December 5, 2025 • 33 mins
Is unplugging from your phone the ultimate luxury? This week, Oz introduces us to the businesses that specialize in “dimming the sun” and Karah introduces us to “LinkedIn Face.” Polymarket’s bets lead to disinformation about Russia’s war with Ukraine. 23andMe reveals secret families — and secret inheritances. And Oz and Karah almost cry over the latest invention from Japan: a human washing machine. Finally, we celebrate ChatGPT’s 3rd birthday (and possible decline) with Axios technology reporter, Megan Morrone.
If you’ve used a chatbot in an unusual or surprising way, send us a 1–2 minute voice note at techstuffpodcast@gmail.com.
Additional Reading:
- Being hot is now a job requirement - Business Insider
- Climate Geoengineering: Dimming the Sun Is a Terrifying New Industry COP30 - Bloomberg
- What Really Happened in the Storm Clouds Over Dubai? - Bloomberg
- How Unplugging Became Luxury’s Most Valuable Currency - Vogue Business
- 'Unauthorized' Edit to Ukraine's Frontline Maps Point to Polymarket's War Betting - 404 Media
- Japan Launches Human Washing Machine For Public Use After Expo Success -NDTV
- They Found Relatives on 23andMe and Asked For A Cut of the Inheritance - WSJ
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Glasco from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is tech stuff. I'm as Valoscian and I'm care Price.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Today we've got two big stories to break down for you. First,
content creators, brands and gen z alike are all turning
towards the latest luxury unplugging. Then tech companies blasting particles
into the atmosphere to dim the sun in response to
climate change.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Then we'll tell you about a few other stories that
caught our eye this week, like how polymarkets bets led
to disinformation about the Ukraine Russian War, a human washing
machine that promises to wash both your body and your soul,
and then we'll dive into how twenty three ande meters
is giving some users a piece of their new family's inheritances.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Then on Chat to me Chatcheep celebrates its third birthday
while Sam Altman declare's code read at Open AI with
Google's Gemini making rapid progress. Joining us to talk about
this is Megan Moroney from Axios, who's just published a
piece with the headline the three things keeping Sam Altman
up at night. All of that on the weekend Tech.
(01:19):
It's Friday, December fifth, Hello.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Cara, Hello Oz I was reflecting this week about this
thing that we used to say when I think we
first did podcasting, which is that you and I had
a face for radio.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yes, I mean funny enough, I've made that joke for
all these years. But now podcasting is pivoting to video,
like what are we?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Nobody is immune? Nobody is immune anymore. And there was
an article that I recently read in Business Insider called
being hot is a new job requirement.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Dari asks why this caught your eye?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
You know, it's funny. My mother always used to say
I'm in an image based business because she's in public relationships, right,
and so who you see is what you get, and
it's very important. And I kind of always used to
roll my eyes at that idea. And then this article
kind of confirmed everything she's been saying to me for
thirty years, which is, and I'm thirty six, but since
(02:17):
I was six, yeah, exactly. Yeah, she always was kind
of like, people who are good looking are more successful.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Well, I mean that's kind of a story as all
as time, right, So I'm curious where the new and
the new job requirement comes from.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
So tech is both driving the issue and it's solving
the issue. Meaning that in some ways we have become
more and more critical of how we look. Like post pandemic.
We talk about the zoom meetings are forcing people to
stare at their faces more and more. You and I,
I mean I just looked at myself in the camera
right now, and I'm like, carry you could.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Have especially with these lights, with these lights.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
But you know, it's like in every field, I think
there is a demand for people to be looking at themselves.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
More and more.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
It's a kind of double headed trend, right, because on
the one hand, is so like the image of our
face talking into the ether has never been more important
nor more easy to fabricate.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
That's right. And this is the way that tech is facilitating,
not the problem, but this idea that you kind of
need to be hot in order to work in the
job market. Very normal people who do not know how
to take headshots are using very simple AI tools to
say I'm not just Emily, I'm yasified Emily, and I'm
going to take this picture of me and my dog
(03:35):
and I'm going to turn it into my head shot.
You know everyone talks about Instagram face. Yeah, Instagram face
is like lip augmentation, botox, GLP ones being on the rise,
plastic surgery of especially amongst men, which we talked about
on the show. I think there's now something that we
can call LinkedIn face that we're actually changing the way
(03:58):
we look for professional reasons.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I heard that some people are actually getting plastic surgery
men in particular to look more alert's.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Isn't that bizarre? The eye is the eye surgery, like
constantly looking like listen.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I'm gonna be awake during these forty million hour weeks
that I'm working.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, totally zoom phage zoom face.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Actually, I think about this particularly in my other sort
of founder CEO role. I do think like I'm losing
my hair a bit, like it too fat, like less
credible because I don't sort of match this particular aesthetic.
So I think it's probably being amplified by tech, but
it is not like a new thing.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
I think the takeaway for me is that as the
job market gets tighter and tighter, looks maxing in general
is something that is playing into the way people get jobs.
And I think that when you see the sort of
most successful billionaires looks maxing, if you're someone who even
aspires to be.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
A millionaire, bezos.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
You're right that, like, all right, I better get my
I think it's actually really interesting. I do think that
our chronic onlineness has led us down this path of
temptation to sort of change our face and what we
look like and how we interact digitally. And I think
that there is now a pushback and it ties into
(05:15):
the story that I want to tell you, which is
about how unplugging became luxury's most valuable currency. Huh, I
actually said this to you. I think when we were
reporting on Sleepwalkers that to me, exclusivity has always been
a luxury.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Scarcity is is luxury?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
What is scarce in the digital age? Offline, being offline,
an analog And so the story that I want to
tell you that comes from Vogue Business, which is about
this woman who goes by the name of cat GPT.
She's a creator. She recently decided to connect her cell
phone to an analog phone in an attempt to cut
(05:52):
down her screen time. Now the irony is her post
about her no phone mourning went viral because of course
she had to put.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
You can't, you can't and you can only be offline performatively,
right if you're just offline nobody knows the thing.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
If you like tree files in the forest exactly, if
you if.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
You're offline without telling people you're offline on your social media,
are you offline?
Speaker 3 (06:16):
It reminds me of this great Onion headline once that
was like woman runs marathon, tells nobody why. But you know,
actually from that viral piece, she created this company called
Physical Phones, which sells Bluetooth connected analog phones and cat
GPT told Vogue quote, people are really turned off by
(06:36):
technology right now. They're turned off by AI. And by
the way, we tend to conflate AI with social media
and our phones.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I think that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I mean, I think that's when we talked about this
a few times with the new Luddites and honestly with
your journey this year in terms of doing less social
media and being offline. I every morning try and make
sure I don't look at my phone for the first
thirteen minutes it's awake, So I think it's it's it's
But what's interesting, and this is I guess a Vogue
business story, is that this like trend and cultural desire
(07:07):
is being.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Exactly exactly and it's similar to the and I know
this from running a book club where we were working
with fashion brands. It's similar to what happened with the
literary space, which was all of a sudden everyone was like,
it's time to read.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
I know, I watched hundreds of hours of you flicking
through books on Instagram. But how do you concentrate on
the book when you're also making social content about yourself?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Is interesting?
