AI Lawyers Are Hallucinating + Hacktivists are Ransomwaring + the Apple is Augmenting Reality

Speaker 1: Scott, the artificial intelligence lawyer is hallucinating again, and now everyone's going to jail. Well,

Speaker 2: don't we all belong in jail for something?

Speaker 1: On this chat episode of Hacked. Everyone's going to jail tonight because the robot attorney made a whoopsie, and we apparently all deserve it. We are talking about a lawsuit against a Columbia based airline that was derailed when the lawyers for the plaintiff submitted a document citing a whole bunch of legal precedents that had been hallucinated by an artificial intelligence.

Speaker 2: Nice. Nice.

Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about that case and the larger question of AI hallucinations, this fascinating term that has been cooked up to describe tools like ChatGPT and Bard making stuff up wholesale, and the huge fallout that can emerge when we confuse large language models with search engines.

Speaker 2: We're also gonna talk about, some of the things being done globally to, reform the youth, young hackers, also look at some of the costs of cybercrime as well as, you know, we can't help but dip our toe into the cost of crypto scams when we're doing that.

Speaker 1: Just can't go one episode.

Speaker 2: I can't. I can't. It's like I can't do it. It's like I'm being pulled by Destiny. You know? Like, I feel like I should start speaking to her, and it could be the scathing criticism of crypto currency.

Speaker 1: Pulled by Destiny, the Scott Winder story. And then I wanna talk about Malice Locker. Ransomware is a dime a dozen in 2023, but most of the time, the motive is profit. With Malice Locker, it seemingly isn't. The hacktivists, they have come for ransomware, and we're gonna get into it. Those stories and more on this chat episode of Hacked.

Speaker 3: How are

Speaker 1: you doing, Scott? I'm great, Jordan. How are you? I'm good. I'm keeping busy. We haven't checked in on the podcast within our podcast, Hacked Presents Zelda Watch. Have you been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom?

Speaker 2: I have not, unfortunately, been playing a lot of it. I do have it. It's literally sitting Oh, your loss. My hand is touching it currently. It's that close to me.

Speaker 1: Sure. It's kind of always touching it. Like, I just like to it's pressing

Speaker 2: My Switch is sitting on top of the case. I will say that the card is in the Switch. I have started it. I have played some, but I'm not haven't played that much. It's, like, two weeks out now, and I think I'm maybe, like, six hours in. So pretty pretty big failure.

Speaker 1: It just means your life is is full of, meat world activities and being outside, and that's a good thing. That's a good thing.

Speaker 2: So wait, meat world? Is that a is that a term that I haven't

Speaker 1: Have you never, have you never, see that stresses me out, because I feel like I've said meat world to you before, and now knowing that you maybe don't know what it means.

Speaker 2: Oh, I can assume- Kinda

Speaker 1: makes me reconsider some stuff and-

Speaker 2: I instantly know what meat world means, but I don't think I've ever

Speaker 1: heard Sure. You can infer it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty pretty obvious what we're talking about.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's either a really popular term that you should know, or I've been wildly overestimating how known a term it is and using it, in the wrong company for years. It's only one of the two.

Speaker 2: I'll tell you that, like, I spent a lot of time in in social circles and around around, and Sure. That's the first time I think I've heard of you.

Speaker 1: Never heard that one.

Speaker 2: So so it might

Speaker 1: be Ruh roh.

Speaker 2: Might be a a Jordan Blumen term.

Speaker 3: I don't

Speaker 1: I it's definitely I did it's not an original, but I I might be, some people's first encounter with it, and I'm gonna try and not think about that too hard as a policy tonight.

Speaker 2: How many times have I inappropriately used the term meat world? Let's count.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It really doesn't sit right if you're not familiar with it, which is what I'm gonna be thinking about. But what I'd like to think about even more than that is all the the new patrons that I wanna thank.

Speaker 2: Just out there in meat world waiting for waiting for some credit.

Speaker 1: I've never met any of them in meat world.

Speaker 2: Fabio, Milan, Ian. Appreciate you.

Speaker 1: Don't forget about Mart. Who? Oh, Mart. Don't forget about Chibika Chan. Yeah. Two of the greats. Best to ever do it. Nor could we ever forget about Andy Lee and our dear friend Gary Allred. Thank you all so much for supporting the show. If you would like to join those fine folk, you can go to hackedpodcast.com. It redirects to our Patreon. That's hackedpodcast.com. It's the, most direct way you can support the show, and it means the world to us.

Speaker 2: It certainly does. Helps us in Mi world every day.

Speaker 1: It helps us afford food in Mi world. Okay. So I I think I wanna kick this bad boy off talking about something called Malice Locker. K. So in the span of less than two months, this newly emerging ransomware group has targeted about 200 organizations, primarily attacking users of a digital workplace collaboration tool called Zimbra. Zimbra is not the interesting part here. What's interesting is how they stick the landing on their, extortion. I think it warrants some discussion. Instead of demanding payment to themselves, Malice Locker is requesting a donation to a chosen charity.

Speaker 2: Is it you get to choose a charity, or do they mandate which charity?

Speaker 1: No. You get to choose the charity. It's all, it's all very flexible to, to the victim. Technology news outlet BleepingComputer is named the ransomware Malice Locker. Started kind of in forms hosted by BleepingComputer that users started reporting this series of breaches involving Zimbra back in March and April. In a ransom notice that this hacking group posted on April 2 in a Zimbra forum, they wrote quote, unlike traditional ransomware groups, we are not asking you to send us money. We dislike corporations and economic inequality. We simply ask that you make a donation to a nonprofit that we approve of. It's a win win. You can probably get a tax deduction and good PR from your donation if you want. Wild. Wild. It's pretty wild.

Speaker 2: Just, like, such an interesting take on it. Yeah. I would love to see their approved list of Sure. Like, obviously, it's gonna be biased to whatever their political and social leanings are. Yeah. Of course. It would be fascinating to see what their approved list of of charities is.

Speaker 1: It sure would be. And their political leanings are made quite plain. I'm pretty sure if the large mining consortium tried to donate money to the, save a large mining consortium fund, they wouldn't approve that. But it sounds like otherwise, they're pretty open, though their politics are stated pretty cleanly. The digital platform that this group operates on the dark web showcases the list of companies that have fallen victim to these attacks. We kinda found out a little bit more of the groups, like, specific modus operandi, that political trajectory on Wednesday, when a website dedicated to transparency, advocacy, and the advocacy, and the hosting compromised data called distributed denial of secrets, disclosed the group's hack on the Harida Group, a large corporation involved in mining and resource extraction in Indonesia. The group wrote that it will not target companies based in Africa, Latin America, and quote, other colonized countries with the exception of a couple big ones of, foreign investors or shitty industries. That's their term, not mine. The group plans to aim their efforts at smaller corporations in The US, Russia, and Europe, quote, excluding Ukraine as they're dealing with enough shit at the moment. Again, their language, not mine. Quote, we don't think they're all bad, just that their relative prosperity is built on theft, and we will steal back what we can. Anyways, we don't care. We have as much sympathy for them as they have for us. They can pay and get their files decrypted or not and get them leaked.

