Week in Tech: Should Tech Bros Dim the Sun?

Glasco from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.

This is tech stuff. I'm as Valoscian and I'm care Price.

Today we've got two big stories to break down for you. First, content creators, brands and gen z alike are all turning towards the latest luxury unplugging. Then tech companies blasting particles into the atmosphere to dim the sun in response to climate change.

Then we'll tell you about a few other stories that caught our eye this week, like how polymarkets bets led to disinformation about the Ukraine Russian War, a human washing machine that promises to wash both your body and your soul, and then we'll dive into how twenty three ande meters is giving some users a piece of their new family's inheritances.

Then on Chat to me Chatcheep celebrates its third birthday while Sam Altman declare's code read at Open AI with Google's Gemini making rapid progress. Joining us to talk about this is Megan Moroney from Axios, who's just published a piece with the headline the three things keeping Sam Altman up at night. All of that on the weekend Tech. It's Friday, December fifth, Hello.

Cara, Hello Oz I was reflecting this week about this thing that we used to say when I think we first did podcasting, which is that you and I had a face for radio.

Yes, I mean funny enough, I've made that joke for all these years. But now podcasting is pivoting to video, like what are we?

Nobody is immune? Nobody is immune anymore. And there was an article that I recently read in Business Insider called being hot is a new job requirement.

Dari asks why this caught your eye?

You know, it's funny. My mother always used to say I'm in an image based business because she's in public relationships, right, and so who you see is what you get, and it's very important. And I kind of always used to roll my eyes at that idea. And then this article kind of confirmed everything she's been saying to me for thirty years, which is, and I'm thirty six, but since I was six, yeah, exactly. Yeah, she always was kind of like, people who are good looking are more successful.

Well, I mean that's kind of a story as all as time, right, So I'm curious where the new and the new job requirement comes from.

So tech is both driving the issue and it's solving the issue. Meaning that in some ways we have become more and more critical of how we look. Like post pandemic. We talk about the zoom meetings are forcing people to stare at their faces more and more. You and I, I mean I just looked at myself in the camera right now, and I'm like, carry you could.

Have especially with these lights, with these lights.

But you know, it's like in every field, I think there is a demand for people to be looking at themselves.

More and more.

It's a kind of double headed trend, right, because on the one hand, is so like the image of our face talking into the ether has never been more important nor more easy to fabricate.

That's right. And this is the way that tech is facilitating, not the problem, but this idea that you kind of need to be hot in order to work in the job market. Very normal people who do not know how to take headshots are using very simple AI tools to say I'm not just Emily, I'm yasified Emily, and I'm going to take this picture of me and my dog and I'm going to turn it into my head shot.

I heard that some people are actually getting plastic surgery men in particular to look more alert's.

Isn't that bizarre? The eye is the eye surgery, like constantly looking like listen.

I'm gonna be awake during these forty million hour weeks that I'm working.

Yeah, totally zoom phage zoom face.

Actually, I think about this particularly in my other sort of founder CEO role. I do think like I'm losing my hair a bit, like it too fat, like less credible because I don't sort of match this particular aesthetic. So I think it's probably being amplified by tech, but it is not like a new thing.

I think the takeaway for me is that as the job market gets tighter and tighter, looks maxing in general is something that is playing into the way people get jobs. And I think that when you see the sort of most successful billionaires looks maxing, if you're someone who even aspires to be.

A millionaire, bezos.

You're right that, like, all right, I better get my I think it's actually really interesting. I do think that our chronic onlineness has led us down this path of temptation to sort of change our face and what we look like and how we interact digitally. And I think that there is now a pushback and it ties into the story that I want to tell you, which is about how unplugging became luxury's most valuable currency. Huh, I

Scarcity is is luxury?

What is scarce in the digital age? Offline, being offline, an analog And so the story that I want to tell you that comes from Vogue Business, which is about this woman who goes by the name of cat GPT. She's a creator. She recently decided to connect her cell phone to an analog phone in an attempt to cut down her screen time. Now the irony is her post about her no phone mourning went viral because of course she had to put.

