This episode we’re covering the news, and there's a whole lot to catch up on! Facebook youngest company to surpass $1T valuation after scoring Antitrust win. The Pentagon Scraps $10B cloud computing contract "JEDI", plans to split between Microsoft and Amazon. Plus, a new ransomware attack targeting Kaseya, who provides software to over 1,500 Managed Security Service Providers, demanding a record $70 million and impacting over 1M computers. Didi app pulled from app stores in China after suspension order. Microsoft executive says U.S. overuses secret orders for Americans' data, and Judge tears Florida’s social media law to shreds for violating First Amendmen. Tune in for the discussion.
This episode we’re covering the news, and there's a whole lot to catch up on! Facebook youngest company to surpass $1T valuation after scoring Antitrust win. The Pentagon Scraps $10B cloud computing contract "JEDI", plans to split between Microsoft and Amazon. Plus, a new ransomware attack targeting Kaseya, who provides software to over 1,500 Managed Security Service Providers, demanding a record $70 million and impacting over 1M computers. Didi app pulled from app stores in China after suspension order. Microsoft executive says U.S. overuses secret orders for Americans' data, and Judge tears Florida’s social media law to shreds for violating First Amendmen. Tune in for the discussion.
It's the Next Wave Podcast Episode 39. I'm James Thomason here with co-hosts Dean Nelson and Brad Kirby. This episode, we're covering the news. And there is a lot of news to talk about. It's a big week, a big month, a big year, a big millennia for big tech who just keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and better. And I guess Jeff Bezos is about to blast himself in the space team.
Dean Nelson:That's big. That is, and you know, he wanted to do that since he was five years old. I have to say this when he stepped down or was gonna step down from, from Amazon, as being the head. But why is he doing that he missed the philanthropy and other things like this, but now we know exactly what it was the board said, there's no way in hell, you're gonna lead our company, and blast yourself into space without much risk. That's got to be it.
James Thomason:He said, Now I'll show you my own rocket and get I guess, somebody. That's my Bezos voice. I don't think he talks like that.
Dean Nelson:I don't think so. Either. I'll show you board of directors.
Brad Kirby:Maybe he just wanted to live a single life, you never know. Oh,
James Thomason:Yes, yes.
Dean Nelson:So Hoff, who's going with him into space?
James Thomason:How about 49%? Hoff? She said hoff. Okay, that's fast. So this is happening soon, like, July 20th Bezos is maybe leaving us forever? Okay, maybe not forever, but it says, three minutes, three glorious minutes we'll spend in space on an unpiloted rocket of his own making. So is this going to be like infamous founder explode self in space story that we're all going to remember for the rest of our lives? Or let's hope not.
Dean Nelson:That would not be good for him or for anybody else. I think. Not that I'm an Amazon shareholder. And
Brad Kirby:this happened on the show billions though, on a TV show. It was kind of an Elan musk esque character and the guy died when he was the first one. So. Okay,
Dean Nelson:we're gonna send positive thoughts that nothing. And by the way, we've done this before James Bezos, Beezos BeesOS. What is it?
Brad Kirby:Bezos
James Thomason:Baeza? Its Bezos isn't it?
Brad Kirby:That's not what Alexa tells me.
Dean Nelson:Alexa would know better than James Thompson.
Brad Kirby:I've got in several arguments when she starts listening to me, and I have to shut her off again. And I say she always says Jeff Bezos.
Dean Nelson:You get in arguments with Siri? Oh, no. Alexa, Freudian?
Brad Kirby:Well, only when she starts talking to me, she's not supposed to be listening. So...
James Thomason:That's a scientific facts series is more likely to argue.
Dean Nelson:I see.
James Thomason:I have to say, I wish there was a way to short simultaneously all virtual AI assistant companies, whether they're making chatbots, or audio assistance, or anything, because this is going to be the biggest smoking crater of startup companies billions of dollars. Down the hatch. I just wish there was a way I could short them all to zero. Not that I wish anyone ill will who's working in these companies and starting these companies. But everyone hates talking to robots? Don't they? I mean Be honest, do you really ever want to talk to a robot when a robot wants to talk to you? I've never had a good conversation with a robot. And I guess if one of these companies does end up inventing a robot that I would want to talk to, I guess I'll eat my words. But I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're going to be worse and worse and worse, less helpful, more infuriating. And the bad part is you won't even know at first when you're talking to a robot until you figure out how stupid it is,
Brad Kirby:Like the Joe Rogan deep fake where it's just sounds just like him.
Dean Nelson:Okay, guys, hold on. I, I totally disagree with you. So for that, well, okay, I agree with you on the first part, every chatbot I've dealt with in the past has been really annoying. And I just did this with AT&T, I got on a chatbot. And I had this basis experience, I said, I got a text message and said, we're going to we're going to basically slow down your data, because you're using too much of it. I'm like, I'm a 25 year subscriber to AT&T, I pay money for this. And you're gonna throttle me because I'm using 10 gigabytes of data. And I just got so I was a little annoyed, I call in and I, I go to the actual thing. And I say, the chat bot comes in, how can I help you that and I said that you're throttling my data. And it went like four different directions because I had no idea what I was talking about that when I tried to explain and say to the way that they would understand. And then I said, let me connect you to all my colleagues. Now that is a chatbot experience, right voice or actual bot with text, same thing. But there is tech out right now that does this. That is scary, scary in a good way. Proper triage. It's about the cognitive AI.
James Thomason:Let me let me play back what I just heard. I heard you say, your excellent chatbot experience got you to a human being and that's my point.
Dean Nelson:Got it? Got it. Got it. I'm just saying that's the past. But what's happening now so when you say you can short on all these companies are gonna basically say anybody doing chatbots is gonna crash. I totally disagree with you. Okay, not to promote you, buddy. But there's a company called IPsoft and they do a thing called Amelia. Right. And I've known for years, yes, that thing is the most human AI when it comes down to cognitive capability of an AI, that thing to 12 different exchange, like, switches context switches within a conversation flawlessly. So I disagree with you, James, I think there's going to be some very interesting stuff is coming out. And it's gonna surprise you because you won't know you're talking to a robot until it's too late.
Brad Kirby:So I didn't I didn't disagree with with I didn't agree with James. I didn't disagree with them with you, either. No, I agree. I think there can be some good use cases. But I've had a lot more bad experiences thing than good. Personally,
Dean Nelson:I think we all have, yeah. But
Brad Kirby:yeah, I can, I can see it, certainly learning to actually direct me to what the problem I need to solve, especially with companies like that you're dealing with that are like Google and Facebook that have virtually zero customer support, whatsoever. I don't even know how to like, I can't even talk to a chatbot, let alone a person. And I had a miserable experience today with the bank, I had to call back like five times with people just being incompetent. So on
Dean Nelson:humans, that's the problem to the humans or the issue. We're just never satisfied. This is what I'm hearing?
