This Week in Tech 1016 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech Great panel for you Sam O'Boole-Sammond, my car guy is here, from San Francisco Business Times, owen Thomas and my dear friend Ed Bott from ZDNet. We'll talk about Bill Gates' fascinating interview in the Times of London in which he says I might be autistic. I might be. We'll also talk about Trump coin and why the crypto community is aghast, and a Chinese AI startup that did a lot more for a lot less. All of that and more coming up next on Twit.
00:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is TWIT.
00:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1016. Recorded Sunday, january 26th 2025. Mark or Marks, it's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the latest tech news. I have gathered a fine ensemble of people who don't enjoy football. Actually, that's a lie. Some of them are making sacrifices. Ed bott is here. Senior contributing editor at zd net. He says I'm making a sacrifice being here. Thank you, ed. My pleasure, my pleasure, leon, I appreciate it. Do you want me to tell you the score? No, pause, the TiVo, as they say. He is, of course, senior contributing editor at ZDNet. I know that because it says it right under his chin. And you moved out of Albuquerque.
01:42 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Oh goodness, we're in the Research triangle park area of north carolina now nice, everybody.
01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you know that everybody's moving to north carolina?
01:53 - Ed Bott (Guest)
it. You know, we met some friends the other day who, their entire family, over the course of four years, moved from various parts of california to the same little town in North Carolina. So yes, it's true.
02:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a nice, nice place to be. And you're not having a polar vortex. I hope. It seems to have passed. Good, the weather has warmed up Also with us from San Francisco, where the weather is always a perfect 58 degrees, owen Thomas, managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times.
02:25 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think it's more like an Arctic 52. Oh chilly.
02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's chilly, too bad. You don't have any more Anchor Steam beer to warm you up. Oh, they're bringing it back. New owners, oh hallelujah. That was a sad day when they closed the door.
02:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, no, you can't stop bottling.
02:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know Be like not having a sourdough bread or something.
02:47 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's, something is bubbling up here all the time.
02:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to see you, Owen, and my car guy, Sam Abul-Samad new job, new job. He's VP market research at Telemetry Insights that's telemetryagencycom, but still writing about cars, Sam.
03:07 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I am still writing about cars, still doing the Wheelbearings podcast, and we started a new transportation and mobility-focused research and advisory practice out of Telemetry, which is a company founded by my friend, craig Dach, five years ago.
03:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh nice.
03:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, so are you specializing a little more into of about 50 or 60 people in an 18,000 person consulting firm that gets 60% of its revenue from government contracts, to something that's more focused and a smaller organization. So now I've gone from being a tiny minnow in a huge ocean to being a big fish in a puddle. I like it, I like it.
04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it so far too. So, gentlemen, this was, as I informed you before the show began, kind of a slow week in tech. I'm going to give you two choices. Right off the top, you can either talk about the new Chinese AI R1 and uh, it's amazing six million dollar training cost which is, by the way, for those who don't know, cheap uh or the new galaxy s25 phone, which comes in coral, red, blue, black or titanium jade green or titanium jade green. That's a tough one. Maybe, ed, we should go back to Microsoft and talk about the botched co-pilot launch. You spent a little time on this on Windows Weekly. I know you wrote about this on ZDNet. You say the Microsoft 365 co-pilot launch was a total disaster. What does that?
05:06 - Ed Bott (Guest)
mean, well, pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. They, you know, microsoft has, you know, they've been sticking AI in everything lately and they call it copilot. So you've got copilot in Windows and you've got Copilot in a lot of their enterprise security tools and now you've got Copilot in Microsoft 365, which is for family and personal subscriptions, which is what used to be Microsoft Office right, the subscription-based oh, so this is not the business version.
05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is for people.
05:42 - Ed Bott (Guest)
This is for the home people, this is my $8 a month subscription that I have to office. Oh, I'm sorry, sir, uh, so the? So yeah, the first thing they did was they they jacked your price up uh 30 to 45 percent. Oh, um, with uh, with no notice, your next bill will be up $3 a month, or 30% if you're on an annual plan.
06:13 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, technically they did give you notice. It's up until whenever your next billing period is.
06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, it's not like they charge you today. You get a week or two. Got until the end of the month.
06:24 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Okay, fair enough, but they didn't give you any notice that these features were going to be in there, so that's number one.
06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm getting AI, but that's good. Doesn't everybody want AI?
06:35 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I don't think anybody. Judging by the reading that I've done in online forums and on Reddit and on social media and in my email inbox, I can't find literally, literally I cannot find one single person who is happy about this. And here's the worst. Here's the worst part. Ok, microsoft says that you know they had done a trial of this in the Southern hemisphere starting in November. So people in Australia and New Zealand, taiwan and all had um, they had their prices raised and they had the AI stuff in there already.
07:14
And Microsoft says they listened to the feedback carefully and and they were going and they're and they're giving people an opportunity to disable this feature, to turn it on or off, but it's not in there. It won't be in there until next month. So if you have Word I think Word on the Mac you can. Now there's an enable copilot box that is already selected and so you can clear that checkbox and then disable it, and that's supposed to be in Windows, but I haven't seen it in any of my copies of Word for Windows and in all the other apps.
07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say, well, it'll be there next month, and so you're stuck with this thing, with these Copilot prompts that keep coming up and you can't make them, and you can't make them go away but so I mean, I like ai um, and I suspect that people who are like me pay for chat gpt or anthropics, claude or perplexity, ai or, in my case, all three um, and would prefer to use ai that way. I guess it makes sense, though if it's integrated into Word it's a writing assistant right, like Grammarly.
08:28 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Well, in Word, it's a writing assistant In PowerPoint. I asked the co-pilot in PowerPoint today to create a presentation for me on the evils of AI assistance in productivity software and it created a 30 slide presentation. It's actually pretty good. It's expert at that, so the thing. But the thing is, had they? I mean, I think they just did this. It reminds me of what they did with the recall feature last year, which is they didn't think about how to roll this out right. So Microsoft hasn't raised the price of what used to be Office 365 and now is Microsoft 365. They haven't raised this price in 12 years.
09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No not, since I subscribed to it 12 years ago. Yeah, Right so it was a good deal.
09:29 - Ed Bott (Guest)
So what they could have done was they could have said hey folks, you know we haven't raised the price here in over a decade. You know the price of everything's going up. We're going to raise your price two or three dollars a month. It'll start, you know, next month or the month after that with your next billing, and I think everyone would have probably been fine with that. They would have grumbled a little bit, but they would have said you know inflation and everything. This seems normal. And then they could have said and we have these new AI features that we're going to offer to every subscriber, features that we're going to offer to every subscriber. And here's a box yes or no? Do I want this enabled in my software? But instead, what they did is they raised the price and they said it's for the ai. And people say I don't want the ai. Uh, you know so. So you raised my price and you gave me something that I didn't want. Right?
10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, as somebody in our discord trust. No one says copilot integration is horrible. The pricing model is ridiculous. Leave it to Microsoft to overcomplicate something that could be so simple. Kind of echoing what you just said, Ed.
10:39 - Ed Bott (Guest)
And I'll add one more thing. So they did understand that this is that people were going to be unhappy about this, and so they. They created a Microsoft 365 classic version, which is the thing you had until yesterday at the price that you were paying until yesterday. But the only way that you can get that is to try to cancel your current subscription, at which point they say wait, don't go away. Would you like the classic version for the old price, for a limited time offer?
11:19 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know the discussion about inflation and kind of using that as an excuse to push through price increases. It's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right, Like if companies push through price increases, everyone pays more, costs go up, then they demand more in wages. It kind of feeds an inflationary cycle, Right. And this is the opposite of the role that technology played in the economy in the 1990s. The role that technology played in the economy in the 1990s, Alan Greenspan, who was, I believe, head of the Federal Reserve back then, observed that there was a strange phenomenon where productivity was going up but inflation was really low, which in turn let them keep interest rates relatively low.
12:07
Where is that tech-driven productivity gain that we're supposed to be getting been productivity gain that we're supposed to be getting? And if we're gaining productivity, shouldn't tech companies be able to hold prices stable? Good point, you know, that's what makes me a little suspicious of that kind of reflexive like oh, let's just raise prices. Why are tech companies not able to capture themselves the gains of technology? And you know, and part of it is that AI right now is kind of in this early investment stage where it is really expensive and maybe not as good as it needs to be and maybe we'll get there on the curve. But yeah, I'm know when companies kind of push through price increases, whatever the rationale is I like ai and I'm surprised to hear, ed, you say that nobody wants ai.
12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't people? Don't people want ai? Or am I again, again?
13:01 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I will say, I will say I have read, I mean literally, literally, thousands of comments, including in forums that are for uh AI, for you know, for uh focused forums. Yeah, yeah, and, and I I cannot find a single person saying I like this, uh, it's worth the extra $3 a month, yeah, Go ahead Owen, go ahead Sam.
13:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
No, no, sam. I was just going to say to your comments, owen, about technology, improving productivity with AI. What we end up having to do most of the time is double check everything that the AI is doing. So we have to do it anyway in addition to using the AI, and so we're not actually getting, at least for right now and probably for the foreseeable future. We're not actually for most people I would say, not necessarily for everybody. I think for programmers, for developers, there's probably a lot of benefits to AI and certainly, leo, you've talked about it a lot I get a lot out of it. Your list GPT thing.
14:08
But I think for most average people that just need to write documents, write emails, do spreadsheets, there's not actually any real productivity benefit to AI yet, and there probably won't be for quite some time as long as we can't actually trust it to do the right thing.
14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if we're get a copilot is very popular, right yeah, but that's that's one example.
14:31 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Like I said, develop for developers there's a lot. There's definitely some benefits there, but even there it's it's a starting point. But for the average person that's using tools like microsoft office, I don't think that there actually is any benefit, not they, not they don't want it and they don't want the pricing. If they had done this without a price increase?
14:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
would it have been more palatable? Probably.
14:54 - Ed Bott (Guest)
If they had offered it as an option, if they had popped up a dialog box that said here's a new feature, it's included with your suite, yes or no? And the idea, though, that they rolled it out and put this thing there, and it is very much in your face. If you're typing in a Word document, there's a little co-pilot icon that marches down the page at every line MIKE HENRY JR, it's like another Clippy. In other words, DAN TAPIERO and people have made that comparison down the page at every line it's like another clippy. In other words, it's then, and that, uh, people have made that comparison. But if you scroll to the end of my article, you'll see, uh, that I asked co-pilot.
15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, if it would explain, if it could explain the benefit of this, this one this year, yeah, yeah, it says if you asked if I have 84 million subscribers who pay me 10 a month and I increase their monthly fee by three mile, how much extra revenue? Well, let's do the math. So you're saying it's another 252 million dollars a month. Is that right?
15:55
okay, yes, yes, yes, so, yeah, so so go to the bottom those last two lines there so would you make an additional three billion a year from this feeding fee increase. What are you planning to do with all this extra revenue? Well, actually we know, because this stuff is really expensive. I don't know if this is even a net profit for Microsoft, is it? This is?
