Speaker 1: Glasco from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: This is tech stuff. I'm as Valoscian and I'm care Price.
Speaker 1: Today we've got two big stories to break down for you. First,
Speaker 1: content creators, brands and gen z alike are all turning
Speaker 1: towards the latest luxury unplugging. Then tech companies blasting particles
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere to dim the sun in response to
Speaker 1: climate change.
Speaker 3: Then we'll tell you about a few other stories that
Speaker 3: caught our eye this week, like how polymarkets bets led
Speaker 3: to disinformation about the Ukraine Russian War, a human washing
Speaker 3: machine that promises to wash both your body and your soul,
Speaker 3: and then we'll dive into how twenty three ande meters
Speaker 3: is giving some users a piece of their new family's inheritances.
Speaker 1: Then on Chat to me Chatcheep celebrates its third birthday
Speaker 1: while Sam Altman declare's code read at Open AI with
Speaker 1: Google's Gemini making rapid progress. Joining us to talk about
Speaker 1: this is Megan Moroney from Axios, who's just published a
Speaker 1: piece with the headline the three things keeping Sam Altman
Speaker 1: up at night. All of that on the weekend Tech.
Speaker 1: It's Friday, December fifth, Hello.
Speaker 4: Cara, Hello Oz I was reflecting this week about this
Speaker 4: thing that we used to say when I think we
Speaker 4: first did podcasting, which is that you and I had
Speaker 4: a face for radio.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean funny enough, I've made that joke for
Speaker 1: all these years. But now podcasting is pivoting to video,
Speaker 1: like what are we?
Speaker 3: Nobody is immune? Nobody is immune anymore. And there was
Speaker 3: an article that I recently read in Business Insider called
Speaker 3: being hot is a new job requirement.
Speaker 2: Dari asks why this caught your eye?
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny. My mother always used to say
Speaker 3: I'm in an image based business because she's in public relationships, right,
Speaker 3: and so who you see is what you get, and
Speaker 3: it's very important. And I kind of always used to
Speaker 3: roll my eyes at that idea. And then this article
Speaker 3: kind of confirmed everything she's been saying to me for
Speaker 3: thirty years, which is, and I'm thirty six, but since
Speaker 3: I was six, yeah, exactly. Yeah, she always was kind
Speaker 3: of like, people who are good looking are more successful.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean that's kind of a story as all
Speaker 1: as time, right, So I'm curious where the new and
Speaker 1: the new job requirement comes from.
Speaker 3: So tech is both driving the issue and it's solving
Speaker 3: the issue. Meaning that in some ways we have become
Speaker 3: more and more critical of how we look. Like post pandemic.
Speaker 3: We talk about the zoom meetings are forcing people to
Speaker 3: stare at their faces more and more. You and I,
Speaker 3: I mean I just looked at myself in the camera
Speaker 3: right now, and I'm like, carry you could.
Speaker 2: Have especially with these lights, with these lights.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's like in every field, I think
Speaker 3: there is a demand for people to be looking at themselves.
Speaker 5: More and more.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of double headed trend, right, because on
Speaker 1: the one hand, is so like the image of our
Speaker 1: face talking into the ether has never been more important
Speaker 1: nor more easy to fabricate.
Speaker 3: That's right. And this is the way that tech is facilitating,
Speaker 3: not the problem, but this idea that you kind of
Speaker 3: need to be hot in order to work in the
Speaker 3: job market. Very normal people who do not know how
Speaker 3: to take headshots are using very simple AI tools to
Speaker 3: say I'm not just Emily, I'm yasified Emily, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to take this picture of me and my dog
Speaker 3: and I'm going to turn it into my head shot.
Speaker 3: You know everyone talks about Instagram face. Yeah, Instagram face
Speaker 3: is like lip augmentation, botox, GLP ones being on the rise,
Speaker 3: plastic surgery of especially amongst men, which we talked about
Speaker 3: on the show. I think there's now something that we
Speaker 3: can call LinkedIn face that we're actually changing the way
Speaker 3: we look for professional reasons.
Speaker 1: I heard that some people are actually getting plastic surgery
Speaker 1: men in particular to look more alert's.
Speaker 2: Isn't that bizarre? The eye is the eye surgery, like
Speaker 2: constantly looking like listen.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna be awake during these forty million hour weeks
Speaker 3: that I'm working.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally zoom phage zoom face.
Speaker 1: Actually, I think about this particularly in my other sort
Speaker 1: of founder CEO role. I do think like I'm losing
Speaker 1: my hair a bit, like it too fat, like less
Speaker 1: credible because I don't sort of match this particular aesthetic.