Brad Kirby:Well, I think I think a human might not have the same amount of information as a computer does in terms of triage situation, I would just like to see the branch of decision making in terms of how I get to who I need to talk to although then you always just go to the escalation group. And okay,
Dean Nelson:let's do this, we need to get somebody on this podcast is talking about AI, specifically, when it comes down to the chat, and you can blast them. And trust me. There's some people out there that are doing some amazing things in this space. And they're replacing 10s of 1000s, if not millions of jobs. And remember, 56% of jobs today are going to be displaced by AI, specifically, yep. 56% of jobs. Now, so amazing thing. Okay, but so it's a pretty impressive, so is the engine. So like all the other things, right? This is natural. But
James Thomason:The difference is, the printing press didn't ask you to click on nine instances of school buses and the following nine photos. That's the difference.
Dean Nelson:I think we need to blow James away with some amazing cognitive AI interactions. Maybe we should do that. James,
James Thomason:if we could get someone on the cast that could demo something that powerful. I am ready for the Turing test. Anytime I've been ready my whole life for the Turing test. It feels like the slippery slope to hell. That's what it feels like. The silicon gateway to hell,
Brad Kirby:We should get Dr. Ben Goertzel on here. He's, he's the guy that created stuff. What's her name? Sofia, Silicon Valley, the show.
James Thomason:You know, I'm not gonna get a Silicon Valley, the show reference is too close to home.
Brad Kirby:I know. But he's also he's also in crypto, he created a company called singularity or something like that. He raised $60 million. You've heard of them. I'm sure. He's a bit of a wacko but he's, he's he's the one that created. Sophia. We've talked about her on the show before and she's capable of feeling emotions and whatnot, but could be an interesting one.
Dean Nelson:So when you lift the hood, and like this technology I'm talking about you look at it is actually the ability to sense the emotion. So it's just like the human brain. They mapped everything that the brain does to be able to connect these together to now be able to dynamically learn. It's impressive, man. So Alright, back to Bezos, Bezos, Bezos, whatever his name is, as James was saying, He's going up with two other people, right? His brother, brother in law brother can't remember. Yeah, that's been a lucky person. They got to a lottery or they bought into this one. I
James Thomason:think they had to buy into me.
Dean Nelson:Yeah, so you too, can go to space for three minutes for 150 million bucks. I'm guessing is that the number?
James Thomason:isn't that expensive? Really? I don't think it's that expensive. Well, then again, you have to build a robot or they have you seen the Blue Origin ship? I think that Bezos is maybe the closest thing we have to actual Dr. Evil It almost looks exactly like the huge Johnson You know, I'm getting. I'm getting serious doctor if there's a naked cat in there. Maybe that's the third passenger. That's the cat. Mr. bigglesworth Oh, man.
Dean Nelson:One day I think we're gonna have to base was on this actual podcast. That'd be really fun.
James Thomason:I'll be amazing. He's not coming here. But 2020 is launching themselves into space?
Dean Nelson:Because they can
James Thomason:It signals their intent. They intend to leave us here as soon as possible as soon as practicable.
Brad Kirby:So the price tag is 28 million.
Dean Nelson:Oh, that's not bad. That's
Brad Kirby:How much did Lance Bass pay back in the day. I don't think he ever made it but You know, the N-Sync guy?
Dean Nelson:Oh, yeah, one of the members. I remember Lance, I've heard his last name. He paid to go into space. Yeah, he never went, but it didn't crash like his career did it? Oh, just kidding. Just kidding. Lance donates money.
Brad Kirby:20 million is what he paid. Yeah. At age 23. Hmm.
James Thomason:Well, things are really good at Amazon. Because the Pentagon has scrapped its$10 billion cloud computing contract known as Jedi. And as indicated, it plans to split the contract between Microsoft and Amazon as opposed to just giving it all to Microsoft. How did that happen? I wonder. How do you think that happened? Why would they change their mind? What could it be?
Dean Nelson:I'm going to speculate on one thing here that maybe there was enough legal disputes from enough companies that said, there's no way we're gonna get to this quagmire because we made a single source selection for $10 billion. What I did like is that the general that's important in charge of that because jetted means the joint enterprise defense infrastructure, and I think it started in 2017. And so they put together this program, and then they awarded it in 2019. Is that right? That's right. But their whole intent was we want to go with one provider, and that one provider, so that they can control from a security standpoint and everything else. But the general actually did pretty well. When he answered it, he goes, things have changed. And so from 2017 till now, we realized that we need to have a diverse portfolio of providers as well.
James Thomason:You know, what else changed between 2017 and now, nothing,
Dean Nelson:Nothing at all, James,
James Thomason:the world has Facebook and Amazon and now the two biggest corporate lobbying spenders in the country. Big Tech has eclipsed yesterday's big lobbying spenders, big oil and big tobacco by nearly twice as much. So in 2020, Amazon and Facebook spent twice as much as Exxon, and Philip Morris on lobbying 124 million in lobbying to be specific during the 2020 election cycle, breaking its own records from the previous election cycle, according to public, citizen, citizen.org, check out this site, kind of like open secrets on lobbying and all sorts of funding, great source of data. Amazon, Facebook drove most of this growth. So between 2018 to 2020. Amazon increase its lobbying spending by 30%, Facebook added an astounding 56%. to its Washington investment. They grew their ranks by 40, new lobbyists from 293 and 2018, to 333 and 2020. Big tech PACs, lobbyist employees contributed 33% more in the 2020 election cycle than they did in the 2018 cycle for an increase of over 4 million bucks in funds. So I wonder why they would back out from the Microsoft contract and award part of this to Amazon. It's a mystery. It's a complete mystery. We will never know the truth. Well,
Brad Kirby:I mean, looking at practically a few major security breaches, specifically a US government agencies. So that could be partially what it's from.
Dean Nelson:Because James was not doing tongue in cheek right there at all. I'm sure. Right. No, no, no.
Brad Kirby:Just thinking about it. Practically. Maybe. Maybe that's the concern,
Dean Nelson:as being the other balance voice of reason on here for James, because I love when James can go tell his opinion, directly. Because it's so entertaining so many times, James, I just have to share. You tell me if you were at a company and you had, I don't know, two of the biggest companies in the world that had lawsuits against you based on favoritism is within the contract. And $10 billion thing in the mix of it and the inability to move forward with anything because they were the contract. They weren't able to actually do anything since then. It's been a year right. Since that was
James Thomason:done nothing. Yeah, it's just it's just sat there, right? In legal quagmire.
Dean Nelson:So the other thing is, you might just cut your losses and say, let's start again and make sure there's nothing in the middle of this is going to cause a problem. It is interesting, though, that they went from a single, like single supplier is going to receive it to multiple. But diversify that helps as well.
James Thomason:Yeah. And stunning that that supplier happened to be the top lobbyists in Washington. So I'm sorry, they're the second biggest lobbyists in Washington DC. Yeah,
Brad Kirby:you're not wrong. I don't. I'm not. I'm not I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that. There may be some other factors that I think there are other factors.
Dean Nelson:I'm agreeing with Mr. Kirby. They're just saying you're not wrong. You're rarely wrong, James.