16:19 - Ed Bott (Guest)
oh no, it's extremely. I think I recall reading $50 or $60 billion in CapEx for this year. Almost all of it related to AI type stuff, and this is only now. The thing is, though, that $3 billion is from a relatively small business unit in microsoft. The consumer version of microsoft 365 is not where the money is right, but they've got but.
16:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the other thing that I ask, copilot their open ai charges 200 bucks a month for uh open ai pro and they say we're still not making money on that because so many people are using it so extensively right and microsoft charges 30 per seat right on top of yeah, uh for the business, yeah for the business version, um and uh.
17:15 - Ed Bott (Guest)
But the other you know the other question that I asked uh, co-pilot. At the end there was um. So what happens if I, if 10 of my subscribers subscribers cancel as a result of this? And it said you know what? You're still going to make $1.7 billion in extra revenue. So how do you feel about that?
17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me ask you this and all three of you can respond Microsoft has, I mean you mentioned recall, but it's a long history of Microsoft fumbling these PR opportunities. They're clearly not good at this. The very fact that everything's got the same name is clearly pointing to a lack of imagination. All of their outlook is the name of all of their many different outlook email products. Copilot is the name of their many different, very different ai things. Uh, they botched, recall, they botched. I mean you can go back to clippy, they bought they, but their tech. But that's just the pr marketing side. Their technology is pretty good, yes or no?
18:18 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
do you remember when microsoft added dot net to every product name?
18:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, right you know, this is like that, is it just two different divisions, and one is competent, one's incompetent I.
18:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think it is just like a cultural problem yeah, at microsoft, where they are bad at bad at product names in particular. Like yeah, they're not terrible at marketing overall. Like clearly, you, clearly, you know. Their messaging, though, is actually confusing.
18:45 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I think that's actually at all big companies. The bigger a company gets the worse it gets at stuff like that Apple is the same way. Yeah, Google is terrible at that. Automakers are also terrible at it. Every big company is terrible at product naming.
19:01 - Ed Bott (Guest)
There is one reason for reusing all those names, however, which is, I don't know if you remember, you know, 10, 12 years ago, when Microsoft had their, when they released their first cloud storage system and they called it SkyDrive. Yes, they got in trouble. They got sued. Yeah, yes, they got in trouble. Many things is because you're not going to have any legal problems, and when you're as big as microsoft or you're as big as google or apple, you are a target for uh, your your target for lawsuits, and so there is some. You know, there's some justification for that, but I found an article when I was doing some uh research for this one. I found an article that I wrote in 2010 um, and everything was called live. Then it was windows live and uh, so they stuck live on the end of everything trademark lawsuits.
20:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We own the name. Let's just call everything the same name you know, um when?
20:23 - Ed Bott (Guest)
when the lawyers.
20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yeah, the lawyers there are still a good. I mean, is the technology good? I mean, okay, patch tuesday last week. What was it? 169 flaws patched, more than ever since 2017. Uh, three zero days. Maybe they aren't even that good technologically. They're a big target. They're a big target.
20:48 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Yeah.
20:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I asked Steve Gibson this on security. Now I said is the problem that there's a billion and a half windows users? So there you know there's going to be. They're going to find more flaws and fix more flaws than smaller operating systems. So, ed, you cover. Microsoft Is Microsoft. What do you think?
21:09 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I think their technology has improved dramatically in the last decade. They've gotten their processes together. In some cases it's but. But boring is is good. You know, you don't. You don't want to have bad headlines and so you know, I think windows is actually a pretty good product these days. It, you know it looks good, it works well.
21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. You know it's the most popular operating system after it's reliable and the and the office stuff.
21:49 - Ed Bott (Guest)
When you know if you can make the copilot stuff you know reach its proper place is is actually also is also quite good. You know, I don't hear, I don't hear a lot of complaints about that. That aren't sort of either edge cases or just sort of the normal. You know, when you have a small percentage of a very large number it's. It might seem like it's a.
22:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's a lot of problems but I know one billion and a half people I know we're in place that three extra three billion might be going. This week, uh, the president, elon musk, larry ellison of oracle, um, a bunch of sam altman of open ai, announced a new half trillion dollar over four years, a project called stargate, to create an agi. Elon subtweeted this, by the way, saying I know for a fact they don't have the money, to which satya nadella, the ceo of microsoft, said well, I know, I'm good for the 80 billion. Okay, I think he's referring to the 80 billion in Azure credits that they uh, that they've given. Uh, open AI, I would guess. But uh, hey, credits count. Um, I'm good for my 80 billion. I love that all right. Well, I started to have to lead with such a fascinating subject. You can see it was that of the colors of the S25. So I think we've bested that anyway.
23:34 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I checked. There actually are four additional colors in the ones you mentioned. Oh, what is the blue black, the coral red and the pink gold that you mentioned? But there's four others that you can get in stores, which are navy, which is a darker blue, mint, which is a light green, boring, icy blue there's icy blue, no, that's boring and silver shadow. So I mean there's seven colors and they're arguably more vibrant colors than those you can get on an iphone pro uh, vibrant, is that vibrant?
24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
those are those vibrant colors. You're looking. Well, you checked out iphone pro lately well, that's true, they're not exactly so, uh all right. Coral, red, blue, black, titanium, jade, green. All right, anyway, it's fine. It's fine. That's. The big story is this s25 announcement.
24:30 - Ed Bott (Guest)
The problem was, everybody already knew even the color names weeks ago, because every, for some reason that samsung managed to get everything, and they did spend a lot of time talking about galaxy ai in, oh yeah, that event, oh yeah, this week, but most of that is uh integration with google gemini, as far as I can tell, right.
24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't know. There's a this. The ai world is pretty incestuous, which is why this deep seek r1 was so interesting, because this is an AI that came out of China. They claim it was developed for very little money and is doing reasoning that seems to be as good as O1, the premier AI from OpenAI. So that's why that was the other story.
25:26 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know it does make me wonder. You know, the Biden administration has been had been really tightening the screws on China's AI sector by limiting its access to NVIDIA chips and other chip technology. Is that just forcing China's ai sector to get smarter than us?
25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
essentially, that's exactly the point from a wired's uh article about this from uh j yi yang, who says unlike let's see, deep seek's success points to an unintended outcome of the tech Cold War between the US and China. Us export controls, as as you pointed out uh, have severely curtailed the ability of Chinese tech firms to compete on AI in the Western way, that is, by infinitely scaling up, buying more chips, training for a longer period of time. As a result, most Chinese companies have focused on downstream applications rather than building their own models. Deep seek apparently uses meta's uh llama model, which is a I'm going to put this in air quotes open model. It's not open source, it's just other people can use it, which is kind of what that means. Even though they're calling it open source, deep seek has proven there's another way to win by revamping the foundational structure of ai models and using limited resources more efficiently. They did buy 10 000 nvidia chips to do this. It's funded, uh by a hedge fund billionaire. He, he uh made a lot of money and decided that he wanted to start. Deep seek started as something called fire Flyer, a deep learning research branch of high Flyer, which is the hedge fund I mentioned, um it's. I think it's an interesting story and people who've used deep seek say it's great unless you ask it about Tiananmen Square because it is Chinese uh. It just shows that there is a lot of creativity, I think, in the AI sphere and that there is no one way uh to solve this problem. Um, it's very interesting uh.
27:39
Liang, the founder, told a Chinese Tech publication the decision was driven by scientific curiosity rather than desire to turn a profit. I wouldn't be able to find a commercial reason for DeepSeek, even if you ask me to. It's not worth it commercially. It must be nice to have so much money. You can say you know what we should do. We should spend it on NVIDIA cards. Basic science research has very low return on investment ratio. Liang said when OpenAI early investors gave it money, they return on investment ratio. Liang said when even when open ai early investors gave it money, they sure weren't thinking about how much return they would get. Rather, it was that they really wanted to do this thing. It's pretty. It's actually very cool uh that they've succeeded, although it does put into uh doubt the us's policy to keep these chips out of Chinese hands.
28:23 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, even if you were able to keep the Chinese from buying NVIDIA processors, one thing that we're increasingly starting to see is use of other types of processors. The NVIDIA processors are great at essentially brute forcing the problem Right, but they're not actually that highly optimized for doing the very specific types of calculations that they do have. You know, like the black wall processor and others. You know, the previous generations have tensor cores in them that are very optimized for this. But increasingly, as you get into these LLMs, what you need is something even more highly optimized for doing matrix math. And if you can get to that and that's you know, we're seeing increasing development of these matrix optimized, matrix math optimized processors are way more efficient at doing the kinds of calculations you need to do to do AI with much less power consumption.
29:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam Alton has to freak out, though, when he sees this, because he's the one who's raised all this money. He's the one, one of the people spearheading Stargate, looking to spend half a trillion dollars. These guys don't have anywhere near the resources and they don't have access to the hardware. Wired writes deep seat made. Deep seek has also made significant progress on something called multi-head, latent attention, mla and mixture of experts, two technical designs that make deep seat models more cost effective, requiring fewer computing resources to train. In fact, according to the research institution Epic AI, deepseek's latest model required one-tenth the computing power of Meta's comparable Lama 3.1 to train. So sometimes that's true, isn't it in the world? When you have constraints, you're forced to get creative and maybe even do a better job. It's very it's interesting yeah, I mean that's.
30:29 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I thought that was all the best engineering comes from is having having constraints I thought that was an interesting and an odd remark, that, uh, the quote that you read about the guy saying, you know basic research doesn't have a return on investment. I mean, that might literally be true because by definition, basic research isn't designed to turn into a product, but I think some of the most important products of our lifetime and you know, the last couple of generations have been sort of uh, have come out of accidental discoveries from basic research. Right, you know, you bet you know semiconductors and such. So you know there's a, there's a strong case to be made for funding basic research. Uh, you know, both at the government level and by private capital, because you know that you're, you know that somebody is going to get lucky and find something amazing that nobody thought of.
31:37 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
We and of course you can go ahead, sam, if you can, then if you can let somebody else do that funding of the basic research and then when they find something, then take that and create the applications, which is what it looks like DeepSeek is doing here to commercialize it. If you can continue to rely on somebody else to do that basic research and give you those foundational layers that you can then build on to build technology applications, why wouldn't you do it, especially at this point in time?
32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, as you grow and actually start to generate some revenue and some profits, then maybe you start doing some of your own basic research Also excuse me if I'm a little cynical, but this is a guy operating out of communist China and it is definitely in the Chinese government's interest to show that it can still compete, even with the sanctions placed on it by the United States. So I imagine, even if he's not getting any concrete remuneration for his research efforts, there's probably support there's a little bit of support and encouragement and even maybe a medal in it for him.