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Well, that's why people ask if it's performative reading into that.
I say, no, it's not.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
There was a rumor that you were a celebrity.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Book book stylist.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yes, I that you gave celebrity books that they could
be papped with.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
That's right, true or not?
Speaker 3 (07:48):
I can't say. I still can't.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I still want to say.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
But going back to this why it's a Vogue business piece.
You know, this idea that brands are now investing in
luddite behavior like Burbery sponsored an outdoor walk with a
group of women who were just trying to connect to nature.
You know what I mean. It's just there's something so
interesting about to me that not using technology can be
(08:17):
something that is in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
We have this, I guess, tremendous nostalgia for a lost time.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
We do and I think it's I mean, I was
kind of laughing. I was looking at the Physical Phones
website this morning, and I mean, apparently people are buying
these physical phones. I think the irony that they're connected
via Bluetooth is not lost on me. But in a
moment of actually great irony, AI companies are actually up
on this trend.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I saw this.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
There was a piece in The Times about how the
all of the marketing campaigns of the major AI companies
don't include AI, and didn't didn't Anthropic open a pop
up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
The Zero Slop Zone, so you would go inside. It
was this you know pop up in the West Village
where all pop ups are, and inside you were asked
to unplug and interact with other humans. So the company
actually passed out baseball caps, really some really hard hitting
stuff that read thinking. And they were also handing out
(09:16):
hard copies of a fifteen thousand word essay written by
the Anthropics CEO Dario amo Day. The essay is called
Machines of Loving Grace, How AI could transform the world
for the better.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I mean, having a super premium printed essay handed out
by an AI company in a pop up in the
West village.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
I mean there is a kind of mind melting quality
to this.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I was thinking, Actually, I saw Elon was on X
this week talking about something that was actually connected, and
I want to play you a clip please.
Speaker 6 (09:46):
When digital media is ubiquitous and you can just have
anything digitally essentially for free or very close to for free,
then the scarce commodity will be live events.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
There we go, the scares com It'll be live events.
Just Also, one more thing that I thought was very funny.
Part of being able to be let into this, you know,
zero slop zone was that you had to have cloud
on your phone. Of course, so they weren't like letting
people in willy nilly to like read a fifteen thousand
word essay that you had to have cloud on your phone.
Which is funny.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Was having an AX, which entitles you to buy water
full price of the USA.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
That's that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
We're going to give you a free bad ear radio
if you spend eight hundred dollars a year on the
American Express. The other thing that I thought was really
interesting is that open Ai actually shot their latest ads
on thirty five millimeter film and insisted that no AI
was used in the making of the ad. That's Oppenheimer's stat.
Speaker 7 (10:39):
Living in the end times, it's just like, either be
what you are or don't be what you are, but
don't like try to make a gimmick about how you're
using analog film to make a commercial about the product
that's probably going to change the world most drastically in
the next ten years.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So Caro, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Now.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You brought up hotness earlier. Do you know what the
hottest thing of all time is? What the sun? Okay,
so I want to talk to you about the sun.
Imagine if the solution to global warming was as simple
as blocking sunlight.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
This is interesting.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, So I actually read a piece in Bloomberg about
how there's tens of millions of dollars being invested right
now into an area of technology called solar geoengineering. Okay, Basically,
what they're trying to do is to do something called
stratospheric aerosol injection. Basically, the premise is if you can
(11:38):
sort of shoot reflective particles into the sky, they can
reflect the sunlight back towards the sun, and it's actually
it happens naturally.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
So we're fighting the sun with the sun.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
We were sort of turning the sun itself. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
This actually happens after a volcano erupts. It happens anyway.
All of the stuff, the sulfur dioxide that goes into
the environment after a volcano, a period of cooling often follows.
So some people are experimenting with pumping sulfur dioxide in
the environment, which can cause acid, rain damage, the ozone
and asthma attacks.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Great.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
I mean there are others though, who are using other
theoretically non harmful materials. And there's kind of two tracks
to this. On the one hand, there's a government track.
The UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency has invested seventy
five million dollars researching.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
This insignific not insignificant.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
But a private company called star Dust of course, which
is a sexier name than the Advanced Research Invention Agency,
has raised sixty million dollars and they are looking to
pattern a chemical that has fewer drawbacks than sulfur dioxide.
There's also a company called Make Sunsets, which is which
(12:53):
is selling cooling credits for one dollar a pop to anyone.
You can buy one. You remember when you were a
kid that you could buy an acre on the moon.
Of course, of course this is the acre on the
Moon the.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Green Bay Packers. Yeah, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So for one dollar you can have the good feeling
of paying for a sulfur dioxide balloon that explodes into
the environment.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I should have bought one. I should have bought one.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
The EPA has suggested it's not maybe not the best idea,
and the company has two founders, neither of whom are scientists,
one are technologists, and one's a marketer. They claim on
their website that one gram of particles in a stratosphere
prevents the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide,
which is about as credible as when you are offered
the opportunity to spend an extra dollar on your flight.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Carbon exactly. I just think it's I mean, it's an
interesting text story because from what you've read or what
you've learned in reporting this, like has has any significant
change been made?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
I don't think so yet. But Elon actually, and I'm
sorry to bring it up again, has talked about sending
a fleet of solar powered satellites into the atmosphere in
order to reflect sunlight. So this is like a kind
of tech bro thing. I mean, there's a kind of
icarous esque quality to this story.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Don't you think it has something to do with controlling
such an unruly element?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Can you imagine controlling the sun? There's nothing more potentate.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
If you can't take over the Earth, take over the sun.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
But it has that little bit quality of like, oh,
you know, there's global warming, let's think about colonizing Mars
global warming.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Let's pump random chemical and.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
See what happens. It just seems like a fool's errand
to me.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, Well, interestingly, there's a kind of an analogous technology
which is being used and has been being used for
quite a long time called cloud seeding I've heard of
and cloud seeding has also been in the headlines recently
because there's there's a huge cataclysmic flooding storm in Dubai
last year and some people think it's because of cloud seeding.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
And what is cloud seeding exactly?
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Cloud seeding is basically, if there are clouds in this god, yeah,
you can get them to rain by giving them particulate
to coalesce.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
It's like oxytose. If you take oxytocin, sometimes it helps
you cry, Is that right?