You can't, you can't and you can only be offline performatively, right if you're just offline nobody knows the thing.

If you like tree files in the forest exactly, if you if.

You're offline without telling people you're offline on your social media, are you offline?

It reminds me of this great Onion headline once that was like woman runs marathon, tells nobody why. But you know, actually from that viral piece, she created this company called Physical Phones, which sells Bluetooth connected analog phones and cat GPT told Vogue quote, people are really turned off by technology right now. They're turned off by AI. And by the way, we tend to conflate AI with social media and our phones.

I think that's right.

I mean, I think that's when we talked about this a few times with the new Luddites and honestly with your journey this year in terms of doing less social media and being offline. I every morning try and make sure I don't look at my phone for the first thirteen minutes it's awake, So I think it's it's it's But what's interesting, and this is I guess a Vogue business story, is that this like trend and cultural desire is being.

Exactly exactly and it's similar to the and I know this from running a book club where we were working with fashion brands. It's similar to what happened with the literary space, which was all of a sudden everyone was like, it's time to read.

I know, I watched hundreds of hours of you flicking through books on Instagram. But how do you concentrate on the book when you're also making social content about yourself?

Is interesting?

Well, that's why people ask if it's performative reading into that. I say, no, it's not.

There was a rumor that you were a celebrity.

Book book stylist.

Yes, I that you gave celebrity books that they could be papped with.

That's right, true or not?

I can't say. I still can't.

I still want to say.

But going back to this why it's a Vogue business piece. You know, this idea that brands are now investing in luddite behavior like Burbery sponsored an outdoor walk with a group of women who were just trying to connect to nature. You know what I mean. It's just there's something so interesting about to me that not using technology can be something that is in the zeitgeist.

We have this, I guess, tremendous nostalgia for a lost time.

We do and I think it's I mean, I was kind of laughing. I was looking at the Physical Phones website this morning, and I mean, apparently people are buying these physical phones. I think the irony that they're connected via Bluetooth is not lost on me. But in a moment of actually great irony, AI companies are actually up on this trend.

I saw this.

There was a piece in The Times about how the all of the marketing campaigns of the major AI companies don't include AI, and didn't didn't Anthropic open a pop up in New York.

The Zero Slop Zone, so you would go inside. It was this you know pop up in the West Village where all pop ups are, and inside you were asked to unplug and interact with other humans. So the company actually passed out baseball caps, really some really hard hitting stuff that read thinking. And they were also handing out hard copies of a fifteen thousand word essay written by

I mean, having a super premium printed essay handed out by an AI company in a pop up in the West village.

I mean there is a kind of mind melting quality to this.

I was thinking, Actually, I saw Elon was on X this week talking about something that was actually connected, and I want to play you a clip please.

When digital media is ubiquitous and you can just have anything digitally essentially for free or very close to for free, then the scarce commodity will be live events.

There we go, the scares com It'll be live events. Just Also, one more thing that I thought was very funny. Part of being able to be let into this, you know, zero slop zone was that you had to have cloud on your phone. Of course, so they weren't like letting people in willy nilly to like read a fifteen thousand word essay that you had to have cloud on your phone. Which is funny.

Was having an AX, which entitles you to buy water full price of the USA.

That's that's exactly right.

We're going to give you a free bad ear radio if you spend eight hundred dollars a year on the American Express. The other thing that I thought was really interesting is that open Ai actually shot their latest ads on thirty five millimeter film and insisted that no AI was used in the making of the ad. That's Oppenheimer's stat.

Living in the end times, it's just like, either be what you are or don't be what you are, but don't like try to make a gimmick about how you're using analog film to make a commercial about the product that's probably going to change the world most drastically in the next ten years.

So Caro, I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Now.

You brought up hotness earlier. Do you know what the hottest thing of all time is? What the sun? Okay, so I want to talk to you about the sun. Imagine if the solution to global warming was as simple as blocking sunlight.