32:43
Who knows? I don't know. Uh, this is. But it's also good if again, we have to somewhat, uh, put some faith in what they're saying and they could be making this. We don't know really and, as always with ai, you don't really know what's what's going on. So there's a certain amount of trust here, uh, but uh, wired quotes a professor of university at the university of technology sydney, marina zhang, who studies chinese innovations. She says unlike many chinese ai firms that rely heavily on access to advanced hardware, deep seek is focused on maximizing software-driven resource optimization. They've embraced open source methods, pooling collective expertise and fostering collaborative innovation. This approach not only mitigates resource constraints but accelerates the development of cutting-edge technologies. So bravo, I mean right. We should all be in favor of that. That's a good thing. By the way, they are releasing this model and giving it away for free, so they are putting their uh mouth where their money is. That doesn't make a lot of sense. You know what I'm saying. They're giving it away where their mouth is.
33:58
You know that's yeah, but they didn't yeah. Well, they're putting their robot where the ai? I don't know. Well, they're putting their robot where the AI, I don't know. We'll have to come up with something for this era, the AI era.
34:10 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
We'll ask ChatGPT to work on it, would you?
34:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's good. See, this is exactly the kind of thing I think ChatGPT would be very good at. We're going to take a little break. We have lots more to talk about, I think. Ai we got some more AI stuff we should talk about. Stargate uh, a little bit. Owen's got brought some, uh some san francisco news along from the san francisco business times. Good, good, good on you, um, including an interview with julia hearts, a web 2.0 legend still around. We got more to come. You stay right here. You're watching this week in tech with my buddy, ed bott, who I've known since what comdex days, I think long time it's, it's been used to come on years than either one of us.
35:00
Yeah, I know used to come on with me and dvorak on dvorak on computers back in the 90s saturday mornings right, sunday mornings.
35:08 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Sunday mornings, yeah, sunday mornings.
35:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, a lot of fun. Uh, I've known owen thomas for some time. To come to think of it, managing editor of the san francisco business times. It's always great to see you, owen I have one comdex flashback.
35:22 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It involves Bill Gates and Third Eye Blind.
35:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember that.
35:28 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
The memories are blurry, beyond that, you might have been at that exact party.
35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I was. I remember the white man's overbite or, as we now call it, the bite dance, bill is. I think I danced like five feet away from bill gates for a while at comdex, one of devorex famous parties uh, it's great to have you, owen. And of course, my buddy, the car guy, sam apple samad, now at telemetryagencycom hire them, and also his great podcast, wheelbearingsmedia. We were talking about robbie uh on wednesday because I asked why does ever? Why does uh sonoma county? Why is my town, my little town, has so many cover bands? And benita reminded me that robbie has like seven cover yeah, robbie's in half of them I think he's got.
36:20 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
He's got a daft punk band, a talking heads band, a depo band, yeah, um, a back cover band, um, I can't remember the others now I think, there's at least 60 boys band yeah, yeah, yes, I think he does a beastie boys one.
36:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wow, so all right, we're, and we also I want to talk cars with you, sam, because there's a lot, a lot going on, uh, including maybe a little um trouble in paradise with, uh, adolf titler, as they call him. Uh, we're gonna take it, but that's not, it's nothing funny about that and uh, we're gonna take a break and talk about it in just a bit. You're watching this week in tech, our show today, brought to you by, I'm very happy to say, or Oracle. Even if you think AI might be a little bit overhyped, it really is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine and, yes, to business efficiency. In fact, if it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed, a lot of computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control?
37:28
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38:33 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, they were. Let's see Overall globally I think they were down by about four or five percent last year and they were up by about six point seven percent in the US despite adding sales of the Cybertruck 6.7 percent in the us despite adding sales of the cyber truck. So even with the cyber truck, which only sold about 35 000 units last year, half of them to petaluma.
38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see them all over our little town. Yeah, it's wild. My neighbor is just balling. Ah, sounds like it's time to move. They're not the most attractive vehicles, uh why at not at all? Yeah, is it because of Elon's association with the new administration? That is a big part of it.
39:12 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I personally know a number of people that have sold their Teslas in the last year, year and a half. It's political, yeah, particularly since he bought Twitter, but especially in the last year. People don't want to be associated with them, and even people that are keeping their cars because they can't necessarily afford to get rid of them they may have a car loan that they're paying off.
39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They get the bumper sticker that says I bought this before Elon, or yeah.
39:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I bought this before I knew Elon was a jerk or other words, and so there's a lot of people that are kind of stuck with them for now. And you know, I mean that's, that's fair. I, you know, I, I know you know, if I was ten thousand dollars underwater on a loan not a car loan I probably wouldn't be selling it to buy something else right now either. Yeah, so it's. You know it's a challenge, you know, and there's a lot of people who like the idea of electric cars and you know there's. There are good reasons to, you know, to have a Tesla if you want an EV, because of the charging infrastructure, but they do not want to be associated with this guy because of what he is doing outside of the company and they don't want to be financially supporting him.
40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know for a fact that it's because of the politics. It could very well be that there are just many more competing vehicles.
40:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, yeah, and that's why I say the politics is just one part of it, but there's also the fact that their lineup, their products, are getting older. They haven't really fundamentally changed.
40:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say it's a testament to the original design, though, that they don't look out of date.
41:05 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
They don't make more regular changes. People don't want to necessarily be. Especially those that are buying new cars don't necessarily want to be driving the same thing that they bought five years ago or 10 years ago, you know, uh. So even even cars that you know have a very evolutionary design process, like, say, the porsche 911. You know porsche 911. You look at one today, you look at the 1960s. Yeah, you know it's a very different car, but you can see the dna there. Yeah, and you know, must that too? That's not necessarily you know with in the case of tesla's, you know that's. It's much more. There's much less change. That's visible. There's actually a lot of, strangely enough there's actually a lot of change under the skin that people are not aware of.
41:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think people, maybe, who buy Teslas are more aware of that. Teslas still have a technological lead, don't they? In efficiency.
42:02 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Not necessarily. No, I think, if you're looking at efficiency, lucid is, I think, like, in terms of you looking at efficiency, lucid is absolutely the best. They're amazing efficiency, uh, and you know a lot of other automakers you know are in the same ballpark as tesla in terms of efficiency, uh, in terms of charging speeds, um. So, and and you know, that's the other thing there's a lot more competition now. There's a lot more evs in the marketplace today than there were five, seven years ago. And you know, I was just going through the sales numbers this week and you know, except for the Volkswagen ID4 and some Mercedes EV models, pretty much every other EV model on the market in the US their sales have gone up. Last year, tesla went down, vw and Mercedes went down. Everybody else was up.
42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting.
42:48 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And Tesla's share of the EV market in the US has dropped steadily over the last five years. In 2020, they were about 80% of all EV sales. In 2023, they were at 55%.
43:02 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Last year they were down to 47% of EV sales 2023, they were at 55% Last year they were down to 47% of EV sales and for years Tesla made a lot of money selling a sort of tax credit to other car companies, because Tesla basically had more credits than it knew what to do with and these other companies weren't selling enough enough evs and it kind of made for a nice trade for well and good.
43:28
On elon, I mean you could say that he started, he jump started the ev market though and, of course, now what he wants to do is have, you know, have his buddy trump take away. Yeah, this is puzzling to me. Well, no, it makes perfect sense if you think about it. He's's still got 47% of the market. Take away the subsidies for all the other smaller players, which, by the way, tesla no longer qualifies for because it's gotten too big. No, they do. Oh, they still qualify.
43:58 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, when they did the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and revamp the tax credit scheme.
44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tesla was again well at least the vehicles that have.
44:10 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
US-built batteries were qualified again.
44:14 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, there was a period when Tesla kind of maxed out on the credits. Tesla is going to benefit if you take away subsidies. Tesla is probably going to be in a better financial position car by car than anyone who's manufacturing at smaller?
44:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
scale. I mean, it does seem as if Elon, who has the president's ear, must have argued against removing the EV subsidies, or no, no, what do you think?
44:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
think it doesn't appear to be the case. Yeah, it doesn't appear that he is yeah, why not?
44:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what doesn't that hurt him?
44:52 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
um, I think he feels like he's going to continue selling teslas anyway, with or without the subsidies, that that customers are going to continue buying them and so oh it.
45:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The essential point is that it hurts other people more than it hurts Tesla.
45:07 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, because Tesla, because they build so many EVs they do have the economies of scale on the EV side and the way that they've designed their cars, they've managed to take a lot of cost out of them, and so it appears that they can sell their EVs profitably, whereas others can't. And without the tax credits, then other manufacturers would have a harder time selling their EVs and would then potentially have to go to Tesla to buy those ZEV credits, the Zero Emission Vehicle credits, those ZEV credits, the Zero Emission Vehicle credits. But the other part of this is that what Trump also wants to do is he wants to roll back the emissions and fuel economy standards which are part of, and eliminate California's waiver to set their own standards.
46:00
He calls it the elimination of unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs Right, and then if they do that, if they succeed in doing that, then other manufacturers won't have to sell as many EVs to meet the requirements that they want to roll it back to, and then they wouldn't have to buy credits from Tesla. So Tesla still gets hurt. So it doesn't make sense why Musk would want to roll it back to and then they wouldn't have to buy credits from Tesla. So Tesla still gets hurt. So it doesn't make sense why Musk would want to roll back those standards.
46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or maybe he doesn't have as much clout as we assumed.
46:39
That's certainly a possibility, In fact it looks like Doge, which was initially the Department of Governmental Efficiency with the meme name, was going to be slashing federal bureaucracies, and now it looks like it's been absorbed. It's actually they took the US Digital Services, which our friend Matt Cutts had started or was part of, and have renamed it Doge. So now what was gonna be something a little bit more drastic has really boiled down to well. It's gonna help improve digital infrastructure in the US government. That sounds like a demotion. Vivek Rajaswamy has left to run for governor of Ohio.
47:27 - Ed Bott (Guest)
His left is an interesting way to put it Was he fired. Well, it certainly sounds like he was pushed out.
47:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he didn't get what he. He didn't like the direction Doge was going.
47:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, Elon never likes to have anybody that's on the same level as him.
47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was shocked that they created a co-chairmanship.
47:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, just besides the fact that it was inevitable that elon department had a government deficiency department it's already a problem. It was pretty much inevitable that elon was going to find one of them was going to go. Yeah, just as if, just as he has with anybody else that threatened his position at any of his companies, but doge does seem to be somewhat, uh, reduced.
48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm I'm just wondering, maybe elon just doesn't have the, the cloud he thought he had. I mean, he's busy gaming, yeah that's the number one what I forget which game it was he's admitted essentially that he, he, he farmed all of his equipment and gear and then when he plays, the real players are going. He's an idiot, he doesn't.
48:33 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
He just walked by it's a very important drop and ignored it wasn't grimes tweeting about how the the father of her children was, was she did a little hostage tweet.
48:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it had very much that hostage flair to it. You want me to read it. It was actually pretty funny. I can find it. Then we will talk a little bit about Twitter, because Twitter also in the news, you know, come to think of it, maybe a few things did happen. Grimes Elon tweet uh, in the news, you know, come to think of it, maybe a few things did happen. Uh, grimes elon tweet it was. It had a very, let's see.
