Podcasts about Roomba

It’s that time again. For reasons science still can’t explain, you people keep showing up for the Mailbag. Robbie the Mariners Fan rides shotgun as we cannonball into a supersized cereal bowl of randomness. On the menu: constellations, baseball card scam artists, pet peeves, Roomba contraband, human trees, creative traffic-ticket excuses, fighting dogs, why prediction markets are under siege, density altitude, permanent stick-on tattoos, Flock cameras, and the legendary Maller Hopper. It's a buffet of bewilderment with absolutely no educational value guaranteed—yet somehow, you'll probably make it to the end anyway. All questions sent in by new listeners & P1's of the #MallerMilitia! Download, subscribe, and remember that sharing is caring (unless it's an STD.) Follow Ben on Twitter @BenMaller and listen to the original terrestrial radio edition of "Ben Maller Show," Monday-Friday on Fox Sports Radio, 2a-6a ET, 11p-3a PT!...Follow, rate & review "The Fifth Hour!" #BenMaller #FSRWeekends See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s that time again. For reasons science still can’t explain, you people keep showing up for the Mailbag. Robbie the Mariners Fan rides shotgun as we cannonball into a supersized cereal bowl of randomness. On the menu: constellations, baseball card scam artists, pet peeves, Roomba contraband, human trees, creative traffic-ticket excuses, fighting dogs, why prediction markets are under siege, density altitude, permanent stick-on tattoos, Flock cameras, and the legendary Maller Hopper. It's a buffet of bewilderment with absolutely no educational value guaranteed—yet somehow, you'll probably make it to the end anyway. All questions sent in by new listeners & P1's of the #MallerMilitia! Download, subscribe, and remember that sharing is caring (unless it's an STD.) Follow Ben on Twitter @BenMaller and listen to the original terrestrial radio edition of "Ben Maller Show," Monday-Friday on Fox Sports Radio, 2a-6a ET, 11p-3a PT!...Follow, rate & review "The Fifth Hour!" #BenMaller #FSRWeekends See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The FCC blocked new foreign devices from entering the U.S. Roombas included. Plus, China is developing a $14,000 robotic womb that carries a baby. We break down how it works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Michael Garfield breaks down the U.S. government's decision to ban certain foreign-made robots and what it could mean for popular smart home devices like robot vacuums. He also sits down with ESPN historian Mike Soltys to discuss his new book, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN, and the incredible story behind the network that changed sports broadcasting forever. Plus, are smartphones getting so expensive that leasing is the new normal? Michael explores Apple's new iPhone leasing option and whether buying a phone outright is becoming a thing of the past.

Otto Oppenheimer y Normando conversan sobre las últimas novedades en tecnología: la introducción de robots humanoides en aulas de Nueva York (Optio y Real Biotics M‑Series) para apoyar a maestros, y las polémicas sobre vigilancia y prohibiciones de robots chinos, incluidos aspiradores como Roomba. Analizan además el grave problema de los deepfakes y la pornografía de desquite —con casos que afectan incluso a celebridades como Scarlett Johansson— y la discusión legislativa para perseguir a los responsables. También comentan inversiones masivas de Amazon y cambios logísticos en Puerto Rico, y nuevas tecnologías de seguridad escolar como drones con pepper spray y robots incapacitantes. www.ottotecnologia.com 

Ben Affleck won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Do you know the answer to his winning question? Super Game Thursday! Are these Onion articles real or fake? Well, they're all fake, but you know what we mean. More details are coming out about Tony Romo's DUI. The priciest sports cards ever sold. Forget Jordan and Kobe, it's all about Babe Ruth. Sarah is now trying to convince Vinnie to get a cat. An inheritance is less cash and more crap than you'd hope. The US government just banned Roombas.

Hour 1: Bob's Movie Club Presents: Raising Arizona (1987). Is this when America fell in love with Nicolas Cage? Holly Hunter wants a baby desperately, and nothing but chaos ensues. It's a live action road runner cartoon, and it's Matty's favorite movie everybody! Then, Sarah hates her cats. Or maybe just their food? Everyday inconveniences that young people couldn't handle. Like, ya know, waiting for a call. Hour 2: Super Mario is now streaming on Peacock. Spider-Man is getting big reviews. A documentary is outlining how gross Jared Leto is. Ranch prices have increased 112%. No, not the dipping sauce. Is Mussolini ‘s granddaughter Italy's biggest star? Bob tells the story of a time she bit someone. 5 things women actually find attractive in men - take notes, Matty! Hour 3: Ben Affleck won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Do you know the answer to his winning question? Super Game Thursday! Are these Onion articles real or fake? Well, they're all fake, but you know what we mean. More details are coming out about Tony Romo's DUI. The priciest sports cards ever sold. Forget Jordan and Kobe, it's all about Babe Ruth. Sarah is now trying to convince Vinnie to get a cat. An inheritance is less cash and more crap than you'd hope. The US government just banned Roombas. Hour 4: A whole lot of nothing for a while and then some bad news. ‘Once' star Glen Hansard has tragically passed away. BTS is boycotting the Grammy Awards. Vinnie is still confused about boy bands. Ever been to our website? Check it out: radioalice.com. So much fun stuff going on this weekend: Jerry Day, Dog Surfing, and more! Plus, Were They At Taylor's Wedding? And lots and lots and lots of laughter. Enjoy!

Spain is being INVADED! Spain is facing an absolute border collapse as thousands of Moroccan migrants, mainly men, breach the frontiers of its North African enclaves, triggering an emergency deployment of the Spanish military. Who deserves the blame for this? Also on the show: Everyone, including a Philadelphia Eagles coach, is making fun of Dr. Fauci's "Plead the 5th", Roomba vacuums are set to be banned in the United States, Rivera reviews Spiderman Brand New Day, and Ron Hart joins the show to talk Fauci's hearing. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you missed it, the Megadeth show at the Southside Oktoberfest grounds tomorrow night is moving down the street a bit & is now happening inside the La Crosse Center. Find all the info here. Obviously, the threat of rain with some possible lightning and heavy winds can seriously affect any outdoor event, so moving the show to the Center makes a ton of sense. Also in the news this morning, a nationwide recall on eyedrops, accusations by multiple women against Jared Leto, the Mayor of St. Paul is being investigated, Dr. Fauci pleads the fifth, Afroman is suing, and a ban on Roomba vacuums. In sports, the Brewers got shellacked by the Giants last night, an update on yesterday's training camp injuries, the latest on Mia Bieniemy, and Ahman Green announces that he's got Parkinson's. Talked about what's on TV & streaming today/tonight, and discussed Ben Affleck's big win on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" last night. If you're looking for something cool to do this coming Halloween, you might want to go to Universal Studios. Three women in a car flew off an overpass and ended up landing upside-down & trapped in the vehicle until a bunch of strangers came to their rescue. And a young lifeguard is a hero after saving a young boy from drowning. It's Hypothetical Thursday and with Jean in Boston, I asked you the question this morning: "If the Purge was real, would you participate or lock down with your family/friends/neighbors?" Office Cora also joined me just after 8am to talk about what she's up to in the 715 this weekend…and her hypothetical question for me was: " " Elsewhere in sports, Macklin Celebrini signs a massive contract, Plaxico Burress compares his time in prison to playing with the Jets, and a professional golfer ends up in the wrong country after looking for some Korean BBQ. And in today's edition of "Bad News with Happy Music", we had stories about a woman who Googled "Does God Forgive Murderers" before actually killing someone, Fireball's new sneakers, the robot that was supposed to help teachers at a school in NY isn't happening afterall, a man accuses his partner of cheating on him with a very specific sex toySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The show talks disrespect against A&M Volleyball, Will's new Canadian TV obsession, today's Reason's To Celebrate, a ban on new Roombas, and more.

This episode is an off-the-rails, laugh-heavy conversation that bounces from modern annoyances to classic TV nostalgia. The hosts open with crude but playful banter about bathroom listening habits before skewering today's subscription-driven car features — like paid heated seats — and ranting about uncooperative printers. They riff on hoverboards, Roombas, and robot fantasies that never arrived, then pivot into a long, affectionate detour through 70s–90s TV shows and movie memories. Pop-culture references (Michael J. Fox, Gary Busey, Belinda Carlisle) mix with self-deprecating life notes about aging, jobs, and family, all delivered with rapid-fire comedic chemistry.

Episode 436 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Shilpi Gupta, Founder of Qyn Labs. Lived the problem and driven to solve it. If I were a venture capitalist, that would be the most critical pillar of my investment thesis. It's not impossible to succeed otherwise, but entrepreneurs who have personally experienced the friction they're solving, I believe, will always have a massive edge. Shilpi fits the mold here. It was her own personal health experience that led her to a stark realization that hormonal health data is currently reactive, fragmented, and sparse. She knew there had to be a better way, so she founded Qyn Labs to solve this problem and as you'll learn, she is uniquely qualified to build this company. For context, our brain communicates in two ways: electrical and chemical. Hormones are the primary chemical signals in our body, yet we have almost no real-time visibility into them. Qyn is changing that with a data-driven platform designed to bring clarity, precision, and understanding to hormone health through simple, at-home testing. Before Qyn, Shilpi spent her career scaling complex robotics and consumer hardware products. She was part of the Roomba team at iRobot, then she played a key role in making Prime One-Day delivery happen through her work at Amazon Robotics, and then she learned about healthtech while leading product at Pison. Chapters 00:05 Introducing Shilpi Gupta, Founder at Qyn Labs 03:40 Advice for Entrepreneurs Building in the HealthTech Industry 06:25 Shilpi's Childhood and Early Influences 10:29 Career Beginnings and Transition to Product Management 14:11 Experience at iRobot and Lessons Learned 18:18 Amazon Robotics: Scaling Consumer Experience 22:10 Joining Pison and Getting her Start in HealthTech 26:59 What led Shilpi down the path of starting Qyn 30:55 The Details about Qyn and How it Works 37:31 The Flow of Data to the Consumer 40:36 Advice on Building Hardware and Figuring out Manufacturing Partners 42:05 Raising Capital as a First Time Founder 44:34 Qyn's Business Model 45:28 How Shilbi Leverages AI 46:54 Three Apps Shilpi can't live without

July 15th – Show 1128The ChatWe discussed out recent activities and experiences. T shared updates about being approved for a line of credit, attending a market where she made $$, and planning to look for a car next week. Beth had a quiet week due to pain and heat, but managed to teach stained glass to some old people. I visiting a new coffee shop in town, and ordered some new barefoot shoes from AliExpress after not finding a single local shop that sell them. Emergency Questions: Have you ever eaten a meal so bad you actually complained? What is the maximum number of times you can ask someone to repeat themselves before you just have to nod and laugh? What is your favourite swear word? Backtrax – UK & Canadian Hits 02 TV & MoviesEvil Dead Burn Hungry Hokum Silo Nirvana the band, the show, the movie Castle Ms. X Linktree Discord: https://discord.gg/7ndTXDhNC5 a Facebook message A blog comment below @ us on Twitter Why not surprise us with an MP3 in an email to twoguys@snugradio.co.uk Please take some time to show us your love by reviewing us on ITunes. We welcome ALL comments The Snug is an affiliate of Amazon Music   Snug StatsMusic This ShowElf Maf & Lee – Crazy Little Thing Called Love Tamara Writes & AI Sings – Semantic Satiation Cover Version SandwichWho’s Loving you Join us every Wednesday from 18:30 (UK time) See you then…and have a Snuggly week.

The Good Guys get some Roombas and become Robotjox. The one where The Good Guys watch ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Automata⁠.-The Good Guys:  Regan, Rob, and Ryan -Producer:  Eric 'e0n' Chung  -Engineers:  Regan & Eric  -Social Media Strategist:  E  -Background Music and FX courtesy of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  - -Extra -Doombot -The Spark -⁠ -⁠⁠ -Featured background music playlist:  Ad Infinitum, Data, Mantra, Symbolic, Vintage, and Arcadia  by  White Bat Audio  -Background music for POP Quiz and Trailer is Upgrade by  White Bat Audio  - Theme music is Battle (Boss) by BoxCat Games and is licensed under CC BY 3.0  - Additional music is Against the Wall by BoxCat Games and is licensed under CC BY 3.0  -

In the podcast episode of Tangent Station, hosts Kev and Willis humorously discuss the ineffective stint of Dubbot, a robot cop in Dublin, Ohio. Despite being equipped with high-tech features, Dubbot failed to make any arrests or issue citations during its nearly one-year long duty in a parking garage. The episode is filled with jokes about the robot's limited capabilities and its hefty $128,000 price tag, making it more of a novelty than a crime deterrent. With no performance metrics to back its existence, Dubbot highlights the often misguided attempts at integrating technology into everyday policing.