This is interesting.

Yeah, So I actually read a piece in Bloomberg about how there's tens of millions of dollars being invested right now into an area of technology called solar geoengineering. Okay, Basically, what they're trying to do is to do something called stratospheric aerosol injection. Basically, the premise is if you can sort of shoot reflective particles into the sky, they can reflect the sunlight back towards the sun, and it's actually it happens naturally.

So we're fighting the sun with the sun.

We were sort of turning the sun itself. Yeah, exactly.

This actually happens after a volcano erupts. It happens anyway. All of the stuff, the sulfur dioxide that goes into the environment after a volcano, a period of cooling often follows. So some people are experimenting with pumping sulfur dioxide in the environment, which can cause acid, rain damage, the ozone and asthma attacks.

Great.

I mean there are others though, who are using other theoretically non harmful materials. And there's kind of two tracks to this. On the one hand, there's a government track. The UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency has invested seventy five million dollars researching.

This insignific not insignificant.

But a private company called star Dust of course, which is a sexier name than the Advanced Research Invention Agency, has raised sixty million dollars and they are looking to pattern a chemical that has fewer drawbacks than sulfur dioxide. There's also a company called Make Sunsets, which is which is selling cooling credits for one dollar a pop to anyone. You can buy one. You remember when you were a kid that you could buy an acre on the moon.

Green Bay Packers. Yeah, it's so interesting.

So for one dollar you can have the good feeling of paying for a sulfur dioxide balloon that explodes into the environment.

I should have bought one. I should have bought one.

The EPA has suggested it's not maybe not the best idea, and the company has two founders, neither of whom are scientists, one are technologists, and one's a marketer. They claim on their website that one gram of particles in a stratosphere prevents the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide, which is about as credible as when you are offered the opportunity to spend an extra dollar on your flight.

Carbon exactly. I just think it's I mean, it's an interesting text story because from what you've read or what you've learned in reporting this, like has has any significant change been made?

I don't.

I don't think so yet. But Elon actually, and I'm sorry to bring it up again, has talked about sending a fleet of solar powered satellites into the atmosphere in order to reflect sunlight. So this is like a kind of tech bro thing. I mean, there's a kind of icarous esque quality to this story.

Don't you think it has something to do with controlling such an unruly element?

Can you imagine controlling the sun? There's nothing more potentate.

If you can't take over the Earth, take over the sun.

But it has that little bit quality of like, oh, you know, there's global warming, let's think about colonizing Mars global warming.

Let's pump random chemical and.

See what happens. It just seems like a fool's errand to me.

Yeah, Well, interestingly, there's a kind of an analogous technology which is being used and has been being used for quite a long time called cloud seeding I've heard of and cloud seeding has also been in the headlines recently because there's there's a huge cataclysmic flooding storm in Dubai last year and some people think it's because of cloud seeding.

And what is cloud seeding exactly?

Cloud seeding is basically, if there are clouds in this god, yeah, you can get them to rain by giving them particulate to coalesce.

It's like oxytose. If you take oxytocin, sometimes it helps you cry, Is that right?

Yeah?

Or you know, actors very famously use menthol blowers to make themselves cry because it like blows mint essentially into your eyes and it makes you tear up.

That's atreat great analogy. This is a quote from the Bloomberg piece about cloud seeding. There are natural seating agents dust that's blown into the troposphere, or the miasmic stench of ammonia gas wafting up from penguin poo in Antarctic colonies above which researchers have observed extra cloud cover. There are unnatural agents too, such as stratocumulous trails above shipping lanes caused by engine pollution. Plain old salt seems to

I would love to see pilots are like thrown salt.

Well right now, shoulders so now that the innovation is to cover salt in titanium, which I'm not quite sure why. But in Dubai right now, there's a fleet of planes that whenever a cloud, you can't create a cloud, but as soon as a cloud comes into the sky, it's basically like clouds showing as much titanium coated salt into the cloud as possible.