Speaker 1: So I think it's probably being amplified by tech, but
Speaker 1: it is not like a new thing.
Speaker 3: I think the takeaway for me is that as the
Speaker 3: job market gets tighter and tighter, looks maxing in general
Speaker 3: is something that is playing into the way people get jobs.
Speaker 3: And I think that when you see the sort of
Speaker 3: most successful billionaires looks maxing, if you're someone who even
Speaker 3: aspires to be.
Speaker 2: A millionaire, bezos.
Speaker 3: You're right that, like, all right, I better get my
Speaker 3: I think it's actually really interesting. I do think that
Speaker 3: our chronic onlineness has led us down this path of
Speaker 3: temptation to sort of change our face and what we
Speaker 3: look like and how we interact digitally. And I think
Speaker 3: that there is now a pushback and it ties into
Speaker 3: the story that I want to tell you, which is
Speaker 3: about how unplugging became luxury's most valuable currency. Huh, I
Speaker 3: actually said this to you. I think when we were
Speaker 3: reporting on Sleepwalkers that to me, exclusivity has always been
Speaker 3: a luxury.
Speaker 2: Scarcity is is luxury?
Speaker 3: What is scarce in the digital age? Offline, being offline,
Speaker 3: an analog And so the story that I want to
Speaker 3: tell you that comes from Vogue Business, which is about
Speaker 3: this woman who goes by the name of cat GPT.
Speaker 3: She's a creator. She recently decided to connect her cell
Speaker 3: phone to an analog phone in an attempt to cut
Speaker 3: down her screen time. Now the irony is her post
Speaker 3: about her no phone mourning went viral because of course
Speaker 3: she had to put.
Speaker 1: You can't, you can't and you can only be offline performatively,
Speaker 1: right if you're just offline nobody knows the thing.
Speaker 2: If you like tree files in the forest exactly, if
Speaker 2: you if.
Speaker 1: You're offline without telling people you're offline on your social media,
Speaker 1: are you offline?
Speaker 3: It reminds me of this great Onion headline once that
Speaker 3: was like woman runs marathon, tells nobody why. But you know,
Speaker 3: actually from that viral piece, she created this company called
Speaker 3: Physical Phones, which sells Bluetooth connected analog phones and cat
Speaker 3: GPT told Vogue quote, people are really turned off by
Speaker 3: technology right now. They're turned off by AI. And by
Speaker 3: the way, we tend to conflate AI with social media
Speaker 3: and our phones.
Speaker 2: I think that's right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's when we talked about this
Speaker 1: a few times with the new Luddites and honestly with
Speaker 1: your journey this year in terms of doing less social
Speaker 1: media and being offline. I every morning try and make
Speaker 1: sure I don't look at my phone for the first
Speaker 1: thirteen minutes it's awake, So I think it's it's it's
Speaker 1: But what's interesting, and this is I guess a Vogue
Speaker 1: business story, is that this like trend and cultural desire
Speaker 1: is being.
Speaker 3: Exactly exactly and it's similar to the and I know
Speaker 3: this from running a book club where we were working
Speaker 3: with fashion brands. It's similar to what happened with the
Speaker 3: literary space, which was all of a sudden everyone was like,
Speaker 3: it's time to read.
Speaker 1: I know, I watched hundreds of hours of you flicking
Speaker 1: through books on Instagram. But how do you concentrate on
Speaker 1: the book when you're also making social content about yourself?
Speaker 2: Is interesting?
Speaker 3: Well, that's why people ask if it's performative reading into that.
Speaker 3: I say, no, it's not.
Speaker 2: There was a rumor that you were a celebrity.
Speaker 3: Book book stylist.
Speaker 1: Yes, I that you gave celebrity books that they could
Speaker 1: be papped with.
Speaker 2: That's right, true or not?
Speaker 3: I can't say. I still can't.
Speaker 2: I still want to say.
Speaker 3: But going back to this why it's a Vogue business piece.
Speaker 3: You know, this idea that brands are now investing in
Speaker 3: luddite behavior like Burbery sponsored an outdoor walk with a
Speaker 3: group of women who were just trying to connect to nature.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean. It's just there's something so
Speaker 3: interesting about to me that not using technology can be
Speaker 3: something that is in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 1: We have this, I guess, tremendous nostalgia for a lost time.
Speaker 3: We do and I think it's I mean, I was
Speaker 3: kind of laughing. I was looking at the Physical Phones
Speaker 3: website this morning, and I mean, apparently people are buying
Speaker 3: these physical phones. I think the irony that they're connected
Speaker 3: via Bluetooth is not lost on me. But in a
Speaker 3: moment of actually great irony, AI companies are actually up
Speaker 3: on this trend.