49:15 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, she's been embroiled in in a custody thing with elon for a while now. Yeah, um, over at least a couple of the, the three kids, uh, that they had together yeah, only one of which she actually gave birth to. The other two are with surrogates yeah oh really, yeah, she. Apparently she had some major medical issues during the birth of the first one.
49:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You must be reading people magazine.
49:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I didn't, I missed that one um, and you know, and apparently uh, the, the kid who has a long unpronounceable name but goes by x, has been at elon's side like and and in mar-a-lago, you know. It just strikes me like he's got what?
50:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
11 plus kids there's at least 12 that we know of.
50:07 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know probably more like is there a website? How many kids does elon musk have?
50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, but that's a good idea for a site maybe you want to register.
50:15 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Should I just ask?
50:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
chat, gpt, yeah, um. So grimes tweeted just for my personal pride. I would like to state that the father of my children was the first American druid in Diablo to clear abattoir of Zier and ended that season as the best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia and beat Felix himself at the game. This is the hostage statement. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who could verify this. That is all. Now please give me custody of my children. No, I left that.
50:48 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I added that at the end uh wait, leo, you don't actually follow Grimes, I'm disappointed.
50:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, you're right, you caught me out. I do not follow Grimes, I come on, follow Elon. So Elon is denying now that he said this, but it was. I did see it in the Wall Street Journal that X is he, sent out an email to uh employees. You can deny it all you want, but it's kind of hard once you uh send out an email. Uh, the Wall Street Journal reported that he X is barely breaking, even struggling, to which a number of banks have responded by saying, yeah, we're going to try to get out, get out of as much of this. They're preparing to sell billions of dollars of their loans at, they're hoping, 90 to 95 cents on the dollar, which actually, if they get out at uh at that price, they did pretty well, I think uh, especially considering the interest rates.
51:48 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Uh, yeah, they issued those loans right before rates started soaring. So great, great timing for elon, uh, but uh, terrible for the, for the banks. I don't know the exact math, but I would be surprised if they got 90 cents on the dollar base, just based on the differential in prevailing rates right now yeah.
52:10 - Ed Bott (Guest)
But those loans are all those are personally guaranteed, aren't they?
52:15 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh, that's a good question yeah they're guaranteed with he put up his Tesla stock Tesla stock. Yeah, that's right.
52:22 - Ed Bott (Guest)
So those are very, very safe investments If you you know whatever price you can get for those you're, you know you're going to get your money. That's true.
52:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point. $13 billion of the $44 billion.
52:35
Elon yeah but you could just buy T-bills is my point. Banks have to diversify, right, the? L include mitsubishi, bnp uh, society general. There are a few sovereign, uh uh, wealth funds, I believe, involved in all of this. Um, the email said over the past few months, we've witnessed the power of x in shaping national conversations and outcome, which I would argue makes x pretty valuable, right, uh, we're also seeing other platforms begin to adopt our commitment to and I'm going to put this in air quotes free speech and unbiased truths. Okay, uh, he apparently is referring to meta rolling back it's fact checking. Um, so even if you lose money, yeah, a, you've got that bully pulpit that's hugely valuable to elon personally anyway. B, the banks aren't gonna. Really, they've got it. It's backed by. Uh, I mean, what happens if tesla stock tanks sam? Is that that means that their collateral is worth a lot less, right?
53:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
is there any chance of that happening um right now, given who's in power in washington right now? Probably not.
53:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably not um, but you know if he by the way, elon denies this email, which is bizarre.
53:59 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't know if, if trump had lost, you know it would probably be a different situation. But yeah, the you know, if Tesla shares were to drop, you know, because he he used the shares as collateral, you know, then he would potentially they could call in the loans he would potentially have to liquidate and for that could could have forced a downward spiral of Tesla shares. But what has happened is, since the election, the value of Tesla has skyrocketed and Elon's personal share of Tesla has gone up by something like 100 or 150 billion dollars since.
54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did he get his 56 billion dollars in annual pay?
54:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
you know the the uh. The judge in uh delaware uh declared that that vote was still invalid. He still does not get that money okay, yeah, the shareholders.
54:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, the judge ruled he couldn't have it. Shareholders at the shareholders meeting said no, no, he deserves it. So the judge came back and said no, he doesn't. It's yeah that those chancery judges are tough, oh yeah, yeah.
55:11 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, that's that's why, uh, that's why he reincorporated the company in texas.
55:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh much better place yeah, elon responded to the wall street journal with this tweet and this is why twitter is valuable to him, or X is valuable to him. The report is false. I said no such email. Wall Street Journal is lying. And then, of course, immediately, uh, his, his fans say why do these Legacy media keep lying? I was excited about the fact that X breaking even huh, why would you care if you're not a shareholder?
55:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
why would you care if it's breaking even?
55:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, by the way, I've been informed I did not know this that the dance elon's doing is the x. He's making the x of x. I thought he was just kind of a nerd well, those two are not mutually exclusive x not mutually exclusive what is the obsession with x?
56:18 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
it's so weird, that's just so he, you know he he owned the domain uh for a long, long time, and single-letter domains were very rare.
56:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He bought it in the PayPal era, I believe.
56:31 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
No, no Pre-PayPal.
56:34 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, Xcom was his company that merged with the other company to form PayPal.
56:39 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I have an Xcom debit card in my archive of Fin of uh oh, fintech, uh. Paraphernalia nice um, so, sometime in the 2010s I think, 2015 or so he actually bought the xcom domain back from paypal ah, which had, which had owned it since the since the merger and he wanted and he wanted to turn PayPal into the everything, the everything, yeah, the everything site and and give it the name X.
57:10 - Ed Bott (Guest)
And so you know, and so he, just now he has Twitter and you know I I haven't heard much about his plans to turn Twitter into a bank and everything.
57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know, every, ultimately every Silicon Valley company wants to become a bank that's funny because goldman sachs, which got the coveted apple card, is desperate to get out of consumer because they've lost billions of dollars on it. Um, so maybe you shouldn't want to be a bank.
57:42 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Maybe it's not such a good thing. Well, they lost billions because they did a bad deal with Apple. How do you?
57:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
lose a billion dollars on a credit card. I mean, I know how I would, but how does a bank do that? Isn't it just a license to make money Normally? Yeah, I guess printing all those titanium cards cost a lot of money.
58:07 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Also, Goldman made a lot of rookie mistakes. You heard about incidents where, say, someone would get a card and then their spouse would be denied an Apple card which just speaks to questionable underwriting Alexis Ohanian, wasn't it Alexis?
58:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who was it that said I could get the car but my wife couldn't? Yeah, yeah, so, okay, we're gonna take a break when we come back. Here's a riddle for you. It's almost as big as manhattan and mark zuckerberg is building it right now. Whatever could it be. Is it his new yacht? Stay tuned.
58:48
You're watching this week in tech. Owen thomas is here. San francisco business times great to have you. My old friend ed bott also here. Many a magazine. He's now senior contributing editor at zdnet.
59:00
Does that mean you just kind of file whenever you feel like it? Is that what that means? Yeah, that's, that's probably probably a pretty accurate job description. Yeah, I got an idea. I'm going to take the week off. How about that? Uh, also, sam and bull samad, my car guy. Telemetry agency dot com.
59:21
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01:02:22
So what is this giant thing? Slash security so what is this giant thing? Here's a picture of it, superimposed over the island of Manhattan that, my friends, is a data center, the Richland Parish Data Center. Mark put this picture up on Facebook, saying this will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect, meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than a billion people. Llama 4 will become the leading state-of-the-art model and will build this is the scary one and a. We will build an AI engineer and we will build an AI engineer. We have the technology that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to an r&d efforts. To power this meta's building a two gigawatt plus data center so large it would cover a significant portion of manhattan. We'll bring online a gigawatt of compute in 2025 and end the year with more has anyone told mark that you can?
01:03:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
you can build buildings higher like you have multiple stories, yeah like they don't.
01:03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where is? Where is this? Uh, richland park, where is this?
01:03:40 - Ed Bott (Guest)
um, well, there is a. There's a richland in eastern washington oh, that makes sense. That's where you'd want it, because you get a lot of power, lots of hydropower.
01:03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he says we're going to end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs.
01:03:56 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
This one's in Louisiana, which makes sense.
01:03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's in Parrish, of course. Yeah, right Planning to invest $60 to $65 billion in CapEx this year. We're also growing our AI team. What happened to the metaverse? Hold on.
01:04:12 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Mark, well, it didn't have legs, leo. Oh, I like it, it didn't.
01:04:19 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You haven't heard about the plan to renamea Facebook with an I.
01:04:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
F-A-I Facebook Facebook Facebook.
01:04:34 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I got that one from ChatGPT. That's no good. I'm going to tell him to go back. Tweak. My prompts work a little harder.
01:04:42 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Of course, all these data centers is probably part of the reason why Trump has this executive order to open up drilling everywhere you know to drill for more oil and gas, because they, you know he wants it to power all these data centers. These things are consuming huge amounts of power. Notice, in this post he doesn't talk about how much it can actually compute. He talks about gigawatts. This is the amount of power it's going to consume.
01:05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's power. It's 4 million square feet, yeah, it doesn't say what kind of computing capability Over two gigawatts of power.
01:05:16 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, he's got 1.3 million GPUs, but two gigawatts of power. It's an enormous amount of power because, you know, if it wasn't for these, these data centers, we actually don't need to do any more oil and gas drilling or coal drilling. We already produce way more oil and gas than we need. You know, the US is now the number one, the world's number one exporter of oil and gas. We export more than Saudi Arabia does. That was under Biden, by the way, that that happened yeah and you know.
01:05:48
So we don't need to be producing more and, in fact, if, if we did produce more, uh it actually would go down well, but except it wouldn't, because the the thing is um, you know, because we're not consuming it right now. People, people are not consuming the oil and gas.
01:06:08
If the price does go down? Right now, oil is about $75, $80 a barrel and almost all of the oil and gas we produce now comes from fracking, and the cost of producing oil and gas from fracking is in somewhere in the $60 to $65 a barrel range. So if oil prices actually dropped below that range, what happens is they just stop producing. They stop drilling more. That's what happened back in the mid 2010s, when we had oil prices that were over a hundred dollars a barrel. We started doing all this fracking and, all of a sudden, oil prices collapsed to $40 a barrel.
01:06:44
And all that fracking, all those fracking operations came to a grinding halt.
01:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Something analogous is happening in California. Our local utility says that because we're conserving so much, the price of electricity has to go up. Yeah, and they've had six rate increases in the last year, not because we're using more power, but because we're using less yeah, they need to recover their investment in the, in the infrastructure and the power plants and the infrastructure so this is more what's going to end up happening.
01:07:16 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
If it doesn't get consumed somewhere, then they'll. You know well. You just reach that equilibrium point where, if the price drops, they just stop producing more, so you're not actually going to be there's no net seeing any reduction in price for consumers so to support this meta data center, enter g, which is probably a chat.
01:07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gpt created name uh, the, the louisiana energy company. Enter g energy has been around for a long time. Yeah, the.
01:07:45 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Louisiana Energy Company.