James Thomason:Yeah, it's just it's merely coincidence. Look, in 2010, the number one lobbyist was pg&e Corp. Everybody loves pg&e. So they decided, I guess they didn't need to lobby that much anymore, especially after they burned down the California they're like, you know, winning friends influencing people, okay. 2017 brought Google as the biggest lobbyists. And it's 2020 it's Facebook. Okay, so number two and 2010 was General Electric. In 2017. It was at&t and 2020. It's Amazon. In 2010. Number three was FedEx 2017, Boeing and 2020 Comcast. I didn't see that one coming, Comcast. Comcast tells you that tells you something. nobody buys that much lobbying unless they're up to something. I wonder I'd like to
Brad Kirby:see the org charts. I wonder how many of them are just hopping from ship to ship every year? The lobbyists themselves. I know with a facebook i think i think there was a flux of the lobbyists set one one of the tech companies into Facebook at one point.
James Thomason:While I'm quagmire, bring us here. Number 420 10 AARP, everyone loves our retirees right there. But they were brushed aside in 2017 by the open society Policy Center. You
Dean Nelson:know who that is? George Soros.
James Thomason:Hail Satan. Yes, for sure. My it's 2020 is Lockheed Martin. So Lockheed is obviously pushing forward. But yeah, they brushed Soros aside.
Dean Nelson:Okay. Can we just touch on George Soros for a minute? Because you guys educated me on him a bit ago, and I've never knew who he was before. But you just talked about Dr. Evil I? I don't think Yeah, I share more. James why why do you believe that about george soros? He's he's basically profiled as the, the most prolific philanthropist in the world.
James Thomason:So what am I missing, not just philanthropy, but very specifically targeted political philanthropy, designed to in his own words, carefully control and guide manipulate public opinion. So Soros was a student of Karl Popper, the noted scientist, philosopher of last century, and he, after cornering the British pound and becoming a billionaire and becoming the spawn of Satan. He turned on on poppers teachings, a philosopher, at least he drawn into question and there's this quote, this is at the front of I forget which of Soros his books, but I found it an astounding quote. So here's a quote from George Soros. It says, popper had argued that free speech and critical thinking would lead to better laws and a better understanding of reality than any dogma. I, George Soros came to realize that there was an unspoken assumption embedded in his argument, namely, that the purpose of democratic discourse is to gain a better understanding of reality. It dawned on me that my own concept of reflexivity brings poppers hidden assumption into question. If thinking has a manipulative function, as well as a cognitive one, that it may not be necessary to gain a better understanding of reality in order to obtain the laws one once there's a shortcut spending arguments and manipulating public opinion to get the desired results. Today, our political discourse is primarily concerned with getting elected and staying in power, poppers hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena, extending it to human affairs as part of what I have called the Enlightenment fallacy. Sincerely, George. So that's an introduction. If you want to know who doesn't believe in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, believes that the masses of humanity are supposed to be corralled and controlled by the enlightened guided hand of its superiors, it's George Soros. So why is it always that when you have something named like the open society center, it's like the dead opposite?
Dean Nelson:Mm hmm. Sorry, I'm just digesting that. That paragraph you just read? You know, it came to mind to me when you read it was that if you look at the platforms of today, the fact that they can disseminate misinformation so quickly, and they can they can change public opinion. I wonder if if Karl poplar wood popper was saying that because he died in 94. Right. He died before all this stuff came out the ability to go back and, and change public opinion like on a dime on things with money. I wonder if if that's. So first of all, I don't like what george soros just said, I but I'm saying I'm wondering about these platforms and the ability today for those platforms to read so many people's so quickly with with something that may not be actually accurate. And then people pay more money to fake election interference or whatever else, like all that stuff that's going on is because of the platforms that allow you to get to people that quickly comparatively to what it was in 94 or in 1990 itself.
Brad Kirby:So there's a new documentary that came out last year that was directed by Bob Dylan son, who's actually the lead singer of the wallflowers
James Thomason:the guy in the wallflowers Oh,
Brad Kirby:yeah, yeah. Funny enough. Most people don't know that. But I'd be curious to see that was funded by George Soros. I think
James Thomason:so. Oh, yeah. Well, if you want to be indoctrinated, I suppose that's the that's the one to watch. Yeah, I mean, I've been I've been pretty brutal. But truth is, there's all sorts of interference in politics, and he's a favorite target of the most extreme conspiracy theorists. They bring up Soros all the time is like the number one, the number one source of everything. He's the man behind the curtain the polar of leavers and strings. The natural tendency is to discount that but if you turn over a rock Every time and cirrhosis there, you start to think Well, okay, maybe there's something to it. And indeed, there is a very vast and complicated scheme of investments and nonprofit organizations, all of which are tethered to the overall mission of manipulating public opinion. And so I think it's a in the future, it'll be a case study of propagandizing. And using mass media to influence society at large, assuming that we don't completely slide into dystopian hell state.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, I mean, if you're not, if you're not listening to Fox News, and Tucker Carlson every night, then you might have a different viewpoint. I don't know what what you put on, but I know he's a big he loves to create a lot of those theories himself.
James Thomason:Well, it's the ridiculous thing of it. It's like the as well known, I think the CIA coined the term conspiracy theorists to discredit the notion that rich people get into rooms and make plans with each other and amongst themselves and then execute plans and that's the thing is this these become such a Boogeyman that you can't even say the word Soros without getting accused of being anti semitic or something ridiculous like that. I can't even call into question. Yeah, is a Holocaust survivor his activities and in fairness, that's because the extreme right has often brought up that you know, as part of the the grand conspiracy right in there, they are quite anti semitic. So the taint of that is everywhere, right. But on the other hand, he's a very serious, very serious, very intelligent, very philosophical person and everyone should read if they don't know about sources history in his tutelage under Karl Popper, the man went through the Holocaust and ended up in in London studying under popper, and then later cornered the British government on pound sterling when they went off the silver sand. It's a fascinating story or a fascinating, he's definitely the closest thing to an evil genius in the world. He's just not the richest evil genius. He's eclipsed by the likes of Bezos building his own rockets and so forth. But I don't I don't think these those has I studied
Brad Kirby:him. As a finance guy. I definitely studied him growing up and in terms of his philosophies and ideologies. So as I showed you guys, I have this book called the alchemy of Finance. It's a real it's a real struggle to read.
Dean Nelson:But it's a struggle. It's
James Thomason:a tough read. Yeah, it's a tough read.
Dean Nelson:I'm very tempted dozer or what? What do you need?
Brad Kirby:Just to get his point across? I don't think he's a very good communicator. Oh, I
Dean Nelson:see. I see.
James Thomason:Okay, soften the quote. He's a very deep thinker, and philosophical, philosophical thinker to take takes a while for him to come to a point. But when he does, you realize that he's sucking the world down the drain. There we go. Well, you basically said I'm sure I now on the you know, as soon as this podcast goes live, that will be on the hit list, I'm sure.
Brad Kirby:Yeah, so the documentary is just called Soros. So I think I'm gonna watch that.
Dean Nelson:There you go. Oh, speaking of podcast. Today, we had a very interesting milestone, did we?
James Thomason:We did, in fact, cross the sound barrier of 10,000 downloads. So
Dean Nelson:10,000 downloads.
James Thomason:Look at that. We hit the top across the top 5% of podcasts, I think, is that right? Top Five?
Dean Nelson:Yeah, we're in the top 5%. This is to kind of blow you away that the 10,000 people have downloaded this stuff. Just listen to us shoot the ball.
