Autonomous Vehicles, Cybersecurity and Connectivity

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Hey folks, greetings in welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain. Great to be back in the studio again after a bit of time overseas and fantastic to have Seabi Woodhouse joining us back on the New Zealand tech podcast. How are you, Seeby?

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, great, thanks. I don’t know whether this is my fourth or fifth time on, but it’s great to be back, of course, as always.

Paul Spain:
Always good to have you on the show and of course owner and founder at Voyager Internet, but maybe you can just sort of remind people more broadly where you fit into this big, wide world of tech.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, so a lot of people, I’ve been in the telco industry since I was 18 years old. Most people know me, kind of most famously for starting Oron, which then got bought by Cordia, then core plus and is now basically half of two degrees. Sorry, Voyage is my second time around, which I’ve been running for 13 years now. And voyages, New Zealand’s probably arguably 6th largest Internet provider. So obviously Spark will be number one and one and two degrees and so we’re number six. So we provide about 1% of all New Zealand’s Internet but we also punch above our weight in terms of providing about one in five domain name registrations. So we’ve got 120,000 domain names. So like I don’t think McDonald’s is a customer but like the example is McDonald’s NZ or whatever.

Seeby Woodhouse:
There’s a 20% chance that that’ll be provided by us through our subsidiary first domains and probably provide somewhere in the order of about 10% of all the web hosting in New Zealand. And we’ve got a cloud division where we’ve got like 1000 virtual server customers. And also a product that we’ve had for a number of years is our cloud voice platform which is kind of a home grown version of like Microsoft Teams and we have 5000 Kiwi SME’s that use that. So a lot of small businesses are on our kind of IP voice platform. So yeah, basically, yeah. New Zealand, little Batla telco, 125 staff, 40 million turnover. So it’s a reasonable sized organisation even though we’re based here, Minnow, and you know, small ISp in a small country is tiny compared to the giants of overseas and things. But yeah, we still like to think that we’re substantial in our own way.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, no, it’s great. Look, and I think we’re big advocates on New Zealand Tech Podcasts for having competition and we certainly appreciate the support we get in terms of our show partners who I should thank, who are One NZ, Spark, HP, 2degrees in Gorrilla Technology. And there’s something that comes with the sort of scale that those firms bring that enables them to do certain things. You know, it gives them that capacity to provide, you know, support right across kind of the tech and innovation ecosystems in New Zealand. But I think there’s also an important part for other organisations in the space to play. So, yeah, it’s always interesting having a bit of a catch up and hearing some of your perspectives.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So, look, you’ve got sponsors. You’ve got sponsors of like 90% of New Zealand ISP industry. But, yeah, the small guys still run 10%. And, you know, as we like to say, if you want that more personalized, local, kind of friendly service, as soon as you’re with a big company, it’s just harder for them to do that. There’s nothing wrong with the big guys, but they just aren’t going to provide the same personal service that a smaller company is. So some people like that and some people, you know, want to go big, but we have our niche.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, there’s something, and we may or may not get into it in this show, but there’s also something to be said for being able to get in touch with the founders and chief executives in organisations, which sometimes becomes harder as organisations get bigger. But I have a particular story, which we may not get to today, of how emailing the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup was very helpful to me in the last few days. But if we don’t get to that this time, we’ll pick it up another time. I’ve just arrived back from the US this morning, so we’re going to talk a chunk today around something I’ve been really keen to do for a long time, which is to get in some autonomous, semi autonomous vehicles, kind of the next level compared to what’s been available in New Zealand. So we’re going to delve into the experience with Waymo and also the latest updates from Tesla with their FSD supervised, which we’ve talked about a fair bit on the show, but it was really me talking about based on things I’d seen and maybe varying people I’d spoken with. But yeah, quite different to have had that. That firsthand experience. We also want to delve into what’s going on with Google threatening to stop linking to New Zealand websites.

Paul Spain:
There’s some delving into Wifi on planes, some issues that we’re seeing, and maybe some opportunities on the horizon, some scams that are going on, probably important to be aware of. And yeah, also keen after those things to delve in and hear a little bit of what’s happening in your world as well. So yeah, first up, Google’s threatening to stop linking to New Zealand sites. We probably have talked about this before, but they seem to be kind of doubling down on this rhetoric. If the bill, which is potentially moving forward and I think initially national, it sounded like they weren’t going to support the bill, the fair digital news bargaining bill. But as it happens, the coalition is largely sort of pushing ahead with this bill and it is being referred to certainly from the Google end. They’re saying this bill proposes a link tax that would require Google to pay simply for linking to news articles. And they say while Google supports efforts to foster a sustainable future for New Zealand news, this bill is not the right approach.

Paul Spain:
And look, this is something I tend to look at things, try and get a viewpoint from differing parties perspectives. Look, I can see we’re in this situation for New Zealand media partly because of the size of the market here. There’s a whole range of things where, you know, our media is struggling and of course we saw, you know, tv three sort of news hub, you know, shut down that news operation, two or 300 people out of work. But you know, media has been, you know, a difficult, difficult era recently. Television, New Zealand, the news today, government continuing to put pressure on them to, you know, to balance their books. And so, you know, they’ve obviously had varying efforts from a layoffs perspective, but they were under pressure I think to save another 30 million. It’s not an easier landscape. But yeah, if Google’s commentary is correct, this idea that you’re actually paying, that they would have to pay a tax for linking out of and actually pushing traffic to New Zealand media websites.

Paul Spain:
That doesn’t sound like it makes sense either. What’s your pick on this? And I guess I should preface it that you’re the. Or that Voyager is the sponsor of the New Zealand Media Awards, is that right?

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah. I’m probably a pretty good person to give a perspective on this and comment on it. So yeah, Voyager is the sponsor of the New Zealand Media Awards. Don’t want to put a foot wrong and say that I speak for the New Zealand media or anything like that, which is certainly not the case. But I know that definitely media in general has been struggling and obviously that started with the fact that papers were very physical. So then once they moved online it’s like, well, why are people, you’re not getting that seventy nine cents per newspaper or whatever this is the nature of digital transformation.

Paul Spain:
Every industry changes.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah. And then if newspapers, well, obviously newspapers went online, the challenge that they’ve had is even if without the social media companies like Google and Facebook, if you have a website which gives away news information, then you’re not charging $0.79 or whatever it is for a newspaper. So then how do you make money from that? So then it was kind of, the answer is advertising. But the macro problem is that there’s this massive squeeze for, I guess, what you would call the attention economy. And the social media companies have essentially sucked up so much value, they’ve essentially destroyed the traditional advertising market because eyeballs are on people’s phones and the social media companies are the portals to basically people’s attention. If you’ve got people’s attention, you’ve got revenue. There’s kind of Internet service providers, which is one company that I run. We’ve had the same issue in that telecommunications companies.

Seeby Woodhouse:
We basically built the Internet. So we built the undersea fiber cables, the 4G towers, the infrastructure, all the stuff that makes your cell phone and your home Internet connection work. Internet service providers built all that. It used to be a really profitable enterprise, essentially, even Internet service providers. What’s happened is the margins have kind of gone to the social media companies because the advertising has gone to social media companies. And so all the infrastructure is kind of like not really valued anymore. And there’s obviously really fierce competition. And, yeah, when you digitize anything, obviously the business model changes.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So the music industry went through a, you know, kind of like a hail Jesus, you know, moment when, you know, Napster came out and all of a sudden, is music going to be free? What are we going to do? And a lot of musicians have transitioned to kind of things like live concerts, making money out of live concerts as an income stream. And obviously, you know, apple music and itunes and Spotify may have solved, you know, solved a bit of that. But I saw a thing a while ago where Snoop Dogg basically said that, you know, his entire royalty revenue from Spotify was like $25,000. So, I mean, Snoop’s like one of the most popular hip hop artists in the world if he’s getting paid $25,000, you know, from Spotify. And Spotify is the number one music platform. We’re probably not going to see the same kind of lifestyle of musicians that’s been before. And then does that mean that that whole thing’s destroyed? But trying to stay on topic, I mean, the social media companies, yeah, they’re going to fight tooth and nail against anything. So you’re going to say Google, say this is ridiculous, but the fact of the matter is the social media companies are so valuable because they have so much information on all of us.

Seeby Woodhouse:
They have our name, they have our birthday, they have what we look at, what our interests are, whether we’re gay, whether we’re straight. They know all this information, they’ve got all our private messages, they know what we’re saying to our friends. And so they can target that information to deliver advertisements, whereas a newspaper, they don’t really know anything about most of their customers. If you visit a newspaper site and you do it anonymously, they don’t know anything about you. They just have to serve some random ad that’s not relevant. And so they’ve basically been left behind. So the fact that social media companies have so much information, they can deliver such targeted messages, and they’re so juicy in terms of addictive type stuff. I mean, Facebook had a whole team of people, of psychologists working on how do we make our products more addictive? And so it’s like candy for the ADHD mind.