Speaker 2: I saw this.
Speaker 1: There was a piece in The Times about how the
Speaker 1: all of the marketing campaigns of the major AI companies
Speaker 1: don't include AI, and didn't didn't Anthropic open a pop
Speaker 1: up in New York.
Speaker 3: The Zero Slop Zone, so you would go inside. It
Speaker 3: was this you know pop up in the West Village
Speaker 3: where all pop ups are, and inside you were asked
Speaker 3: to unplug and interact with other humans. So the company
Speaker 3: actually passed out baseball caps, really some really hard hitting
Speaker 3: stuff that read thinking. And they were also handing out
Speaker 3: hard copies of a fifteen thousand word essay written by
Speaker 3: the Anthropics CEO Dario amo Day. The essay is called
Speaker 3: Machines of Loving Grace, How AI could transform the world
Speaker 3: for the better.
Speaker 1: I mean, having a super premium printed essay handed out
Speaker 1: by an AI company in a pop up in the
Speaker 1: West village.
Speaker 2: I mean there is a kind of mind melting quality
Speaker 2: to this.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, Actually, I saw Elon was on X
Speaker 1: this week talking about something that was actually connected, and
Speaker 1: I want to play you a clip please.
Speaker 6: When digital media is ubiquitous and you can just have
Speaker 6: anything digitally essentially for free or very close to for free,
Speaker 6: then the scarce commodity will be live events.
Speaker 3: There we go, the scares com It'll be live events.
Speaker 3: Just Also, one more thing that I thought was very funny.
Speaker 3: Part of being able to be let into this, you know,
Speaker 3: zero slop zone was that you had to have cloud
Speaker 3: on your phone. Of course, so they weren't like letting
Speaker 3: people in willy nilly to like read a fifteen thousand
Speaker 3: word essay that you had to have cloud on your phone.
Speaker 3: Which is funny.
Speaker 1: Was having an AX, which entitles you to buy water
Speaker 1: full price of the USA.
Speaker 2: That's that's exactly right.
Speaker 3: We're going to give you a free bad ear radio
Speaker 3: if you spend eight hundred dollars a year on the
Speaker 3: American Express. The other thing that I thought was really
Speaker 3: interesting is that open Ai actually shot their latest ads
Speaker 3: on thirty five millimeter film and insisted that no AI
Speaker 3: was used in the making of the ad. That's Oppenheimer's stat.
Speaker 7: Living in the end times, it's just like, either be
Speaker 7: what you are or don't be what you are, but
Speaker 7: don't like try to make a gimmick about how you're
Speaker 7: using analog film to make a commercial about the product
Speaker 7: that's probably going to change the world most drastically in
Speaker 7: the next ten years.
Speaker 2: So Caro, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Now.
Speaker 1: You brought up hotness earlier. Do you know what the
Speaker 1: hottest thing of all time is? What the sun? Okay,
Speaker 1: so I want to talk to you about the sun.
Speaker 1: Imagine if the solution to global warming was as simple
Speaker 1: as blocking sunlight.
Speaker 2: This is interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I actually read a piece in Bloomberg about
Speaker 1: how there's tens of millions of dollars being invested right
Speaker 1: now into an area of technology called solar geoengineering. Okay, Basically,
Speaker 1: what they're trying to do is to do something called
Speaker 1: stratospheric aerosol injection. Basically, the premise is if you can
Speaker 1: sort of shoot reflective particles into the sky, they can
Speaker 1: reflect the sunlight back towards the sun, and it's actually
Speaker 1: it happens naturally.
Speaker 3: So we're fighting the sun with the sun.
Speaker 2: We were sort of turning the sun itself. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: This actually happens after a volcano erupts. It happens anyway.
Speaker 1: All of the stuff, the sulfur dioxide that goes into
Speaker 1: the environment after a volcano, a period of cooling often follows.
Speaker 1: So some people are experimenting with pumping sulfur dioxide in
Speaker 1: the environment, which can cause acid, rain damage, the ozone
Speaker 1: and asthma attacks.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 1: I mean there are others though, who are using other
Speaker 1: theoretically non harmful materials. And there's kind of two tracks
Speaker 1: to this. On the one hand, there's a government track.
Speaker 1: The UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency has invested seventy
Speaker 1: five million dollars researching.
Speaker 3: This insignific not insignificant.
