SPEAKER_01 0:18

Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Welcome to my Talking Talk from Walla Walla, Washington. Actually, we're live from what's called the Rocks District or the Rocks AVA, uh, which is near Milton Freewater. Oh wow. I've never heard of that before. Yeah, and the reason it's called that, if you see look closely, you see all the rocks down there.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

You know how you've probably heard, you know, like uh vines, if they struggle, yeah, and they can get more concentrated, and stuff like that. And so this whole AVA down here is rocky.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

I'll get close to some of the rows looking the other way, and you can kind of see, and you're like, that's like those are yeah, those are really dense vines, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

They really are. Especially think about this. We're still in June. And uh so they're getting a lot of heat. You know how like um so let's see here. I'm gonna angle down, and you'll see the giant rocks. And so my god, the roots are having to bore through these rocks to uh to get in there. It's not like it's some kind of nice soft soil or something, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah, so what are these? Uh is this like Grenache and Pinot Pinot?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

There are some there actually is some Grenache here, absolutely. There's Grenache, they've got some Syrah here.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Syrah, yeah. Okay, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Yeah, yeah. This particular, I'm at Roti, R-O-T-I-E, uh, and they they're they kind of focus on Rhone style.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah. So well, that's that's what they do in the Rhone. The you know, the southern Rhone, that's the whole style because the the um terror yeah, uh the ground. Yeah, the terror is uh yeah, it's rocky, like big boulders like Chateau Duftapop, it's all like friggin' gigantic.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Absolutely. You're so man. That's beautiful. Oh my god. Well, you know, that's like looks like a jungle, dude. That's like some serious, serious, serious, healthy vines. Are they old or are they pretty young?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

They look like they're I think they're younger than yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't think there's I don't think there's anything in this rock district that's too old. But uh yeah, it's it's nice to be out here, nice weather, and uh tasting a lot of wines, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Yeah, yeah. So maybe we should call ourselves IoT IoT wine talk.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

It's IoT wine talk, exactly, exactly. Well, but hey, hey, do you use IoT with vines? Yeah, what do we do? Is this I mean, how is this different than any other agriculture?

SPEAKER_01 3:09

You know, not I mean it's measuring uh super precision.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Yeah, it's in fact I think I think I think IoT actually is how you bring precision agriculture to life. Yeah, I don't think there's any other way to do it. You're so you're you're measuring temperature, soil moisture, uh nutrients.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Everything, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

There's something called uh NPK, nitrogen, blah blah blah, potassium, whatever. And um, and the reason you care about that, you know, sometimes we give too much to the to our when we're growing crops, you know, like uh, you know, like people talking about over-fertilizing. Yeah. And fertilizer can run into run off into rivers. That's that's that juju. It's not good. And um and so when you monitor the soil nutrients like NPK and other things, it's back to that precision agriculture. It says, Oh no, I don't need to over-fertilize, or no, I'm good to go here. I'll be precise in how I fertilize rather than just randomly spraying everything, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Um, and then the same with the water, right? Um, you know, precisely when my crops need water, when my vines need water, and how much, and then as soon as they're good to go, we're gonna shut that stuff up.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Hey, you know what? Uh uh, we can see a lot better now. Yeah, uh, yeah, because you were really really jittery, and all of a sudden yeah, your uh upland quality got a hell of a lot better. That's cool.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Yeah, I think my I switched to 6G.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

You did? 6G, wow, incredible. You hear you heard it here first. We're the first this the first podcast of 6G. 6G, official.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah, this is official. So how is how is Denmark? How is TM?