That's crazy, It's it's pretty bizarre.

And so the original verdict was that cloud seeding had nothing to do with this cataclysmic flooding in Dubai. It was a conspiracy theory, blah blah blah. However, this Bloomberg piece that came out this month that actually there may have been a substantial amount of cloud.

Seeding in the days around this huge flood. So interesting, Be careful what you wish for.

The thing that makes me think about here is like we are now acting as gods, including in human gene editing. Like there's that crazy scientist in China who edited the heritable human DNA thing, so that irreversible over generations if that person procreates similarly, like you know. The Bloomberg piece made a good point that the average lifespan of a major private of a major public listed company is now

Why not, let's try.

But if your horizons are let's say, even your children, right or your children's children. I have a feeling that we may look back on this time of cloud seeding and star dust and gene line editing, and think, how was it.

That's all we can do?

That was all we could do. It does beg the question like how effective are these things?

Unknown?

And to the star doests make the point we're already geo engineering because we're pumping so much common dioxide and other crap into the atmosphere that it would be unreasonable not to use technology to try and counteract the negative consequences we're already generating through technology.

I just think it's really interesting that these are private companies that are trying to do this, because obviously we know that anything the government tries to get done is going to take forecs, and private companies like taking it upon themselves. It's it's a sort of oligarchical mentality of like we're going to take responsibility for how it rains. I mean, these are I.

Don't imagine if the Manhattan Project had been private, like tons of nuclear explos.

There'd be no US. It's very true, it's very true, But now this seems to be so popular. You know, private companies move a lot faster than governments, and the speed at which climate change is occurring means that there's not much time for governments to catch up.

After the break, Polymarket continues to bet.

On the Ukraine Russia war.

Japan's latest invention claims to wash your soul, and twenty three in meter users assuing, then you found relatives for a slice of the inheritance.

Then un chat and me Happy third birthday, Chat GPT, watch out, Google might outpace you, and.

We're back, Cara.

Remember poly Market, the online gambling site where you can basically bet on anything.

It's my favorite thing in the world. It's how we knew Mom Danny was going to win.

They had basically called the election based on betting volume.

Before the election happened.

We talked about it last time on the show, in relation to the betting volume on whether or not presidents the lens you would wear a suit. Unfortunately, and distastefully, people seem unable to be able to get enough of betting on Ukraine Russia war stuff. One such bet is around whether Russia will capture a town called Mirno by November fifteenth, will be called mir No Grad in Russian.

But in Ukrainian Mino. I know because I have Ukrainian grandfather.

Yes you do.

The battle around this city is dragged on for weeks and it's actually generated more than a million dollars in trading volume on polymarket about whether or not russiall will capture this town. Poly Market in order to determine whether or not Russia has captured the town, uses maps of the front lines generated by something called the Institute for the Study of War, which is a DC based think tank. Their maps are considered the gold standard for where the

You're kidding.

What for a for media who broke this story hypothesized is that someone at the Institute for the Study of War was gotten to, essentially was bribed to temporarily change the border of the conflict so that whoever was betting that Russia would take it was paid out.

What do you think about gambling on a war with real human lives.

Well, I think it's extremely distasteful. I should know.

IW have said that there was unauthorized and unapproved edits, so they've acknowledged that somebody did go into the mainframe and change the front lines temporarily, haven't. They haven't gone any further than that. But but yeah, I mean it's I'm gambling on a war with real human lives at states.

It's one thing to gamble on people who are boxing, which I still feel like is barbaric. But I mean when it comes to war in people's lives, like and that this is now something that like has become you know, almost like a fun thing to do on the internet.

I think it's On the other hand, you might just say this democratizing different governments basically bet one way or another. I mean they're you know, yes, let's look at you know, Syria for example. All these conflicts have governments who are betting on either side essentially, And now you can do it too.

You can be like, you can do it too, but you're just making money. You're not like changing Well, I guess you can kind of change the course of things.

