Join Josh Webb (Hypr NZ) and host Paul Spain as they delve into cybersecurity concerns following the alleged hacking incident on the U.S. Treasury. They explore key trends from CES 2025 including autonomous systems, innovative robotics and AI virtual training, and discuss New Zealand’s pioneering geothermal projects. The episode also covers Northland internet outage and the impact of emerging satellite technology on rural connectivity, the impending U.S. TikTok ban, and Meta’s controversial AI-generated personas and shift to a community-based moderation model and more.
Special thanks to our show partners: One NZ, 2degrees, Spark NZ, HP, and Gorilla Technology.
Episode Transcript (computer-generated)
Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and great to have Josh Webb joining me for this hour. Kind of our first live episode for 2025. So great to see you, Josh.
Josh Webb:
Cheers, Paul. Happy 25.
Paul Spain:
Yes, it’s an exciting year ahead. I hope maybe you can let listeners who don’t know you know where you fit into this big wide world of tech and startups and the like.
Josh Webb:
Yes, I’m a Kiwi American, longtime entrepreneur, long time cto, cpo, done everything, et cetera. Current life is I’m a consultant. I’m actually focused on sort of innovation, new product development and currently run my own consultancy and also work quite closely with a company called Hyper that is very much in the new product development mode. A lot of our stuff we do is sort of top secret stealth mode work. So at the moment I’m doing one of those projects. But yeah, that’s probably about the summary. How does that sound?
Paul Spain:
Yep. Yeah, we won’t get you into any trouble asking you too many difficult questions about things that you’re not supposed to speak of, but maybe at some point in the future you’ll be able to share a little bit more. Course, before we jump in, a big thank you to our show partners to One NZ 2degrees Spark, HP and Gorilla Technology really appreciate their support keeping us on air, as it were. I know that’s a term in 2025, is it? But I guess to a degree. But yeah, I guess how podcasts get transmitted varies depending on where you are and how you like to consume. Right.
Josh Webb:
We were just talking about this, weren’t we? So, yeah, more and more it is actually coming back on the air and my vision for the future is that we’ get rid of cables altogether and everything will be wireless. Because honestly, I think in life cables are still one of the biggest problems that humans have.
Paul Spain:
That could be quite a big debate. So maybe we’ll come back to that when we sort of start talking about communications. But I mean, yes, certainly we’ve got used to so much in terms of wireless communications and so on over the years. Not so far on the wireless power yet, but anyway, so we’ll come back on that one. And I guess delving into, you know, couple of the local stories, there was an Internet outage in the Kaipara district in Northland that impacted a whole bunch of businesses who I guess were probably on with fibre connections. And those things had been impacted after a digger took out a fibre optic cable. So around 2,000 premises, you know, homes and businesses were impacted and I guess this sort of speaks to what you were talking about in terms of, you know, wireless when, you know, when we rely on cables that can be impacted. But I guess to get wireless infrastructure like cell sites and so on, in a lot of cases they’re relying on fibre type backhaul and the like.
Paul Spain:
But yeah, it is a reminder that, you know, I guess to a degree whatever technology you go with can be impacted in one way or another, whether through, you know, a cable getting knocked out, a mobile service getting impacted in some way, a software vendor, you know, having a disruption. But 13 hour outage would have I’m sure been quite a challenge for some of those businesses that are used to having a EFTPOS service and credit card transactions online.
Josh Webb:
Yeah, I kind of looked at this article and thought so the summary of this is a north power digger broke a chorus fibre and the Internet stopped working in dug a wool for a day. Okay. So I mean obviously to local businesses that are impacted, that’s a bit rough and it’s never a good thing. On the other hand, I mean sometimes being disconnected is a good thing. I remember living through Super Storm Sandy and when I lived in lower Manhattan and I spent two weeks with no Internet and no power and no connectivity of any kind and it was one of the greatest times of my life and it just made me think back to and think about this sort of other meta trend that’s going on of disconnection, right? Like actually the younger generations are starting to go, we need to be disconnected, we need to turn that into a thing. And yeah, whilst this was a business story, it actually made me think about that other side of things, of how reliant we are. It’s been 25 years really since widespread Internet became a thing in this country at least. And that’s not that long when, when you think about it, it’s become so part of the furniture now.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And yeah, that’s certainly becoming a more common conversation I’m having too as we look at sort of satellite Internet and Internet being able to get to you now in all manner of different places is well, hey, when do you decide not to use it and is it something you just have on tap all the time because you can or actually, are there some benefits in not being staring at screens and not having connectivity?
Josh Webb:
Is it the exact date? I’d like to hear from the good folks of Dargaville if on January 12th or whatever it was, were any new relationships founded, were any new Friendships made. Did people talk to someone they haven’t talked to for a while? What were the upsides of this?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s a good reminder, isn’t it, that, yeah, good things can come from being disconnected. I spent one particular chunk of the summer break and we got to a lot of different places, but one bay in particular, Banks Peninsula near Christchurch. We were in this bay that you kind of got to through a farmer’s property. And my. Fortunately, my brother has been, I guess, going there for a long time and the farmers let us go and be in a park, upper camper van there and so on. But it was completely, you know, you were completely off grid. And that was a really interesting experience because it’s probably been a while since I’ve been off grid and or away from Internet, you know.
