Welcome to the Geek News Central podcast. I'm
your host, Chris Cochran, and I have a
great episode lined up for you guys tonight.
Leading off, Ring aired a feel good Super
Bowl ad about finding lost dogs, and it
freaked out everybody so badly that Amazon killed
a surveillance partnership four days later. Also on
the show, AI companies battled it out during
the big game. Apple's got a March event,
but Siri still can't keep up.
RAM prices have gone absolutely bonkers, and a
Pokemon card just sold for 16 and a
half million dollars. Plus,
SpaceX gets a new crew to the space
station after the first ever medical evacuation.
Let's get into it.
Man, guys, it's been it's been a little
while. If you guys can tell right now,
mind my, I hope you guys can,
mind my congestion today. My nose is kind
of stuffy. So,
I sound a little I just some sniffles
going on today, some sneezes.
But, you know, wanted to get this shot
to you guys because I've been wanting to
talk to you about a lot of,
you know, the recent news.
This goes back to the Super Bowl.
You know, if you guys watch Super Bowl,
there's a lot of companies that did a
lot of commercials. It's all it does Super
Bowl's infamous
for their commercials.
And recently, you know, it's I think it
was about a week or two ago where
this Pokemon card was just sold for, like,
6 and a half million dollars. It's crazy.
But, yeah, life recently,
you know, maybe, like, guys, on on that
same topic about the Pokemon cards,
I've actually been getting into collecting cards myself.
I've never really been a big card collector.
I'm a I'm a huge nerd, so I
like to collect a lot of figures. I
like to build Gundam, but, I never got
into cards until recently.
And that has to do around
the One Piece anime.
Dude, it's crazy. It's such a fun hobby.
I've been enjoying it a lot. And let
me tell you, it is so addicting.
I've actually found a recent fact about the
one piece card community
and
pretty much this was back in January. Okay.
But I thought I'd bring it up now.
But in January, collectibles and alternative assets, they
actually beat stocks and crypto
over the last ninety days. Okay?
A lot of the strongest returns did not
come from stocks and all that stuff, but
it came from silver
trading cards and pop culture collectibles that quietly,
you know, outpaced the broader market. So they
kinda ranked it. And if you guys know,
Pokemon has been like one of those collectible
card games
that's been like booming for the past few
years. Like, it it had a crazy increase
in in the profit wise and collectors.
But
on this list,
the top three actually rank Silver's number one
with the 58%
increase,
One Piece with the 43%
increase,
and then the third one is actually Monkey
d Luffy, and that's 41% or Monkey d,
for short. That's, like, the main character in
One Piece. Now all the way
down at number 12, that's where Pokemon is
now.
And then Gold is, like, at 14, just
to put things into perspective. Amazon's at 21.
Apple's at 23. Nvidia's at 26.
Let's see other stuff. Bitcoin's at 33. You
know? So
just to put things out a little perspective
for you guys, and I thought that was
really interesting.
And I heard recently, currently,
the one piece market is just starting to
settle back down, going back down a little
bit. So thank God for me because
I like to collect the cards just for
myself.
I never really gone to the profit aspect
of it yet, but
it is difficult to collect sometimes because since
so much people have moved from Pokemon
to one piece collecting cards,
it has brought the market up like crazy.
And the pricing for these cards, let me
tell you, is ridiculous. I would say about
two years ago,
you could be able to buy a booster
box. Now booster box is it's a box
that holds a bunch of different packs. And
when you open the packs, that's when you
get the cards. Right? Now booster box was
maybe like a a mere $100.
Now there is a booster box
for let's
I'm I'll give you different prices for three
different booster boxes from one piece. One of
them was not worth $100 before. Now it's
$500 for just a simple box. One of
them is actually worth a thousand dollars. And
a lot of them have just, like, they
don't stay in the $100 range anymore. They
are $200 plus just to get a box,
and it's crazy because you aren't even guaranteed,
a rare card. Right? You could get a
good card that would be worth, like, 50
to $80.
