southwestern, where discoveries change lives. and this spark is just the beginning. follow your spark at ut southwestern. the future of medicine today chevy has the suvs you know and love. and now there's one more. the chevy blazer ev with the latest tech. incredible range, and it's easy to charge. chevy blazer ev motor trends 2024 suv of the year when you're ready to go, ev chevy's got you the easy to own, easy to love chevy blazer ev. current qualified competitive lessees can get this blazer ev for around 369 a month without any acquisition fees. chevrolet together, let's drive. we're all about getting you ready for today, especially here in the bay. this week, a super quiet leaf blower invented by college kids, and we take a look at the history of games with author kelly clancy and josh browder, ceo of do not pay pits i against

i. that's this week on press here. welcome back to press here anyone who has been on a zoom call knows the worst thing that can happen during that call is not your child wandering into camera range. like, what happened to that fellow on the bbc, or accidentally using the cat filter. the worst thing that can happen in a zoom call is the leaf blower. your neighbor or your neighbor's gardener right under your window for a surprisingly long time. well, inventors here you students at johns hopkins have figured out how to muffle the leaf blower. madison morrison is part of a four person engineering team that silenced the leaf blower. or at least cut it down by 40. and their technology will soon be in black and decker leaf blowers at hardware stores. madison, i want to start with

johns hopkins. you know that old joke about what do they call the person that graduates last at johns hopkins? they call them a doctor. but in fact, you're not in the medical school, right? no, i am not. there's a great engineering school at johns hopkins. absolutely fantastic. all right, well, let's start with a simple one, although i will point out you are going to be a doctor of letters eventually because you're going to go to stanford, right? yes, i am. well, we're glad to have you back, let's start with the leaf blower. why the leaf blower? yeah, absolutely, so i think when stanley black and decker came to us with this problem, i mean, it's something that almost every person uses, you know, in your neighborhood, you hear them all the time, no matter where you are. and right now, there's a lot of neighborhoods that are putting bans and restrictions on leaf blowing, especially early in the morning and especially if the units are particularly loud and annoying. so i think right now, just due to the pressing call to end leaf blowers and put bans on them, stanley black and

decker was really interested in trying to reduce the noise and create a system that is overall more pleasant for both the user and your neighbors. so the manufacturer came to you. is that the usual way that university work works? so this was part of our mechanical engineering senior design project. and so the sponsor came to us with a real world problem, and we wanted to take it on. so we worked together. okay. well, let me ask the second obvious question. that is how do you make the leaf blower quieter? absolutely. so it was a really open ended problem for us to solve. and we tried a bunch of different tactics at first, both with passive and active noise cancellation methods. but, you know, i think it's an interesting problem because you can't just, you know, put a muffler on the end of a leaf blower because it won't blow any leaves. so it was we'll make it quiet, it'll make it quiet, but your leaves will still be there. but yeah. so for us it was a big balance of trying to create a system that reduced the noise, but also allowed the leaf blower to, you know, maintain its

normal function. so what we ended up creating is an end attachment to the leaf blower that creates destructive interference at specific frequencies that are unpleasant to human hearing. so those high pitched kind of squeals that you hear coming out of the system. so, you know, yes, you are reducing the volume, but more importantly, you're you're choosing what frequencies at which to reduce that volume. yeah. so one of the main things that we tried to do was improve the noise quality. and in doing that, we wanted to target specific frequencies that are unpleasant to human hearing. so ones that were particularly sensitive to. and so it's a difference when you're inside of hearing what you might consider to be wind noise versus that high pitched squeal that i mentioned. and then and then you said you are canceling it out. so you talked about active. i mean, i have a pair of headphones, right, that uses a battery to create an active noise canceling and you're doing this passively. so you're you're actually generating noise in your noise killing device, which then cancels out the other

noise. yeah. so essentially we're phase shifting. so our invention essentially filters some of the air into these helical channels. and they're at an overall longer path length. and so when they recombine with the flow going through the center of our device, they're out of phase. and so that's what creates that destructive interference at the specific frequencies. and so that leaves. yes. exactly. so the air coming through the center still allows us to have the same performance of our leaf blower. that's going to be cool when it's in stores, because that's one of those things. and i talked to book authors, the same way, you know, they walk into a store and they see their book and there's that moment where they think, oh, i did that, you know, and you'll be able to walk into a store and say, i you know, that right there. i did that. yeah, absolutely. i mean, i think that's every engineer's dream. i mean, we all come to these schools with very big aspirations and being able to walk into a home depot, see your product on a shelf or see your neighbors using it is obviously a dream for any engineer you led me into my last question and