Speaker 5 (15:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Or you know, actors very famously use menthol blowers to
make themselves cry because it like blows mint essentially into
your eyes and it makes you tear up.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
That's atreat great analogy. This is a quote from the
Bloomberg piece about cloud seeding. There are natural seating agents
dust that's blown into the troposphere, or the miasmic stench
of ammonia gas wafting up from penguin poo in Antarctic
colonies above which researchers have observed extra cloud cover. There
are unnatural agents too, such as stratocumulous trails above shipping
(15:44):
lanes caused by engine pollution. Plain old salt seems to
work in early experiments. Pilots toss it out of plane windows.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
I would love to see pilots are like thrown salt.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well right now, shoulders so now that the innovation is
to cover salt in titanium, which I'm not quite sure why.
But in Dubai right now, there's a fleet of planes
that whenever a cloud, you can't create a cloud, but
as soon as a cloud comes into the sky, it's
basically like clouds showing as much titanium coated salt into
(16:15):
the cloud as possible.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
That's crazy, It's it's pretty bizarre.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
And so the original verdict was that cloud seeding had
nothing to do with this cataclysmic flooding in Dubai. It
was a conspiracy theory, blah blah blah. However, this Bloomberg
piece that came out this month that actually there may
have been a substantial amount of cloud.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Seeding in the days around this huge flood. So interesting,
Be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
The thing that makes me think about here is like
we are now acting as gods, including in human gene editing.
Like there's that crazy scientist in China who edited the
heritable human DNA thing, so that irreversible over generations if
that person procreates similarly, like you know. The Bloomberg piece
made a good point that the average lifespan of a
(16:59):
major private of a major public listed company is now
fifteen years. So if your horizons are the next financial quarter,
you may think you know have at it.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Why not, let's try.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
But if your horizons are let's say, even your children,
right or your children's children. I have a feeling that
we may look back on this time of cloud seeding
and star dust and gene line editing, and think, how
was it.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
That's all we can do?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
That was all we could do. It does beg the
question like how effective are these things?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Unknown?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
And to the star doests make the point we're already
geo engineering because we're pumping so much common dioxide and
other crap into the atmosphere that it would be unreasonable
not to use technology to try and counteract the negative
consequences we're already generating through technology.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I just think it's really interesting that these are private
companies that are trying to do this, because obviously we
know that anything the government tries to get done is
going to take forecs, and private companies like taking it
upon themselves. It's it's a sort of oligarchical mentality of
like we're going to take responsibility for how it rains.
(18:12):
I mean, these are I.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Don't imagine if the Manhattan Project had been private, like
tons of nuclear explos.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
There'd be no US. It's very true, it's very true,
But now this seems to be so popular. You know,
private companies move a lot faster than governments, and the
speed at which climate change is occurring means that there's
not much time for governments to catch up.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
After the break, Polymarket continues to bet.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
On the Ukraine Russia war.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Japan's latest invention claims to wash your soul, and twenty
three in meter users assuing, then you found relatives for
a slice of the inheritance.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Then un chat and me Happy third birthday, Chat GPT,
watch out, Google might outpace you, and.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
We're back, Cara.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Remember poly Market, the online gambling site where you can
basically bet on anything.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
It's my favorite thing in the world. It's how we
knew Mom Danny was going to win.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
They had basically called the election based on betting volume.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Before the election happened.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
We talked about it last time on the show, in
relation to the betting volume on whether or not presidents
the lens you would wear a suit. Unfortunately, and distastefully,
people seem unable to be able to get enough of
betting on Ukraine Russia war stuff. One such bet is
around whether Russia will capture a town called Mirno by
(19:49):
November fifteenth, will be called mir No Grad in Russian.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
But in Ukrainian Mino. I know because I have Ukrainian grandfather.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yes you do.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
The battle around this city is dragged on for weeks
and it's actually generated more than a million dollars in
trading volume on polymarket about whether or not russiall will
capture this town. Poly Market in order to determine whether
or not Russia has captured the town, uses maps of
the front lines generated by something called the Institute for
the Study of War, which is a DC based think tank.
(20:19):
Their maps are considered the gold standard for where the
front line is on any given day. Just before the
resolution on this of this Mirnograd bed, the map was
changed to show that Russia had indeed taken the town.
Polymarket paid out, and the next day the map reverted.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
You're kidding.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
What for a for media who broke this story hypothesized
is that someone at the Institute for the Study of
War was gotten to, essentially was bribed to temporarily change
the border of the conflict so that whoever was betting
that Russia would take it was paid out.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
What do you think about gambling on a war with
real human lives.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Well, I think it's extremely distasteful. I should know.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
IW have said that there was unauthorized and unapproved edits,
so they've acknowledged that somebody did go into the mainframe
and change the front lines temporarily, haven't. They haven't gone
any further than that. But but yeah, I mean it's
I'm gambling on a war with real human lives at states.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
It's one thing to gamble on people who are boxing,
which I still feel like is barbaric. But I mean
when it comes to war in people's lives, like and
that this is now something that like has become you know,
almost like a fun thing to do on the internet.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
I think it's On the other hand, you might just
say this democratizing different governments basically bet one way or another.
I mean they're you know, yes, let's look at you know,
Syria for example. All these conflicts have governments who are
betting on either side essentially, And now you can do
it too.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
You can be like, you can do it too, but
you're just making money. You're not like changing Well, I
guess you can kind of change the course of things.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
But well, okay, so that brings us back to the
politics point.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I read a piece in the Financial Times a couple
of weeks ago with the headline A new specter looms
over democracy, prediction markets, and basically the columnists Jami M.
Kelly writes about how these prediction markets can manipulate the
perception of the outcome of political events. So once you
see like Mandani ninety four percent according to.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
The better, you're like, hey, Mammdannie's going to win.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
If you're a Cuomo voter, you might think no point
turning up for the polls. Yeah, you would have been right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
But she makes the point that in closer run things,
this could be really really bad. For example, last year,
more than three point six billion dollars was staked on
the outcome of the presidential election the US presidential.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Three point six billion usix.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Billion, despite the fact US users were not officially allowed
to use the platform, so Kelly points out in the
FT they may have used VPNs to circumvent that. But
according to the FT, four non American accounts from outside
the US together placed more than thirty million dollars in
wages on Trump's winning, which creates a decisive swing in
(22:54):
his favor on the platform in the weeks leading up
to the election.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And the platform does affect how people vote.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
For thirty million dollars, you could tip that that's not
in the grand scheme of things compared to the amount
of money flowing through packs and super packs and whatever else,
like it's a drop in the ocean, but to be
able to effect the perception of the whole you know,
United States public who look at these betting markets for
a source of truth about's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
She also made it do it for sports so effortlessly.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
You know, this like this whole of the election was
stolen narrative, et cetera, et cetera. If you've got like
a poly market which has been externally manipulated to show
like a much higher chance of let's say, Trump winning,
and then I mean it's like the negative consequences of this.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Are quite high, quite high. Yeah, no, absolutely, I would
actually call poly market weird technology. And I have another
piece of weird tech that I think is going to
excite you.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Go ahead.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
From the country that brought you the singing toilet.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Oh I love to sing, this is Japan, right.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Japan is now making a human washing machine. What yes,
what do you.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Think this looks like, I mean, like a washing machine,
but a little bit.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
No, it looks like when you know a you know,
Ridley Scott movie, someone comes out of a machine and
there's this like primordial ooze, like a chyrogenic Yes, exactly,
a cryogenic pod. It kind of looks like that. It's
a capsule with a sort of lounger that's built inside
(24:21):
the capsule and so you sit on that lounger and
the top comes down around you, and it sort of
looks like this whalehead and the whole cycle itself takes
fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
It's a womb.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
It is a womb, and it's surprisingly not designed by Toto.
