Brandon (00:01.507)
Always, we have an excellent set of topics to cover this week, but nothing more important to the world this week than is Matt Ra Ray buying a new robo vacuum cleaner. There was some talk on the Slack. There were several recommendations given. one of the recommendations involved potential death. There's some potential death and gloom and and gloomy doom talk about robot vacuums. And so, Matt, I I come to you with this question.

Matt Ray (00:12.846)
Ha ha ha.

Brandon (00:31.657)
One, what ultimate model did you decide to replace your I guess your old RoboVacuum, which I think you as I recall, I think you actually liked it. So give you know what? Give us the whole story, Matt. What happened to RoboVacuum one and what what are we replacing RoboVacuum One with now?

Matt Ray (00:40.387)
Yeah.

Matt Ray (00:49.054)
well I RoboVacuum one was probably like three. So yeah, Robovex and f and

Brandon (00:56.091)
In human years that's like eighty. That's like you're like three years of a vacuum you're like

Matt Ray (00:58.196)
yeah, exactly. I I don't know what it is. R I mean I I've I've been, you know, I was like an OG Roomba guy and then I had something else and then I had some UFI product that yeah, we we we named Dustin and and Dustin had had a good run. you know, lots of aftermarket repairs, battery upgrades, you know, new spinners. Dustin was doing well for a long time, but

I don't know. You hit eighty as a robot vacuum and and it's all it's all done. it was on its third lithium battery. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he he had transplants. It something something wasn't quite right up top.

Brandon (01:28.349)
It's time that lithium, that lithum battery life comes to an end for all of us. my gosh. Okay. Well, he had three transplants. He's barely- He was barely to be

Brandon (01:41.359)
Okay, so he was retired, as we like to say, to a farm, or yes, to to a big vacuum to a big living room in the sky. Now, what happened next? You had you had another va I had another one in between?

Matt Ray (01:46.766)
Yeah. Yeah, he's gonna be vacuuming up the farm.

Matt Ray (01:55.028)
I I I think I had like some other

Brandon (01:57.116)
I thought you said you had one from China that you liked. Is am I c recalling that wrong?

Matt Ray (02:00.505)
Yeah. Yeah. I I think it might have been a UFI also. I I think that's a Chinese brand. You know, I they're all over Amazon, but whatever. so you know, the time came. It's like, hey, gotta get a new new vacuum. as as listeners may know, I'm I'm not like the the bells and whistles guy when it comes to a lot of things. I just like what is the minimum thing I can do to just have it get vacuumed and not think about anything else?

Brandon (02:04.762)
Okay.

Brandon (02:28.625)
You're an iPhone twelve person as I like to call it.

Matt Ray (02:30.228)
I fun story. The other day my my charging cable broke and I was like I thought it was the phone and so I was like, do I have to go buy a new phone?

Brandon (02:40.957)
You're like, am I gonna upgrade to a fifteen? Crazy talk. Go on, Dough, but don't don't get us distracted off topic. We're on robot vacuums. Don't get us talking about iPhones.

Matt Ray (02:44.044)
No no, I would buy anyway.

The yes. yes. so so you know we're all about the default's lifestyle here and nothing nothing fits the default's lifestyle better than Wirecutter. So I just went to Wirecutter, I was like, what should I buy? And it said buy yourself a Roborock. And I went

and and found not the exact model but you know the version they sell here in Australia and I was like good enough it was on sale you know hundreds of thousands sold it's super popular and you know the review was like it does mopping but who wants that and I was like exactly

Brandon (03:28.795)
Yeah. I don't know. The whole water el vacuum electron it's never been like this makes a lot of sense to me. But go yeah, I I don't know.

Matt Ray (03:31.903)
Exactly, said

No, no. I just want something that, you know, vacuums and d this is my first model that actually has like the lidar and the mapping. I've always been just, you know, bang around the room kind of guy. So I guess it's gonna be the Yeah.

Brandon (03:47.375)
Mm-hmm. So you've graduated from pure randomness to an actual mapped out room. Does it have an app where you go through and like in

Matt Ray (03:55.562)
I you know, so so it it showed up and I I haven't turned it on yet. It's it's been sitting in the charger for two days. Hey, you're you're the one who brought the topic.

Brandon (04:00.962)
we don't you don't even know if it works. You you have we have no idea.

Brandon (04:08.625)
Well, because there was great interest on the Slack channel. And then there was now somebody said, I was wondering, did you factor this into your buying? Someone said that, of course, it's always like a friend of a friend. He said a friend of a friend had a major house fire and the fire chief, they always say the fire chief, like the fire chief, like really is he really investigating all the fire chiefs? Maybe a fire person, shall we say? And a fire investigator, probably more likely, said that that they thought it was potentially the the robo vacuum battery.

Matt Ray (04:11.404)
Matt Ray (04:18.959)
sure.

Brandon (04:36.669)
Do you I do you have any concerns about that? did you factor this in?

Matt Ray (04:38.508)
No, no. No. It no concerns because it's like the number one selling robot vacuum in the world. I mean, y you sell enough things, eventually there's gonna be some you know s i i if if the yeah, if if the Amazon reviews were like every third one was like house burned down, house burned down, I'd be like, No, I don't want that. But yeah.

Brandon (04:52.049)
Something could go wrong.

Brandon (05:02.107)
You're not worried about big robo company, you know, just out there selling lies and just putting it putting out fake ro robo vacuums that could be exploding at any moment. You you willing to take on this risk.

Matt Ray (05:14.074)
you know, I've I've got two tiers of reviews here. I've got I've got Amazon's reviews and I've got Wire Cutter. I I feel that's that's the best you can do these days.

Brandon (05:20.977)
That's right. That's really what you want. You want the wire cutter, you want one to validate the other. It's like, hey, wire cutter said it was good, which again, I like wire cutter, but they could be a little biased. And then you've got a lot of good Amazon reviews. And of course, do you have like the thing where it's like it's gotta look like a t a lot of reviews and kind of will by real people? Do you have that kind of matte AI filter? Like, let me look at this whole thing. Are these just one line reviews or some people that actually go through?

Matt Ray (05:42.228)
Yeah. I the the only thing I do like on Amazon's reviews is they have on reviews they'll they'll mark who's bought things. And so even yeah, probably that can be game too. Somebody's you know, the API is like, just push this value onto that field. Now I'm a yo, now I bought it. You know, hopefully they're safe against that. That's the only thing I trust in Amazon's reviews. The rest of it is straight garbage.

Brandon (05:53.553)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon (06:11.729)
Now, I actually trust almost more when something has a lot of good a lot of fives, but something has like a lot of four star reviews. And especially when they had some four star reviews with someone that's taken some pictures where the person really doesn't have an axe to grind, but there's like one thing they didn't like about it. They're like, it's really good, except for like and it's like cause you're like, that's like a real cause that's that really shows they used it. And then it's also, and then of course you can read about it, and if that's something you don't care about, they're like, it doesn't vacuum on.