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Uh yeah, it's it's a great show. Um you know, you always learn something, and it's always great to get a sense of the pace of adoption and uh you know actual deployments of all flavors of AI, you know, where where these guys are on their journey toward uh autonomous networks and stuff. So uh yeah, it's it it's good. Uh and you know, the the cool thing is is it's so dense and it's all about uh innovation because they have these catalyst programs and stuff that are really well done. Yeah. Um uh and yeah, had uh uh uh had a run-in with uh tons of companies and um talked about uh I actually presented on open or what is it uh network APIs, which was funny. Yeah, my my my first slide. Uh so they have this weird format there. You have to you have to present stuff in 15 minutes, and I wanted to cram all the stuff, basically 15 slides into 15 minutes. Oh my god, which was not what I should do. And so I was like I was like frantically trying to stuff all the stuff, all these talking points into into 15 minutes, and I went, I ended up running like three minutes over. Oh but you know, like the whole time I've like, you know, tried to rush all my talking points. And um uh anyways, uh it was well received. And uh I my first my first uh what do you call it uh slide was um you know rule number one in innovating on network APIs, stop talking about APIs. And oh by the way, you don't monetize APIs. No one no one buys APIs.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

But people, but you know what? I remember the early days of this whole API thing, and even prior when they had proprietary APIs, yeah, there were mobile operators who said, if I give you, if if you're a subscriber to my network and I give you a little app that's a button, and maybe you're at a football game and you need 10 minutes of more bandwidth, you're gonna push this button and I'm gonna charge you 10 bucks. Yeah, I'm gonna get I'm gonna give you insane bandwidth for a little bit. Stuff I remember I just remember ideas like that floating around, you know? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. And that's that's like right now, like right now. Like right now, we're lucky because I have 6G on this new phone from the future. But if I was a normal human being, I might say, gosh, I'm in the middle of nowhere. I need you to move a satellite uplink in my direction right now. I'm gonna push a button and call it API that has a satellite aim at me and uh and some other weird stuff I'm making up, and we're gonna get good connectivity.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Even though uplink is inherently uh crappy for satellite, but yeah, no, I I get your point. Maybe even downlink, but um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

What if we start a new company that's all about uplink performance, man? You know what, dude. I'm seeing talking about it. I know so many I'm seeing so many startups coming out of nowhere in the last two months that are space-based data centers, and not even not even talking about Google. I'm talking about random people. Like, yeah, we're gonna do it. And people are like, Yes, how much money can I give you? And so it turns out you just say we're doing it, and we're doing it, and you know, here's here's where you need to wire the money to our Cayman bank account.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Yeah. Well, you know, it it's like with physical AI and robotics, everyone started jumping in as soon as the buzzword got hot. It's you know, it's like domain names, man. Yeah, it's like people just uh you know trying to get in, get their domain name, and try to turn around and sell it for like three thousand bucks or some shit like that, you know. It's it this is not how you build an economy. You know what I'm saying? It it's just it's just all of this is just turning into a joke where people are basically just trying to make names off of domain, you know, money off of domain names. You know, it's like, I mean, you know, it's cool. Yeah, sure. You know, if something like uh uh you know a domain like a name like if you're uh if you're first, you're last is a good one.com is a good one.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

I love uh things like that. El Diablo, it's like a Mexican flying chicken, you know, things like that. That's all good. Did you see my friend Oxel? Oxel? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Oh, dude, dude, dude. I the approach these guys have is just so cool. So you know they're handing out little badges. So it's Pega Systems, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Maybe like workflow management, BPM, uh, you know, like analytics and data stuff, but mostly like BPM automate based automation. And um it was so funny because they they were handing out bad uh these little uh pins that said no tokens.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