that is what's next for you? i mean, yes, stanford, but but what would you like to do next? yeah absolutely. i mean, i think i'm just really interested in r&d, just the research field. i think this project was super cool because it allowed us to just explore a bunch of different options and just try any crazy idea we had in order to try to reduce the noise. and so i look forward to designing more things and, hopefully inventing a lot more as well. well, we look forward to having you back when you got your new invention. and on behalf of all the people who have to be on zoom and their neighbors, we appreciate your invention. madison morrison, thank you for being with us this morning. madison morrison is an engineering student at johns hopkins. we'll be back in just a minute. the olympic games are coming. but first, the best american athletes have to make team usa. the us olympic team trials begin june 15th on nbc and peacock. the paris olympics

and paralympics coming this summer. brought to you on nbc bay area by toyota. proud partner of team usa. dupixent can help people with asthma breathe better in as little as two weeks. so this is better. even this dupixent is an add on treatment for specific types of moderate to severe asthma. that's not for sudden breathing problems. dupixent can cause allergic reactions that can be severe. tell your doctor right away if you have rash, chest pain, worsening shortness of breath, tingling, or numbness in your limbs, tell your doctor about new or worsening joint aches and pain or a parasitic infection. don't change or stop asthma medicines, including steroids, without talking to your doctor. ask your specialist about dupixent. this is the most exciting moment in painting. when the frogtape comes off. when all the swatches sample oils, prep and pride depend upon frogtape best in class paint block technology to keep paint out and keep lines sharp from long stretches of baseboards to

complicated corners around windows to crown molding that will have you asking, what room should we paint next? frogtape when it matters most. welcome back to press here. my next guest is a neuroscientist and a physicist who studies intelligence and has been thinking a great deal lately about how games shape that intelligence, indeed how they shape our world. her new book is playing with reality, and it's a very serious and studious read about doing things for fun. kelly clancy joins me this morning. kelly, you know, games are integral to what it means to be human. in fact, you write, they are older than written language itself. that's right. yeah. games, in fact, play is even more ancient than that, play is has been around since some of the earliest animals and most mammals play even lizards and, birds play. so it's a really important behavior. and it's been hard to study

previously because it's so integral that it's hard to kind of stop animals from doing it. so you can take the entire cortex off a rat. the part of the brain we think of as being responsible for intelligence. and they they still play. so it's a really deep behavior in us. and for animals, we think of it as being a behavior for exploring, exploring and learning about the world. and for humans, it's about exploring and learning about the world and each other. right. because games, you know, i mean, either mimic our social structure or sometimes set it on its ear, but we learn more about how we interact with each other. you know, i will if i play poker with you enough, i'll be able to start telling when you're bluffing. that's right. yeah, we can learn a lot about ourselves and each other through playing games in medieval times, it was required for the nobility to learn chess because they thought it was like a mirror. and by playing chess, you would see yourself more clearly. so this

is an idea that goes back thousands of years that we can learn about ourselves and through games, and we can also learn about how our brains work. it's the basic premise of the book is sort of like, what can we learn about people by studying what fascinates them? and for thousands of years, people have been fascinated by games. now you're writing about games, but i've heard of game theory, but those are two different things, right? yeah. so game theory, is based on, von neumann. john von neumann, a brilliant mathematician, often studying games, thinking about games, thinking about started with poker, supposedly. and how do we make decisions at different choice points in a game? so he was ultimately trying to model human behavior through this lens of games. and part of this was because he had recently fled europe, this was in the 1930s. he was a jewish, of jewish descent, living in, living in europe in the time of