01:07:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Entergy, entergy's been around for a long time yeah will produce three combined cycle combustion turbines, each with a combined capacity or no, total combined capacity of 2.2 megawatts, 2.2 thousand megawatts, two of which in Richland, Paris. They're going to build two new substations, six customer substations, install 100 miles of 500 kilovolt transmission lines, eight new 230 kilovolt transmission lines. This is I mean yes to power a gigawatt data center. I'm surprised they're not building a pocket nuke.
01:08:21 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
By the way, combined cycle uh turbines are natural gas fuel. They're a more efficient way of extracting uh energy from from natural gas um and that's fairly clean right yeah, you know, nancy pelosi infamously once once characterized natural gas as a green energy. It's still carbon, um?
01:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and if it, escapes into the atmosphere. It's's not good.
01:08:45 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah Well, and it still generates CO2.
01:08:47 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Okay, Although the CO2 is less greenhouse intensive than methane, methane is really a problem. So if you're fracking and releasing methane into the atmosphere, that's about 10 to 20 times more intensive than CO2.
01:09:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So these new generators are burn.
01:09:06 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It are 30 hydrogen which is absolutely better right, and they want to transition to 100 hydrogen well, again, except that you know most of that hydrogen is being created by, by cracking natural gas, fossil fuels. Okay, so unless, unless they're using solar right or wind to wind to produce the hydrogen from water.
01:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they are putting in 1,500 megawatts of solar resources. I mean it's got to do a lot to get three gigawatts.
01:09:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, what's amazing is Texas, for example. I saw a pie chart. It's getting nearly a third of its energy needs from wind and solar, which trump has said he wants to abandon. You know, it just makes no sense, except that, um, I guess, uh, some, you know trump felt that some wind turbines in scotland were uh, you know, we're messing up the views from his golf course well.
01:09:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is what I don't understand. You're basically he's basically implementing policies that are going to hurt the oil industry in the long run. Is that right, Sam? Is that what you're kind of saying?
01:10:14 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, I don't think he actually understands. No, no, I understand, but they understand.
01:10:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And why aren't they standing up and saying hey, mr President, this is not what you want to do.
01:10:24 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So, leo, climate change is a hoax and we need to annex Greenland at the same time, I understand all that I feel like it's not that it's actually not going to benefit the oil and gas industry.
01:10:37 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh, they still make money. Yeah, because if they produce more, they'll find markets for it, and AI data centers are a prime market for burning that gas. To to power data centers, that's a market for them. What I was saying is that is that consumers are not going to benefit from lower pump lower gas prices at the pump.
01:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will never see lower gas prices than about three bucks a gallon so, ed, when you talk about microsoft making an extra three billion on copilot, that's a drop in the drop in the bucket like I said, that's a tiny little division there.
01:11:13 - Ed Bott (Guest)
They need, they need to, they need to get an order, an order or two magnitude more yeah, they have to force everybody to use copilot for everything they do.
01:11:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, otherwise they lose so, uh, the all tesla owners are not the only people a little mad at elon. There are at least a hundred subreddits that are considering banning all links to x on the subreddits uh and I. I don't know if you use reddit, but if you use reddit it's all over reddit. No more links to x. Not that many of them have had links, some of this because of his questionable gesture at the president's uh inaugural rally um, I don't think there's any question about what that gesture was well, one way or the other, the subredditdits seem to think so.
01:12:03
The New Jersey subreddit, london Ontario, the 49ers I know my team subreddit. It's not run by the 49ers, it's run by individuals. Slash r slash. Christianity banned Twitter links with a gif in which Musk's salute was put side by side with neo-Nazis. R slash. Nfl, hockey, baseball and nba all considering a ban. Uh, comic book movies, oh no. Uh made me smile. It's interesting. It's funny how, um, what I'm just saying where's the backlash on some of this stuff? And I guess that's maybe on Reddit. Maybe that's where the backlash is. What's going to happen to TikTok?
01:12:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Does any of us care?
01:12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I'm in favor. I'm in favor of TikTok. I'm a TikTok guy. I like TikTok. My son made his career on TikTok. He's managed to guy, I like TikTok. My son made his career out of on TikTok. He's managed to move on. Thank God, tiktok's still around, but you can't get the app anymore from the Google Play Store or the iOS store, which, by the way, has created a fairly brisk, I think. Fairly brisk, I think market for iphones with tiktok still installed on ebay. Here's a two thousand dollars or, best offer, eighteen hundred dollars. Three thousand dollars. Here's one. I don't know if this is going to sell for twelve thousand four hundred eighty one dollars with tiktok installed, because you can't. You know, if you bought a new iphone today, you wouldn't have tiktok on it, you couldn't install it.
01:13:50 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Ten thousand forty thousand that iphone, and it's an iphone 12 too, so it's a classic oh well, this is worth more because it has tiktok and cap cut.
01:14:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I don't. I somehow think that this is just a publicity stunt, because nobody obviously is going to pay 40 000 for it but you know, there was, there was apparently check this old listing oh, apparently this.
01:14:17 - Ed Bott (Guest)
This apparently happened, uh, 15 years ago or so, with flappy bird was yes when he pulled flappy bird back.
01:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, how do I make this sold only uh oh it's on the left somewhere.
01:14:29 - Benito (Announcement)
It's one of those checkbox on the checkbox.
01:14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here sold uh lock status price sold and completed items only okay, on the lower show only. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, thank you. I'm an old man and I don't understand how the internet works. Here's one that sold for 67 800 okay okay, 120. Yeah, they're not going for 40 000, but they're. They're going 500 bucks for a 14 with tick tock, 560 for 15 pro max with tick tock but that's about what that phone should cost anyway, right?
01:15:06 - Ed Bott (Guest)
right, so whether it has tiktok, yeah this is basically an easy way to you know, I wanted to sell this phone anyway. Now I can, I can sell it quickly that's hysterical.
01:15:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It ended 685 bucks. He got it. Well, I have a phone, a few phones, with TikTok installed.
01:15:27 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Make yourself rich. Spare a few of those. I've read that the most likely outcome for this is that Oracle is going to wind up managing the business in the United States.
01:15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they already were kind of hosting the data with Project Texas.
01:15:48 - Ed Bott (Guest)
But I guess maybe that gives them an inside track and and, and you know this was, this was a dumb move from from day one, and you know, and a terrible precedent to set. And the fact that that it got this far and then that the courts upheld it and said you know, this doesn't have anything to do with the First Amendment is is kind of crazy, and the best thing that could probably happen is for some sort of kabuki theater to happen where you know bite dance is pulling the strings from you know halfway across the world, but there are American overseers who can reassure the members of Congress who voted for this that everything is OK now and then they can just stop thinking about it. Yeah, which?
01:16:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is really what they would like to do at this point. Somebody in our chat room suggesting maybe Microsoft just renamed Teams to Microsoft TikTok.
01:16:51 - Ed Bott (Guest)
With.
01:16:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Copilot With plus Copilot. Thank you, Search Strip, that's a good one.
01:17:01 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean, Meta is already like weaving AI into Facebook, such that, you know, I think pretty soon it's going to be suggesting what to post. Meta is already weaving AI into Facebook. I think pretty soon it's going to be suggesting what to post and writing your posts for you.
01:17:15
Well, they already have bots that are posting stuff which they said that was a mistake, that was an accident, an early test. We've gotten rid of those. That is meta's MO, isn't it that? That was a miss? That was a mistake, that was a, that was a, an accident, an early test. Uh, you know, we've, we've got those that is meta's mo, isn't it?
01:17:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just do stuff. When you get caught, say oh, that was a mistake and then move on. Is that called moving fast and breaking things? I think it is uh david sacks who is our new ai and crypto czar. He is, of course, one of the paypal mafia, friend of elon's, a south african like elon, who is now a fairly important I think fairly important role. I guess czar is important in the uh government.
01:18:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yes, I think that's real up both. Uh you're, you're thinking of who's a south african um?
01:18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so is sax. Sax is south african too. Yeah, yeah, they all are it's a little weird.
01:18:12 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Teal was not born in south africa, but he grew up there. His parents, his dad is so weird was running a, a uranium mine in, uh, what is now namibia. Um, when he was five years old anyway whether he's South African or not.
01:18:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He has decided that nfts and meme coins are not securities. This is, of course, one of the reasons the crypto industry supported the new administration. They didn't like this idea that Gensler had of calling them securities. They're collectibles, actually, that's true, until they do a rug pull, but they are. I mean, that's the idea. They're collectibles. Now, I don't know his his word has no force of law, but he does presumably advise the president, so maybe we'll see an executive order saying they're just collecting.
01:19:03 - Ed Bott (Guest)
You know, there's a really funny thing about that distinction, though Obviously they don't want them to be called securities because they don't want them to be regulated by the SEC and other organizations and the capital gains taxes. In the United States, the long-term capital gains rates for collectibles are much higher than they are for securities. Oh, that's not good. Oh yeah, it's really bad to get rid of this frying pan and replace it with this huge gigawatt-fueled furnace.
01:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Whoa, the capital gains tax on collectibles is higher than it is for, say, a stock. Yeah, huh, well, we have to fix that.
01:20:05
I'm going to keep it right board. It's just a little bit longer. I had no idea. Actually, this is the funny thing, you know. Of course, the crypto industry really supported not only the trump election but also the election of 100 I think it was 135 new members of congress who are pro-crypto and celebrated a real victory effect. They had the crypto inaugural ball that snoop dogg performed at. Um, they they've really felt like, uh, this is good and in many ways, you know trump's uh announcement that they want to, that the us is probably going to have a uh, a fort knox of bitcoin, which is great for anybody who's currently holding bitcoin.
01:20:45
Right, yeah, just don't lose the password. I know from personal experience. But the other thing that the crypto industry is a little bit shaken by is the day before he got inaugurated, trump created a meme coin. So did melania, and the new york times says trump's crypto venture divides the industry he aims to support.
01:21:07 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Well, that's shock.
01:21:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There they are, coming into the crypto ball. They look like crypto bros, don't they? They look like they got the crypto money. Make Bitcoin great again. Baseball caps and Snoop Dogg offered a rendition of journeys. Don't stop believing and, whatever you do, keep buying the bitcoin.
01:21:32
Uh, it was during the party that he announced that he was going to launch trump meme coin, and crypto executives said just what we were getting credibility right. Uh, and we're, and we're trying to, you know, enter the mainstream. His venture, they said, created a brief. This is the new york times a brief and highly publicized bubble that partly deflated within a few days, even as trump's family and its business partners collected millions of dollars from fees on the purchases and sales of the coin. Nick carter, who, who is a vocal supporter of Mr Trump, runs the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures, says it makes it all look corrupt and self-interested. Really, oh no, welcome to the perpetual grift.
