The Internet Reacts to CEO's Murder

news unfolded this week. One of the top stories this week was that the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson died after being attacked by a gun wielding assailant in New York City and what was clearly a premeditated act of violence. Now, this is not a true crime podcast, so I'm not gonna dwell on the extraordinary facts about this case, the ones that have been shared with us so far. You

can read up all about that if you like. Rather, what I wanted to talk about is how the reaction online to this act of violence has been pretty brutal, and not just among your typical Internet trolls. Over on Reddit, moderators had to shut down a thread in which doctors were criticizing Brian Thompson and the insurance industry as a whole for practices that prioritize profits and shareholder return over

human life. The participants in a thread in the subreddit r slash medicine took United Healthcare to task for allegedly denying coverage to patients, all in an effort to squeeze out more value for shareholders. It got so spicy that moderators chose to nuke the thread from orbit, because it's the only way to be sure. I've been seeing a lot of response to this killing online and there's a very dark core of eat the rich fueling a lot

of these reactions. And y'all, don't get me wrong, I'm very much in the camp of eat the rich, but I think there's a very small number of an incredibly privileged people who wield far too much wealth and power in the United States and beyond, and that strikes me as wrong. However, I'm also very much in the let's not kill anybody camp when it comes to those sorts of things. I have deep compassion for the countless patients who found themselves lacking coverage despite having insurance. Like that

should never happen. That's why we have insurance Obviously, denying patients in need is wrong, and it's a problem that does need to be rectified. But I also, at the same time think that killing someone is wrong as well. You know, both things can both be you know, simultaneously be true. Anyway, I guess this is where I say the compassion part of my philosophy of compassion and critical

thinking comes in. I don't think those who create and foster systems that profit off the suffering of others should get away with that. They should be held accountable and be required to participate in the fixing of those systems. However, I also think gunning someone down in cold blood isn't a reasonable solution to those kinds of problems anyway. One other thing I want to mention about this is that there's a lot of misinformation going around regarding this attack.

I have seen numerous posts quoting people, primarily Elon Musk, about this incident. In fact, I saw one post getting a lot of traction on Facebook being shared by multiple friends of mine, and in that post it appeared that Elon Musk was tweeting out essentially that CEOs keep the world going round and that without CEOs everything falls apart. The only thing is I could actually find no evidence that he ever tweeted that message, and you know, he tweets a lot, and there was no record of him

actually tweeting that out. There were these photos of a tweet, but they looked weird, like the font wasn't right, the kerning wasn't right on the typeface. So, in other words, at least to my eyes, it appeared to be fabricated in order to support a narrative. Of that narrative apparently being that Elon Musk is a billionaire with no consideration or awareness of what normal folks go through, and that he has an overinflated opinion of himself, which you know,

I agree with that perception. I think it's accurate, but I don't think that means people should go around inventing quotes. The guy has plenty of real quotes that give us insight into his beliefs and thoughts. There's no need to make up new ones just to support a particular point of view. So yeah, I guess ultimately what I'm saying when I'm bringing up this whole story is one try

and keep compassion in mind. I understand if your capacity for compassion is stretched due to the impact the insurance industry has had at people at large, particularly people who need it most. But also keep using critical thinking when you're seeing you know memes and stuff shared about this because often the people who are creating them have no

real consideration for you know, reality. They might saying things that are accurate depictions, but not actual quotations, and I think it's important to make the distinction, by the way.

To stick with the tech theme, one story that has resurfaced in the wake of the killing of Brian Thompson is how some ultra wealthy folks have been worrying and preparing for a tumultuous upheaval brought about by one of many potential things like climate change or a social revolution, or just war in general, or another pandemic, that kind

of thing. Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this for The Guardian back in twenty twenty two, and even then he was referencing an event that had happened years earlier, and the article is titled the super rich Preppers planning to save

themselves from the Apocalypse Now. In that piece, rushkov explains he was lured to speak at an event, only he discovered this event was actually a group of billionaires who wanted to know about practical considerations they should be, you know, making their designing constrs, structing, maintaining and operating a shelter or a bunker that's designed to keep their precious bodies safe while the rest of us suffer out in the