hitler. so he was really disturbed by by, what he thought. well, what looked to him like irrational human behaviors. and he wanted to come up with a sort of theory of what is truly rational human behavior. and so he used games as this kind of framework for thinking about how do we make more reasonable choices. as you know, one of the things i think is so interesting about the human brain is that when we play a game like monopoly, we want to win. though there is no prize at the end. i mean, you know, you don't get anything out of winning at monopoly, and you want to beat people who on under any other situation, you would give the shirt off your back to, you know, your close friends, your family. you would never want them to lose unless you're playing monopoly or chess or checkers or whatnot. it's an interesting little human condition. so that's a great point. and one of the basic premises of the book that games ultimately are playing us, when

you play monopoly, you have to act like a cutthroat capitalist, even if you're a hippie at heart . so we absolutely stab our friends in the back. we stab our family in the back. we're desperate for that paper money, and it's all in sort of, the socialization of games where we agree to want this thing together and this is a kind of amazing quality of humans that we can sort of collectively choose what things we want to work together towards or work against each other for. like what do we collectively value and it's interesting that, in some senses, games are competitive because we're, you know, if it's a zero sum game, we're trying to win, but ultimately games are a cooperative technology because we're in it together to have a good time and to really have a good time, you kind of need to truly try to win. yeah, i mean, it's so fun to play against somebody who doesn't want to,

you know, like, oh, just take the money, be like, well, now you don't know how to play monopoly. yeah, exactly. yeah. let me ask you about, you know, there are some games that don't, the sims is the one that immediately comes to mind. and i remember many, what, 20, 30 years when it first came out, some people were a bit bewildered by it because, well, what do you what do you do? you. you know, i suppose minecraft is much the same way these days. it's. well, you do whatever you want. well, how do you win there really is no winning. yeah. so we can call these sort of sandbox games where the idea is to kind of be creative and tinker around. and they came out of the idea of will wright, the designer who was, designing the level of a different video game and realized it was so much fun. he wanted to share this with other people that they could build their own sort of video game levels. and so he created simcity, which was totally an anomaly, and no one thought it would work. and it ended up being a huge hit, and he based it on the equations, the urban design equations of this, mit engineer jay forrester. but what's kind of funny is that jay

forrester was a huge libertarian, and so he his equations is kind of, made the game such that the most stable win state is, a huge police force and no public services. what? i mean, maybe, maybe this answers my own question, but what surprised you most in your research when you were writing the book? i think probably how, how much games have come concretely impacted history. so, in the 19th century, a game called kriegsspiel in german, that means war game, helped german military officers completely rewrite the map of europe. so the germans cohered, their first empire from central europe by using this incredible military, simulate game so they could kind of workshop how battles would work beforehand and think about how to reinforce troops and, you know, predict supply chain needs and so on. so

this game was incredibly powerful. and, but also ultimately, because other countries started using it, it was ultimately disastrous for the for the germans because, other countries got on board and started using it and became, you know, as, as good as the germans. yeah. and then lastly, kelly, what what's your favorite game? i mean, to play. yeah probably a tie between the video game, fez and playing peekaboo with my son. oh, that's a great answer. i love that, and peekaboo is indeed a game. well, kelly clancy, i appreciate you being with us this morning. kelly clancy, the author of a new book called playing with reality. thanks again. and we'll be back in just a minute. most things in belfast. but man. get out of my house. yeah. bitmart.

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nearest you or to have their mobile showroom come to you. ready to go? it's the little things that make the greatest impact. but together we can protect this blue planet for all who call it home. monterey bay aquarium inspiring conservation of the ocean. welcome back to press here. if you have serious xm in your car, you may know this already. if you call the company and say, i'm going to cancel my subscription at the end of the subscription period, they'll offer to cut the subscription price in about half. you can find discounts for just about anything if you'll do the work, but josh browder says don't do the work his company do not pay. we'll send an army of bots to negotiate deals with just about anything you pay money for, and they're using ai to do it, of course. good morning josh, you know you've been using ai for quite some time. starting with chat. gpt three. that was a few years ago, but it was good enough, right? i mean, the concept of asking for

a lower price is not difficult for a computer to do exactly. so my company do not pay as an ai consumer champion. and what that means is helping people fight back against the companies and governments. our very first use case was getting people out of parking tickets. and fast forward to today and we have over 200 areas that we help people with. now what's interesting to me is oftentimes if i get online at newyorktimes.com or siriusxm or whatever it happens to be, it's a it's a, you know, a little chat window, that tends to be a chat bot, where i can negotiate with them. but then you send your chat bot and sometimes it's two ais negotiating with each other. the new price. exactly. so no one has time to wait on hold for three hours to save $20. and that's a really good job for ai. so we've built ai robots that log into people's utility accounts like comcast and start chatting with an agent to negotiate someone's bill and what's interesting is these big