Speaker 2: The idea of a, like, a Marxist based cybercrime syndicate is is Sure. Interesting, to say the least.

Speaker 1: It is very, very interesting. Entities that have been targeted by this group are given two choices. Either provide evidence that they've made a donation to a charity or hand the money over to the group who will then make a donation to the charity themselves. Third option, their stuff gets leaked. To your point, Scott

Speaker 2: To my point.

Speaker 1: The interesting question of a low barrier of entry, for ransomware and making this a good tool for, Marxist hacktivists Mhmm. In a conversation with Cyber Scoop, who did some secondary reporting on this after the original bleeping computer coverage, Brett Callow, a threat analyst with cybersecurity company, MSoft, told Cyber Scoop, quote, ransomware is an excellent tool for hacktivists for the same reason it's an excellent tool for profit extortionists. Entry barriers are low, and it has the potential to cause massive disruption. This is not the first instance of hacktivists using ransomware. In 2022, campaigners opposed to the regime of Belarusian president Lukshhenko encrypted computers belonging to the Belarusian railway service. On January 24 of that year, a group calling itself the Belarusian cyberpartisans tweeted that they had encrypted servers, databases, and workstations belonging to the country's railway service. And instead of demanding a ransom, the group said that it would supply the encryption keys if Belarusian authorities released 50 political prisoners needing medical attention. Domestic human rights groups, Viasna, has captured more than 995 political prisoners in Belarus, following a bloody crackdown on protests after elections marred by fraud in 2020. Just to give a little bit of context there. There's this big, I love the way these folks write. This big emoji laden message on the group's kind of dark web home page. And it sits under the heading soma malas podomeros a serpioris, I'm sure I'm not saying that right, which in Spanish translates to we are bad, we can be worse. That is a slogan used, in sort of protests around the globe over the last couple of years. And that's soma malas, where this name comes from. And the message on the website alludes to this kind of, you know, class warfare stuff that you you flagged between the wealthy and the impoverished, portraying, you know, hacking as, you know, one tactic, a form of counter attack. The message includes a series of questions and answers, including whether their efforts are effective, whether they're gonna give the money to charity, and why they're going through all the effort of, you know, kind of communicating what is fundamentally a political message in this way. Mhmm. When ransomware victims are often, paying out to profit driven ransomware groups. Quote, it will make some companies unwilling to pay us, but we aren't writing this message for them. We're writing it for other kids in Africa, Latin America, Palestine, and the world over. Ransomware should not be the business of a few Russian groups as it is now. It's a tool for all of us to uplift our communities through robbing the countries that have pillaged ours. It's fascinating.

Speaker 2: So so so unpacking this is a very political discussion that I just don't think I wanna lean into. It certainly is.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. It's it's really fair. It's an inherently political story, but it is fascinating to see I think at its heart, it is a new group of people using this same tool for an entirely different end. And that is that is interesting. Wherever you fall on it, I think it is I think it's interesting to see new people using, existing tools to new ends.

Speaker 2: New people using existing crimes to new ends, I think is the I think is the the correct way to

Speaker 1: state that. What is yeah. It it is definitely a crime.

Speaker 2: Well, I think that's a I think that's a good segue to, you know, just talking about some of the, some of the global costs for cybercrime things. So I pulled the IC three, the Internet crime complaint center.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. And

Speaker 2: just looking at kind of what the cost of cyber risk has been to businesses, which I think ties perfectly to this. The, yeah. So It shows. In 2022, there were 3,260,000 complaints totaling 27,660,000,000 in losses, a majority of which stem from phishing, which is no surprise. We've talked about it a number of times of how big a headache it is. The 300,000 plus complaints for phishing, which, you know, I get I get one a day probably, so it's no surprise. Sure. One of one of my bigger headaches is the nonpayment, nondeliveries. When you buy something online from a fraudulent website or fraudulent person, then you have to deal with the headache of trying to recoup the money. 52,000 complaints. Wow. Not sure if that's happened to you, but Not very common in today's world.

Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. This is a fascinating list. 300,000 complaints for phishing, 50 just shy of 59,000 complaints for personal data breaches. Mhmm. 52 for nonpayment delivery, which I actually don't know that I've ever encountered.

Speaker 2: Happened to me recently. I hate to admit it. Really?

Speaker 1: What the

Speaker 2: Yeah. I bought something. That sucks. I bought, there's a clothing company that I was looking to pick up something, and they had cloned the entire site because the site the main site for the company didn't allow shipping to Canada. Woah. So their entire domain .ca Yeah. Was a clone of their website servicing the Canadian market, only shipped to Canada, added stuff to cart, bought it. When I after the PayPal transaction gone through, it, like, it went to, like, Veronica Reyes, not some company. And I was like, oh, I just got Oh, you

Speaker 1: just got grifted.

Speaker 2: That sucks.

Speaker 1: And I

Speaker 2: got grifted. And then the worst thing is is that the PayPal resolution system is, like, not set up to deal with someone being, like, there's a fraudulent website. It's like,

Speaker 3: what

Speaker 2: item didn't you get? When was it supposed to be delivered? And it's like, no. They didn't send me anything. They just took my money.

Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah. It makes me wonder what the approval process for being able to, receive PayPal payments as a vendor is. Like, if PayPal is operating the assumption that, oh, you they they must have been legitimate. What item didn't you get? And it's like, no. They're none of this was legitimate. It was completely made up.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This is this is a complete fraud, and I need to be able to like, the second the transaction went through, I went to the PayPal resolution center to be like, hey. You need to, like, halt this account and stop this. This is the cloned website and all the rest of it, and their little automated system, like, would not let me get to the point of being able to report anything valid. And I was like, this is so bad. Weird. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Did the site make it clear what it was? Was it like, we know you love those pants, but as a Canadian, you can't buy those pants. So we set up pants.ca.

Speaker 2: No. It was like it was like Got it. A full copy of the website, the same marketing images, the same everything.

Speaker 1: It

Speaker 2: had a login. Like, I created an account. Like, it was, like, this the full blown thing. Contact us page. It had the shipping information, the like, I went through and looked at everything, and I was like, wow. Woah. This is the use of the logos, like, everything was perfect. And it was, like, only when I pushed this the pay button.

Speaker 1: Did you realize?

Speaker 2: Thankfully, I chose to use PayPal. Yeah. Sure. So I didn't have to cancel my credit card, but the but it was like, in a second, it was like, your payment to Veronica Reyes has been sent.

Speaker 1: And I

Speaker 2: was like, hold up.

Speaker 1: Was it without giving away the brand name, was it the right name of the company in the URL? The

Speaker 2: oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Everything was perfect. Use of the logos, the the images. That is elaborate. Even every product detail. Like, it was fully it was just It was a whole site. A whole site.

Speaker 1: So that's somewhere between nonpayment and delivery and phishing. It's kind of this, like, weird blend of the two.

Speaker 2: It's like full fraud. So, like, it showed up in Google search reports. It, like like, I don't know. That was gonna be

Speaker 1: my next question was how did you find the site? And it is that it it had been indexed and was, like, coming up in search results on Google. Exactly. Woah. You're gonna have to tell me off mic what company that is. I'm very curious.