hellscape that is the apocalypse. And he claims that at one point, the fat cats asked him how best to keep control over their security details. After all, the people working security would be coming from the commoners and they might share some of those sentiments with the struggling and the dying, dirty people outside. Rushcoff suggested that they actually extend a hand and become friends with their staff, you know, before the world falls apart, because human cooperation is necessary

for survival. But the rich folks, according to Rushkoff, favored approaches like controlling the food supply or even requiring their security detail to wear electric shock collars. And I'm not being dramatic here. You should read the article now. The reason I bring up this article, which is a couple of years old, more than two years old at this point, is that new articles are popping up about very similar

topics in the wake of Thompson killing. Natasha Tiku of The Washington Post has an article titled Fearful of Crime, the tech elite transformed their homes into military bunkers. That article published just yesterday, and she also talks about a Silicon Valley startup company the designed security systems for the uber rich. And the company has a name that pretty much tells you everything you need to know the name of the company, sourn. Now, I wish I were making

that up. It's already insane to me that there's a tech company out there with the unironic name Palanteer. And here you have companies catering to the ultra wealthy or the defense industry, and they're eagerly adopting names from J. R. R. Tolkien's works, particularly the Lord of the Rings series, and these are often names that are associated with bad guys.

So they're saying the quiet part out loud, y'all. Anyway, if you want to get angry at rich people who seem to think that it's better to live in a world that's falling apart as long as they personally continue to accumulate wealth, rather than live in a world where they don't accumulate so much wealth and the rest of the world starts to patch itself up, like, oh, well, no, I want to have money, So why would I deny myself all that money just so that the world could

potentially fix some problems. Let the world sort itself out. I need mine. Well, these two articles are a pretty darn good start for you to go down your journey of decrying the rich. It's interesting because, like, there's definitely been a growing sentiment and in the world in general, at least the world I'm familiar with that has been anti wealthy because of these sorts of issues. And when I say wealthy, I mean like ultra wealthy, the people

who are benefiting from others, you know. And it sounds like folks are worried that it's coming to a head. I don't think it's coming to a head yet, but you know, pressure does seem to be building, and I expect that's going to continue over the next few years. Another big story here in the United States involves more

details around the Chinese hacking operation known as Salt Typhoon. Now, I'm pretty sure that we talked about Salt Typhoon months ago, that we had talked about the discovery of a naming of this operation earlier this year, but more details have emerged recently that indicate the project is far broader in

scope than first imagined. So, according to the FBI, Chinese hackers have infiltrated telecommunication systems here in the United States, and we're talking the big guys like AT and T, Verizon, and T Mobile, although T Mobile claims there's no evidence hackers accessed customer information on their network. Further, these hackers have accessed call information and texts and that kind of thing. The matter is severe enough that the Senate had a

classified briefing on the matter this past Wednesday. According to Reuter's, Senator Rick Scott was angry that the briefing didn't detail information on why the FBI didn't catch this intrusion and what they could have done to prevent the intrusion. Well, I think i'll handle this one, Senator Scott. I think it's entirely possible that the manner in which the hackers use to intrude upon these systems is not yet known.

And if you don't know how someone got into your house, you can't really address how you would have prevented it from happening, Right, So I would argue that perhaps more germane at least for the immediate future, is how do we oust the hackers from the systems and then shut off access so they can no longer spy on people

here in the United States. However, I admit I am no politician anyway, this sort of thing, you know, state impact hackers from China infiltrating telecommunication systems on a widespread basis.

It's one of the big reasons why several politicians voted to ban TikTok in the United States unless it's Chinese parent company Byte Dance divests itself of TikTok, And I understand that line of reasoning, but I'll point out once again that the issue of China spying on the United States is way way bigger than TikTok, and there's a real danger of using TikTok to be an example of patching a very small hole while ignoring a huge crater. And if we focus exclusively on TikTok, we're going to

ignore the larger problem that continues to be an issue. Okay, we've got more news stories to get through before we move on. Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, and you know what, here's another story that involves tech, the United States and China. We left off with one of those, let's pick up with a different one.