companies are using ai, and we're using ai. and so sometimes the two eyes are negotiating our ai is more motivated. so, hopefully we win most of the time. yeah. what what is the cut? am i paying you a cut of this or is this a subscription or how does that work. no, it's a subscription. it costs $18 a month. and you it's like costco. you get access to all of our services. we have, credit cards that you can use to sign up for free trials. so you don't have to give your real payment information services to get you out of tickets and hundreds of other things. now, you said, the covid really accelerated this, which makes sense because more things went online, because you do most of your work online, right? that's right. so i think covid moved the legal system forward by ten years. so there were certain things where you had to do a wet signature. it was like stuck in the stone ages . but now lots of governments and companies say that you can do these things online. so one example is the irs. there was this obscure tax form that they made you sign. but now they can

do it online. even with gyms, a lot of gyms said in the past you had to go in to cancel. but now they say, okay, fine. if you send us a signed legal letter, we'll cancel your membership. and that's a good job for software. you know, in a lot of cases, if you're looking for some sort of discount, it really does come down to just asking. yeah. and i think, i will really empower people who maybe don't have the courage or the time to jump through all of these hoops, one example is, even with parking tickets, i started the company because i was a terrible driver when i was 18 and got a large number of tickets, and if you know the right things to say and you know the rules, you can fight back. but people are so busy they don't have time to understand all of that. now, your ai is not going to tell any, any untruths on my behalf, right? like i parked in that red zone because my ill grandmother, you know, this is the police we're talking about. that's right, we've we've worked very

hard to keep the ai honest and truthful, which is a very difficult task. oh, well, you've expanded into some sort of legal, some legal services, small claims, that kind of thing. you did get a little pushback over that? yeah i think that, the best job for, ai is these really simple things where it's, consumer rights. so there's not a lawyer who is going to get out of bed to help you with a $20 comcast refund. and so these issues are really underserved. and that's why these big companies know that they can charge all these fees, because people don't have the resources to fight back. you mentioned that you, you created this company somewhat accidentally after trying to get out of some parking tickets. and it's now very, very successful. is there ever a time in which you think, well, hold on, this is not what i meant to do. i just accidentally created a company that's that's very successful. i i feel like i have the best job in the world, my, my job consists of building robots to fight big companies

and all sorts of different things. what i'm working on right now is really interesting, which is, phone bots. so when this ai first came out with chat, gpt three and chat, gpt four, it was too slow. it took about three seconds to generate a response, but now they've released a new version called gpt four zero that responds much more quickly. and that's more quick enough to, respond on the phone. so we're building robots that will phone up united airlines. and when your baggage is lost, it will track down your bags over the phone. and a lot of these things get done over call. so that's really going to expand what we're able to do. and you've done this with what about seven employees. you you've resisted getting bigger. so yeah. exactly. so we only have seven employees and it's a very lean team. but we have hundreds of thousands of paying customers. so we joke inside the company that every person is responsible for 10,000 people. and that's really the benefit of this new technology. you can

really scale up with big outcomes and without having to hire all these people. yeah. that's extraordinary. so last question for you, josh, is, i'm an average consumer. i have the average sorts of things. what am i most likely overpaid for? i think the biggest thing is subscriptions. so, you shouldn't need ai to cancel a subscription, but, in 2024, that's unfortunately the case. so what we do is we have these credit cards, and whenever you sign up for showtime or one of the many free trials you can use our credit card, and it's not linked to you, and you don't have to worry about canceling it. so the thing goes, you know, it's like a dollar for the first six weeks, and then, you know, something incredible after that. i have a few magazine subscriptions where i really need to read that article, this is one of those cases where the website will take that number and then try to bill me later, and it's not going to go through. that's right. and oftentimes there's actually free it's a free trial. and yeah,