James Thomason:I'm flattered and horrified.
Dean Nelson:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
James Thomason:we have a great audience though. This, this audience continues to amaze me when they come out of the woodwork. Everybody's listening almost as a senior executive or technologists of some kind. And so we'll run into them and meetings or customer calls. It's like, Hey, you know, I think you said on the podcast, I'm like, Oh, no, crap. Yeah. What do they say? so far? It's been very positive, you'd like it were very great, and usually covering for us. You know, let's use the voice of reason. There's
Dean Nelson:a good balance here. I think between us, we can actually have really interesting conversations without trying to shoot each other. So I like that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we crossed so many different things like crypto Brad, I know you hit that name, but all the way from finance back into tech into hopefully not politics, but we seem to be crossing over to these things. And then religion we've stayed away from so and on that await I can't do that either. Okay. I'm okay. It's these are no offense.
James Thomason:It's just everyone. Everyone else is covering politics. It's like Why? Yeah. Why would we add to that? And what we know about is, we're nerds we know about business and servers and how the internet works and stuff like that. We don't we know a little bit about Soros, though, don't we? We were stupid. Yeah.
Dean Nelson:Except, there's a difference between nerd and geek, right? geek is chic nerd is not. That's why my license plate is geek ism. Right. So we're clear.
James Thomason:That's true. When they needed a branded Best Buy, they didn't call it the nerd squad. They call the Geek Squad. Thank you. Thank you guys. Congratulations, the audience thanks to the audience for attending, listen, and for clicking the like button here and there. And it's sharing and thanks for, for reaching out, we need to reach out, we'd love to hear from you. So thanks so much. Speaking of big tech having a great week, month, year, millennia, Facebook just had its antitrust case, tossed out of court. Again, the number one lobbyists in DC, I don't know how this out, I don't know how these things happen. But I read the summary ruling by the judge. And my impression was like, this is a judge who just can't have any grounding in reality whatsoever. You know, you just get the feeling that like maybe this guy has never used Facebook, and possibly questions the existence of the internet. You know, it's all just magic buttons and wheels that spin around on the phone or something. But it was a very coherent ruling, I'm sure it was well grounded in, in law, because that's what judges do. But Holy smokes, man, for our listeners, can
Dean Nelson:you just outline what the ruling was? why it was thrown out? What was the reasoning behind it? First up, what was the actual thing brought in antitrust? And then why was it actually thrown out?
James Thomason:Brad, you want to? Yeah, sure. I
Brad Kirby:didn't. I didn't mean, Phil, I know you posted the docket. So I had a feeling you read some of it. But my understanding is that was thrown out by a number of state district attorneys, as well as a judge. It's definitely not the end of, you know, the antitrust battle with Facebook and big tech, but it was a it was a big win. But in terms of their stance, I think they were really using their age and their youth against versus Microsoft, I remember reading the opening statement. And their argument was that if they're violating laws, why isn't Microsoft and within this specific case, now you probably know the details of the actual case itself?
James Thomason:Well, okay, let's do that. So the FTC in 46, states filed an antitrust suit against Facebook accusing the firm of buying up all the competitors, namely, WhatsApp, Instagram, anything that threatens them whatsoever, after they approved it. Yeah, but why notably, after they approved a great point to share after they approved it, a federal judge tossed the lawsuit six months after was filed, saying the FTC did not provide enough evidence for the claim that Facebook is a monopoly and that it waited too long to present the case. So going back to your previous point, they not only did they approve these acquisitions, but then they rested for a long time before coming up with these charges. This is not over the agency has, I think the FTC has 30 days or something to kick this back into court and to firm up their evidence. I just don't think that the peel the onion on the evidence here at all, because the the well is very deep that Facebook controls fully half of all digital advertising. And if you want to put this in context, not only just half a digital advertising, but the eyeballs of billions of people. And so you go back to the 1950s and 60s, basically 100 companies controlled 95% of all media, so all all eyeballs all advertising. And in the ensuing years, traditional media got compressed down to just five owners, basically only 95%. Well, in the digital world, basically two companies own 95% of digital eyeballs. The media monopoly is more concentrated and larger than at any point in history. And so the idea that the judge would lean back in his robes, and then say, well, there's just no evidence that Facebook has a monopoly. I mean, it's preposterous. It doesn't even cross the chalk line of have seen, there's no way you can contemplate an interview. I mean, we broke up Standard Oil at like 93% or 90%. market dominance, right? We broke up at&t in the 80s 80 percentile, I think so the idea that these two companies control that many eyeballs, and are the top lobbyists in Washington and yet, somehow are not monopolies exerting monopoly influences. It's just preposterous.
Brad Kirby:And it's worth noting that one of the House Judiciary committees passed six bill or they proposed six bills. I think a couple of weeks ago, even today, we're just reading assess how current it is the House Judiciary Committee, Republicans laid out the framework for regulating big tech, and that was only like a couple hours ago. So I haven't actually looked at it. But that was based on the original 20 hours of debate that lead to those six bipartisan anti trust bills that were proposed a couple of weeks ago. So that that's an overarching piece of legislation that will bypass these individual monopoly antitrust suits on an individual basis. Right. That's right. And,
James Thomason:well, Congress is coming, right there are a number of bills in Congress. The stance of neutrality was really important to them preserving their monopoly status, and the town stole over that and this will election. So the result of that is going to be punitive, I think regulation. So there's a number of bills in play the American innovation and choice online Act, which would prohibit discriminatory conduct by big tech firms or big platforms as they define it quite loosely. The platform competition and Opportunity Act is out there. Still, I think, which would bar the use of acquisitions and mergers to crush competitors who are fledgling. exactly the kind of thing like Facebook, acquiring Instagram would be prohibited under the Act.
Dean Nelson:But that that's a natural, like, business, right? you acquire talent acquire IP acquire acquire customers. The
James Thomason:question is, are they exerting a monopoly force? To gain these acquisitions? Right? That's the real key question. That's not just, of course, acquisitions are a normal. Yeah, that's what I do for a living, is make companies and sell them to bigger companies that some of which are on this podcast, probably you're not interested. But based on my based on my point of view, but there's many other great tech companies out there that are interested, it will be fun. There you go. There you go. There's the platform competition and Opportunity Act. Sorry, I'd mentioned that when the ending platform monopolies act, I got confused. We're seeing big tech companies were using their power across multiple types of businesses to give themselves unfair advantage. So this is the ever increasing ellipsis of the Venn diagram as the platform companies keep investing in newer and newer markets, basically creating a platform, a pack that's insurmountable to any new competition. There's the augmenting compatibility and competition by enabling service switching Act, which I think would crack open the data access, not in personal privacy nuts. And these platforms, and they emerge your filing fee Modernization Act. So there's a litany of these coming, they're making their way through committees, I think that at least one of these a couple, these are going to see the light of day to vote. And I hope that I hope that there is something needs to be done. Obviously, we've never allowed monopolies of this scale to exist. Not in a very long time. Something has to be done. I feel this, I think everyone in the tech industry, who runs small companies, is jerked around by the influence of these companies, many companies who early stage companies who invested in these platforms, got the proverbial bait and switch many of the big brands who invested as advertisers, these platforms were bait and switched from building these organic audiences to a pay to play. So basically, they deserve it. And they've got it coming. I mean, there's just there's no, there's no way around it. And after this election cycle, and everything that happens with various forms of censorship, and they just poke the stick in the eye, I mean, that they're doomed now to being over regulated, I think.