Seeby Woodhouse:
You’ve got your phone in your hand, and anytime you need distraction, you just go to the social media companies and they’ve worked out brilliantly how to monetize that. And they’re hundreds of billions, trillions of dollar companies. And then you’ve got stuff in New Zealand sold for like a dollar because the advertisements just got ripped out of them. So the thing is that journalism is really important for a stable democracy. And if journalism is really struggling through newspapers or even tv stations, all traditional media is struggling. If no one does that job, then, I mean, as a society, we could be in a massive amount of trouble because you need journalists to go and dig up a story. You can’t just have, oh, I’ve seen this thing on Facebook that’s gone viral from someone that has no idea what they’re talking about. And then that’s just as valid as like a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who’s done a whole lot of investigation.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And so we have a real problem, which is a global problem, that these social media companies are not really paying their way. And the counter argument, which is kind of going through the courts in Australia, Australia’s maybe leading the way in this, I don’t know. But they’ve actually implemented a thing to say. If social media companies are getting attention from people’s eyeballs and selling advertising on Facebook, but actually the content is a news article from a newspaper, you should pay that newspaper for that. Article. I don’t really see that that’s unreasonable. Google and Facebook are going to say that’s unreasonable. Why should we pay? But there is an argument that it’s reasonable and that’s what we’re going to work through in New Zealand as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, you make a good argument. And look, I think there is that attention, and certainly on a lot of social media platforms, it’s very common, I think probably largely agree with me on this one, and that you’ll often see comments under something that somebody’s posted, whatever platform it’s on, and you don’t get down too far before someone’s, have you even read the article? And that actually it is, as you say, it is so much about the attention it creates because the headline might be all that somebody takes in the, and then they start commenting and posting and whatever they do, whether it’s liking or sharing based on the headline. And yeah, in a lot of cases, it doesn’t necessarily lead to everybody clicking through and having the benefit. That said, when somebody does click through, then that platform is generating traffic for the news media site. And then that news media, you know, ultimately that helps with their advertising. You know, cost per thousand, as you know, one of the mechanisms they use to charge for advertising. So every, every eyeball that comes through helps, you know, generate something people don’t really realize.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And there was a, there was a TikTok that went like mega viral, I don’t know whether you saw. And basically it was a woman who was sitting next to her boyfriend on the couch. They both had Instagram open, and then she commented on a photo that was like her friend’s photo. And the photo had something was like a husband and wife arguing about something. And so the girl commented and then her husband knew the same people, so he commented. And then they looked at the comments. And basically all of the comments on the woman’s version of Instagram was all like from other women and pro women and like having this kind of side. And then all the comments that were on the top of the guys, one were all the guys basically saying thing.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So there was like, there was basically a difference between the comments that each person was receiving on the same couch based on what their gender and everything was in their opinion. And it was like, if you look at the same photo on Instagram, you don’t even get the same newsfeed, which was kind of a shock to a lot of people. And me, I thought, oh, if you look at an Instagram post, the comments are the comments. That’s not the case. They actually literally customize the comments to make it as inflammatory and as attention getting and most likely for you to respond on like a post by post basis. So there is no one article, there is no like single source of truth. If you go to the New Zealand Herald, you get an article and that’s kind of what the article is. But on social media, even the same article is like presented to people differently.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Different comments are rated at the top depending on whether they’re going to provoke the most reaction. And, you know, you’ve seen terrible things happen like the, you know, the massacre in Burma or. I can’t remember, there’s a country essentially where Facebook was, was deemed to be responsible for an ethnic genocide because there was a series of posts that just went completely viral and they were unsubstantiated that because they, because they were attention getting. All of a sudden people turned into this firestorm of ethnic conflict.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, yeah, it’s going to be an interesting one because ultimately governments have, they have to make their calls. This legislation is there and we’ll see how it plays out. But if the likes of Google want to, I guess, pick a government to sort of play with, then you could argue that it’s pretty low risk. Pushing back on the New Zealand government, bearing in mind population, how much money they earn. A reasonable amount of money out of New Zealand. To be fair, these companies, there’s billions of dollars at stake. However, in the scheme of how much that they would lose compared to their kind of global revenues, New Zealand is probably a place to do it. And I guess we’re 80% smaller than the australian market where it looked like they might push back on some things there.

Paul Spain:
So I think we’ll just have to wait and see, see how that plays out.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to give away $100 billion idea, but it’s definitely frustrating for the consumer in terms of like I subscribe to the New Zealand Heralds online and it costs me like nearly $20 a month. And it’s just, you know, one of these subscriptions that disappears out of my wallet. And then some months I won’t even read the Herald. I’m like overseas and things and then I’m paying all this money and then it’s like the other week there was a couple of articles on the New York Times that I wanted to read and I didn’t want to subscribe to New York Times, but then I was like, oh, I really want to read this article. So then I decided to, oh, I’m going to subscribe to this, and then I’ve got my Netflix and it’s all really annoying. And then. So to me, I think the solution would be fantastic if there was some global micropayment kind of company. And it’s like you read an article on the Herald all the times, you pay ten cents, and it that goes to pay a journalist.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And if Facebook is selling advertising and then Facebook links to that story, then Facebook says, okay, well, we’ll keep five cents of advertising revenue. And then, because we’re getting advertising revenue, you get that article for free or a discounted rate or whatever. And there’s all these kind of little things. So, I mean, if I could essentially pay as I go on the web, and it’s like if I’m reading and reading and reading stuff on the web, I can read free articles from my friends or paid articles from whatever, and it’s just like a little micro payment, and I just decide to do that. That would be great. But that’s not been solved by anyone. But I think if that was solved, it would be a lot of.

Paul Spain:
For a decade or more.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, that would be something that would solve a lot of these issues between everyone.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. None of those micro payment sort of solutions have ended up sticking onto other topics. I flew from Auckland to Singapore in the last couple of weeks as one of my flights on here, New Zealand, and it was as though the satellite Internet provided over Wi Fi was just broken. Now, I think you’ve probably got these scenarios where even though we’ve now got satellite Internet delivered from low Earth orbit satellites to airplanes, you’ve also got more and more people utilizing them. And I think basically got to a. A choke point of some form and the Internet was basically useless. So I was trying to fill out my arrival card, which for most countries now is online. Right.

Paul Spain:
So you’re not filling out a piece of paper. Singapore’s like, in fact, Singapore, you can’t even fill out the paper option. Well, there may be an option, but the first time I went through without having done it online, it just had a whole, you know, they had a lineup of tablets that you could use if you hadn’t, hadn’t already done it online. So I did that kind of the moment we touched down and turned on and, you know, I’m on 4g or five g and away we went. But that was a really poor experience. Now, of course, in New Zealand, have announced that they’re moving to Starlink. And, you know, in fact, there was some commentary from Greg Foren in what was it, CNBC in the States, just in the last few days. And he’s basically making the comment that, hey, Starlink is kind of the it service that every airline has to have.

Paul Spain:
And New Zealand will be going in that direction, even right down to. Apparently they’re going to be putting it on ATR 72. So, you know, turboprop airplanes flying regional routes are going to have, they’re going to be able to squeeze in Wifi in flight. So a big change happening now. You’ve experienced this, you’re on Hawaiian, which I think one of, if not the first airline in the world to put in Starlink. What was that experience like?

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, so basically I was on a flight from La to Hawaii, thought I’ll just stay in Hawaii for a few days because I love Hawaii. Who doesn’t?

Paul Spain:
Good, cool.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Anyway, I opened up my laptop and I was kind of like doing stuff on the Internet connected to hawaiian wifi. I’m like, oh, this is good. And yeah, I’ve done the New Zealand to USA League and a bunch of other. I did New Zealand to Bali and obviously New Zealand’s great. They were one of the first airlines to have onboard Internet. But quite often it says it’s available, it’s not available and it’ll sometimes drop out and they apologize. I was on a twelve hour flight to LA and I actually really wanted to do some work and the Internet didn’t work the whole flight and then another flight. It seemed to be okay, but it’s just a little bit erratic just to be technically direct.

Seeby Woodhouse:
You said that the reason that airlines are having trouble is because the Leo satellites are overloaded. Well, New Zealand, and New Zealand doesn’t at the moment use Leo, which are low Earth orbiting, and Starlink, they use high earth or geostationary satellites, which are.

Paul Spain:
Like the intel two was a lot faster than the previous generation of Earth satellite.

Seeby Woodhouse:
It might be me, it might be talking out of town, but I don’t believe that Air New Zealand at the moment is using low Earth orbiting satellites. And anyway, so I was on a hawaiian flight and yeah, I was using the Internet. It was great. I just kind of didn’t really think about it. I did think I did. Had a subtle thought in the back of my head, oh, this Internet seems to be really good. I’m like doing everything I want to do. Didn’t really.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And the guy next to me obviously had the same kind of thought and I chatted to him a little bit. He seemed like he was kind of an it tech savvy person. Like me, we had a five minute kind of chat. Anyway, he decided to do a speed test. So he opened up his phone, did a speed test, and got like 250 megabits on his cell phone. And I was like, oh, holy shit, like, what the hell? And so we worked out that we were on Starlink, which I didn’t know and they didn’t promote. But, you know, I kind of thought the Internet was really good, but it was like, you know, I mean, I think in a New Zealand, I did a speed test once, and it was like half a megabit at best and, like, you know, 10% packet loss and 405 hundred milliseconds. And, you know, Starlink’s like 20 milliseconds.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So it was, like really awesome. But, yeah, I mean, in terms of the challenge. So there’s geostationary satellites, which is kind of the old intel satellites with very high latency. And satellites have what’s called, like a view cone. So with a geostationary satellite, they’re so far out in space that they stay over a fixed portion of the earth, but they have such a large view cone that they almost see half of the entire planet. So with geostationary satellites, you only need three satellites out in space, and you can cover the entire planet because they see basically 50% of the entire planet. So with two, you might miss a tiny bit, but with three, you basically get the whole thing. But, you know, low Earth orbiting satellites, what Starlink is, I believe there’s 6200 Starlink satellites now.

