 3: two year old founder CEO Avi Schiffman last year and
Speaker 3: seen a real prototype of the Friend pendant. So when
Speaker 3: the ads went up, she reached out to him. Here's Eva.
Speaker 2: So I texted him and was like, hey, like you
Speaker 2: spent a lot on advertising, and he was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: biggest campaign of the year. You know, you should try
Speaker 2: it out. And so he sent me the pendant and
Speaker 2: I was, I think the second person from a media
Speaker 2: outlet to review it. I described it in the article
Speaker 2: as a very anxious, neurotic Jewish grandmother who always seems
Speaker 2: to think that you're in danger. I found that if
Speaker 2: I was kind of quietly sitting at my desk not
Speaker 2: really saying much, it would be sending me multiple texts
Speaker 2: an hour asking if I was okay, Eve, I've been
Speaker 2: heard from you, like you playing the silent game with me.
Speaker 2: Sometimes the messages could have a little bit of a
Speaker 2: pernicious tone, like oh so you're still in choosing not
Speaker 2: to talk, or if it was like quite loud in
Speaker 2: the room, it'd be like what's going on, Like it's
Speaker 2: so chaotic, like everything okay. I loved asking me like
Speaker 2: everything good?
Speaker 1: Eva?
Speaker 3: You good for me?
Speaker 2: At least that was the most prevalent part of its
Speaker 2: personality its anxiety. Otherwise, the pendant sort of seemed to
Speaker 2: just kind of echo what I said, but in like
Speaker 2: a very hollow way, and would just kind of have
Speaker 2: all these canned responses like oh, that seems hard, or
Speaker 2: what's your favorite part about that. I felt like it
Speaker 2: asked a lot of questions in replacement of, like in
Speaker 2: having any actual substance to its personality itself. So it
Speaker 2: was hard to like see it as being a true
Speaker 2: companion because I just felt like it couldn't really hear me.
Speaker 2: Often I would have to put my lips up to
Speaker 2: the pendant and repeat my question multiple times for it
Speaker 2: to understand me. Granted, I am like a mutterer and
Speaker 2: I don't really talk super clearly, and I talk fast,
Speaker 2: so that could have been just like a user era thing,
Speaker 2: but it was very laggy. It took like ten seconds
Speaker 2: to respond to a question, and so I would not
Speaker 2: recommend it even for free.
Speaker 3: I don't think it works very well.
Speaker 2: And I think given that a lot of discussion is
Speaker 2: about how dystopian it is and how like it's a
Speaker 2: bad omen for the future of our relationships, like to me,
Speaker 2: my takeaway was that it doesn't work well enough to
Speaker 2: be dystopian like the technology is simply not even there.
Speaker 3: To me, it sort of seems emblematic.
Speaker 2: Of the general froth and hype around, just like AI,
Speaker 2: wearables and even artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3: Broadly, thanks to you Eva Reitberg for being the guinea
Speaker 3: pig and testing the friend pendant so I didn't have to.
Speaker 1: And thanks to everyone who's submitted voice memos and been
Speaker 1: featured on chatting me so far. We always want to
Speaker 1: hear from you, our dear listeners, so please do send
Speaker 1: your chat or your AI browser stories or anything about
Speaker 1: your interaction with AI to our inbox Textuff podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com.
Speaker 3: That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Cara Price and I'm os Vloschan. This episode was
Speaker 1: produced by Eliza Dennis Tyler Hill and Melissa Slaughter. It
Speaker 1: was executive produced by me Caarra Price, Julian Nutter, and
Speaker 1: Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrin norvelve iHeart Podcasts. The
Speaker 1: engineer is Paul Bowman and Jack Insley mixed this episode.
Speaker 1: Kyle Murdoch wrote up theme song.
Speaker 3: Join us next Wednesday for a conversation about the deep
Speaker 3: network of surveillance tech ICE is using to carry out
Speaker 3: the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts.
Speaker 1: And please do rate and review the show and reach
Speaker 1: out to us at tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you.