Speaker 1: But a private company called star Dust of course, which
Speaker 1: is a sexier name than the Advanced Research Invention Agency,
Speaker 1: has raised sixty million dollars and they are looking to
Speaker 1: pattern a chemical that has fewer drawbacks than sulfur dioxide.
Speaker 1: There's also a company called Make Sunsets, which is which
Speaker 1: is selling cooling credits for one dollar a pop to anyone.
Speaker 1: You can buy one. You remember when you were a
Speaker 1: kid that you could buy an acre on the moon.
Speaker 1: Of course, of course this is the acre on the
Speaker 1: Moon the.
Speaker 3: Green Bay Packers. Yeah, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1: So for one dollar you can have the good feeling
Speaker 1: of paying for a sulfur dioxide balloon that explodes into
Speaker 1: the environment.
Speaker 3: I should have bought one. I should have bought one.
Speaker 1: The EPA has suggested it's not maybe not the best idea,
Speaker 1: and the company has two founders, neither of whom are scientists,
Speaker 1: one are technologists, and one's a marketer. They claim on
Speaker 1: their website that one gram of particles in a stratosphere
Speaker 1: prevents the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide,
Speaker 1: which is about as credible as when you are offered
Speaker 1: the opportunity to spend an extra dollar on your flight.
Speaker 3: Carbon exactly. I just think it's I mean, it's an
Speaker 3: interesting text story because from what you've read or what
Speaker 3: you've learned in reporting this, like has has any significant
Speaker 3: change been made?
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think so yet. But Elon actually, and I'm
Speaker 1: sorry to bring it up again, has talked about sending
Speaker 1: a fleet of solar powered satellites into the atmosphere in
Speaker 1: order to reflect sunlight. So this is like a kind
Speaker 1: of tech bro thing. I mean, there's a kind of
Speaker 1: icarous esque quality to this story.
Speaker 3: Don't you think it has something to do with controlling
Speaker 3: such an unruly element?
Speaker 1: Can you imagine controlling the sun? There's nothing more potentate.
Speaker 3: If you can't take over the Earth, take over the sun.
Speaker 1: But it has that little bit quality of like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's global warming, let's think about colonizing Mars
Speaker 1: global warming.
Speaker 2: Let's pump random chemical and.
Speaker 3: See what happens. It just seems like a fool's errand
Speaker 3: to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, interestingly, there's a kind of an analogous technology
Speaker 1: which is being used and has been being used for
Speaker 1: quite a long time called cloud seeding I've heard of
Speaker 1: and cloud seeding has also been in the headlines recently
Speaker 1: because there's there's a huge cataclysmic flooding storm in Dubai
Speaker 1: last year and some people think it's because of cloud seeding.
Speaker 3: And what is cloud seeding exactly?
Speaker 1: Cloud seeding is basically, if there are clouds in this god, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can get them to rain by giving them particulate
Speaker 1: to coalesce.
Speaker 3: It's like oxytose. If you take oxytocin, sometimes it helps
Speaker 3: you cry, Is that right?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Or you know, actors very famously use menthol blowers to
Speaker 3: make themselves cry because it like blows mint essentially into
Speaker 3: your eyes and it makes you tear up.
Speaker 1: That's atreat great analogy. This is a quote from the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg piece about cloud seeding. There are natural seating agents
Speaker 1: dust that's blown into the troposphere, or the miasmic stench
Speaker 1: of ammonia gas wafting up from penguin poo in Antarctic
Speaker 1: colonies above which researchers have observed extra cloud cover. There
Speaker 1: are unnatural agents too, such as stratocumulous trails above shipping
Speaker 1: lanes caused by engine pollution. Plain old salt seems to
Speaker 1: work in early experiments. Pilots toss it out of plane windows.
Speaker 3: I would love to see pilots are like thrown salt.
Speaker 1: Well right now, shoulders so now that the innovation is
Speaker 1: to cover salt in titanium, which I'm not quite sure why.
Speaker 1: But in Dubai right now, there's a fleet of planes
Speaker 1: that whenever a cloud, you can't create a cloud, but
Speaker 1: as soon as a cloud comes into the sky, it's
Speaker 1: basically like clouds showing as much titanium coated salt into
Speaker 1: the cloud as possible.
Speaker 2: That's crazy, It's it's pretty bizarre.
Speaker 1: And so the original verdict was that cloud seeding had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with this cataclysmic flooding in Dubai. It
Speaker 1: was a conspiracy theory, blah blah blah. However, this Bloomberg
Speaker 1: piece that came out this month that actually there may
Speaker 1: have been a substantial amount of cloud.