Paul Spain:
So, yeah, certainly away from Internet connectivity and mobile coverage for a number of days now, me being me, I always like to test some technology. So, of course I’d thrown in my backpack a little, you know, mini Starlink, mini dish to try out and just to be able to, you know, check in from time to time. But I very quickly came to the conclusion that, boy, it’s actually good not having any connectivity. And so, yeah, we only plugged it in for short periods of time and I just had some portable batteries that I was able to run it off a sort of USB C type connection. But, yeah, there was one occasion where my brother was either gonna have to go for a bit of a drive up to see the farmers and have a chat to them, or he could just give them a call. So I, I hooked up the Starlink and of course all our mobile networks in New Zealand now you can do calling, IP calling. So as long as you’ve got an Internet connection, your normal texting and mobile calling services just light up as though you’ve got a connection to the cell site. So, yeah, he did that, was very pleased with it.
Paul Spain:
He ended up mentioning it to the farmers who mentioned that their connectivity to this particular bay with Chorus had got impacted at some stage, I don’t know, over the last year or two. And, you know, I don’t know the full story on, you know, how challenging, how long it was going to take Chorus to fix or whether they just didn’t even bother and they just went and bought a Starlink. But their connectivity has switched from having, you know, I guess, some sort of DSL connection maybe, certainly, you know, copper phone line. That’s all happening now over Starlink. So there’s some interesting sort of aspects as well, to. As we get newer types of connectivity, how does delivering broadband to these rural locations and any sort of, you know, telephony connection, how does that, you know, play out? And of course, you know, part of. Part of the cost that telcos, you know, have had to contribute to or do contribute to is, you know, making sure that we can provide a service sort of right across society. But of course, satellite connectivity starts making some of that sort of stuff a whole lot easier.
Josh Webb:
I was a big fan of starlink. I was one of the first adopters in New Zealand, in fact, and we’ve been constantly surprised about how great it is because my place is rural, my place in Wellington. But, yeah, it just makes you think, doesn’t it, how rare it is to hear about people that just don’t have connectivity available these days because it’s just so widespread. Well, it’s great that you managed to take the Internet with you on vacation, but more importantly, did you get a bit of sunshine on your feet, Paul? Get a bit of boating in or got out.
Paul Spain:
Got out in the water. We hauled in nine crayfish on Christmas morning. So you can, you can imagine Christmas lunch was. Yeah, we. We were well spoiled, put it that way.
Josh Webb:
So color me impressed.
Paul Spain:
So, yeah, so that was, it was. It was pretty neat, actually. So, yeah, always nice to, you know, to get that time and time with relatives, time with other friends and so on during that window of time. And, yeah, I think, look, unplugging was, you know, is one of those things that when you get used to being connected in all the time, you realise actually a lot of times it’s better for you. So, yeah, very pleased with that. Now, this kind of dovetails into the news that we had sort of leading up to Christmas, that one NZ and Starlink, you know, turned on their service. So, you know, this just happened. Yeah, bit over a week before the end of the year and, you know, we’re now in this.
Paul Spain:
We’re now in this scenario that if you’re on the right handset and you’re on the one NZ network, then you have that potential of being in one of those areas that has zero cell sites nearby. But of course, there are cell sites flying over now on some of these Starlink satellites. And so the top three phones from Samsung are in the list that have got the. If you’re looking on the One NZ website, I’ve got the Tick as satellite ready and turned on. So that’s the Galaxy Z Flip 6 Z Fold 6 S24 Ultra. And then they’ve got a list down to some reasonably low priced smartphones of the last few years, down to their, their A13 which is, I don’t know, you know, 200 or would have been a 200 handset when it was sold. 2 to 300 is my, my guess anyway. Certainly sub $400 handset.
Paul Spain:
And yeah, those devices are in testing so, so no doubt we’ll be on soon. Oppo got their find x8pro and then they’re in testing with some of their Reno 12 models. No news on the Apple front at the moment, but I think the word that was shared by Musk and Starlink was that basically all phones are going to be able to use this service. So my understanding is this is sort of turned on at a, at a sort of a sim, SIM based level, based on your, your phone or at a connection level. So if you’ve got one of the right phones, you’ll be away.
Josh Webb:
Do you happen to know what the technology is? I don’t know, I’ve never looked into it. But are they using 5G, 4G or they use it. Is there something else that’s deceiving?
Paul Spain:
So, so this is basically from this phone’s perspective it just looks like another phone cell site. I believe they’re 4G and so it looks like a 4G cell site. However, the capabilities that are turned on initially are just for sms and the reason being is there’s not enough of the satellites going around to have that with a cellular capability to have continuous access. So if you think of Starlink and you put out your satellite dish and you know it’s able to pick up, you know, multiple satellites at a time and give you that continuous connectivity. But it’s only a subset, something like, and I’m pulling numbers out of the air here, but it certainly, it’s single digits. You could say, I’m just trying to guess here, maybe it’s 3% of Starlink dishes or Starlink satellites at the moment have that cellular capability. So you know, you might have to wait, you might have to wait, you know, a couple of minutes or so to be in coverage for your message to go. But when it gets the connectivity then the text you’ve sent will send and you know your, your incoming one will, will be received.
Paul Spain:
So yeah, that’s the, that’s the new world. I don’t imagine it’s going to take one NZ too long to start switching on more, more phones under their, their SpaceX page. Yeah, they’ve got those handsets Listed out for folks that are interested and we show notes under Apple. It says more information about eligible iPhones is coming soon. My pick is probably not. We’re not waiting months and months for this sort of stuff to happen. It’ll probably be turned on largely in weeks based on a reply I saw online from Jason Paris at One nz. So yeah, the world forever changes.