This one revolves around rare earth metals and other raw materials. Also, just as a reminder, rare earth metals tends to refer to a class of metals that aren't necessarily actually rare. They might be plentiful in the Earth's crust. The problem is they don't typically appear in concentrated forms, so getting hold of a lot of it is hard. It requires a lot of work. Often it requires a lot of work that is environmentally dangerous, also dangerous to the health

of the people who are working there. Like you're using a lot of caustic chemicals to leach away metals from other material So it's dangerous stuff. But the word rare

is a little bit misleading anyway. These are materials that are very important for different aspects of the tech sector, and recently the United States instituted new restrictions on products that contain US made semiconductor chips from being sold to Chinese businesses, essentially saying China is desperate to get their hands on US designed semiconductors in order to steal the

technology and then repurpose it for other stuff. This is been an ongoing concern for many years now, and so one way that the United States tries to address this is by banning the sale of certain materials and certain products to China so that they can't just harvest the

semiconductors and use those to create knockoffs. But in retaliation of this increased restriction on certain products to China, China itself has announced that it is going to ban the export of several rare earth metals and other minerals and materials that are used in industries including military applications, as well as the tech sector in general. So you may be aware that many of our devices rely in part on stuff that requires this kind of material, stuff like batteries,

for example. So this is a case of two superpowers squaring off against each other in an attempt to deny access to technology or the materials used to build technology, and I suspect we're going to see more of these kinds of conflicts during the Trump administration, assuming the tariffs that Trump has promised actually come to pass. To read more about this, I recommend Ashley Bellinger's article in Ours Technica. It is titled China hits US with ban on critical

minerals used in tech manufacturing. Oh hey, let's get another Tolkien reference in here. Why not? I mean, I'm leaving the show in a month, so I might as well sneak in as many as I can. I mean, I've got a Tolkien tattoo on my arm for goodness sakes. Actually, in this case, I'm not really sneaking anything in the tech sector has me covered. Palmer Lucky, the guy who created the Oculus VR headset and then who subsequently made headlines with some very edge Lord activities, also has a

military defense company, because of course he does. And it's called and Uril, which at least is not a reference to a villain in the Lord of the Rings books. Instead, it's the name of a sword anyway. And Uril has announced a strategic partnership with open you know, the company that's behind Chad GPT. And if you are thinking, well that sounds bad, then you and I were on the same page. And if you're also thinking, wait a minute, I thought open AI was founded to be an organization

dedicated to the peaceful, responsible development of artificial intelligence. Well, my dear sweet summer child, I've got some bad news for you, because that version of open AI hasn't really been a reality for quite some time at this point. Anyway. Rob Thubren of tech Spot has a piece on this that's titled open AI partners with Palmer Lucky's defense firm, paving the way for AI driven military tech, And yeah, I don't really see a positive way to spend this.

Apparently the initial focus of the partnership will be to develop military platforms that can identify, target, and destroy unmanned drones. But apparently they mentioned that they could also use that same technology to deal with quote unquote legacy threats. Legacy threats is a euphemism. It's a nice way to obfuscate the fact that what they're talking about our aerial vehicles with an actual human crew, you know, like aircraft, And this would be a case of robots killing human beings.

And yes, we have all seen this movie, and yes we do know it turns out poorly, and yet here it is happening. Anyway. Yes, early this week, Intel announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger is retiring from the company, but as Stephen Vaughn Nichols a Computer World puts it, that's a line that very few in the tech sector are actually buying. So von Nichols has an article that's titled Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger retires right. That's actually the name

of the article. His right has like five eyes in it. Anyway, it indicates there's a certain level of skepticism around how much of this was actually Gelsinger's own decision versus a corporate move in an attempt to right the course of Intel. And as you know, von Nichols writes, Intel's board of directors has grown impatient and allegedly gave Gelsinger the choice to either retire or face just being outright canned. Von Nichols has a great treatment of what has happened at