Speaker 2: Seeding in the days around this huge flood. So interesting,
Speaker 2: Be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 1: The thing that makes me think about here is like
Speaker 1: we are now acting as gods, including in human gene editing.
Speaker 1: Like there's that crazy scientist in China who edited the
Speaker 1: heritable human DNA thing, so that irreversible over generations if
Speaker 1: that person procreates similarly, like you know. The Bloomberg piece
Speaker 1: made a good point that the average lifespan of a
Speaker 1: major private of a major public listed company is now
Speaker 1: fifteen years. So if your horizons are the next financial quarter,
Speaker 1: you may think you know have at it.
Speaker 3: Why not, let's try.
Speaker 1: But if your horizons are let's say, even your children,
Speaker 1: right or your children's children. I have a feeling that
Speaker 1: we may look back on this time of cloud seeding
Speaker 1: and star dust and gene line editing, and think, how
Speaker 1: was it.
Speaker 2: That's all we can do?
Speaker 3: That was all we could do. It does beg the
Speaker 3: question like how effective are these things?
Speaker 2: Unknown?
Speaker 1: And to the star doests make the point we're already
Speaker 1: geo engineering because we're pumping so much common dioxide and
Speaker 1: other crap into the atmosphere that it would be unreasonable
Speaker 1: not to use technology to try and counteract the negative
Speaker 1: consequences we're already generating through technology.
Speaker 3: I just think it's really interesting that these are private
Speaker 3: companies that are trying to do this, because obviously we
Speaker 3: know that anything the government tries to get done is
Speaker 3: going to take forecs, and private companies like taking it
Speaker 3: upon themselves. It's it's a sort of oligarchical mentality of
Speaker 3: like we're going to take responsibility for how it rains.
Speaker 3: I mean, these are I.
Speaker 1: Don't imagine if the Manhattan Project had been private, like
Speaker 1: tons of nuclear explos.
Speaker 3: There'd be no US. It's very true, it's very true,
Speaker 3: But now this seems to be so popular. You know,
Speaker 3: private companies move a lot faster than governments, and the
Speaker 3: speed at which climate change is occurring means that there's
Speaker 3: not much time for governments to catch up.
Speaker 1: After the break, Polymarket continues to bet.
Speaker 2: On the Ukraine Russia war.
Speaker 1: Japan's latest invention claims to wash your soul, and twenty
Speaker 1: three in meter users assuing, then you found relatives for
Speaker 1: a slice of the inheritance.
Speaker 3: Then un chat and me Happy third birthday, Chat GPT,
Speaker 3: watch out, Google might outpace you, and.
Speaker 2: We're back, Cara.
Speaker 1: Remember poly Market, the online gambling site where you can
Speaker 1: basically bet on anything.
Speaker 3: It's my favorite thing in the world. It's how we
Speaker 3: knew Mom Danny was going to win.
Speaker 1: They had basically called the election based on betting volume.
Speaker 2: Before the election happened.
Speaker 1: We talked about it last time on the show, in
Speaker 1: relation to the betting volume on whether or not presidents
Speaker 1: the lens you would wear a suit. Unfortunately, and distastefully,
Speaker 1: people seem unable to be able to get enough of
Speaker 1: betting on Ukraine Russia war stuff. One such bet is
Speaker 1: around whether Russia will capture a town called Mirno by
Speaker 1: November fifteenth, will be called mir No Grad in Russian.
Speaker 2: But in Ukrainian Mino. I know because I have Ukrainian grandfather.
Speaker 3: Yes you do.
Speaker 1: The battle around this city is dragged on for weeks
Speaker 1: and it's actually generated more than a million dollars in
Speaker 1: trading volume on polymarket about whether or not russiall will
Speaker 1: capture this town. Poly Market in order to determine whether
Speaker 1: or not Russia has captured the town, uses maps of
Speaker 1: the front lines generated by something called the Institute for
Speaker 1: the Study of War, which is a DC based think tank.
Speaker 1: Their maps are considered the gold standard for where the
Speaker 1: front line is on any given day. Just before the
Speaker 1: resolution on this of this Mirnograd bed, the map was
Speaker 1: changed to show that Russia had indeed taken the town.
Speaker 1: Polymarket paid out, and the next day the map reverted.
Speaker 3: You're kidding.
Speaker 1: What for a for media who broke this story hypothesized
Speaker 1: is that someone at the Institute for the Study of
Speaker 1: War was gotten to, essentially was bribed to temporarily change
Speaker 1: the border of the conflict so that whoever was betting
Speaker 1: that Russia would take it was paid out.