But well, okay, so that brings us back to the politics point.

Yeah.

I read a piece in the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago with the headline A new specter looms over democracy, prediction markets, and basically the columnists Jami M. Kelly writes about how these prediction markets can manipulate the perception of the outcome of political events. So once you see like Mandani ninety four percent according to.

The better, you're like, hey, Mammdannie's going to win.

If you're a Cuomo voter, you might think no point turning up for the polls. Yeah, you would have been right. Yeah.

But she makes the point that in closer run things, this could be really really bad. For example, last year, more than three point six billion dollars was staked on the outcome of the presidential election the US presidential.

Three point six billion usix.

Billion, despite the fact US users were not officially allowed to use the platform, so Kelly points out in the FT they may have used VPNs to circumvent that. But according to the FT, four non American accounts from outside the US together placed more than thirty million dollars in wages on Trump's winning, which creates a decisive swing in his favor on the platform in the weeks leading up to the election.

And the platform does affect how people vote.

For thirty million dollars, you could tip that that's not in the grand scheme of things compared to the amount of money flowing through packs and super packs and whatever else, like it's a drop in the ocean, but to be able to effect the perception of the whole you know, United States public who look at these betting markets for a source of truth about's going to happen.

She also made it do it for sports so effortlessly.

You know, this like this whole of the election was stolen narrative, et cetera, et cetera. If you've got like a poly market which has been externally manipulated to show like a much higher chance of let's say, Trump winning, and then I mean it's like the negative consequences of this.

Are quite high, quite high. Yeah, no, absolutely, I would actually call poly market weird technology. And I have another piece of weird tech that I think is going to excite you.

Go ahead.

From the country that brought you the singing toilet.

Oh I love to sing, this is Japan, right.

Japan is now making a human washing machine. What yes, what do you.

Think this looks like, I mean, like a washing machine, but a little bit.

No, it looks like when you know a you know, Ridley Scott movie, someone comes out of a machine and there's this like primordial ooze, like a chyrogenic Yes, exactly, a cryogenic pod. It kind of looks like that. It's a capsule with a sort of lounger that's built inside the capsule and so you sit on that lounger and the top comes down around you, and it sort of looks like this whalehead and the whole cycle itself takes fifteen minutes.

It's a womb.

It is a womb, and it's surprisingly not designed by Toto. It's created by a Japanese company. And I love this. This is when the Japanese are like, we do things so well that we're going to call our company Science. The company is called Science, and I wanted to just read you the instructions for how it works. So basically, you enter the capsule, the automatic wash begins. The machine uses microbubbles and a fine misshap to gently clean your

And I shall want to cry. It's kind of make you want to cry.

It's kind of need this. So where this actually was demoed was at the World Expo in Osaka, and you know science the lean named company was compelled to commercialize the prototype. So actually it will suit and be in use at a hotel in that area that purchased one of the fifty units the company plans to produce. Guess the price of this unit.

Twenty five thousand dollars?

No, no, no, my friend to be human car wash that costs three hundred and eighty five thousand dollars.

Well, yeah, well.

So it won't become probably won't be coming to a screen nerrors anytime soon.

No, it will not.

So caart you know that I had this weird obsession with why it's a bad idea to do twenty three and me.

Yeah, of course we know it's a terrible idea. We learned.

So there's a story in the Wall Street Journal this week about how the irony of unintended consequences can be.

Truly mind blowing.

In short, people who find new family members through DNA sites like twenty three and me have started suing.

Them with the inheritance. You're kidding, I promise you it's true.

Well, that's where I'm going to get three hundred and eighty five thousand dollars to get my human watching she is, I have to find a rich relative on twenty three and me.

So I'm going to tell you a story about Carmen Thomas. Okay, Carmen Thomas used twenty three and means DNA tests to track down her absent father, Joe Brown. Okay, but am I'm going to reach on the story now. It turned out the man she believed to be her father had died five years earlier, but she connected with two likely half sisters. They went out for boba te and a sleepover at their grandmother's. She looked through family albums and

Oh my god, American history.