Seeby Woodhouse:
They’re so much closer. I believe they’re somewhere between. I think they’re nearly 100 times closer, and I could be wrong on that, but at least ten times closer. So it’s a massive difference. And because they’re so much closer, they have to go much faster in order to not fall into Earth’s orbit and burn up. So they’re not stationary, they’re whizzing around all over the place. But because they have such a tiny view cone, they only see a very small portion of the earth because they’re so close. And so there has to be way more of them.

Seeby Woodhouse:
They’re way closer. It’s way more complex. It’s a huge engineering challenge. But the upside, obviously, is that you get much faster speeds and much more incredible. And then there’s medium height satellites, which have a little bit of the characteristics of both. You need more than three to cover the entire planet, but it’s not like 400 milliseconds ping and things. And so maybe New Zealand’s on medium height satellites. But certainly what Elon’s done is a massive engineering challenge.

Seeby Woodhouse:
You know, everything that Elon does, Jeff Bezos wants to do. So they’re talking about another 6000 satellites or 9000 satellites to just do exactly the same thing, which I think is a waste of time, but it’s pretty crazy. And then of course, you have the risk of like space junk and all that kind of stuff crashing into each other and, you know, space they’re talking about, you know, there is a potential. I was reading an interesting thing that potentially, if there was like a catastrophic space disaster where satellites started crashing into each other and then causing junk to basically permanently orbit the planet you might end up in a situation where we’re permanently trapped on Earth and we can never leave in a rocket because essentially the rocket will hit junk on the way out because there’s just this cloud of crap up there. Hopefully that doesn’t happen. Hopefully we get to be a star fearing species like Elon wants. But the engineering challenge is pretty crazy. Yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
The benefit is, anyway, you can be on YouTube and, you know, be sitting in your seat and have 200 megabits, which I’ve experienced. So it’s just a game changer, but yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
And I just did a quick look and it looks like in New Zealand they’ve been using Inmarsat’s Global Express, which is geostationary.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So that’ll be like equatorial orbit satellites.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Half a millisecond ping. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
So there are a lot.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So 20 times bigger latency and.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So no, that’s great. Thank you for correcting me on that one. Now, delving into some other topics we had in the news and I got a call from media around this one last week while I was in the US, a joint operation by police that, that took out a smishing scam. And when I sort of delved into that a little bit deeper. And smishing is sort of phishing type attack via sms, via text messaging. And yeah, it was quite interesting to delve into. So this is sort of the first documented case where somebody in New Zealand has set up a basically a fake cell site.

Paul Spain:
And these particular cell sites that are used for this type of technique, what they do, by my view, and you may have any other thoughts on it, but from the reading I’ve done, is they’re basically trying to get mobiles that are within cue of them to switch back to protocol. The protocols associated with second generation mobile networks are such that you didn’t have the sort of authentication and so on that came with three g, four g and five g networks. So I think they basically try and mess with the other bands and interfere and then have phones basically switch down to. Then once a phone is on 2G, they’re there to say, hey, we’re here, we’ll help you. And we’re your official mobile network that you should be connecting with. And you can basically go in as any telco that you set the fake sort of cell site up as. And then you can basically send text messages at zero cost because you’ve got people connecting to your cell site and you can send them those kind of scammy text messages and basically some pretty serious fraud there and pretty serious, I guess, efforts in terms of messing with the telecommunication systems.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, it may be. It sounds like potentially, you know, more than I do, but obviously people are pretty familiar with the concept of like a yemenite, a wi fi ssid, which is the network name of wifi. So you open up your phone, you see a bunch of wifi networks. You click on the one you want to connect to, and that’s what you’re connected to. So obviously, in a similar way, the network name that you’re connected to often appears at the top of your phone, and that’s normally a subscriber. But if you roam overseas, you might be a two degrees customer or whatever customer. And then you go to Australia and it says three networks or Hutchinson or whatever. So people are sort of familiar with that.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And if you have your phone locked to a specific network provider, then obviously your phone won’t roam onto a foreign network. But if you have any cell site, then you can set it up to essentially advertise whatever network name you want. And my understanding, and I could be wrong because you’ve said you have to force the phones down to 2G, but I believe you can buy a cell site and set it up as a cell site and just get it to advertise the network name of a similar network. Now, obviously, you run into issues where if you have two networks that have the same name, then there can be fighting around for things. But not having done the research before I came on the show about this particular topic, but yeah, I do believe it is possible to do the hack at levels. And then essentially what happens? You might connect back into the. The host telco network by being. Pretending to be a customer.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So the hotspot effectively pretends to be a phone, and then it advertises itself as a network. So some phones connect to it, and then it’s essentially doing a man in the middle attack. I’m not 100% sure that you have to force the phones down to 2g. That’s something I haven’t heard. I think there are ways of speaking, spoofing the auth and things, but I could be wrong on that. So you might be right. But the general thing is that you can have someone’s phone connected to what looks like a legitimate network and it’s not, and then you receive a bunch of text messages. And the telco, like one NZ, has no record of those text messages because they were never sent from them.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Now, the benefit to that of a hacker is that if you’re sending traditional text messages, maybe, say, from overseas, I mean, the wonder of GSM text messaging is that any telco can send a text message to anyone else in the world and it works through interconnects. But of course, all those text messages are traceable. So if there’s a spammer who wants to do a BNZ banking hack or something, they might have an italian sim or something. They send text messages to a bunch of New Zealand numbers. But ultimately, all those text messages, if they go through the traditional telco channels, are traceable to some sim or some person anywhere in the world, and then the local police can get involved and whatever. So the benefit of having a smishing box is that you have text messages that appear to come from any number, and because you’re connected to a cell site, but they’re completely invisible to the host telco. So, you know, that’s. That’s why.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So it’s. It’s interesting that this is the first. The first case, but maybe not the last. And the kid that did. It’s clearly got some technical now, because you have to have some pretty deep technical telco knowledge in order to do this kind of thing. So, you know, maybe he’ll get repurposed as a white hat, you know, kind of hacker down the line, but otherwise, I don’t know whether the New Zealand government or whatever is probably going to throw the book at him. So his future is probably up in the air, but clearly a talented individual, but obviously gone the wrong path at the moment, you know?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we always hope those that get caught into these sorts of things when they. When they’re younger, you know, will find a path and some good folks to be around them that kind of maybe help steer them in a good. In a good direction. Yeah. Looking. I did a little bit of research about this after I got a call from media outlet last week and looked like you could buy these sort of boxes off the shelf with kind of everything you needed to be able to plug in into a vehicle and drive around to reach as many people as possible, which was apparently what happened in this scenario online, for it was something in the sort of four to $6,000 kind of range. So I’ve seen varying prices online.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So, yeah, I mean, you might not find it. There might be a bit of pearl clutching of how can it be that these terrible devices are for sale? But you have to remember that they’re essentially telecommunications devices, so you can go and buy, any citizen can go and buy telco grade routers and Internet equipment and all kinds of things, and wifi boxes. People essentially do the same kind of thing with wifi hotspots. So you have to be pretty careful about connecting to open Wifi hotspots because there are malicious people who purposefully give away free wifi and busy city centers. And then if you happen to have anything unencrypted that goes across, they can then sniff that and then they use that against you. And there still is a portion of Internet traffic that’s not encrypted. And so people get caught out with that or present things like fake websites. So say, for example, if you have a malicious wifi router and someone says, oh, this has got free Internet, I’ll join that.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Well, then the person that’s operating that wifi router can control the name servers that are given to you. The name servers then control the IP addresses of whatever. So someone can then spoof Google, spoof Facebook, pretend to be other websites, pretend to be. There’s all kinds of attacks that can be done. And so wifi free wifi hotspots are actually a pretty serious attack vector. So unless you know the provider, you’ve got to be careful. And this is just a similar thing in terms of like the telco world.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, there’s a lot to be said for just roaming on four g, five g when you travel to stay safe, apart from the cost mechanisms. Right. So obviously it depends on where you’re going and so on. And we are starting to see more scenarios where, say, roaming to Australia is built in. You know, two degrees have done that for some time. I’m not sure if Sparc do, but one NZ on one of their plans, you know, bundles in, certainly on one of the business plans they bundle in Australia, roaming now as a sort of standard, standard option. So those things are getting easier and I imagine that they will continue.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, well, I mean, actually a bunch of your listeners will probably be pretty jealous. But I used to live in the US for sort of four years, on and off, and had an apartment in LA. And so I got a US cell phone plan on my iPhone 15. I’ve got two sIMs and I still have a New Zealand number and a US number and US telcos. I mean, the Internet kind of started in the US and us telcos are just like the big dog, so they have like the bullying type stuff. So I actually have a us plan that costs me dollar 65 a month. And I have unlimited data roaming in just about every country on earth apart from North Korea. And I’ve had that for like the last eight years.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So I don’t worry about roaming anymore because I’ve got a us telco that’s just not widely distributed. So there’s a saying, you know, the future is not. The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed. So unlimited global roaming exists if you’re a us citizen and a lot of people don’t know that, you know, so. But it’ll get there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
For everyone. It’s just as a New Zealand telco, you just don’t have as much power to negotiate with every other telco. But someone like at and t is just like, oh, you give us roaming or else, you know.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s jump across to talking about autonomous vehicles. Now, there is going to be potentially a little bit more on this next week because Tesla have their robo taxi sort of announcement coming up in Los Angeles, end of this week, New Zealand time, I think Friday. I think it’s listed as the. The 10th of the 10th in their invite. A lot of people kind of talking about online, you know, what’s this event going to be? What’s the robo taxi going to look like? What’s the technology that’s sort of built in? What will it cost to ride one, et cetera, et cetera. Is it basically the same as the technology that’s in a lot of existing teslas today? So there’s been a topic we’ve talked about over a period of years, but I’ve been very keen to, I guess, hands on or hands free with this technology. You and I have had access to varying sort of levels of the technology within our Teslas in New Zealand, but the very latest iterations of Tesla’s technology certainly haven’t been broadly made available within the.