Matt Ray (06:18.816)
Yeah.

Matt Ray (06:27.081)
Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't read the five stars. I read the four stars.

Matt Ray (06:40.256)
The mopping sucks.

Brandon (06:41.711)
Right. Or the mopping sucks. Or the carpet, you know, you don't have it. And you're like, it almost it's like a five star review. You're like, I don't have that problem. And this person's happy. And this person actually wrote a while. So I can be pretty confident it's a real thing. So all right. Well, you know, Matt, next week, I expect you to have that robot turned on. I expect you have a the house fully mapped and I want to know where every speck of dirt in your actual home was.

Matt Ray (06:58.167)
Turn it on.

Matt Ray (07:07.819)
Was.

Brandon (07:10.491)
Now, in other news that's slightly different, Matt, I think this week I have read 75 million takes on the AI doom and gloom. That's all anyone's talking about it. So I figured, why not? Why not us? Why don't we talk about it? So, you know, the gist of it is, if you're somehow haven't listened to five million podcasts and r read seven million articles about this, is that

Matt Ray (07:25.75)
Why not us?

Brandon (07:35.975)
An open AI researcher came out and said that there's basically a one in ten chance that the end of humanity can happen in the next 10 years or 10%, if you know, for those doing math at home. That didn't spun off. Literally everyone has had a take on this. And there's been every conceivable take, right? Everything from it's complete nonsense. This is just it just made up to it's actually underestimating it. Some people are even like, actually, we think in three years things are going to be.

you know, coming to an end for humanity. So I'll just start with you. What not even what your take is. Like how are you consuming this information if you're consuming it at all? Like what are you doing to process all the all of this?

Matt Ray (08:20.705)
Well obviously, you know, you w you wanna you wanna be aware of of the source, you know, where ha who who who did this? What's their X? And so the the meta commentary I've been looking at is well, I mean the the commentary I've been looking at is the meta commentary, like, you know, why why this message, why now? I don't really care about the messenger. I mean, other people have said similar things. What's interesting to me is the discussion of

how how like open AI and Anthropic are running with it. Like, yeah. we maybe we are too dangerous to exist, or, you know, maybe we are setting the world on fire. And so how they've responded to this, you know, tempest that they've they've you know probably helped stir up and and create. so I I think, you know, there there's a couple of of angles to it. There's, you know, is there is there a legitimate fear here?

I'm in the like not so much. I think what's if if we were doing our prediction show, like my prediction would be in the next year. No, not not ten years, next year, some major service is gonna get taken down and stay down for a extended period of time. Yeah, like right now we're in Salesforce is having a bit of an outage. I was like, what if someone just took Salesforce down for a month? Yeah, what does that look like?

Brandon (09:44.956)
Am I look if that's the doomsday, is it wrong to be like that sounds fantastic to me? Like if Salesforce put offline for a month, I'd be like I'd be like

Matt Ray (09:50.638)
Okay, wait, wait, how about how about how about workday? wait, how about how about the IRS? you know, We well but but but you get what I'm saying. Like some some fairly major service There you go, YouTube. YouTube gets taken down and stays down. Like someone has found a persistent threat to YouTube where they can keep it, you know, pinned down for an extended amount of time. That's probably gonna happen.

Brandon (09:57.053)
we have to keep going. We have to keep fine. We have to find something like, you know, I like me. Mm-hmm. I got it. Like if you took down YouTube TV and I couldn't watch college football, I'd be pissed. Other than that, it's like, I'm with you. That would be important to me. Mm-hmm.

Matt Ray (10:20.459)
I mean, you know, we're we're seeing little, you know, things get knocked off here, exploits, vulnerabilities. That's probably gonna happen. Does that mean humanity's dead in ten years? No. But I think that's a sort of early wake up call that is gonna shake. I mean we're we're already in in you know, the the whole

industry is being sh you know shook right now with like mythos fear. Like everywhere you go, people are terrified of of AI, you know, hacking into their stuff. And then, you know, people are like, you know, I need to run Mythos against my stuff. And I was like, dude, you you haven't even locked on your firewalls. you know so so so yeah, but but the the the point is like I think there's going to be of a couple of of similar

Brandon (10:56.222)
How about you change your password from hello to something a little bit more secure?

Matt Ray (11:09.419)
you know, scale things that just kinda get knocked offline.

Brandon (11:10.92)
So you're just saying like large scale cyber attacks with some real ramifications, right? Seems likely.

Matt Ray (11:15.177)
Yeah, but but that's that's still pretty different from, you know, everybody being dead. And

Brandon (11:21.266)
That just kind of feels like another day at the office, right? Like we already have these things, not from AI. Like the airport thing went down for a while, right? And that was a huge mess. And then, you know, you know, I mean, some would say, you know, Amazon already has conditions all with this, right? With the US one out there in Rustin, Virginia, where it's like there's no AI causing that. There's just like random stuff goes down on there all the time. So I mean, we're like, we're pretty used to that.

Matt Ray (11:28.851)
Mm-hmm. I think we're gonna see an acceleration of those. And and until like the the the doomsayers

Matt Ray (11:45.975)
Ha ha ha.

But but if if everything becomes ricketier, is that a word? Ricketier and and falls over more often and the internet becomes less reliable and you know everything becomes un more unreliable, that's not end times. You know, it sucks and that's still not everybody's dead. And I think that's where that's where the gap happens because

Too many people in, you know, in their Silicon Valley heads like, the internet's the world. And, you know, people will find a way to persist and and and and move on. you know, maybe we'll go back to the the trunk of machines and start, you know, doing our credit cards that way. But you know, we'll I I I think that's the gap. I th I think too many people are equating

Brandon (12:35.646)
All right, so let's kind of summarize this. What this is good summary of this one. So it's legitimate fear. The person legitimately feels as if this is the problem and they're putting it out there. But they, like any other human being in the world, may just be over, you know, indexing on what they personally know. That they're just like, this is gonna happen. And as we talked about more on the like modernization side, it's like

As any system comes into contact with like human beings, reality, enterprise systems, it's just hard, right? I mean, forget about end of humanity. It's just like getting two to three large organizations at two companies to interact in some way and have something actually happened is very hard even today, even with AI. So so we could say, okay, legitimate fear person just maybe has a a different perspective than we do. And maybe not saying they're wrong, but it's just sort of like,

You know, it's a different perspective. Then you alluded to the second one already was this little tinfoil hat, right? This is sort of like all of this is a kind of a regulatory capture game. By that we mean anthropic, open AI, and I guess Grok, you know? Somehow like I don't know. Somehow they're all kind of in loosely aligned, saying that they would prefer

Matt Ray (13:50.836)
No, no.

