S11E02 – Who Controls Your Data and AI

Episode Summary

The theme of this episode was control: who controls AI, the chips that run it, and the data people hand over. Mike started with the White House’s new AI policy framework, then moved to NVIDIA’s big conference, Apple’s plan to have Google power Siri, and a large breach at the call-center company Telus.

A caller, Charles, steered the middle of the show into power generation, small nuclear reactors and solar in Arizona.

Mike ended with the practical advice he gave for all of it: a different password for everything, two-factor sign-in wherever it is offered, and treating any message that asks for information as fake.

Topics Covered

The White House AI framework

Mike walked through the proposed framework, which he said came out about a day earlier. It covers protecting children (no ads or data collection for under-18 users, plus age verification), fighting AI scams and deepfakes, protecting vulnerable people such as the elderly, treating human-made work as open for AI training, letting data centers generate their own power, regulatory sandboxes for testing, tax breaks and retraining for AI adoption, and a light federal touch that would limit stricter state laws. Mike said he was split on the training-data and state-law points, and liked the sandboxes and retraining ideas. He also mentioned Google testing a system that guesses whether users are under 18, which wrongly flagged some adults.

Scams and the family passcode

Mike repeated his advice from the previous week to keep a family passcode, so that a cloned voice claiming to be a relative in trouble can be checked. If the caller cannot give the passcode, hang up and call other family members. He also said scams can be reported, usually to the FBI.

Data centers, power and chip prices

Mike said letting data centers build their own power plants sounded sensible, but that connecting amateur-run generation to the grid is risky, so he suggested such plants stay off the grid. He then covered NVIDIA’s conference, where the company announced new chips and said it expects sales to climb from $500 billion last year to over a trillion dollars. He worried that one company has near-monopoly control of AI hardware, and said RAM that cost about $30 for 16 gigs two years ago can now cost $500 to $700, with new computers about 40% more expensive than at the start of the year.

Siri, Google and the Telus breach

Mike said Siri is getting a custom version of Google’s Gemini, and wondered what that means for Apple’s privacy stance. He then described the Telus breach, which he said involved about a petabyte of data, including call recordings, taken by a group called ShinyHunters that reportedly demanded $65 million. He said Telus declined to pay, that the attack began in early 2025 and chained from one set of stolen credentials to the next, and that leaked voice recordings could feed AI voice-cloning scams.

Calls

• Charles asked about small modular nuclear reactors and how many solar panels equal one. Mike said he would like to see small reactors but US regulation would need to change, and that matching one would take roughly 5 to 10 acres of solar. Charles and Mike also discussed utility payments for home solar and whether homes near the grid must connect to it.