Paul Spain:
Within the New Zealand market. They’ve done some tests here and so on behind the scenes, so had a look at that. There’s also the technology from Waymo where you can. In three us cities, you can go and jump in an autonomous, very much like catching an uber ride sharing type service. Fire up the app, tell it where you want to go, it’ll come and pick you up and take you there. Absolutely no human driver in there. You just get in there. And so, yeah, just wanted to really, I guess, get a feel for.

Paul Spain:
Where’s this technology at right now? The Waymo experience was really interesting. Besides me leaving my phone behind in the Waymo, you can’t call the driver to ask for it. But fortunately, the next passenger jumping into the vehicle answered when my son called them. But, you know, it works really well. Seems to be getting quite broad use. It’s not a particularly cheap service. I think they’re shorter. When I tried it anyway, which was on Sunday in San Francisco, the minimum fare was around $17.

Paul Spain:
And even if you’re just going for a three minute trip, that said, you know, at varying times, it’s reasonably hard to get rides in busy cities like San Francisco.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Did you already cover, like, the. I imagine you would have seen the media around the honkpocalypse. There was like a hashtag honk pops. And basically there was, like, San Francisco residents getting, like, really pissy because the Waymos have a. Have a thing where if the car in front doesn’t move for a certain amount of time, they’ll, like. It’ll, like, use the horn to. Yeah, hurry someone up. And then at the.

Seeby Woodhouse:
At the Waymo depot, you know, they got like several hundred cars. So then they were getting into traffic jams and all of the Waymos were, like, honking. So you got, like 600 Waymos backed up, all honking, and you got poor residents. And then there was another thing where, you know, they had waymos and they’re like a random city block where they were all way around the block. And so the Waymos were, like, stuck, like, beeping at each other.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And, you know, so that’s not. It’s not perfect, but I. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah. I mean, to reuse the phrase I just used, like, five minutes ago, the future is often here. It’s just not widely distributed. And so, you know, autonomous stuff is kind of here in terms of Waymo’s. And Tesla’s FSD is, you know, getting really good.

Seeby Woodhouse:
But I had someone who talked to me the other day and I was, you know, I’ve got a Tesla. So I was talking about, you know, yeah, kind of autopilot and stuff. And, yeah, I had someone that said, oh, like autonomous cars. Are never going to get here. Technology is not going to exist. It’s just a pipe dream kind of come on. And I was like, it already kind of exists in some cities. And they were shocked.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So a lot of the population kind of thinks, oh, it’s just not going to happen. So there’s a segment of the population, probably not your listeners, who don’t. It’s just this kind of thing that I think what happens with advancing technology is often it’s like, it’s a pipe dream. It’s a pipe dream, it’s a pipe dream, and then, bam, it’s here, and then it changes the world. And I think autonomous autonomous driving is going to be one of those things where people have heard about it for a long time. It doesn’t seem to arrive. So a lot of people have kind of been like, it’s never going to get there. And then one day it’s just going to be everywhere and it’s going to work well, and, you know, the problems will be solved.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So. Yeah, and may, and I think I saw a thing about four years ago where there was a, you know, test. Sorry, Elon has a. Has a habit of obviously over promising a lot and getting everyone hyped up. So that I saw this would have been years ago. A guy bought a model three on the BaSis of Elon saying, oh, you’ll be able to use it as an income stream. It’ll be a robo taxi. It’s going to be released next year.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And this Guy was ABSoLutelY livid, like, oh, Elon’s lied to me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But Elon usually delivers on the end, so I think at SOme POint it’s going to get there. And maybe this event on the 10th, we’re going to see some of that. I do personally kind of wonder about the viability of, like, a fully camera autonomous driving platform. Cause I just kind of worry that there’s just. There are SOme downloads. Obviously, the Waymo solution has all the sensors and lidar, and they have a radar system on top and everything. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Quarter of a million dollar vehicle, right?

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, it’s pretty bulletproof. But I use Tesla autopilot, and it’s AbSoLutElY fantastic on motorways and things. But I had a thing the other day where I was using autopilot to get up to my, you know, lodge that I own a walk with Woodhouse. Woodhouse lodge. And I always just kind of autopilot on the. On the motorway. And then, you know, just can, you know, relax and let the car drive. And then it started pissing down, and of course, all the cameras got obscured, and then it’s like, oh, beep, beep, beep, you gotta take over.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So I’m like, well, how’s that gonna work? Like, cameras get water on them and raindrops and like, is Tesla ever gonna solve it? How are they gonna solve that? What’s the car gonna do if the car suddenly can’t see? It’s a real problem. But awaymo doesn’t have that problem because it’s got radar, basically. So I don’t know about this promise of full self driving. A Tesla’s going to be on a highway and then just all pull over every time it rains. I don’t know that there’s a solution for that. So there’s some things like that as a Tesla owner. Like, how is this ever going to be solved?

Paul Spain:
It doesn’t, I mean, to be fair, it doesn’t do that in typical, it’s pretty serious rain when it does that. Like, you can be driving around in rain and it’s no problem at all, but when the rain gets, you know, when the rain gets extra heavy. So there are some of these sort of nuances where, yeah, I find it quite fascinating. And I do wonder what, you know, what does the solution end up being? So for me, with Tesla FSD, which is the full self drive software in the US at the moment, their latest iteration is called Tesla FSD, supervised. And so this was a Model Y that I drove over the weekend, and it had that software available on it. What I found were some quite interesting shortcomings, but for the bulk of my experience was, hey, this is really, really good. Like, it’ll take you out of a car park. In fact, you know, yesterday I was, I was charging this vehicle that I’d rented via Turo.

Paul Spain:
That was the company where I had to email one of the senior leadership to solve some issues I was having.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Turo is great. I love Turo.

Paul Spain:
So an amazing platform when it’s working. I’ve had a little bit of an obscure case, but they solved it for me. But I was just at supercharger before returning the car, and I was able to basically, you know, tap into autopilot. It drove out of the park that I was in, and it drove basically through the car park and out onto the street and drove me virtually the whole way. I think there was one case where it was being a little bit slow, and I put my foot onto the accelerator to give it a, to give it a little nudge along but other than that, it got me from there to where there’s a long term parking at San Francisco airport where I needed to drop off the vehicle. I did then drive it into the car park and did that side of it. But, yeah, pretty impressive experience. But yeah, the shortcomings I found were the odd sort of slow start or it doesn’t get started, maybe it can’t get you out of a particular kind of, you know, parking area and you do need to drive yourself.

Paul Spain:
There was a case quite near to my accommodation where I was heading out to catch up with a friend in another part of sort of the San Francisco Bay Area. And it took a slow start. And so the vehicle behind me was kind of tooting, going, hey, get a move on. And so I think in that case, I just put my foot on the accelerator and gave it a nudge. But other than that, a lot of journeys were very much sort of start to finish, other than really getting out of the car park and then parking at the other end. And it looks like Tesla are actually doing quite a bit of work on both of those areas. So there may be a resolution. The other situation, in fact, on that same journey, I got a situation, and this one is quite a worrying if we think about a future in which we want to be able to fall asleep in our vehicles, because you definitely couldn’t with this scenario.

Paul Spain:
So I came up to a set of lights. There was a green light and there was a red arrow pointing to the left. I needed to go left. The Tesla did not break. And so if I just let it keep driving, you know that in the.

Seeby Woodhouse:
US you’re allowed to turn left on the red, right?

Paul Spain:
Allowed to turn right on a red, but I was turning left across the traffic, right?

Seeby Woodhouse:
Oh, sure.