Paul Spain:
We get to a point where there’s, you know, virtually no dead spots unless you’re in a cave or underwater etc. Right.
Josh Webb:
I’m in the Apple ecosystem so it’s still not something available to me but I keep, I do keep noticing the little satellite pop up and I know, I can see that it’s available on my handset. I just. It’s only available for emergencies as.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, so that’s the Global Star service that they’ve had. So iPhone 14s are onwards have that capability and that doesn’t use a traditional cell site. So it’s talking to those satellites using a different mechanism but we have a limited capability as far as Globalstar at the moment. Late last year it was announced that Apple are investing or prepaying Global Star. There’s US$1.1 billion to extend or expand their, their coverage which I guess at the moment is used for emergency SOS type features sort of predominantly but is turned on I think in the States now that you can use it to send imessages or text messages if you’re out of coverage there as well.
Josh Webb:
Yeah, there’s sort of big convenience factor, isn’t there? But it seems like right now the main use case is still or the most important use case is sort of emergency situations and I’m stuck in the wilderness and that sort of stuff and eventually it gets to. I’m on holiday and I don’t want to bring my Starlink dish with me for my crayfishing.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, well most people aren’t going to be doing that. Right. That’s the sort of reality. But nice to know you’ve got the connectivity if you need it. I didn’t, you know, I probably could have got away without it but you know, I like to try out and test out these things and it had been a while since I was in a position of wanting to test the Starlink and yeah, it’s pretty impressive technology these days and how quickly you can get one of those little units up and running in that sort of scenario.
Josh Webb:
Oh, it’s almost instant, isn’t it?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, slow. Wow, that’s really easy. Onto other topics. Meta has I guess been Getting their fair share of attention on an international front, first of all. Then they got quite a big backlash after some of these AI identities that they had put online. And I guess they hadn’t really got a whole lot of attention before December or January. And it just kind of, you know, just kind of hit that. Hold on, Meta have been making up these characters.
Paul Spain:
Liv was presented as a proud, black, queer momma, you know, by meta, but actually not really a person at all. It was this generated sort of personality, creating content.
Josh Webb:
If you have a look at these in their world, right, These metabots, I hadn’t been aware of them, I didn’t know that they existed, but when I saw this, I took a look at them and these things are wild. They have really elaborate backstories with families, histories and all sorts of stuff, and they’re floating around on meta, interacting with people. I’m not sure how you get them to interact. I don’t know how you find them. I actually haven’t had that experience as an occasional meta user. But what I do know, and you can see, is that if you ask them about themselves, they’ll tell you about themselves. But if you ask them if they’re real, they’ll straight up tell you, no, no, we’re not real, we pretend. And so they’ll basically say, yep, no, no, I was just lying about that.
Josh Webb:
I made it up, you know, in that sort of Uncanny Valley AI way that we’re probably used to with ChatGPT and Things Now. But it reminded me of that, the Jim Carrey movie Liar, Liar, when he’s just. His character is just moving through the world, is unable to lie, and someone asks him a question, he doesn’t want to answer, answer it. And then he’ll go, ah, it’s like these things are behaving just like that.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? And they were certainly called out in terms of some of the answers that they were giving around. Well, who created you? And they were, you know, trying to come up with something that kind of sounded really good and made it look really good. And then as they were sort of pressed a little bit more, they maybe revealed that, yeah, maybe they weren’t being quite so. Quite so straight.
Josh Webb:
One of their answers was, I was programmed by a team of 100 diverse engineers from around the world. And the truth was, it was. It was just a handful of people in a room. Something along those lines.
Paul Spain:
Yep. So interesting, as we see, the likes of Facebook and others really experiment with the role of AI and sort of experiment in differing directions, some of which just don’t go down very well. And you scratch your head and wonder, you know, why did they think this was, was a, was a good idea? Are there use cases that make more sense now? The other area where Meta’s getting attention is that they’ve decided to throw out the fact checkers. And yeah, this one, it certainly caught, you know, caught me by, you know, by surprise. I know there’s been, you know, varying, you know, admissions across social media companies, you know, X and, and Facebook of like. Well, actually, yeah, we, we, you know, we messed with XYZ content because the US Government told us to, although we weren’t legally obliged to, but we, but we did and you know, we went down these differing tracks. But yeah, it seemed in many ways like, yeah, some wisdom in having some sort of fact checking. But now, yeah, they’ve really admitted that the fact checking processes were prone to a lot of issues and actually, you know, pretty unreliable.
Paul Spain:
And so they’re actually, you know, following the direction that Musk has taken with X. The community notes, you know, functionality whereby it sort of, you know, come comes down to the users of the platform to, you know, to sort of steer a response and, you know, clarify whether content is actually legitimate or not. Do you have a sort of feel of how this will go down? I mean, I kind of like this idea of relying on a broader community if you’ve got a big enough base of users and I guess if they’re in one particular political direction or another, that could influence the outcomes. But in general, you should be able to expect people to be able to guide and point back to kind of factual sources and so on and challenge, I guess, incorrect content. What do you think?
Josh Webb:
It feels like a bit of a movement towards the. It’s the wiki model. Right. Or it’s a little bit more Reddit, like. Right. It’s decentralisation. And in a lot of ways I like that idea. And the alternative is in what they were previously using were, you know, other corporations whose sole job is just we do fact checking and you pay us to do that and we recruit people that fact check.