Brandon (13:59.263)
There to be regulations, which would then allow them to lock in a permanent lead in the race to build AI and then therefore locking in most of the value. So they're protecting their IPOs, right? Because no one else can build it without following these like very long regulations that no startup would actually be able to do. That one seems to be going around the internet. And I I'm I'm not the tinfoil hat person. So I was sort of like, I don't know. I can't, you know, it's hard to get three people to agree on where they're gonna have lunch.

Matt Ray (14:10.923)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon (14:28.54)
Like this kind of thing, and these three people and these three groups generally hate each other. So I'm like, I don't know. I don't see them working together. But people did point out that the tweet was from an like a relatively new account. This is from the OpenAI researcher. And then upon that tweet going out, it was very quickly, I guess, retweeted. And then there were several people came out in agreement about like OpenAI agreed with it, anthropic agreement. Then there was the blog post from Dario.

That's like super long. You can read it if you want. And so it did have a little twinge of like, this felt a little orchestrated. But then I but then I go back to like, no, not really. I'm I'm just more like three people kind of like coming to the same conclusions, kind of talking to the at the same time. So now what are your thoughts on the regulatory capture angle?

Matt Ray (15:05.514)
Yeah.

Matt Ray (15:17.9)
well what what's what's funny is is there was who had the follow-up article? yeah, there was Wired had a had an article about China not buying Silicon Valley's call for an AI slowdown. And and what's funny is like Dario from from from Anthropic, he's like

Yeah, I I really haven't talked to anybody in China and I have no idea how to negotiate with China, so I'm just saying stuff. And it's like, of course you are, right? You're like, well, if if if we can agree that open AI and Anthropic should be the world leaders in AI and everyone else will just back off and let us have the money, that would be great.

Yeah, I mean he pretty much pulled the the you know, the cover off of like, Well, I just want everyone to leave us alone. So we can focus on on trying to t you know, slow down the incineration of of of dollars. And so I mean there is

I think that's what they're they're trying to play up is like, hey, we've got a lead. You know, we po posted various articles and and and Slack this week. you know, is it is it a five month lead for the closed frontier models? you know, we've got a lead over, you know, various other other vendors. You know, can't we just agree that it should stay this way and lock it in and nobody else move? And you know, obviously nobody's agreeing to that. You know, th th you know, the Anthropic and Open AI, they'll give it a little lip service.

Because yeah, they would love regulatory capture. They'd love to have, you know, the the US government, you know, s have a fact-finding mission where they they burden every potential competitor down with oversight and and you know some sort of you know bring dragging people before Congress to talk and they you know the the big vendors would love that because it makes everyone slow down and they don't you know they and maybe they can lock in some some profits while they may be had.

Matt Ray (17:16.086)
Instead, that's not what's happening. You know, we've got you know Zuckerberg. I was I you know there was another article where where you know Zuckerberg essentially said, Yeah, we're not doing that. I mean just you know like the TLDR is nope, not slowing down. And you know and and and so so what what they're essentially asking for is like okay.

Brandon (17:30.622)
We have other plans.

Matt Ray (17:44.34)
If you can just let us lock in as monopolists, we'll collude to keep everybody else down. Is that cool? you know, we're not allowed to collude. well we can if there's regulatory capture and you give us permission to do it. Can you do that for us, please? And yeah, well nobody's gonna sign off on that.

Brandon (18:00.998)
Okay, so that was the second one, regulatory capture. Then you were kind of leading into the third one. I like it. Why not? Why not at all? Who knows? I mean, I why why not? it's like it's like a buffet. Just pick which one. Okay, because the third one is really kind of what you're alluding to is like I just kind of call this purine chaos, or maybe it's better said, it's like it's just normal human behavior. Everyone picks based on everyone's incentive, dictate true opinion. And the reason I would say that is like if you're Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and you're not a leading model.

Matt Ray (18:03.116)
So yeah, I I I'm on board with all the theories.

Brandon (18:30.524)
Right, then you you benefit from things staying open, right? You don't you don't want there to be regulatory capture that you know that's gonna make it harder for you to catch up. So that's an obvious place, right? Jensen Wong, right? They sell all the chips. What does he want? He wants more people buying chips. So therefore, if you have a lot of regulations, that means people can't buy your chips as much and they're not gonna use it. So that makes sense, right? then you've got so they're against it, right? Then you kind of have the open AI.

In the anthropic. It's like, I guess this is just where you have to try to look within someone's soul. Like OpenAI and Sam Altman, they feel like they're more economically motivated, right? Because of all the things that have happened. Now, anthropic, I kind of go I the this is the one I struggle with is anthropic, right? Because the whole company exists solely because they believed open AI was

Essentially not going to be safe with what they're gonna do, right? I mean, this is all pre before their everything was a trillion dollars. So they did this without necessarily thinking they were gonna be trillionaires. I I I don't know. I at least I'm gonna put that out there. You can push back on it if you wish. So that's okay. So there is some prior evidence to say that they were thinking about this beforehand. Now, of course, if you're sitting on a trillion dollar company though, I'm sure that changes your motivation.

So they kind of like have this split motivation to me. It's sort of like the companies founded around a core idea of like doing the safe thing, but now they're in this position where they are potentially going to make trillions of dollars. So I don't know, what do you think about pure chaos? It's sort of just just everyone acting in their own self interest, which feels to me the most human and therefore the one that's most plausible.

Matt Ray (20:16.597)
yeah, that's I mean, I think that's just what we're gonna be living in. that that is the current MO and I think I don't think anything's gonna change that.

Brandon (20:29.736)
So, well, the other thing too that sound felt very orchestrated because everyone's accusing everyone else is like coll colluding and orchestrating things. There was this funny moment where funny, maybe that's the wrong word. There was this moment on stage where Jensen Wong, he's on stage at the all in conference, can't remember the name of it. This was like the all in podcasters. And it just so happens who calls President Trump and they put him on speakerphone and Trump comes on and says, Hey, you know, there's not gonna be any need for AI regulation. And it kind of felt like, okay.

This f it felt like a stunt, right? Like the president just pick up the phone at that specific time and then like Jensen Wong's like whatever admin admin comes out and hands him the phone on stage, right? That whole thing kind of felt like I was like, this is this seems like bad stagecraft. You know, it's like I I don't know what's going on here. Like it just so I but again, like maybe it did. Maybe I don't know. Maybe President Trump just I guess he's been reportedly to call people at random times. Maybe that just happened. But that felt it felt weird.

Matt Ray (21:02.539)
Are they sure it was him?

Brandon (21:28.178)
Right. It it felt it felt strange. So all right, well let's put let's go ahead and solve it for everyone, Matt, because you know, we're here, what we have our own podcast and we should just solve the entire thing. What do you recommend should happen? Like what what is the Matt Ray solution to this?

Matt Ray (21:44.469)
Ha ha.

Brandon (21:45.32)
Perfect. That is perfect. That's exactly what we want. Nothing. Mm-hmm.