It's created by a Japanese company. And I love this.
This is when the Japanese are like, we do things
so well that we're going to call our company Science.
The company is called Science, and I wanted to just
read you the instructions for how it works. So basically,
you enter the capsule, the automatic wash begins. The machine
(24:57):
uses microbubbles and a fine misshap to gently clean your
entire body. There's built in sensors that track the user's
vital signs during the wash to ensure safety, and while
the washes in progress, calming visuals and soothing music are
played inside the capsule. Then, after washing, the machine drives
(25:20):
the user automatically. The user steps out fully clean, relaxed
and monitored. No towels or manual effort are needed.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
And I shall want to cry. It's kind of make
you want to cry.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
It's kind of need this. So where this actually was
demoed was at the World Expo in Osaka, and you
know science the lean named company was compelled to commercialize
the prototype. So actually it will suit and be in
use at a hotel in that area that purchased one
of the fifty units the company plans to produce. Guess
(25:54):
the price of this unit.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Twenty five thousand dollars?
Speaker 3 (25:58):
No, no, no, my friend to be human car wash
that costs three hundred and eighty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Well, yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
So it won't become probably won't be coming to a
screen nerrors anytime soon.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
No, it will not.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
So caart you know that I had this weird obsession
with why it's a bad idea to do twenty three
and me.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, of course we know it's a terrible idea. We learned.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So there's a story in the Wall Street Journal this
week about how the irony of unintended consequences can be.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Truly mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
In short, people who find new family members through DNA
sites like twenty three and me have started suing.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Them with the inheritance. You're kidding, I promise you it's true.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Well, that's where I'm going to get three hundred and
eighty five thousand dollars to get my human watching she is,
I have to find a rich relative on twenty three
and me.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
So I'm going to tell you a story about Carmen Thomas. Okay,
Carmen Thomas used twenty three and means DNA tests to
track down her absent father, Joe Brown. Okay, but am
I'm going to reach on the story now. It turned
out the man she believed to be her father had
died five years earlier, but she connected with two likely
half sisters. They went out for boba te and a
(27:07):
sleepover at their grandmother's. She looked through family albums and
held a pillow with his photo printed on it. A
year later, she was suing the Brown sisters and then
remember that you made me pay. Thomas wanted to share
of a multimillion dollar medical malpractice award they had won
after Joe Brown had died of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Oh my god, American history.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
So American unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I laugh, but it's pretty imagine.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
So this is basically people going on twenty three and meters.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
I think she's in earnest and then she was like, eh,
she's like.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Wait a minute, there's some money here.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
That case actually settled in favor of the family because
Thomas's claim came too late. But another example went the
other way. A brother and a sister in Utah were
fighting over their late father's estate, and for reasons best
known to himself, the brother reached out to someone on
twenty three and me who might be.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
A half brother.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
The deceased biological father didn't have a will, and the
potential half brother sued the original brother and sister and
one a third of the disputed estate. The reason for
the victory was because the father had been sending a
card and one hundred.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Dollars each year on his birthday. To the court's ruled
that was fatherhood.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Fatherhood.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Basically what this The sort of effect of this is
that people are being encouraged to frame their wills much
more consciously. To my family or to my dear children
is a minefield.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
So again the takeaway from this is do not use
twenty three and me, I guess you have money that
you want to protect.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 8 (29:04):
Happy birthday to chat GBT, Happy birthday to your chat GBT,
Happy third Bert gotta hit it birthday to chat GYBT,
Happy third birthday.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
This is chatting me.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
I couldn't have hit it. You're right, Cara.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
It's almost three years to the day since the release
of Chat Gypt, which seemingly changed the way we all
interact with technology forever.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
And to celebrate, or rather memorialize our dear friend Chat,
we're here with Megan Moroney, the editor of Technology at Axios.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 9 (29:37):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
I love to talk about.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
The chat Cara saying happy birthday, but I was also
thinking of the Drake songs my birthday. I can cry
if I want to. How much my celebration is there
in the halls of this week?
Speaker 9 (29:50):
Yeah, not a lot in Open AI. It's been a
rough week. A lot of competition, specifically from Google.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah, and Sam Alton has talked about a code. I'd sarge,
what does that look like?
Speaker 9 (30:02):
There's three things I wrote a piec yesterday for Axios
on like the three things that are keeping Sam Altman
up at night and they're big.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
The first one is just money.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
I mean everyone is talking about the AI bubble and
how much AI costs to create the models, and then
you know, for everyone to be using them, and it's
scary and there's a lot of circular investments. So a
lot of people are just saying the bubble is about
to pop. And the second thing is Gemini is Google's
newest model and it's has great reviews. The image model
(30:37):
is great.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
This is nan nano banana mode.
Speaker 9 (30:40):
Yes, nano banana. And the third thing is really the
safety issues because people are using it as a therapist
or you know, as a confidant, and there's a lot
of issues coming up with that.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Cara, I think is most interested in the in the
therapist angle. We've talked about a bunch on this show. Yes,
I'm very interested in the Google angle.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Though.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Since the release of Gemini three, Google's added more than
three hundred billion dollars to its market cap. Why was
the release of Gemini three so consequential?
Speaker 9 (31:13):
So you have to go back obviously three years when
chat Gipt was first released and Google was caught on
the back foot. They you know, started a lot of
this generative AI technology and with deep Mind, they have
some of the biggest models. And they were surprised when
chetchipt it came out. They didn't have a similar tool
(31:33):
and they make their money in search, and they were
threatened by this.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
And so you know, it's taken them.
Speaker 9 (31:40):
A few years to figure out how to not cannibalize
their their business and then also to really catch up
and they have with Gemini, which is built into Google Docs.
You know, it's just it's part of the tools that
everybody uses.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Do you think we could look back on this as
the week that opened up AI's dominance started to fade, Like,
is that what this week is going to signal?