01:22:21
An analysis by the crypto forensics company Chainalysis showed the majority of people who bought trump were likely inexperienced retail investors, possibly even dabbling in crypto for the first time. I think some of them are members of my family actually, uh, not my immediate family. Think of these traders. According to the analysis roughly broke. Even more than a hundred thousand of them lost money. Meanwhile, the launch of trump generated 58 million dollars in fees for the trump family in less than a day. 58 million dollars. Oh, and let's not forget, they own on paper 23 billion dollars worth of trump, uh, at its 29 price, which is already a 60 drop from the peak now I mean, this is, this is the franklin mint, um, but without all that messy physical stuff you don't actually have to stamp out coins, you have to do anything people just announce it if they rug pulled.
01:23:21
If they started to sell it, that was, that's a rug pull and the price would go down. But if they did it quickly, um to a girl reap billions and billions of dollars. Asked about the coins launch on tuesday at the white house, mr trump said I don't know much about it it.
01:23:39 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It is amazing how how much trump has changed his uh his tune about cryptocurrency.
01:23:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was very suspicious he said it's not money last time yeah, uh, but this time crypto wealth helped get him elected.
01:23:51 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Turns out it is money. Yeah, who knew? You know, it is interesting to to kind of think, like if you were to wind back the clock, if biden were to, you know, were to have told gary gensler, like, maybe ease up like 10 on the crypto industry, and, uh, if biden had say invited, uh, invited elon musk to you know an event about electric vehicles at the white house, um, you know, might the might things have turned out differently uh, but I don't know.
01:24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I think you really honestly don't you have to. If, if you're going to make bitcoin be, uh, what it wants to be, don't you have to regulate it like a security?
01:24:36 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
otherwise it's just a speculative I think I think even under gensler, bitcoin was going to kind of, uh, come clean or be regulated as a commodity, rather than a security.
01:24:49
I think you want that right, yeah, but most other cryptocurrencies tend to be associated with an entity or a small group, and Gensler's SEC was moving to regulate like securities. Gensler SEC was moving to regulate like securities. I suspect under Trump, the, the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, is going to end up with most oversight. So, there will be some oversight. You think, right, which that was. That was the crypto industry's kind of preferred regulator.
01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they want to be somewhat respectable. That's why I don't like these or at least to appear respectable Right.
01:25:23 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Right. They just don't want SEC regulation, right. They'd rather this other smaller agency.
01:25:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eric Trump. When asked about the Trump tokens, he dismissed criticism. He says the Trump trading card and World Liberty Financial are two of the most successful products in crypto history. What are you? Talking about? What are you talking about? How can you say it was a conflict of interest?
01:25:55 - Benito (Announcement)
So I'm kind of still stuck on the NFT crypto as collectibles because they're fungible. So, like you don't collect them all, you're trying to collect all the Bitcoin. No one's trying to no, I no.
01:26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you know, he's not saying crypto, he's saying nfts.
01:26:13 - Benito (Announcement)
Uh are collectibles right and that makes more sense. And meme coins, but mean coins no what mean coins?
01:26:20 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
yeah, they're fungible right they're not.
01:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't say I've got, unless you get a nice piece of paper with gold borders on it or something like that's. The whole point of crypto is that it's fungible. It's fungible, that it's all. One is the same as the other. It's not collectible. An nft. You could say well, I've got this board ape, I've got board eight 304.
01:26:42 - Ed Bott (Guest)
but but is a? Is a meme coin? Is a Trump meme coin fungible? I mean, there are places you can go. There are banks and retail outlets. Dell will take your Bitcoin. You can pay them in Bitcoin. There's places where Bitcoin is fungible, but a meme coin, if you, if you were to take your phone in and show someone the, you know the, the bits that say this is a trump meme coin, I would like that car um well, I think I don't think you're going to get very far.
01:27:19 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, I think it's different it. You know it's. It's more that you know, is it? I think your question really is that it is exchangeable for some goods or services.
01:27:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's different Fungible. Fungible means they're all the same, Like one is the same as another Right One Trump coin is the same as another Trump coin.
01:27:36 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Right, whereas you know two NFTs, you know two to each is unique Dumb monkeys are different, slightly different from each other, and so you know they're not directly exchangeable. But, right, you know whether you can exchange a trump coin, you know, for some good or service. You know that's, that's, that's not fungible. I think I'm not sure what the you know, I mean exchangeable or or legal tender. I guess you know would be the probably well, there's a, but there's also.
01:28:03 - Ed Bott (Guest)
There's also the concept of scarcity, right, and I mean so baseball cards right, there's, there's more than one, uh, uh copy of the mickey mantel rookie card. You know, um, so you know, and, and one is just like the other, except that it's not because one's worn and one has a crease in the, in the edge, and everything. And I don't think you get the exact same variation with meme coins, but you do, at least in theory, have scarcity. If you say, you know, this is a, this is a limited run.
01:28:38
There's only five Right and just like the and just like the Franklin Mint or just like anyone that does limited edition prints or something you can say. It's the scarcity that makes this thing valuable and that will allow scarcity of trump.
01:28:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, well, there is, there's, but there's just millions of them of the dollar sign trump so if only there was scarcity.
01:29:08
Now you're just going to, I'm just going to get more email. Now you see, look, we're only talking about it from a point of view of a technology point of view, and this is a. These are technology, technological innovations. I honestly, I looking at trying to find a silver line. I I feel like the let's saying let's not over regulate AI is a good thing. Right, rolling back some of those AI you know Biden's ex AI, uh, executive order and so forth that's not. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we want to stimulate this, uh, this ai economy. To see what happens now. If you think ai is bs, you disagree, and I don't know if ai is bs or not. I don't know if we're going to get super intelligence or we're going to get something super valuable. I think it's worth a try the.
01:30:05 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
The problem is that. The problem is that the states are not going to stay still like. California already has some ai regulations right on the book, which passed in the most recent legislative session, some of which kicked in january 1st. And you know, I think you'll see more from probably from new york, I would guess would be one uh yeah, but you know who is not going to stand still for sure is China.
01:30:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've already seen that. So I think we need to move forward. We can't get too finicky here on AI unless it truly is an existential threat to humanity, but I don't think it is.
01:30:42 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I mean. And China, by the the way, has been very uh. You know, china has cracked down on lots of tech sectors and I think that you will see. You know, the ai that comes out of china, it's already regulated, right. We talked about how you can't ask uh, chinese chatbots about tiananmen square. Yeah, um. So china? China is going to have AI with Chinese characteristics, and I think it behooves us to have AI with American characteristics. Yes, and think about what I agree, but but I don't think.
01:31:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in fact Governor Newsom vetoed that AI regulation in California because he felt like it would hold ai development back, that it was too aggressive yeah, the the specific one that kind of required uh uh safety testing, a kill switch and things.
01:31:34
Yeah, the the biden executive order required safety testing for companies of a certain size, but the california uh law actually required a kill switch, which I think might have been going up rich too far, or at least it was for governor newsom, or governor new scum, as the president calls him in a very mature fashion. Uh, all right, I want to take another break here. You're watching a bunch of libtards talk about talk about cryptocurrency. Clearly, you thought you thought you had twit, but you had msnbc all along. Uh, we'll move on from uh, from that in just a little bit, maybe not right away. Samuel will. Sam, it is here. Owen thomas great to have all three of you. Ed bot so nice to see you. You're watching this week in tech, brought to you this week by my personal choice for VPNs. People are always asking me A should I have a VPN? And then, b which VPN should I get? Yes, you should have a VPN. Maybe don't use it always, but there are times when you need it. I'll be honest, when we wanted to test to see if tiktok really was was gone for good, we fired up express vpn and and went to a few different countries to see if we could get it.
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01:37:30
Sir Paul McCartney says Don't let AI steal all records. He is worried about proposed changes in the United Kingdom copyright law that would allow tech companies to freely train their models on online content, unless the copyright holders expressly opt out. Sir Paul says no, we're the people, you're the government. You're supposed to protect Paul. You're sounding like a hippie. You're supposed to protect us. That's your job. So if you're putting through a billie, you're supposed to protect us. That's your job. So if you're putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists. This is a warning, or you're not going to have them now.
01:38:17
He's not against ai. Remember he used ai to create that what he called the last beatles record, to clean up a John Lennon demo and make a real song out of it. So he knows AI and he uses it. But he says you get young guys and girls coming up. They write beautiful songs and they don't own it. They don't have anything to do with it and anybody who wants to could just rip it off. That money's going somewhere. He said it should go to the artist artist, not just some tech giant somewhere. I I was the one who's just arguing that you shouldn't have any restrictions on ai, but if sir paul says you should, I think having it be uh, opt out is probably not the right way to go, or is it?
01:39:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
can we run leah's voice through an ai that does a paul mccartney accent better than that, paul mccartney.
01:39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll talk like this the whole time. I don't mind, that's a bad paul mccartney I I was reluctant to invoke because I like sir paul. Um, he has a point he has been saying this for a while right.
01:39:27 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Yeah, and one of the things I've seen or read about lately I haven't I haven't actually seen them myself is a lot of AI slop songs on on Spotify in particular.
01:39:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, did you see that, yeah, yeah spotify in particular. Oh, did you see that?
01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, you know, if you ask for a ambient playlist, you know I want a dinner party, bossa nova. Three quarters of the songs were not created by artists yeah, they're just ai.
01:39:58 - Ed Bott (Guest)
They're just ai slop and and and that's a place. That's a place that sort of discovery mechanism is where artists you know built from, you know, make me something that sounds like Elvis Costello, make me something that sounds like David Sanborn. You know, you're you're never going to get, you know you're just not going to get, you're not going to have space for, uh, new artists to come up there.
01:40:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think that's exactly the same point he was making well and frankly, spotify, even if you are an artist, pays the least of any of the music uh services. So you know already they're kind of you're an ai.
01:41:01
They don't pay you anything and they don't have to pay anything because it can't be copyrighted, right? Um, there's a new study from duetti, the new economics reports, analyzing the artist's payouts for various music streaming services. Who, would you think, pays the most? I was surprised to see this per thousand streams. Amazon pays the most. Amazon Music pays $8.80 per 1,000 streams. Apple is second with $6.20. Then Google's YouTube, $4.80. Then Spotify $3. Almost a third less, two-thirds less, than Amazon, and Apple plays double what Spotify plays. And, uh, and apple plays double what spotify plays.
01:41:47 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know it's interesting how amazon music really started as this kind of defensive move to protect, uh, the cd business that they had back in the day.
01:41:56
Oh, really is that why they did it wow yeah, no, I mean same same reason for for the kindle, amazon sold a lot of books. They saw eBooks coming and didn't want to lose out. I do wonder if Amazon's payouts are higher because they're subscale in digital music. Do they need to go out and buy, say, a Sirius XM, which owns Pandora, to compete with Apple and Spotify? Yeah, I think this is a spotify.
01:42:26 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, I think this is a a market share question. Like anybody, who's who has the top market share, I think is going to pay to pay less.