Right?
But
a lot of people are chasing that thousand
dollar plus card, multi, you know, thousand dollar
card
that they're willing to spend all this money.
But at the same time, it's not really
the most the best financial decision ever because
you could spend all this money just to
get, like, nothing. Right? So,
me personally, I haven't really opened much booster
boxes anymore. I stopped doing that.
I I was actually opening Japanese boxes because
they were really cheaper. They were much cheaper
because I was just admiring them for the
art. But,
it's more financially responsible just to buy the
card itself. Because if you continue to buy
booster boxes continuously,
it's just it's ridiculous.
The amount of money you would spend just
to have a chance at getting a good
card. Anyway,
enough of that nerd talk. Let's kinda get
into the show today.
We're gonna take it back to the Super
Bowl on on how
that ring had this crazy not crazy, but
this really cool concept of,
their new, like how do I say it?
Their new,
basically update. Right? So
Ring, you know, Amazon's home security brand, they
aired its first ever Super Bowl ad, and
it had over 120,000,000
viewers.
The commercial showcase Search Party. It's a new
feature that uses AI and Ring's massive camera
network to help find lost pets. All you
had to do would all you had to
do was, upload a photo of your missing
dog and neighborhood ring cameras alert you if
they spot it. And it sounds awesome, right?
But viewers connected the dots fast
and pretty much where they came to the
conclusion where if it can track a dog,
they can track a person.
Now, Ring already has a rough history here
because they caught heat over police partnerships that
gave law enforcement access to footage. And in
2023,
settled with,
the FTC
overcharges
that employees could view customer videos.
Now this ad put all that right back
into the spotlight.
You know, this ad backfired
spectacularly.
Within hours, you know, privacy advocates, including the
ACLU and lawmakers, raised alarms that search party
could easily be repurposed to track humans and
not just pets.
The backlash moves so fast that just four
days later, Amazon killed a plan integration with
Flock Safety,
a controversial
police surveillance tech company. And Amazon said it
was a resource and timing decision, but you
know what? Nobody bought it.
Now
this is the tension at the heart of
smart home tech right now.
The same camera network that helps you find
Buddy, the golden retriever could become a neighborhood
surveillance grid. And if you have Ring cameras,
nothing changes today. You know, a search party
is opt in for pets, but think about
what 10,000,000 Ring doorbells are capable of in,
aggregate.
And that's a lot of eyes. Right?
Even though the Flock safety partnership is dead,
the AI,
capability, you know, it's not going anywhere. So,
you know, something to think about. It's pretty
it's pretty crazy. You know, at first, it
does seem like a really good idea. Right?
Because you're like, oh, man. I wanna find
my dog. But
who knows how this could progress and what
this means for the future for home cameras.
But yeah.
Speaking of the Super Bowl commercials, dude, AI
AI went there were so much AI commercials.
It it was kinda ridiculous.
It it was it was pretty ridiculous. Now
AI companies have been in an arms race
for users, and the recent Super Bowl became
the latest battlefield.
Right? According to Adweek,
AI related ads accounted for 23%
of all commercials, nearly like one in four,
basically.
AI has officially crossed from tech niche to
mainstream consumer marketing.
And the backdrop is the growing rivalry between
Anthro Anthropic and OpenAI
as both companies fight for, paying subscribers. Now
Anthropic made its Super Bowl debut with a
series of ads titled betrayal, deception, treachery, and
violation.
Not subtle, you know, not subtle at all.
The message, you know,
ads are coming to AI, but not to
Claude.
A direct shot to OpenAI's plans put advertising
in chat GBT,
and Sam Altman fired back on social media
calling the ad clearly dishonest.
Now on the lighter side, vodka brand said,
Svedka,
they ran what it claims to be the
first primarily
AI generated national Super Bowl ad. And it's
a thirty second,
spot called shake your bots off with this
robot mascot dancing at a party. And apparently,
it took four months to train the AI
on facial expressions and body movements.