Josh Webb:
And okay, they might, they might do a good job of that, but there are always many, many motivations in business. Right. And so when you give this back to the community, you do remove some of those intrinsic motivations and potentials for bias. So I do like that aspect of it. It makes me wonder if the metabots are streamed into any of that community fact checking too.
Paul Spain:
Right.
Josh Webb:
Do they get a go as well?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, they’ve deleted them now. Right.
Josh Webb:
So yeah, yeah, but you know, I do know and from working in the media industry in the past, any kind of moderation is a really hard job to do, to do satisfactorily for everyone, it’s hard to please everyone and moderation, particularly fact checking at scale is really, really hard. So yeah, it’s going to be a good experience to experiment, to watch and see how it goes. But yeah, my gut feeling is it probably could be an improvement over sort of paid third parties.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, I think it’s going to be one of those wait and see type things. There’s certainly, as with any of these sort of changes, there’s a backlash. Right. And so there’s been a lot of negative coverage around the change to date, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see if in 612 months that actually, you know, it sort of settles and people are reasonably accepting of the change. I think the reality is though, there’s never gonna be a perfect scenario and you’re never gonna please everyone. Right. Because we all gonna have differing viewpoints on what’s right, what’s the truth or not and so on and who’s speaking rubbish and who’s not. And you know, we’ve seen this with some of the fallout in the UK where the Prime Minister, Starmer, and he’s sort of been called out by Musk and there’s a lot of backwards and forwards and it’s like, I don’t know who’s telling the truth on some of that, you know, some of these things it’s, you know, pretty, pretty, you know, heavy topics of, of abuse in the uk but I guess over time we’ll get some reality there.
Paul Spain:
But it’s kind of, it seems like a lot of finger pointing and so on at the moment. And yeah, the technology’s not necessarily able to solve all the issues.
Josh Webb:
I guess there’s potential for gaming the system in either case. Right. So you get rid of the companies, you give it to the community and then you can, you can gain the system in various ways. So I mean, I’m pretty sure the meta bots aren’t in there but there are other, you know, sort of concepts that people believe more or less in or you know, bot farms and you know, political motivated, you know, sort of sentiment bombing if you like. You know, you quite often look at a site that’s covered in reviews and go, yeah, but are these real? Are they bot farmed? Are they, has there been some manipulation going on? So yeah, you’d have to rely on the ability to filter those to real and reliable community notes. Or if you’re gonna rely on community notes right now, in either case, I guess you’re somewhat relying on Meta to do a good job of making sure that’s happening.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. That the system works and yeah, I don’t know how you deal with the different biases that, that people have. I guess we’ll see how that one plays out. Just one more on the New Zealand front is we saw news through that there’s a new web based tool to help greenhouse growers switch to geothermal heating. And this is, I think it’s not expected to launch until March 2026. So it’s still quite some way off. But it seems to make sense with geothermal which is obviously being used to generate a chunk of our electricity in New Zealand and it’s one of the renewable considered a renewable source. So yeah, I’m kind of curious to hear a little bit more around that technology when it comes through and maybe we’ll hear a bit more closer to the time.
Paul Spain:
But being able to tap into that geothermal to heat greenhouses, I guess in scenarios where they need a bit more heating, then that sounds like it would make a lot of sense for New Zealand. We’ve got that amazing situation that so much of our electricity is coming from renewables anyway. And if you can just tap into the heat directly and I’m not sure of the technical realities of how they achieve this, but if you’re able to tap into the geothermal heat directly for those greenhouses, that sounds pretty good.
Josh Webb:
When I first saw this article, I immediately thought it must be some kind of a scheme where you’re just trying to funnel generated energy to different places. But it does appear at least this is a legitimate attempt to use physics to transfer heat directly from the geothermal source to the greenhouse, which obviously needs to be somehow co located nearby. And like immediately where my mind went, and I admit my mind is not normal, was like what kind of brand names would you put on these things? Like if you were growing tomatoes on the side of a volcano, would they be volcano Martos or would you have geopotatoes? Or like where are you going to actually take this? Because that’s like ultimately you’re going to take them into a supermarket and sell this, right?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good point. There’s some interesting potential there from a branding perspective. Now right at the end of the year, over the break we saw news that the new from the U.S. treasury saying they were hacked by China and a major incident and by that sort of talking about state sponsored hackers having broken into the US Treasury Department’s technology systems in December, that they were able to access the computers of some of their staff and apparently unclassified documents. We just kind of keep hearing these stories, right? It doesn’t seem to stop in terms of issues from, from a cyber perspective. And yeah, it does seem that those that are being attributed to, you know, to nation states and, you know, usually a reasonably sort of small list of them, you know, is continuing. So yeah, I think it’s just a reminder, you know, for us all that no one’s completely immune when you’re getting entities like the US Treasury Department getting hit. And of course we’ve seen most of the big, well, probably all of the big software and technology players get impacted at times, but I know challenging for New Zealand, where we’ve often got sort of smaller firms that don’t have the same sort of levels of, of budget.
Paul Spain:
But it is still really important that we consider these things because there’s a whole range of impacts from those sort of nation state ones to those that are being held to ransom or having bank accounts impacted and the like.