I love it.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

No tokens. Oh dude, I was like, oh my god. Then, you know, these guys like uh they proceeded, you know, I dropped by their booth and they proceeded to hog up like a lot of my time, but they were so excited to just you know get in my face and tell me about their approach. And it's so interesting, man. Their whole approach is uh how to auto how to get to a automation configuration that gets you as close to autonomous as possible, where the agent uh is positioned to burn the least amount of tokens, deliver reliability, and you know, for whatever task. But it's like literally taking a whole process flow, looking at decisions that need to be made, determining, okay, can an LLM or a uh agent, you know, uh Gen AI driven agent uh be valuable here, and then configure it in a way where it's going to do some valuable stuff without burning a ton of tokens. And so their whole value proposition is gonna be going to the CFO and say, oh yeah, by the way, we we you know, our tool uh helps you figure out where the optimal spots to deploy agents, AI agents, with uh the goal of balancing benefit with minimizing the amount of tokens and risk of like having these things go off the rail and burning a shit ton of tokens and then you ending up with this gigantic bill. And I was thinking, dude, that is so cool. And you know, you have to design your product to do that. Do you know what I'm saying? If you take this whole token maxing philosophy, you cannot do what these guys do. And so I told them, dude, this is exactly what the this is what innovating with agentique AI is gonna look like very, very next, you know, this year. Because people are gonna start crapping their pants, figuring out because no one else has figured it out. They they haven't taken that discipline. So, anyways, really cool stuff, man.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

It's kind of token maxing, TJ maxing.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

TJ Maxing, yes, find cheap tokens, use tokens.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

B suck, C stock, no premium tokens.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

You know, or Rick Rick Viato came up with a follow-up video to his, you know, he had the one in March where he's like, wait a second, I know what's gonna happen with this whole token AI thing. This this is the same thing that destroyed the music industry. Yeah, and then yeah, and he said a follow-up and he goes, I was right. He's like, this isn't gonna work. It's like, and he obviously he explains it from the perspective of a musician in the music industry, but I think it's a valid perspective. Um hey, you know what, dude?

SPEAKER_01 13:24

I'm telling you, man, um, the music industry, we we've mentioned this on the show before, is the first one to get disrupted, usually, right? They feel the impacts and they're very philosophical about how they deal with these technologies. So, you know, just because it's a music industry, I mean they know I'll tell you right now, dude, they know more shit than the tech industry about ethics, you know, safety, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, rights, you know, impact on the industry, both uh good and negative, uh, the all the creativity stuff, innovation. They know this stuff way better than these Yahoos uh in Silicon Valley, who are, you know, their whole thing is like basically ripping people off uh, you know, their IP and then trending these models. And then going to Washington and whining like a little baby when the Chinese uh you know release a model that it it kicks the crap out of their models and are cheaper and they're open.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

You know, it's like so hypocritical. This whole like obviously just recently in the last week or two, we've had the US government tell anthropic to stop and reel back in their latest builds and radius mythos, and yeah, and uh what was it started with an F.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Yeah, something like that. That's how far gone we are. Flippity flam. Flippity flam. And and the government told them to shut down, and then just recent even more recently, uh Chat GPT 5.6 was gonna come out, and the government told them to chill out on that. And so is the take. So all of a sudden, let's just think about that for a second. Lots of companies, lots of enterprises, because so many people are just like, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, they're all taking dependencies on these LLMs, these frontier models, to run all these enterprise systems. All of a sudden, there's the possibility that you could have the rug pulled out from under your whole system because the US government says we need to shut that down, or no, these people can't use it. Who in the right mind would take a dependency on things where uh that there's not a guarantee that it's gonna be there? If if the US government can just snap fingers and say, no, no, this is a national security thing, shut it down right now, and they have to do it. You know, Dario's like, oh crap, I remember all I remember they heard they got the news like at 5 whatever p.m. on a Friday night that they had to shut it down for non-U.S. citizens. They're like, well, we don't know how to do that granularly, so we're just gonna have to shut the whole thing down totally for everybody. Yeah. Uh and and I get it. And it's like, well, what if you were a company that's all in? We're AI native and you took a dependency on that shit. Guess what? All your systems are down. It's like the system of the down.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yeah, yeah. And and uh and it's uh at a whim, it's a kill switch, right? And so it's a kill switch. Well now, uh here's the thing that um the American audience is not a lot, many of the American audience is not gonna really uh have visibility to just because uh you know, unless you go overseas, you're not gonna hear this stuff, especially at tech conferences. So all this sovereign stuff, you know, sovereign AI, blah, blah, blah. You know, um, the biggest fear factor uh uh that is driving this conversation is not China, it's the United States. For exactly what you just said is the risk that, you know, uh out of a out of a whim, that all of a sudden your access to AI can be completely removed or compromised, or you can be you know coerced in in in some way. Uh and if you don't do something uh a certain way, oh, you know, you're gonna you're gonna lose your access to AI. And and and so this is the you know uh the big danger right now is that it is danger, Will Robinson.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