Dean Nelson:And that's why there's probably quite a bit of lobbying going on, to try to preserve is the lobbying increasing, trying to preserve their mom exactly a monopoly? You know, have you ever worked with lobbyists, I have not directly worked with lobbyists, no, my companies, my employers have had lobbyists. But I had the pleasure of actually working with a lobbyist before and a little bit different, what we are lobbying for was renewable energy and legislation to enable renewable energy. And that was a completely counter thing to what we're talking about. Now, it was really just Can you give us the opportunity to actually have direct renewable energy versus we have to go through the all the utilities and the tariffs and all the wheeling, recharges, and all that stuff. And it was interesting to me, because the positioning, I mean, the reason that they are paid the way they are, is that they have access to the people to be able to, to come in and present an educate This is the way that they shared it with me educate that lawmaker on the issue and the challenge and the opportunity. Great. So I spent a lot of time I went up on the hill and others have just had conversations with people, as just one of the industry representatives around this and also for the company I was working for, and we were able to get legislation passed. The sad part of that is all that lobbying work, the money that was paid went in because they are educated, they understood the value opportunity for that state, right for this renewable energy. Then the lobby and on the other side came back and then the law went into into pass. And guess what, they had all of these other things on top of it, they took the law, they broke it apart. And they made it impossible. So we still can get renewable energy. Even we had this Renewable Energy Act, this thing passed SB 12. It was called. So Senate Bill 12. And that's my experience of lobbyists. So that kind of like, I'm sure, just like anything, there are people that are out there to do the right thing when there's others that might be influencing in the wrong way, motivated by money in a different kind of thing. So
James Thomason:somehow that comes out to is to the other side. Right. And so you seem to do yeah, is this beautiful mission and beautiful purpose? And somehow I got attached to the distribution of pork bellies, and you're like, what does that have to do with pork bellies getting my bill, how does the pork belly funding is 10 times the amount of your amount of your contract funding under like, what what what happened? Well, meanwhile in big government, we talked about big tech big government is moving along. China pulled DD From the app store's after a suspension order, just unilaterally ordered the app source to pull it, which I guess is a thing and trying to write the well, it was very, almost a thing here with Trump, right? Try to get rid of Tick Tock. But that didn't work out. So well did it. China ordered apps or apps or operators removed the app DD from their stores, the latest has tension escalated between the largest ride hailing giant and local regulators in that market. The app has disappeared, according to TechCrunch, from several stores, including the App Store in China, yeah, yeah, I assume the
Dean Nelson:stores This is crazy, because I mean, just think about the unilateral, like decisions that are made at a government level. I think back when I was at Uber, you know, was this big effort to go into China? And they did. And they spent billions of dollars and it was a losing proposition because DD and DD and Uber were just basically incentivizing the hell out everybody, the drivers, the riders, etc. to try and get them on the platform is all about grabbing share. And so they just get more and more more and more money into it. And ultimately, what happened is that, you know, they sold to DD and right and then they got a stake in DD. So, Uber actually worked out pretty well in that it was $6 billion. They netted out of that transaction. But DD I mean, dominated that's just Chinese approach. What was interesting, if you take DD and Alibaba right now, they were the darlings before that, right? The Chinese government is basically just come down. I mean, think about this. You went public. Right? As CD. Two days later, the government says you can no longer download the application for ride hailing. How much was last Brad?
Brad Kirby:Yesterday it was 15 billion in market cap
Dean Nelson:alone. Who said billion not million, right? If Dean 15 billion so $15 billion of market cap went away because of a government choice against a single company, because they said they violated something.
Brad Kirby:data privacy laws Republic company, massive.
James Thomason:Imagine the Chinese imagine the CCP is saying that someone else violated data privacy laws.
Dean Nelson:Hilarious. Okay, so look, let's flip this back over to crypto for a second. Think about what just happened what a month or two ago, where they said no more cryptocurrencies they clamp. There's gigawatts of stuff just like exit in China and landing in Europe, right. Norway, Sweden, and then of course across Oh, yeah.
James Thomason:These big wooden crates and stuff of servers that they're and miners that they're just shipping out in mass?
Dean Nelson:Yeah. It's unbelievable. So last night, Peter gross. I was at dinner with Peter gross. He's on chairman of board my board. Yeah, he was saying, here's a visual for you. If you took all the mining machines, and put them on train cars, it would be a 27 mile train of just machines stacked floor to top all the way across, right with the mining machines that are sitting right now. Like 27 miles of mining shades. That's a significant amount of machines. They can't even pay for things with cryptocurrency anymore. So what do you do with the machines? How do you sell them? Anyways? That mass exodus it's going somewhere, is remember, there's 15 gigawatts of Bitcoin mining going on,
Brad Kirby:except for now. I'll find out for next week for you. I'll make I'll make some calls and figure it out.
James Thomason:Mostly in the my garage. Several pallets are arriving
Dean Nelson:long as you're plugging into your neighbor's plug. Yeah,
James Thomason:yeah, that's,
Dean Nelson:it's crazy. First off, talking about a business risk that the government come in and just say click one day, we're not going to allow you to download apps or at your app. How do you recover from that one? I mean, sounds like lobby.
James Thomason:There you go. Sounds a lot sounds turning to some. Well, okay. Maybe when you have two economies as intertwined as the United States and China, it's natural that they would become more like us and us more like them, isn't it both culturally and business practices? I mean, the that sort of thing. Trade contaminates the rest of life. Many of the cultural and political differences have to be dealt with in trade. Right. So it's natural that it's a transforming process on both. No such thing as a free lunch, right?
Dean Nelson:I mean, you Yeah, James, that brings up the sortation. Super Well, I always thought it was funny that they would do something with chickens, where they would kill them here, ship them to China package them there to ship them back, to be sold. There's like McNuggets and things. But there, that was a trade thing. For some reason, something happened here that'd be shipped across the ocean to be packaged to be shipped back. It just makes zero sense.
James Thomason:Even like mining rare earths in Argentina and Australia, shipping them to China to manufacture them into batteries to ship them into Japan to put them in the car. So send them over here and sell them in the name of saving the planet. Yeah, it's kind of like that, huh? That sound was a sustainable it was the Prius supply chain. Yeah, very sustainable. Wow. Buy a Prius, save the planet.
Brad Kirby:We're officially at war with China right now. You guys do know you are aware of that. Right? This is like we're at war. It's not. Oh, yeah.