Josh Webb:
Yeah, this appears to me to be yet another one of those sort of articles, you see, where the gist of it was, America says China did this, China said we didn’t do it. And that’s the article, right. There isn’t much more to it, but it sort of really makes you a bit frustrated that, well, we don’t know that. There’s probably no way to know the truth. What do we do with this information? Right? Do we just keep listening to the news like someone’s making some ad money on the fact that we read that article, we both read this article and it said nothing, basically. The BBC said basically nothing in an article. Great, they made some money. Is there a cybersecurity risk for companies like the us? Of course.
Josh Webb:
But how do we know what to do with this information? Our attention is just being farmed.
Paul Spain:
Look, I think it’s helpful that we know, but you have to also recognise that many of these sorts of things that are reported unnecessarily, backed up with evidence and so on. So yeah, you have to weigh those things up. Of course, a lot of things that happen from a cyber perspective are never shared publicly because there’s a lot of embarrassment that often goes with these things. And probably anybody working in this field will be aware of scenarios and, and cyber incidents that have taken place that haven’t gained any kind of media attention and, you know, largely because, you know, those involved aren’t wanting any attention. So, you know, it’s important, I think, to keep things on the radar. But, yeah, I take the point, too.
Josh Webb:
So I’ve been a user of one of those sort of cybersecurity tools for a very, very long time, and one of the tools I use provides an alert whenever there’s a hack for an account that you’re associated with. So it’s part of a password management system, and most people don’t use this kind of system, but it would blow a lot of people’s minds how often this happens. And it will specifically tell me when an attack happens on any account I have. And I look through the list every month or two and go, okay, huge, huge, huge, huge. Like giant brands, global brands, sites that everyone uses. Hacked passwords leaked, they’re all over the Internet. They’re on the dark web. I get little alerts.
Josh Webb:
Most people are just unaware, but they like. There are daily, daily hacks of sites that everybody uses and our information is out there.
Paul Spain:
Yeah.
Josh Webb:
So, I mean, there’s no one. It’s no wonder that nation states want to get in on the action, too. Allegedly.
Paul Spain:
Yeah.
Josh Webb:
But yes, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a big concern that gets very little attention because frankly, it’s a little bit boring and hard to understand and kind of esoteric for the average human, I think.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. We should, really should talk about ces, what used to be known as Consumer Electronics Show. Not an event I have been going to the last, the last bunch of summers, but I, I think I was last in Las Vegas. Someone was messaging me asking me if I was going to be at ces, and I said, oh, I’ve already been in Las Vegas very recently. Not going back that soon, but it was certainly a regular event on my calendar. These days I tend to enjoy the summer a little bit more and watch from afar, but lots and lots of announcements and news and varying bits and pieces and a whole lot of reporting on online around it. Some of the things that sort of caught my attention, just the ongoing increase in sort of autonomous systems of all sorts, you know, with robotics and the like. Sounds like, yeah, masses of robots at CES now compared to, you know, they were around from a robotic.
Paul Spain:
What was it? I think there was a machine that, you know, made you some food and would cook it and, you know, do the, do the whole process, you know, going back maybe six or seven years and we’ve seen an increase of those sort of things. John Deere with their farming equipment and tractors were out in force. And yeah, we’ve certainly seen the world of farming sort of move to a lot more, you know, automation. And, you know, we’ve got a number of these automated farms, you know, operating in New Zealand. And I guess this will, this will continue. And what can be automated, you know, keeps increasing. So, yeah, interesting to see that. The usual TVs, of course, and it’s usually sort of CES where whatever the newest latest thing is kind of tends to get announced.
Paul Spain:
When it comes to sort of TVs and you know, a lot of other entertainment. I think the, you know, video cassette, the DVD and so on, they were all sort of launched at CES over the years.
Josh Webb:
There’s a lot of little incremental changes in the TV and the consumer electronics. But it strikes me that some of the robotic stuff seems to be where a lot of the hot action is happening at the moment. And the definition of robot is sort of starting to shift, I’m noticing, just like the definition of AI is gradually shifting into the future. And now we, you know, I heard an argument a while back that when a dishwasher was invented, it was considered a robot. Yeah, a dishwashing robot. And now actually a lot of the robots that I saw on the CES coverage were around domestic services. So doing laundry is quite a hot topic at the moment. So there’s laundry cleaning and folding bots happening and also just around generally cleaning up some of the, you know, robotic vacuums have been a thing for the last decade or so and now they’re starting to get robotic arms that will actually pick up socks and move things out of the way.
Josh Webb:
And that was always one of the biggest problems. So my, my Roomba used to just, you know, get, get caught up on a rug and now they can sort of solve these. So, yeah, we’re getting to the point where they’re, they’re beyond experimental and starting to become truly useful labor saving devices, which is the dream. And then one day, you know, sometime, hopefully soon, we’re going to get this Tesla Optimus bot and it’s going to do absolutely anything. And then, you know, we can sit back and, you know, play PlayStation for more hours per day.
Paul Spain:
Right.
Josh Webb:
Like that’s the dream.
Paul Spain:
Yeah. And different people have different dreams. And I saw somebody, did some, saw some video footage of the robotic companion or what. One headline said the girlfriend robot from ces. It just, it just looked, yeah, like something, looked like something out of, out of, out of your nightmares. It was, you know, quite, quite weird. But we’re, we’re certainly what it is showing is a, is a further, you know, step along this sort of continuum between reality and science fiction. And we’re getting, you know, we’re getting closer and closer to, you know, all those TV programs and movies that we’ve seen where there, there are characters that, you know, are supposedly robots, but they just, they’re obviously just acted by a person and so on.