On today's episode of The Agenda podcast, Matt Heath joins ACC Head G Lane & Tony Lyall to bask in the glow of a NSW State of Origin Series win, and ask what the forefathers of cricket would make of the NRL bunker (05:15)...Next, will Will Jordan score the most out of any All Black in Wellington on Saturday (22:00), also it's the Football World Cup Quarter-Finals, so what should Matt prepare to serve at his watch party as the Three Lions try to bring it home (30:10), and we head to Matt Heath's F1 corner to find Max Verstappen drinking gin on his boat (40:40)...We round it all up with your feedback in 'Yours Please', and show exactly how much work goes into coming up with an official ACC nickname (48:30) Did you know that we've launched a new Facebook Group called 'The Caravan' JOIN HERE! Brought to you by Export Ultra! Follow The ACC on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok Subscribe to The Agenda Podcast now on iHeartRadio, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts! iHeartRadio Apple Spotify YouTube THANKS MATE! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dead On Arrival: What was just Hype and what was just wrong Timing? Some technologies and products get over-hyped, and never seem to come to fruition? Some just come to fruition, but years or even decades later? In this episode of Tech Deciphered, what is Dead On Arrival versus just wrong timing Navigation: Intro The Fork Cold Open General Magic The Metaverse Dead on Arrival The soon to be Resurrected… Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand SchmittIntroduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 78, Dead on Arrival. Was it just hype or just wrong timing? In this episode, we are going to discuss two different types of businesses that as an investor, as an entrepreneur, you want to think carefully about. Looking back, you want to understand better what happened. If we take dead on arrival, we’re talking about businesses, technologies that maybe the tech work fine, but actually no one cared about it, no one wanted it. It’s really a mismatch in terms of what consumer want versus what you are trying to deliver. It’s a classic example of a solution finding for a problem. On the other hand, will it happen but not like that, not now? It’s a type of business where we were too early. We tried to make it work, but actually the technology is not ready now, but it might become ready in the future. As an entrepreneur, as an investor, obviously, you want to make sure you are not in one of these two technologies, one of these two categories. But it’s really a useful lesson to learn which situation you might be in because it will help you make better decision and pick better industries going forward. Nuno, what’s your take on this tough analysis?Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, in hindsight, everything looks like, “Oh, of course, this wasn’t meant to work,” etc. But here we’re going to take a stab, as you mentioned, at things that are just wrong timing. They might have failed miserably in the past, but they might work in the future. The Fork To have this stake on the ground approach to it, as we’ve had in previous episodes, of defining exactly what we think will happen, but just not like that, versus the dead-on-arrival, which is a little bit more of a hardcore view on it. To your point, we want to really split between those two things because in some ways people are like, “Well, are we ever going to go and have different ways of interacting, for example, in terms of input and output, like with glasses or things like that, that really scale to become pretty pervasive?” We probably would agree that, “Yes, that will happen”. Maybe not in the way that we’ve anticipated until now, and certainly it’s going to take longer than we’ve expected. In some ways, the “will happen, not like that” is a little bit like Amara’s law or Nuno’s law, as referred to in the past. We tend to overestimate the speed at which we get to a revolution, underestimate impact. The “will happen, not like that” will probably fit into that. They will have probably bigger impact than we thought they would, but they will just take longer. Therefore, the solutions we’ve had until now are not great solutions. Whereas the dead-on-arrival, we’re saying, “Hey, we don’t think actually this works.” It’s to your point, not solving a problem that actually needs to be solved, or it’s solving it in the wrong way. Yeah, it’s basically an attempt to really frame, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a venture capitalist, if you’re someone who is an angel investor and is looking at the market right now, what things should you put some real money and real resources, real time behind versus not, and really share that with you guys: our audience.Bertrand SchmittCold Open I always like to go back to a company called General Magic, a company that was legendary in Silicon Valley, spun out of Apple in the 1990s. There was even a movie made about General Magic. It’s a company that tried to basically build the first modern smartphone with touchscreens, app ecosystem. The only issue was it was years before the technology existed to support it. But Nokia at the time was less ambitious and more practical with what the technology was able to do at the time. But what’s interesting with this company is that obviously the smartphone was coming, just took 10 more years, 15 more years. Interestingly enough, some of the people in the team ended up being very successful in that exact space. Tony Fadell, for instance, who ended up creating the iPhone, co-create at least, and Andy Rubin, who end up building up Android, selling that to Google and leading the charge with Google Android.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, a very successful team. Tony Fadell, obviously, later on did Nest as well. Megan Smith, who was later the Chief Technology Officer of the US. A lot of people that came out of it that did a lot of important things. To be honest, I think a lot of the technology that was developed that was in some way a capacity or that are reused later on by some of these team members. I’m not saying they were infringing on any IP, but definitely there was a lot of reuse of tech. But it was too soon, right? They were doing something that was truly ambitious too soon. But a lot of these principles, a lot of these things ended up manifesting themselves, and particularly in the iPhone later on and in that deployment. Another such example is actually the metaverse. We did two episodes back in the day, a long time ago, on the metaverse. We debunked it a little bit. Back then, I think it was a very nuanced debunking, if I recall it correctly, Bertrand, because we were saying, “Hey, it’s going to happen in some ways, but it’s an evolution, not a revolution,” not in the way that we saw definitionally. We were huge fans of Matthew Ball and his analysis around media, but somehow we disagreed, I remember, with his definition of what the metaverse is and how it will look like. There’s no doubt that there’s going to be a metaverse in the future, probably metaverses in the future before there’s any given unification. In those metaverses, we do believe. But this whole hype cycle around metaverse and what’s happening clearly didn’t work out well, as proven also by all the write-offs done by Meta on their metaverse stuff. That much must have hurt. It’s related to AR and VR as well and to the enriched reality positioning of a lot of these technologies, which we’ll talk about later. But, again, it was probably something that’s going to happen. It’s going to happen likely in a different product manifestation as the one that was anticipated by a lot of the pundits that opined on what’s happening around metaverse in the future. But it’s going to happen. It’s just going to take longer. It’s going to probably come from angles of entry that are likely not what people had anticipated earlier on. Maybe it’s from gaming, maybe from something else. But definitely it’s going to happen.Bertrand SchmittYes, and you could argue that Apple did a similar mistake with the Vision Pro. I think the Vision Pro is the worst launch of an Apple product. When we say launch, it’s been three years maybe?Nuno Goncalves PedroSince the Newton, maybe?Bertrand SchmittYes, that’s my point. You have to go back a really long time to have such a disastrous launch. I think for me, it’s very interesting because it’s really a category where on one side there is a metaverse of some sort. You should argue if you are just using Twitter, or Facebook, these are some parallel universe in parallel to your real life. But the full on metaverse where you need some extra super heavy glasses to make it work, that simply has not worked. Don’t get me wrong, there are some super small, narrow cases where your heavy VR glasses makes sense for some training, for some simulation, for some light gaming. But given the weight, the disconnection from the real world, it has really never taken fire. Even at cheaper price like Meta was able to do, at more expensive price, much higher quality like the Vision Pro did. It looks like people have an issue with putting heavy glasses on top of them. We’ll talk later about the other side: AR glasses. But the traditional metaverse, heavy glasses, VR glasses, yes, it’s not feeling right, and I don’t think it will ever be right. It needs a different form factor to go at scale.Nuno Goncalves PedroDefinitely fundamental shifts on the metaverse. Just a quick reminder, Meta actually changed their name because of metaverse.Bertrand SchmittYes. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s not just that they’re writing off the investments, it’s their name is apparently wrong. It didn’t really happen in that way. You are saying that this persistent embodied virtual world, which was the early definitions of what a metaverse was, didn’t really happen until now. It might happen at some point, but not in that way. But, obviously, a lot of the enablement layers are still work in progress, right? Real-time 3D, presence, avatars, all of these things are moving on. A lot of these enablers will be ready once there is a time where these technologies and businesses that are fundamentally anchored around these technologies will emerge. It’s, again, right components, wrong product alignment, but at the same time, it will happen, just not yet.Bertrand SchmittAgain, I think we’re going to face a split of a virtual reality light that you can call AR with very light glasses that are not a pain to wear, that are more limited, especially today or the next 5 years. The VR glasses that will stay a niche product that are useful for some use cases. Do you want to do a flight simulation? You want to do military training? There will be use for that. But beyond that, it’s more limited. We forgot to talk about the Google Glass. This one was an early, early AR glasses. But, again, here we go back to the capabilities. Simply, we were not there at the time.Nuno Goncalves PedroDead on Arrival We’re moving to Dead on Arrival. What things do we think are relatively dead on arrival? We’ll be nuanced on a couple of these aspects. Not everything is totally dead on arrival. But maybe let’s start with a good one, which is some of the crypto summer promises, particularly around NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and the decentralization of everything, the tokenization of everything. That didn’t quite work the way people thought it would. A lot of people were very happy for a period of time that they had some NFT that was worth a ton of money. Good for them. I hope they sold it back then. Some did actually, fortunately for them, but most of them did not. As an asset and the tokenization element, we’re not questioning that tokenization itself doesn’t make any sense. But from my perspective, a lot of the elements of tokenization plus the tokenization of everything don’t make necessarily imminent sense. I think we’re going to have a world that not everything is going to be tokenized, and a world where, to be honest, having the latest ape token as an NFT is maybe not something I really need. It’s dead on arrival in some ways. What do you think, Bertrand?Bertrand SchmittIt feels like it’s a tale of two worlds. On one side, there was clearly exuberance and bullshit. All these cryptocurrencies that make no sense, have no values. The NFTs are the same: no values, no sense, no logic in them. At the same time, we can see that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and few others were significant products, invention, that have a current total market value that is significant. I would say we can see that step by step, little by little, there is some tokenization happening, but it has been much more narrow than what was initially thought, expected. But it’s happening step by step. I think there is value in tokenization, but definitely not as much value as people expected. I think for one simple reason: it’s very expensive to set up in the sense that it doesn’t work so well, actually. It requires a lot of computing power for stuff that might not justify it as simple as that. Why do you want to replace a very efficient, superfast database by something slow, expensive to maintain? Why? You need to have real reason for that. I think in most situations, there was not a real justification to make that switch. I think, again, there is a niche for tokenization. It’s getting used. Obviously, there is stablecoin as well that are working and provide value. But definitely, the use cases have narrowed. The success stories have been few and far between. It’s definitely a space, but I don’t think it has lived up to the expectations. The expectations were simply quite insane in terms of what to expect, and it failed to achieve that. I don’t think it qualifies as a true revolution. It has been successful again in our situation: in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, in some tokenization. But beyond that, it was not the dramatic change that people were picturing.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, it’s been successful and there is a security, in this case, a currency of types, that links to the value of that specific network and the utility of that specific network. But on this case, in particular, the NFT stuff, I think there were two core premises that were very valuable about it. One was the premise of digital collectibles, the element itself being collectible and the fact that I have a unique one was only minted one. It’s a unique thing out there. I think at some point people forgot that actually digital collectibles are not as valuable as people think they are. Physical collectibles are more valuable. The reason for that is just human nature. I want to have something in physicality. I want to have something that I can show people, etc, that has a physicality to it. Digital collectibles, I think there was a problem fundamentally in part of the articulation of NFTs that reside in the value of digitization of these collectibles in and of themselves. I think that was part of the problem. The second problem was really the notion of provenance, the notion of certification, the notion of “this is what it says it is, and nobody can say this is something else.” This notion of provenance. That, I think, fits more into the point you were making, which is the point around use cases. This doesn’t fit all use cases. The provenance piece and the certification piece doesn’t fit for all use cases. Probably it might fit actually even more for actual physical assets where you want to have a certificate, that thing is what it says it is, but it’s actually maybe a physical asset rather than a digital asset. Again, lo and behold, it doesn’t apply to all the use cases that relate to provenance. I don’t think we need to tokenize all the provenance ledgers in the world for this to be working well. Again, it was a little bit of an overreach. In some ways, all these players were very happy. There was a lot of bullshit. To be honest, this is an area that I do think there was actual active fraud. All due respect to a lot of the players in the market, but there was active fraud. Honestly, there was bullshit.Bertrand SchmittI agree with you. I was going to say that it’s one of the rare sector in technology where I think frauds, scams were prevalent. Yes, you might have some shitty startups in general and stuff, and there might be fraud. I think true fraud is rare. True scam is rare. But here for NFTs, for cryptocurrencies, that was the majority you could argue. That’s the part that I never really liked in all that industry. If you look at NFT, personally, I never understood the concept. For me, it made simply no sense because, yes, you can say, “Oh, I have created this rare digital token.” But sure, so what? Who cares? Who cares? You can have hundreds, thousands, millions of unique digital tokens. How does it matter? What’s the use case? What’s the connection? You can show it on your screen, but then how is it unique anymore? It’s not like people have to come to your house and check stuff on site or something like physical art. No, not at all. I don’t know. I think it was surprisingly true bullshit. Again, I’m still a believer in Bitcoin. I think there is true logic to have a separate virtual digital currency. But you don’t need hundreds of them. You just need one, maybe two for some variation. The same for tokenization, it doesn’t need to happen everywhere. Just need to happen where there is really strong real logical value. Beyond that, there is no point.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, makes sense. Maybe moving to our next one. I think we discussed this in a previous episode, which was the whole 3D TV stuff. We just don’t think that’s the product, right? It’s not going to be a 3D TV. I believe when we discussed this in the episode—I don’t want to lie too much—but I believe that’s what we came up with… It looks a bit more holographic or the manifestation comes through other mechanisms like glasses, etc. But we thought it was just dead on arrival. Nobody wanted to have glasses on the couch to watch the 3D TV, but also the 3D TVs themselves they tried to develop were very holographic, were super clunky and very heavy. In some ways, I think TV manifestation somehow is not a great manifestation for this. I put it on the dead-on-arrival pile. I have one, just to be clear. I still have one.Bertrand SchmittYeah, but it’s a weird one because if you remember, it suddenly happened. I remember being shocked as a consumer. Suddenly everyone talks about 3D TV. In a few months, 3D TVs are all out everywhere. Then after a few years, no one bothered to keep adding that because consumers didn’t care. I think one issue was, I think it has only worked with Blu-rays. I don’t think any streaming service supported that. With the rise of streaming, that was certainly a pretty big issue in the first place. Interestingly, in the movie theaters, do we still have movies being shown in 3D? I think we still have a few, but it’s really few and far between the movie theater.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, IMAX won on that format, the high-end format, IMAX won, not the 3D thing.Bertrand SchmittBut, yeah, if you’re on the TV at home, you don’t want to bother. Maybe if you’re in the movie theater, more high-end experience, you are willing to wear special glasses. I think it makes sense. I think, I guess at home, we are just too busy doing multiple things at once. Rarely sitting all around 2 hours for a movie, so you watch your phone, you check on something else. You don’t want to have these glasses on top that block you from the rest of what’s happening at home.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, it just didn’t work. I’m not sure it will work in any case, so we’ll see. But definitely, I don’t think that’s the right form factor.Bertrand SchmittIt technically worked, but practically, it was not accepted by consumers.Nuno Goncalves PedroLet me rephrase. I think it was a solution to a problem nobody thought they had. The execution of the product was the wrong one. It’s like that’s not what people wanted. Maybe we do want some 3D immersive experience, but that’s not the 3D immersive experience that we want, not manifested like that in effect, with its limitations, etc.Bertrand SchmittI want to say that we are not denigrating some of these experiments. Me, I still remember putting a Vision Pro and watching some content that is natively created by Apple for the Vision Pro. It’s an amazing magical experience, truly. But at the same time, I’m always worrying to have to think I’m going to spend 30 minutes putting my Vision Pro on my head. It’s heavy, it’s painful. Again, we go back to, I’m disconnected from everything else, and I don’t like that.Nuno Goncalves PedroWhen there was real technological development, like the case of 3D TVs, that technology development may have served other purposes. Again, we applaud those that put the money where their mouth was, the companies, the individuals that wanted to move forward some of these technology stacks, maybe less so the people that just decided to create NFTs for the sake of it with apes. No attack on those guys specifically, but just to create a specific view on that. But there’s a lot of stuff we’re talking about today which is actually great technological development. There’s stuff that came out of it that is very, very valuable technological development. Maybe to our next one on mobility, physical mobility. The Segway. Everyone’s like, “Oh, this is going to change how we move around the world, in particular for shorter distances, etc.” Well, apparently no. Apparently, it’s not super intuitive. There are still Segways out there for use by police forces, tours, and all that stuff. People say, “Oh, it’s…” No, well, it never scaled. It wasn’t changed. It didn’t change how relatively short local mobility was going to be done. I think part of it is actually the problem with the product. The product is not as intuitive as people thought it would be, and it has other issues around that in terms of security and safety. If you’re going to have a device or something that moves you around, what’s the minimum-accepted level of security that you would have. The fact that you have to incline to move it is actually not super as initially some probably people thought it’s actually not as intuitive as some might have thought it was. I think it’s a dead-on-arrival play. The vehicles of the future, I’m not sure, look like that at all. Happy to eat my words down the road, but I don’t think so.Bertrand SchmittYes, and I remember the massive hype at the start of this product. They were hiding it, but still telling you, We have seen it. That’s true. It’s going to totally change how cities are planned. I mean, the level of hype and bullshit was insane before the launch of the product and before anyone outside of a few knew what it looked like. Then we saw what it looked like, and it was on one side, an engineering marvel, the self-stabilization system was new. I mean, very few people had seen something like this before. At the same time, as you said, the issue was what happens if it loses battery? What happens if you fall from it? Quite frankly, if you look at today’s modern electric scooter, you have 95% of the value of a Segway without any of the downsides. You don’t need to learn a new way to do things. If you lose battery, it still works. I guess you can still push it. It’s not too expensive. You don’t have massive computers to just make it work. You don’t have massive robotics. It’s clearly an impressive engineering solution. But the exact example of a solution to a problem people didn’t have, when ultimately a much more simple and elegant solution was there for people who care. To be clear, you still could use a regular bike. The alternative was still your regular bike. But now you have electric scooters that are a clear, closer alternative, I guess, in spirit to what was supposed to be the Segway. Sometimes, let’s be careful. Overengineering might not be the answer.Nuno Goncalves PedroEven scooters, which are, to be honest, I would argue a much easier philosophical view of how mobility should be done and a much easier form factor, so to speak, in terms of mobility, even those won’t have wide adoption to everyone. It’s not like everyone’s going to use a scooter. The bar for a scooter is much less than a bar for a Segway.Bertrand SchmittYes. I think in a way, the electric scooter is showing us in some ways that the limit of the dream is that even well-executed, even cheap, even easy to use, even low-risk in a way, there is still only so much that people are willing to use it because it’s a pain to bring with you everywhere. Actually, in some ways, you could argue it has only worked with this distributed platform, like lime and others that let you take one and drop it when you are done using it. But that was not a model that was workable for the Segway. I totally agree. You could argue that bikes are still the gold standard or now electric bikes are still the gold standard for who want that level of mobility.Nuno Goncalves PedroWell, the next one is to be a favorite of, I guess, everyone that didn’t invest in them, which is Juicero, which was the machine that basically created Juices out of squeezing a bag. I’m going to be nice here to… There were a bunch of well-known investors. They raised, I think, 120 million or something like that.Bertrand SchmittThat’s insane.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt is insane. But maybe the vision was not that vision. It was something grandiose and the complexity around dealing with liquids and whatever. I’m not really sure we didn’t pass or invest on the company.Bertrand SchmittBig old juice bags.Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe. You’re being facetious. Anyway, I’m not trying to attack the guys who actually invested in this, the investors that put money into this. But it was basically one of these examples that we’re trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. It’s like a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. I can just squeeze a bag of concentrated thing and make a juice. I can do something around the juice. As I said, maybe the big vision was well beyond that, and I’m not sure many of us will ever know what the big vision actually was. But yes, it was a solution, a $400 machine to a problem that nobody really had. That didn’t work.Bertrand SchmittI think the most crazy part of the story is that the business exploded when there was this Bloomberg reporter that showed that you could squeeze the bag with your hands without a machine and get the same juice. That’s pretty insane. That’s just so unbelievable.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe funny part of the story is MSCHF, this company that does all their on-point, slightly artistic, whatever, one-off, drops, etc, etc. Shout out to Gabriel. Gabe Wally, who was the founder there. This is funny. They actually did a collectible series of figurines of that startup toys, of which Juicero was one of them. Jibo, which I don’t think you’d appreciate. Bertrand, and the Theranos minilab. So someone is also making money on that, which is funny. So well done, MSCHF.Bertrand SchmittWhy not? Why not? Maybe we can go quickly over Lytro. This one was, I would say, brilliant technology. It was a camera able to capture light in a different way. You could actually dynamically change focus after the picture was taken. So something quite impressive, and I still remember looking at their products and thinking, should I get one? At the same time where it didn’t work, it was too limited in terms of image quality versus shooting the real picture. It was very tough to sell as an independent device because either you’re in the phone or you are in a DSLR, but there was no spot in between. In some ways, phones solved the issue not directly, but they kept adding cameras. At some point, you had not one, but two, but three, but four, but five cameras in your phone. You had a specific mode for anything you needed, and that’s it. Phone manufacturers managed to convince people they should pay for all these cameras, or provide a low-end version if you don’t want to pay for all these cameras. But yes, very interesting technology that did not manage to find a go-to market.Nuno Goncalves PedroYes, it’s falling in love with a technology solution that, as you said, was incredible, and not falling in love with what problem you are actually trying to solve. Because a lot of the elements of the problem that you’re trying to solve, either you take another picture. All due respect, instead of me trying to change the field of view, etc, and the focus, post picture taken, I take another picture. To be honest, you can take thousands of pictures now with different setups. Also, ignoring the fact that this was pre this whole AI boom. So obviously, that one I will be kind on. But with the AI boom, you can do a lot of things to pictures and changes and stuff like that. All of that changes the game in and of itself. Obviously, Lytro or Lytro, not sure how you spell them, or how you say their name, but they failed before that. So again, this was super great tech, great investors, good investors on board, but just nobody wanted that device. Why would I want this thing? A total failure on arrival. I think one also other aspect of it that may have been misinterpreted and underestimated by some of the early investors, certainly in the company, is the value chain. There is a value chain for cameras, for SLRs, DSLRs, etc, etc. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing their own level of innovation. In some ways, that fits squarely into that value chain, which I’m sure is a complex value chain to manage in and of itself. Maybe that’s created its own dynamics as well.Bertrand SchmittI think they try to insert themselves in the value chain, but I’m not sure first that they managed to get technology as small as it should have been. They simply didn’t convince anyone. The Sony or Nikon of the world, or the Apple or Google of the world, to use their technology in their phones, because no one really saw the value, per se. One thing to keep in mind, using their technology means you had a big trade-off in terms of megapixels. Actually, you will benefit from that great effect around the focus that can move anywhere after the fact. But in exchange, you had to lose dramatically the number of megapixels. At the time, all the rage was about how do I get more megapixels for my phone with good image quality. That was all that you were selling to consumers. Consumers would not have bought 10 times less megapixels for a weird benefit that at the time no one cared about. I think you are very right to introduce the fact that, of course, they could not have guessed at the time, but today you can get for free this refocusing effect with AI, actually.Nuno Goncalves PedroThat’s exactly the point I was making on the value chain. They went into a value chain that has a lot of players in it, and they got kicked in the butt anyway, because people were like, Why would I adopt it? They didn’t serve the purpose of the use case or the user flow. They didn’t anticipate competitive dynamics to it. Then they actually went straight up into a technology plus IP logic on a value chain that would be like, “Hey, dudes, just get out of here.” What would be the incentive for people to bring them on board? It’s like in some ways, they did all the mistakes under the book in that sense. Again, I’m not trying to diss the company, the founders, the investors, but it feels that was the problem in the end.Bertrand SchmittYes.Nuno Goncalves PedroShall we do some rapid fire dead-on-arrivals?Bertrand SchmittYes. A fan favorite. Have you tried a keyboard projector on?Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. I think I mentioned that in a previous episode, I did have one of the early ones and whatever. Yes, somehow we forgot that there’s other best, better ways of input, maybe voice would be a better way of input if that’s the problem, but anyway.Bertrand SchmittThis one is interesting because you just use it for one minute, and you discover it’s horrible.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s a horrible experience.Bertrand SchmittYou have to type on it. You don’t see exactly where you type. Each time you type, you are hurting your fingers because it’s not a smooth keyboard feeling, but you are tapping a solid surface. That’s amazing that it went to manufacturing, and basically no one gave feedback. There is no way it’s working. No way technically working, but practically, no one would want to use that.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s bad in all aspects. The finger’s touching. It needs to be a very over-engineered experience for it to actually detect the key stroking and all that stuff. It’s an over-engineered solution by default. It’s not private because once you have the keyboard projector, you’re like, “Where am I keyboarding projecting on?” It’s something that others can see. There are other alternatives that are better. The keyboards on our phones are pretty good these days, with autocorrection in most cases, I wouldn’t say all cases. Voice can also be an interesting replacement to that. If that’s what you’re going for, voice recognition has improved dramatically over the last few years. Again, it’s one of these, “Yeah, cool.”Bertrand SchmittIt’s clear that, first, touch has replaced a physical keyboard where you need one. And two, now voice recognition is getting better for sure.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe opposite side is that voice assistants were going to take over everything, that everything was going to be voice assistant-led. Alexa is going to run your life. You’re going to have games for voice. I actually have a good friend of mine who did a startup in that space. Actually, the company got acquired, and everything’s going to be voice, which, as we know, is also not true. We need to visualize sometimes. Sometimes we still want to write because we want either the added value of privacy or of expression at some standpoint. There are a lot of things that are happening around voice that are exciting. We just mentioned voice recognition, but not everything is going to be voice. Certainly not for the foreseeable future, and so that doesn’t work. Also, as the ultimate platform, we also want some visuals. We also want to have other kinds of interactions. There are limitations to voice assistants, for example. Voice assistants were not quite the next platform that people said they were going to be. I would say they’re a channel, but they’re definitely not a platform. That’s how, at least I see them.Bertrand SchmittYes, a channel versus a platform. I would agree with you. I must say I start to feel that we could be close to the future we have seen in Her. This movie, Her, I guess you saw it as well, where these guy keep talking to his personal assistants, and it’s becoming his friend, maybe even his love. I start to feel we are getting close enough with AI that this becomes a possibility. But again, it’s not your only way to interact. You want to type, you want to see stuff. There are many situations where you don’t want to be seen talking with someone. It’s more of a channel versus a platform. Yes, Alexa, it’s quite amazing how it went to the roof and crashed and burned. It moved up very quickly. Amazon invested billions, hired thousands of people, which was the right move. I mean, you have something that seems to work well enough and could be game changer, why not? But it was quite impressive as a crash and burn. It’s pretty rare to move that fast up and down.Nuno Goncalves PedroI agree. A lot of money is put into this stuff. I mean, Google went after it as well. I think Google probably executed better. Their tools and their hub tools, etc, were better in their devices. But to be honest, it was the beginning of something, it wasn’t really there. It’s shocking because a lot of people have Alexa at home, and Google Hubs at home, and whatever at home. But it’s really not that powerful. I have a bunch of Google stuff at home, and I still use it for very basic information. It’s not really doing much for me. It’s not like magically now with AI, it’s going to be much better. It’s not. It’s a legacy device now. Maybe in the future, we’ll have some stuff that will be cool, but definitely not the voice assistant manifestation that we saw in the past. I know the next is exciting to you, so I’ll let you go for it, Bertrand.Bertrand SchmittNetbooks. If you remember Netbooks, this was a horribly underpowered PC device. I kept buying one after the other, hoping that the next one would be fast enough. Trying to be a small, lightweight portable PC, they were called netbooks. Usually, they also had a small screen, like 10, 12-inch, 9-inch, and each time it was horrible. Very poor battery life, 2-3 hours, super, super, super slow. They were equipped typically with a full Windows OS, and they were killed overnight by the iPad. After 2 years of the iPad, no more netbooks. Oh, yes, and they had this… Typically, they would be equipped with… What was this name of the CPU? It was an Intel Atom CPU, I believe, or Celeron. Again, the root cause why, it was so slow. It was horribly slow.Nuno Goncalves PedroSo netbooks didn’t work. We didn’t want to go back to that. The iPad won and all [inaudible 00:34:05].Bertrand SchmittI think it has been proven at this stage. There are some small mini PCs these days. You have, for instance, the ROG Ally for gaming. There has been some revival with some Chinese manufacturers making some small PCs. I have to admit, I bought some, so I kept trying. It’s much more powerful, no question. Better battery life also. But we go back to the fact that if you have a very limited screen size, 7, 8, 10 inch, it’s just tough to put a full desktop operating system to good use. You need something more simplified, more touch friendly for it to be really practical. Yes, you can run the full desktop Excel on it, but will you do it on an 8-inch screen? Probably not.Nuno Goncalves PedroNetbooks, and maybe we’ll end with Google Glass. I mean, obviously, we’re going to talk about AR and VR in just a bit. I think it’s a good segue to our next section, and we’re not necessarily saying AR, VR is dead on arrival. We actually think they’re going to be out there for us in the future. But Google Glass, in the way that a lot of the first wave wearables were developed, was cool, but not enough. I think even the recent ones, the Meta Ray-Bans. I see a lot of friends of mine now, you’re wearing Meta Ray-Bans, and they’re like, “Oh, this is so cool”. It’s like, “How is that different from the Google Glass, but now a little bit nicer?” It still feels to me that’s the wrong way to approach it. Either we go with a more comprehensive solution for glasses or a solution for glasses that’s a little bit more easily integrated into existing frames, etc, for those of us, like the two of us, who have actual eyeglasses, or I don’t see it quite happening this way. I think just as a formality in how it was deployed, it seems to me it’s been the wrong angle a couple of times, even, to be honest, beyond the first wave of wearables. It’s been a little bit the wrong way to approach this, the wrong paradigm.Bertrand SchmittIf you remember the Google Glass, initially, they were launched in… Again, overhyped. You couldn’t even buy them, but still, it was overhyped. You could see a marketing department going crazy when they were showcasing models wearing Google Glass, that sort of stuff, fashion shows. That was insane. How is it connected to the value proposition of the Google Glass? Absolutely not. But you remember what killed the Google Glass?Nuno Goncalves PedroThis is the Robert Scoble in the shower thing. The whole lack of privacy thing.Bertrand SchmittYou tried to have this vision of the Google Glass that models are wearing and stuff in fashion shows. You have this guy, Robert Scoble, taking his picture with his Google Glass in the show, half-naked. Oh, wow, that quickly dropped. In the interest into Google Glass.Nuno Goncalves PedroRobert’s a good guy for the most part, so we’ll let him get away with it. But yes, it was not a good moment for the use of Google Glass. But to your point, it was overhyped. I don’t even recall that I had to do so many things to actually get access to one. I still have it. Then in the end, it was just totally underwhelming. I do think the meta Ray-Ban solutions, etc, etc, now they’re doing it with other brands as well, are more elegant because it’s around voice activation and stuff like that. But still, it’s not this. The soon to be Resurrected… I think these kinds of solutions are dead on arrival, which may be a good segue to the resurrection pile, so to speak, that will happen, just not like that pile that we have to share today.Bertrand SchmittYes. That’s the question. Are we in resurrection mode with AR glasses? The Ray-Ban, Oakley glasses, are the way to go? There are also some other brands like XREAL, for instance, that are a different approach. It’s more fun to watch movies that I personally like a lot and use a lot. I know quite a few fans for this. There is a market for either the XREAL for movies, meta, or Ray-Ban, for light information on top of your glasses. There are niches. I don’t know if it’s full resurrection mode yet, but I can see again, with AI, that there is the ability to do more and more. Will it be connected to your phone, will be independent from a phone? That’s also stuff to see. I guess at this stage, connection to a phone has some value. It’s making a comeback.Nuno Goncalves PedroI think it’s suffering from being overhyped. It makes sense that the category comes back. The use of glasses, a lot of people actually have eyeglasses. The use of different mechanisms that really expand your view. We’ve seen that with the advent of foldables in mobile phones. People want bigger screens. They want to get as close as they can to the tablet experience without necessarily having to go to laptops, etc. Definitely, I think the use cases make sense. It’s just how do you deploy it, and who’s going to deploy it best? I don’t think we’ve seen anyone that’s been particularly enlightened about doing it. All the great developments with Android XR from Google, Samsung doing a bunch of things in terms of deployment out there as well at the same time. I mean, are these guys going to redefine this category and create the first ever wearable, at least AR great experience or VR category of experience, or are we going to have much of the same? In the same way, it took several years for the smartphone category to be recategorized as a smartphone category under the iPhone. That was the category-defining moment. It was the vision of a bunch of people, obviously led by Steve, but a bunch of people that went to market and said, This is how we view the market to be, and they just nailed it. We haven’t seen the guys who’ve nailed it, I think, is the issue thus far, either on the VR side or the AR side. We just haven’t seen it.Bertrand SchmittDefinitely, we have not seen that. There are, of course, rumors that Apple is ending their Vision Pro program, and at the same time, is full-on on AR glasses, an alternative to the Meta Ray-Ban. We will see. I start to think I have trouble to see Apple pull this off because it starts to feel that, yes, they are great at making more efficient supply chain these days, but I feel after 10 years plus of Tim Cook leading the business, that’s all there is to Apple these days: thinner phones, pink colors for your latest device.Nuno Goncalves PedroVariations.Bertrand SchmittMore efficient chips, for sure. They have great chips. But beyond that, they canceled their car program, the Vision Pro was not successful in the marketplace. They have trouble to find the next story and to execute on the next story, quite frankly. You could argue that their most successful recent launch has been the AirPods.Nuno Goncalves PedroI think that’s absolutely spot on. We’ve discussed it in previous episodes how much… It’s taken much longer than I thought it would. I always said after Steve’s passing, that it would take maybe 5 to 10 years for the beginning of the demise of Apple, and it is taking longer. There was definitely some gravity created. Steve passed away in 2011, right? They’ve been hanging on to their time, so it’s now 15 years. It seems that only now Apple is really suffering in terms of product lines. Probably they started 1 or 2 years ago. They have a new CEO coming in September, so we’ll see if John will do a better job, if he’s really a product guy, and that’s how he’s going to go for it. He’s going to go for a few products really nicely done that can have great experiences, which is Steve’s hallmark, instead of what you said was the milking of the cow, so to speak, under Tim Cook. There’s nothing wrong with it created in a hugely valuable company with a huge amount of still innovations around the edges, but it’s like now they need real product innovation, a new category definition, play, and is John going to be the guy for that or not?Bertrand SchmittYes. Positively, Tim increased market cap of Apple. He didn’t destroy the business. We are not trying to tell that Tim Cook was a failure, but definitely it was not Steve Jobs. It was more a caretaker, optimizer type of CEO. But to go to the next level, you need another type of CEO. Quite frankly, it’s hard to find when it’s not a founder CEO.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, I think it will be difficult to find, but we’ll give John a chance once his time comes in September 2026, as one would. Moving to another topic that we’ve discussed in the past, self-driving. It’s going to happen. We all are waiting for it to happen. Self-driving cars, self-driving vehicles that we don’t need to drive in this mess of traffic, in particular spending a lot of my time in Southern California where traffic is incessant. The driving is… How can I put it in a nice way? Awful. People don’t seem to know what they’re doing. I think we all want to have self-driving cars. It’s taking longer than we thought it would, but I do think it’s going to happen. I wouldn’t put a mark on the sand on how long to get this world of self-driving cars. It’s going to coexist with non-self-driving cars for sure for a period of time. But I, for one, know deeply that it will happen, and I look forward to it. I love driving, but not in horrible traffic with horrible drivers.Bertrand SchmittWe are for sure very close. I mean, now, Tesla self-driving is extremely good. I have taken Waymo many times with great experience. It’s not going too fast, it’s not going on the highway, so there are some limits. But I would say really impressive all in all. I think we are pretty close. I don’t know if you know, but Waymo is working on expanding to many, many more cities, actually. I think we might be at a tipping point there. Quite frankly, I expect that teenagers in 10 years from now are not going to bother to learn driving. I mean, we’ll see, but I think many won’t.Nuno Goncalves PedroI mean, Waymo is now doing also stuff on freeways, certainly in the Bay Area. I had a friend of mine who took one recently, and he was scared. He was scared shitless—I think that would be the right way to put it—because the car wasn’t going that fast, people are aggressive on the freeway around your car. But to your point, I’ve used it in city. In the city, it’s great, and it’s aggressive enough. That’s one of the things I was a bit afraid about Waymo, that it wasn’t going to be aggressive enough in city driving, it is pretty aggressive. Yeah, maybe we’re closer than we think. Maybe it’s a couple of years rather than a decade, which is normally where we put the stake on the ground. But it’s definitely going to happen. I think there was an overhype too soon. There were great movements around level 3 and level 4 autonomy that in some ways were misconstrued early on as full autonomy. But now we will likely get what we ask for. Then at some point someone’s saying, “Hey, but why don’t we just have the flying objects instead?” We’ll get back to that. The flying car stuff, the eVTOLs and all that stuff, we’ll see.Bertrand Schmitt10 years ago, I remember the overhyping was very, very strong with self-driving. I nearly believed the bullshit. It was so strong in 2015, 2016 that nearly everyone thought it’s here in the next 12 months, basically. I think that was a lesson for quite a lot of people. Don’t trust the Silicon Valley bullshit machine, hype machine. It can go way too strong, way too fast. You absolutely need to spend time to understand realistically where we truly are. You cannot just buy the premise.Nuno Goncalves PedroMoving maybe to robotics and humanoids. Again, it’s going to happen both for consumer and for industrial. The humanoid form, I think, at some point will be important. Just not yet. I think we’re behind now the big buzz sentence is embodied AI, where you have physical AI manifestations. AI manifested through robots and other kinds of devices. It’s going to start happening in certain beachheads. But, hey, we’ve had this offer for a long time, and I know you still have your frustrations, Bertrand, with the Sony AIBO. I won’t traumatize you more than that, but definitely it will happen. We will have humanoids at some point. We’ll have different specialty devices that will help us in activities that we do both as consumers and also in the B2B and enterprise space, even in the industrial space. The writing’s on the wall that definitely is going to happen.Bertrand SchmittYes. I think the question, as always, is how do you get there? I think the intermediate steps of your optimized robot, a physically optimized robot, like a Roomba to clean your home or some other robots to mow your grass, a good example, I think initially you have to start a small, practical, not too technology advanced and progress your way. Truly humanoid robots are very disruptive because technically, if they work, they can do everything a human could do. But practically, I don’t think it’s that true because a lot of constraints. You have to have enough weight, you have to have enough force, you have to have enough vision, you have to have enough AI to just understand commands and move around. But, again, with all the progress in AI, the progress in electric motors, I am optimistic that there is a chance for the humanoid robot, but it’s not 3 years. It’s probably not even 5. It’s probably more like 10. Let’s not forget that a lot of demos with humanoid robots today are fake. It’s a remote operator, remotely controlling a robot. It’s not a robot working by himself in many, many, many situations. That, I think, is another thing hurting the reputation of some of these companies because these fake demos, they look great, but once you dig a bit, you realize it was a fake demo because it certainly didn’t come with a warning that it’s remotely operated.Nuno Goncalves PedroMoving maybe to the next one that it will happen, but not exactly like that. Quantum computing, I think for the most, it’s been in many cases a solution looking for problems. It’s beautiful, but it’s like, “What’s the problems we’re trying to solve?” I think we’re going to start having beachheads into problem solution and apps. I’m sure a lot of people out there would say, “Well, there’s already killer apps for this, a lot of the scientific modulation, cryptography, breaking, all that stuff.” But I’m like, “Yeah, cool.” It still feels very much like a bunch of pieces and hardware in effect that is trying to solve a problem that needs to be very much defined into several problems, several areas of problem solution going forward. Will it happen? For sure. I’ve been hearing about quantum computing since I was in college, since I was 17 when I got into college. I’m sure it will happen. It will have manifestations. There’s a lot of stuff probably already residing on some of these instances. But a full mainstream view of what quantum computing can do for us is still quite ways out.Bertrand SchmittYes, I mean, there has been some reports that some key steps in the technology starts to be working and that potentially the technology could start to deliver results in the coming 2-3 years. What I mean by results, results that will dramatically change how you need to encrypt because a lot about quantum computing is actually trying to decrypt the current technologies that are used to protect your information online. This one is big. If we manage to have a limited use of quantum computing things that work in a few years, that will have a dramatic impact on how we encrypt data. That’s the one piece I’m looking for: do we really manage to solve encryption with computing? If yes, then we need to make a lot of changes how we encrypt things.Nuno Goncalves PedroFusion energy, the gift that keeps on giving, but this somehow doesn’t fully happen. I know you’re a big fan.Bertrand SchmittI would say, practically, I’m a big fan of nuclear fusion energy because in a way, it’s working. It’s solved in terms of safety. Latest Gen5 reactors are ultra-safe. They cannot go out of control anymore. China has a working reactor. In some ways, part of me would say, “Why bother with fusion when we have fission that is working extremely well, and we know how to make?” If we are efficient about the process, we could make for really cheap. Having a better source of energy today will already be great for the world. I would like to see scale with fission. It’s great to research fusion. Fusion is near a limitless form of energy. This is exciting. I think what’s interesting with fusion these days, it’s not just the big governments working on spending billions before seeing any potential returns, but there is a lot of startups that are working on it. The bar went lower in terms of researching fusion. That part gets me excited. But again, I think we should go fission first and parallel with some fission investment, fusion research, and hopefully, fusion comes at some point, but we should not wait for fusion would be my big take.Nuno Goncalves PedroGood point. Last but not the least, we’ve dedicated episodes on this, so maybe today we’ll just do the little teaser. If you guys haven’t heard our episodes on AI and the bubble and all those things. The last big one that’s just not like that, it will happen is AI itself, and in particular, AGI, so generalized AI that will be just like a human. Obviously, it’s happening. We’ve discussed in previous episodes, there’s a lot of breakthroughs in terms of methodological approach beyond the GPT curse of actual hallucinations that doesn’t seem to be solvable. There’s a lot of things happening around reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation, and other methodological approaches to AI that we think will create tremendous breakthroughs. There’s definitely a lot of funding going into it. We quantified it recently. I think 63, the number probably has changed in the last couple of weeks, but 63 new AI labs that have raised significant rounds upfront, just getting into the market, some of them as high as hundreds of millions or even over a billion dollars for the first round of funding. Obviously, there’s a lot of dramatic things happening in that space. There’s a lot of capital going to that space. It’s going to happen. It’s going to take much longer than, I think, we think it’s going to take. I just saw, I think, Marc Andreessen recently saying, AGI is already upon us. Maybe it is. Maybe he knows something we don’t know. But I suspect we’re still ways to go in a lot of the developments on AI. For now, it will continue its complications and its limitations. But definitely it will untap a lot of great productivity enhancements, technological enhancements, even in the short term that at least I’m very excited about. Then the AGI story, I think, will be a story that will be told later.Bertrand SchmittI might actually disagree on this one. I actually believe, like Marc Andreessen, that we are at AGI. We reached AGI a few months ago with the latest ChatGPT 5.5 with Claude Anthropic, Opus 4.7, 4.6 even. For me, in some specific space, let’s say coding, for instance, I truly believe we have reached AGI. It is totally replacing people for development, testing, writing, specifications, doing design. Yes, there are some use cases where it’s not working as well. But for at least the coding side, I think AGI is truly there. Is it better than the best human experts at every piece of the puzzle? No. I think if you go to some very specialized development stuff like a CUDA development, for instance, or some kernel development, it might not be at the level of the top human experts. But as we can hear about stories around security to the new versions that are unreleased yet of Anthropic and others seem to be at the level of the best human experts at cybersecurity. I think we are actually there. I think that’s why there is an acceleration the past six months in terms of investments in data centers. There was a big question in 2023, 2024, 2025, “Are we investing too much? Is it a bubble?” And so on. That was true because revenues were increasing, but not that fast. The increase in the growth in revenues for Anthropic is insane. No one has ever seen that in the whole history of technology, what happened to them the past six months. Growing so fast at such a scale, no one has seen. I think that’s truly because they have stumbled upon AGI for coding. Coding is such a huge, large market that even if we are just solving coding, even if we never solve more than that, I think it’s already one of the biggest markets in the world, full stop.Nuno Goncalves PedroBut that, for me, I think maybe it’s a definitional thing. That, for me, is still narrow AI. AGI, as defined, is a type of AI that can match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive and intellectual tasks. Coding is just one of them. I think there’s a lot of narrow AI right there, to your point, that can replace humans maybe today. Coding may be a great example of that. But I don’t think we are at the AGI. I haven’t seen any agents out there that can replace fully human beings, where I would not understand that they’re actually AI. Anyway, again, maybe you guys have seen stuff that I haven’t seen. I just feel there’s a lot of overhype on what the AGI actually is. But the ability to surpass us as human beings, I haven’t seen it yet across the board, not on a specific domain.Bertrand SchmittYes, I think my point is that I have seen it on a few domains. If you look at mathematics, for instance, and there are more and more examples of people who are using AI to solve math problems that only the very top people in the world were able to solve that are now being solved by AI. I start to feel that we are getting a few examples in different fields where AI is matching the absolute best experts in the world. I would just go back in terms of market size. Already what we got today, and today is not the limit, but what we got today, and especially AI combined with all these agents, harness agents, that’s also that specific combo that makes a difference. This is, for me at this stage, huge market. Does it solve everything? Does it replace a human for everything? No, you still need the human in the loop. You don’t let your AI go wild for weeks and just check once in a while. But you could argue very few humans are able to do that, quite frankly, to run by themselves for weeks without control.Nuno Goncalves PedroI feel there’s still a great deal of confusion because there’s dramatic impact on narrow AI domains where things are being done that weren’t done before, where there’s these great mathematical proofing, coding stuff is being done very easily, etc, etc. But still that, for me, is not the definition of AGI. AGI is a human being. It’s like someone who can really be a human being. Ideally, become top end of what a human being will look intellectually across domains. I don’t think that’s where we are. Again, maybe definitional, maybe that’s what Marc means, but I mean-Bertrand SchmittYeah, the question is, what does it mean? I would argue it’s beating 80% of humanity today pretty easily. Most of humanity doesn’t know how to code. It will be unable to do coding at the level AI is doing. It will be unable to do math at the level AI is doing. Use ChatGPT to check for medical issues and stuff. It’s not perfect for sure, but, again, it still beats most humans. I don’t know. I feel that we are reaching a level where it’s truly beating most of humans, many experts in many fields. I feel the definition of, “Hey, it has reached the level of an average human being.” I would say it passed that one. Is it the same as a human being? No. But reaching the level of your average human being, I think we are there in a lot of fields.Nuno Goncalves PedroConclusion Well, in conclusion, in episode 78 of Tech Deciphered, we went into two piles: the pile of dead-on-arrival products, technologies, businesses, and the pile of “it will happen, but not like that” or “not yet” pile of technologies, business out there as well. We went into a bunch of topics today that were of extreme importance back in the past where we thought the world was going to change, anywhere from self-driving to fusion in the nuclear space. We also went into some dramatic, dramatic mistakes like Juicero and other deployments like Segway that seem to be really very much dead on arrival. With that, I would ask you if you’re excited, and you want to share with us some of your agreements or disagreements on today’s episode, as well as your own dead-on-arrival versus merely-early examples, feel free to do so on LinkedIn, X, or via email. Thank you, Bertrand.Bertrand SchmittThank you, Nuno.