James Thomason:Well, the problem is we've been at war for a long time, probably. And, Andy. Did you know that prior To the communist takeover of China, and the sort of difficult union between the USSR and China, USSR, China relations way back during and after Mao, the West was almost completely ignorant of Chinese culture. And not just Chinese culture, but deep Chinese history and philosophy. So what happened like in the USSR was when when we still had our kids reading, see spot run, they had their kids reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu So, to sunsoo, the pinnacle of war artful warfare was to wage war against the enemy without the enemy even being aware that you were waging war. So you do subvert and undermine them every pillar of their society, by the time your troops arrive at the gates, the castle just falls down in front of you. I mean, that was going back 1000s of years into Chinese strategy, right. And so when the process of subversion, which became a in the USSR became a funded, worldwide effort, clandestine subversion, which the USSR wielded to great efficacy throughout Eastern Europe to bring societies down and install socialism before the tanks would even rolling in, right so the greatest play it's a version was to subvert the United States. It's just taken a really long time. And it really has really happened through our economic relationships with China. So we became trade dependent and outsourced all of our jobs and that's kind of like, kind of history. At this point. There's no turning the dial backwards. So I think I think we're all gonna get the war. I don't think it's gonna get hot. I think it's gonna get cold. We're gonna get a lot closer. A lot. cozier. It's too small now.
Brad Kirby:Did we talk about the ransomware? attack? No, that's not China. It's Russia. But
James Thomason:well, it's allegedly I mean, his alleged Russian group, I find that the Russians are like the universal scapegoat like Soros. Right. And I mean, they're, it's becoming kind of ridiculous. Everything is the right. It's either Putin or Soros hiding under a rock, depending on who you're talking to. Politically, but yes, another huge, massive, massive ransomware attack targeting, how do you see is it Cassia Cassia Cassia, who provides software over 1500 minutes service security service providers, demanding a record 70 million and affecting or impacting over 1 million computers? Yeah, I think they recently lowered the price to 50 million, right? What a bargain to get a million computers about Yeah,
Dean Nelson:yeah. If you pay today, you can save 20 million. Yeah. What's scary about this one is that it's the customers of the customers. So it's not just that they breached this company, this company also serves other IT service companies, which means it breach them, which means it breached their customers on top of that. So I think is a much larger wake that's coming out of this breach. And I think they must know that that's why they put this number up
Brad Kirby:that high. It's kind of similar to solar wins in that that sense, except, in this case, there was encrypted drives there, and they have a universal decrypter that give us 50 million, then we'll give you the universal key. And you can look these things up to a million computers that were encrypted. Yeah. And it was only 1500 companies. But I think it was a million there was a store in Sweden that shut down 800 stores for two days. Lesser companies. Yeah, I mean, there were small to medium size. And, you know, it wasn't like the God of the D o t, like solar winds. But I know some people think that that we can get by these, but I just I don't see these ending anytime soon. I
Dean Nelson:don't either. I mean, think about our last guests we had on and there's so many holes. I mean, the zero trust networks and other things are just not in place across everything. And all it takes is one weak spot, that weak spot opens it up for the next thing, and if you don't have ways to contain it, it's going to go, that's just the nature of the beast right now. And, you know, we keep talking about edge and the number of nodes that are gonna be outside of that we have to architect this differently. That has to be to where those nodes are actually secure. And the blast radius is small. Those things Yeah, exactly. has to
Brad Kirby:be for sure. Early, actually, we're talking to a former general about that. And just just the hardening around I mean, really a more one of the targets has been communications right infrastructure. So if you think about it, as we build out the digital infrastructure for future it has to be ready for war warfare. Really. Yeah.
James Thomason:An interesting aside is the the technology wars as these have been proxies for the geopolitical wars and battles that are going on right so the the internet war, the.com War, the victors of that emerged and fought a mobile computing war. And then they got tired of that and fought a cloud computing war, but the Really big bore that's coming is critical infrastructure and edge. Right. So as much energy and money and resources went into Cloud computing over the last decade, the edge is orders of magnitude bigger, and it's orders of magnitude bigger, because the western coalition must necessarily now harden his infrastructure assets against these type of attacks, especially for critical infrastructure, because what's happening is that the critical infrastructure is becoming digitized. And there are very real risks to the so called I hate to see, I never want to utter the words digital transformation. But you know, the, the digital transformation of critical infrastructure, poses grave new risks from a military standpoint, from a threat model standpoint. And these things have to be hardened against the NPS, they have to be hardened against intrusion. And they have to be recoverable. They have to be decentralized and work without falling victim to one cloud or another. And I've always said that the Achilles heel of the cloud computing model was security. And that one day, the Sharon, the toll booth, let's whole boat to hell would claim their gold coins. And that would be when a severe security compromise effected one of the big clouds. And it's I mean, it's it's testament to just how astoundingly good the security practices of Amazon, Google, Microsoft are, that one of them has not fallen wholesale victim to a full bore compromise where all of their customers were impacted in some way or where they were forced to cease operations for a long period of time. And we've, I mean, we faced this going way back into the data center days, we had routers hacked and entire data centers taken down. We were security clowns back then. So it really is, to me impressive that that hasn't happened yet. yet. The risk remains. It's like, as Nassim Taleb says the Black Swan the long tail, highly improbable, yet devastating event that is just looming out there. One of these guys is going to get taken down. And that's going to trigger a mass exodus from the public cloud. And I think ransomware these are getting so severe that it's getting to the point like who can you really trust besides open source, because that, you know, in terms of the ability to detect attacks, and rest assured you haven't been compromised, or that at least the vectors are known or to get as many eyeballs as possible, open source really is the only guarantee right to put it out there and have everyone look at it. And I'm equally amazed that closed source is still such a big thing in critical infrastructure and government, that we continue to rely on closed source. I mean, voting machines, for example, should never be closed source, you know, the way that they work and the way that they work and their operating systems and the code that they run something that's as critical as that should never have, in my humble opinion, closed source code that is not subject to public scrutiny. I feel the same way about, you know, the software that changes traffic signals, or, for that matter, you know, directs tumblers inside or uranium enrichment facilities or whatever, that's critical. You need as many eyes on it as you can. That's how the only way we've ended up with true security was to subject it to scrutiny, you know, to have open standards and open source.
Dean Nelson:I guess it's a two edged sword, though, right? Also, when it's there, people can take that see where they can actually hack from an open source standpoint. And the other side is you got a lot of people who can watch to keep them in check. So I think Brad's right. There's no, like, this is not going to stop. And James, if there's a way to solve that. I don't know how it is. So first off, it's so big, so many companies, so much source, so many access points, so many users. I don't know how you would go back and secure up all these things. Because I'll give you an example. Earlier today. I was talking with our software software architect, and he was saying that we have to go deal with mud bus ever. So power system? mod bus? Yes. Right. Because a lot of the systems still have my bus interface with like, have you ever heard of IP? That might be an interesting thing? It may take off? Yeah, if you get an IP address. It's possible, but even think about Modbus was created in the 60s 60s. Yes, 50 plus years later, we're using this protocol in brackish systems. Yeah. And so and then what makes me most nervous is the the aging electrical infrastructure. And the risk that we got there is that
James Thomason:Modbus PLC controller is one wire, all of this, it all exists still. It's all over. And I By the way, a serious problem is that the I was never really acutely aware of this until I started becoming a dilettante in the oil and gas space. But these facilities like refineries, various oil production facilities, storage facilities, they're all custom built. That's one thing to know it's not a highly componentized industry. Everything is custom engineered for the site. And the systems that run there are often custom. So a good example we hear this a lot is refineries and nuclear power plants, they have operating systems that like maybe one guy is still alive. Who knows how that code works. It's written in a programming language no one has ever heard of, because they made it up. For the site, I think a lot of this critical infrastructure is going to come tumbling down, because of just the lack of understanding. And so they're grasping at straws to try to digitize this stuff as fast as possible. One facility I visited in Texas, I mean, they're 3d imaging the whole thing. They've got the guy on his oxygen bottle, literally trying to explain to them how this stuff is worth. They have pencil design drawings of every modification that's gone into the plant for 70 years. Oh my god. And it's a notebook. They're like, this is a decaying notebook of engineers notes and calculations, and schematics and like, that's the only record of what it is. The public records are woefully inadequate, a lot of stuff wasn't even permitted and thing back in the day is just the way it was built, representing millions of millions of dollars of investment. And this guy's literally gonna die any day. So all right, this is risk. It's gonna be an interesting decade.