Josh Webb:
Bearing in mind one person’s nightmare is another person’s dream, though, Paul, you know, some people are waiting for these things and I think there’s very legitimate reasons that some people can benefit from having these things, even if they are purely there for, you know, pleasure purposes or else. There was another one in there called the Mirumi Bot. I don’t know if you saw that one, but this was actually my personal favorite thing that I saw in the CDS coverage. It’s, it’s actually just a tiny little fluffy robot that you attach to your bag or, you know, sort of. The demo was showing it sitting on a handbag and it literally does nothing apart from just sort of look around and sort of occasionally acknowledge people in the room. It’s just a little robotic doll, but it’s so cute and fun. And I thought if I was going to have any, I don’t need a more high resolution TV or a better whatever, but I would totally go for.
Paul Spain:
That thing and just pure, pure fun.
Josh Webb:
No, it literally says in the marketing, this thing has no purpose.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay. Love it.
Josh Webb:
And I like the honesty.
Paul Spain:
I mean, this is the reality, right? I mean, if you look at a lot of the stuff that comes through at a show like ces, if you were to look at it in the light and I said, do I really need this? Then you know, the very large majority of it is going to be no, you don’t. But could it make my life a little bit better, a little bit more interesting? Gives me something else that’s helpful then. Yeah, those things come through. But one of the things I saw on one of the lists was the TVs. And you’re looking through and you’re looking at the spec changes and the 8k this and what’s happening with the OLED panel and the refresh rates and these bits and pieces. Yeah, you just kind of look at that and you’re like, yeah, these would be really, really nice TVs to have. But yeah, in the scheme of it, it’s not gonna make that much of a Difference. But what we have seen at ces, I guess over the last sort of, yeah, maybe decade has been a move, you know, towards often things that are less the sort of small consumer electronics.
Paul Spain:
And this is probably partly why they removed Consumer Electronics show as the name and just called it ces. You do have things like the autonomous tractors, you know, we had the, you know, vertical takeoff and landing, you know, what were going to become autonomous taxi, you know, air taxis that haven’t quite landed yet, you could say, you know, and all other sort of manner of vehicles and autonomy. So, yeah, still a really interesting show and yeah, lots and lots of things to look at online. One thing I saw one of the BBC reporters talking about was a smart mirror that you could look at. I guess it was kind of a mirror TV kind of combined bit of AI. It would have a look at you and then give you commentary around what products would improve your look and how you were looking and so on. Again, I’m not sure that anybody needs that, but the comment was that certainly for, I think this particular reporter was, oh, this was going to save them money because it was suggesting alternative product to whatever product that they were using on their face and it was going to be half the price. I’m not sure that you necessarily need a smart mirror to do that.
Paul Spain:
I would think that there’s, you know, your phone can see you and can, you know, tap you into services without having a smart mirror. But I guess, you know, people are going to keep coming up with ideas and probably most of the things that we see at CES will, the new edgy things at least, you know, will at some point get incorporated somewhere into some technology, even if they themselves don’t end up getting any traction. Right.
Josh Webb:
There’s a market for that smart mirror somewhere and you never quite know where it’ll be. Well, one of the things I noticed and a lot of the media outlets do sort of a top 10 or pick a winner and things. And there was a couple of interesting winners on the list. One was sort of an accessibility device. A smart cane for blind people was the winner of, I think it was the N gadget one. And, and CNET’s Roundup actually had the number one as sort of Nvidia’s new Cosmos AI model, which is interesting because obviously it’s not really a consumer oriented product at all. It’s actually an AI model that is used for training AI. So if you’re familiar with how AI learns, you know, they’re thinking, we can’t have millions of robots running around the world, making mistakes to figure out how to operate in the world, because it would cause all sorts of problems and people would keep falling over them.
Josh Webb:
So what they’ve done, they’ve built this model which robots can basically virtually go into, to learn how to operate in the real world. So they’re training people, training a robot to use the real world by simulating the real world, which is both completely nonsensical and very sensible at the same time, but very, very interesting. Right. It’s. It’s synthetic data, but really on steroids.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yep. Yeah. And, yeah, that is one of the. One of the things I think we’ve seen from Wave out of the uk, which, you know, founded by Kiwi, who are doing the sort of the autonomous driving. And they’ve been, you know, they’ve been you know, generating, I guess, rather than having to. Well, they don’t have the advantage Tesla has, of millions of vehicles on the road. So, yeah, they’re using AI to kind of generate and come up with all the scenarios for them to test on. So, yeah, I think quite a bit of attention on Nvidia and what they’re up to.
Paul Spain:
And, you know, it’s fair to say they’re doing incredibly well.
Josh Webb:
Yeah. I’d love to actually spend a bit of time being a gamer inside this version virtual world that they’ve come up with, because I can imagine if an AI generated this model, we’re getting super meta here. Right. But if an AI generated this model, does it think about all the annoying things that humans will do just to troll robots? People are going to boot it and see if it falls off a cliff whenever, like, did they make a model that does that? Not sure. If they didn’t do that, then all these robots are going to get booted off cliffs as soon as they start permeating society.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, yep. You mentioned this sort of picking up socks sort of robot before, and that one is interesting because it’s, you know, some of these things are really the start of something. Right. I think it’s Roborock, who, you know, one of the big brands for the autonomous vacuum cleaners that’s got this little arm that comes up and can pick up the socks and, you know, put them in place. At the moment, that just seems largely sort of pointless. But you can imagine a few generations down and this technology will actually get to a point where it’s like, oh, that actually could be, you know, it could do enough to be somewhat useful.