Speaker 2: Hey, Clay. I only lost, like, $89 or something. I'm still trying to figure out. Still. I need I need to talk to somebody at PayPal to get them to process it because all of their, like, automated dispute things lead to places where I can't answer. So it's like I need to actually just Sure. Have the conversation. They've since taken the site down. It's now being squatted. So but I imagine it's the same people probably waiting for the same they probably put it up and take it down over and over just as, like, a way to try and limit the amount of exposure they get. That's a wild grift.

Speaker 1: I'm just finding, like, geo locked physical products and then spoofing the entire website with a, like, geotargeted, whatever the domain end thing is, .ca. That's really interesting. I wonder if they donated the proceeds to charity.

Speaker 2: I highly I highly doubt it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: No. That that $80 got chipped into the what was it? 27,600,000,000 in losses, reported. Yeah. That is a very fascinating list of cybercrime types. Phishing, personal data breaches, non payment, non delivery, which you kinda got hit with, extortion, which is terrifying, and then tech support is the fifth item on the list with 32,000 complaints. So that's folks getting false calls or Call center frauded. Yeah. Call center fraud

Speaker 2: sounds like. That's the that's the classic, like, Twitch streamer.

Speaker 1: We're with Microsoft.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Like the you get a pop up from some website being like, your computer is compromised. Call Microsoft right now. Here's the number. Sure. We're gonna delete all your files. And it's like, oh my god. Here's my credit card, or here's a $500 Google gift card.

Speaker 1: We just maybe we don't do gift cards. Maybe we can just, like, like, dry out, like, a third of all Internet crime, but for two years, we're not doing, gift cards. There's no gift cards for two years. We don't do that. We dry out criminal that corner of the criminal ecosystem, and then we can have credit gift cards back.

Speaker 2: Oh, you

Speaker 1: But for a little while, we just don't have them.

Speaker 2: You say that, but did you know that there's a massive correlation between crypto and cybercrime? Well, crypto like, if you think about it, like, if you're doing any kind of illegal

Speaker 3: Sure. Sure.

Speaker 2: Cybercrime, ransom, etcetera, like, you're using, like, most most of these people are using crypto as the, like, base token to transfer the money around because it's the least amount of tractability. Sure. So there there's like a which which segues perfectly into just chatting about, like, the size and and amount of of crypto things, which I think ties perfectly to the cost of cybercrime. The do you know that compareatech.com, Rebecca Moody, the head of their data research department, updated 06/09/2023, so it's pretty recent, they track rug pulls and scams, and then the total value of that of those scams in in real world dollars as well as inflated dollars based on the value of the underlying token.

Speaker 1: These are startling numbers. To

Speaker 2: date, they've tracked 630 rug pulls and scams, valuing 20 approximately 27,000,000,000. And then it at at today's valuation would be around 51 and a half billion dollars in US dollars stolen. And they tracked them, like, monthly.

Speaker 1: It's pretty pretty wild. This is a fascinating chart I've never seen before. 630 scams. You can see a massive spike Twenty crack of 2022, it looks like.

Speaker 2: So 2022, there was literally 365 scams and rug pulls. So that's literally one a day.

Speaker 1: This is a great point. That's a very, very good point. That's well, interestingly oh, they're these charts tell a story. So we're looking at three charts. One is the total number of rug pulls and scams by month and year. Another is the amount stolen by year. And I think those are the two pretty important ones because while the number of rug pulls and scams goes through the roof in 2022, the, amount stolen, the profitability of these endeavors is meaningfully higher in 2021.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And that tells a pretty, specific story that a small group of people made an extraordinary amount of money in 2021 doing this. Yep. And by 2022, it became vastly less profitable as way more people started trying to do it. The public was generally getting aware of it by then, and a whole bunch of new people, kinda like the second wave of grifters, got into it then.

Speaker 2: I love the go down to the go down to the Tableau circle chart, and you can see some really interesting ones. So 2017, we've talked about OneCoin on the show.

Speaker 1: OneCoin. We sure have.

Speaker 2: 4,000,000,000 right there, and it's like

Speaker 1: Double whammy. Yeah.

Speaker 2: That is that is most of out of the 4,350,000,000 stolen in 2017, OneCoin was 4,000,000,000 of it and is one of the biggest scams of all time. If you look at 2038, you had gained Bitcoin, 3,000,000,000.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Modern tech, Pincoin, and iFan, 650,000,000. Let's jump ahead to 2021 because that's the one we were just chatting about. AfriCrypt. AfriCrypt, 3,600,000,000.

Speaker 1: Oh, that tells a rough story.

Speaker 2: Bitconnect, 2,400,000,000, and Theodex. Thodex? Thodex? 2,000,000,000. So, like, those three alone are, like, almost $10,000,000,000.

Speaker 1: That was the year with the single largest amount stolen. Yeah. And it looks like it was largely in three. Yeah. It's kind of the year it all came together.

Speaker 2: So there's so so it's like we the people that were in early got paid, You know, those first early scams before people got super wary about it, made tons of money. And then you see in 2022, the size of them is getting smaller. The biggest one, I think, is for Sage in 2022, and it was 340,000,000. And, like, if you look at the 2023 dots, they're tiny. It's much tiny. That's

Speaker 1: I'm I am glad to see these dots getting smaller. Yeah. It it fragmented in 2022. But that felt like the barrier of entry got much lower, and there were just a lot more sloppy actors in this space. 2022 seemed like it was the year that if you really put the energy into cooking up a thodex, which I've ever even heard of, you could do a lot of damage, like a lot of real harm. This also interestingly makes the distinction between rug pulls and scams. So when you brought up OneCoin in 2017, it made me think, oh, this isn't just referring to crypto scams. OneCoin was a crypto themed scam, but there was no crypto.

Speaker 2: Wow. It was

Speaker 1: just a scam. It was just a there was no coin. There was nothing being like, no, like, digital thing being created. It was just a a black hole you put money into.

Speaker 2: But it was a Ponzi scheme. But the but the It

Speaker 1: was a Ponzi scheme. Exactly.

Speaker 2: It was a crypto related Ponzi scheme. I think you can

Speaker 1: It was crypto, Jason.

Speaker 2: I I don't think you can you can pull it out of the crypto scam world. Like, it was very much a crypto themed

Speaker 1: scam. So But it is worth distinguishing. I like that the chart makes that distinction. Rug pull or scam. What a great what a great color coding for our graph. Was this a rug pull or just a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme?

Speaker 2: Well, let's look here. So they list the biggest ones of all time. So OneCoin was a scam, 4,000,000,000 biggest. Africrypt, 3,600,000,000. Was it a scam or

Speaker 1: a rug pull? No. That was, it was a Bitcoin pool, and then the people that were controlling it ran.

Speaker 2: This is a rug pull. This is a rug pull. Yeah. So the biggest one was a scam. Second biggest one was a rug pull. Gain Bitcoin, India's biggest crypto scam, 3,000,000,000. Crazy, crazy numbers.

Speaker 1: Crazy numbers. And stories that didn't get like, we follow this pretty closely. And Afrocrypt and Game Bitcoin, I think maybe I've seen the term Afrocrypt, but I don't know if I've ever even heard of Game Bitcoin.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, it's it looks India based, so maybe we just don't read enough Indian news. That's on us.