Brad Kirby:Sick of getting hacked on us. Like, I found out today with the hack what it was called print nightmare. Where they take over your spooler Oh, you got hacked last week?
Dean Nelson:Again? Last again. Yeah.
James Thomason:Why are you so popular?
Brad Kirby:I think as a crypto like, everybody loves bread. I don't own crypto, I just like I'm working on a specific project and I had to download some wallets. Any sign of the traffic? Like I don't know what to do. I've lost all my files. And I have nothing left. So I'm just gonna learn everything and start my God. given up
Dean Nelson:sorry to laugh, but you're gonna go to a Mac. Right.
James Thomason:JOHN has my Mac right now. Okay, that's booked a few times to Yeah, I only want the apple in the NSA getting into my stuff. So yeah, I use a Mac. I'm cool with the NSA. Good massada continuing the big government scheme. Yes. A former Microsoft executive as a current or former Microsoft executive says the United States government has been overusing its secret subpoena power to routinely gather vast amounts of data on American internet users. No, I guess this is a current executive and prepared testimony to Congress. I didn't see that earlier. In remarks for US House representative Judiciary Committee. Hearing, the executive said that in the last five years, Microsoft had received 2400 to 3500 secrecy orders a year. And the US courts provide a little by way of meaningful oversight. So basically, whenever they issue a data subpoena, they get it. Especially when it's overseas. there's basically no oversight. And they're just collecting as much data as possible. I think this guy Snowden said something about this. Anybody ever heard of Snowden?
Dean Nelson:Yeah, I think I heard about him once was it's a fictional character on
Brad Kirby:contract for some government agency.
James Thomason:I looked him up. He's only got one. He only follows one person on Twitter. So couldn't, skinny provider in testimony, Bert, this executive said providers like Microsoft regularly receive boilerplate secrecy orders, unsupported by any meaningful legal or factual analysis. Basically, just give me that data, or else.
Dean Nelson:So Isn't this what Apple fought those subpoenas? You need to have the backdoor you need to be able to get in to get the data. Well, they want Apple to weakened as encryption. I'm not sure.
James Thomason:I'm not sure that's totally necessary, given the NSA capabilities to get the cooperation of people on their payroll. I'm not sure you know, clandestine efforts I'm not sure that they need as the FBI that's always trying to get them to weaken their encryption the other intelligence services don't say booboo kitty about any of this. I think that's because it's not a problem for them. But you know, those agencies don't always share information. As we know,
Dean Nelson:I've never designed I've never heard of Google kitten, by the way. So it's a new technical term. Boo Boo kitten, booboo kitten. They don't say booboo, Kitty about anything. So you have learned two things on this podcast, spit and Chiclets and Boo Boo.
James Thomason:Boo Boo kitty,
Dean Nelson:kitty. Sorry. It's my accent.
James Thomason:Yeah, that goes right back to the 90s I'm dated with that reference.
Dean Nelson:I was in the 90s I never heard that reference. So booboo getting on me. Yeah, but you were a geek. Only nerds know that I was chic. You were not cheap. I see. I see. That's right. Full Circle.
James Thomason:Last in the big tech or the big government lineup. Maybe a judge tour. A government especially this is a Florida judge. So I get to say government. Right on. I get to abbreviate the word governor and government in the cell. A judge has blocked the Florida law calling an example of burning the house to roast a pig. Now any judge that uses language like that I can kind of automatically like even though I don't think I'd like what he did is his name Haas or the the the state law made it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban Paul Titian's wholesale, and impose other restrictions on tech companies around censorship. US District Judge Robert Hinkle yesterday called use that colorful language to describe the four law issues, issued a preliminary injunction order to stop the law from progressing. So this is now going to get dragged on in court. For years and years or until I guess the legislature will probably intervene before this court case will wind up. They'll either modify the law in a way that they think they can skirt around this order. Who knows what will happen, but I think it's interesting that states are starting to take independent action due to the inaction of federal agencies, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the large amount of lobbying dollars that are being spent by big tech in Washington. But the 40 plus states that sued under antitrust, and lots and lots of I can't even keep track of the number of state laws anymore, that are coming on the books or at least coming up to vote, trying in one way or another to, to stem big tax influence. So take note, I think this is going to get very nasty over the next couple of years. Yep, there's
Dean Nelson:no doubt in my mind, it will. Because there's so much emotion behind it and so much money behind it. So much influence. So basically, that was that thrown up and
James Thomason:well thrown out. But there's a there's an injunction preventing enforcement under that law. So nothing basically it's a it's null and void until the case is resolved. In court, it's only a temporary so either they'll litigated and get the law back in force, or they'll change the legislation and try again. We live in a complicated world. Don't wait. It's got more competencies. At least we've been traveling again, that's been nice. I've been I've been flying all over, right. I mean, I grew I was in I started my trip in Mobile, Alabama, and then went to Nolan's now I'll be down to Miami Beach. I was actually in Miami Beach at the time of that awful building collapse. Oh, no, just north of me just a mile or so north. And, of course, the local news coverage was was nonstop. So it was really just horrific. While there and gave me some thoughts about the building I was sitting in probably a lot of people felt that way that we're sitting in, in these mid rises on beautiful Miami Beach. Just tragic. And I think I haven't checked the latest news today. But I don't think any good news is coming from that site. No, or probably is expected to
Dean Nelson:at this point, so and also the hurricane just hit right. So ama, I think it is or something?
James Thomason:Well, anything else, Floridians unless it's like a cat five, they don't even flinch. They're like, you know, whenever we've been through, we've been through storms that scrape the ground clean. If it's not one of those, then we probably got it. In the end, I saw a leak and I looked up some of the local engineering reports and surveys that had been done that showed the areas of like Miami Beach, Miami proper, that are sinking and have been sinking for decades. And so I wonder how much this is going to become a home and how much of it relates to the rising sea level or whether this was just a freak incident or a case of neglect.
Brad Kirby:I was supposed to be in Miami with you that week. But I get to start traveling in two days. So
Dean Nelson:we're even doing wait Brad so you've been locked in your country for a while as a as of two days ago. I
Brad Kirby:can actually come back without quarantine for 14 days because I'm double vaccinated. which is rare. It's rare for Canadian.