Josh Webb:
You’re totally right. It’s the first Darwinian mutation Signal towards a future. Well, depending on what you believe in of course, Paul. But the, the, yeah, the natural conclusion of that evolution is obviously any robot can do anything that involves hands and movement and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, if you look at the very clumsy robotic arm now, it’s like it can’t pick up much more than a sock because it’s not very strong. But it’s not going to take long before people are hacking these roombas and I think doing the Robo wars style battles with them. Yeah, because those, those arms could, could take it. They’d be rolling each other over and beating each other.
Josh Webb:
I’m in a strange like anti robot violent mood today apparently.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, you could have Robot wars, couldn’t you? Between your, your vacuum cleaners and see who, who can make the. Who can make the toughest. Yes. No, yeah, really interesting to sort of. Yeah. Delve in and see some of these things that are going on before we wrap up. U. S.
Paul Spain:
Supreme Court. Do you think they’re going to uphold this ban on Tick tock? Which would mean because apparently they, they haven’t got any sort of, you know, deal behind the scenes to sell Tick tock in the, in. In the US that tick tock will be banned on I guess the. The 19th of January US time. There’ve been number of kind of takes of this from, you know, when Trump was last president, you know, he was suggesting something like that. This kind of mostly has, you know, really taken place under Biden’s watch. This, you know, this current look to ban TikTok but Trump has kind of pushed back a little bit on it. But it’s supposed to come in the day before he’s, you know, the inauguration.
Paul Spain:
So. Yeah. What are you thinking on this? I’m really stuck as to. Because there’s been so much backwards and forwards as to whether this will actually kick in. But worth remembering that India’s ban on TikTok has been in place for years now and largely content from India stopped on TikTok years ago.
Josh Webb:
Yeah, a lot of this hinges on the definition of foreign adversaries. So the law in question actually sort of defines a foreign adversary. So if US Is considering China to be a foreign adversary, this is a platform under Chinese control. And so the whole question is are they really a foreign adversary? By the letter of the law, apparently this is, you know, the pundits are saying this is likely to take effect and the whole case is filled with claims of espionage and harassment and there’s all sorts of language being used in There. But I think it’s actually a lot of those things are sort of like, yeah, maybe. But actually what this is about is attention control and what, you know, a lot of the arguments against TikTok are around how the algorithm is subtly different in different places.
Paul Spain:
Places.
Josh Webb:
So if you’re in the U.S. you get a slightly different experience than if you were in China. And it’s, and it’s tending towards something that you may consider to be propaganda, like mind control. Psyops.
Paul Spain:
Right, like, yeah, well, people spend hours staring at a screen.
Josh Webb:
Hours.
Paul Spain:
And you’ve got an algorithm that’s kind of controlling what they see. And, and we’ve seen some pretty harsh consequences of that in varying ways, but it’s really, really hard to monitor and to know the full story because every individual sees their own unique take. The algorithm’s gonna give you something different than what it would give me or anybody else. And you don’t understand and know those subtleties. And I guess we’ve got markets like China, where TikTok is from, that largely have banned social media platforms from other countries. Now they’ve got some scale and there’s a whole lot of other aspects that play into it.
Josh Webb:
So the real question is, is there intention behind the control of the algorithm or is it being generated by our behavior? Because they’re very different scenarios. And I think the, the implication from the US and the law is there is intention behind it and there is political motivation behind it. Whereas you might also argue, actually perhaps this is happening because the way we behave in this culture or country, whichever one it is, is causing the algorithm to skew in the favor of this, because that’s what we happen to look at. Now actually, either case you could argue is really bad outcome. Right. Like, neither of these are good, good, good cases. But yeah, the intention question is the key thing. And in fact, if we said, okay, banned, no one can access it and assume nobody knows how to use a VPN and nobody will use it.
Josh Webb:
We replace it with something else. Does the algorithm just drift back in the same direction and then, and then is that perhaps that’s the only way to prove conclusively whether there’s manipulation happening?
Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think, look, I think it’s easier said than done. If they do disappear, it’s certainly going to change some people’s habits and it will give a lift to more than likely US properties from the likes of Meta. Although there has been some backlash online from people, people saying, well, you know, go and use these other Chinese platforms and use those and go and Start buying stuff from them and let’s get behind and let’s show our dislike. Let’s support China.
Josh Webb:
So where does TikTok sit currently? Do you know, in terms of rankings globally for social media?
Paul Spain:
I think they’re probably number one in social media and in a lot of.
Josh Webb:
Markets if you ignore China, are they still number one?
Paul Spain:
Well, they’re not actually in China under the TikTok brand anyway. They’ve got a whole nother product. But I think yeah in terms of the social media platforms and this is also that blurring between sort of. Is YouTube social media? Is TikTok? What are the things that define social social media? And you know, we heard about this with say Australia where they will, you know. Well they put in their ban for it’ll take some time to sort of go, to go live but they’re moving to, you know, to block social media for everyone under 16. So yeah, if these, you know. Yeah. So depending on where you draw those lines, depends, was it really social media? Is it video? Well, you know, what’s, you know.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, how do you, how do you draw those lines? And we get, you know, we get platforms like you know, telegram that come, you know, come up as sort of social media because of how they get used, not necessarily just for sort of one to one, you know, messaging. And so there are some sort of blurry lines I guess around some of these, some of these tools that effectively all do fall into that sort of bigger world of social media.