So American unbelievable.

I laugh, but it's pretty imagine.

So this is basically people going on twenty three and meters.

I think she's in earnest and then she was like, eh, she's like.

Wait a minute, there's some money here.

Yeah. Exactly.

That case actually settled in favor of the family because Thomas's claim came too late. But another example went the other way. A brother and a sister in Utah were fighting over their late father's estate, and for reasons best known to himself, the brother reached out to someone on twenty three and me who might be.

A half brother.

The deceased biological father didn't have a will, and the potential half brother sued the original brother and sister and one a third of the disputed estate. The reason for the victory was because the father had been sending a card and one hundred.

Dollars each year on his birthday. To the court's ruled that was fatherhood.

Fatherhood.

Basically what this The sort of effect of this is that people are being encouraged to frame their wills much more consciously. To my family or to my dear children is a minefield.

So again the takeaway from this is do not use twenty three and me, I guess you have money that you want to protect.

Yeah, exactly.

Happy birthday to chat GBT, Happy birthday to your chat GBT, Happy third Bert gotta hit it birthday to chat GYBT, Happy third birthday.

This is chatting me.

I couldn't have hit it. You're right, Cara.

It's almost three years to the day since the release of Chat Gypt, which seemingly changed the way we all interact with technology forever.

And to celebrate, or rather memorialize our dear friend Chat, we're here with Megan Moroney, the editor of Technology at Axios. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

I love to talk about.

The chat Cara saying happy birthday, but I was also thinking of the Drake songs my birthday. I can cry if I want to. How much my celebration is there in the halls of this week?

Yeah, not a lot in Open AI. It's been a rough week. A lot of competition, specifically from Google.

Yeah, and Sam Alton has talked about a code. I'd sarge, what does that look like?

There's three things I wrote a piec yesterday for Axios on like the three things that are keeping Sam Altman up at night and they're big.

The first one is just money.

I mean everyone is talking about the AI bubble and how much AI costs to create the models, and then you know, for everyone to be using them, and it's scary and there's a lot of circular investments. So a lot of people are just saying the bubble is about to pop. And the second thing is Gemini is Google's newest model and it's has great reviews. The image model is great.

This is nan nano banana mode.

Yes, nano banana. And the third thing is really the safety issues because people are using it as a therapist or you know, as a confidant, and there's a lot of issues coming up with that.

Cara, I think is most interested in the in the therapist angle. We've talked about a bunch on this show. Yes, I'm very interested in the Google angle.

Though.

Since the release of Gemini three, Google's added more than three hundred billion dollars to its market cap. Why was the release of Gemini three so consequential?

So you have to go back obviously three years when chat Gipt was first released and Google was caught on the back foot. They you know, started a lot of this generative AI technology and with deep Mind, they have some of the biggest models. And they were surprised when chetchipt it came out. They didn't have a similar tool and they make their money in search, and they were threatened by this.

And so you know, it's taken them.

A few years to figure out how to not cannibalize their their business and then also to really catch up and they have with Gemini, which is built into Google Docs. You know, it's just it's part of the tools that everybody uses.

Do you think we could look back on this as the week that opened up AI's dominance started to fade, Like, is that what this week is going to signal?

I wouldn't say the beginning of the end, but it changed, Like I'm not discounting chat GPT for sure. It could be just that this renewed focus gets them back on the right track. But I think this is this is the first real threat that they've had. And of course,

It could go that way too, Megan, thank you for joining us again. And if you're thinking listeners about switching to Gemini writing your wedding vows with the chat GPT using anthropic to make a company of one, please write into tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot.

Com with your stories.

We'd love to hear from you and we love to feature them.

That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm Kara Price and.

I'm Oz Voloshin.

This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced by me Kara Price, Julian Nutta, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. The Engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode.

Kyle Murdock wroteut theme song.

Please rate, review and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.

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