Speaker 3: What do you think about gambling on a war with
Speaker 3: real human lives.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's extremely distasteful. I should know.
Speaker 1: IW have said that there was unauthorized and unapproved edits,
Speaker 1: so they've acknowledged that somebody did go into the mainframe
Speaker 1: and change the front lines temporarily, haven't. They haven't gone
Speaker 1: any further than that. But but yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: I'm gambling on a war with real human lives at states.
Speaker 3: It's one thing to gamble on people who are boxing,
Speaker 3: which I still feel like is barbaric. But I mean
Speaker 3: when it comes to war in people's lives, like and
Speaker 3: that this is now something that like has become you know,
Speaker 3: almost like a fun thing to do on the internet.
Speaker 1: I think it's On the other hand, you might just
Speaker 1: say this democratizing different governments basically bet one way or another.
Speaker 1: I mean they're you know, yes, let's look at you know,
Speaker 1: Syria for example. All these conflicts have governments who are
Speaker 1: betting on either side essentially, And now you can do
Speaker 1: it too.
Speaker 3: You can be like, you can do it too, but
Speaker 3: you're just making money. You're not like changing Well, I
Speaker 3: guess you can kind of change the course of things.
Speaker 2: But well, okay, so that brings us back to the
Speaker 2: politics point.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I read a piece in the Financial Times a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago with the headline A new specter looms
Speaker 1: over democracy, prediction markets, and basically the columnists Jami M.
Speaker 1: Kelly writes about how these prediction markets can manipulate the
Speaker 1: perception of the outcome of political events. So once you
Speaker 1: see like Mandani ninety four percent according to.
Speaker 3: The better, you're like, hey, Mammdannie's going to win.
Speaker 2: If you're a Cuomo voter, you might think no point
Speaker 2: turning up for the polls. Yeah, you would have been right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But she makes the point that in closer run things,
Speaker 1: this could be really really bad. For example, last year,
Speaker 1: more than three point six billion dollars was staked on
Speaker 1: the outcome of the presidential election the US presidential.
Speaker 3: Three point six billion usix.
Speaker 1: Billion, despite the fact US users were not officially allowed
Speaker 1: to use the platform, so Kelly points out in the
Speaker 1: FT they may have used VPNs to circumvent that. But
Speaker 1: according to the FT, four non American accounts from outside
Speaker 1: the US together placed more than thirty million dollars in
Speaker 1: wages on Trump's winning, which creates a decisive swing in
Speaker 1: his favor on the platform in the weeks leading up
Speaker 1: to the election.
Speaker 3: And the platform does affect how people vote.
Speaker 1: For thirty million dollars, you could tip that that's not
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things compared to the amount
Speaker 1: of money flowing through packs and super packs and whatever else,
Speaker 1: like it's a drop in the ocean, but to be
Speaker 1: able to effect the perception of the whole you know,
Speaker 1: United States public who look at these betting markets for
Speaker 1: a source of truth about's going to happen.
Speaker 3: She also made it do it for sports so effortlessly.
Speaker 1: You know, this like this whole of the election was
Speaker 1: stolen narrative, et cetera, et cetera. If you've got like
Speaker 1: a poly market which has been externally manipulated to show
Speaker 1: like a much higher chance of let's say, Trump winning,
Speaker 1: and then I mean it's like the negative consequences of this.
Speaker 3: Are quite high, quite high. Yeah, no, absolutely, I would
Speaker 3: actually call poly market weird technology. And I have another
Speaker 3: piece of weird tech that I think is going to
Speaker 3: excite you.
Speaker 2: Go ahead.
Speaker 3: From the country that brought you the singing toilet.
Speaker 2: Oh I love to sing, this is Japan, right.
Speaker 3: Japan is now making a human washing machine. What yes,
Speaker 3: what do you.
Speaker 2: Think this looks like, I mean, like a washing machine,
Speaker 2: but a little bit.
Speaker 3: No, it looks like when you know a you know,
Speaker 3: Ridley Scott movie, someone comes out of a machine and
Speaker 3: there's this like primordial ooze, like a chyrogenic Yes, exactly,
Speaker 3: a cryogenic pod. It kind of looks like that. It's
Speaker 3: a capsule with a sort of lounger that's built inside
Speaker 3: the capsule and so you sit on that lounger and
Speaker 3: the top comes down around you, and it sort of
Speaker 3: looks like this whalehead and the whole cycle itself takes
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: It's a womb.
Speaker 3: It is a womb, and it's surprisingly not designed by Toto.
Speaker 3: It's created by a Japanese company. And I love this.