Now the results were at the Anthropics website's
traffic jumped 6.5%
and daily active users rose 11% after the
game.
Now if you guys saw that ad, man,
the the Svetka ad was I'm not gonna
lie. It was weird.
It
it was weird.
And there's I guess there's two big takeaways
from this. You know, the AR wars are
now a living room conversation. These companies are
spending 7 to $8,000,000
per thirty second spot just to win you
over. Right? Now second, the anthropic versus open
AI feud is about something that actually matters.
You know? Should your AI assistant show you
ads?
If you use Chatty if you use ChattyPT,
you know, watch this closely. Right?
Because,
one company says pay and stay ad free.
And the other seems to be exploring an
ad supported model.
And one of sup one in four Super
Bowl ads were AI related this year, and
this tells you where the money thinks, the
future is. And, you know, one of four,
I I personally was not
not stoked to see,
you know, all these AI ads. I really,
miss the old Super Bowl commercials, you know,
because
a lot of non football fans would watch
the Super Bowl
for the halftime show and for also the
commercials because the commercials were awesome. They were
creative. They were funny. And, like, sometimes they
were so good that you would literally
go on YouTube just to look up a
commercial. Like, who does that?
Who does that? Like, we like to skip
ads. But before the Super Bowl, made us
wanna watch ads. And now it's just been
like
a AI Fest of shoving,
like,
non thought
commercials down our throat, if that makes sense.
Right?
But yeah. Was disappointed in that, to be
honest, but hopefully, you know, some companies
took away from that and maybe next year
they start to think more about getting back
into the creative aspect of ads because, you
know, that was a big part of the
Super Bowl.
But yeah.
You know,
just wanna take a quick break though. You
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Now let's get back to the show, guys.
Now Apple confirmed a product launch on March
4 with the iPhone 17 e,
a cheaper iPhone pretty much.
MacBooks MacBook Pros with m five Pro and
m five Max chip and an eighth generation
iPad Air
and a twelfth generation iPad. So it's a
pretty solid hardware lineup.
The big story is what won't be there.
The AI powered Siri overhaul. K? So Bloomberg
reports the future plans,
the features planned for iOS 26.4
have hit snags in internal testing and are
now being spread across iOS 26.5
in May and iOS 27 in September.
Now Apple says Siri's improvements are still coming
in 2026,
but they've been saying that for a while.
Right?
Now, if you've been waiting for, to upgrade
your iPhone, the iPhone 17 e could be
interesting. You know, Apple's targeting the budget crowd
heading into back to school season, you know,
but the Siri delay is the real headline.
Now Apple's assist assistant is falling further behind
Chachi Bitty,
Gemini and Claude. These are the same tools
that were just badly out on the Super
Bowl stage. Right?
The March 4 format, small demos, no live
streams tells you Apple wants to manage expectations.
They'll lean into hardware and on device processing
rather than making,
Siri promises that, you know, they can't keep.
So,
you know, something to keep an eye on.
Right? A lot of cool hardware stuff coming
out, but hopefully, Siri gets that little update
that we've all been waiting for.
Another fun interesting topic. Right? If you guys
are PC lovers, PC builders,
I guess PC gamers, all that kind of
stuff, PC stuff, this is important for you
because the DDR five RAM prices have surged
300%.
Sheesh. Now there's a global memory shortage right
now, driven almost entirely by AI. Companies like
Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft are gobbling up high
bandwidth memory for AI data centers. And the
manufacturers,
Samsung,
SK Hynix, Micron,
have shifted their factories to make the AI
stuff instead of be call it, instead because
the profit margins are five to 10 times
higher.
Meanwhile,
DDR, the older RAM,
has been discontinued by most manufacturers,
forcing everyone onto DDR five, right, as supply
is drying up.