You just said the term kill switch, and it's not even just AI, it's just clouds. Clouds, everything now clouds, general clouds. They the term kill switch is now floating around that the US government has a kill switch and can kill switch all US hyperscalers overseas. Yeah, and the Europeans are like, I think the Europeans about the Americans now, the same way Americans have been thinking about the Chinese.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Yeah, and you know, here is the crazy thing, man. Um 2017, I was in China. Um I was at the World Internet uh com uh conference, which is um that you know, big um it it's sort of like the uh the uh how would you I I describe it? Well, anyways, it's it's it's that uh big uh uh digital tech conference that uh Xi Jinping uh really uh sponsored because it takes place in Wujian, which is uh in the province that he used to be the governor of. But anyway, uh long story short, um uh the theme at that time was digital sovereignty. So that's what the Chinese were pitching at the time. Yeah. Right. And everybody thought that was like such an anti-movement, global movement type of thing, right? Because the whole idea was everything should be global, everything should be open. China, you should open up. And you know, there was a lot of pressure globally in the region to have China open up their markets and you know, um but this whole agenda of digital sovereignty and they wanted to promote it um, you know, uh through uh the companies like Huawei, which at the time had it didn't have the notoriety that they had until maybe about 2018 when all of a sudden everybody learned who Huawei was, right? Um but uh you know now the rules have flipped. China is for open. The US is driving sovereignty. I mean, where Europe and and everyone was criticizing China back in, you know, uh 2017 for uh and you know the Western world was basically maligning uh China for that sovereign agenda, and now they're the ones uh uh taking up that mantle, you know? Which is uh dude, it is so ironic. It's most people uh will not remember that. They won't even know because a lot of people don't know what was happening in China at that time.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

So here we are. Europeans don't trust the Americans, uh digital sovereignty, data sovereignty is like number one on the agenda in Europe. Um they're they're looking for options to alternatives to the hyperscalers. Um for plain old cloud stuff, for networking stuff, like you know, the whole sovereignty thing works, has to go to the networks. Just because your server is in a European country, if that data shoots out a network and leaves the EU and goes to the US or somewhere else, that doesn't fly with them. Or or now we're doing more dependency on satellites. Boy, there's nothing sovereign about satellites, man. You're in space and you're just bopping around. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Um you're gonna have like a bunch of people smuggling like uh CPEs, like uh uh Starlink CPEs, you know, to piggyback on the Starlink network, and then um I you know, it's just uh it's a new world, man. It is a new world. It's a new world. It's gonna be completely uh well it are it's already different, but it's gonna be even more different now that like yeah it looks like Elon is looking for uh uh for a terrestrial operator now. Is is super ironic because people are like claiming that um you know, oh my gosh, Starlink is gonna take out terrestrial networks and then the dude goes, you know, now the dude is talking about acquiring. Yeah, I need uh maybe yeah, satellite's not good enough.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

So you love an analyst coming out and saying, Oh, I think he's gonna acquire T-Mobile. Sure, why not?

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Do you have a good talk with Eric Eckoden?