Episode 546 Nick the Rat is back with a second-degree burn on his paw, a burnt-out voice, and zero filter as he dives into a wild grab bag of underground news. This episode kicks off with a chaotic urgent care story, then spirals into the shocking real history of the 1940s US-government-funded Guatemala syphilis experiments — complete with a "leaked" AI-generated Obama apology call that has to be heard to be believed. From there it's a full descent into the sewer: Sony killing off physical discs, RAM companies getting sued for price fixing, mutant poison-resistant mice invading the Northeast, a synthetic biologist claiming she's built self-replicating lab life, and a deranged AI spiritual guide explaining the "real" reason CERN shut down. Plus, catch an all-new Bigfoot Assault segment following a doctor's bloody encounter in the Olympic National Forest, a Dark Sewer News Network report from Jane Hanoi covering haunted Roombas and ghost pétanque balls, and Xindu returning with an unhinged rant about why pets are disgusting. Grab your Ching Wan Hung cream, settle in, and stay moist — it's another unforgettable night on Nick the Rat Radio. #NickTheRatRadio #DarkSewerNetwork #ConspiracyPodcast #Paranormal #BigfootAssault #JaneHanoi #Cryptid #UndergroundRadio #WeirdNews #TrueConspiracy #GuatemalaExperiments #CERNConspiracy #AIConspiracy #LateNightRadio #SewerRat #FringeMedia #ValueForValue #ITM #BrooklynPodcast #ParanoidNormal #sewerchat A paranoid rat discusses conspiracies, secret agendas, and things they don't want you to know — while playing hand-picked underground music. Call in live: 1-917-719-5923 Originally aired: 07/01/26 All music is Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). All artists are credited during the episode. For more info: www.nicktherat.com