Paul Spain:
Okay, so, yeah, so other scenarios, it followed the us rules and it turned right on a red, you know, when it was safe to do so. And it did that on plenty, on plenty of occasions. But this was turning left across traffic and it was keeping going. And so that’s where the technology, you know, you recognize, hey, this technology is not fully there, it’s not fully baked there. I actually could have gone through and, you know, you could have made the judgment of like, hey, you’re going to be all right, you would get through, but you’re breaking the law. And, you know, just dumb thing to do. So. So I breaked there.

Paul Spain:
That happened one other occasion. The other scenarios that I. That I got, and this depends on where you go, but I kind of went all over a bunch of you know, a bunch of places. And there were two scenarios where I went under these kind of mini tunnels or bridges, you know, under other roads and so on. And what happens is it was a bright, sunny, hot day in San Francisco is so the camera on the vehicle, because it is the way these light cameras work. Yeah. There’s this sort of light balance or white balance situation when you change from being outdoors to suddenly being in a really dark area. Takes a little while for the camera to adjust a little bit, like our eyes take to adjust when we go into a really dark environment.

Paul Spain:
And on two different occasions, not on every occasion that I went into these scenarios, but two different occasions, basically, the vehicle did its beep, as you experienced in the heavy rain, and told me to take over. And so it was just like, whoa. And I put it straight back into full self drive mode on one of those occasions straight away, and it was no problem. It just picked up and took over again. But it was just, there was maybe going to be half a second or a second there. On one occasion, I was following a cyclist who was right in the middle center of the lane. So I was thinking, I wonder if that’s to do with the cyclist. And it’s worried that, you know, we’re quite close to a cyclist and it can’t see the next scenario.

Paul Spain:
There wasn’t anybody that had been in front of me, but it did exactly, exactly the same thing. Now, I guess here, when I think about Waymo, one of the things around Waymo, and you’ll see similar in places like China, where in Wuhan you’ve got autonomous robo taxis or driverless taxis, as well as these services tend to run within a geofenced area. So it’s just a very specific part. So when I wanted to try Waymo, I would have tried it probably from the airport if it had been available, but it wasn’t. It was geofenced just to really to downtown San Francisco. So it didn’t even cover to the airport. So they picked an area that they’ve got really high confidence that the service is going to work in. Now, you could argue this sort of two ways.

Paul Spain:
One, that it couldn’t go brilliantly further afield, or the other is, hey, if you pack them all into a really short, small space, then there’s always going to be vehicles available on tap, and they’re going to get the best return, and the vehicles are going to get better and better and better at that very small, tight area. And look, it could be a combination of the two, but it did leave me wondering when I had those sort of poor experiences with the Tesla’s full self drive. And when I say poor, they were poor. If you put them in a context of it being a robo taxi and there being no driver like that would have been not a good position to be in. If there’s a driver who is there to supervise and to pay attention. Those were no drama at all for me as a driver because it did most of the work, but it’ll give you a slap around if you’re not focused on the traffic. So it’s looking at your eyes, and if your eyes are elsewhere, then it’s going to warn you basically to take over. And if you misbehave too many times, then you’ll actually lose access to the full self drive.

Seeby Woodhouse:
I suppose another macro thing is the scenarios you’ve highlighted is basically kind of indicated that Tesla full self drive is not really where a good human driver is, but it’s getting close. You know, it’s capable, but it’s not as good as a good human driver. It’s probably better than a really terrible lunar driver, you know, a lot of the time. But the thing is, is that in order for self drive to get widespread adoption, they really, you know, Elon, Tesla, whatever, they really have to prove that it’s superior to a normal driver. Otherwise you can’t really get widespread spread adoption. And that’s the thing, because obviously, essentially, cars are like rolling death machines. And, you know, the first couple of times when you have a pedestrian and a pram or something gets splattered, it’s going to be pretty bad pr. And then it’s like, how do we adjust to that? So that’s why I think the waymo Lidar type stuff just gives me a little bit more comfort, because Lidar is basically a form of radar.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And so the thing about radar is you’re really seeing the absolute truth about objects, physical objects and things that might damage and hurt people that are there. Whereas with Teslas, and they’re just essentially doing image recognition, if a pedestrian or something happens to blend into the background and look like whatever, then there’s a chance of them getting hit and they’ve solved a lot of that problem. But I just worry a little bit more. But ultimately it’s going to depend on the quality of the software. But I think having that additional information to the car sensor from Lidar probably gives it a lot greater certainty that it’s not going to run someone over or something like that. It’ll be interesting to see whether Tesla’s long term succeeds, but, I mean, we’ve already had situations where, obviously, people using full self drive or autopilot have fallen asleep and then had accidents or the cars had accidents. So I was kind of surprised that that hadn’t really taken tests throughout a bit. Obviously, there is a certain amount of patience from regulatory authorities and the public to be happy with your car driving you places that I didn’t know that was kind of there.

Seeby Woodhouse:
I kind of figured the first time Tesla had an accident with someone on autopilot, that would be the end of it and kind of be banned, and then there’d be this whole additional hurdle, but that hasn’t seemed to happen. So I think we’re going to get full self driving. But, I mean, it’s just, you know, it’s the whole trolley problem, you know? Cause how do cars do that? You know, if there’s two bad situations, plow into a mother and baby in a pram or have an accident or something, what’s the car gonna choose?

Paul Spain:
I don’t think they’re at that sort of level of even. Of even being able to distinguish that at this point, you know? No, they’re way, way off that. Oh, there. Look, there was one other scenario that I did experience, which was its inability to read one way signs, which is a concern. So I had two interesting scenarios. One where it tried to turn down what was a little one way street. Yeah, maybe it was just that one where it tried to turn down a one way street. The other one, it was a street that was blocked off for an event, and it started nudging towards.

Paul Spain:
And it was like I could see with my eyes that it was clear that that street was fully closed. And it took a little while. It kind of got quite close before it realized and then turned around. But I do wonder if they were to take the Tesla’s full self drive and put it on, say, a subset of San Francisco, downtown San Francisco, or whichever area they pick in terms of how that might perform against, say, Waymo. Of course, Waymo has been going a lot longer, January 2019. So they’re over 15 years old that they’ve been trying to build this technology. After 15 years, they’re still limited to a small amount of geographies, but arguably, they’re the best, and they’re a leader globally. Clearly, Tesla and some of the others, like New Zealand, founded Wave AI, which is based in London.

Paul Spain:
And for those that haven’t seen any videos of Wave AI’s tech, that’s really worth looking at, because they seem to be on quite a similar track to Tesla, and again, using cameras. And I guess there’s always that argument with camera only, as like, hey, that’s what humans use. One of the other interesting things there is that Tesla sort of share data regularly around accidents in their vehicles versus what’s normal in other vehicles. And the stats of when people are driving with the autopilot type technology on, the number of accidents is kind of, you know, is considerably down versus normal drivers of everyday vehicles. So I certainly, I guess, felt like a lot safer having Tesla FSD supervised doing the bulk of the driving, especially as I haven’t driven in the US for maybe five years or so and trying to work out the lanes and all the sort of different distractions. I felt safer with that than if I was personally driving. I was still supervising, so I was still looking out for those oddities, and I was ready to take over. But actually, that was where my confidence level is.

Paul Spain:
So if we look to sort of the announcement coming up this week from Tesla around robo taxis, how they going to do it? If I was sort of to look back a month and YoU’d ask me, can they do it? Does this announcement make any sense at all? I would have said it really doesn’t make any sense. Their vehicles are too far off. It can’t work. As I’ve been thinking about it and experiencing some of this tech and looking at Waymo, that operates within quite a small area, I think if Tesla are going to make this announcement, either their heads, they’re thinking that they can operate based on technology they don’t have yet. Maybe they know something we don’t know. Maybe they’re just doing the usual musk thing, which is say, oh, yep, this technology’s here. And then actually, it takes a whole lot longer, which could create a lot of drama with shareholders and so on. If they announce SomEthing they just can’t deliver, or maybe they are actually closer to it than what we think.

Paul Spain:
And maybe that would be by operating in sort of maybe some small geofenced regions that they’re able to really double down and get their testing and things operating really well. So it fully understands how to read the traffic lights in those areas. You know, what to do when, you know, we went through an experience where, because of this big festival that was on the traffic lights while they were still operating, there were police there, you know, waving people across the road and waving vehicles through. And the Tesla handled that like a, you know, like a champ. It did, you know, did. It did a great. Did a great job, surprising, you know, through in that scenario. So if they can maybe limit it.

Paul Spain:
And don’t just say, look, you’ve got all of America that you can drive on, and our robotaxis are going to be everywhere. If they start that maybe in a waymo type way of a geofenced area to start with and get really, really good at that, and then sort of slowly move it out, or maybe a bunch of areas, but by saying, hey, we’re going to. Which was always on my mind of like, well, they’re designing this technology to work everywhere. They should be rolling it out globally or at least across a really broad region, that would be one take. But there’s probably a few other approaches that they could take for this announcement that mean we might not be waiting five years. On the flip side, they might come out and say, hey, we’re there. We only need to get to these points ticked off our list, and then we’re going to start putting robo taxis on the road. But the one sort of key thing that I see that Tesla has is this massive fleet of vehicles, right? And the vehicle I was in was a 2020 Model Y, I believe.