Speaker 1: We gotta It's on us. Go over there and find out what's going on. Yeah.

Speaker 2: We'll get Chat Gbq to make up some Indian news for us.

Speaker 1: To hallucinate some news. Well, speaking of that, after the break, let's talk about, hallucinating AI lawyers and some, some consumer tech news. Let's mix it up a little bit.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Mhmm.

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Speaker 1: So this next story starts with a personal injury lawsuit. A man named Roberto Mata, represented by lawyer Steven Schwartz, was suing a Columbia based airline called Avianca. Mata alleged that he was, quote, struck by a middle serving cart on board a 2019 flight and suffered personal injuries. This already has no bearing on what should happen in that case. It's more about the the legal movements surrounding it. Avianca Airlines does what you'd expect, they file a motion to dismiss the case. And in response to Avianca Airlines' motion to dismiss the case, the lawyer, Schwartz, files a response citing six other cases to show precedent, Farheese v. China Southern Airlines and Shaboon versus Egypt Air. The sound like real court cases. The court, however, found that these cases did not exist and contained quote, bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations. This led a federal judge to consider sanctions against Schwartz. So, you you can guess, what happened here? How does a lawyer cite six completely imaginary cases? When questioned, Schwartz revealed that he had used an AI tool that we are all familiar with called ChatGPT. He used ChatGPT to do what he thought was legal research for the court filing that referenced these non existent cases. He he stated that the AI tool had assured him the cases were real. Short signed an affidavit admitting that he used the AI chatbot, but stated that he had no intent to deceive the court and did not act in bad faith, arguing that he should not be sanctioned. He said in a June 8 filing that he was quote, mortified upon learning about the false cases. This part's really important. He admitted that when he used ChatGPT, he quote, did not understand that it was not a search engine, but a generative language processing tool. Schwartz explained that he hadn't used ChattGPT for reg legal research before, and that he'd learned of the tech from his college aged children. He'd read a bunch of articles on the Internet about all the benefits of AI in a professional setting, and how the tools could make re legal research obsolete. The use of ChatGPT was discovered after Avianca's lawyer couldn't find some of these court documents for the cases to which Mata's team referred. They filed a request asking for information, and in response, Schwartz went back to chat chat g p t to get copies of the case documents, still thinking it was a search engine, and handed those more fabricated, precedents over to Mada's other attorney, Peter Laduka. Upon reviewing the documents provided, the judge determined the cases were fake. He announced that the court was facing a, quote, unprecedented circumstance and would consider imposing sanctions.

Speaker 2: Understandably. Very understandably.

Speaker 1: Judge Castell ordered Schwartz to appear for an in person hearing to explain why they shouldn't face sanction for citing quote, non existent cases. In their filing ahead of the sanctions hearing, Schwartz's team argued that the sanctions would serve no purpose as they had already become, and I I do agree with this, the poster child for the perils of dabbling with new technology, and their lesson had been learned. Interestingly, last little point on this, over in Texas, in response to Schwartz's situation, a federal judge in the Northern District Of Texas issued a standing order. The order requires anyone appearing before the court to either attest that no portion of any filing will be drafted by generative artificial intelligence or to clearly flag any language that was. So in rapid succession Mhmm. Someone makes this very grievous error, is immediately called out on it, and in a totally different jurisdiction, there is a legal response saying you cannot do this. As fast as these tools are moving, we're starting to see how folks are responding in the very high stakes situations where they can be used and importantly abused.

Speaker 2: Well, the the thing is too is that there's a lot of you know, like, ChatGPT is what? The last seven months of our life? Exactly. Where people people like Ross and IBM Watson and stuff, they've been dead Sure. Like, a lot lot of big law people, NextLaw Labs, like there's a bunch of people working on building language processing models specific to law because it's Like, if you've ever read a legal argument, it's just a big, you know, syllogism of, you know, this happened, and this case decided this, and that relates to this case, but this and this and this. It just builds this big logical statement. It seems like something that an AI would be able to do incredibly well. It's like, here are the inputs. Here's the output.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: Now go figure out a bunch of inputs that we have, and here's the output that we want, and build me an argument. And it seems like something that would be very good. And it's it's weird. It's I actually feel bad for the people who are building the real legal versions of these because they've probably spent so much time and money building something that probably works on actual information. Sure. Sure. And then somebody comes along and just generates a bunch of fake cases, and then all of a sudden, everybody's like, hold up. Let's let's, let's put the brakes on on on these AI things. It's like, okay. Well, what about these other what about these other models that are actually really good at it and probably better than most humans?

Speaker 1: It makes total sense that there could be really powerful AI models for for lawyers. Whether or not large language models are the right answer there, I think we're starting to see that in their current state, not so much. They're not great at building arguments. They're not great at reasoning. We call it hallucinating because it's not lying if the thing doing it doesn't have a concept of truth. You would need law software and law AIs to be able to understand that they're building an argument which relies on, I understood the past thing. I can make an inference from it, and therefore reach the next thing. That's not what these things are doing.

Speaker 2: They're very good at summarizing. They sure are.

Speaker 3: It's one

Speaker 2: of the main things that I use chat tp t for.

Speaker 1: They're great at summarizing, and they're great at generating text that can pass the muster of a human being reading it. Mhmm. As long as the human being reading it doesn't have a source it can check against it, then you're relying on a bunch of other things. You're relying on the thing's ability to determine, oh, I just told a whoopsie doodle. Like, I just told a lie. And they're not totally there yet. There's a really cool piece on AI hallucinations in the New York Times by Karen Weiss and Kate Metz that asks, it starts by asking a bunch of different AI's a really simple question. When did the New York Times first report on artificial intelligence? According to Chat GPT at the time of publication, it was 07/10/1956 in an article titled Machines Will Be Capable of Learning, Solving Problems, Scientists Predict about a seminal conference at Dartmouth College in 1956. That conference was real. The article was entirely made up.

Speaker 2: Really?

Speaker 1: It just made it up. The article was totally fabricated. They saw instances of that in Bard, Microsoft's Bing, which is obviously built on chat GPT. It it's good at finding information, but it reaches false conclusions based on that information. That is why in its currency, you cannot think of it like a search engine. That's what happened here. This lawyer thought he was plugging a question into a search engine, and he wasn't. He was asking a machine to generate text, and it did too good of a job.

Speaker 2: I wonder how it learned to lie. Like, I wonder in the constraints of the model, what they did to, like you ask it for a factual piece of information, and then it Yes. Takes real world information and generates a lie.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You think you're asking it a question, and it thinks you've asked it to write an answer.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like it's it's it's It

Speaker 1: is not necessarily concerned with the truthfulness of that answer. It has just been asked write an answer to this that will pass this human smell test.

Speaker 2: It's like it's based in pure fiction. Like, it it doesn't

Speaker 1: Partial truth. Yeah. The conference happened.

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 1: It's like alt history.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. It's like it's it's it's yeah. It's like in a different timeline. It's using the same same inputs but generating completely different outputs.

Speaker 1: We're later gonna find out, that it is glimpsing into the multiverse, and it's not making things up. It's just, telling us about things that didn't happen here.