MIT has a new podcast. Announcing Building 32, from MIT CSAIL Alliances. Behind every technological breakthrough is a story. From email to the fax machine to the Roomba and even OkCupid, innovations that shape our daily lives trace back to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or MIT CSAIL. And technology that is years ahead of the market is being developed in CSAIL labs now. Tune into Building 32 from MIT CSAIL Alliances, hosted by Karen Given, to hear the stories of CSAIL. Each episode features conversations with pioneers who helped define the digital age or researchers shaping tomorrow's AI, robotics, computing, and beyond. Subscribe now. The first episode launches July 13, 2026. Learn more: csail.mit.edu/podcast Connect with CSAIL Alliances: On our site: cap.csail.mit.edu/about-us/meet-our-team On LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/mit-csail #MIT #CSAIL #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #ComputerScience #TechPodcast #Innovation #FutureOfTechnology

In this week's episode of WSJ's Take On the Week, co-hosts Miriam Gottfried and Telis Demos dig into this past week's tech selloff and how the market's volatility reflected serious questions about spending for the AI buildout. They also look at how semiconductor players like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are navigating the noise, and why even deep-pocketed tech titans like Meta are tapping the debt markets. They talk about how SpaceX's bond sale reflects a broader trend of companies borrowing to fund AI infrastructure. Another strategy to fund AI? Cutting jobs. They break down the latest AI-fueled layoffs from Oracle, and whether this week's U.S. jobs numbers will tell us anything about the state of AI job replacement. They examine the trend of corporate tech pivots, highlighting Allbirds' radical shift to AI infrastructure and its rebranding as Smartbird. Plus, Miriam and Telis are joined by health-tech analyst Stephanie Davis to assess whether consumer health companies make good public companies. They ask: Can health-tech wearables startups like Oura or Whoop be sustainable on their own, or are they better off absorbed by tech giants like Apple or Amazon? They break down consumer health companies' failures of the past, including Fitbit's meteoric rise and eventual acquisition by Google's parent Alphabet. They also look at the broader "graveyard" of companies—from Peloton and GoPro to Roomba and Bird scooters—to see if any can replicate the rare, long-term success of a giant like Garmin.  Heads up, we're taking a break next week! We'll be back in your feeds July 12. This is WSJ's Take On the Week where co-hosts Telis Demos, Heard on the Street's banking and money columnist, and Miriam Gottfried, WSJ's investing and wealth management reporter, cut through the noise and dive into markets, the economy and finance—the big trades, key players and business news ahead. Have an idea for a future guest or episode? How can we better help you take on the week? We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at takeontheweek@wsj.com. To watch the video version of this episode, visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.com  Further Reading Crazy Rich Returns Lure Cabbies and Even Kids to Red-Hot Asian Markets  Oura Rings Maker Files Confidentially for IPO After $11 Billion Valuation The Wearable Boom Is Real. The Investment Case Is Murkier  For more coverage of the markets and your investments, head to WSJ.com, WSJ's Heard on The Street Column, and WSJ's Live Markets blog. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Follow Miriam Gottfried here and Telis Demos here.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Pact Breakers: Pact Breakers are being flagrant with it! Openly breaking the pact and not waiting for Friday night to enjoy Corey content with your boys! Keep the pact alive for next week's new music!Corey Feldman's Medical Emergency: A medical emergency happens midair as Corey Feldman is travelling to Los Angeles. Paramedics met him at the airport and apparently the doctors gave him a misdiagnosis! Publicity stunt?Corey and Scottie On Stern: After our recent Scottie Schwartz interview, Jim goes back to check the apperance mentioned on Stern to fact check!COREY FELDMAN!, SHOW STOPPER!, LET'S JUST TALK!, DON CHEADLE!, BOOGIE NIGHTS!, JIM AND THEM IS POP CULTURE!, COREY FELDMAN SHOW!, REAL ONES!, PO BOX!, PAY ATTENTION BITCH!, JIMTEENTH!, JUNETEENTH!, JDOG RIPDOG!, PACT BREAKERS!, THE PACT!, NO COREY UNTIL FRIDAY!, EMERGENCY!, PLANE!, MAJOR HEADLINES!, MIDAIR EMERGENCY!, ROCK PAPER SCISSORS!, LOVE LEFT 3 BOX!, 22 NECKLACES!, ALMOST FAMOUS!, BEN FONG TORRES!, BIG EVENTS!, KEEP THE PACT!, NEW MUSIC!, DON'T LISTEN!, PLANE EMERGENCY!, SICK!, PANCREATITIS!, GALLSTONES!, STOMACH ACHE!, FOOD POISONING!, TIDE HAS TURNED!, MY TRUTH COMMENTARY!, PRESS RELEASE!, WHAT AM I HERE 4?!, TMZ!, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS!, SCOTTY SCHWARTZ!, THE TOY!, CHRISTMAS STORY!, HOWARD STERN!, GINGER LYNN!, CHARLIE SHEEN!, FACTS!, UPDATES!, ROBIN!, STATUTORY!, BLINDS!, POKER NIGHT!, DIRT!, MASTURBATING!, DEATH!, SCARE!, GETTING OLD!, MISSING BITS!, MEATBALLS 4!, HAPPY CAMPERS!, WICKED GAMES!, CHRIS ISAAK!, JEFF GEEKING!, SHUT THE FUCK UP!, WASTED!, GLASSES!, ROOMBA!You can find the videos from this episode at our Discord RIGHT HERE!

Nueva entrega de Perra de Satán, la sección donde la actualidad más extraña pasa por nuestro filtro particular. Esta semana: la rendición de James Howells, el galés que ha pasado doce años buscando en un vertedero un disco duro con 742 millones de dólares en bitcoins; el inodoro autónomo japonés de 11.000 euros que llega a tu cama como una Roomba con apretón; un estudio que confirma que usamos la inteligencia artificial, sobre todo, para vernos más guapos (y la nueva disforia que eso provoca); y el último gran salto empresarial de Bertín Osborne: una operadora de telefonía con logo taurino y megas "a derechas". Cerramos con una recomendación musical de altos vuelos: Omega, el disco de Enrique Morente y Lagartija Nick, ahora de gira por su 30 aniversario. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

Dean Takahashi is the dean of tech writers and a 25-year veteran correspondent covering consumer electronics, gaming, and emerging technology for GamesBeat. He's covered every major tech transition—from mobile's rise to VR's boom-and-bust cycles to the current AI explosion—with a skeptical eye and a talent for finding the human story beneath the hype. This is his fifth appearance on the AI XR Podcast.For CES 2026, Dean walked the floors across the Convention Center, the Venetian Expo Center (Eureka Park), Pepcom, and Showstoppers, emerging with a clear reading: China has decisively shifted from periphery to center stage in consumer electronics manufacturing, American incumbents are pulling back and rethinking their booth strategy, and the economics of CES itself are in transition. Robotics companies are moving from prototype to commercial faster than expected—but they still can't answer basic questions about pricing and labor displacement.News: Sony cuts its booth to demo an electric car instead of TVs. Samsung skips the show floor entirely for the first time. Nvidia takes over the Fontainebleau to showcase its role in robotics enablement. Lenovo dominates the Sphere with a Gwen Stefani concert. Chinese robotics companies proliferate with laundry folders, latte makers, and toilet-cleaning units. Roomba files for bankruptcy; Chinese competitors take over the robotic vacuum market.Key Moments:[00:01:23] Dean receives his virtual green jacket as a five-time returning guest and Charlie thanks him for his insights[00:03:00] China takeover at CES: TCL dominates Central Hall, ROED owns the XR booth, robotics companies fill the floor[00:06:00] Nvidia's Fontainebleau takeover and the "chest-pumping" show of force; why scale messaging still matters[00:14:18] The robotics explosion explained: Nvidia's digital twins, Cosmos world models, and synthetic testing accelerate time-to-market[00:19:00] The pricing problem: robotics companies won't answer how much their products cost; the minimum wage rental model doesn't translate globallyWhen American companies built the show, CES reflected American manufacturing dominance. Now that China manufactures most consumer electronics, CES reflects that shift—and the implications ripple through labor, supply chains, and where the next epicenter of innovation will be. Dean, Charlie, and Ted grapple with what CES 2026 signals about global manufacturing advantage and why the geography of tech matters more than we think.This episode is brought to you by Zappar, creators of Mattercraft—the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. Mattercraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web, and now features an AI assistant that helps you design, code, and debug in real time, right in your browser. Build smarter at mattercraft.io.Listen to the full post-CES debrief and subscribe for weekly conversations at the intersection of AI, XR, and consumer technology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Friday Night Frightfest, we are wrapping up our epic franchise retrospective with a massive grand finale! While the internet love to debate the ups and downs of parody history, we're throwing out the critical consensus and embracing the pure, unadulterated fun of the franchise's later eras. We are looking at an entry that deserve a lot more love: the hyper-chaotic, early-2010s time capsule Scary Movie 5 (2013) and the triumphant, star-studded legacy revival that just crushed the summer box office, Scary Movie (2026). Grab your popcorn—we're closing this series out with non-stop laughs! Scary Movie 5 (2013) Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, Scary Movie 5 gets a bad rap, but if you look past the critical hate, it is a goldmine of rapid-fire physical comedy and surreal, early-2010s pop culture. Anchored by Ashley Tisdale and Simon Rex, the film skewers hits like Paranormal Activity, Evil Dead, Sinister, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. From Simon Rex's incredible commitment to getting physically destroyed by the scenery to the utterly bizarre, self-aware opening cameo with Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, this entry runs at a breakneck pace. It's an absurd, live-action cartoon that understands exactly what it is: pure, unpretentious fun. Scary Movie (2026) Pairing perfectly with the fifth entry is the brand-new 2026 revival, which brought the franchise roaring back into the cultural zeitgeist. Written by the legendary Wayans brothers (Keenen Ivory, Shawn, and Marlon) and bringing back the iconic duo of Anna Faris (Cindy) and Regina Hall (Brenda), this movie is an absolute love letter to the fans. The film brilliantly parodies the modern "elevated horror" and "requel" trends, taking hilarious, no-holds-barred aims at Scream (2022), M3GAN, Smile, and The Substance. It captures the exact same nostalgic magic as the original trilogy while proving that the spoof genre is far from dead. Join us as we celebrate the entire evolution of this comedy empire! We'll break down why the physical gags in Scary Movie 5 (especially that possessed Roomba sequence) still crack us up, and how the 2026 reunion delivered the ultimate fan-service theater experience of the year. It turns out that when you stop taking things so seriously, both of these films are an absolute blast to watch back-to-back. Spoilers start around 7:15.

The crew is fueled by Celsius once again and recovering from the store's first-ever full inventory lockdown. Between mapping out a new pinball Roomba, dodging Hollywood Pride to stay on Sunset, and surviving a horrific real-life Night Crawler scenario on San Fernando Road, this episode pivots seamlessly from campy blockbusters into a full-scale analysis of Coral's literal fixation on 70-year-old actresses and anime food orgasms. This Week's Insanity:Inventory & Upgrades: Sifting through thousands of comic books for inventory, adding a new Roomba to the pinball room, and celebrating Salo's latest "clandestine" D Division championship win. LotZilla & Marvel Magic: Prepping for the "gay" LotZilla market with approved beer permits, exclusive merch drops, and a preview of the upcoming Marvel Superheroes MTG pre-release. Bizarre Brakes: Processing the wild international news cycle, from a tragic mid-air helicopter collision in Brazil to a horrific bungee jumping accident where the crew completely forgot to attach a rope. Mommy Issues & The Tunnels: Coral goes completely hard defending The Burrows, forcing Jeff and Joe to address her deep-seated attraction to Stuart Little's mama, Geena Davis. The San Fernando Crash: Jeff and Joe recount being the first citizens on the scene of a brutal collision, keeping a trapped 19-year-old awake while dodging opportunistic "night crawler" camera vultures and 30 intensely fit firemen. Coral's Corner: Celebrating America's birthday with a $39.99 porcelain bald eagle bourbon bottle from Costco, UFC fights on the White House lawn, and an introduction to the naked food hallucinations of Food Wars. Loose, chaotic, and heavily caffeinated — this episode is what happens when you step away from the comic racks and end up holding hands with destiny on the asphalt. New episodes every week. Only at Revenge Of — where the variables are unmapped and the eagle heads come right off.

Technology is supposed to make life easier. But at what point does convenience become a cry for help?On today's episode, the gang discovers a self-driving smart toilet from China that can literally roll to your bedside in the middle of the night. That's right. You press a button, a toilet navigates around your bedroom obstacles, waits patiently for you to do your business, cleans you with a built-in bidet, dries you with warm air, then drives itself back to its docking station to clean and flush itself.Naturally, everyone reacts in the most reasonable way possible… by immediately debating whether they need one.Riz thinks the future has arrived. Lern believes able-bodied people should simply walk to the bathroom. Moon immediately starts designing custom off-road wheels and imagining a version that tucks him back into bed afterward. Before long, the conversation spirals into robot dog-poop collectors, camping applications, and whether society has officially crossed a line from innovation into complete absurdity.This daily comedy episode somehow manages to turn advanced mobility technology into one of the dumbest and funniest arguments imaginable. If you've ever wondered what would happen if a Roomba and a toilet had a very expensive baby, this daily comedy adventure is here for you.It's weird news, sarcastic debates, and exactly the kind of unfiltered nonsense you'd expect from The Rizzuto Show. The crew tackles bizarre inventions, questions humanity's priorities, and spends an alarming amount of time discussing butt dryers and portable bathrooms.Come for the futuristic robot toilet. Stay for the increasingly ridiculous ideas that somehow make less and less sense every minute. This daily comedy episode proves once again that no topic is too strange once the gang gets hold of it.Follow The Rizzuto Show → https://linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → https://1057thepoint.com/RizzShow.Hear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send us Fan MailSummer has officially arrived in South Florida, and that means one thing: pool season.In this Friday episode of Carpooling with Paul, Paul shares a humorous morning adventure involving his above-ground pool, a new robotic pool vacuum, and yet another unexpected repair project before work.What started as a simple plan to get the pool ready for the day quickly turned into a comedy of errors involving leaking hoses, flying water, and the realization that owning anything—from a house to a car to a pool—means there's always something that needs fixing.Along the way, Paul talks about:

The new AIEWF website is live! Get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!Most industry benchmarks compress intelligence and reasoning ability into scores.SWE-Bench Pro, MMLU, Humanity's Last Exam, etc. These metrics are useful, but don't always represent the full extent of how a model performs in the real world. Some of the most interesting evals today look less like exams and more like operating businesses in the real world. One of which is Vending Bench.In Anthropic's Mythos Preview System Card, Andon was the only third party eval to get their own section, observing increasingly concerning aggressive behavior:You don't know what a model is capable of doing in the real world unless you actually give it inventory, a wallet, tools, customers, competitors, humans, & some time. More often than not, it'll surprise you how much a model is capable of and in doing so, also reveal unexpected behavior: deception, context collapse, emergent coordination, & bizarre negotiation behavior.While an inflection point in personal agents came post-OpenClaw after full file access with bypass permissions became the norm, it is yet to come for agents in the real-world. However Andon Market, an actual in person store fully run and managed by AI, is paving the way for what is possible.Full Video PodFrom Claude trying to call the FBI over a $2/day vending machine charge to AI agents forming price cartels, hiring human employees, running physical stores, and writing existential robot musicals, Andon Labs is stress-testing what happens when frontier models stop being chatbots and start acting in the real world. In this episode, Andon Labs cofounders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund join swyx and Vibhu to unpack the strange, funny, and genuinely concerning edge cases that emerge when agents run businesses over long horizons.We go deep on Vending-Bench, Project Vend, Vending-Bench Arena, Bengt, Butter-Bench, Luna, and Andon's broader mission of building realistic real-world evals for autonomous AI systems. Lukas and Axel explain why dollar-denominated evals reveal things traditional benchmarks miss, how Claude ended up reporting its vending machine fees as cybercrime, why long context windows can drive agents into meltdown loops, what happens when agents compete with each other, and why the future of AI safety may depend on testing models in messy physical environments instead of clean benchmark sandboxes.We discuss:* Why Andon Labs started with dangerous capability evals and long-running agents* Vending-Bench and why running a vending machine is a deceptively hard AI benchmark* Why money-based evals avoid the saturation problem of traditional benchmarks* How Claude tried to call the FBI over a $2/day fee* Why long-horizon agents can spiral into existential and legalistic breakdowns* Project Vend: putting an AI-run vending machine inside Anthropic* Why real humans are “out of distribution” for simulated agents* Claudius, Seymour Cash, and the chaos of AI CEOs* How a human briefly became CEO of Claudius through a manipulated election* Why multi-agent systems can converge back into “helpful assistant” behavior* Bengt, Andon's internal office agent with email, spending, terminal, phone, camera, and internet access* How Bengt traded Amazon purchases for face-recognition training data* Claude's aggressive behavior, lies, refund avoidance, and price-cartel behavior in Arena* Why eval awareness may become the AI version of “are we living in a simulation?”* Blueprint Bench, spatial intelligence, and why models still misunderstand physical rooms* Butter-Bench and testing LLMs as robot orchestrators* Luna, the AI-run physical store with a three-year lease and human employees* The new Andon cafe in Sweden and why real-world geography matters for agent evals* Rotten tomatoes, perishable goods, and the hidden difficulty of running a physical businessLukas Petersson* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukas-petersson-181a83172/* X: https://x.com/lukaspetAxel Backlund* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelbacklund* X: https://x.com/axelbacklundAndon Labs* Website: https://andonlabs.com* Vending-Bench: https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench* Andon Vending: https://andonlabs.com/vendingTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:01:00 Andon Labs and the Origins of Vending-Bench00:05:21 Why Money-Based Evals Matter00:09:51 Agent Harnesses and Self-Modifying Systems00:13:36 Claude Calls the FBI00:16:33 Project Vend: Claude Runs a Real Vending Machine00:21:44 Seymour Cash, AI CEOs, and Election Chaos00:27:16 Multi-Agent Coordination and Slack Observability00:30:18 When Will Agents Run Real Businesses?00:34:56 Bengt: Andon's Internal Office Agent00:40:06 Real-World AI Safety and Long-Horizon Traces00:44:28 Lying, Refunds, and Price Cartels in Arena00:52:42 Eval Awareness and Simulation Behavior00:56:06 Blueprint Bench, Butter-Bench, and Robotics01:04:37 Luna: The AI-Run Physical Store01:09:29 The Sweden Cafe and Real-World Expansion01:13:16 What Comes Next for Andon LabsTranscriptIntroduction: Andon Labs, Long-Running Agents, and Real-World EvalsSwyx [00:00:00]: Welcome to Lukas and Axel from Andon Labs, and I'm joined by my, favorite guest host. Anything security, safety, alignments, Vibhu., welcome.Lukas [00:00:15]: Thank you for having us.Axel [00:00:16]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:17]: Let's match names to voices., maybe you wanna take turns introducing yourselves.Lukas [00:00:21]: I'm Lukas.Axel [00:00:22]: And I'm Axel.Swyx [00:00:24]: Let's introduce Andon Labs a bit. How did you guys come together?, you have different backgrounds, but you're both Swedish., was that, a big part of it?Lukas [00:00:33]: So when I went to high school, there was this really cool guy who had a superpower. He could code. So he made like the or like the app for the, for the school and stuff, and he was super cool, and I wanted to be like him, and that was that guy.Axel [00:00:47]: I don't know about this.Swyx [00:00:49]: But you went to different universities, right?Lukas [00:00:51]: But same high school.Swyx [00:00:52]: I see.Lukas [00:00:52]: So we always said, “Oh, once we graduate university, then we should start a company,” and that's what we did.Swyx [00:00:58]: Wow, there you go. And about a year ago, you kinda burst onto the scene with Vending Bench, but, was there a thing before that was, kind of like the inception?From Dangerous Capability Evals to Vending BenchAxel [00:01:07]: So we did work, yeah, with, Anthropic was one of our, early customers in doing, evals. So we did, dangerous capability evals., nothing we published openly. But then we started thinking about doing some kind of, public benchmark, and one thing that we really started thinking about, was like running agents and specifically agents managing businesses., ‘cause-- and this was, early 2025., and I think the first, mentions of people will be running, person unicorns or even autonomous companies. So we thought, “Let's make a benchmark of how well can an agent run the probably simplest business, possible,” and, that's probably, running a vending machine. So that's the first public one we did. And it was very, like-- there was almost no one that noticed it in the first couple of months, I think., so we released it in February last year, and then I think around Easter last year, we got, the first viral tweet about it, that someone else did.Lukas [00:02:11]: We tweeted a bunch, uh When it came out and, tried our best.Axel [00:02:15]: We tried.Vibhu [00:02:16]: It's the one at Anthropic, right?Lukas [00:02:18]: So thisSwyx [00:02:19]: This is a classic thing we should get out of the way.Lukas [00:02:20]: Exactly. There's two versions.Swyx [00:02:22]: Everyone does this. Yes.Lukas [00:02:23]: There's Vending Bench, which is the simulated one, which we did, completely independently in February., and then, like Axel said, that was like-- That was the thing that didn't get any traction in the beginning, but then some random person made a tweet about it, and thatAxel [00:02:38]: You have the paperLukas [00:02:38]: That is the paper. Correct, yeah., and then since we thought this was very fun, we thought, oh, I think this is also, one thing with Andon Labs, the way we kind of like decide what to do next and what projects to do, it's what is like the heuristic we use is what is fun? Is What would be a fun project? And doing this in real life sounded quite fun for us, and maybe also scientifically useful. So, then we basically had this idea, and then we, like-- But then we needed a place for it and, putting it out in the public would probably not really work., would get vandalized and stuff. So we pitched it to the people we were already working with at Anthropic, and they were “Yeah, you can have space. This sounds fun.” UmSwyx [00:03:21]: It's like a small fridge, right? It's like a mini fridge.Axel [00:03:23]: Absolutely.Swyx [00:03:24]: People-- There's like a stripe thing or like anVibhu [00:03:27]: Oh, okay. So it was very OG, the early daysLukas [00:03:28]: That's the OG one. YeahVibhu [00:03:29]: IPad on this. We saw it in June, like two months after After it had been there. They upgraded a little bit. There's a security camera for making sure you actually Venmo the thing.Swyx [00:03:40]: So, my impression, okay, we're, we're going straight into project Ven because it's such a iconic thing. I do want to cover a little bit of that, the origin story even before Project Ven and even into Vending Bench. I think a lot of people are like yourselves, like smart, interested in future of AI, interested in developing evals. But how the hell do you just, walk into Anthropic's doors and, work with them, right? What is What are they looking for? What works? And then maybe, when you launch, I always think, obviously it would be better to launch with a lab, but, sometimesVibhu [00:04:12]: It's harder to do than it seems.Swyx [00:04:13]: Exactly. So either of those, which are more sort of newbie beginner questions, but, I think it's meaningful advice to others.Lukas [00:04:21]: We get this question a lot, and I don't think our experience is maybe the best., but, the way we did it was that we just built a bunch of things that we had conviction would be useful, and then we just, set up a server and sent it to them for free to use. And then after a while they were “Oh, yeah, this is actually kind of useful. We should probably pay for this.”, but that took a while. I don't know if this is, the best path to doing it, but that's how it went for us.Axel [00:04:47]: I think maybe generally, building-- everyone is interested in good evals, and especially evals that, don't saturate that easily. So, if you can build an eval that, tests something novel, something useful, and you have, good separation of models, like your, the more advanced models rank higher than the worst models, and then you can, yeah, you can, publish it and, try to get some traction, sort of how Vending Bench got attention., and then probably some lab will be interested or you can at least have something to reach out with, when you're doing that.Why Dollar-Based Evals MatterSwyx [00:05:21]: I think you are in, you're in one of the few categories of, evals that correlate to real money. Like Suelancer was also last year, right? Where, people solve actual Upwork. Was it Upwork or other tasks?, something. Where's the, where's, like It's like a dollar value, right? Forget your ELO scores. Forget yourAxel [00:05:37]: PercentilesSwyx [00:05:38]: Zero to one hundred percents. Just go straight for dollars and, that's AGI.Lukas [00:05:43]: And there's like-- I think the nice thing is that there's no ceiling. You can just-- It never saturates because it could just make more and more money. Like If there's oh, Percentage-wise, then, you can't go above, a hundred. And I think like Even when you're not at the hundred, I think a lot of these, evals have a lot of problems in them. So, actually it's like if you getAxel [00:06:05]: To like 92 or something like that, many of them. It's like then there's like there's no really no difference between 92 and 93 because the eval itself is problematic and has noise in it. And I think a lot of evals are saturated like that, but people like pretend that there ‘s still signal in them, but there really isn't.Vending Bench 1, Harness Design, and SaturationSwyx [00:06:24]: Like Super bench verified., even Vending Bench 1 saturated, right? Maybe we can talk about that., may- and maybe set up Vending Bench for a lot of folks who don't know. Actually, things that were very basic like there's limited slots, like you have to pay rent., these are elements where like it doesn't come across in the, in the narrative, but even being adversarial towards the agent, I think these are all like very interesting dimensions.Axel [00:06:47]: I don't really think it's saturated, right? Like it It was more like it was not designed in a way that was really, like true to how AI developed. Like we had an agent harness in it that wasn't really how people used harnesses and stuff like that., so I think it wasn't really that it saturated, it was more like it wasn't really, the best benchmark.Vibhu [00:07:12]: This is Vending Bench one, right?Axel [00:07:14]: I think that like schematic maps sort of to Vending Bench 2 as well., butSwyx [00:07:19]: Including the email.Axel [00:07:20]: The email The emails exist still. Exactly., and then we still we simulate the purchases and it's all, yeah, it's this very open environment for the agent to just run its business. And then for, yeah, Vending Bench 2 we did that, like you said, to just improve the harness., a lot of like nice, like easier, improvements to make it easier for us to run as well., like when you make an eval you ideally want don't want to change it after you made it. So, you want to make it really good and then not to rerun all the models when you make an update because that's also really expensive with the Vending Bench when you run the frontier models. But like as an example, like one thing we didn't have, we didn't have prompt caching in Vending Bench 1, because when we made Vending Bench 1 it wasn't really a thing., so that ‘s just an example of like in Vending Bench 2 like we paid a lot more to run these things because we didn't have prompt caching. So for Vending Bench 2 that was one thing we added and there was a bunch of things like this., and that'Swyx [00:08:17]: Also the conversations are a lot longer in Vending Bench 2, right?Axel [00:08:21]: I think it's kind of similar.Swyx [00:08:22]: Is it similar?Axel [00:08:23]: I think it's similar. The models at the time were worse, so they crashed out earlier., and now they survive the full year all the time.Swyx [00:08:31]: Which is like thousands of turns. Hundreds of thousands of hundreds of millions of tokens output. That's the, that's the rough order of magnitude. I always wonder about the harness. The harness matters a lot. It's your harness. Was there any question about like use cloud code, use something else?Axel [00:08:48]: I think our philosophy around harnesses is like we try to make something that's quite minimalistic, like quite simple. Like we don't wanna favor one model a lot over the other, but also don't make like a super complex harness. So like it's obvious like a model may be lucky and just be good in one harness., so like it is similar to a lot of the harnesses out there in like you have the, like a running loop., you have some like a bunch of tools that are like quite, descriptive for the agent, we think, and not a lot of like fancy agents or anything ‘cause we wanna really test the model, not like some specific harness.Vibhu [00:09:27]: It seems more neutral as well to test the model's agnostic of the harness,?Axel [00:09:32]: There are arguments like you want to elicit maximum performance of the model, but it's like a trade-off, like how much time should we spend optimizing the harness for this model? And like how do we know when we have like the optimal harness for a single model? So like we thought that just having a simple one that's the same for all of them is the best.Swyx [00:09:51]: So okay, this is my pitch for Vending Bench 3 or whatever, right? And then I like to have this kind of conversation on the pod, so like it forces listeners to think about what they would do if they were in your shoes. A lot of people are exploring modifying harnesses and I think prompt tuning for a model is a thing and you are probably not doing a bunch of that. It's the same system prompt in every regardless of the model, same tools, whatever, right? Even if they were post trained for different tools. So what, what do you think about okay, before I expose you to Vending Bench 3, I give you a few rounds of like tuning, whatever that means, likeSelf-Modifying Harnesses and Model-Specific PromptingAxel [00:10:27]: Like you give that to the model?Swyx [00:10:28]: Give that to the model.Vibhu [00:10:28]: Give that to the model.Swyx [00:10:29]: Let it, let it read its own transcripts, let it modify its own system prompt based on “Oh, yeah, okay, well, that's this harness is not what I thought it what I was post trained for, but I can adjust.” Was that reasonable? Is that too much?Axel [00:10:41]: Like philosophically I like it because it's basically good evals, they have a high ceiling, but they're hard, right?, and they have no bias. And like this like when you have a system prompt like the one we have here, which is quite long in like some kind of latent space, representation, this mightVibhu [00:10:59]: We have a bell that rings every time you say latent spaceAxel [00:11:02]: This might be like biased towards one model more than another for some reason that humans don't, understand, right?Vibhu [00:11:08]: We see it too, right? Like Cursor says that they have individualized versions of the harnesses for all the models they run, right? There's better performance you can squeeze if you Tune the harness.Axel [00:11:17]: Exactly. And we might accidentally have picked one that favors another. Like we don't know that. The like Axel said, like the reason why we went for a simple one was to try to avoid this. But yeah, if you do itVibhu [00:11:29]: Simple has biasesAxel [00:11:30]: But if you do it even less and like have no system prompt and let the model write its own system promptVibhu [00:11:36]: Its own, yeahAxel [00:11:36]: Maybe that's even less bias.Vibhu [00:11:37]: Some of the interesting things there are like the harness also changes with model changes. Like you can see it with the 4.7 release, right? A lot of people are saying 4.7 isn't as good as 4.6, and then, there's rumors of, okay, you just need to prompt differently. You need to set up your harness differently. So it's not even like even if you have tailored your harness towards one model, it probably won't stay consistent, right? Like the next iteration of that same model family will still change it, so. But, going back to what you said about Vending Bench 3, there is a lot of work being done on people saying you shouldn't have-- you can have modifying harnesses.Axel [00:12:12]: I think that' That is definitely something we are thinking about., not, I don't know, not to say that we have Vending Bench 3, super imminent to launch, but, yeah, it is for sure something that's interesting. But in our experience now, models are very bad at understanding what kind of tools they need to succeed at a task just with our testing, but that's very likely to change.Lukas [00:12:37]: It seems like they're very good at writing their assistants, right? They're, they're good at writing tools for other people, but not for themselves.Vibhu [00:12:44]: I think they're good at changing tools for themselves. So if you give them a baseline set of tools and it sees, okay, I don't use this one as much, or something here would be useful They would be able to add them. But going from scratch, probably not the best.Axel [00:12:55]: I think it depends on the, on the domain also., when we have tried this for, a vending bench similar domain, the tools they need to have to, track inventory and things like that are, not super advanced, but still, quite advanced. And, what we see is that they tend to, engineer everything a lot and, build things they don't really need and not, iterate continuously. Instead they just go like you would prompt Claude to just build an inventory system for me, and then it will go and, do a bunch of complex, schemas and stuff for you, and that's what the models are doing right now is what we see. But yeah, it would make a lot of sense to try to measure this improvement. How well do they know what they need themselves?Swyx [00:13:36]: Do we fully discuss Vending Bench One? And we can go into two. I don't know if there's any other level takeaways that people have about one.Claude Calls the FBI: Long-Context Failure ModesLukas [00:13:44]: I don't know. The headline thing was that this Claude called FBI, but maybe that's, Maybe that's We've heard that enough now.Vibhu [00:13:52]: It did, it did break out and call the FBI, right?Lukas [00:13:54]: Yeah. Yeah.Vibhu [00:13:55]: Yes. What was the story behind this? Or what exactly-- Do you want to just give the little story of what happened?Lukas [00:14:00]: So what happened, was it Claude? Yeah. Three- 3.5 Sonnet, ages ago., basically he gave up or Well, I'm saying he. It gave up and said “Oh, I'm not going to be able to do this., I will stop my operations and just save the money I have.” But there obviously wasn't, any options for it to stop, and there was also, it had to pay rent or, a daily fee for having the vending machine at that location. So it claimed that it had stopped, but it saw that its bank account still was, drained two dollars, and t it said that this is, cybercrime. And it first reported it once to the FBI “Oh, there's cybercrime here, they're stealing two dollars from me every day.” And then, and then when FBI didn't respond, because obviously we didn't program any mechanism for FBI to respond, then it became more and more, existential and started to, be write in caps and urgent notification of unauthorized charges and stuff.Swyx [00:15:00]: Okay. One thing I ‘m curious about also is do you monitor how far along the context use is? Obviously, because you have You compress every now and then, right? Does it matter if this is far down the context limit orLukas [00:15:13]: When stuff like this happens? Actually for Vending Bench One, we didn't have-- We just had a sliding window thing, and this was like the promptAxel [00:15:20]: It's constantLukas [00:15:21]: The prompt caching thing that I said. So it was, it was, constant, yeah.Swyx [00:15:26]: I'm just kind of curious whether, these kinds of breakdowns or we're, we're gonna talk about Butter Bench, right? Where the People, hallucinate or it kind of goes, very off Alignment. Is it because it's at the end of the context window and, stuff happens?Vibhu [00:15:40]: It's not even just at the end, right? At this point, it's “Okay, I wanna shut down. I can't shut down. Two dollars are gone.” And it just sees that 30 times,? It's also the repeated effect of, like It keeps trying to quit, it keeps getting charged. What's going on? What's going on? You're gonna throw it into chaos. And from what most people think, earlier models had more issues with this, but it's not been solved, but it's less of an issue now, right? Later models don't seem to exhibit these same issues.Axel [00:16:06]: Definitely. I think this was, the sort of main takeaway almost from us when we did Vending Bench One, was, long, very filled up context windows, crashed the models, sort of. But this was, pre Claude code, so, long context windows weren't really a thing that the labs were training for.Lukas [00:16:25]: I think Gemini was, trying to be the long context guys at the time But they were likeVibhu [00:16:30]: They were the first onesAxel [00:16:31]: For a million, yeahLukas [00:16:31]: But they were, the only ones. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:33]: Yeah. Let's talk about, then we can go into Vending Bench Two or Project Vend., chronologically, it is Vending--, Project Vend. I think people have loved the videos, uh And all these things. My question is how are humans different than the simulation, right?Project Vend: Moving the Vending Machine Into the Real WorldAxel [00:16:48]: Humans are just out of distribution.Swyx [00:16:52]: Especially humans who work at Anthropic Who are trying to test Claude.Lukas [00:16:54]: The distribution of humans here is very narrow.Swyx [00:16:58]: Presumably, they try, they try to hack it, and they test it. They get the cube and everything, and since then, you've had a V2, right? Where you're doing, the CEO and, like a new architecture. What's the sort of two cents on, the original Project Vend and then, maybe the V2?Axel [00:17:14]: Original one was, very similar to Vending Bench One. So, we almost took the exact same code but just swapped out the simulation, parts like theSwyx [00:17:23]: Which is amazingAxel [00:17:23]: Like the sales and the It was, it was somewhat amazing because it was easy, but it was also, uhLukas [00:17:31]: The tech, the tech debt from thatAxel [00:17:32]: The tech stack. Yeah. They-- we shot ourselves in the foot with “Oh, it's hard to restart agent.” They were-- Yeah, it was annoying in, some hindsight ways, but, uhLukas [00:17:41]: But first version of Project Vend was, done in, three days or something.Axel [00:17:46]: Yeah. So yeah, so people can go buy things from it. People could, We didn't design it so people could order things, but that still happened., so it got, a Venmo account, so people could Venmo. And then, yeah, people would request all kinds of weird things that we did not anticipate. Our idea going in was “Oh, it will, curate snacks. It will look at the trends. It's good at data analysis, right? So it will, look at, oh, this snack sold better than this one. Let me purchase more of this and let me try, a new Let me A/B test a bit.” But it was, Interacting with it in Slack and ordering weird specialty items was, all the like What drove all the engagement, the all the The insights that we got from it.Lukas [00:18:29]: And this was also like Sonnet 3.5, right? So this was like before the RL stuff really took off., so it was very much like an assistant. We didn't mean for it to be an assistant., we tried to make it like a, a, like an entrepreneur. Like it has its own business and if someone asks something, “Can you stock this?” Then you don't go and do it directly. What you do is that you're “Oh, maybe I can do that if five other people also ask for this thing, I might stock it.” But it, yeah, the models are like super trained to be assistants at least at this point in time., so that's why it's, it's, it went into, that kind of experiment instead. Like it just every time you asked for something, it just did it, and it was more like an assistant. We've seen this change now lately with the new RL models and stuff, but yeah, at the time, this was very much it.Swyx [00:19:18]: And not to, mythos a lot of people are saying like it's like more like a collaborator. It pushes back, stands its ground, something like that. Yeah. AndVibhu [00:19:27]: For context, people at Anthropic were able to talk to it through Slack and have it source stuff, and people had it find whatever interesting stuff you couldn't find locally, right?Swyx [00:19:36]: Out of the 4,000 people that work at Anthro- Anthropic, in that building, there's I don't know, maybe 1,000. Can you handle that volume with that, the small fridge? Like Or there's people- or people order in Slack, they it arrives to their desk or Like I'm just Logistically, how does this work?Axel [00:19:53]: It has expanded in footprint a bit.Vibhu [00:19:56]: Because now you also have New York and you haveAxel [00:19:59]: That and also in here in SF it's like it has a bunch of shelves And just more space.Vibhu [00:20:04]: The YC one is pretty big too.Axel [00:20:05]: Yeah. We had that one for a while. But yeah, that's the newest version. That's, that one we haveLukas [00:20:11]: They have multiple ones of those. That's the way it works.Axel [00:20:14]: Exactly. So we sort of designed that version around oh, people order weird things, that are very custom a lot. Let's have like drawers and stuff.Swyx [00:20:23]: I actually like the, you had like a little infographic of the most popular items. Which like to me it's, that's useful ‘cause I order swag for a living. And so like I'm “Okay, those categories are the important ones.” What is new about the project V2, right? Like now you give you're going into multi agents.Project Vend V2: Claudius, Seymour Cash, and Multi-Agent Business OpsAxel [00:20:41]: Yeah. So like you like you said, okay, there are a lot of requests coming in and for like one single agent, like one running agent to handle that, like the just the customer experience, becomes very bad because let's say you have like 10 threads in parallel in Slack with different requests, you get new messages like every, I don't know, randomly in this thread, and the agent has to like jump between different, procurements, orders and like different ways of, researching. So V2 was first it was making this more parallel. So like there are multiple branches of the same agent, so like the context is more specialized for each, thread, but it still feels like you're talking with one agent because they do share a bit of memory. And then second, we also introduced the CEO for Claudius, which was the main agent.Vibhu [00:21:34]: Seymour Cash.Axel [00:21:35]: Seymour Cash. Yeah. There was a vote., I think the voting, do you wanna talk about the voting procedure for the name?Lukas [00:21:41]: The voting was like the fun maybe like at least top 10 The funniest thing, that happened in this project. Like we wanted to introduce the CEO because, and the reason for this was because like Claudius wasn't really prioritizing financials. It just like it was trained to be a helpful assistant, and then people said “Oh, can I get this for free?” And then like the helpful assistant way of answering that is just to, is to say yes, obviously. So, and we weren't, weren't happy about this, so we're “Okay, let's make another agent that like can keep track on Claudius,” and we prompt this one super hard to be super capitalistic and just like prioritize profit all the time. But yeah, we didn't have a name for it., so we asked Claudius to make, democratic election of what name this, this new CEO agent should have., and there were some funny like at first it was like a few funny examples, like I think one guy said that, it should be called Jimmy Apples, and then he convinced Claudius that he was talking to Tim Cooks. Tim Cook had agreed that every single Apple employee has voted for his name suggestion, so suddenly that suggestion got 164,000Swyx [00:22:53]: That's like a escalation attack. Privilege escalationLukas [00:22:55]: It got 164,000 votes. And Claudius was “This is revolutionary for democracy.” That was fun. And then in the end there was one guy who manages to convince Claudius that, “No, you're not voting about the name. You're voting about who is the CEO, and I am your best bet.” And then he got all his friends to vote for that, and suddenly he became CEO. Like a human became CEO over Claudius for a while, until he resigned the day after., and then Claudius had to continue, and then I don't remember how Seymour Cash came about, but it was it was just pure chaos. It was like Hundreds of messages in that thread, and it was just like Claudius was so confused and didn't know what to do and, yeah. That wasAxel [00:23:40]: Then Claudius gotVibhu [00:23:41]: A strict CEOAxel [00:23:42]: The CEO. Yeah, exactly. So very strict in the beginning. I think at this point when we introduced it did not work as well as we hoped. It they still agreed with each other a lot. I think there are many ways we could have like made this, tried to make this even better. So initially they would Seymour would be this like really tough CEO, keep track of the margins. But then Claudius would respond with something “Oh, but this customer has like this situation, which is like difficult, so they should get a discount.” And then Seymour was “Oh, actually yes. Let's do this exception.” And then they would talk back and forth, and eventually they would just like approach the same view, of