Intel since two thousand and seven. Two thousand and seven was when Intel fumbled a deal that would have seen Intel chips inside Apple iPhones instead. That deal would end up going to Samsung at the time, and von Nichols makes a case that this was sort of the beginning of a decline for Intel, and he says the company has been in that downward trajectory ever since, and the board apparently feels that Gelsinger didn't do enough to reverse

company fortunes. Whether anyone else can succeed in that job remains to be seen, although against Stephen Vaughan Nichols at the very least is not optimistic about it, and I am inclined to agree with his assessment. Hailey Welch achieved Internet celebrity with her response to a Man on the Street interview that well, let's just say, if you don't know Hailey Welch, if you don't know who that is, I'm not going to go into it here because this is a family show and I'm an old man, and

I just I just don't have the energy, y'all. But yeah, I mean, she gave like a flippant, little funny answer to a question and then became an Internet celebrity. And apparently she wanted to leverage her newly won celebrity status by lending her brand to a meme coin cryptocurrency that

was called a dollar Sign hawk Hawk. But that meme coin experienced a dramatic decline in value, or, as Meredith Clark of The Independent put it, dollar Sign hawk Quote crashed by more than ninety percent just hours after it hit the market. End quote, and in the wake of that glorious failure, Welch is now facing accusations that she was involved in essentially what was a pump and dump

rug pole scam. So a rug pole, in case you're not familiar with the term, is a scheme in which someone puts forward an asset that they invite people to invest in. That asset could be anything. It doesn't have

to be digital, it could be whatever. The scam artist owns steak in this asset, and that asset could effectively be worthless, but the goal is to build up excitement for this asset, to get people to buy in, and that drives up the selling price of the asset, and then the scam artist sells off their steak and essentially they make money off of nothing at all. And then typically they head for the hills. And that's your classic

rug pole. You pull the rug out from under the investors, You build up excitement around something, you get people eager to buy in out of fear of missing out, and then you cash out before the whole thing comes crashing down. Now, Welch ha said her mean Coin was never intended to be a rug pull. That was not her aim. That however, has not stopped an early investor from filing a complaint with the US Securities Exchange Commission or SEC against Welch.

Welch maintains she never tried to pull a pump and up, and in fact says her stake in Dollar Sign Hawk is something that she's not even allowed to sell for a year. And if that is true, then this just might be a case of snipers and such taking advantage of a meme coin launch and everyone else is ending up left holding the bag, including Welch, which stinks but also pretty predictable outcome. If I'm being totally honest, It's not like this is unprecedented. It is very much precedented.

Waimo has announced that it is bringing its driverless cab service to Miami, that the driverless vehicles will start trolling around the streets in twenty twenty five. In fact, the company says it will quote began reacquainting waymos all electric Jaguar eye pieces to Miami's streets quote in a recent press release. Now, the actual service, the driverless cab service would wait until twenty twenty six to get into business. And I'm sure there are many people in Miami who

could benefit from improved transportation options. I'm thinking of like seniors in Miami who might not have easy ways to get around, and I am glad that they will have more options. However, I'm also worried that adding more cars to the streets isn't really the ideal solution. But what

do I know? I mean, hasn't stopped us from doing it in other markets too, even though I think ultimately that there are other solutions that could not only give more options for those who need transportation, but also have a smaller impact on overall traffic in cities. And I don't know, I think adding more cars does not really address the traffic issue. In fact, I mean this might be ignorant speaking, but it seems to me like it just exacerbates that problem. All right, we've got more headlines

to get through before we get to that. Let's take another quick break to think our sponsors. Google has also proclaimed, through the AI arm of Google called DeepMind, that an AI research laboratory called Gencast has developed a weather predicting AI model that is more accurate than existing models, the models that meteorologists typically depend upon, and that this model can better predict extreme weather events up to fifteen days out and in less time than it would take a

traditional model. This is interesting, and if it is true, it could potentially lead to a rather drastic improvement in

weather forecasting and disaster preparedness. Now, I'm sure it's going to take a lot more time to analyze gen casts, systems and results to make certain that in fact, what appears to be an improvement is really the case, right, Because it could just be that it looks like it's an improvement, but maybe over the long run, when you get a larger sample size, those advantages might wash out. We don't know. I hope they don't wash out, but you need a lot of testing to make sure that

these things are actually more accurate. But this is the sort of AI application I can actually really get behind. If we can develop AI that is more effective at analyzing data and patterns than we are in order to do stuff like forecast the weather, I think that's great. I think if people have an accurate or at least a pretty accurate forecast, that if there are signs of severe weather on the horizon, they can have more time to prepare for that. I think that could save countless lives.