they can make it free because they know people forget to cancel. and that's a good job for do not pay all right. well josh browder, thank you for being with us this morning. josh browder ceo of do not pay. we'll be back in stoney point. get fresh local live news straight from our newsroom to your screen with nbc bay area news at 430. cut through the clutter and get right to the facts fast. let's go ahead and begin with that magnitude 4.2 earthquake. as the day develops, we're working to move you forward. this video just came into our newsroom. get a first look at stories affecting your community. artificial intelligence. how does it impact the bay area and the answer is you need to stay informed. nbc bay area news at 4.30. moving the bay area forward. thrill makers in paris, asia wilson's career on the court began at age 11. in college, the native of columbia, south carolina, led her home state gamecocks to a national

championship, and in tokyo, she helped team usa to its seventh straight title. one of the true dynasties in sport. now she looks to extend the us legacy in paris. the paris olympics, brought to you locally on nbc by nissan, supporting college athletics across the country. the new school year is here, which means new teachers, classmates and things to learn. but for foster kids, this can be tough. starting a new school with no friends, supplies, and an old backpack just makes catching up and fitting in even harder. that's why mancini, slip road and the ticket to dream foundation is hosting a school supply drive for foster kids to participate. just bring in new backpacks and school supplies to any mancini sleeper or donate online at sleep world.com. together, we can help local foster kids start the year off right. welcome back to press here. i talk a lot, particularly on my podcast, about big funds writing big checks to big startups like 60 million, from

andreessen horowitz to a company like lyft. but there are other ways to raise money fast, too, like pulling together small groups of investors, small investors into an spv or special purpose vehicle, something kingsley advani knows a lot about. he runs a company called allocations that helps investors create those spvs kingsley, i'll warn you, we often talk on my show about things like, you know, robots that play tennis or the search for extraterrestre. so i really need you to bring it with the excitement on spvs, good morning to you. first of all, what is an spv? and if i'm a startup, do i want to get involved in one of these? definitely. so let me start with spvs of the future, and, and, you know, esps are basically legal entities set up, for group investments in financial assets. so typically a group of friends or investors will come together,

set up an spv and invest in a financial asset that could be anything like space x or a property or a football club, or really any type of financial asset. so the spv is a club or a company that that we all own in our members of that, with all the money put together, is much more powerful and then you provide the turnkey service, right? i mean, that's where you come in. i want to create an spv. you help me set up the charter and find a bank and register with the government and all that. yeah, exactly. yeah. so spvs is a future allocations. is the leader in spv technology. and we've helped to set up and manage over 1600 spvs in funds. so you know, what goes into setting up an spv where you have the entity formation, you have the deal set up, you have the legal documents set up, you have the banking, you have the investor onboarding, the kyc,

aml, you have the regulatory filings, the tax returns, and finally, the distributions at the very end, you're taking the place of many of the lawyers and the accountants and that kind of thing. this is something that i can do online. we've reduced the cost with the help of ai by, you know, about 80. and we've increased the speed of setting up spvs by 3 to 10 x kingsley advani is the founder and ceo of allocations. i appreciate you being with us this morning. that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. dear california dream, it's been a minute. i haven't given you much time lately because part of your whole dream thing is believing. i can own my first home and real talk. i need someone to make you a reality again. someone to create answers around me, not an algorithm.

speak human, not jargon. someone who believes in my dream and won't stop until it becomes my home sweet home. buying, selling, dreaming. who's your realtor? i see no different. yes what is going on? you get out! pg&e out of my room! get out! andy, i'm not lying. i didn't say anything. yes you did. what did you? for the world's greatest athletes, there is nothing like competing on the world's biggest stage. the world record again. and when that stage is here, anything is possible. how about that? an olympics unlike any other. the paris olympics coming

july 26th. brought to you locally on nbc by tri counties bank, california's local bank. where the locals down the street . the neighbor you come to for advice. a nest egg for the golden years, a loan or a new account for that growing business. what started in chico 50 years ago has taken us all around california to providing big bank lending power and high tech service while keeping our relationships personal. we're still the locals down the street, no matter where your street might be. damian trujillo: hello, and welcome back to "comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and a reminder that the qr code you see at the bottom of your screen is that-- so that you can register to vote. it takes you directly to the secretary of state's office in sacramento, you can register to vote here on "comunidad del valle." no more excuses, latinos need to vote.