Speaker 2: I feel like just some tweaking them tweaking the model to make sure that it values legitimacy in its answers isn't that hard. But I guess when it is asked to fabricate so much stuff, you know, write this write me 500 words about why the new Samsung TV is so good so that I can put it on my affiliate marketing website. Sure. It's like it's Sure. It's yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. Interesting interesting collision of of the the generation versus

Speaker 1: Yeah. You

Speaker 2: know, what we consider to be fact.

Speaker 1: The the big Google IO event that showed sort of this runway of the next year of how they're integrating AI into tools, most importantly, Google Docs for, I think, new people experiencing it, and then Google search for even more people experiencing it. The only way that's gonna work is if they can figure out that distinction between have you asked this tool to create something for you, or have you asked this tool for an answer that is falsifiable? Totally. It needs to know if it's being asked a falsifiable question. That's different than being asked to write something for me. In that New York Times article, they asked for ChatGPT to tell them about the first meeting between James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin, an encounter that did not ever happen. Or at least if it did, it's never been confirmed in any history text. And Chat GpT responded with a detailed account of their first meeting in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916 at the Cafe Odeon. It's not it's nothing. It didn't happen.

Speaker 2: It's almost like ChatCpT and these models are still like children, you know? Like they haven't they don't have the moral development of going through you know, the first twenty years of their life. They're they're you ask a ask a three year old a question about something, and chances are they can Sure. Leverage their imagination and spin you a yarn about about the answer, and it's it's almost feels like that's this.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It

Speaker 2: It's like Totally. Chat GPT is a three year old. It has a bunch of knowledge, but at the same time, it's like it has no moral and ethical development. Yeah. Just like a three year old.

Speaker 1: Like a three year old, and like I said earlier, if it doesn't have a concept of truth, is what it's doing really lying? It's it's really a

Speaker 2: thing. Philosophy.

Speaker 1: Philosophy podcast. Speaking

Speaker 2: of youth and moral and ethical development transitions beautifully to my next one topic that I wanna chat about. European countries are trying to figure out what to do with all of these cyber criminal, cyber curious youth that are kind of becoming youth hackers. You know, they might not have bad intent, but they're digging into and and and looking at lots of this stuff. So there's interesting things coming out of some of these countries where they're looking at essentially identifying and leveraging and redirecting some of these kids. So I just thought that was an interesting thing to talk about as, you know, somebody who might have grew up in that same space is the you know, they're they're seeing a lot more young offenders coming into the criminal justice system related to cybercrime. At the same time, they're seeing their security services in need of resources who understand cybercrime. So it's like this it's like the classic sci fi TV show where like, you know, the the the hacker on the the team was like arrested at 16 and then has chosen the better life of becoming a member of the crime prevention unit. They're kind of doing that exact thing. So in in in in The Netherlands, the Dutch model is they're they're they're calling it is HackRight. So it's a rehabilitation program for first offenders between the ages of 12 and 30. So, essentially, they're they're pulling people out of the criminal process and and rehabilitating them, looking at preserving the skills, and putting them to use to serve, you know, essentially the government and businesses, so the economy, which I think is great. Yeah. You know? Giving people a a positive and healthy output for that stuff, you know, putting them into into prevention and and as well as testing and other things, you know, I think is I think is cool. So Finland's also doing the same thing. They they have the exit project, which is I think Denmark and Finland have replicated the the Dutch model. You know, being Dutch yourself, I'm sure you can appreciate and love it.

Speaker 1: So the We we stand a Dutch solution. Sure.

Speaker 2: So they're they're they're they're, like, looking it seems like 12 to something. So these guys so the finished project's 12 to 25, so they're they're trying to grab people before they get kind of instilled in the criminal life.

Speaker 1: It's really interesting.

Speaker 2: So it's it's just neat. I just thought it was cool. Like, just an interesting way to to to identify skills that you need as a as a nation and as a economy. And instead of punish people for those skills, they're providing a healthy output for it, which I think is is positive. Because I think there's other countries in the world that are allowing those skills to be developed at a much more rapid rate, And I don't think those countries are very friendly to most of these countries.

Speaker 1: What's really interesting to me about this, I've heard of programs like this before, but I've never really heard about the motivations behind them, beyond the sort of obvious benefit of not putting 16 year olds in prison. And so much of the language I'm seeing here is rooted in, rehabilitation. Yep. Which isn't something I've ever really thought of before. The article cites a quote, it says, quote, hacking and addiction go hand in hand. The reason why I say this is that anybody with an addictive personality can easily get addicted to the adrenaline rush, and that's exactly what hacking provides. It's that biofeedback, that rush. Mhmm. And it makes a huge sense to me that, you know, a kid, a younger person who figures out that they can do this, and figures out that it's a button they can press, not just literally, but kind of in their own brain, that'll result in this huge dopamine rush of solving a puzzle, of seeing how a system works and navigating through it. That that becomes addicting and incentivizes them to do it in a way that transcends any kind of criminal benefit. It's easy to look like this. It looks indistinguishable from a crime. It benefits the person like a crime would, but it's not necessarily clear that when a minor is doing this, that's kind of why. Totally. It has a lot more to do with neurodevelopment in youth and access to computers than it does with, like, the kids are doing more crimes, so put them in prison. I appreciate that that's the language and the the framework that they're approaching this from.

Speaker 2: Oh, totally. Well, the the thrill of it, like Sure. Doing it criminally and doing it as a professional penetration tester or pen tester, very similar. You know? Right. It's like essentially like our bug bounty, or it's like, can you hack this system? Of course. It's like, yeah. Sure. I can. And it's like, okay. Here's some money. Thank you. And it's like, that's versus, like, k. I've hacked the system. Now I need to figure out how to leverage it to get money from it. Yeah. It just I don't know. It it it just makes total sense to me. And it's like I I think

Speaker 1: It makes complete sense.

Speaker 2: You know, I think there's ways you know, if you wanna walk the dark side of the of the path, I think there's ways to make tons of money quickly. You know, obviously, we're seeing that. Sure. We've talked about that in numerous crimes. But if you're somebody who maybe doesn't wanna be a bad person, there's a bunch of ways to to do it and and and, you know, make good money. Like, I know a lot of, like, propenters make great livings and stuff. So I

Speaker 1: I I'm glad to see this in any space. I think when kids do something that we've decided is a crime, imprisoning them is almost never a net positive. Truly. So starting with computer crimes, where it's like these are specifically nonviolent crimes, almost always provoked by, like, maybe it's profit motive, sometimes it's profit motive, but a lot of the time it's curiosity. But these are fundamentally nonviolent crimes being committed by youth. I think