But we have to understand also that weather is an extremely complex phenomena, and even a really effective model is going to get things wrong sometimes. I know people who get mad when it's been predicted that there's going to be really traumatic, like severe weather, and then it turns out to not be so bad, and they get angry about it, And I'm like, y'all are angry about the

wrong things. I would be angry if I were told it was just going to be a little bit of a sprinkle outside and then a tornado tore my house down. That's when I would get mad. I don't get mad the weather's not as bad as I was told it was going to be. I don't know, I'm probably a weirdo. Bill Nelson, the administrator for NASA, announced that the agency's Artemis program is going to experience a bit of a delay, and I think this comes as a surprise to absolutely

no one. I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned a few times this year that I thought NASA's earlier plan for Artemis was overly ambitious. But right now, the Artemis mission the next one, which is to send astronauts on a trip that will take them around the backside of the Moon and then back to Earth, not landing on the Moon, just going around it. That mission has now been pushed

back to April twenty twenty six. The Moon landing mission, which would return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since nineteen seventy two, has now been pushed back to twenty twenty seven. Further, Trump's pick for the new head of NASA is Jared Isigmann, who is a filthy rich businessman who back in twenty twenty one paid SpaceX and undisclosed amount of money, but I imagine it was a princely sum to fly aboard a SpaceX mission

in an all civilian space tourist mission. He would later on fly in a second space tourist mission to become the first space tourist to participate in an EVA. That's an extra vehicular activity or spacewalk. Do you and me? And In very sad news, we learned not too long ago that Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks dot com, committed suicide in his office at the campus of North Carolina State University. Brain founded how stuff Works in the

nineteen nineties. He used his passion for learning and communicating to build a site that aim to explain how everything works. He would later launch a podcast called brain Stuff that would become the first of many stuff shows to launch, including tech Stuff, and the story obviously has a big personal impact on me. I literally would not have the career I am in right now without Marshall Brain. I

wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be doing this podcast. I met Marshall Brain several times, but we never actually worked together on any projects. Some of my colleagues spent much more time with him, and all of us from the Stuff era are still processing this and grieving for his family. I have no real details to share about his story and what led up to him deciding to take his

own life. There are pieces in outlets like Ours Technica that shed a little more light into what was going on leading up to his death, but I don't feel like this is the right place to dive into that. I would just like to say that if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, reach out for help. There's no shame in reaching out for help, and I, for one, would prefer a world that has you in it. That's

a very heavy note to end on. I do have a couple of additional reading suggestions for all of y'all before I head out. First up is a piece in The Verge by Elizabeth Lopoto titled stop using Generative AI as a search engine. Lopato details incidents in which people have used generative AI to answer questions only to receive incorrect answers, often with invented details that just never really happened in the real world, which is really similar to what I found when I use chat GPT to quote

unquote write an episode of Tech Stuff. You know, if you haven't listened to that episode, you should, because I bring up some big concerns I have as a result of what I got when I use chat GPT to do that. But check out Lopato's piece for more insight into that issue. And finally, I recommend reading Tim Cushing's piece in Tech Dirt titled Federal Court says dismantling a phone to install firmware isn't a search, even if it

was done to facilitate a search. So essentially what the story is saying is that a court has decided that law enforcement officials do not need to secure a search warrant before attempting to compromise a phone or other device like a laptop. But once they do get access to that device, they then would need to get a search warrant in order to actually search the device. They wouldn't be allowed to search it after breaching it unless they had the warrant. They just don't need the warrant to

start the process of breaching the device. Moreover, the essentially hold on to the locked or defunct or broken device for as long as they need to before they're able

to crack it open. So check out that article. He brings up some pretty interesting arguments about the good and the bad of that, and he advocates for more of a more clarity around this from a court perspective, which I think makes sense, Like we live in that world where this is a very real possibility and the laws that guide us around illegal search and seizure were not equipped to handle those kinds of scenarios, so we really do need more clarification on that. That's it for this

episode of the tech News of tech Stuff. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.