Matt Ray (21:47.007)
The yeah. Nothing. Yeah. I d I don't have a recommendation. I mean

Brandon (21:52.063)
All right, let me propose this one for you. I was thinking about what I would do. It's like that's the only thing I would do would just be some level of transparency. Right. It's not so much gonna prevent anyone from doing anything. It's just trying to say it's like nobody really knows what's going on. It's a very complicated time, and we should all just have more information about like what are the like one, what are the future models that are coming.

What things do you think they can do that we should all be worried about? And when something bad does happen, be very transparent. Like, here's exactly what we did. This is exactly what happened. Here's all the information about it. So we can at least all be like somewhat informed about at least what what's going on, or at least we have all have the access to information. And I give you this idea. This is the one, the one I think this is gonna be in your wheelhouse, Matt. I think I'm gonna really continue up here for a long time.

Segment that you can go off on. It's like I was talking to my wife who doesn't follow any of this, and she was kind of making the parallel, and I like it about social media, right? Like social media came on the scene, pretty much unregulated. And now I'm just gonna say it's general consensus, at least amongst you know, people that work with youth all the time. It's like it's it has like some severe consequences, right? Like teen depression and all of the other issues that are actually out there. So maybe in some ways that's the problem.

Right. We can look back and say, hey, that if there had been a little bit of forethought about like what are we introducing into the world and what are the potential consequences? And everyone had shared all the research around like what this could happen, maybe we'd be a little better off around that. So looking back on that and saying it's like it feels like it's not totally unreasonable just to add ask for a little transparency. What do you think? What do you think of my proposal?

Matt Ray (23:47.295)
Think I think what happens when just a little bit of transparency is provided. You know, let's let's talk about the the hugging face hack. people who understand what happened, you know, like our industry, you know, security experts and stuff are like, holy crap, open AI didn't lock anything down.

They gave this thing unlimited tokens and told it, go find a way to solve this thing. And it hacked its way out and you know did a bunch of damage using things that were done previously. I mean, a lot of the patterns were not new. they were just you know put together with a you know a terminator-like approach where it doesn't stop. You know, it will that's what's different about AI is it just never stops working.

And you know, until it runs out of tokens. And if you give it all the tokens, it'll eventually find some creative way. And so that's what's freaking people out because, you know, the little bit of transparency they gave, people are like, what are you guys doing? What kind of, you know, ridiculous experiments are you running? And so you're like, well, you know, it maybe, maybe if they were just had a little more thought involved, and it's like they're not attracting people who want to slow down.

You the they're attractive people who are like, I'm gonna make some money. And, you know.

They don't you know and and and and the beauty of AI is like they don't need a hundred thousand people to make a lot of money. They can make you know ten thousand people or or so and and say, like, you know, we we have we have our ten thousand true believers who are going to drive this thing to any extent that we can. And you're like, won't somebody slow down? You know, you know, this guy left and said, you know, they're doing bad things. It's like, you know what? He left, and a hundred people are like, there's a job opening, right? And so

Matt Ray (25:37.32)
I I think the problem is there's too much power that is in too few hands and there's no incentives not to do it. Like

you know, you've got y Dario saying, we need to pace the frontier. It's like and then, you know, Zuckerberg's like, No, I'm not doing that. You know, and and over on on you know, over on on Twitter, they're like, you know, hey look, Groc can make, you know, nudes of of celebrities for you. And it's like nobody cares about any sort of standards or, you know, slowing things down. They're just like, hey, we have to have the most powerful tools and we'll see what happens. And that's that's

How social media got to where it is today where people are like, It's a cesspool, you know, but it's also like, it's a cesspool and you know, the president's all over it.

Brandon (26:25.936)
Now, but to that point, I guess that's the whole thing is like, do you like that like do you think transparency is something that would actually help? Or is it just another band aid on like a like a gushing wound? Like there's just no there's kind of no stopping these things.

Matt Ray (26:37.586)
I mean you know I mean transparency is the only thing that can help because at least people can see what's happening. And so I'm I'm always gonna be in favor of of more transparency. just so you know, whistleblowers or you know what's left of the media or what's left of journalism can, you know, point things out and maybe encourage people to do something about it. But yeah, so I'm all in favor of transparency.

Brandon (27:08.668)
Well, I think we've solved it right there. You know, that's the answer. Transparency will save us. There's I don't know. I really wish I had like something more to say, but I think it is something I guess it's like I kind of come back to like sometimes I just want to like choose optimism, right? 'Cause it's like I think it it could be a a very bad situation, but at the same time too, it doesn't mean that has to happen that way. And it but I say I don't want to ignore it, but also at the same time I want to be pragmatic about

Matt Ray (27:23.496)
Yeah, I I do too.

Brandon (27:37.727)
Excuse me. I want to be pragmatic about what can be done. So we'll see. I I I kind of think, and and I think transparency is a a reasonable place to start. Now, a place where we're actually getting some transparency, some unusual transparency, is some weird executive behavior, I'm gonna call it. And I thought it was interesting to pull up these two stories because there's so much skepticism of executives around AI. And sometimes people kind of feel like,

Te journalism, journalists are too hard on tech or like tech leaders are held to a bad standard. And, you know, on and on and on. And I as someone that we do this podcast, we like tech, we work in tech. I I you know I kind of see both sides of it. It's like, yes, at times, you know, it feels like maybe people don't get it, but there's also times where like the executives are behaving extremely badly. And I think a lot of a lot of people listening to this podcast probably have worked at or know of bad executive behavior that doesn't make it out into the public because it's not, you know.

Newsworthy, right? But you've probably seen some executive behavior at companies you worked at where you're like, I think that's questionable. I don't know if that's the way I would have done that. I don't think that's a big thing. And so two things came up this week that I think are just weird, funny things. One is we're not a sports podcast, but Coach is not here this week, so we can talk about it. Steve Vallmer, former CEO of Microsoft. I think he's like, I don't know, ninth or tenth richest person in the world. Long story short, he bought a basketball team in the NBA.

Matt Ray (28:41.386)
Ha ha ha.

Brandon (29:04.078)
The called the Clippers for about $2 billion, like I don't know, 10 years ago, eight years ago. Then it has come out now, after a long investigation, that they cheated. And in this case, this is not really anything. They don't breaking any laws. At least we don't know if they've broken laws. Maybe that'll come later. But we do know ultimately that they cheated at the salary cap, right? And they essentially broke the rules of the league. And after a long investigation and a long set of denials, he ultimately said that.

While he disagreed with some of the results of the investigation, he accepted the punishment upon which they've lost, I think, five draft picks, get a $30 million fine. And he's not allowed, he being the owner of the team is not allowed to be involved with the team for a year. So I just wanted to ask you, Matt, like, does this, if you will, change your opinion of Steve Ballmer at all? Cause obviously this is just an NBA team. This is not life or death, right? And this is really just an entertainment product at the end of the day.