Dean Nelson:Really? Okay, I'm not gonna ask my age, my age. Gotcha. All right. But James and I've been traveling quite a bit. So I took the jump. I went to Las Vegas, right? I have three meals outside within four days, which was like crazy. I couldn't believe it. Then I went to Nebraska because the first plane ride I had to get on to I had to go to Nebraska. That was really really important. The hub of the world right? Yeah. There you go. liner. I went to Nebraska and I went to her to Bitcoin mine, right. It was Wow. It was eye opening. So 70 megawatts of mining going on? The majority was Bitcoin they had other other ones there as well. But they built it on an oil well, they just pump up natural gas and convert it directly into bitcoin. No, James, they actually right next to a solar farm. So it was actually good and the amount of clean energy in there. So I got to give a shout out compute North Good job. They're working on doing the right thing. They host lots of lots of mining stuff. They're growing like mad. But anyways, I went to Nebraska. I went to Texas. I went to Denver, where to go Utah? Yeah. So in the last three weeks, I've been on like 12 planes. And I'm alive. So it feels so good to be back out and doing things so Brad be jealous, but two days.
James Thomason:It really does. But I got I think I got overstimulated. I went to Dallas on my last leg. And I did a datacenter trip and I haven't done a datacenter trip never let it be said that I'm not a hands on CTO. Okay, so back in the data center once again, plugging in cables fighting firmwares and absolutely nothing went correct the facility we were in lost our packaging and optics and network cables and turned out to be the Postal Service's fault raised hell the Postal Service and magically the box appeared two days after I left Of course, but hey, we've got in theory, it's sitting in our cage now but nothing Nothing went right. went well
Dean Nelson:went right. But James if he if you had a lobbyist that would have been there on time.
James Thomason:Well, that's the thing is they had the box. They had it for a week, but they they misplaced it in a split. I'm like, you know, I'll just run down to Best Buy and buy these highly specialized optics and never didn't know I won't do that I have to leave now. Fly to California to San Jose to try to resurrect this in another data center. That's pretty close. Pretty close. Pretty good. So back when I'm playing jetsetting and then I don't know about you. I just got overstimulated Dean. I'm not used to being around people anymore. I went and I hid in a cabin up in the California foothills, for for the Fourth of July. just turned off the internet.
Dean Nelson:You and I are very different people. And I think maybe maybe you got to ease yourself back in. I missed this. This is like, suddenly getting the ability to sit down in front of people on a whiteboard and do something. I literally met my team in Utah for the very first time. We hired them all during the pandemic, and we've never been in the same room together. It was great. Like that kind of thing. And then getting with customers and having conversations and catching up and having dinner and the things that you just can't do a resume. You just can't Yeah, business is so different. I can't wait. It's I'll be there soon. All right. Awesome. Prep. Well,
Brad Kirby:we will be doing a review. You were working on some stuff. Some personal stuff. you're recording, right?
Dean Nelson:Are you Oh, my daughter was? Yeah, yeah. No, she's my, Okay, I gotta give a shout up. My daughter just signed up for Twitch. So she's streaming on Twitch. So my daughter's in the group citizen Queen, right where we talked about she was on our very first episode. So she started streaming in the last week. And we're traveling in LA right now. We brought a rig with her. So she streams every day. And she's doing a lot of hours on Twitch. And she's writing music real time. Right in front of people in front of an audience whether
James Thomason:whether that would drive me nuts. I mean, musician I would have to have
Dean Nelson:It's amazing. I love the closed door. My tool to use Twitch, dude, I'm on Twitch. You're like 12 No, no, it's like, it's kind of like getting kick butt. It's addicting. It is addicting. I you know, as soon as she finished her thing that others pop up, and I'm like, I'm watching all these people. Gaming is huge on Twitch, right? Yeah, no gaming. But from the music side. There's just some, I think this is the future of television, like, you know, the reality shows and things. So you're doing it live. And so my daughter, bless her heart she was in there. She said, I usually talk to myself my room. I'm doing this all by myself with maybe one of the producers. So you're just gonna see my process. She says he's, I'm gonna try it's gonna sound like crap doesn't matter, because I'm going to tune it. So she did sound like crap. She tuned it. It was just really neat to watch the process and having fans come in and others and they start throwing out ideas. And it's just that it's cool. So if you're on Twitch, go look, Nina and Nelson. See what what her stream is doing?
Brad Kirby:I will I will download it just for that. That's a thanks, Brett.
Dean Nelson:Right? You got rid of Facebook, you're gonna get twitch now. Good job. They don't have that much power. Do they? Know what they're an amazing platform?
Brad Kirby:Don't worry, Facebook will acquire them. And then they'll just be part of the I will say organizing a party at my house because we could have 25 people in the backyard for Canada today, which is the CIA independency was the first time I felt like I needed Facebook. Hmm, just to communicate first time I guess like yeah, it's still worked out fine. But I was like, gosh, I can't he can't communicate
James Thomason:Hmm. Well being in the not in the know and like interacting with people used to be this thing called socializing. So I'm enjoying it because I constantly run into situations I have no knowledge of in my soul. So I'm like, Oh, really? You know, do tell me the news of your life. I'm not up to date, because I haven't been reading your feed obsessively for the last six months. So I know. That's, that's kind of different now, right? Like with Facebook, I always felt like oh, yeah, I know what you're doing. I saw I saw your party and I saw your this is kind of cool. That's going back to like actually having to have conversations with people to understand what their lives are like and relate to them as human beings.
Dean Nelson:I agree and they're not offended it's also very they're not offended that you don't follow them and watch their every move.
James Thomason:Now everybody was I deleted I got a couple of inquiries. People didn't notice I deleted they're like Dude, why are you on Facebook? Do you unfriend me? I'm like, No, I deleted I'm gone.
Brad Kirby:I unfollow people have freaked out but too many people in life to feel like Sorry, I can't do this. We'll see if they're listening because they know who they are.
Unknown:You are
James Thomason:so Miami before the disaster I was at the IoT Expo the first trade show I've been to since before the pandemic broke out. So that was a really weird feeling to be in an expo hall. With lots of people I saw lots of cool gadgetry and gizmos the it the coolest thing I saw was a an edge device they're using to using optical imagery to guesstimate the size of cows. So you know, they mount these in the stock yard and the cow wanders by and then they they know when the cow is ready for harvest by weight. Just by looking at the cow and then amazing that sucks for cows. Yeah, and then the cow has a radio tag. It's like yeah, the literally the numbers up like the cow is radio tag. Let me get this founder on the show just because their Gizmo is so cool. And the Indian use case is so cool. Wow,
Dean Nelson:that's that's a moving movie. Thank you. Thank you.
James Thomason:Well, on that note, folks, if you enjoy shows such as this one where we bring you the latest news in tech, plenty of opinionated discussion. We're not trying to protect anyone's feelings around here only Dean is because you haven't had this big global nonprofit but the rest of us can just say whatever the hell we feel like. Please do give us a like because it does help us for the audience. Thank you so much for being listeners and growing us to 10,000 listens. We are sponsored, of course by infrastructure masons and nonprofit uniting builders of the digital age. Learn how you can participate by going on the web to ai masons.org that's AI masons dot o RG and by edX building a next generation platform for all the things visit us on the web at Ed gx.io. That's Ed j x.io.