A 64 gigabyte kit on DDR five RAM
has gone from around $200
in mid twenty twenty five to over a
thousand dollars today. That's 300%
in six months with another 50%
spike just in the last month. You know,
that
puts a basic RAM upgrade at a higher
price than the MacBook Air.
You know, the math is simple. Right? Making
one unit of AI memory requires three times
the factory capacity of regular DDR five.
Every production line that switches to AI memory
removes three times as much consumer ramp from
the supply,
and global inventories have dropped to just eight
weeks.
Analysts does don't see meaningful relief until late
twenty twenty seven or 2028.
Really unfortunate news. Right? If you're thinking about
building or upgrading PC, you know, just brace
yourself, guys. RAM that cost $200 six months
ago is now over a grand, and it's
still climbing through mid twenty twenty six.
This is a direct side effect of the
AI boom. The same technology powering those Super
Bowl ads we just talked about is making
your computer upgrades more and more expensive.
Now, if you can wait guys, just wait.
And if you can't, buy sooner rather than
later because it's not coming down anytime soon.
Laptop and prebuilt prices will creep up too
as manufacturers absorb these costs.
Now
finally well, not finally. Moving into our next
topic. Well, I wanna talk about the SpaceX
Crew 12 launch.
Right?
This was from a few weeks ago, so
the news might be a little changed. But
just for a little update, if you guys
aren't familiar,
NASA's Crew crew 12 is a replacement for
crew 11, you know,
whose members came home early in January following
the first ever medical evacuation from the International
Space Station.
That was a historic and sobering moment,
for the space program and it fell it
left the station short staffed.
Getting a new crew up there quickly was
a priority and SpaceX delivered with the launch
on Friday the thirteenth no less.
SpaceX launched four astronauts to the ISS on
February 13
from Cape Canaveral.
Hope I said that right. And the crew
is NASA commander Jessica Mayer, NASA pilot Jack
Hathaway,
ESA mission specialist Sophie Adadot, and Russian cause
cosmonaut
Andre or Andre
Fedu Fedeve. I I apologize
for my, butchering of the napes.
Now they lifted off at 05:15AM
and their
EST
aboard a Falcon nine with the Dragon capsule
Freedom
and docked on Valentine's Day.
The mission is planned for eight months, and
the Falcon nine's first stage stuck its landing
back at Pad 40.
The medic the medical evacuation in January was
the kind of thing that reminds you space
is still dangerous. Right?
Crew 12 getting up there smoothly is a
good news story. And the Valentine's day docking
is a nice touch. It also shows how
reliant we are on SpaceX. They're basically NASA's
ride share to orbit at this point. And
the international crew is notable given everything happening,
geopolitically.
That's a that's a word.
Geopolitically.
Anyway,
space cooperation keeps going even when things are
tense on Earth and this crew will be
up there till around October. So,
good luck to them.
Now, huge shift in topics, right? We're going
from space and we're gonna be talking about
a little bit of a Pokemon type of
thing. But this is a trading card story
that'll make your jaw drop. All right? If
you guys don't know Logan Paul, he's a
popular YouTuber. He sold a Pokemon card for
record $16,500,000
Think about that. $16,500,000
That's crazy for,
you know, not to be that guy because
I also collect, but 16.5
doll billion dollars for a piece of cardboard.
It's crazy. Now
the card that was sold, it's the Pikachu
illustration
illustrator card, and it's the holy grail of
Pokemon collecting. You know, only 39 were ever
made, and they were created as prizes for
a Japanese illustration contest in the late nineties.
Now Logan Paul bought his, one of the
few graded PSA 10, perfect condition back in
2021 for $5,200,000
That was the record at the time. He
famously wore it on his neck in a
custom case during his boxing matches, WWE,
yada yada yada. Now this card went up
through Golden, a major online auction house.
His
Pokemon
card,
the illustrator sold for
$60,492,000
a new Guinness World Record for the most
expensive trading card ever sold at auction.