But to go to this level of cheating for an NBA, do you kind of look back on and be like, like I know Microsoft was famously like a difficult place to like be and work at times? It's not that's not necessarily breaking any information, but I'm like, do you look back at the times of Microsoft and be like, hmm, probably could have been some even, I don't know, even more devious behavior than maybe we know about. What what are your thoughts?

Matt Ray (30:26.385)
Yeah, I mean the what was it, the Halloween files? You know, the the the records that came out during their antitrust hearings. Yeah, there are all sorts of, you know, documented smoking guns and and you know, guns on the counter full of ammunition and guns that were just pulled. You know, so there's there's a lot of evidence of bad behavior and to think that it would magically disappear in sports, you know, that's just not gonna happen. I mean

Any any casual observer of sports knows that like it's only cheating if you get caught. And so there's always there's always lots of folks willing to push the edge. And I think what this says with the NBA's quite, you know, significant

response and finds is like we don't care how rich you are. you know, we're we're all billionaires who, you know, everybody who owns an NBA team is probably a billionaire. And, you know, we have to have some sort of gentleman's agreement of how we play the game. And so that that's probably why the level of punishment is so severe is because like, you know, any of these any of these teams, any team in the NBA could be like, okay, there's no salary cap anymore. You know, we're we're gonna start you we're just gonna double

what the market is offering to the superstars we want and we will build a team. I mean, I love college football, but that's kinda what's happening right now.

Brandon (31:52.999)
Yeah, I I'm interested in the the whole thing. It's just kind of fun to watch and kind of funny to see it play out. Because I do think, you know, I the one thing I thought about is like if you've ever played any type of game, sometimes on the board game, sometimes little kids are like this where they don't want to lose and they just change the rules and you're like but at some point when any anybody does that in a game, like you just stop playing 'cause it's not fun, right? Not because it's just like there's just no point because it's like you're always gonna change the rules. And I

And I think that's what's kind of interesting about this is like the NBA, if you have all this money it's and you're buying an NBA team, like that's kind of what you're doing, right? You're just, if you will, trying to have fun. And the reason you can have fun is you would agree to a s set of rules and you can win or lose. You can't just change them in the middle. So so I just think it's an interesting like window into like I I d I even when I even because I'm super rich and I'm super successful, I can't even enter a game for fun. Like, like could you imagine playing Catan with with Ballmer? He's like, you know what?

Matt Ray (32:34.809)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Brandon (32:48.476)
I just bought every what I just bought all the fire cards or all whatever it is. I just I bought I own all of it. Yeah, I brought my own pieces and they're like all magic cards and they do everything. I they they make everything instantly. It's like, well, why are we playing this game? Like you've you just wanted to tell us you won, then you just won. Why don't I so so I thought that one was kind of fun to to just kick around. And then the other one, which is like, I don't know, I guess it's sort of like a pet project of mine, like following this. So there was this whole thing with

Matt Ray (32:50.505)
He he he shows up is like wait, wait, wait, I brought my own pieces.

Brandon (33:18.638)
Automatic and WordPress, they got in a big fight with our friends over at WP Engine. And long story short, litigation still goes on. But basically, you know, he sort of you know was trying to coerce them into paying some type of fee that they didn't want to pay fee. And from that, there have been really a lot of weird interviews and communications that have come out around him. Now, this week, this is the following things that have happened really in the last five days. So by the time this publishes.

Matt Ray (33:46.025)
Yeah, give me the timeline.

Brandon (33:47.429)
Maybe something else has happened. So I think it was on Monday or early last week, Matt Mullenwig, the founder of Automatic and WordPress, was put on leave by his board of directors. Okay. So he was out. And it was like, so I saw that and I was like, I can see it. Like there's a lot of legal problems. And maybe they're just trying to clean up the the thing and trying to like settle and get get this litigation over with.

Matt Ray (34:03.657)
Whoa, something happened. Yeah.

Matt Ray (34:10.844)
Or or or something something was the straw that broke the camel's back. Yeah. Cause it's this is ongoing. I mean he he this isn't like, nobody saw that there were any red flags. It's like he's been making the story headlines f for, you know, the last year.

Brandon (34:15.08)
Yeah, I don't know, but it just I just kinda felt like okay.

Brandon (34:27.718)
Easily, right? And it seems like he's generally been made, even like I I'm trying to be very objective, but like it seems like he's been making it worse. Like I think the lawyers he's hired have probably told him, please stop talking. We need you to stop talking. Okay. And so I was like, well, maybe he just finally said something too much. And they okay, they put him leave. Okay. So since then, I was like, so I th I figured, we'll talk about that. Now, thirty-six hours have transpired. He is now, to my knowledge, back being the CEO. Now, during that thirty-six hours, they

signed they appointed a new interim CEO. That was, I think he was the CEO before, as well as they had a chief legal officer. Now during that 36 hours, each one of those people signed a new severance agreement that is extremely favorable for them. And because they're on the board, they each signed, if you will, each other's cer severance agreement. So it'd be like you and me sitting here and being like, Kote's out this week. So we're gonna like.

Take, like, I'm gonna say, like, if you leave, you get all the money, and if I leave, we get all the money. And under no circumstances can Kote talk, do anything. It's like, it's not quite that bad, but it's along the same. So this is just in the 36 hours this has happened, right? So now it sounds like those two people are no longer at the company, and Matt Mullenwick is back in charge. Now.

Just what's going on like this? Seems like this is a quote unquote a real company that makes like WordPress is, I think, still considered like it hosts most of the sites on the internet, or at least a lot of them, at least until Cloudflare finally. You know who's loving this Cloudflare? They're just like, just get off this stuff, guys. What are you doing? Anyway, that's another subject. so so I don't know. I just look at it like this seems just like a a complete, you know, I don't know, sinking ship, chaos, like

Why would any company think about all the compliance training you have to go through at a company and you're like, you're watching your executives do this. So like signing severance agreements by them each other in thirty-six hours, having Alsace the CEO. I'm not even sure they're wrong. Maybe they were the right people. They were trying to do the right thing and they had to protect themselves because he they thought he would come back in.

Matt Ray (36:34.747)
Yeah. 'Cause th they knew he would he would come back into power and and immediately, you know, kick them out for for being, you know, friendly with the board that put suspended him.

Brandon (36:41.926)
Right. Or or maybe you know, or maybe he's right. Maybe they did try to like like oust them in some type of coup. But then it's just like what is going on? Like why is it like so important that you have to like oust somebody and get a severance agreement to make I mean, I was like, this it just seems very complicated.

Matt Ray (36:52.873)
It's

Matt Ray (36:57.125)
It is this is this below the threshold for like a Hulu movie?

Brandon (37:01.694)
I think this actually gets the YouTube documentary treatment that we've been watching. This would be a good one. The story of WordPress.

Matt Ray (37:07.846)
Ooh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well I I see I don't think a lot of people are gonna wanna be on the record. That's the problem.