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yeah, yeah. Um briefly, they they introduced uh some cool stuff. Um, you know, uh there's a knowledge plane. Uh it's not I don't know if you really call it a product, but it's a it's an element of their whole network automation stack. So all our talks about IoT and digital twins and knowledge, you know, we've been, you know, um we've been talking about knowledge, how and you know, I've been saying this for years. AI is about knowledge, it's not about data, right? Uh models react to data. You know, the AI the AI is based on uh knowledge. Now everyone's talking about knowledge and knowledge bases, but that is funny because most people have no idea what knowledge management is like and what what it takes to curate knowledge, and they think it's maybe the same discipline as data. It's not. There are different frameworks and you know um it's a comp it it's not a completely dis different discipline, but it is a it's not the same discipline. And um, yeah, they're making a big deal out of that, um, which I think is a good thing because the digital twin network is, I think, foundational to uh this automation, uh, you know, autonomous stuff, and then making AI, especially generative AI, um a little bit more um applicable and uh you know um interfacable into, let's say, an automation stack. And then um the digital twin stuff like we've been talking about, then you need the knowledge bases to hydrate these uh you know graph databases or vector databases that they're talking about. But um still, you know, a lot of this is still new because people are not cognizant that you have to continually maintain these things. They just think it's a one-shot thing, and all of a sudden it it just does this magical shit. It it this is so not true. So I I you know you know uh you know the thing that just makes me laugh, dude, is just seeing how things that we've been talking about on the show for years. I'm not talking about a month or six months back, years now. People are just starting to figure out. And um, it's it's like I don't know, it's like wow, it you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Um it's like how, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Yeah, it's crazy, dude.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

So you know what? It's time for me to go. I'm gonna go wander back. I'm gonna go wander back into the vineyards and disappear, okay? Lovely hanging out with you and all of our audience today on the special edition of IoT Coffee Talk in a vineyard. You know, and in your beautiful backyard.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

You know, look at that. Look at that. That is gorgeous.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

It's all fuzzy right now, but who doesn't want to hang out there?

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Everybody wants to hang out there. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Well, whenever you're in San Diego, you know, it's not like a big, big backyard, but it's so Zen and comfortable. We love Zen.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

That's why we need peace.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

So uh yeah, yeah, cool. So remember to take us seriously at your own risk, and uh we're just having fun.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Yeah, I mean it might save your life one day.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Yeah, probably one of the big one of the biggest jokes is when we say, hey, uh take us seriously at your own risk. Um, you know, we have a pretty good track record, but anyway, uh yes, and remember it's about elevator uh communities. Because, you know, England was 114 uh over the during the week. So they're having a massive um massive heat wave, suffering a massive heat wave where I had a couple of Brits who show me pictures of a lorry, as they call it, on that side of the pond. If you don't know what a lorry is, it's a friggin' truck on fire because it exploded because it was so hot. So if you don't care about the planet, you should care about yourself. And so Rob's book, okay, is a recipe with blueprints on how to save yourself from yourself.

unknown 27:15

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Who knows? So you gotta buy it.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Yeah. And it's actually the odd thing is it's going to be it's going to inevitably be the foundation for elevate communities because we're gonna all be about democratizing the information, knowledge, these blueprints that Rob is uh you know putting together in his book, which is either out or gonna come out soon. And so you gotta definitely check it out. And uh yeah, uh whether you like it or not, you're gonna have to elevate communities because the water levels are gonna rise so high. You're gonna need IoT to help you guys plan how to lift your entire village uh above the increasing water line.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Uh who would have thought that someone would write a book where one of the 100 we use recipes is actually monitoring sea level rise. There's another one where it's monitoring glacier thickness. And I know some of you guys will probably think this is all wacko and corny, but you're the same people who don't think that global warming is real while the planet is on fire.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

So yeah, in Europe right now, they believe in global warming. It's like that meme.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

You always see the guy, the dog or whatever in the room of the flames, and he's like, I'm fine.

unknown 28:36

It's fine.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Well, you know what? I heard some folks, yeah, no kidding. I heard some folks in Colorado these days are are uh you know, they're finding out. Yeah, they're finding out scary stuff, man. Same with uh California. So when your banana costs you 20 bucks, yeah, and I don't mean a bundle of bananas, your one banana costs 20 bucks.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Absolutely, absolutely. We have to rethink so many different things, man.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Yeah, yeah. So, anyways, we'll see you next week, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Good talking to you, bro. We'll see you guys on the other side. Adios, and we're gonna be able to do it.