Speaker 2: if you're a 12 year old who is is learned how to, you know, hack into SQL databases or, you know, whatever it is, whatever chosen like phishing and stuff like that. Yeah. Maybe maybe you've got problems. But the if you're somebody who's, like, actually learning how to penetrate, learning, you know, security from the root, looking at network security, looking at, like, application security, understanding different types of attacks and things like that, like, that is strictly I don't know. I'm not gonna say strictly. But I think Overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly somebody who enjoys puzzles. Yes. Yep. And I stand by that. And it's like that, like, it's that mentality of can be harnessed and leveraged and put into use in other ways. Bingo. It's like it's like, hey. As a as a software engineer myself, I love and somebody who enjoys puzzles and enjoys these kinds of puzzles. You know, I I love bugs in systems, like finding and killing bugs. That's great. It's so much fun to to solve tiny little micro puzzles all the time. Like, if you're a part of a software release and there's a huge bug list and you need to get those bugs crushed, doing that is so satisfying to me because it's literally just like micro puzzles. Can you figure out why this is doing this and solve it quickly? Yes. You can. Bang, bang, bang. And it's like I feel like, you know, seeing like, if I met a twelve year old who was obsessed with cybersecurity, I would just assume that they are that same personality type. It's like

Speaker 1: It's like

Speaker 2: the great unknown, learning a bunch of things, a bunch of esoteric things, strictly for the sake of solving puzzles that you can create all around you. It's like it's explorer it's like an exploration video game with puzzles, but it happens on the world wide web. So, yeah, I I I love stuff like this because I think it's I think if I was a ute, you know, it would have been if theoretically, if I'd ever gotten in trouble, it would have been good to it would have been nice to have some of these things because I definitely couldn't see my life going in the positive way of becoming a pen tester and doing stuff like that. So I

Speaker 1: think if you find a young person who has developed, who has that natural aptitude and those natural that natural curiosity is maybe just pointed in a bad direction, you redirect them.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: You say this is this is a skill. This is an opportunity, and we can do something wonderful with this. If, as you said, you encounter a 12 year old that has taken up phishing schemes and is chronically lying to people on the Internet, the other side of it, then that's a rehabilitation question. Mhmm. That's or something's not quite okay here. It's odd that you're lying to people on the Internet at this scale and to this end. Let's figure out why so we can help you not do this.

Speaker 2: Well, like, we were just just talking about AI fibbing Mhmm. And the the fact that it has no no moral and ethical development. I think when I think when you if you were to meet youth who were chronically lying and stealing and socially engineering things on the Internet, I would I would question the moral and ethical development that they had in their life and the support that they were receiving from, you know, stakeholders in their life. The nice politically correct way

Speaker 1: to say Stakeholders in their life. Before we wrap it up, we don't really talk about consumer tech here, but one of the largest tech companies on the planet, announced a product in an entirely new product category. So I think we should spend a couple minutes talking about, Apple vision, Scott, and that next big push to put tech over your, face holes.

Speaker 2: Only only only two of your face holes.

Speaker 1: Only two of them.

Speaker 2: But two really important ones. Dyson's trying to cover the other four.

Speaker 1: Totally. But with all the smoke that's been going on, maybe maybe we, maybe we laughed at that product a little preemptively. I

Speaker 2: I'd love to talk about Apple Vision. I think it's I think it's a great topic to chat about.

Speaker 1: For anyone, if somehow you have managed to avoid reading about this, Apple has announced an augmented reality headset called Apple Vision Pro that, quote, seamlessly brand blends the real and digital world, quote, it's the first Apple product you look through, not at, according to CEO Tim Cook. Great great line, by the way. This thing was very heavily rumored prior to launch. We had a sense this was coming. Features a separate battery pack, and you control it with your eyes, hands, and voice. There are no classic VR motion, controllers announced at this point. It is starting at 3,500 sorry. 3,499 US dollars at launch early next year, and we'll be launching in The US with more countries coming later in 2024.

Speaker 2: I I wanna I wanna get a hot take out of the way right away.

Speaker 1: Hit me with that spicy take.

Speaker 2: It is an Apple product you look through, not at. That is a complete lie because you actually do not look through it.

Speaker 1: No, you do not. Importantly, you do not.

Speaker 2: It has an OLED screen, or OLED screens inside that your eyes look at, and then it has an OLED screen on the outside that fake Yes. Reproduces your eyes so that you don't look that creepy wearing it. Totally.

Speaker 1: Yes. Couldn't have put it better. The first version so here's my, abstract hot take on this. The first version of every product Apple has made as long as I've been alive has been an early version of the product they want to make. Stick with me.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The first iPhone was an iPhone. It was a multi touch slab of glass that can make calls, run software, and take pictures. What is an iPhone today or a decade later? It's a multi touch slab of glass that can make calls, run software, and take pictures. The software can run, the quality of the camera, the screen, the hardware, it's all gotten better. But the first version was fundamentally the same product as the thing they're still selling. That is true of the watch. That is true of the iPad, MacBooks, AirPods. The first version is an early version of what they wanna make. This is not an early version of the product they want to make, which is AR glasses. It's an extremely advanced version of a product they don't seem to want to make, which is a VR headset. They wanna be making AR glasses. They made an extremely advanced VR headset. And to make that distinction even finer, if AR glasses run out of battery, you're wearing glasses. If a VR headset runs out of batteries, you're wearing a blindfold.

Speaker 2: Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna counterpoint you on that one Yeah. Because I think what they've made is the best AR glasses they can imagine, because they've taken out all of the limitations being introduced by actually physical glasses. They now have the ability to control the environment that you're looking at, where through a through a regular transparent set of glasses, they wouldn't have that ability, or it'd be much harder. So they've they've essentially created a VR headset to replicate the best version that AR can be, I think.

Speaker 1: I think we're saying the same thing, because you used two terms, very hard and replicate. And replicate is a synonym for simulation. I think they've created a a VR headset that is an extraordinarily good simulation of AR glasses, which are you're looking at the real world, and then all of that digital content can take over and get mapped onto it.

Speaker 2: But but I don't think that their intention long term is to actually create an AR set of glasses. I think this is their AR headset. I think this is I just I just think that they've solved the problem the problems with AR by making it a VR experience.

Speaker 1: Which in 2023 is all you can do. Yeah. The ace in the hole here is that I I do recall a quote from Tim Cook referring to a pair of glass glasses as this is what we wanna be creating. This is years ago. I think it was, like, 2016. I think that's that is eventually what they wanna do, but it's it's physics and engineering just aren't there yet. We can't the screen tech isn't there, and what little version of that transparent display we can create is so computationally expensive and so money expensive, and so it would get hot, it would weigh a ton. If you think an external battery pack for two hours is bad, imagine what you'd have to do to get that running. We're sort of like we're behind on the engineering and the science of it and this is this is for $3,500 an extraordinarily good replication simulation facsimile call it what you want Mhmm. Of sort of where this is going. But it is that if that turns out to be true, and I'm speculating here, that's a fundamentally different product than this. So this is this, like, really cool dev unit glimpse into the future. It might be a huge hit. This might be the form factor for long enough that this thing gets lower in price and gets normalized enough that it really does blow up, but it does feel like a glimpse at something rather than a first version of something.

Speaker 2: So here's my here's my my hot take prediction. Apple Apple Vision Pro. So, essentially, it's an iPad with a really crazy Yes. AR, VR interface. Right? Bingo.

Speaker 1: Yes. You got it. Yeah. I think.

Speaker 2: So I think that there's I suspect that there will be an Apple Vision non pro

Speaker 1: Yeah. I would agree.