Brandon (37:13.085)
Well

Brandon (37:16.604)
Well, I guess we have to wait. You just have to wait till it's kind of over or until everybody's gone, right? Out out of there. So so I don't know what like do you do you have a side? Do we pick sides in this? Do we think do we side with anyone here? You know what? I'm gonna answer my own question. I think we side with the people that actually make WordPress and are keeping it going. That are somehow the couple layers down and they're just like, I have no idea who the CEO of this company is. I don't even know what these people do, but I'm gonna make sure the WordPlus plugins still actually work.

Matt Ray (37:29.433)
Matt Ray (37:34.621)
Yeah.

Brandon (37:44.882)
And I'm gonna give you some new themes. Maybe those are the heroes here. Those those are the true heroes and those are the people that deserve a bonus.

Matt Ray (37:48.553)
You know the the the true heroes are the open source users.

Brandon (37:54.783)
So I don't know. It it's crazy. Now, all right, final thing I wanted to get your take on this week, Matt. And I expect you to not like anything I say for the next few minutes, but I'm gonna say it anyway. It's like Facebook or Meta, they announced a new AI tool called Muse. And I was like, it is my duty to go in here and try this thing out. I'm not I'm I want to be someone that touches the products before I make some type of you know wide-ranging

Matt Ray (38:06.938)
Ha ha.

Brandon (38:23.696)
uninformed opinion. So I signed up for Muse, which is their essentially their, I don't know, let's call it like their online AI agent. And I went in full Matt Ray. I was like, Meta does a lot of bad things, a lot of bad things with privacy. This is not going to be a good product. But I got to be honest with you, I did not hate it. I actually thought it had some good ideas. And just to give you an idea, because I listen, I'm just going to jump ahead. I don't think you're ever signing up for this. I'm just guessing you're never even going to log in.

So let me tell you what it does. So you can at least have a little bit of information as you tell me why it's crazy to do it. So essentially what it is, it's it's it's a chat bot. So it kind of has a look like a chat GPT, but you get into it and it has like a lot of structured things you can do. So it basically says, Hey, I'm I'm Muse. And you can actually, it actually asks asks you like what what do you want to call me? Like you can give it its own name. I was like, I'll just call you Muse. And what they basically do is it's essentially a little virtual machine sitting there.

Matt Ray (38:51.068)
You're correct.

Brandon (39:18.992)
in the cloud for you and you can chat like you would any other chat bot, but you can actually have it do stuff. It's kind of stuff that you could do with Claud Code or Codex. But what's nice is it's all of course in the cloud. So you can just say like stuff like, I'm gonna, I'm looking for plane tickets on this day and this time, keep looking for them. Send me a di send me an email anytime there's a good deal. Or I told it that you know I do this podcast. I said I'm looking for this topic. So it says okay, I'll create a a daily digest for you. after coming up my

We're gonna have to get another car. So we're starting to shop around. So I said, okay, I'm looking for this car and this time. So I gave it a bunch of tasks. And so it basically is off doing all, if you will, the internet searching for these things. And then it will email me when it actually if you will, you know, find some stuff. So I thought that's really nice. It's not none of that is new, of course, but it's just nice that I don't have to like manage any of the infrastructure. Of course, you could do it with cloud code, of course you could do it with something else. Then it has a bunch of other things.

Matt Ray (40:12.145)
Open claw, yeah.

Brandon (40:15.476)
this idea of like a feed. So I don't know. This one haven't really seen they have a feed page, an ideas page, and a goal page. And this, okay, this part was a little bit more weird. The feed is just like what you'd expect. It says it'll show me things based on my interests. So I assume it's gonna read all of my chats and then eventually it'll start surfacing things in like like a social feed. So I don't know. I haven't had been around it long enough, but I assume that'll just be the normal stuff. Then it had this ideas page.

That was pretty good. Again, if someone you're new to AI, it was just like, here's all the things I can do for you. So I think it's trying to get a regular person to actually kind of think like a clawed code person. Like instead of doing this, why don't I just ask the AI to do it? So I liked it there. Like it was giving some good ideas, some other things you could do. Didn't have the goals page. This place, then this is when I did have some Matt Ray feelings. I was like, I'm not feeling this because it basically said it was like set goals around productivity, relationships.

Work. This felt like I was felt like a weird like counselor mode, like a high school counselor mode. It's like, this is a lot of work. I I'm not here to like share all my feelings. Yeah, I was like, I don't know. I I I don't really I just I just wanna like find good deals on stuff and get stuff done. I don't want to sit here talking to you about all this other stuff.

Matt Ray (41:10.92)
Kit k yeah. Make make Facebook the center of your life. Yeah.

Matt Ray (41:22.824)
It's like Brandon. Brandon, I y I I overheard you arguing with your wife. I've changed your status too. It's complicated. You're like, Whoa, whoa, stop

Brandon (41:35.135)
and then of course, like artifacts, which is just sort of like if you if you can have it create anything, you know, just like markdown files and write stuff up for you. So, so that part was good. So I was like, you know, this seems like a better way to get started for a normal person that wants to like get using using AI because they don't have to do all the stuff that we talk about in the show, like use cloud code or codex, they don't have to do any of that, they don't have to understand any of that, but it sort of like gives them a window into like ask the computer, in this case a virtual machine.

Matt Ray (41:39.848)
no. Yeah.

Matt Ray (41:59.612)
Yeah.

Brandon (42:04.808)
To do stuff for you. And I was like, so, so I did like it. Now, of course, you know, before I turn it over to you and you tell me like many of the things I promised, like I privacy has to be like, I mean, I don't know if there's if there's like a one to ten scale, like we're at a hundred. Like I just assumed everything I'm typing in here is being used against me at some point. Like I was like super care. I'm like, I'm like, every even when I'm keying stuff in, I'm like, I need to be careful. Anything I say inside of this is gonna be like.

Matt Ray (42:25.011)
hell yeah.

Matt Ray (42:33.362)
Ha ha ha.

Brandon (42:33.788)
Not it's gonna be saved, backed up, used against me in a court of law. I mean, anything. So okay, so I was I was tr I was trying to be c pretty careful. But of course, like when you ask for things, you're revealing some information. Like I'm looking for a car in Austin, Texas. It's like,

Matt Ray (42:36.754)
Just just exactly.

Matt Ray (42:44.55)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and and it's like Brandon, Brandon, I've read through your credit report. You shouldn't be shopping for that. Have you have you thought about, you know

Brandon (42:50.654)
You can't, you don't, you can't afford that. What are you doing? so that would that was a huge problem. Now it does they do say, and they went to great lengths to say that they run all of this in a virtual machine and then somehow, like, you know, all the information is like in some type of like locked down and can't be used. But like, I I I I just assume we can't trust that, right? There I probably signed when I was clicking through the agreements, I probably said like

Matt Ray (43:13.234)
I don't trust them. Yeah.