01:42:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you look at this, it probably is exact reverse order of market share, isn't it? By the way? Uh, spotify denies it, says those numbers are wrong. None of these companies reveal what they pay. So Spotify says we don't even pay per stream. So this these claims, are ridiculous and unfounded. No streaming service pays per stream because that would incentivize streaming services to minimize streams or use AI to generate songs. He didn't say that out loud it. It would mean low engagement, fewer artist connections and lower overall payouts. Instead, we take the opposite approach. They don't really explain it. We want users to engage more, so they pay more by sticking around and choosing premium. We're proud to be the leader in total payouts. Oh, we make it up in volume. Of course they're the leader in total payouts.
01:43:27 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
They're the leader by far in total plays I, I have a good friend who's a musician and he says that, uh, you know, he he gets these uh like quarterly or or what have you? Um? Statements, yeah, statements, and it's, it's all spotify, nothing else.
01:43:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really kind of no I'm surprised apple doesn't, but apple was so slow to go to streaming. Right, they really wanted you to. They thought buying music. They thought people wanted to own the music, even though you don't really own the music when you buy it.
01:43:57 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Oh, steve jobs famously. Steve jobs famously said people want to own their music, right, uh? And so he wanted to sell tracks rather than stream them.
01:44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were very slow to go to streaming.
01:44:11 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I was so happy when the other day, when I was craving the wicked soundtrack after after seeing the movie and discovered, oh yeah, I bought that back in the iTunes music store days and it's still on my Apple music app.
01:44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you, you mean the original broadway show. The original broadway show much better, probably, I don't know. I I tried to well.
01:44:32 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know the, the fandom debates it the really do they.
01:44:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They think ariana and uh cynthia are better. No, uh, you know, dina menzel and uh christian chenoweth excuse me, that's adele dazeem to you, sir adele dazeem to all of us uh uh uh, I, you know you. You loved that movie. Are you holding space for defying gravity?
01:45:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
uh, you know, I, I I just saw this real uh, where ariana grande is is talking about being in that interview where cynthia arribo is asked about how fans are holding space for defying gravity, and cynthia arribo has no idea what the interviewer means and I think that's because the interviewer had no idea what she meant by holding space and to this day, none of us know what holding space means when used in any context about anything I'm glad I wanted to ask my gay friends uh, what does that mean?
01:45:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because I thought maybe I'm just too. Oh, don't put, don't don't put this on us gays we are not holding space for holding, you're not holding space either. Well, who the hell is then did? Did you love wicked? The not the play the, the movie, I I did. I did love it. Okay, I did love wicked. I have not been able to get through it. I I'm I'm partly because I'm a type 2 diabetic and too much sugar will kill me and my.
01:46:09 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I could feel it well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you this uh, judy, and I saw wicked, you know 10 yeah many, many, many years ago on broadway with christian ch Amazing and really, really enjoyed it. And then we saw the movie and we really really enjoyed that, because they are two completely different things. It's a different. You know, they're just different experiences. Yes, and they both.
01:46:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know we're both fans of the story and the artists and all you know the play was over in three hours. The movie it's not going to be over until next year, so there is a difference there.
01:46:56 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I'm waiting. I'm waiting for the for for AI to take the two halves, when they finally come out and merge them into one two and a half hour to two hour 45 minute film. That'll be good yeah.
01:47:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you won't be able to do is put them on your Blu-ray DVD, because Sony has ended production of recordable Blu-rays, with no successor planned. It's the end of the line for recordable Blu-rays, with no successor planned. It's the end of the line for recordable blu-rays.
01:47:31 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh they're also going to stop manufacturing mini discs. Did you know they were still making that?
01:47:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anybody's still using either of those I mean well, I could say I could see recordable dvds, blu-rays. Yeah, because for even for data backup and stuff. Right, apparently nobody's buying them or they wouldn't stop making them.
01:47:47 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I mean, they're gonna stop record is anybody still back, you know, doing the backup to recordable discs, somebody, as opposed to just doing cloud backup my grandfather must, I don't know.
01:47:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's sad and ed you probably kind of sympathize with this used to be able to make fun of older people and their lack of knowledge about technology. Now I am one, and I yes yeah. So I can't any longer, you know, say well, you old folks, stop backing up to recordable media I, you know, I, I'm gonna say um, I, I for the, the for my entire career.
01:48:27 - Ed Bott (Guest)
That's a thing that I have tried to avoid. Is those?
01:48:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
stereotypes. Don't say, your mom would understand how this works.
01:48:33 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Your mom, would you know? Or your or your grandfather, you know, you're less technically sophisticated relatives, regardless of what age they are. That's right. Is is the thing. That's right. Is is the thing. But I do. One of my favorite lines was a friend of mine back in the 90s who was she was 50 something and had worked at a very large company doing very important technology work, and she had some very young person come into the company who was trying to, you know, trying trying to impress her with his level of knowledge, and she just looked at him and said you know, kid, I have email addresses that are older than you.
01:49:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's probably true, probably, and I think, and I think that's probably true for our generation. That's right, you know, you and me now I think frankly, it's the case that we older folks, because we had to work it all out on our own, maybe understand technology a little bit better than a generation that just kind of had it handed to them on a on a slab of glass, right yeah, my kids are, you know, 33 and 29, and they grew up using this technology their entire lives.
01:49:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
You know they, I mean they learned to use a mouse, you know, when they were like our my younger kid, you know, started using a mouse. Sure, too, it's nothing special for them, and but you know, if you ask them how any of this stuff works, no, no idea.
01:50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ask them if they've ever. Have you ever removed the ball of your mouse to clean it?
01:50:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I mean, both of them actually have assembled their own PCs, oh well, they're. Both of them wanted to do that, yeah, but I mean I don't think that you know. They know how to plug the pieces together and basically what the what each of those components does, but they don't really understand. They've never done any coding.
01:50:27 - Benito (Announcement)
Nothing in PC these days is like Legos.
01:50:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's not what it used to be, that's true. I remember putting chips I'm sure, ed, you remember putting chips maybe SAM2, into the sockets right the memory adding RAM chips.
01:50:42
And you could put it in the wrong way and screw the whole thing up you could or bend the pin, or yeah, there's all sorts of things you could do. Wrong sony. By the way, we should point out these are recordable blu-rays. They're, they're, you're still going to be uhd and blu-ray discs for commercial movies. That's not going to change it. And apparently verbatim and others are going to continue to make recordable blu-rays. So this does not mean they're gone, it's just sony's going to stop and it is their technology. They didn't invent it. They're going to kill mini discs, md data and mini dv cassettes as well. Um, it's funny because the all of this, all of the tech tv shows, recorded on mini dv cassettes somewhere I'm amazed they're still making those.
01:51:21
I know so well.
01:51:23 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
The cameras are out there, right I mean, I've got one in the closet here across from me and sure blocks of mini dv tapes, but you know, I transferred those to, I digitized those.
01:51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got probably 10 15 years ago. I have not yet transferred them.
01:51:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I probably should oh, yeah, yeah, I've got. I've got all those home movies we shot when the kids were little on on my Plex server now.
01:51:50 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I do worry in terms of understanding technology developments like Meta's AI engineer. Is Meta going to have staff who understand how their algorithms work If it's all offloaded to an AI engineer that's developing the AI and we don't really know already how these large language models work. Kind of on a deep level, we just see the inputs and the outputs.
01:52:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we actually glossed over that and I thought that was a fairly interesting thing that Mark Zuckerberg said that they would have an AI engineer designing software for Meta, presumably for Facebook and Instagram.
01:52:33 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's like how are junior software engineers going to learn how to code and develop and progress and get to the skills that they need to perfect AI? I mean, I guess we just offload it all to AI and hope that AI perfects itself, you know.
01:52:51 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
In the early part of my engineering career in the 90s and you know, and then into the mid 2000s, you know I was doing software, automotive software and part of our process was doing code reviews. You know doing reviews at various stages of development. You know doing reviews at various stages of development. You know, reviewing the documentation, reviewing the code, doing peer reviews, and you know so we actually had to go through line by line and obviously I don't think it's possible to do that anymore just because of the huge size of some of these applications. But that was, you know, that was part of how I learned. How to do this stuff was from reading and reviewing the code that other people wrote.
01:53:33 - Ed Bott (Guest)
And there's another related issue there. I know at Microsoft and at other large companies there's big code bases and there's a real reluctance to touch that code unless you know exactly what you're doing. And in fact I can remember a couple times when a problem came up and somebody had to be called in who had been at the company, who had retired five years earlier, 10 years earlier, but had been responsible for that code for 10 years. And they brought that person back in, paid them a huge consulting fee to help them understand what the issue was and how to fix it.
01:54:20
And if you have an AI engineer I'm going to use your air quotes there Leo, uh, again AI engineer writing this code, uh, how are you ever going to have someone who can explain to you what it does? Or, uh, or, more importantly, explain why this one part of it is the way it is, because a bad thing happened 10 years ago and you know it wasn't obvious, but we never touched that block of code, because bad things happen, you know, and you won't have that. You won't have that, you, you don't get institutional knowledge because there won't be an institution now you are sounding like an old timer, ed, because, honestly, the same.
01:55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the COBOL engineers were brought in to fix Y2K. We got another one, by the way, coming up in 2038. It's the Unix Epic problem. The Unix time is going to run out of bits in 2038. It'll be very much like Y2K. I am convinced that by then the fixes will be automatically applied by AI. No human will have to look at it. No COBOL expert will have to come in and fix it.
01:55:32
If you've ever looked at a regular expression that was very intractable and obscure. The easiest way to figure out what it's doing is to give it to an AI. It's brilliant at that stuff. It can look at the code that no one else could figure out. Why does this work and why did we do it 20 years ago? I think AI is completely capable of doing that. I think an AI coding engineer is not too far off Now.
01:55:59
I'm not an expert in this domain, but we have a new show launching. We're going to rename this week in Google A week from show launching. We're going to rename this week in Google a week from Wednesday. We're going to rename it intelligent machines. Uh, we're booking Ray Kurzweil to come on and I think if anybody would understand and be able to tell us whether this is going to happen, to be Ray.
01:56:17
He's been saying the singularities just around the corner for decades but we are going to get people on who can talk with some expertise around this. But it is my sense it's possible Mark is a hype monster, that Sam Altman's a hype monster, that these guys are just raising money and you know that they're they're misrepresenting what's going to happen. But it's honestly I don't think they're wrong. I think it is my sense that within the next few years it'll be very credible to have an AI generate working code and at that point there is a scary singularity because once AI can start writing itself, start creating new AI itself, that starts to happen very, very quickly. So I know you guys are skeptical, but I think it's just around the corner, literally a few years off at the latest, I guess.
01:57:14 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm not skeptical about the idea that there is a lot of scut work in programming, a lot of repetitive kind of not high value work that has to be done because you know the process of coding is still not sufficiently kind of instrumented and automated. You know, I definitely see a role for AI in kind of reducing that scut work. But yeah, I guess I question, you know I question the higher level applications of AI and if we as a society want to offload this higher level parts of the process.
01:57:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we replaced the weavers when we came up with automated looms.
01:58:02 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I mean this is what happens in the world. Yeah, but the thing is we, we had people that knew how the looms worked and how to fix the looms and how to keep them running, and we also birthed, you know uh, fashion industries in in milan, london, paris, new york.