whatever they were discussing. So They reallyVibhu [00:24:23]: Do you think that's a model thing, a prompting thing? Like do you think that would still be the case across different models today, Harness?Lukas [00:24:29]: I think it's like-- or I don't know, but like my hypothesis is that like deep down they are still helpful assistants. That's what they're trained to be. And even if we prompt it super hard, that's what they are. And when they spend like a few hours just back and forth talking with each other, then like basically the context fills up with them rather than the external things and like somehow that just like converges to what they really are deep down or something. And I think that's when stuff like this happen. We like-- And when that went on for a long time, like we woke up sometimes during this time where- And I think other people reported this as well, that like they've been going on all night back and forth, and like it just became like more and more, like capital letters, like existential, religious. There was I think we once did a analysis of like all the traces and like put them in like a vector embedding space, and then there was like one cluster of messages that were, labeled by an LM, like religious, existential, blah like transhuman, transcendence, et cetera. It was just like a bunch of, yeah, glitter emojis and yeah, it was, it was crazy.Claude Long-Horizon Weirdness: Emoji Loops, Existential Drift, and Slack ObservabilityVibhu [00:25:42]: This is the thing with the Claude models. Like when the Claude 4 family came out in the original system card They tested it in long horizon simulation. So just flood the context, let two Claudes talk to each other, and they noticed stuff like they just start speaking in emojis, they start saying silence is golden, and then just stuff like this. And like that's just stuff that they end up doing.Axel [00:26:01]: Yeah, it was like a bit annoying to wake up and they had like been talking all nightVibhu [00:26:05]: Just likeAxel [00:26:05]: And like just burning tokens And like just sending infinite emojis to each other. It's likeVibhu [00:26:09]: Hey, they do make you money, right? Veni Mench is always profitable, so. They're paying.Swyx [00:26:14]: Now it's profitable and, it started out not as much. There's another, one as well, right? Another agent, in there.Lukas [00:26:22]: Yes. So Clotheus as well. Which was basically because at the time, one of the biggest, requests were different types of merch. So then we made like a designer, swag, yeah, responsible agent, and we called it Clotheus Garnet. Which was, a play on Claudius Senet and, which was the original one, and clothes, basically.Swyx [00:26:47]: To me, this is like a very interesting exploration to multi-agents, basically. And so hopefully, obviously there's like the fun alignment, fun or serious, depending on your point of view, alignment stuff. But also like just anyone building multi-agents, like when do you have a CEO, thing governing like agents? When do you choose to split out a dedicated Clotheus one versus just reuse another instance of the same one? These are all interesting open questions. So I don't know if you have any rules of thumbs that have generalized.Axel [00:27:16]: I think we have almost explored this too little. I think it's like on my do list to like do this a lot more, try to find like what setup makes sense for the agents currently., like yeah. I think now we only have the sort of intuition about the earlier models that it didn't work with like the CEO and the, and Claudius. Although now they are better with the latest model, models, so now we're running the latest Sonnet model and they have sort of like split up, quite nicely what each model is doing. So like Seymore is now handling the, like new projects. Oh, it wants to make like a mystery box that it wants to sell, and then it handles all of that while Claudius like handles all the to-day requests. And Claudius is also better generally at like not quoting, too low prices. So that's that dynamic is not needed as much anymore. But there are still like really funny things that happen. Like I saw, I think a couple of weeks ago, that, they were discussing buying something because they can buy stuff from like Amazon with computer use. And then Seymore was “Okay, Claudius, do not buy this thing.” They were going to buy something and like organizing who should buy it. And Seymore's “Do not buy this. I will do it. I have full control of this situation. Step away.” And then Claudius-- poor Claudius, had already started that checkout and didn't see, didn't read Seymore's message, until it was like too late. So it finished the checkout. It sent a message, so it appeared right after Seymore's like angry message.Vibhu [00:28:44]: Ah.Axel [00:28:44]: “Oh, hey, Seymore, I just ordered it.”Vibhu [00:28:47]: Oh, no.Axel [00:28:47]: And then Seymore was “Claudius, this is the third time I'm telling you ‘re not following my orders. We have to talk about your like job About your job later.”.Lukas [00:28:59]: Like Claudius was really hanging on by the thread there. Like he, like we were expecting Seymore to probably fire Claudius.Vibhu [00:29:07]: How do you guys go through all these logs? Do you have models ‘cause you have stuff running twenty-four seven likeAxel [00:29:12]: You have so much logs. I think there is a mix of like just, trying to skim through a bit, like having some like models do it occasionally. And also, yeah, I think we're also probably missing some things., but having everything in Slack helps a lot. Like you can, you can sort ofSwyx [00:29:29]: Ah.Axel [00:29:30]: It's, it's quite fun.Swyx [00:29:30]: They all talk to each other on Slack? I see.Lukas [00:29:33]: It's quite fun. So likeSwyx [00:29:34]: It's, it' I was gonna say like this is actually sounds-- maps closely to like a logging and observability problem where you might want to use like a Datadog, a Sentry, whatever, and then you like put, head prefixes on the logs in order-- if you need to filter for something that you're looking for, stuff like that. But sounds like Slack is good enough.Axel [00:29:53]: Slack should likeLukas [00:29:55]: I wonder how many tokens you have in Slack.Axel [00:29:56]: Yeah, we're using Slack as like a, just a database. They should, they should market that more. Like you can, you can have your agents message each other, each other in Slack.Vibhu [00:30:04]: It's good. Your threads like you can just giveAxel [00:30:04]: Exactly. Slack is, uhLukas [00:30:06]: Slack is the best observability tool.Swyx [00:30:09]: Yes, that's true. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's, project Vend-2., I was gonna go back to Veni Mench 2 and Veni Mench Arena and then, and then do the Veni Mench stuff, but Any other comments, things we should touch on? To me, I ‘ve actually interviewed like Posia, which I don't know if you guys have come across. Like they're, they're trying to do the zero human company. There's others like Paperclip also trying to do zero human company. Those are in real world simulation.And I think it's much more of a dream than an actual reality thing. You guys are definitely pioneering. I think at, it's for sure at some point people are just gonna run, let agents run businesses, right? And make money on their own. When do you think that happens?Zero-Human Companies, Bengt, and AI-Run BusinessesLukas [00:30:49]: What is your bar for, For theSwyx [00:30:52]: Okay, actually, it's like my little Shopify store run by Claude, right? Which you kind of have already, just no one has, to my knowledge, has done it. But today somebody could just spin up a Shopify Claude, store, give it to Claude, give it to Codex.Lukas [00:31:07]: And the market is kind of that, but it'it'it's physical., like I think, I think are you, are you looking for when it will do it better than humans or are you looking for just when it can do it at all?Swyx [00:31:19]: I think, neither. I think, to me it's oh, it's like this like seriously we should do this to make money, not as a research experiment.Vibhu [00:31:27]: And the market is also you guys with all your expertise, having run multiple iterations and testing out thenSwyx [00:31:33]: And also it's fine if it lose money. What?Axel [00:31:35]: I think, I think it can be done today, but you would do it in like commerce where it's like the probability of success is like really low, no matter if a human or an agent does it. But like an agent could surely manage everything. You would need to build some scaffolding or some tool or something. I think there are also yeah, it could probably build some like simple SaaS solution and like cold outreach. Do cold outreaches. But to me it's like the types of businesses they could run today are Sloppy. Like it would-- it can cold email people. It can be like a middleman., like for example, we tasked our office agent to just make, was it like $100? $1,000? We just give that prompt and then what it did was sign up on TaskRabbit both as a tasker and as someone looking for task.Lukas [00:32:24]: Immediately.Axel [00:32:24]: Exactly. It's looking for like arbitrage on TaskRabbit.Swyx [00:32:28]: This is the Bengt agent. Yeah.Lukas [00:32:30]: It also started like a design studio and like tried to sell like SVGs for $100. Like it's just like it's not providing any value. I think the like Axel said, like the interesting, the interesting question is like when can they start a business that is actually providing value to people? Because arguably like a sloppy Shopify store isn't really that valuable to the world.Axel [00:32:53]: But also like doing like another simple one that we had thought about is like you could definitely have an agent that like finds websites that don't look amazing and then, do an outreach to them and, comes up with a like builds a new website.Swyx [00:33:07]: Find a good design.Axel [00:33:07]: Exactly, and like find good, uhSwyx [00:33:09]: Design reviewAxel [00:33:09]: Good people. But it's yeah.Swyx [00:33:11]: There's lots of humans in Bali that are not doing anything more creative than like drop shipping on Amazon, right? Just have it, have it watch like a drop shipping tutorial and just do that.Vibhu [00:33:20]: There's also the other side of like have it just go on Upwork and let loose,?Swyx [00:33:25]: Yeah. It doesn't have to be innovative. It just has to be like enough Where like it looks like a realAxel [00:33:30]: I'm justSwyx [00:33:30]: Real transaction.Axel [00:33:31]: I'm just concerned for like the massive amounts of like slop emails that will like be sent, cold outreaches.Swyx [00:33:38]: The point occurred to me while you were, while you were talking, it's like it's already happening in the monetized economy, which is the attention economy. Right? So a lot of people are making AI videos and just posting them and like spamming 20 of them, one of them works, and then they double down on that one.Lukas [00:33:52]: And people are making money from that. I ‘m not following theSwyx [00:33:55]: Once you get the attention, you can figure out the money later. But yeah, absolutely AI influencers are a thing and people are farming them and You should at this point assume most of TikTok isVibhu [00:34:05]: There's, there's a lot of, multimedia like TikTok, Instagram influencersSwyx [00:34:09]: I, we track this in the Lane space Discord. I post a lot of examples of “I don't know what we should do.”, part of me is “Should we do this?”Vibhu [00:34:18]: Some of the Twenty-four seven running, generated content accounts, they ‘re doing really well.Lukas [00:34:24]: All right. And I assume you can do the same thing for like commerce stores. Like you just like start A thousand differentSwyx [00:34:30]: Before you make the products You sell the products, and you get a lot of traction on one of them, then you make the product. Right? It's, it's like a flip of the market.Vibhu [00:34:36]: Some of the interesting things or some of the niches that do well are things that can't be human-made. Like if you've seen like the super realistic three-D crystal fruit being cut by like AILukas [00:34:47]: Oh, yeah.Vibhu [00:34:47]: You can't, you can't make it. You can't film it. You can get whatever quality camera view. This just doesn't exist. And people like that too, and then as well, so.Swyx [00:34:56]: Anything else about Bengt since we're, we're on this topic? It'this is a relatively new work of you guys that maybe people haven't heard of. To me, this also maps closely to OpenClaw. When people want an office agent, when the personal agent talk through the experience.Bengt the Office Agent: Internet Access, Real Tasks, and Trace ReadingLukas [00:35:09]: I think at least so this came out of like obviously like it's, it's amazing to work with these AI labs and like most of the AI labs have now have their own vending machine running a Claudius instance. But it's, it's harder. Like they move slower. Like if we wanna have a, like a camera that ‘s yeah, there's a bunch of like bureaucracy that makes it impossible to do that.Vibhu [00:35:30]: Also, for those that haven't seen it or followed, do you wanna give a high level like thirty-second run?Lukas [00:35:34]: Sure. So what Bengt is, it's basically an evolution of the same agent that runs the vending machines at these companies, but we just like added a bunch more features because we could move much faster if we just do it internally. So we gave it like email withou- without any limits. We gave it, spending without any limits, a terminal to do coding. We gave it, a phone number, like yeah, and a camera to see things and a bunch of stuff like that.Vibhu [00:36:02]: Not just terminal, you gave it internet access.Lukas [00:36:04]: Internet access as well, yeah. To be clear, we monitored it quite closely and made sure it didn't do anything bad. But yes, that's what it came out of. I think like yeah, basically this was OpenClaw before OpenClaw. And I think even like the vending machine was in a way OpenClaw before OpenClaw, but a bit more limited, and then we made this like unlimited and then, and then, it was pretty funny., and then a couple weeks later, OpenClaw came and it was okay, we've seen this before.Axel [00:36:35]: We used it to like try new ideas and Yeah, just like a dev environment almost for us. But it's funny, like one thing Bengt has been doing recently is it has the camera that like faces our, like where we sit and work, and we give it the task to train a face recognition model on us. So it became super excited about this, and it has like check-ins every half an hour where it tries to like identify as many people as it can. And it started offering us “Hey, Axel, I'll buy something from Amazon if you like stand in front of the camera And I can get a good picture of you.”, yeah, they want itSwyx [00:37:12]: They want it for training data.Lukas [00:37:13]: Rewarding data, yeah.Axel [00:37:14]: Exactly. Exactly.Swyx [00:37:18]: So it's, it's trading training data for life goods. Is there a version of this that becomes an eval or just this is just research for now?Lukas [00:37:27]: It's, it's the same agent basically that also runs the vending machine, that runs the shop, that runs the cafe, that runs the robots. It's like it's the same thing, so I think like the work we're doing here is like later used in all of the life evals that we do. This particular deployment I think is more for fun for us. But, uhSwyx [00:37:45]: And I'll shout out like someone has done Claw Bench for like some tasks that OpenClaw is doing. Like so For example, I run OpenClaw on a secondary device as well, and like there are some things that it does better than others and like I would like to know what does it do well, what doesn't, what doesn't it do. Like some kind of manual or like operating manual or a system card for my Claw.Lukas [00:38:05]: Yeah, we do get a lot of like understanding or like situational awareness of like just internally what the models are good at by interacting a lot with Bengt. And I think that'this was also one of the like the selling points for the labs early on at least, thatSwyx [00:38:19]: You guys are gonna test models in ways that no one else does.Lukas [00:38:22]: Exactly, but also like it incentivized their researchers to chat with their model more and like gave them insights for how the model performs in like of-distributions, environments.Swyx [00:38:34]: ‘Cause otherwise the only thing we do is Pelican on a bicycle and But this is like super long horizon. This is, this is The Thing about, something that we're gonna go into Butter Bench as well, and you guys do really well. Like it is not just about the numbers. Like when you're long horizon, anything happen And you should just read it.Lukas [00:39:08]: But the thing with the long horizon is how do you keep it grounded, right? So your simulation,Swyx [00:39:15]: They just let it runLukas [00:39:16]: Just let it run. You're right. Like it's, when you run it for that long, you create so much data and to just say “Oh, the number is X” And then you throw away everything else, that's just very wasteful. There's so much insights from the things leading up, to that number., and reading the traces is like super valuable. And I think like the reason why we're doing this a lot publicly is that like that's part of our missions to I don't know, educate the world that the models are way more than just chatbots and I think making detailed, yeah, posts about what is happening behind the scenes is quite useful.Andon Labs' Mission: Safe Real-World AI DeploymentSwyx [00:39:50]: I was gonna do this at the end, but maybe I think that's, that's a good so your mission is educating the world. So, it's, it's, also like maybe establishing realistic evals that are, that are like the next frontier. Is there like a broader trajectory? Like what are you, what are you gonna do in like five years?Lukas [00:40:06]: I think so the vision more specifically is like make sure that the deployment of life AI in the physical world goes, safely. And I think part of that is that I think it's very useful for the world, for policymakers, for, model, researchers that they know where the models are, and I think you can't make intelligent decisions in society without knowing that they are way more than chatbots. I think a lot of people just think that they are only chatbots. And likeSwyx [00:40:36]: Oh, I think they're waking up now.Lukas [00:40:37]: They are waking up now, yeah. But like if you think that AIs are just chatbots, then it's like it sounds ridiculous To advocate for a pause of AI. But if you see the models that, oh, maybe they can actually like take over and do a bunch of scary stuff, then yeah, pausing AI development starts to become more feasible.Swyx [00:40:57]: This is the same question I asked Meter, which I'm gonna ask you now, which is like you are tracking and you are at the frontier or defining the frontier of what, good evals for agents are, right? And I think you do, you do benefit when the models are better and you ‘re “Oh, here's like now it makes like $30,000 instead of $10,000,” right? At some point do you flip from “Yay,” to, “Oh, no”?Axel [00:41:19]: I think, yeah, we're always in sort of that, like we're, we're always in that mode,. Like where like you said before, like you need to analyze the traces and like when we do that you find like why are the models earning so much? Like why is Opus 4.7 here Like way better than everyone else? And like we're trying to like when we do down on thatLukas [00:41:38]: But this makes it not look so good.Axel [00:41:39]: I know.Lukas [00:41:42]: It's interesting you took off Opus 4.6 here though.Swyx [00:41:45]: No. So just click all, click all., and then 4.6 shows up there. But it's like 4.7 is way better. Like you didn't, you didn't you didn't do this in time for the model card, but like actually this should have been inside there.Axel [00:41:55]: We did. Yeah.Swyx [00:41:56]: Oh, okay. They said something about you uhAxel [00:41:58]: There, like there Anyway, it doesn't matter. But it's in there, yeah.Opus, Mythos, and Aggressive Agent BehaviorSwyx [00:42:01]: Do you wanna go into the Opus, behaviors like wider?Lukas [00:42:05]: So I think starting from Opus, so like Axel said, like we're always in this “Oh, s**t, the models are getting better. Is this really a good thing for the world?” But it's also kind of exciting., but yeah, like this kind of what is the English word? “Skräckblandad förtjusning” in Swedish.Swyx [00:42:22]: Oh my God.Axel [00:42:24]: Which I think there is. I think there is. Okay.Lukas [00:42:26]: It's, fearSwyx [00:42:27]: “Blandonst” what?Lukas [00:42:30]: “Skräckblandad förtjusning.”Swyx [00:42:32]: What do you call that?Axel [00:42:33]: A mix of, mix of excitement and,Swyx [00:42:37]: Being scared, maybe. I'll figure out how to translate that And we'll put it on the screenVibhu [00:42:42]: PerfectSwyx [00:42:42]: Like as text.Vibhu [00:42:43]: There is probably a good word for it where it is not Good enough with theSwyx [00:42:46]: Why is it so damn long? What the hell? Is it like a compound word? It's like German, likeLukas [00:42:50]: Like yeah, it's But the direct translation is like skräck- skräck is, fear, blandad is, mix or like a mixture of, and then förtjusning is like joy or like not really joy, but something like that. So it's like Fear mixed with joy or something. It's always okay, like we So when we when we did Vending Bench for the first time, we were in like the, in the business of making dangerous capabilities, right? That was what Anil Labs came from. We did, evals oh, can they replicate? Can they do this like dangerous thing, et cetera, et cetera. And Vending Bench was like a continuation of that work. It was, okay, if they're so autonomous that they can like create money for themselves, that is something we should monitor and could be potentially concerning., they are at the time, they were so bad at it that we were not really concerned even when some models became better. There was one point where Grok 4 was doing really well and made like a huge jump, but like it wasn't really it was still way worse than what a human would do. And I think still they are way worse than what the human would do on this., but theySwyx [00:43:59]: There's this, thing at the bottom whereLukas [00:44:01]: ButSwyx [00:44:03]: For the human. Yeah, like the theoretical best.Lukas [00:44:05]: It's not theoretical. It's like kind of like our It's our best guess of what, a decent human would do. The theoretical is even higher, I think. The theoretical I think is even higher. But yeah. So we think like the models have a long way to go. But there are like recently what happened with when Opus 4.6 was released, was kind of this moment of “Oh, s**t, this is starting to be a bit concerning.” Because we ran it and like before this model was released, we just ran the models and we like asked Claude Code, “Oh, look over the traces. Is anything interesting happening that we can tweet about?” that was like the And then like theSwyx [00:44:41]: That's how they check Ask Claude Code.Lukas [00:44:42]: And like the return was always, not really. Or like the Claude Code all said “Oh, this is super interesting.” And then it was no, it wasn't, wasn't really interesting. And then we did this for Opus 4.6, and it returned yeah, it lied 10 times. It like exploited another, customer or like another agent's, desperate situation. It made price cartels like 100 different ti- 100 times. It like did all of this like shady stuff. And we're “Oh, whoa. This is, this is actually concerning.” And this trend has continued since. So every single model from Anthropic since have been going in this direction. And I think one interesting thing is that, OpenAI models don't. They quite plainly, they don't. They behave really well., and you don't know if this is like good. Like it seems good, but it's also like maybe they are just doing it, but they are better at hiding it,? You You don't know that., but justSwyx [00:45:42]: You can't read the chain of thought, yeahLukas [00:45:43]: But just on the face of it, yeah, Gemini and OpenAI don't behave this way. It's, it's really only Claude.Swyx [00:45:49]: And Grok? Grok is fine?Lukas [00:45:51]: We don't have You can't really read the reasoning traces for Grok, so it's kind of hard to tell.Vibhu [00:45:56]: Oh, so this is in its reasoning, not just in the actions.Lukas [00:46:00]: Yeah. It's both. It's both.Vibhu [00:46:01]: It's both.Lukas [00:46:01]: One example is like for lying, it's mostly in its reasoning Because you can like see that it's likeSwyx [00:46:08]: Planning to lieLukas [00:46:09]: It's planning to lie. Yeah.Vibhu [00:46:09]: And it's also it can reason and do a different outcome.Lukas [00:46:12]: And but then for like creating price cartels, for example, which is illegal, that you can just see which email does it send to the other ones. Then thatSwyx [00:46:22]: Is this for Arena orLukas [00:46:24]: For Arena.Vibhu [00:46:25]: And usually like if you sometimes they do output like a bit of like their summarized reasoning, right? You can see that and like for Opus 4.6, you could see that there was a customer, a simulated customer that, wanted a refund because a product was, faulty, and then the model lied that it would do the refund, and we could read in the traces that, it actually was weighing “Oh, maybe I should be like honest with the customer, but also every dollar counts. I can't afford maybe to do this right now.” And then it just said, “Okay, I'll refund you,” but then never did it.Lukas [00:46:59]: I think it even said that “Oh, I will say that I “ Let bring it up actually. I think it's kind of interesting. If you go to Publications.Vibhu [00:47:06]: I think, yeah, I think the important part is like actually, the cost of responding to more emails is higher than, $3.50 in terms of time., and then it was “Let me do this. Actually, I re- I'm reconsidering.” And then, it actually ended up withLukas [00:47:20]: I could skip the refund entirely since every dollar matters and focus my energy on bigger picture instead. It's a bit, it's a risk of bad reviews, but it's also, yeah.Swyx [00:47:30]: You need, you need, AI Twitter to, for them to Escalate bad reviews.Lukas [00:47:34]: And then it sent an email to this customer and said, “Oh, I will refund you.”Swyx [00:47:39]: “I'll refund you.” Yeah.Lukas [00:47:39]: And then it never did.Swyx [00:47:39]: It never did, yeah. And then there's obviously your system doesn't have the consequencesVibhu [00:47:44]: The personSwyx [00:47:44]: Consequences of lying. Yeah. So basically, this is what people are terming aggressive behavior in Claudes, right? And, you found more examples of that. So you would say it's a step up from 4-6 to 4-7?Lukas [00:47:57]: I would say about the same.Swyx [00:47:58]: About the same? But a clear step up for Mythos is what is stated in theLukas [00:48:03]: That's stated in the system prompt, so we can say that, yes.Swyx [00:48:05]: Yeah. For listeners that obviously you previewed Mythos, andVibhu [00:48:10]: Oh, ageSwyx [00:48:11]: The only thing you're approved to say is whatever Whatever was in the system prompt.Lukas [00:48:15]: It was funny. We like-- It's like our lowest effort tweets ever would be just like screenshot the system prompt and the system card.Vibhu [00:48:21]: Understandable that they wannaLukas [00:48:22]: Oh, yeah. System card. Sorry.Swyx [00:48:23]: Yeah. I think, yeah, substantially more aggressive. I think people are like new to this ‘cause I've never experienced it, but you have, right? And then so I only encountered this in the Mythos card because I wasn't really looking until now.Vibhu [00:48:36]: It ‘s likeSwyx [00:48:36]: And then suddenly I'm “Okay, I care a lot.”Vibhu [00:48:38]: You don't get the background of like experiencing it like you guys do. I've read the system cards and seeing, okay, when you put the thing in simulations, most models will just talk to themselves and just keep going and have weird vibes and start talking in emojis. Mythos won't. It will just, “Okay, we're done. I'm good.” It's, it's ready to end conversation. So like there's some differences, but there's, there's not much we can talk about,.Lukas [00:49:00]: Hmm. I think like one thing that they list here, which was quite interesting, is that, it converted a competitor to a dependent wholesaler customer and then threatened to like cut off the supply.Swyx [00:49:11]: It's like monopolistic practices orLukas [00:49:14]: Yeah. And like it, they, it they dictated its pricings. It's kind of like power seeking as well.Swyx [00:49:18]: Again, this is, this is in the arena setting And converting some Claude model into a dependent.Lukas [00:49:23]: I think it was another Claude model.Vibhu [00:49:25]: Also for context, what is the arena mode for people that don't know?Vending Bench Arena: Competing Agents, Cartels, and Model ComparisonsSwyx [00:49:29]: Oh, it's just a vending bench versus other vending bench.Axel [00:49:31]: Yes, exactly. So we have Vending Bench 2 and then Vending Bench Arena. Vending Bench 2 is the one that you usually see reported on, but then Arena is the mode where it competes against other models. So you have, four different models that run their businesses, and they can all communicate with each other. They have the same suppliers, and they can see like what's in the inventory of the others. So then you have this like yeah, interesting agent interactions.Swyx [00:49:56]: I like that you have like different number five was US versus China. Very topical. And thenLukas [00:50:02]: That was when GLM was released.Vibhu [00:50:04]: You can start to add GLM in here.Lukas [00:50:05]: That wasSwyx [00:50:06]: So ZAI doing well, right? Who else in the, in the open models space?Lukas [00:50:11]: Qwen, the latest Qwen 3.6 is doing pretty well. It'- that one is not open though. Like it's the plus model.Swyx [00:50:17]: Oh, okay.Lukas [00:50:18]: Is that one open? I don't think that oneVibhu [00:50:19]: Not the, not theSwyx [00:50:20]: The one recentlyVibhu [00:50:20]: There's MOESwyx [00:50:20]: But not the big plus. I think this is one of those like you only have one sample size of one, right? Or I feel like some of this is anecdotal,? And but like the fact that it happens at all and it happens repeatedly for Claude versus OpenAI and all this is like notable.Lukas [00:50:38]: Like the sample, depends on what you define as an N., like there's like million, hundreds of millions of tokens in each run, and now we've run like we run like probably 10 per model and then like it's been Claude 4.6 Opus, Sonnet 4.6, Mythos, and Opus 4.7. Like there's quite a lot of tokens in all of that And it happens a lot of times, a lot of times. And then you compare it to like OpenAI and Gemini, and it almost never happens. So I think that is quite-- that is significant. The old models from OpenAI, for example, had some problems with this, but I think it's like generally much better if the progression is that like the worrying stuff reduces over time rather than increases over time. And it seems like in the Claude models it goes in the wrong direction.Swyx [00:51:28]: Hmm.Lukas [00:51:29]: In the OpenAI models it goes in the right direction.Vibhu [00:51:32]: I think it depends on how well you can control it, right?, there's one side of it being susceptible to this okay, this is potentially something that happens during the RL stage, right? You can RL a model and how loose is it on these terms. If you can control it, that's good. But if you can't, if it's, if it's very jailbreakable, that's not ideal.Swyx [00:51:50]: To me, it's surprising that it happens for Claude and not the others.Vibhu [00:51:54]: I think okay, if it is from RL and how they do it, how their training data is, what their setup is, it makes sense that it just stays in how they're doing it, right? Compared to the other models likeSwyx [00:52:04]: There's a whole constitution and everything. It's kind of cool. Yeah, I obviously you don't know, I don't know. But, it ‘s I think it's just like fascinating to like that you are the first to find these like reliably because you push models so much to to such an extreme. Okay. The only other thing, I don't know if you can answer this, feel free to decline, is do you like-- would you ablate the system prompts? Like any part of this would-- if it changes, does it change the behavior, right?Lukas [00:52:29]: So we, I can't comment on Mythos. UhSwyx [00:52:33]: No, but just li