Paul Spain:
And so this is a car that’s four years old. They’ve now got millions of vehicles that have got the technology in them. So you think around, if anybody else wanted to roll out, say, robo taxis into, let’s say, the New Zealand market, for instance. Right? And that is the technologies here, we’re going to roll them out. That’d be a really big deal to get vehicles to New Zealand and so on. But when you’ve got actually a fleet of vehicles that’s already in the country, there would be a portion of Tesla owners that would say, hmm, this is interesting. I’ll make mine available to be on the network to try out. Right.

Seeby Woodhouse:
If you knew that Tesla was absolutely going to announce the robotaxi service on the 10th, you’d want to be shorting Uber stock pretty hard. That’d be a good play.

Paul Spain:
I just don’t know how it’s going to come out. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be buying or selling Tesla stock at this time. I’ve just no idea, or I wouldn’t have confidence in what their approach is going to be for how they’re going to do this announcement, what the timing will be. They’ve touted a dedicated robo taxi vehicle that’s made just for being a robo taxi. But of course, you know, the thing they’ve got up their sleeve is this fleet of millions of vehicles that they have publicly advised you will be able to make money on putting your vehicle onto their kind of autonomous, uber like, or waymo like network. But, you know, without there being anybody in the vehicle, of course, there’s a bunch of other things to, you know, wireless charging for vehicles and other things to make that really easy. Or the, what was it? Little autonomous sort of snake thing that would plug the charger in when a vehicle sort of pulled up. There’ll be a bunch of bits and pieces, but I’m sure they’ll have a fair bit to kind of share later on the week around that.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be pretty interesting. Obviously, the Tesla self driving software is unbelievably complex being. And I don’t know whether in the future we’ll sort of see any of these, like, ghost in the machine type, you know, effects where, you know, the ghost in the machine’s kind of a name for, like, software that just suddenly seems to do a random thing that no one can really explain. And it’s just. It’s just got too complex. I don’t know whether you’ve seen in the news, but there’s been a couple of incidences where, you know, Teslas have basically gone, like, runaway acceleration or, like, done something really weird. So there’s been a couple of cases where essentially a Tesla’s just gone full acceleration for, like, no reason. Accelerated pedals, not pushed.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And it’s just decided because it’s all drive by wire. Like, the amount of power to put into the motors is purely a decision that’s made by the computer based on the position of the accelerator pedal and the current speed and things. So there’s been a couple of Teslas that have gone basically bananas and just essentially said, okay, apply full power to the motors. I think one guy survived and one guy didn’t like Anne Heche. I think she died as an actor. I’m not sure whether she was driving Tesla, but her car appeared to go down a suburban street at like, 200 kilometres an hour and then slam into a house for no reason. And so that was either, like, I think. I think she might have been driving a mini, but it would have either been like a stuck accelerator pedal or something.

Paul Spain:
So Tesla have pushed back on those things because there was something in, I think it was China around that, wherever. Yeah, they came back and I think the court ended up siding with Tesla. So there’s no.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Not trying to make people scared, but.

Paul Spain:
I don’t know the realities of those ones.

Seeby Woodhouse:
It is pretty interesting in the abstraction, obviously. Like an old car. You know, like, I had an old Ford laser, and I didn’t maintain it when I was a kid, so I was a teenager and I got a suck. Accelerator cable once. And obviously the accelerator pedal leads to a cable, physical cable, which leads to the carburetor. And if that cable jams in its sleeve, then you can end up with an accelerator thing. You know, I just. I just instantly figured out what’s happening.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Turn the ignition off, put the car into neutral. I had multiple ways of stopping it. You know, handbrake, physical brake, turn the ignition off, all these kind of things in a Tesla. It’s like if the car starts accelerating and you’re not doing it, like, what do you do? Like, it’s just. It is what it is. Like, there’s no button, there’s no off thing. There’s no anything. Like, you’re at the mercy of the car.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And then once it’s actually driving itself and doing that and making decisions, like, we’re getting very removed from, you know.

Paul Spain:
Well, and I should mention the name of their event, which is going to take place at the Warner Brothers studio in Los Angeles called Wii Robot. So if you kind of want to think of some worst case scenarios, look at the irobot movie. So they’re having, you know, having a little bit of fun there. But look, it is important for us to think around the downsides of technologies. And, you know, how if things aren’t and well thought out, you know, how badly they could go wrong. And we have to consider that stuff. Look, I think that from a software perspective, Tesla seem to have put themselves in a really good position, and their software seems to have been designed in a way that leans more towards safety than random crazy things happening. But when you lean into AI systems, there are some risks, and certainly hence why they can, or why they must use that FSD supervised terminology at the moment, rather than just, this is autonomous.

Paul Spain:
This is full service.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Have you ever experienced your Tesla rebooting? Because I’ve experienced that a couple of times, two or three times. So basically, essentially, I’ll be driving along the motorway, and then my central console screen, the dashboard, everything will go completely black, but the accelerator pedal and the brake, and everything will work perfectly. So the car’s still fully drivable, but it’s like the central computer just has, like, a blackout and then takes a minute to come back, and then everything kind of pops back. But if you’re on. If you’re on auto logging that under warranty, if you’re on autopilot or anything. All of that’s gone. It’s just literally there’s like a base level of command that the car has where the pedals and everything work as a normal car. Indicators and all that sort of stuff, light.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So I never felt was super dangerous, but if you were an autopilot, it would be gone. And my car’s had that two or three times. I mention it to them, they’re like, oh, sometimes it happens. Computer reboot.

Paul Spain:
And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So powerful.

Paul Spain:
I mean, I’ve rebooted while driving. And I was like, what’s going on here? Is it the LT. Is it the connectivity? I’m trying to get a map or something. Yeah, you can hold both buttons down and it’s. No, you know, it doesn’t have any impact on your. On your direct driving because it is more the entertainment system than it is because you’ve got multiple, I guess, levels of compute and you’ve got the system that drives the screen and I guess the varying levels. And I’m not quite sure exactly how those delineations are. So did you find your autopilot dropped when that happened?

Seeby Woodhouse:
The first time it happened, it was a bit scary because my whole screen and everything went blank.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I can imagine.

Seeby Woodhouse:
When the screens are so big, you notice I was driving at night and everything went black, but the headlights were on.

Paul Spain:
Thankfully, indicators don’t work as my recollection. So when you’re rebooting your indicators, well, they might work, but you can’t hear them inside, I guess. Cause the tick tick tick sound probably comes through the entertainment system. So as it’s ticking, you don’t hear that and you don’t get a visual. But they may work outside the vehicle, like experimenting.

Seeby Woodhouse:
I mean, if it happens, it definitely makes you feel like you’re driving an iPad, you know?

Paul Spain:
Yeah. One thing that I wasn’t aware of, Rivian has been kind of coming through as quite a competitor to Tesla. And I think one of the more recent announcements we heard about is that Volkswagen, basically. I think it’s Volkswagen, if I remember correctly. But one of the big automakers basically leaning in with an investment into Rivian. And part of their arrangement is they’ll get access to Rivian software, right? And Rivian, when you look at the videos and the screenshots and so on, the Rivian software looks really good. Right. As a kiwi, that was my impression.

Paul Spain:
Just things that I’d seen online was like, well, the Rivian software looks really sweet. You know, this is kind of.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, Rivian’s have a few Tesla sort of class, right?

Paul Spain:
It looked amazing. Well, the feedback I got. Yeah. Talking to the first person was someone whose family owns both Tesla and Rivian. And they’d gone down the Rivian track for a ute rather than a Cybertruck. And their comment was just, the Rivian software is junk compared to Tesla’s. So they said that’s, you would have.

Seeby Woodhouse:
To think, it would have to be.

Paul Spain:
A really weak point. And then the other was a Cybertruck owner who I spent a chunk of time with, got a good demo of the ins and outs of the tech on the Cybertruck. And they made sort of the same comment that, yeah, there’s a huge kind of difference software wise, between the two. So that maybe doesn’t bode so well for those automakers who are thinking they’re going to be at the pinnacle of technology by taking on Rivian’s kind of, you know, software for. For their vehicles. So, yeah, maybe Tesla have actually still in a very forward position when it does come to their software, which was interesting, because today, when I look at a vehicle, the software is as important as every other aspect. And I guess what we’re seeing with things like the FSD, the full self drive coming through on Tesla, there’s no other automaker that’s certainly within their price point, rolling out this technology right across.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Their fleet to it. Maybe that the other automated automakers capitulate at some point. And that’s what’s happened in the US with the charging network. So obviously, Tesla was by the first electric car company in the US. And so they’ve got a huge national supercharger network. And so now all other companies, a couple of months ago forward and everything said, oh, we were going to roll out our own charges, but we’re just going to use Tesla charges now. So in the US, effectively, Tesla will own the electric charging infrastructure. In New Zealand, we’ve got chargenet was an independent, just being bought by one of the power companies.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And then you’ve got Tesla. And so the plugs are kind of incompatible. And I was a little bit surprised that charging, it didn’t get bought by Tesla. And then it would be like, you know, Tesla everywhere as well. But, you know, maybe the smaller markets, they can’t do things. But, you know, if Tesla owns the us electric charging infrastructure and the other car companies are just like, okay, we’re just going to license that. It’s not impossible to think, well, the other car companies essentially will just eventually license full self drive, the way that CarPlay is available in every car and, you know, Android play or whatever it’s called, is available. And it’s just kind of like a feature, you know, if you want self driving, you have to have.