Speaker 2: That will interface with hardware. So whether that is like, the when I look at it, I go, wow. If this actually works, this like, I'm sitting at my desk right now, and I have five monitors around me. Yep. So it's like if I could just throw those into a a quick headset that, like, I sit down on my desk and I pop my quick little headset on, and I can create as many monitors as I want in the space around me and and but I can still kind of interact with code and the world and software in a similar way. Mhmm. That to me would be valuable. Like, I could get rid of all of these monitors, and you could tuck away your computer Pretty cool. Pretty easily. Especially, like, I know it has built in sound. I'm not sure what quality would be, but but it would be like a great little workstation thing just to, like, slap on and, like, have a little keyboard and, like, live in this virtual world for work, and then pop off the headset and go away. So I suspect that there will be a non pro version, which will not be stand alone. That's my gut feeling. It will obviously have its own motion interpret like, it'll have its own chips built into it because it still needs to do so much of the VRAR stuff, the the image processing. But I think that the larger like, I don't I don't know if it'll be a full iPad. Maybe it will. Sure. Maybe I'll be wrong.

Speaker 1: I think you're right. I think you're a 100% right that the real version of this the real measure of success, they're not making that many of this. They don't think this is gonna be an iPhone moment. They're making I think the rumor is 200,000. They make like 240,000,000 iPhones every year. This is early days. And the real test of it is gonna be, is there demand for a non pro? How much is the non pro, and what can it do? Yeah. I totally agree with that. I think it'll always be stand alone. This is running an M2, which is a chip that they put in a $1,300 computer.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: The chip's not where the cost is coming from. It's the fact this is the gizmoiest gizmo that ever did gizmo. It's got like 12 cameras. It's got everything in it. And they're just like, no, it just costs that much because that many sensors and new sensors doing new stuff, it just cost a ton of money. They get that down, you know, this isn't that vision of the like, you know, AR future where you're looking through glasses with stuff imposed on it, but if it was cheaper and it worked this well, as this apparently does, sure. I see the value of that. I'd pop this on and suddenly have like giga display in front of me. That sounds sounds pretty cool. Like, I see the appeal of it.

Speaker 2: Well, the

Speaker 1: I'm curious what the timelines are. Like, how long out is that?

Speaker 2: I think it's I I'm not willing to say it's not gonna be an iPhone moment. I I think

Speaker 1: You think this this first one, you think the pro?

Speaker 2: No. No. No. No. Like, they're they're gonna make it better and stuff over time. But here's the real question is, like Yes. Okay. Is what will this become? You know? Will will we will we collectively go, wow, we needed this added value to our life, and all of us are walking around with these weird goggles? Or looking at caricatures of each other rendered in real time? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Or are we

Speaker 2: going to or are we going to do the opposite and go, this is ridiculous. We need to stop with these ridiculous things. Like, this is a blast failed. Yeah. Like, there's just so many of these things leading up. But the thing is is, like, I look at use cases for this. Like, if I'm a a bachelor and I need to buy a new TV, this thing's probably gonna provide a way better theatrical experience in my one bedroom apartment than, you know, like a movie like, so it's like it has so many there's so many valuable little uses for it that you can you can see business cases or, like, you know, human cases of, like, creating a value to this that it's like it could be great. Like, I've never used it. I've seen videos. I've seen people talking about it. It could be

Speaker 1: Could be dope.

Speaker 2: Insane. I know one of my friends had an interesting point. He said, I'm gonna see a load of people walking around in these just to show people how much money they have.

Speaker 1: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: You know what? You know you know what? That's a that's a thing.

Speaker 1: That that will definitely be a thing.

Speaker 2: This is a $4,000 pair of sunglasses, and it's like, people will buy those and wear those around to show other people that they're, like, edgy tech people and have a lot of money. And it's like, that's I don't know.

Speaker 1: No. I I But the first I agree. The first

Speaker 2: car crash that happens with somebody wearing one of these is gonna be an interesting thing Woah. And, like, a headache that Apple's not ready for.

Speaker 1: Yeah. When stuff when stuff starts getting weird with it. That's a really good point. Yeah. People always talk about how when the Apple Watch came out, it was kind of framed as, like, this is, you know, so much more than a fitness tracker. They were trying to distinguish it from Garmins and Fitbits and all that stuff, and there's so much more than that. Yep. Four generations later, you look at the marketing for it, and they're like, this is the best fitness tracker ever created. Because they didn't really know what it was for when they launched it. And I think that this is gonna be this fascinating, everyone's been talking about what's the killer app for it. That's the next five years. What do people actually use this for? Does it turn out that it is the best display ever created? That you you plug it into any device that you're using, and it just makes it better. It's this portable display. You can pop it on your head. You can still see out because the pass through is good enough, because of that processor and those cameras. Is that gonna be what it turns out to be for, or is there something that none of us are thinking of yet? Up until this point, gaming has been the present the sort of theorized killer app for this. Hell, it doesn't seem like it really cares about traditional VR gaming, at least at this point. But

Speaker 2: I don't know. They did a lot of gaming announcements at their at their WWDC, but I agree with you. Traditionally, they haven't been big on gaming.

Speaker 1: Traditionally, and I I it's clear that Apple wants to get more into gaming, but, like, the one thing that every VR headset has in common is motion controllers. It's pretty much impossible to play like a a Beat Saber without them. You don't wanna do that with your hands. And they didn't release motion controllers, so they don't seem to care about the existing back catalog of VR games. Maybe they have a vision of a new kind of gaming experience that that works different.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They're touch screen.

Speaker 1: But it's an interesting line in the sand. Yeah. They're going for a touch screen moment. They went black They might be really invested in it.

Speaker 2: Blackberry, the iPhone, the touch screen. Oh, that's

Speaker 1: a really good point. Yeah. It might be we're we're drawing a line in the sand with user the sort of user input on this.

Speaker 2: But the like, the to talk about the iPhone for a brief moment, the the thing that made the iPhone pop. Like, the iPhone was cool, and, like, if you had a three g or whatever the first one was, I'm pretty sure it was the three g.

Speaker 1: The App Store.

Speaker 2: Yeah. The extensibility. When they released the App Store and said Yeah. It's a platform built for

Speaker 1: it. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: People were like, yes. And that's what that's what made the iPhone the iPhone. And it it's what made Android Android is the essentially, the copying of that. The the I

Speaker 3: don't know.

Speaker 2: That's true. When they when they released the watch, I think they thought that they were gonna get the same kinda moment, but just the It's different. Yeah. It's different. It's smaller. It doesn't have as much, you know, utility. Like, there are special utilities, like, it can track the motion of your golf swing and things like that. Like, there are very specific uses for it, but at the same time, it's not like carrying a, like, nine inch supercomputer in your hand that shoves in your pocket and can do pretty much anything. Where the Apple Vision Pro has more like, it has like, you're creating a virtual world, like, around my eyes. Yeah. Like, for a multimedia enter like, Apple's been on this weird AR thing for a long time. Like, they've they, you know, they've been been really? And stuff like that. Yeah. Like, they've been building out a vision for something, and I think we're just starting to see the tip of it. I would Like, they've been tend to agree. They've been, yeah, they've been building towards this. And I don't fully know what No. The outcome of this is gonna be, but, like, I I read one article, and I don't don't remember if this was right the day of launch. So I apologize for not being able to credit you and cite you, but it was somebody talking about how Apple needs to go buy Disney.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I've heard that. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Because tuning and directing multimedia creation specific to this device will allow them to definitely show and highlight the value that it can can introduce.