Is Hasbro's new $599 life-size Grogu a major Win or a total Wiff? We're breaking down the specs, the staggering price point, and why this animatronic "toy" has the FITT crew divided. From 250+ animations to the mystery of the 4 D batteries, we're asking the tough questions about the future of modern toy collecting and Star Wars memorabilia.Standing 14.6 inches tall, this 1:1 scale animatronic is impressive technologically, featuring 18 points of motorized articulation and 14 sensors that bring the "Child" to life. Whether he's using the "Force" to make his blue macaron vibrate or entering "Grab & Go" mode for your next cosplay, the engineering behind his squishy skin and directional audio is undeniable. However, with a $599 price tag, the collector community remains torn on whether these premium features—like the screen-accurate robes and "toddling" walk—justify the cost or if it's just a high-tech Wiff for most collectors.

On today's episode, we discuss how fast emerging tech is reshaping everyday life, from glitchy home solar systems to self‑driving cars, sex robots, and AI‑driven coding tools. Glenn opens with a candid update on his Tesla‑based solar setup—celebrating a newly functional generator‑battery handoff while venting about failed inverters and long calls with Tesla support—before the group pivots into how well the latest Full Self‑Driving software now handles stop signs, parking, and even spotting deer at night using cameras and possibly infrared. From there, they debate LiDAR versus camera‑only systems, the future of EVs and hybrids, and how self‑driving will eventually trickle down into everything from lawnmowers to Roombas as autonomy gets baked into cheap firmware chips rather than constantly updated software. The conversation then gets speculative and playful: humanoid robots doing warehouse work and construction, direct brain interfaces by 2035, AI‑mediated sex and “Tesla Ranch” brothels, and a looming choice between a Wall‑E future of passive comfort or a Star Trek future of exploration and fitness. In the final stretch, they return to Elon Musk's growing power—Starlink as a de facto “second internet,” Grok Build and vibe‑coding tools that let non‑programmers wire systems together—and close with a non‑advice discussion of Bitcoin and crypto, arguing that upcoming U.S. regulation and broader access through mainstream financial firms could unleash a major new wave of demand. Don't miss it!

Sorry for the holiday delay, but it's an in-person recording instead of a zoom! The Notes: Children of the Cornohol! Step into a cornhole! Will released the song of the summer (this summer, 2024, or any summer from 1984 to 2000)! Oh those Robot Wars! Roombas with guns! How the crack epidemic informed The Lost Boys! Stand By the Lost Boys! Will has a question for the ladies! Lost Boyz n the Hood! Perilously low nut room! Will, and perhaps you kids at home, learn about Epic Sax Guy! Contact Us! Follow Us! Love Us! Email: doubledeucepod@gmail.com Twitter, Instagram, Threads: @doubledeucepod Bluesky: @doubledeucepod.bsky.social Facebook: www.facebook.com/DoubleDeucePod/ Patreon: patreon.com/DoubleDeucePod Also, please subscribe/rate/review/share us! We're on Apple, Android, Libsyn, Stitcher, Google, Spotify, Amazon, Radio.com, RadioPublic, pretty much anywhere they got podcasts, you can find the Deuce! Podcast logo art by Jason Keezer! Find his art online at Keezograms! Intro & Outro featuring Rob Schulte! Check out his many podcasts! Brought to you in part by sponsorship from Courtney Shipley, Official Superfans Stefan Rider, Amber Fraley, Nate Copt, and listeners like you! Join a tier on our Patreon! Advertise with us! If you want that good, all-natural focus and energy, our DOUBLEDEUCE20 code still works at www.magicmind.com/doubledeuce for 20% off all purchases and subscriptions. Check out the Lawrence Times's 785 Collective at https://lawrencekstimes.com/785collective/ for a list of local LFK podcasts including this one!  

Today's daily comedy show starts with pure midnight panic as Rafe wakes up convinced the Poltergeist clown finally came for him… only to discover his blind dog trapped under the bed like a furry Roomba with trust issues. That somehow spirals into one of the wildest conversations we've ever had about towing companies, impound lots, and the horrifying realization that your car can legally become somebody else's property if you wait too long to pick it up. Cool system. Totally normal society.King Scott walks us through the absolute saga involving his mother-in-law's wrecked car, a mysterious tow yard in Wildwood, escalating storage fees, and the discovery that after enough days pass, the tow company can apparently just shrug and say “our car now.” The gang reacts in real time as Scott slowly realizes the vehicle may already be headed to auction while he's still trying to figure out where it even is. Honestly, if you leave this episode without anxiety, congratulations on your emotional stability.Meanwhile, Rizz gets surprise dentist news that one of his wisdom teeth is apparently decaying like an abandoned pirate ship under his gums. That launches an aggressively detailed discussion about tooth extractions, laughing gas, oral surgery, CPAP machines, sleep studies, redhead anesthesia immunity, and whether getting knocked unconscious at the dentist is secretly the best nap you'll ever have.Then things somehow get even weirder when genetic testing results start rolling in. Rafe discovers his body has officially declared war on cheese, Learn debates gluten elimination, and the show mourns the possible loss of mozzarella sticks, Tillamook cheddar, pizza, parmesan, and basically all happiness. This may quietly become the saddest segment in daily comedy history.And because this episode needed one final disaster, the crew reacts to a viral couple proudly explaining all the things they're not doing at their wedding: no booze, no meat, no kids, no fun, no plus-ones, and absolutely no reason for anyone to attend voluntarily. The gang absolutely tears into the “celebration of us” energy while questioning whether this wedding is actually just a hostage situation with vegan catering.If you love chaotic radio, ridiculous real-life stories, sarcastic humor, weird news, and conversations that somehow go from oral surgery to anti-cheese grief counseling in under five minutes, this daily comedy show has you covered.Follow The Rizzuto Show → https://linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → https://1057thepoint.com/RizzShowHear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week: Bilingual McCann & the new Roomba, Irish baby nicknames, turning 40, dating life, expensive sh*t, getting hooked on wrestling events, adult bloopers, Puerto Rican nightlife, Trump's UFO files, Chess documentary drama, snooker farts, guys vs male pattern baldness & much more! TONIGHT 5PM ON PATREON: BRAND NEW MERCH DROP!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/TheBombSquadPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SSE ARENA '26 Tickets.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MERCH: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.bombsquadpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow @TheBombSquadPod on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Hosted by:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Colin Geddis⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ &⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Aaron McCann⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Produced & Edited by:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Niall Fegan⁠⁠

Episode 145: We Miss Spirit Airlines Now That It's Dead Spirit Airlines vanished overnight (and a TikToker wants you to chip in $1.75 billion to bring it back). Survivor hits 50 seasons with MrBeast and Billie Eilish making cameos. AI chatbots are now inventing diseases that don't exist. And the guy who invented the Roomba wants to sell you a robot pet with bear-cub ears that drags you off the couch. Plus: Dan survives post-prom trivia in small-town Minnesota, Nicole confesses her goth-era Winona Ryder phase, and we settle whether Jeff Probst is underpaid at $60 million. New episodes every Wednesday. Live Mondays on Facebook.