Speaker 9 (32:04):
I wouldn't say the beginning of the end, but it changed,
Like I'm not discounting chat GPT for sure. It could
be just that this renewed focus gets them back on
the right track. But I think this is this is
the first real threat that they've had. And of course,
you know, everyone who's been following tech for decades. No,
(32:26):
there's the myspaces, you know that everyone thought was gonna
be the next big thing, and you know and remembers it,
or the Beta max where no one used that anymore,
so very you know.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
It could go that way too, Megan, thank you for
joining us again. And if you're thinking listeners about switching
to Gemini writing your wedding vows with the chat GPT
using anthropic to make a company of one, please write
into tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Com with your stories.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
We'd love to hear from you and we love to
feature them.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm Kara
Price and.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I'm Oz Voloshin.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and
Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Kara Price,
Julian Nutta, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell
for iHeart Podcasts. The Engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack
Insley mixed this episode.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Kyle Murdock wroteut theme song.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
We want to hear from you.
Glasco from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is tech stuff. I'm as Valoscian and I'm care Price.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Today we've got two big stories to break down for you. First,
content creators, brands and gen z alike are all turning
towards the latest luxury unplugging. Then tech companies blasting particles
into the atmosphere to dim the sun in response to
climate change.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Then we'll tell you about a few other stories that
caught our eye this week, like how polymarkets bets led
to disinformation about the Ukraine Russian War, a human washing
machine that promises to wash both your body and your soul,
and then we'll dive into how twenty three ande meters
is giving some users a piece of their new family's inheritances.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Then on Chat to me Chatcheep celebrates its third birthday
while Sam Altman declare's code read at Open AI with
Google's Gemini making rapid progress. Joining us to talk about
this is Megan Moroney from Axios, who's just published a
piece with the headline the three things keeping Sam Altman
up at night. All of that on the weekend Tech.
(01:19):
It's Friday, December fifth, Hello.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Cara, Hello Oz I was reflecting this week about this
thing that we used to say when I think we
first did podcasting, which is that you and I had
a face for radio.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yes, I mean funny enough, I've made that joke for
all these years. But now podcasting is pivoting to video,
like what are we?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Nobody is immune? Nobody is immune anymore. And there was
an article that I recently read in Business Insider called
being hot is a new job requirement.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Dari asks why this caught your eye?
Speaker 3 (01:57):
You know, it's funny. My mother always used to say
I'm in an image based business because she's in public relationships, right,
and so who you see is what you get, and
it's very important. And I kind of always used to
roll my eyes at that idea. And then this article
kind of confirmed everything she's been saying to me for
thirty years, which is, and I'm thirty six, but since
(02:17):
I was six, yeah, exactly. Yeah, she always was kind
of like, people who are good looking are more successful.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Well, I mean that's kind of a story as all
as time, right, So I'm curious where the new and
the new job requirement comes from.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
So tech is both driving the issue and it's solving
the issue. Meaning that in some ways we have become
more and more critical of how we look. Like post pandemic.
We talk about the zoom meetings are forcing people to
stare at their faces more and more. You and I,
I mean I just looked at myself in the camera
right now, and I'm like, carry you could.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Have especially with these lights, with these lights.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
But you know, it's like in every field, I think
there is a demand for people to be looking at themselves.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
More and more.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
It's a kind of double headed trend, right, because on
the one hand, is so like the image of our
face talking into the ether has never been more important
nor more easy to fabricate.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
That's right. And this is the way that tech is facilitating,
not the problem, but this idea that you kind of
need to be hot in order to work in the
job market. Very normal people who do not know how
to take headshots are using very simple AI tools to
say I'm not just Emily, I'm yasified Emily, and I'm
going to take this picture of me and my dog
(03:35):
and I'm going to turn it into my head shot.
You know everyone talks about Instagram face. Yeah, Instagram face
is like lip augmentation, botox, GLP ones being on the rise,
plastic surgery of especially amongst men, which we talked about
on the show. I think there's now something that we
can call LinkedIn face that we're actually changing the way
(03:58):
we look for professional reasons.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I heard that some people are actually getting plastic surgery
men in particular to look more alert's.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Isn't that bizarre? The eye is the eye surgery, like
constantly looking like listen.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I'm gonna be awake during these forty million hour weeks
that I'm working.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, totally zoom phage zoom face.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Actually, I think about this particularly in my other sort
of founder CEO role. I do think like I'm losing
my hair a bit, like it too fat, like less
credible because I don't sort of match this particular aesthetic.
So I think it's probably being amplified by tech, but
it is not like a new thing.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
I think the takeaway for me is that as the
job market gets tighter and tighter, looks maxing in general
is something that is playing into the way people get jobs.
And I think that when you see the sort of
most successful billionaires looks maxing, if you're someone who even
aspires to be.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
A millionaire, bezos.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
You're right that, like, all right, I better get my
I think it's actually really interesting. I do think that
our chronic onlineness has led us down this path of
temptation to sort of change our face and what we
look like and how we interact digitally. And I think
that there is now a pushback and it ties into
(05:15):
the story that I want to tell you, which is
about how unplugging became luxury's most valuable currency. Huh, I
actually said this to you. I think when we were
reporting on Sleepwalkers that to me, exclusivity has always been
a luxury.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Scarcity is is luxury?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
What is scarce in the digital age? Offline, being offline,
an analog And so the story that I want to
tell you that comes from Vogue Business, which is about
this woman who goes by the name of cat GPT.
She's a creator. She recently decided to connect her cell
phone to an analog phone in an attempt to cut
(05:52):
down her screen time. Now the irony is her post
about her no phone mourning went viral because of course
she had to put.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
You can't, you can't and you can only be offline performatively,
right if you're just offline nobody knows the thing.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
If you like tree files in the forest exactly, if
you if.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
You're offline without telling people you're offline on your social media,
are you offline?
Speaker 3 (06:16):
It reminds me of this great Onion headline once that
was like woman runs marathon, tells nobody why. But you know,
actually from that viral piece, she created this company called
Physical Phones, which sells Bluetooth connected analog phones and cat
GPT told Vogue quote, people are really turned off by
(06:36):
technology right now. They're turned off by AI. And by
the way, we tend to conflate AI with social media
and our phones.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I think that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I mean, I think that's when we talked about this
a few times with the new Luddites and honestly with
your journey this year in terms of doing less social
media and being offline. I every morning try and make
sure I don't look at my phone for the first
thirteen minutes it's awake, So I think it's it's it's
But what's interesting, and this is I guess a Vogue
business story, is that this like trend and cultural desire
(07:07):
is being.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Exactly exactly and it's similar to the and I know
this from running a book club where we were working
with fashion brands. It's similar to what happened with the
literary space, which was all of a sudden everyone was like,
it's time to read.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
I know, I watched hundreds of hours of you flicking
through books on Instagram. But how do you concentrate on
the book when you're also making social content about yourself?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Is interesting?
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Well, that's why people ask if it's performative reading into that.
I say, no, it's not.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
There was a rumor that you were a celebrity.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Book book stylist.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yes, I that you gave celebrity books that they could
be papped with.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
That's right, true or not?
Speaker 3 (07:48):
I can't say. I still can't.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
I still want to say.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
But going back to this why it's a Vogue business piece.