Brandon (43:18.886)
I understand you're doing this now, but you can change it all in the future. I I probably agreed to something like that. but I did the the biggest takeaway I had from the whole thing was like this kind of felt like what Surrey should be, right? Because I was thinking to myself, it's like, you know, we have all these iPhones, even you and your iPhone 12. It's like it has, you know, like you plug your phone in at night, it's not doing anything. It's like it could do all these things too, right? It could go like search the way, like, you know, just do all of this and then in the morning show me all that stuff. So I kind of thought like what we need here.

Matt Ray (43:21.893)
Exactly.

Matt Ray (43:30.098)
Yes.

Brandon (43:48.339)
Are the Apple engineers to take some time to go look at Muse? And then I want them to implement the similar features in the new Surrey. And then I want it to just work on my either my iPhone or my iPad. And that way it's all stays local. So that's that's really what was my final thing. Was like that, I think Muse has good ideas, but like, do you think anyone at Apple will be allowed to sign into it? Maybe that's a better question. Maybe they're not even allowed to look at it.

Matt Ray (43:56.552)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Ray (44:12.466)
But so so my my takeaway is one, of course, I'll never trust it. So yeah, that that's that's just a a a non-starter. but two, like it is nice to see that

They've taken the time to kind of walk through what a an AI assistant experience could be. Where, you know, it's like, okay, if we went end to end with all this stuff, here are the things that you logically would have. You'd have these artifacts, you'd have these plans, you know, you'd have these, you know, short-term goals, long-term goals, things that I'm I'm reminding you of periodically. I like I like all the ideas there. And I I'm looking forward to the implementation and you know, some completely private lockdown.

open claw fork of it. where, you know, this is an inspirational thing and it'll have users the same way Threads has users, right? It's like, yeah, apparently like everybody with a Facebook account is now officially a muse user and they provision that for them and they're gonna say, you know, we've got you know four billion muse users and you're like, but when it comes time to actually see anybody who uses it, it's like, you know, fraud.

Brandon (45:00.75)
Mm.

Brandon (45:17.47)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon (45:26.844)
No, I think skepticism is warranted here, but I and I think you're right. And I think the the question I guess I kind of come back to is sort of like, I don't know who's gonna solve it, but like that's the part that kind of because this really does come from like open claw. A lot of these things, these are the kinds of things people are talking about, like, my computer can just do all of this for me, right? But you have to maintain it. So it was like, so that's the part I kind of liked. It's like, this is get this is all getting a lot easier. Like no normal people, even me, I'd never really mess with open claw. It's just like, I don't really mess with that. I'll just wait for

Matt Ray (45:42.982)
Yeah, yeah.

Brandon (45:54.053)
Features to be incorporated and other things. And it's slowly happening. So that part is good. But I guess going forward, I'm like, like, who will will you trust anyone? Because it is kind of nice to have this like computer in the cloud, if you will. It's like, here's all the stuff that, yeah, you know, you can do it with like cron jobs, or now it's like loops or schedule tasks and claw code and others. But it's really kind of nice if I because you I just doing something other night and it's just like my computer just went to sleep, right? Just because it's like no normal setting. And then of course it's you know, it goes to sleep, you can't it doesn't do its thing and

Matt Ray (46:20.38)
Gave up.

Brandon (46:23.282)
And it's like actually I I prefer not to have to like for things like that, I would like something else to be working on that. And this virtual machine I like, but I don't know. That's why I was seeing Apple. I was like, well, I have this iPhone and it's it's idle like ninety percent of the time. So why don't it it it would go ahead and do it? But like obviously Google could do it, you know, Amazon could do it. So I mean there's plenty of people that could do this kind of stuff, but I don't know who we trust.

Matt Ray (46:42.255)
Yeah. Well

And I and I think that's why everyone is so caught up in Apple getting Siri right, 'cause Apple, for good or bad, is probably the most trusted in this space because, you know, they've at least publicly tried to put on, you know, a lot of privacy first features and you know, they're not an ad company, even though, you know, they are an ad company. And you know, so they they're more trusted than

you know, Facebook, or or you know, Twitter or, you know, any any other potential competitor in this space. so I mean yeah, my takeaway of this is like it's it's nice to see what a polished version of this could look like. I'm not a

I'm obviously not the target audience for it. I think there are gonna be a lot of people dissecting this for lessons learned as as it's good examples. So, you know, yay for that. but also it's kind of the same way we look at you know, meta as like, you know, well we learned a lot about VR on the way.

Brandon (47:51.195)
That's right. It was it was the legs we didn't see along the way that made all of them worth it. So I like it. All right. Well listen, I don't if you're so inclined, if you're someone that likes to try new things, try Muse. If you're super interested in your privacy, probably you probably need to opt out of that one. But it was it was fun to check it out. Now, something you should opt into is you should send your postal address to stickers as helpful fine talk.com.

There, I will send you a sticker anywhere in the world. And like I did for Matt this week, Matt is in Illinois, so I was happy to get an email from him. If and I and more people should do it coming to the end of summer, at least here in the northern hemisphere. But for everyone, you know, down your way, Matt, it's it's probably just getting nice. You probably need to start putting stickers on your water bottles. But we're getting into conference season. That's what I really want. We're getting into conference season, and everyone needs to put even more stickers on their lanyards, right? And their ID badges, because it's like

Matt Ray (48:39.463)
Spring is coming. Yeah.

Brandon (48:48.904)
You're not there representing just yourself and your company. You're representing software-defined talk. So if you don't have stickers, let me know. And some of the conferences you can go to, we are friends over at We Are Developers. That conference is September 23rd or 25th. So if you haven't gotten a ticket yet, try the free tickets. Use the code dev pod50. Looks like Kote's going to like, I don't know, looks like 50 million different DevOps days. You can probably find him somewhere speaking in Europe. In fact, at this point, it's easier just to be like,

Matt Ray (48:51.623)
You're representing us.

Brandon (49:14.82)
If he if there's a conference in Europe, I'll list it if he's not speaking. Otherwise, just assume he has a session. Just he has a has a session. You know, he's doing this whole dev transformation thing. I'm sure it's going great. Looks like he's gonna the latest one is Denmark, right? And it's there's just a lot of he has a lot of codes in there, right? He's got like three or four different codes. So so check those out as well. now we definitely want to check out some recommendations this week. And Matt, I'm sure you have a fantastic recommendation.

Matt Ray (49:22.491)
He's everywhere.

Matt Ray (49:43.709)
huh.

Brandon (49:43.73)
Fact as I see it here, I'm a little concerned. So tell us what it is. What's going on?

Matt Ray (49:49.575)
Recommendation is get yourself a miter saw. I don't have a lot of power tools. I, you know, I I tend to you kind of get the the the baseline models of things if if I use them frequently. And so I didn't have like a bandsaw or a lot of other saws, but the miter saw I I finally got it because doing some some molding, some framing, and then I did some screens, and it's like

Once you have it, you're like, being able to cut angles is actually really useful. And and if you have just regular stuff, it you know, it it can take the place of a bandsaw and a pinch. So it wasn't that expensive. I I've used it a lot more than I thought I would. So that's my my my shop recommendation for, you know, the the home not the home office, the the home shop woodworking shop is miter saw is a good place to start.