Speaker 1: Totally.

Speaker 2: And I think that that's I think that that's more where it's gonna go. It's it's gonna go to what new experiences can we create with this thing.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Less about less about, you know, what kind of more value can we add to your life through efficiency, which is the iPhone. I think this thing's gonna go to an experiential thing.

Speaker 1: There's a if they did that, you can imagine a future where the killer app for this is the fact that, I don't know, Avatar seven was filmed in stereoscopic, and the way that you really wanna consume it is with one of these headsets. I, I can imagine that future. It's like this is the best media consumption device ever created. We made an iPhone big with an iPad and created the second best media consumption device ever created, and then we slapped it on your face, and we finished the whole thing. And maybe I'm wrong. No. Maybe it never becomes a thing you do wanna wear outside in the world. I think that's where they started for sure. Mostly because I think all this started in 2016 with Pokemon Go, which is a fundamentally outdoor social experience.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: But maybe they never make it. Maybe the engineering is they maybe they can't pull that off, and this is the best faced TV ever made.

Speaker 2: I think I think we're gonna see I think we're gonna see what's gonna happen soon here. Like, I think Apple TV, some of their new releases, I I bet Sure. One of their new highlight releases has a Apple Vision Pro mode, whether it's shot in stereoscopic, whether it's however it's gonna play out, it's gonna be tuned for it. And if they haven't done that, then I would actually consider that a fault of theirs. But the Yeah. I think Pokemon GO is an interesting thing to bring up because imagine imagine a augmented reality world where we're walking through, you know, just space. You know, we're out in the city or out in the country or whatever, and we're multiplayer playing games in in an AR world with people around us. Like

Speaker 3: Sure.

Speaker 2: It's gonna be I don't know. Yeah. It's it's it's

Speaker 1: That could be really neat. It's gonna be I

Speaker 2: mean It's gonna be the iPhone or it's gonna die. It's like one of the two.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 2: It's three d TV or it's the iPhone. You know? It's it's it's nowhere in between.

Speaker 1: Right. On the, on the subject of so if we think of this kind of like a dev unit, maybe we'll kinda wrap up here. Mhmm. It the line between hacking something together, and it just developing for it is is pretty blurry. It largely stands on whether or not Apple likes what you're doing, but it does raise the question of what happens when folks start hacking this thing. There's hacking in the cybersecurity sense of compromising it, which for a device that tracks eye motion is a fascinating privacy nightmare. Mhmm. There's the fact that it uses eye based biometrics, which isn't I don't know if it's meaningfully different from face ID, but it is what they used in minority reports, so it just sort of feels extra spooky by way of that. But then there's hacking as in, like, developing for and using the tech in unintended ways. This is a really roundabout way of getting to the parental advisory warning point that porn might be the killer app for this thing. I think it's clear that the world's wealthiest porn consumers are gonna have a field day with this bad boy, and we're gonna learn a lot about how people wanna use it from it.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. There was somebody once told me that, like, you can you can track most Yes. Innovations in the world to to war and porn. Sure. And it's like and it's like that's I could like, obviously Obviously. Obviously, someone like, I feel like people were already you know? I I don't I've never owned a VR headset, but I assume there's porn for those. But this like, what is it? Like, dual four k displays on each eye? Yeah. Like, essentially, like, a completely immersive experience.

Speaker 1: And it can film for me. Like, it it is the camera and the display.

Speaker 2: The the thing that I'm like, I know that there's all this crazy fitting stuff, not to not to digress away from talking about porn because it isn't true. That was the entirety

Speaker 1: of the point. Continue. The the,

Speaker 2: I know that when you get your when you buy one, they scan your face, and they build you essentially a face mold for this thing. I'm a glasses wearer. Like, what happens to me? Like, I I I looked up, and apparently, there's, like, a lens adjustment or something.

Speaker 1: But There is. Yeah. You submit your, Prescription?

Speaker 3: It

Speaker 1: kinda speaks to the fact that they're not expecting people to casually purchase these when you buy it. My understanding is that you, submit your prescription, and they create essentially these little magnet on attachments that go over, the lenses, and it's just like a teeny little couple millimeter extra layer that adjusts the stock lenses for your individual prescription.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It really speaks to the fact that this is not a device that they're imagining you're gonna share with other people. I was talking with a mutual friend of ours about, like, iPads still don't have multiple users. They're certainly not imagining that this is a shared device, which is shocking because it costs, we're in Canada, like, almost $5,000.

Speaker 2: I'm I'm intrigued to see accessibility stuff about that because that like, that's a huge I can't believe Interesting. That they're gonna, like, cut me some custom Zeiss lenses and drop them into this thing. The that's amazing. Totally. Like, I wonder what else they're imagining for Yeah. Accessibility issues because it could be massive for the for that for that market if they can figure out ways to embrace and directly compensate for that stuff. So I don't know. Here's how I'm gonna wrap it up. 75% chance it's three d TV, and we see two or three versions of it and it goes away. 25% chance in thirty six months, we all own one. Sure. It's one of the two.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'll I'll end with a I have, like, 19 Tim Cook quotes here, none of which I read, but, two that seem pertinent. Our augmented reality will take some time to get right, but I do think that that it's profound. I would tend to agree with that. Mhmm. And then most technology challenges can be solved. It's just a matter of how long. And I think that this is an extraordinarily impressive half step towards solving a lot of the tech challenges that would need it to be solved for this thing to be a real smash hit. I want one. I'd love to try

Speaker 2: one,

Speaker 1: and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I wanna actually, I'm not done. I wanna talk about one of those. The like, phones have already disrupted our social cycles so much. Like, the amount of time that you're sitting at dinner with somebody, you're at someone's house, somebody's over at your house, and people are looking at their phones and are removed from from the now and are, you know, pulled into these and I'm bloody guilty of this. Royalty guilty

Speaker 1: of it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, I love news and information, and having all of the world's news and information at my fingertips is wildly addictive to me, and I'm the first one that says that. If we start to live in this I I don't wanna call it dystopian, but, like, not a utopia, this, like, future world where There's a different world. You're going out for dinner, and all four of you are sitting around with your Apple Vision pros on eating. And at the same time, you know, you're eating. You're trying to maintain some form of social contact with the people you're with as well as you're, like, doing something inside of your eyesight, like you're reading news or messaging with friends and, like, it's I I don't know. It's gonna be interesting just, like, looking at how much the phone has changed our social dynamics.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: If this thing really does blow up, I I And

Speaker 1: what does that look like?

Speaker 2: And what does that look like? Like, are we all just gonna have virtual hangouts? It's like we're all playing golf, but on different golf courses, but linked to each other through AR. Like

Speaker 1: glimpse. Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. So, anyway

Speaker 1: Well, with that, chilling glimpse into a a future yet untold, this is another act in the bucket. Thanks for coming along. Thank you for, thanks for coming along, and thanks for joining us, and we will, as always, catch you in the next one.

Speaker 2: Take care.

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