You know, this idea that brands are now investing in
luddite behavior like Burbery sponsored an outdoor walk with a
group of women who were just trying to connect to nature.
You know what I mean. It's just there's something so
interesting about to me that not using technology can be
(08:17):
something that is in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
We have this, I guess, tremendous nostalgia for a lost time.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
We do and I think it's I mean, I was
kind of laughing. I was looking at the Physical Phones
website this morning, and I mean, apparently people are buying
these physical phones. I think the irony that they're connected
via Bluetooth is not lost on me. But in a
moment of actually great irony, AI companies are actually up
on this trend.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
I saw this.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
There was a piece in The Times about how the
all of the marketing campaigns of the major AI companies
don't include AI, and didn't didn't Anthropic open a pop
up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
The Zero Slop Zone, so you would go inside. It
was this you know pop up in the West Village
where all pop ups are, and inside you were asked
to unplug and interact with other humans. So the company
actually passed out baseball caps, really some really hard hitting
stuff that read thinking. And they were also handing out
(09:16):
hard copies of a fifteen thousand word essay written by
the Anthropics CEO Dario amo Day. The essay is called
Machines of Loving Grace, How AI could transform the world
for the better.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I mean, having a super premium printed essay handed out
by an AI company in a pop up in the
West village.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
I mean there is a kind of mind melting quality
to this.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I was thinking, Actually, I saw Elon was on X
this week talking about something that was actually connected, and
I want to play you a clip please.
Speaker 6 (09:46):
When digital media is ubiquitous and you can just have
anything digitally essentially for free or very close to for free,
then the scarce commodity will be live events.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
There we go, the scares com It'll be live events.
Just Also, one more thing that I thought was very funny.
Part of being able to be let into this, you know,
zero slop zone was that you had to have cloud
on your phone. Of course, so they weren't like letting
people in willy nilly to like read a fifteen thousand
word essay that you had to have cloud on your phone.
Which is funny.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Was having an AX, which entitles you to buy water
full price of the USA.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
That's that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
We're going to give you a free bad ear radio
if you spend eight hundred dollars a year on the
American Express. The other thing that I thought was really
interesting is that open Ai actually shot their latest ads
on thirty five millimeter film and insisted that no AI
was used in the making of the ad. That's Oppenheimer's stat.
Speaker 7 (10:39):
Living in the end times, it's just like, either be
what you are or don't be what you are, but
don't like try to make a gimmick about how you're
using analog film to make a commercial about the product
that's probably going to change the world most drastically in
the next ten years.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So Caro, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Now.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You brought up hotness earlier. Do you know what the
hottest thing of all time is? What the sun? Okay,
so I want to talk to you about the sun.
Imagine if the solution to global warming was as simple
as blocking sunlight.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
This is interesting.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yeah, So I actually read a piece in Bloomberg about
how there's tens of millions of dollars being invested right
now into an area of technology called solar geoengineering. Okay, Basically,
what they're trying to do is to do something called
stratospheric aerosol injection. Basically, the premise is if you can
(11:38):
sort of shoot reflective particles into the sky, they can
reflect the sunlight back towards the sun, and it's actually
it happens naturally.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
So we're fighting the sun with the sun.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
We were sort of turning the sun itself. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
This actually happens after a volcano erupts. It happens anyway.
All of the stuff, the sulfur dioxide that goes into
the environment after a volcano, a period of cooling often follows.
So some people are experimenting with pumping sulfur dioxide in
the environment, which can cause acid, rain damage, the ozone
and asthma attacks.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Great.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
I mean there are others though, who are using other
theoretically non harmful materials. And there's kind of two tracks
to this. On the one hand, there's a government track.
The UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency has invested seventy
five million dollars researching.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
This insignific not insignificant.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
But a private company called star Dust of course, which
is a sexier name than the Advanced Research Invention Agency,
has raised sixty million dollars and they are looking to
pattern a chemical that has fewer drawbacks than sulfur dioxide.
There's also a company called Make Sunsets, which is which
(12:53):
is selling cooling credits for one dollar a pop to anyone.
You can buy one. You remember when you were a
kid that you could buy an acre on the moon.
Of course, of course this is the acre on the
Moon the.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Green Bay Packers. Yeah, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So for one dollar you can have the good feeling
of paying for a sulfur dioxide balloon that explodes into
the environment.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
I should have bought one. I should have bought one.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
The EPA has suggested it's not maybe not the best idea,
and the company has two founders, neither of whom are scientists,
one are technologists, and one's a marketer. They claim on
their website that one gram of particles in a stratosphere
prevents the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide,
which is about as credible as when you are offered
the opportunity to spend an extra dollar on your flight.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Carbon exactly. I just think it's I mean, it's an
interesting text story because from what you've read or what
you've learned in reporting this, like has has any significant
change been made?
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
I don't think so yet. But Elon actually, and I'm
sorry to bring it up again, has talked about sending
a fleet of solar powered satellites into the atmosphere in
order to reflect sunlight. So this is like a kind
of tech bro thing. I mean, there's a kind of
icarous esque quality to this story.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Don't you think it has something to do with controlling
such an unruly element?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Can you imagine controlling the sun? There's nothing more potentate.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
If you can't take over the Earth, take over the sun.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
But it has that little bit quality of like, oh,
you know, there's global warming, let's think about colonizing Mars
global warming.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Let's pump random chemical and.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
See what happens. It just seems like a fool's errand
to me.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
Yeah, Well, interestingly, there's a kind of an analogous technology
which is being used and has been being used for
quite a long time called cloud seeding I've heard of
and cloud seeding has also been in the headlines recently
because there's there's a huge cataclysmic flooding storm in Dubai
last year and some people think it's because of cloud seeding.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
And what is cloud seeding exactly?
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Cloud seeding is basically, if there are clouds in this god, yeah,
you can get them to rain by giving them particulate
to coalesce.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
It's like oxytose. If you take oxytocin, sometimes it helps
you cry, Is that right?
Speaker 5 (15:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Or you know, actors very famously use menthol blowers to
make themselves cry because it like blows mint essentially into
your eyes and it makes you tear up.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
That's atreat great analogy. This is a quote from the
Bloomberg piece about cloud seeding. There are natural seating agents
dust that's blown into the troposphere, or the miasmic stench
of ammonia gas wafting up from penguin poo in Antarctic
colonies above which researchers have observed extra cloud cover. There
are unnatural agents too, such as stratocumulous trails above shipping
(15:44):
lanes caused by engine pollution. Plain old salt seems to
work in early experiments. Pilots toss it out of plane windows.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
I would love to see pilots are like thrown salt.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well right now, shoulders so now that the innovation is
to cover salt in titanium, which I'm not quite sure why.