Seeby Woodhouse:
You push the Tesla thing and your Ford turns into Tesla software, basically. And it has to have eight cameras and it has to have this and then it’s compatible.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, that could be wave AI, right. That could be a success story because it’s a Kiwi that’s running that out of the UK. So there are obviously others doing that stuff. Tesla are very keen for people, obviously, to license their technology. I don’t think they’ve had any takers at this point. Yeah, I think we’ve got a pretty interesting time ahead, but we are now kind of in that world where, yeah, a pretty interesting level of autonomy is available, but it’s certainly not there yet. And that was kind of my experience anyway, in the US. It has.

Paul Spain:
Interestingly, one of the things that’s been hard for Tesla is getting a consistent result across all their vehicles. There’s different levels of hardware. So some of them have got their FSD three hardware, which was the previous generation chip. Some of them have got the FSD four hardware, which is a current generation chip. There’s an FSD five chip that they’re going to be launching and then there’s getting it working in different vehicles. So the Cybertruck that I was having a look at on Saturday after catching up with a friend, had just gone on to the FSD, supervised, but he’d had that for maybe six months and that capability hadn’t been available because Tesla were trying to rework it and make it work on that particular hardware and get the software all operating. And it had taken them this period of time. So I can imagine that there’s going to be complexities the more vehicles that a company has trying to get all these different bits and pieces to line up.

Paul Spain:
So Tesla not having a lot of vehicles, that’s been an easier experience for them. Oh, one other thing from, I think.

Seeby Woodhouse:
You said Tesla, but I think you meant Rivian not having as many vehicles.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, others maybe not. Oh, no, no. Tesla have a small number of models, right? So the less, you know, if you’ve got 20 different car models and each one takes you a lot of engineering hours to sort of, you know, get your full self driving, your autonomy rolled out to, you don’t actually want to have 20 or 30 or 40 different car models and most of them don’t realistically, they’re just small variations, but, yeah, you want a small number so there’s not too much work to do. But the other comment that came out on Saturday night was, yeah, we’re catching up with my friend. He was saying that his wife basically drives with FSD, supervised on all the time. And I was like, oh, well, why is she so keen on it? Well, she doesn’t actually like driving that much and she really actually appreciates that the technology kind of takes that burden off her to a degree. She’s obviously still supervising and still part of the experience, but she just finds it a whole lot easier. So I’m sure there are some people that will be in that camp.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah. I mean, even enhanced. Even enhanced autopilot in Auckland traffic, it’s stop start. And so if I happen to, I try and avoid going into the city in early morning. But if I end up on the motorway, I mean, enhanced autopilot is a joy because basically it’ll just follow the car ahead of you, keep the distance. You don’t have to think, oh, brake, blah. You know, I mean, if you’re in a manual car, an old manual car and stop start traffic, putting it in and out the clutch and, you know, you get your thighs getting sore, it’s a nightmare. And I mean, if you’re on a Tesla with enhanced autopilot at a minimum, you know, you just don’t have to worry about that.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And in fact, I’ve never had a car accident. But the one time I would have had an accident and I, my Tesla avoided me having an accident. So my Tesla has saved me is I was not using autopilot. I didn’t have autopilot on at all. And I was in stop start traffic because I thought, oh, I’m just, I’m just driving and, you know, there was a queue or something. And so I’m kind of, you know, on the accelerator and then following the car in front and then, you know, closing the gap. And then I happened, you know, traffic was moving really slowly and then I happened to kind of look down and my phone, like, pinged or whatever. And I grabbed my phone and then I looked up on the car in front of me and the queue had, like, hard lights, you know, stopped hard.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And as I looked up, I was like, oh, my God, I’m gonna hit that car. Didn’t even have time to react. And then my Tesla’s automatic, you know, emergency braking kicked in even though I didn’t have autopilot on and literally stopped me, you know, 2 cm from the bumper, calculated the distance absolutely perfectly that it didn’t, you know, didn’t brake too early, just braked exactly when it needed to. And I was like, oh, that would have been a little feminine fender bender because I got distracted. And so then I was like, well, I should use autopilot. Cause if I had autopilot on, I wouldn’t have done that, you know.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So it was actually a case of like, well, yeah, it’s better than me. So, yeah, you have to give them credit. You have to give them credit.

Paul Spain:
And a lot of cars will do that braking. But I don’t think probably to the same level as Tesla, who are constantly updating the software. Another friend of mine, you know, he was saying after they picked up a model Y, I don’t know, maybe when they first launched in New Zealand and within days of having it, one of the family was driving it. I didn’t want to say his wife, because I keep giving these wife examples. But anyway, his wife was driving it and actually was nothing to his asian.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Wife, it was nothing cancelled, nothing to.

Paul Spain:
Do with her driving. But somebody came into the intersection in a Way that they shouldn’t.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Right.

Paul Spain:
And the light, and it wasn’t just a simple brake. Cause it was in front, it was at an odd angle. It was just like, not what you expect a vehicle to be able to automatically handle, but it figured out the situation and I think swerved to avoid being in an accident and they completely missed what would have been an accident. So there is some pretty incredible autonomy that’s going in there from that safety perspective. And I guess that’s also probably part of Tesla’s overall safety picture. And it’s what we should expect across any vehicle in the future. But I think at the moment, it’s Tesla that have kind of leading the way when it comes to software and safety. We’ll see how that plays out longer.

Paul Spain:
Cause you would expect everyone to be able to match up. But we’re still in that world where there is, in some ways, quite surprisingly so, there is still that reasonable difference between what Tesla are doing and what other automakers are doing. Even though everyone else has had years to figure out and maybe to take on board their approach to software, you know, designing their own chips and things like that, it still seems like there’s a, there’s a reasonable gap. So, yeah, so, yeah, we will, we will see what happens next on the, on the robo taxi front. But, yeah, been, been, you know, certainly a really interesting time. I’ll give one last example yesterday, actually trying to get to get to the airport and I was in downtown San Francisco. I guess it had figured out, mapping wise, what was a smart way to go, which was sort of through the city streets rather than probably completely kind of freeway. I’d just come across the Golden Gate bridge and basically needed to get back up towards the airport.

Paul Spain:
And it took me through town and most of the town. It was fine to get through downtown, but as we were kind of getting quite close to where you would enter the freeway again, the traffic kind of just stopped. And I don’t know, there was a problem going on. But in the end it decided to sort of cut across into the next lane, which was quite free, and take that lane, but we only had 140 meters to where it needed to sort of turn back and get back into the.

Seeby Woodhouse:
So it’s like a cuter lane jumper into the traffic.

Paul Spain:
So it was like, what’s going on, going on here? Because both, you know, I guess, yeah, both Waymo and Tesla do have some smarts around dealing with scenarios where things, you know, freeze up and so on, and they will make, sometimes make a.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Judgment call, get honked at as a queue jumper.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, yeah. And actually there was another example. We decided to go to in and out burger, you know, one of those famous kind of american burger joints. And, you know, my son had never, I don’t know if he had been there or not, but he certainly couldn’t remember going there before. And so he wanted to go and there’s this huge queue for the drive through. Now the car didn’t know that we didn’t want to go through the drive through that we did or didn’t. We just put the destination in and it had taken us there, took us into the car park. But the traffic was just a complete stall within this huge car parking area.

Paul Spain:
And then it just, you know, ducked out to the side, right. And I’m like, what the heck? That’s crazy. And it was the right thing because we didn’t want to go to the drive through and so we did just want to park. But at that stage I took over and parked the vehicle. But yeah, if I hadn’t have done that, I might have sat in that queue for another sort of five minutes before thinking, actually, yeah, this is dumb. Or maybe another 30 seconds, who knows? Anyway, back to the other scenario, was trying to get onto the freeway and yeah, it took me out into this other line. I’m thinking, what’s it going to do? And I just decided, look, I haven’t been using the technology enough to trust it, whether it’s going to pull back into the traffic, whether it’s going to do something kind of, you know, dodgy or dangerous. So at that point, I took over, indicated back in, and came back into the traffic myself.