They live shoot it they live shoot the
event, and they saw about 97 bids with
the price sitting at $6,800,000
before a flurry
of last minute bids during an extended bidding
period drove it to the final number.
The buyer was venture capitalist,
Adri
Scaramucci,
son of the former White House Communications
Director, Anthony Scaramucci.
He got the card placed on his neck
on a $75,000
diamond necklace,
and Paul's $5,200,000
investment turned into a $16,500,000
Wow. That's pretty much like a roughly,
you know, about, like, a three times return
in his past in the five years.
Insane. Insane.
Now
if you love him or hate him, doesn't
matter. Logan Paul just turned a trading card
into $60,500,000
asset. That's a, like I said, a three
times return in the past five year in
in five years. And that beats most stock
market performance.
This is the bigger trend, Pokemon cards, sports
card, comic books, becoming a serious alternative investments.
But, you know, don't rush out to buy
cards guys, thinking, yo, you know, you're gonna
strike gold. This is the rarest of the
rare, one of 39 ever made. And it's
also telling who bought it, a venture capitalist.
And the cap the collectibles market is increasingly
driven by wealthy investors treating these things like
fine art and, you know, not by fans
who grew up playing these games. This was
a big problem too. Right? Logan Paul.
Yeah. I guess he he is a collector.
He says it all the time.
He
he's one of those people that
kinda
increases the price on these things, makes it
more difficult for, like, things like One Piece.
Because in a YouTube video, he literally
showed him, like, buying cases of One Piece.
And that just brought more people to the
market. People see someone like him switching to
One Piece even though he's not really a
fan. He literally butchered the first, the main
character's name like crazy. And it's like
it just tells you, like, there's a lot
of people that
are just collecting to invest, and it kinda
ruins for the fans that, like, you know,
play the games or watch the show or
read the manga. Right? It and it makes
it difficult. So,
like I said, though,
there are, like, roller coaster
emotions of these, like, in when it comes
to these hobbies. Right? So what goes up
is as much you're gonna have to come
down. And right now it's going down, thankfully.
But
I will say
it is pretty ridiculous right now for,
for what the market is at. So,
you know, yeah.
I guess, to finish off with some discussion
questions.
Now if
you've got 10,000,000 ring doorbells out already out
there,
is there any way to build AI features
like search party without also building surveillance infrastructure?
Or is that just a trade off? Okay.
One question for you guys. I got three
questions for you guys. Now number two, ads
in your AI. Anthropic says paid to use
to a ad free. Open AI
may go ad supported.
Which model wins guys? Is this going to
be the cable TVs versus streaming debate all
over again?
Let us know.
And then
AI's hidden tax. Now AI is making chatbots
smarter, but RAM more expensive,
super
ads pricier, and temp tech companies richer.
Is the AI boom actually helping regular folks
or mostly helping the companies building it?
Right. So
some questions for, to have to show up
for you guys, something to,
think about,
but that's pretty much gonna do it for
this episode eighteen fifty eight. You know, thanks
you so much for hanging out with me
today. I apologize for my nasal congestion.
Next time, I'll be clear. No more sniffles
and be able to, you know, pronounce the
things I wanna say correctly
and not stutter as much.
But yeah.
Real quick, though.
For all you GNC insiders at geeknewscentral.com//insider
if you wanna join the inner circle. Check
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and everything we do lives at geeknewscentral.com,
which looks phenomenal, by the way. If you
guys haven't looked at it yet, geeknewscentral.com,
Ray doesn't give himself enough credit, but the
website looks phenomenal.
I know a lot of you guys might
have been used to seeing the website a
certain way, but Ray kinda took it to
the next level, you know, reimagined it, and
I think it looks great. Let us know
what you guys think. I I I think
it looks pretty sick if you ask me.
Now I'm Chris Cochran, guys, and,
the next episode should be Ray. So you
guys should have a good time. And, yeah,
I will see you guys next time. Have
a good one. See you. Bye.