But in Dubai right now, there's a fleet of planes
that whenever a cloud, you can't create a cloud, but
as soon as a cloud comes into the sky, it's
basically like clouds showing as much titanium coated salt into
(16:15):
the cloud as possible.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
That's crazy, It's it's pretty bizarre.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
And so the original verdict was that cloud seeding had
nothing to do with this cataclysmic flooding in Dubai. It
was a conspiracy theory, blah blah blah. However, this Bloomberg
piece that came out this month that actually there may
have been a substantial amount of cloud.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Seeding in the days around this huge flood. So interesting,
Be careful what you wish for.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
The thing that makes me think about here is like
we are now acting as gods, including in human gene editing.
Like there's that crazy scientist in China who edited the
heritable human DNA thing, so that irreversible over generations if
that person procreates similarly, like you know. The Bloomberg piece
made a good point that the average lifespan of a
(16:59):
major private of a major public listed company is now
fifteen years. So if your horizons are the next financial quarter,
you may think you know have at it.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Why not, let's try.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
But if your horizons are let's say, even your children,
right or your children's children. I have a feeling that
we may look back on this time of cloud seeding
and star dust and gene line editing, and think, how
was it.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
That's all we can do?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
That was all we could do. It does beg the
question like how effective are these things?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Unknown?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
And to the star doests make the point we're already
geo engineering because we're pumping so much common dioxide and
other crap into the atmosphere that it would be unreasonable
not to use technology to try and counteract the negative
consequences we're already generating through technology.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I just think it's really interesting that these are private
companies that are trying to do this, because obviously we
know that anything the government tries to get done is
going to take forecs, and private companies like taking it
upon themselves. It's it's a sort of oligarchical mentality of
like we're going to take responsibility for how it rains.
(18:12):
I mean, these are I.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Don't imagine if the Manhattan Project had been private, like
tons of nuclear explos.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
There'd be no US. It's very true, it's very true,
But now this seems to be so popular. You know,
private companies move a lot faster than governments, and the
speed at which climate change is occurring means that there's
not much time for governments to catch up.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
After the break, Polymarket continues to bet.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
On the Ukraine Russia war.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Japan's latest invention claims to wash your soul, and twenty
three in meter users assuing, then you found relatives for
a slice of the inheritance.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Then un chat and me Happy third birthday, Chat GPT,
watch out, Google might outpace you, and.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
We're back, Cara.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Remember poly Market, the online gambling site where you can
basically bet on anything.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
It's my favorite thing in the world. It's how we
knew Mom Danny was going to win.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
They had basically called the election based on betting volume.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Before the election happened.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
We talked about it last time on the show, in
relation to the betting volume on whether or not presidents
the lens you would wear a suit. Unfortunately, and distastefully,
people seem unable to be able to get enough of
betting on Ukraine Russia war stuff. One such bet is
around whether Russia will capture a town called Mirno by
(19:49):
November fifteenth, will be called mir No Grad in Russian.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
But in Ukrainian Mino. I know because I have Ukrainian grandfather.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yes you do.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
The battle around this city is dragged on for weeks
and it's actually generated more than a million dollars in
trading volume on polymarket about whether or not russiall will
capture this town. Poly Market in order to determine whether
or not Russia has captured the town, uses maps of
the front lines generated by something called the Institute for
the Study of War, which is a DC based think tank.
(20:19):
Their maps are considered the gold standard for where the
front line is on any given day. Just before the
resolution on this of this Mirnograd bed, the map was
changed to show that Russia had indeed taken the town.
Polymarket paid out, and the next day the map reverted.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
You're kidding.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
What for a for media who broke this story hypothesized
is that someone at the Institute for the Study of
War was gotten to, essentially was bribed to temporarily change
the border of the conflict so that whoever was betting
that Russia would take it was paid out.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
What do you think about gambling on a war with
real human lives.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Well, I think it's extremely distasteful. I should know.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
IW have said that there was unauthorized and unapproved edits,
so they've acknowledged that somebody did go into the mainframe
and change the front lines temporarily, haven't. They haven't gone
any further than that. But but yeah, I mean it's
I'm gambling on a war with real human lives at states.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
It's one thing to gamble on people who are boxing,
which I still feel like is barbaric. But I mean
when it comes to war in people's lives, like and
that this is now something that like has become you know,
almost like a fun thing to do on the internet.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
I think it's On the other hand, you might just
say this democratizing different governments basically bet one way or another.
I mean they're you know, yes, let's look at you know,
Syria for example. All these conflicts have governments who are
betting on either side essentially, And now you can do
it too.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
You can be like, you can do it too, but
you're just making money. You're not like changing Well, I
guess you can kind of change the course of things.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
But well, okay, so that brings us back to the
politics point.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I read a piece in the Financial Times a couple
of weeks ago with the headline A new specter looms
over democracy, prediction markets, and basically the columnists Jami M.
Kelly writes about how these prediction markets can manipulate the
perception of the outcome of political events. So once you
see like Mandani ninety four percent according to.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
The better, you're like, hey, Mammdannie's going to win.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
If you're a Cuomo voter, you might think no point
turning up for the polls. Yeah, you would have been right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
But she makes the point that in closer run things,
this could be really really bad. For example, last year,
more than three point six billion dollars was staked on
the outcome of the presidential election the US presidential.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
Three point six billion usix.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Billion, despite the fact US users were not officially allowed
to use the platform, so Kelly points out in the
FT they may have used VPNs to circumvent that. But
according to the FT, four non American accounts from outside
the US together placed more than thirty million dollars in
wages on Trump's winning, which creates a decisive swing in
(22:54):
his favor on the platform in the weeks leading up
to the election.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And the platform does affect how people vote.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
For thirty million dollars, you could tip that that's not
in the grand scheme of things compared to the amount
of money flowing through packs and super packs and whatever else,
like it's a drop in the ocean, but to be
able to effect the perception of the whole you know,
United States public who look at these betting markets for
a source of truth about's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
She also made it do it for sports so effortlessly.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
You know, this like this whole of the election was
stolen narrative, et cetera, et cetera. If you've got like
a poly market which has been externally manipulated to show
like a much higher chance of let's say, Trump winning,
and then I mean it's like the negative consequences of this.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Are quite high, quite high. Yeah, no, absolutely, I would
actually call poly market weird technology. And I have another
piece of weird tech that I think is going to
excite you.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Go ahead.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
From the country that brought you the singing toilet.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Oh I love to sing, this is Japan, right.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
Japan is now making a human washing machine. What yes,
what do you.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Think this looks like, I mean, like a washing machine,
but a little bit.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
No, it looks like when you know a you know,
Ridley Scott movie, someone comes out of a machine and
there's this like primordial ooze, like a chyrogenic Yes, exactly,
a cryogenic pod. It kind of looks like that. It's
a capsule with a sort of lounger that's built inside
(24:21):
the capsule and so you sit on that lounger and
the top comes down around you, and it sort of
looks like this whalehead and the whole cycle itself takes
fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
It's a womb.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
It is a womb, and it's surprisingly not designed by Toto.