Speaker 3: This is when the Japanese are like, we do things
Speaker 3: so well that we're going to call our company Science.
Speaker 3: The company is called Science, and I wanted to just
Speaker 3: read you the instructions for how it works. So basically,
Speaker 3: you enter the capsule, the automatic wash begins. The machine
Speaker 3: uses microbubbles and a fine misshap to gently clean your
Speaker 3: entire body. There's built in sensors that track the user's
Speaker 3: vital signs during the wash to ensure safety, and while
Speaker 3: the washes in progress, calming visuals and soothing music are
Speaker 3: played inside the capsule. Then, after washing, the machine drives
Speaker 3: the user automatically. The user steps out fully clean, relaxed
Speaker 3: and monitored. No towels or manual effort are needed.
Speaker 2: And I shall want to cry. It's kind of make
Speaker 2: you want to cry.
Speaker 3: It's kind of need this. So where this actually was
Speaker 3: demoed was at the World Expo in Osaka, and you
Speaker 3: know science the lean named company was compelled to commercialize
Speaker 3: the prototype. So actually it will suit and be in
Speaker 3: use at a hotel in that area that purchased one
Speaker 3: of the fifty units the company plans to produce. Guess
Speaker 3: the price of this unit.
Speaker 2: Twenty five thousand dollars?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, my friend to be human car wash
Speaker 3: that costs three hundred and eighty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, well.
Speaker 1: So it won't become probably won't be coming to a
Speaker 1: screen nerrors anytime soon.
Speaker 3: No, it will not.
Speaker 1: So caart you know that I had this weird obsession
Speaker 1: with why it's a bad idea to do twenty three
Speaker 1: and me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course we know it's a terrible idea. We learned.
Speaker 1: So there's a story in the Wall Street Journal this
Speaker 1: week about how the irony of unintended consequences can be.
Speaker 2: Truly mind blowing.
Speaker 1: In short, people who find new family members through DNA
Speaker 1: sites like twenty three and me have started suing.
Speaker 2: Them with the inheritance. You're kidding, I promise you it's true.
Speaker 3: Well, that's where I'm going to get three hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty five thousand dollars to get my human watching she is,
Speaker 3: I have to find a rich relative on twenty three
Speaker 3: and me.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to tell you a story about Carmen Thomas. Okay,
Speaker 1: Carmen Thomas used twenty three and means DNA tests to
Speaker 1: track down her absent father, Joe Brown. Okay, but am
Speaker 1: I'm going to reach on the story now. It turned
Speaker 1: out the man she believed to be her father had
Speaker 1: died five years earlier, but she connected with two likely
Speaker 1: half sisters. They went out for boba te and a
Speaker 1: sleepover at their grandmother's. She looked through family albums and
Speaker 1: held a pillow with his photo printed on it. A
Speaker 1: year later, she was suing the Brown sisters and then
Speaker 1: remember that you made me pay. Thomas wanted to share
Speaker 1: of a multimillion dollar medical malpractice award they had won
Speaker 1: after Joe Brown had died of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, American history.
Speaker 3: So American unbelievable.
Speaker 2: I laugh, but it's pretty imagine.
Speaker 3: So this is basically people going on twenty three and meters.
Speaker 2: I think she's in earnest and then she was like, eh,
Speaker 2: she's like.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, there's some money here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1: That case actually settled in favor of the family because
Speaker 1: Thomas's claim came too late. But another example went the
Speaker 1: other way. A brother and a sister in Utah were
Speaker 1: fighting over their late father's estate, and for reasons best
Speaker 1: known to himself, the brother reached out to someone on
Speaker 1: twenty three and me who might be.
Speaker 2: A half brother.
Speaker 1: The deceased biological father didn't have a will, and the
Speaker 1: potential half brother sued the original brother and sister and
Speaker 1: one a third of the disputed estate. The reason for
Speaker 1: the victory was because the father had been sending a
Speaker 1: card and one hundred.
Speaker 2: Dollars each year on his birthday. To the court's ruled
Speaker 2: that was fatherhood.
Speaker 3: Fatherhood.
Speaker 1: Basically what this The sort of effect of this is
Speaker 1: that people are being encouraged to frame their wills much
Speaker 1: more consciously. To my family or to my dear children
Speaker 1: is a minefield.
Speaker 3: So again the takeaway from this is do not use
Speaker 3: twenty three and me, I guess you have money that
Speaker 3: you want to protect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 8: Happy birthday to chat GBT, Happy birthday to your chat GBT,
Speaker 8: Happy third Bert gotta hit it birthday to chat GYBT,
Speaker 8: Happy third birthday.