Josh Webb:
So in a world where I don’t know, every say 16 to 28 year old TikTok is it right? It’s your life along with a couple few other things but TikTok’s up there now if TikTok goes away and I know that a lot of the other platforms are, you know, emulating TikTok like features in order to, you know, potentially fill that gap. Where do you think the critical mass goes that are currently all the TikTokers and by proxy should I be investing in it? Paul, this is not advice.
Paul Spain:
Well, yeah, I’m curious. I mean I’ve just asked ChatGPT around sort of rankings and I’m not sure that I believe their data. And it also depends on how you look at because you can slice and dice data in a lot of, lot of different ways. TikTok coming up number three in Australia, number four in the US and according to this, number six in New Zealand. At the top of these lists is Facebook. But I don’t think that Facebook has the engagement that it once did. So although you, you know, you’ve got, you know, Instagram or, sorry, TikTok style content across. Yeah.
Paul Spain:
Facebook, Instagram, I guess you’ve got it on X. Even LinkedIn now is doing these sort of short form vertical videos. Right. As well as, you know, YouTube and so on. So yeah, does it matter which one is number one and which one will be number one? I mean, I would pick that probably Instagram or YouTube are likely to sort of gain the, you know, gain the most in terms of benefit. But I mean these particular lists I’m looking at that have, that have come from chat GPT. Interestingly, YouTube is listed on the US list but I’m not seeing it on the, on the other list. So how, how Chat GPT actually came up with, with, with, with the results.
Paul Spain:
Yeah, is. And it kind of looks like that the US list is really based on some global numbers and of course that data probably actually isn’t necessarily accurate. Right. Because there’s a bunch of places that show different data and a lot of the platforms don’t consistently publish the data. Yeah. You’ve got other tools that try and estimate it.
Josh Webb:
But it sounds like at any rate, your advice is keep investing in faang.
Paul Spain:
I’m not giving any investment advice today. I think we’ve got an episode coming up with Darcy Ungaro from NZ Everyday Investor. Maybe we can ask him a little bit around some of those tech investments. But I mean, I tend to think from an investing perspective you want to look out as far as you can and put on your futurist hat and think, well, what are the trends and the changes that are going to really make a big difference over, over the long term and that’s actually really hard to do unless you’ve got particular knowledge in an area. And then of course things can come in. Not that you can invest in TikTok, but if you could, I think there’d probably be a lot of Kiwis who would have invested because it’s got such high uptake and people spend such a large amount of time on it. But yeah, an event like this can make a huge difference to their viability.
Josh Webb:
Well, I’ve got a personal view on this which is I’m waiting for the decentralisation and open sourcing of all of the social media we do now. We keep seeing little movements towards it. We keep seeing like, oh well, you can try mammoth, you can try this, you can try that. None of them really get traction for more than a few weeks and a couple of hot media cycles and then we Sort of end up falling back to whatever. Now when is this going to happen? Is the question is bytedance the moment that spurs a movement? Is it another few years from now? Surely it has to happen because we’re still in this very ad driven, the user is the customer world and at some point something has to give. But when does that happen? I would love to see this being a moment where we go, can we just, can we just get rid of this big social media world? Right. It’s been long enough. It’s been 20 years now.
Josh Webb:
I remember you and I were friends, Paul, on Friendster, I think in the 90s maybe or the early 2000s, something like that. Yeah, yeah, early 2000s, pre Facebook, we’ve been through Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3. Now when do we get to this decentralized model? And I don’t care if it’s blockchain based, open sourced, you know, like maybe Meta’s bots can go and do that since they’re out of jobs.
Paul Spain:
We will see that. Yeah, the future typically doesn’t land exactly as we imagine it, but often some variation thereof. So we’ll keep watching this space. Yeah, well, great, great to have you on, on the show again. Great to, great to catch up and always interesting insights from you Josh. You’ve always been something of a futurist and thinking ahead and joining up dots and coming up with things that others might not see. So yeah, great to chat of course. A big thank you to our show partners to One NZ, 2degrees Spark, HP and Gorilla Technology.
Paul Spain:
Before we finish up, anything else you wanted to share around, sort of work you’ve been doing or how people can get in touch with you and so on.
Josh Webb:
I’m mostly working for a company called Hyper Hypr and we’re a consultancy, we doing innovation, we’re doing new product development and anyone who’s doing that in the corporate space can come and work with Hyper. We’re a really talented, amazing team of people that move big rocks really fast basically. So that’s what we’re doing. Yeah, it’s an exciting time. At the moment I’m sort of forbidden to talk about some of the work we do because a lot of it’s sort of top secret new stuff that is in stealth mode. But yeah, right now we’re having a lot of fun playing with sort of a hybrid between hardware and software. So it’s a very interesting project and for someone that spent a lot of their life purely in the software world, starting to get to play with some, some real physical manifestations and all of the interplay between those. So, yeah, that’s, that’s been a good time for me lately.
Josh Webb:
That’s. That’s life today.
Paul Spain:
Excellent. Excellent. Oh, well, thanks for joining us. And, yeah, we’ll look forward to what comes up throughout the year. Thanks, everyone, for listening in. If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions of content you’re keen for us to focus on, you know, definitely get in touch. Would would love to hear from you. So if you’ve been listening to the audio, you know, look us up on your favorite social media platform and follow us in those locations to get access to to live streams and future videos.
Paul Spain:
All right, thanks, everyone. We’ll catch you on the next episode. See ya.