Brandon (50:44.414)
All right. So what we know is Matt moved to Australia. He's buying saws and he's getting good at like with his hands. So it sounds like you're you're prepping. You're prepping for the end of the world, is what you're doing. That's that's what I'm taking away from this.

Matt Ray (50:53.606)
That that has crossed my mind.

Brandon (50:58.184)
I'm just looking at it like it looks it looks like you could just really hurt yourself. You know, when I when I was looking at one of these, it's like I was like, You this is probably where you would need to read the manual. Like you actually know a lot of stuff, like, let's just turn it on and play around and see what it does. Like, I don't know. With this, like you definitely want to know where the kill switch is. So no.

Matt Ray (51:02.746)
That has crossed my mind too.

Matt Ray (51:10.192)
Yes.

Matt Ray (51:14.99)
And a and it's also fun for your spatial reasoning. You're like, How are these gonna connect?

Brandon (51:18.726)
That's right. That's right. You're relearning geometry. I should actually should send a picture of this to my son. It's like, listen, I know you're not really thinking geometry is going to come into anything, but later on you're gonna get a saw like this and you're gonna need to know your angles. So good. well, nothing physical like that in my recommendation this week. I was just gonna recommend another cloud code command. And I kind of talked about a little bit earlier. I was like, I've been using the remote control command or the slash RC command quite a bit, and it works great. I mean, it's just been

You know, every you know, I know we talked about the end of the world, but I was like, man, every time I use cloud code to build something new, it gets a little bit easier. And now you can just like be on the go and just like check in on your session. And right from the Cloud Code app, you just like answer a question, you say keep going, and sure enough, you come home. It's like it's like baking cookies. You put them in the oven, you go out, you do some hair and come back, boom, cookies are ready. So I like remote control. You can check in on your your agents anywhere. If you haven't used that one, it's very simple.

And you don't have to install any complicated stuff. So check that out. Now, with that, you've made it through another episode of Software Defined Talk. This is Software Defined Talk 590. If you would like to see some information about the topics we did discuss, as well as many topics we didn't discuss, go to software defined talk.com slash 590. There, you can follow us on the social media. You can join the Slack. We have a newsletter. We have several other things you should.

check out on the website. And of course, we're always looking for sponsor. So if you would like to come on the show, tell us about the great product or service that's going to save humanity, be happy to to talk to you about that or, you know, you know, talk to our listeners about that. And with that, we will talk to you next time.

Matt Ray (53:01.902)
Brandon (53:04.892)
All right. Well, we're gonna put Riverside to the the test on the local recording. There were two times when I was watching you that you like really kind of like got garbled up on the internet side. Did you see any connection issue on your on your end?

Matt Ray (53:17.016)
Yes. Yep. so so you know pulling up the the the unify interface there.

Brandon (53:25.65)
Yeah, the ubiquity baby. Mm-hmm. What happened? What went what went wrong?

Matt Ray (53:27.706)
Yeah. It's there the between eight eight what do we got here? Eight forty to eight forty five. Packet loss and increased latency detected, which may affect voice and video traffic. Contact your ISP if the issue persists. I have an open service ticket with my ISP. Ubiquity says for the week, I'm at ninety eight point one four percent availability, which is not good. No, no.

Brandon (53:54.175)
That's not good. That's not good. And so now tell me the story. I I guess tell the listeners the story. Those who've been following along. You did upgrade, but you were not you didn't get they don't allow you to upgrade or it's not available. Up up link is is not can't be any faster.

Matt Ray (54:08.219)
Nope. No, so so I I I requested the two thousand two hundred package and I was told you can have the two thousand one hundred package. And I upgraded from the one thousand one hundred and the download wasn't really my problem anyway. No, no.

Brandon (54:23.806)
Yeah, you don't really need it anymore. Like it doesn't like and it's it's so funny with these internet providers is they're always like want you to like like I mean, I've gotten stuff like you can get up to eight gigs down. It's like what like what like what am I doing? Like what I was like, I don't even know like what I can even I'm not running a full on like web host out of this place, this house. So

Matt Ray (54:33.264)
What am I what am I doing? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Ray (54:41.326)
Yeah, so I I did I didn't really need it, but it got me a new modem. so I I I I thought, hey, new modem, new router, that should make things better. And so I did I did speed test before and after and it's unchanged. And well not not unchanged. The the new the the the new the new modem with with unify, it does go over a hundred sometimes.

Brandon (54:45.351)
Okay.

Brandon (54:58.436)
Yeah it's so funny.

Matt Ray (55:09.262)
So that never happened with the old one. So I I'm you know, I'll I'll hit 105. and you know, I I went from from a consistent nine hundred eighty-four to you know eighteen hundred, you know, eighteen fifty, that kind of stuff, which is good. and then

Brandon (55:09.552)
Okay.

Brandon (55:24.062)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Ray (55:30.468)
Yeah, there's a two point five gig link between my router and the modem. So yeah, I g I got a little headroom there. And then it immediately drops onto you know, gig Ethernet. which I was never I'd never had any problem with the local network anyway. And with the new Ubiquity router, I've got faster Wi-Fi for you know, four devices in my house that do Wi-Fi seven. Yeah.

Brandon (55:36.668)
Mm-hmm.

Brandon (55:39.964)
Right. Hm. That was never the problem. Yeah.

Brandon (55:53.564)
Yeah, that's nice inside the house. So all right. Well, I think your project then is like now you have the nice ubiquitous stuff, like should monitor the upload link, uplink, right? Or whatever. And be like, 'cause I think if you got a hundred sustained, it would be that would actually be fine. I just think you're getting like we're about to end this recording and we're gonna see what happens. Like, I don't think you're getting anywhere close to a hundred sustained, right? I think you're getting like thirty or fifty at most, right?

Matt Ray (56:02.568)
yeah, that's no I

Matt Ray (56:16.719)
Yeah, I mean the the speed tests are always good. but but yeah, th it's a sustained. Yeah. So we'll see.

Brandon (56:21.704)
But sustain but I guess the the sustaining part is the harm. So all right. Well, this has been another episode of Matt and Brandon talking about networking in Australia. I'm sure everyone has been enjoying it. No, but seriously, thanks for everyone that hung on the stream. The stream was not great today. So I hope the recording's great, but you like me are gonna find out on Friday. I don't know. I don't know what how the audio came through. We'll just have to see how it goes. So with that, we'll talk to you next week, probably a little bit earlier.

Matt Ray (56:29.766)
Brandon (56:49.906)
Will depend on everyone's availability. So we'll see what happens. But until then, take care.

Matt Ray (56:55.566)
Bye.