Speaker 3: This is chatting me.
Speaker 2: I couldn't have hit it. You're right, Cara.
Speaker 1: It's almost three years to the day since the release
Speaker 1: of Chat Gypt, which seemingly changed the way we all
Speaker 1: interact with technology forever.
Speaker 3: And to celebrate, or rather memorialize our dear friend Chat,
Speaker 3: we're here with Megan Moroney, the editor of Technology at Axios.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 9: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: I love to talk about.
Speaker 1: The chat Cara saying happy birthday, but I was also
Speaker 1: thinking of the Drake songs my birthday. I can cry
Speaker 1: if I want to. How much my celebration is there
Speaker 1: in the halls of this week?
Speaker 9: Yeah, not a lot in Open AI. It's been a
Speaker 9: rough week. A lot of competition, specifically from Google.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Sam Alton has talked about a code. I'd sarge,
Speaker 1: what does that look like?
Speaker 9: There's three things I wrote a piec yesterday for Axios
Speaker 9: on like the three things that are keeping Sam Altman
Speaker 9: up at night and they're big.
Speaker 3: The first one is just money.
Speaker 9: I mean everyone is talking about the AI bubble and
Speaker 9: how much AI costs to create the models, and then
Speaker 9: you know, for everyone to be using them, and it's
Speaker 9: scary and there's a lot of circular investments. So a
Speaker 9: lot of people are just saying the bubble is about
Speaker 9: to pop. And the second thing is Gemini is Google's
Speaker 9: newest model and it's has great reviews. The image model
Speaker 9: is great.
Speaker 2: This is nan nano banana mode.
Speaker 9: Yes, nano banana. And the third thing is really the
Speaker 9: safety issues because people are using it as a therapist
Speaker 9: or you know, as a confidant, and there's a lot
Speaker 9: of issues coming up with that.
Speaker 1: Cara, I think is most interested in the in the
Speaker 1: therapist angle. We've talked about a bunch on this show. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm very interested in the Google angle.
Speaker 2: Though.
Speaker 1: Since the release of Gemini three, Google's added more than
Speaker 1: three hundred billion dollars to its market cap. Why was
Speaker 1: the release of Gemini three so consequential?
Speaker 9: So you have to go back obviously three years when
Speaker 9: chat Gipt was first released and Google was caught on
Speaker 9: the back foot. They you know, started a lot of
Speaker 9: this generative AI technology and with deep Mind, they have
Speaker 9: some of the biggest models. And they were surprised when
Speaker 9: chetchipt it came out. They didn't have a similar tool
Speaker 9: and they make their money in search, and they were
Speaker 9: threatened by this.
Speaker 2: And so you know, it's taken them.
Speaker 9: A few years to figure out how to not cannibalize
Speaker 9: their their business and then also to really catch up
Speaker 9: and they have with Gemini, which is built into Google Docs.
Speaker 9: You know, it's just it's part of the tools that
Speaker 9: everybody uses.
Speaker 3: Do you think we could look back on this as
Speaker 3: the week that opened up AI's dominance started to fade, Like,
Speaker 3: is that what this week is going to signal?
Speaker 9: I wouldn't say the beginning of the end, but it changed,
Speaker 9: Like I'm not discounting chat GPT for sure. It could
Speaker 9: be just that this renewed focus gets them back on
Speaker 9: the right track. But I think this is this is
Speaker 9: the first real threat that they've had. And of course,
Speaker 9: you know, everyone who's been following tech for decades. No,
Speaker 9: there's the myspaces, you know that everyone thought was gonna
Speaker 9: be the next big thing, and you know and remembers it,
Speaker 9: or the Beta max where no one used that anymore,
Speaker 9: so very you know.
Speaker 1: It could go that way too, Megan, thank you for
Speaker 1: joining us again. And if you're thinking listeners about switching
Speaker 1: to Gemini writing your wedding vows with the chat GPT
Speaker 1: using anthropic to make a company of one, please write
Speaker 1: into tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot.
Speaker 2: Com with your stories.
Speaker 5: We'd love to hear from you and we love to
Speaker 5: feature them.
Speaker 3: That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm Kara
Speaker 3: Price and.
Speaker 2: I'm Oz Voloshin.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and
Speaker 1: Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Kara Price,
Speaker 1: Julian Nutta, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell
Speaker 1: for iHeart Podcasts. The Engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack
Speaker 1: Insley mixed this episode.
Speaker 2: Kyle Murdock wroteut theme song.
Speaker 1: Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: We want to hear from you.