It's created by a Japanese company. And I love this.
This is when the Japanese are like, we do things
so well that we're going to call our company Science.
The company is called Science, and I wanted to just
read you the instructions for how it works. So basically,
you enter the capsule, the automatic wash begins. The machine
(24:57):
uses microbubbles and a fine misshap to gently clean your
entire body. There's built in sensors that track the user's
vital signs during the wash to ensure safety, and while
the washes in progress, calming visuals and soothing music are
played inside the capsule. Then, after washing, the machine drives
(25:20):
the user automatically. The user steps out fully clean, relaxed
and monitored. No towels or manual effort are needed.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
And I shall want to cry. It's kind of make
you want to cry.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
It's kind of need this. So where this actually was
demoed was at the World Expo in Osaka, and you
know science the lean named company was compelled to commercialize
the prototype. So actually it will suit and be in
use at a hotel in that area that purchased one
of the fifty units the company plans to produce. Guess
(25:54):
the price of this unit.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Twenty five thousand dollars?
Speaker 3 (25:58):
No, no, no, my friend to be human car wash
that costs three hundred and eighty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Well, yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
So it won't become probably won't be coming to a
screen nerrors anytime soon.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
No, it will not.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
So caart you know that I had this weird obsession
with why it's a bad idea to do twenty three
and me.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, of course we know it's a terrible idea. We learned.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So there's a story in the Wall Street Journal this
week about how the irony of unintended consequences can be.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Truly mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
In short, people who find new family members through DNA
sites like twenty three and me have started suing.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Them with the inheritance. You're kidding, I promise you it's true.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Well, that's where I'm going to get three hundred and
eighty five thousand dollars to get my human watching she is,
I have to find a rich relative on twenty three
and me.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
So I'm going to tell you a story about Carmen Thomas. Okay,
Carmen Thomas used twenty three and means DNA tests to
track down her absent father, Joe Brown. Okay, but am
I'm going to reach on the story now. It turned
out the man she believed to be her father had
died five years earlier, but she connected with two likely
half sisters. They went out for boba te and a
(27:07):
sleepover at their grandmother's. She looked through family albums and
held a pillow with his photo printed on it. A
year later, she was suing the Brown sisters and then
remember that you made me pay. Thomas wanted to share
of a multimillion dollar medical malpractice award they had won
after Joe Brown had died of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Oh my god, American history.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
So American unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
I laugh, but it's pretty imagine.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
So this is basically people going on twenty three and meters.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
I think she's in earnest and then she was like, eh,
she's like.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Wait a minute, there's some money here.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
That case actually settled in favor of the family because
Thomas's claim came too late. But another example went the
other way. A brother and a sister in Utah were
fighting over their late father's estate, and for reasons best
known to himself, the brother reached out to someone on
twenty three and me who might be.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
A half brother.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
The deceased biological father didn't have a will, and the
potential half brother sued the original brother and sister and
one a third of the disputed estate. The reason for
the victory was because the father had been sending a
card and one hundred.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Dollars each year on his birthday. To the court's ruled
that was fatherhood.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Fatherhood.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Basically what this The sort of effect of this is
that people are being encouraged to frame their wills much
more consciously. To my family or to my dear children
is a minefield.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
So again the takeaway from this is do not use
twenty three and me, I guess you have money that
you want to protect.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 8 (29:04):
Happy birthday to chat GBT, Happy birthday to your chat GBT,
Happy third Bert gotta hit it birthday to chat GYBT,
Happy third birthday.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
This is chatting me.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
I couldn't have hit it. You're right, Cara.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
It's almost three years to the day since the release
of Chat Gypt, which seemingly changed the way we all
interact with technology forever.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
And to celebrate, or rather memorialize our dear friend Chat,
we're here with Megan Moroney, the editor of Technology at Axios.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 9 (29:37):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
I love to talk about.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
The chat Cara saying happy birthday, but I was also
thinking of the Drake songs my birthday. I can cry
if I want to. How much my celebration is there
in the halls of this week?
Speaker 9 (29:50):
Yeah, not a lot in Open AI. It's been a
rough week. A lot of competition, specifically from Google.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yeah, and Sam Alton has talked about a code. I'd sarge,
what does that look like?
Speaker 9 (30:02):
There's three things I wrote a piec yesterday for Axios
on like the three things that are keeping Sam Altman
up at night and they're big.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
The first one is just money.
Speaker 9 (30:12):
I mean everyone is talking about the AI bubble and
how much AI costs to create the models, and then
you know, for everyone to be using them, and it's
scary and there's a lot of circular investments. So a
lot of people are just saying the bubble is about
to pop. And the second thing is Gemini is Google's
newest model and it's has great reviews. The image model
(30:37):
is great.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
This is nan nano banana mode.
Speaker 9 (30:40):
Yes, nano banana. And the third thing is really the
safety issues because people are using it as a therapist
or you know, as a confidant, and there's a lot
of issues coming up with that.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Cara, I think is most interested in the in the
therapist angle. We've talked about a bunch on this show. Yes,
I'm very interested in the Google angle.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Though.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Since the release of Gemini three, Google's added more than
three hundred billion dollars to its market cap. Why was
the release of Gemini three so consequential?
Speaker 9 (31:13):
So you have to go back obviously three years when
chat Gipt was first released and Google was caught on
the back foot. They you know, started a lot of
this generative AI technology and with deep Mind, they have
some of the biggest models. And they were surprised when
chetchipt it came out. They didn't have a similar tool
(31:33):
and they make their money in search, and they were
threatened by this.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
And so you know, it's taken them.
Speaker 9 (31:40):
A few years to figure out how to not cannibalize
their their business and then also to really catch up
and they have with Gemini, which is built into Google Docs.
You know, it's just it's part of the tools that
everybody uses.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Do you think we could look back on this as
the week that opened up AI's dominance started to fade, Like,
is that what this week is going to signal?
Speaker 9 (32:04):
I wouldn't say the beginning of the end, but it changed,
Like I'm not discounting chat GPT for sure. It could
be just that this renewed focus gets them back on
the right track. But I think this is this is
the first real threat that they've had. And of course,
you know, everyone who's been following tech for decades. No,
(32:26):
there's the myspaces, you know that everyone thought was gonna
be the next big thing, and you know and remembers it,
or the Beta max where no one used that anymore,
so very you know.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
It could go that way too, Megan, thank you for
joining us again. And if you're thinking listeners about switching
to Gemini writing your wedding vows with the chat GPT
using anthropic to make a company of one, please write
into tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Com with your stories.
Speaker 5 (32:54):
We'd love to hear from you and we love to
feature them.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm Kara
Price and.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
I'm Oz Voloshin.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and
Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Kara Price,
Julian Nutta, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell
for iHeart Podcasts. The Engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack
Insley mixed this episode.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Kyle Murdock wroteut theme song.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech
Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
We want to hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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