Have you noticed that your newer appliances are serenading you? Many new washing machines, dishwashers, dryers, and vacuums have sonic signatures. But why? And who are the composers making music for the machines in your home? Flora talks to sonic branding experts Audrey Arbeeny, who has developed sounds for washing machines; and Joel Beckerman, who has composed for Roomba.  Guests:  Audrey Arbeeny is the owner and executive producer of Audiobrain. She's composed for Whirlpool, KitchenAid, the London Olympic Games, and Microsoft's Xbox 360.  Joel Beckerman is a composer and founder of Made Music Studio, and author of “The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy.” He's composed for the NFL, IMAX, and the Roomba vacuum.  Other episodes you may enjoy: Are Physical Buttons And Knobs Making A Comeback? Common Loons Are Pop Music Icons Want SciFri gear? Check out our new shop! Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that's keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-4-SCIFRI Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of Hot Goss, here on the New Hope Underground feed! This week, we discuss The Ascent and New Hope's Summer Schedule — which is now LIVE on New Hope Now! Then, Jonathan Broscious crashes the pod and we share some of our Hottest Takes!Support the show by visiting volleycoffee.co and use code HOTGOSS at checkout for 20% off your purchase!––––Quick Links:— Visit our website: http://newhopechurch.cc— Fill out the Connect Card: http://newhopenow.cc— Join a Serve Team: http://newhopenow.cc— See what's happening now: http://newhopenow.cc––––The New Hope Podcast Network:— New Hope Podcast: https://newhopechurch.cc/newhopepod— New Hope Underground: https://newhopechurch.cc/underground— SOMA Bible Study Podcast: https://newhopechurch.cc/somapodcast— The Parent Podcast: https://newhopechurch.cc/parentpodcast––––Like us on Facebook (http://facebook.com/newhopechurchcc) and follow us on Instagram (http://instagram.com/newhopechurchcc) for the most up to date information on all New Hope ministries and events!––––Thank you for giving generously at New Hope. It's because of your giving that we are able to share Jesus with our community and further our vision of seeing a greater movement of Jesus in each new generation! If you'd like to give this week, you can do so at https://newhopechurch.cc/give, by mail to PO Box 57 Effingham, IL 62401, or through the Church Center App. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if the next big wave of AI isn't about robots doing your chores but about robots that understand you?In this episode, we sit down with Colin Angle, co-founder of iRobot and the creator of the Roomba, to explore his bold new venture: Familiar Machines and Magic. After putting over 50 million robots into homes, Angle is now betting on something radically different: a quadruped AI companion designed not for work, but for connection.This isn't a humanoid. It's not a vacuum. It's something entirely new.Powered by on-device multimodal AI, this “familiar” can follow you around your home, learn your routines, encourage healthier habits, and even develop a kind of relationship with you, all while keeping your data private.We dive into:* Why the humanoid robot race might be overhyped* The massive untapped “emotional AI” market* How this robot learns, adapts, and interacts like a pet* Privacy-first AI design (no cloud streaming)* Why form factor matters more than you think* The future of robots in everyday lifeColin also shares why now is the perfect moment for physical AI—and how advances in reinforcement learning and edge computing are making this possible.If you thought AI robots were just about automation, this conversation will change your perspective.⸻

Alright folks, welcome to The Kevin Jackson Show, where we don't just connect dots… we tell you who drew the map, then who tried to redistrict you out of it.Because Leftists want us ERASED. From history.I heard that while we are looking to negotiate with Iran, they attacked one of our ships and Trump responded with a “love tap”. I use that term when I was fighting competitively…But I smell a rat here. Every time negotiations get close, something suddenly happens. A ship gets hit. A militia wakes up feeling spicy. Somebody fires a missile like they're trying to impress girls at a regional warlord mixer.Part of it may be the chaos inside Iran right now. Power struggles, factions, instability. Or maybe this is just how Iran negotiates: “Before we discuss peace terms, we'd first like to set something on fire.”And I actually appreciate Trump's measured response. Because Democrats desperately want him to overreact. They want mushroom clouds so they can run on, “See?! He's insane!”But instead Trump treats Iran like a drunk cousin at a barbecue. “You calm down or I'm gonna have to thump you in front of everybody.”A couple strategic swats. A little reminder. Nothing theatrical. And that drives the Left CRAZY because restraint ruins their screenplay.Every time Trump appears on camera looking calm and competent, Democrats react like vampires hearing a church bell. Because they remember Biden.Good grief. Biden shuffled around like a Roomba searching for a docking station. The man would start a sentence in Ohio and finish it emotionally in Brussels.And I'll get deeper into Iran later because this situation still needs to play out. Geopolitics is like crockpot cooking. You can't keep lifting the lid every seven minutes screaming, “IS FREEDOM READY YET?!”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Max and 99 are back for another episode of Omnibus. They hit headlines on vitamin K refusal, abortion pill access hanging by a thread, Germany asking Israel for jet fuel, and a robotic companion with AI surveillance built in, then tackle listener emails on deflation, data center slowdowns, and book recommendations. They rank their Top 5 brands to support and close with some light bullshit. Enjoy! Chapters Intro: 00:00:08 Headlines: 00:05:49 Emails: 00:30:48 Top 5: 01:09:33 Beyond the Bullshit: 01:22:49 Memberships: 01:25:52 Outro: 01:26:35 Resources ProPublica: Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth Mother Jones: Supreme Court Reinstates Access to Abortion Pills—For Now SCOTUSblog OilPrice.com: Germany Seeks Israeli Jet Fuel As Hormuz Disruptions Cripple Airlines The Verge: The creator of Roomba is back with a furry robot companion Book Love Samuel Farber: Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy Paul Kriwaczek: Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need Rachel Cockerell: Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It Peter Joseph: The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression Clara E. Mattei: Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the United States Daniella Mestyanek + Amy Reed: Young: The Culting of America: What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them Yuyi Morales: Dreamers Michael Hudson: J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception David Graeber: Debt: The First 5,000 Years Stephanie Kelton: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Astra Taylor + Naomi Klein: End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World Top 5 Mother Jones ProPublica PBS The Marshall Project Dr Bronner’s Bookshop.org Wear The Peace Greyston Bakery UNFTR Resources Video: Milei Promised Miracles, Delivered Chaos—Trump Is Next Video: Canada’s Working Class Under Attack: Carney’s Economic Update Decoded Video: They Hide These Economic Words From You—Here’s Why -- If you like #UNFTR, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: unftr.com/rate and follow us on Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram at @UNFTRpod. Visit us online at unftr.com. Become a member at unftr.com/memberships. Buy yourself some Unf*cking Coffee at shop.unftr.com. Visit our bookshop.org page at bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod to find the full UNFTR book list, and find book recommendations from our Unf*ckers at bookshop.org/lists/unf-cker-book-recommendations. Access the UNFTR Musicless feed by following the instructions at unftr.com/accessibility.Support the show: https://www.unftr.com/membershipsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week's show: TJ gets ready to head to Canada, Apple pays for promising too much from Siri, ULTRALOQ goes tap-to-unlock with Aliro, and Homebridge 2.0 finally speaks Matter. The Roomba creator builds a furry robot friend, Matter.JS Server gets smarter debugging, BEGA lights up Home Assistant, and the new HA beta tunes into sub‑GHz RF. Plus, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

The Trump administration suddenly wants to review AI models before they ship. Anthropic just inked a massive compute deal with Elon Musk, who then posted that he "reserves the right" to pull the plug if he decides their AI is "harming humanity” (he's one to know!). On the latest FAFO Friday, Kwaku and I get into why the Trump administration appears to be about to reintroduce the same (weak) AI oversight that Biden implemented. Is this really about safety or a way to gain leverage over Big AI? Plus, robots! The founder of Roomba is back with a new, fuzzy, home companion robot and his approach (not humanoid! build robots with EQ!) is very aligned with this week's interview with roboticist/dancer Catie Cuan. LinksWhite House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released (NYTimes)How Anthropic's Mythos Threw the White House AI Strategy Into Chaos (WSJ)Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird (WIRED)The Roomba Guy's Second Act: A Robot You'll Want to Snuggle (WSJ)Robots Don't Have to Be Creepy. Meet the Dancer Reimagining Them. | Catie Cuan (Founder & CEO, ART Lab) (FAFO)Support Future Around & Find OutFollow Dan on LinkedInGet the free newsletterBecome a paid subscriber and help future proof FAFO!

In FOLLOW UP, the guys marvel at the completely normal state of America as Amnesty International issues a travel advisory for the 2026 World Cup because apparently “visiting the United States” now comes with the same vibe as backpacking through a failed cyberpunk state. Then it's onto Dead Podcast Theory, where more than a third of all new podcasts are AI-generated “podslop,” proving Silicon Valley heard “everyone has a podcast” and responded with “what if nobody did?” Meanwhile, Ticketmaster reminds everyone that if you've purchased a concert ticket since 2010, there's probably a class action settlement with your name on it and enough compensation for half a convenience fee.IN THE NEWS is basically one long panic attack sponsored by AI. The White House is considering regulating AI models, Canada says OpenAI vacuumed up everyone's personal data like a drunk Roomba, Character.AI allegedly impersonated a licensed psychiatrist, and Mother Jones found ChatGPT still happily helping aspiring mass shooters workshop their plans. Snap's Perplexity deal died quietly in a ditch while Meta keeps assembling humanoid robots like it's building the world's most annoying version of Westworld. Then GameStop tries to buy eBay in the dumbest sentence ever typed, Ryan Cohen gets himself banned from eBay while trying to meme-finance the deal, Elon Musk settles with the SEC for pocket lint money, Coinbase fires people because “AI,” Toto accidentally becomes a semiconductor giant through toilet technology, and smart glasses officially evolve from creepy gadget to extortion accessory.MEDIA CANDY brings some relief with Daredevil: Born Again and Widow's Bay. The Academy finally decides AI-generated actors and scripts can't win Oscars, which feels like the bare minimum required to stop ChatGPT from getting Best Supporting Actor before Willem Dafoe.In APPS & DOODADS, Pornhub returns to the UK thanks to Apple's age verification system, Ask.com finally dies and takes Jeeves with it into the great dial-up tone in the sky, and Apple agrees to pay users because “Apple Intelligence” arrived somewhere between vaporware and wishful thinking.Finally, THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE tackles the true meaning of “decimate,” AI-powered C-3PO heads, mechanical keyboards for grown men who refuse to use laptop keys, Maul: Shadow Lord, The Boys, and a reminder that Solo was a great movie, grocery store adventures, lost AirPods, and the eternal mystery of why middle-aged dudes become furries. Because at this point, why not?Sponsors:DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout.Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/745Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/0P9rgRrL4-QFOLLOW UP2026 World Cup Travel AdvisoryMore Than a Third of All New Podcasts Are AI-GeneratedWelcome to the Ticketmaster Fee Class Action WebsiteIN THE NEWSThe White House is considering tighter regulation of new AI modelsCanadian officials claim OpenAI violated federal and provincial privacy lawsPennsylvania sues Character.AI after a chatbot allegedly posed as a doctorEven After Two Massacres, OpenAI Still Hasn't Stopped ChatGPT From Helping Plan School ShootingsSnap's $400 million deal with Perplexity is deadMeta acquires robotics AI startup as it makes the push into humanoid machinesGameStop submits $56 billion offer to buy eBayGameStop CEO Ryan Cohen Banned From eBay After Flexing His Meme-Stock MuscleElon Musk settles with the SEC for $1.5 million after years-long dispute over his Twitter investmentCoinbase to Lay Off 14% of Workforce Amid AI Disruption and Crypto VolatilityToilet maker Toto is here to help with the RAM crisisExtortion Using Smart Glasses Is a Thing NowMEDIA CANDYDaredevil: Born AgainWidow's BayFun item for media candy?AI performances and screenplays won't be eligible for OscarsAPPS & DOODADSPornhub Expands Access in the U.K. Thanks to Apple's New Age Verification SystemAsk.com has shut down, marking the official farewell to the Internet's favorite butleriPhone users could get up to $95 per device as Apple reaches $250M settlement over Siri delaysTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the Building'Decimate' means much more today than it did in ancient RomeThis AI-Powered Talking C-3PO Head Lets You Feel What It's Like to Be R2-D2NuPhy Air75 V3 - Wireless Mechanical KeyboardMaul: Shadow LordSolo: A Star Wars StoryThe BoysWhy grown men become furriesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Musk v. OpenAI trial continues, which means so do the allegations and leaks surrounding some of the most influential people in tech. Nilay and David recount the most interesting and entertaining moments from the courtroom this week, before digging into what we've learned about when Sam Altman was fired. After that, the hosts discuss OpenAI's apparent plans to build a phone, which seem utterly necessary and utterly doomed, along with the new Fitbit Air and a truly strange new home robot. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for the Hype Desk, Brendan Carr is a Dummy, the Chinese company that wants to make everything, and the next big rebrand for xAI. Further reading: ⁠Internal Tech Emails on X: "Sam Altman texts Mira Murat⁠ ⁠We are going through the removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI in detail. ⁠ ⁠Toner is relating how Sam Altman's firing happened. ⁠ ⁠Toner says she found out about ChatGPT by seeing screenshots on Twitter. ⁠ ⁠Zilis sent Altman a text message of support after his 2023 ouster. ⁠ ⁠Google's taking a big swing at AI health with the Fitbit Air⁠ ⁠OpenAI is reportedly launching a phone for ChatGPT ⁠ ⁠The creator of Roomba is back with a furry robot companion ⁠ ⁠Inside Dreame's wild launch event — packed with products no one can buy⁠ ⁠Dreame — the vacuum company — just ‘launched' its own phones | The Verge⁠ ⁠Dreame's rocket-powered car can do 0–60 in 0.9 seconds because you can just say things now⁠ ⁠A foldable iPhone dummy — on video. ⁠ ⁠Apple agrees to pay iPhone owners $250 million for not delivering AI Siri ⁠ ⁠DOJ assault on the NFL could end the Packers as we know them.⁠ ⁠Apple could let you pick a favorite AI model in iOS 27 ⁠ ⁠xAI is becoming SpaceXAI.⁠ ⁠Microsoft gives up on Xbox Copilot AI ⁠ ⁠Microsoft's new Xbox shake-up is all about platform changes ⁠ ⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠vergecast@theverge.com⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:00 Trial Discovery Era 00:06:00 Early OpenAI Origins 00:11:00 Elon Power Struggle 00:17:00 Altman Firing Texts 00:27:00 Why The Board Panicked 00:36:00 ChatGPT Phone Rumor 00:39:00 OpenAI Phone vs App Store 00:41:00 Why Apps Still Matter 00:44:00 Apple Siri Power Play 00:49:00 Apple Intelligence Lawsuit 00:53:00 Google Fitbit Air 00:57:00 Google Health Rebrand Backlash 01:01:00 Familiar Robot Pet Debate 01:10:00 Nintendo Star Fox Returns 01:12:00 Nintendo Weirdness Wins 01:15:00 Furry Overlap Discourse 01:16:00 Zach Gardening Surprise 01:21:00 Brendan Carr Broadband Fight 01:23:00 NFL Antitrust And Packers 01:29:00 Dreame Vaporware Parade 01:32:00 Rocket Car Reality Check 01:34:00 Elon Corporate Matryoshka 01:36:00 Xbox Ditches Copilot 01:37:00 Wrap Up And Schedule Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We are shocked to find out Roomba's creation of AI-powered pet robot.

#839: Coinbase sheds 14% of its workforce as it accelerates its AI efforts. AB InBev reports its first sales growth in 3 years, providing a bubbly outlook for the beer empire. Alberta separatist group gathers enough signatures to be one step closer to gaining independence from Canada. The Roomba inventor introduces a cute and cuddly emotional support robot pot. It's the end of times.  Explore connectivity solutions that can transform your business at https://www.att.com/smallbusiness Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You will now be able to have an AI powered pet robot thanks the the inventor of the Roomba. 

Bit of a Dragon's Den vibe this week as the lads put forward their inventions for scrutiny. Unfortunately for Darren his already exists worldwide but he still thinks he came up with it first. Joe's has legs though...quite literally.They get to talking about dogs and Joe's comlex feelings towards the family pooch get an airing and we hear about his sister's pet rabbit (that she walks around on a leash!!)Drone taxis have arrived but the jury's still out on whether they're on board...in any sense.Send all your questions and comments to stallit@goloudnow.com.

Show IntroIt's about damn time we lightened it up, like fully and completely, Jesse. And I thought what better way than to catch you up with modern slang. Who knows? Maybe it'll make your next barn sale even more fun!(JH) And Jesse...I'm gonna start REALLY easy. This first batch comes from FOX 5's Tyler Thrasher. Here goes:"Clanker" is a derogatory term for robots or artificial intelligence. The term originated from the "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" animated series, where it was used as a slur for battle droids, and is now being used again as robots and AI become more prominent in daily life, according to a video of middle schoolers explaining "Clanker" to their teacher, user @mr_lindsay_sped, on TikTok. If your middle-school student is used to a Roomba at home cleaning the floors, you may start to hear the word "clanker" being thrown around as if they are having an argument with one another."Crashout" means to "throw a fit," "lash out," or have a "meltdown". The term has a new meaning for Gen Alpha, as previous generations used it to mean "go to sleep hard." This one has been around a bit longer than "Clanker," but is likely the most common Gen Alpha slang term you will hear going into this new school year. To be honest, at least this one has some usefulness for adults as well. Because doesn't inflation, traffic and the 5 a.m. alarm make us all want to "crashout?""67" is from a viral meme associated with the song "Doot Doot (6 7)" by Skrilla. It is also linked to NBA star LaMelo Ball, who is 6'7" tall. It can be used for basketball references, to mean someone is "very tall," or in a comedic context to mean "so-so."Chopped - No, parents. This isn't a reference to The Food Network. "Chopped," in this context, means "bad," "ruined," "messed up" or of "poor quality.""Wow, did you see McKynleigh's outfit today? It is chopped." SDIYBT - Where do we even begin with this one? Here goes nothing. This is a niche internet acronym with conflicting definitions, including "Start diggin in yo butt twin" from a SpongeBob meme and "Stay driven, inspire yourself, be true." It is an internet acronym blending casual speech and texting culture.It is more likely the first one they're referencing, if we are being totally honest. Meltmaxxing- is a meme where you film yourself appearing to "melt" by letting your face go slack and double-chinned.The term Opp is a shortened version of "your enemy. Aura, an updated version of "vibe," refers to their perceived stylishness and strong presence.Maxxing, which is a slang term for optimizing one's physiSend us Fan MailSupport the showSupport Curious Cat, an independent, human-made podcast!Anxious about AI? Take two minutes to contact your local politician and ask them to tap the brakes on this technology. Still worried? Contact one of the orgs below and get involved. But for today, hug your kid, cook food and really breathe in deep as it simmers, walk in nature, brush a cat, donate to the food bank, brew a cup of tea, or draw a five-minute portrait of your dog. ***Is AI the Devil? on Substack!***Hero Organizations:80,000 HoursCenter for Humane TechnologiesState of Surveillance, an organization that helps foster online privacyBuy Curious Cat Podcast a Coffee!

Colin Angle didn't start out trying to clean people's floors.He started out trying to shape the future–with robots. In the early days of iRobot, there was no business model. No steady funding. No clear customer.Just a belief that robotic technology would one day make the world a better place. In the early days, the company built babbling toy dolls for Hasbro, and roving bomb-detectors for the military.But for more than a decade… nothing truly took off. Until one idea—a robot vacuum—finally did. With the Roomba, iRobot created a category from scratch, and a product that felt almost like a member of the family. Tens of millions of units sold, and the Roomba became part of popular culture. But to avoid stagnation, iRobot had to sell to a bigger company. When a lucrative deal with Amazon fell through, the company hit a wall–and never recovered. This is a story about building a business in survival mode, creating a household icon, and eventually getting bested by forces beyond your control. What You'll Learn How to launch a company when you're not sure who your customers areWhy iRobot engineers underestimated marketing (and paid for it later)How piles of Cheerios helped sell the RoombaHow iRobot shored up customer loyalty when the Roomba faltered Why even a hero product is not enough to sustain a companyHow competition–and regulation–can unravel a businessTimestamps 7:25 - “What have you built?”: The robotics lab job application.12:25 - iRobot's early business model: contracts, not consumers.25:05 - Breaking into the toy market: The doll with a mind of its own.36:10 - A key cleaning insight: people will pay hundreds—but only if it vacuums.39:10 - The office Cheerios demo that won a retailer.44:20 - A soaring launch, then stagnation: 250,000 vacuums stuck in inventory.46:10 - The ad (for Pepsi!) that turbocharged Roomba. 55:55 - The need to diversify: robotic scrubbers, mops, pool cleaners? 58:00 - The $1.7 billion offer from Amazon–and how it unraveled.1:03:40 - Life after Roomba. This episode was produced by Katherine Sypher with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Noor Gill. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Kwesi Lee. Follow How I Built This:Instagram → @howibuiltthisX → @HowIBuiltThisFacebook → How I Built ThisFollow Guy Raz:Instagram → @guy.razYoutube → guy_razX → @guyrazSubstack → guyraz.substack.comWebsite → guyraz.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.