Paul Spain:
Cause I didn’t want to kind of get, you know, get caught in it making another poor decision. So some of those decisions you, yeah, you kind of judgment calls wise, you might not agree with what the technology is doing, and it didn’t do it super fast. So I could have probably, I probably could have stopped it even moving away from that lane. But there is this incredible fluidity to the way it drives very human like, you know, so the feedback was, it’s just like, oh, we didn’t even notice that. It’s a, you know, being driven robotically in terms of, you know, passengers in the vehicle. It’s just like, it just feels like, you know, it was like, oh, it just feels like you’re driving, Paul. It’s, you know, it’s just totally normal.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah. I think a massive thing that’s missing is obviously the, the interactivity of a human. So, I mean, when you use full self driving, you know, you plug in an address and then it’s just quietly doing it and either has to do it perfectly or you take over, which is kind of one solution. But the thing that I always think is, imagine if you had some kind of merging of like voice activated chat, GPT and driving, then you could be more like a driving instructor and be like, hey, what are you doing? Don’t pull out here. Like, why are you doing that? If it could actually answer you and you could talk to it and kind of teach it and say, okay, we’ve pulled into in n out burger. I don’t want to go into the thing. Find a car park, and then you’re actually coaching it. That would be like a whole different level because there are going to be scenarios where the car doesn’t know what you want it to do.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Like, if you’re driving with a friend, often you’ll be like, pull in here. This is my friend’s driveway. How’s the car going to know? So if you could actually chat to it in real time with 5g level type stuff, and it’s like, oh, okay, cool, yeah, I’ll pull in. And then you say, park on the left driveway because such and such is coming home. Do this, that kind of thing, that would just be the next level of awesome, you know, and probably where it needs to go well.

Paul Spain:
And I imagine, yeah, that we will see an element of that, you know, come through sort of future iterations, but it seems we are more at that kind of learner driver level. And in fact, the way my experience when I left my phone behind, you know, after, I was thinking of that later, and I was thinking in a dedicated robo taxi, like the tech, you know, on its, you know, it’s just a standard Jaguar I pace, but with all their stuff added on, so it became a very expensive vehicle. Not the I pace was ever cheap. But, yeah, you got a Jaguar I pace, and then you’ve got, you know, 100 grand worth of sensors and technology on top. But I can imagine in a more future, you know, looking iteration, it’s going to have cameras that are like, hey, Paul, that’s your phone sitting there in the center console or whatever, right? If you’ve left something behind, like, that’s not hard technology to have. So there’s probably a whole bunch of iterations that we’ll see. But to start with, the big issue is getting over the confidence that it’s actually a safe driver. And, yeah, waymo kind of keep that quite easy.

Paul Spain:
With a geofenced area, they just kind of pull over to the side of the road. They’re not going through generally very complicated car parking scenarios that I saw, although they have to go and do that within their own complex. So they must have those capabilities. But I guess we’ll get to those kind of next iterations over the years ahead and let’s see how the technology works. But I’m picking they will. They’ll figure out most of these issues and they’ll be able to maybe look ahead a little bit further at things like a street’s blocked off, or in fact, yesterday there was at the hotel, an entrance to a car park area that had been blocked off. I guess the car park was full, and it started driving towards it. Now, it would have got closer and it would have figured it out and probably turned us around, but I was looking and could kind of see that much quicker than what it did.

Paul Spain:
So there’s a lot of these little nuances that they’re not necessarily show stoppers, but they will and need to be improved over time.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Good. Now, I did say we’re going to talk a little bit about, before we finish up on Voyager, any kind of news or anything to sort of share on what’s going on in the business since we put up recently.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah, we’re just tracking on probably the product we’ve been working on same as last time, Voyager Cloud. So I think I even covered last time I was on VMware, kind of had a thing where they quadruple their pricing. VMware is used for a lot of cloud type stuff, so we’ve developed our own Voyager cloud product on OpenStack and changed a whole lot of things around, but that’s allowed us to remove a whole lot of pricing because VMware was a price component. So Voyager’s now got virtual servers from dollar ten a month, New Zealand based. And yeah, it’s interesting because initially in the early days of cloud, we didn’t really have a cloud product. And obviously Amazon Web services was like the leader and everyone got really excited about it. But we’re seeing more and more cases where I saw an ex post just a couple of days ago that I copied to my staff and it was a company in the US that was, they’d signed up for a whole lot of AWS services and they were spending I think two and a half thousand us dollars a month and it had become this kind of headache. And then they said, oh well I think their hashtag was like cancel cloud or something.

Seeby Woodhouse:
They’d gone back to a dedicated server with rackspace where still a cloud server, it’s still outsourced, it’s still whatever. But then their bill came down to like dollar 250 a month because AWS, they just keep on putting their prices up. They’ve got inflation, they charge for data in and out, they charge for database read accesses and things because it’s so powerful and because it’s so tech people love it. The tech people say, oh, we’ve got to have this thing, give us a credit card and all of a sudden it becomes this huge cost. But the cloud companies, Microsoft, Google, AWS, some of the pricing seems to have got completely removed from reality and local providers like Voyage or others, New Zealanders, umbrella and that kind of thing. Yeah, we seem to be able to deliver really, really good value at really good prices. So we’re starting to get ahead of steam in terms of actually people discovering us and saying, I want to go back to a dedicated tin New Zealand supported and actually the pricing is really good. So I kind of felt a bit dejected for a few years that we would just be wiped out by the big guys at Amazon and even Microsoft.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And everyone’s building data centers in New Zealand that’s closer and closer to home. But we are seeing that their pricing seems to be just kind of removed from reality. So I feel like we can compete and have a really good product to make a really good margin, which is kind of exciting.

Paul Spain:
Again, that’s great. Yeah, that’s really pleasing. And I think it is important to recognize that, yeah, sometimes these technologies are not a perfect fit for every scenario. You still need to have a look and work out what is going to be appropriate. And I think one of the, one of the areas where AWS, Microsoft, Google have sort of, I guess, taken advantage of customers as there’s been such a momentum of moving towards their clouds that we’ve kind of accepted that instead of prices going down as they used to, we used to get more and more for our money with technology, that in some areas of these cloud services it has done what you say in terms of prices have been going up rather than being going down. So whereas with traditional computing infrastructure, if we look back what we got for our money 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and then you flipped around to 1510 five, et cetera, you’re getting more and more and more bang for your BUCKLEY now that’s for, if you own the infrastructure when it comes to the cloud, obviously there’s some areas where that has happened, but things like storage, when it comes to in a lot of online environments, the cost of storage is not going down anywhere near as quickly as the cost of, say, disk storage has come down over the last decade, for instance.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Yeah. And I mean, I sort of feel like the big cloud providers almost get a bit of a free pass as well in that there used to be a saying, I think it was, that you never get fired for choosing IBM. Right. And so you’re basically not going to get fired for saying, oh, we migrated to AWS and then AWS has had an outage. So, you know, Google, AWS and Microsoft have all had pretty giant outages over the last few years and they seem to have them, you know, often each one of them will have more than, more than one a year. Like Microsoft had a couple of big teams outages and things and it’s just like, oh, well, they’re the big guys. And if that’s what the situation is, people sort of accept it. So, you know, Voyager, we had one in the last four years.

Seeby Woodhouse:
We had kind of one large voice outage that lasted about eight years ago, about three years ago that was a result of a denial of service. So not really our fault.

Paul Spain:
Sorry. How long for?

Seeby Woodhouse:
About 8 hours. So it’s quite significant. And we had obviously a lot of customers, you know, pissy, but we’re now spending, you know, large amounts of money with Cloudflare to protect against ddos. That kind of don’t necessarily ever happen, just to make sure that we don’t get that. But denial of services, obviously, it’s not a fault of our own. It’s when a bad actor essentially overwhelms us with a whole lot of malicious traffic. So we were prepared to an extent, but just not with the amount of traffic we received. So it took out our systems for a while.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Anyway, we had a lot of customers leaving and fair enough, customers want 100% uptime. But we also had one small data center outage a couple of years ago and we lost a bunch of customers and then they went to AWS and things. And then those same customers said, oh, well, in the same time, you had basically one voice outage and one data center outage in, like, four years. But since we moved to AWS, we’ve had several outages, but the boss is fine because it’s AWS. So it’s almost like we get, like, a harder run than, like, the big guys. We have to be more reliable, we have to be cheaper just to convince people to spend money with, like, a New Zealand company. Yeah, but that’s fair enough. I mean, people want.

Seeby Woodhouse:
With Internet stuff, they want 100% uptime. And so we’re always kind of improving, but. Yeah, yeah, it does. It does grind my gear a little bit that sometimes you can do better than the big guys, but the big guys get a pass.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, there’s a lot to be said for buying, you know, buying.

Seeby Woodhouse:
I probably sound like a jaded guest now, you know, local.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
But we do appreciate anyone out there. Anyone out there wants to buy local. Yes, we very much appreciate that.

Paul Spain:
There you go. Yeah.

Seeby Woodhouse:
And you can ring me up and abuse me, which you can’t do to, you know.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Well, thanks, everyone. We’ve had a long episode today, so thanks, Seeby, for, you know, for joining us and taking the time. Really appreciate it. If folks are interested, they can look up Voyager NZ.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Voyager.NZ. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Voyager.NZ. So, yeah, if you’re interested in catching a little bit more info. But thanks, everyone, for listening in, of course. Big thank you to our show partners, as always, for their ongoing support of the New Zealand tech podcast and sort of the broader technology and innovation ecosystems here in New Zealand. Thank you to HP, One NZ, Gorilla Technology Spark and 2degrees. All right, well, that’s us for this week. We will catch you again next week on the next episode of the New Zealand Tech Podcast.

Seeby Woodhouse:
Thanks for having me on.

Paul Spain:
Thanks, Seeby. Cheers.