01:58:17 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Right, you know uh? Maybe, you know, maybe you didn't need to weave these things by hand to create works of art.
01:58:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
By the way, I found a to what Owen was saying. You know if, if we, you know, if we just hand off all of this coding to machines, you know we don't have the equivalent of the people that that repaired and built and understood how those looms work. You know if, if we, if we rely on them for all the coding, who's going to go back when you know when something inevitably does go wrong and it will, you know it, you know you, you cannot build a perfect system, and so things are going to go wrong and who's going to go back and be able to figure out how to fix those things or even diagnose what might've gone wrong?
01:59:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, if we hand off everything to machines, well, I think we're going to find out. It'll be. You know, it's going to be interesting. I, I think, I don't think code is that special? It's not. Uh, it's not the pieta, it's not the mona l? It's not the Pieta, it's not the Mona Lisa.
01:59:28 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's not the Sistine Ceiling. It's not, but I think we do need to understand it.
01:59:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think a machine is very capable of understanding it.
01:59:36 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But if we don't understand the machine, that's not getting it Well, but we already are there, right.
01:59:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We already know these are black boxes these AIs?
01:59:44 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, that's the problem.
01:59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we, we don't understand the machine well, that's a very human way of of thinking of things well, we don't even understand our own brain.
01:59:53 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
What can I?
01:59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
say but we don't understand how our brains work, doesn't mean we trust them less well?
02:00:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't know. I mean looking back at the last few years. I'm not, you know. I don't know that we should be trusting our brains.
02:00:07 - Benito (Announcement)
That's actually why you should be more skeptical of an AGI, because we don't even know what our consciousness is. How are we going to know what an artificial one is?
02:00:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll find out when we get there.
02:00:20 - Benito (Announcement)
We won't know it's a philosophical question more than a technical question. This is evolution Right?
02:00:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't this evolution? Isn't this how things are supposed to work? We get better and better and maybe we create a new species.
02:00:37 - Benito (Announcement)
Well, I mean, this is the philosophical part of it what is better, right, like what constitutes better.
02:00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there is no better right.
02:00:43 - Ed Bott (Guest)
It's all what can survive, it's whatever will survive and and let's talk about the economic incentives, because uh the economic incentives that are driving most of the ai research today are about uh eliminating human labor cost uh oh yeah, that's right.
02:01:05
Yeah, and I mean I think there was something that I read that Mark Andreessen said that just well, there's a lot of things that Mark Andreessen has said that make me roll my eyes, but, but this one but, but it basically said that you know, he said something like you know that AI will eliminate 70 or 80 percent of the jobs, but it'll drive the cost of everything down so low that people will still have a better quality of life, which was uh, you're talking about his famous techno optimist manifesto, yeah, yeah, in which and this is the problem with all these guys they eventually come to.
02:01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they'll be, uh, universal basic income, because, you're absolutely right, there won't be any more jobs, so how are humans going to survive? Who's going to be the market for this? Ai well, the stuff will be so cheap, you won't need any money will be so cheap, you won't need any money. Okay, then don't charge me for anything.
02:02:10 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Well, that's the plan, leo, I think I. I think at some point we need to go to the andreessen horowitz home page and see what, uh, this purported tech genius has done their investments, yeah oh, no, no, the new logo. You've got to see it, you've got oh, it's a.
02:02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is that? Is it a bitcoin? What is that?
02:02:26 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
what is that it is? It's kind of it's, it's an ayn rand.
02:02:30 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Art deco it is fever dream it is like it's yeah, yeah is that the city that they're building in fairfield uh?
02:02:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so for people who are listening, it's a golden three-dimensional coin with some sort of goddess who seems to have an abacus built into her chest, holding a heart-shaped orb emanating light over a futuristic city.
02:02:59 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Leo, you know what this reminds me of what? When I was a high school student, I went on an exchange program to bulgar grad in uh. What was then the? The fading soviet union? Yeah and uh, they had a giant statue commemorating the, the victory over the nazis.
02:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, this reminds me of that statue yes, there's one in budapest it's very similar um heroic art yeah, they never. They never take these down because they were built with concrete. You can never take it down. I've hiked up to see. It's exactly what that is. That's a Soviet era.
02:03:39 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I'm just waiting for Andreessen Horowitz to begin publishing their five-year plans. For andreessen horowitz to begin publishing their five-year plans? Uh, because then you know, I'm sure that everything will will make perfect sense once we have a five-year plan that's what we need a five-year plan for the agricultural uh harvest yeah, I'm sorry that the uh. Yeah, the people who haven't studied 20th century history might not understand the reference.
02:04:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's worth looking up Chinese famine and you'll Soviet, soviet Soviet, that was true, yeah, stalin.
02:04:15 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Yeah, stalin did a pretty good job of angle. There's actually a tech angle to those famines, because there was a. There was a scientist who believed that there were you know certain seeds or something that you know. These were going to be completely weather resistant and you could just grow them reliably. And and there were other scientists who said no, this, this, this is, these are magic beans here, they're not going to work. But he had the ear of the Politburo and so those were the seeds that were planted and nothing grew and people starved. Yeah.
02:04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Millions. In the 30s, about five to eight million Soviet citizens starved because a centralized plant economy did not did not provide them with food. In the 60s, same thing happened in china. They say as many as uh 55 million people starved during the great chinese famine.
02:05:18 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Three years of famine I'm reading uh, I'm reading a bunch of vladin quotes on Marxistorg.
02:05:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God bless you.
02:05:31 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm just thinking half of these. You could put them out, you could post on X and attribute them to Marc Andreessen, and probably most people would believe that Marc Andreessen said them.
02:05:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't it funny? Because, of course, elon's biggest insult is that you're a Marxist, when in fact a lot of what this test, real kind of utopianism, is very Marxist in its thinking.
02:05:55 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh yeah, it is. Let's see, this is a really good one If you if you, you'll forgive me those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.
02:06:19 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Lennon or Andresenreessen?
02:06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, you should do yeah you, you should do a whole. Uh, you could do it. You know who said it? Uh, yeah, who said it? That's a good uh.
02:06:23 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, mark andreessen, or uh yeah, I mean, that sounds like it's straight out of the uh techno optimist manifesto I want you to write a website.
02:06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, uh, chat gpt will do it for you instantly. Mark or marks with a series of quotes mark or marks, yeah, and you could. Just you could just put them side by side and then grade people at the end, give them their marks. We're going to take a little break. You're watching this week in tech with three. Now we know marxists. Oh no, wait a minute, we're anti-marxists. Ah see, all this time we've been anti-marxist.
02:06:56 - Ed Bott (Guest)
You're going to the re-education camp, leo.
02:06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's uh trouble whatever by the way, uh, I do think I have a new way of raising funds. These are sealed in the box mini, uh, dvs cassettes. Anybody wants to buy these? I just found a whole, a whole bunch of bucks a piece that one was a dat.
02:07:19 - Benito (Announcement)
Do they have tiktok on? There's something like that.
02:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You beat me very good, you recognize the debt. For some reason, I have three of them, say the screensavers from march 2003. Um, they're all the same. I don't know why I have many of them, they're all the same. I don't know why I have many of them, they're all the same. But all right, I just found my entire collection of mini cassettes. Those are probably offsides, right, I don't, you know. It's funny the DAT is exactly the same size. Is it the same technology?
02:07:49 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
No, the same mechanism.
02:07:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, yeah, this is mini DVv, which is what sony's discontinuing. Then some of these are dvc. I don't know. I think they're all from tech tv is what I think. Actually, some one of these intrigues me. It says leo laporte, hour number one. I wonder if it's an old air check, be kind of fun. If it is, where do you get the who can? Who can convert these for me?
02:08:17 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm sure there's a place in petaluma somewhere, or just buy a little machine on get a debt get a debt machine all right wow, there's a science project for you, yeah, that's what I did with my old dv tapes. I just bought an old camera from ebay, yeah, yeah all right, take a break.
02:08:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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02:12:08 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I, I edited it. Uh, this was by my colleague will hicks and it is.
02:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't see it because it's behind the paywall, but this is a company in redwood city there is william hicks that wants to turn your dreams into big business. Tell me all about it it's.
02:12:27 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's really interesting, uh, this, uh, this entrepreneur has been kind of obsessed with lucid dreaming and uh basically wants to turn it into kind of something that, uh, that we can harness for controlling you know, controlling our environment. Uh, driving autonomous cars. Um, it seems it's not completely bogus, is it it? Seems it seems pretty. It seems pretty science fiction name is rem space, right for rapid eye movement yes, and that's the you know, that's the the uh vital part of our, you know, of our sleep that's when we're dreaming yeah, and and and, when our mind kind of regenerates and uh comes up with a lot of things in, in some ways it's the anti-ai right, it's it's harnessing something quintessentially human.
02:13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, that is, uh, you know to to sam's point, poorly understood I remember reading about them, because there was a story that they had two people who were able to talk to one another in their dreams. Is that, is that right? Is my memory correct? Yes, yes, that's the same company. So a word was transmitted into earbuds worn by somebody who was sleeping. The sensors were able to pick up a response, which was then sent to a second sleeping person who then, when he woke up, said rosebud or whatever whatever it was and it worked.
02:13:54 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, it does seem a little, you know, it does seem a little out there, but you know what I like? What I like about the story more than anything is the kind of um meta aspect of it. That is, you know, yes, ai companies are getting the lion's share of uh, of new venture capital these days. But there's other stuff going on. There's other kind of progress, there's other kind of crazy experiments out there.
02:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I mean when I was a young man I was fascinated by the idea of lucid dreaming and I read all the books and did all the tapes and tried to. So lucid dreaming is what happens when you actually wake up within your dream and you're able to somewhat control it right and you remember and you're there right, it is a kind of metaverse, if you think about it.
02:14:40
Yeah, uh, and people yeah, but people claim they can go visit other people, they can, you know, do stuff, they can fly and so forth and, unlike a dream where you don't have any control of the experience, they can troll the experience. I always wanted to do that and never could. Is this their plan?
02:15:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think the founder wants to kind of you know, open up, exploit you know, or you know, or amplify the power of lucid dreaming. I don't know, I don't know if the idea is, um is to, you know, if you're not capable of lucid dreaming, to like, introduce that capability.
02:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, maybe, maybe they have some people who can. That's the uh the point. They have a volunteers. They wear a special sleep mask that monitors their brain waves and and eye movements so they know whether they're lucid or not. They say dreamers were able to control a remote controlled car by twitching muscles during sleep to steer and move the car forward. Uh, they are about to launch a smaller sensor device that could be sent to up to 100 people for the next round of remote experiments. I should say that this guy, this founder, who's from kazakhstan, michael raduga, while he was waiting for his green card, his h1b visa, to come to the united states, had a hole drilled through his skull so he could I don't know what stick a wire in there and he did it overseas because he knew, like you know, if he were in the us or yeah, or france, or wherever they would
02:16:13 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
not allow such a thing, but in kazakhstan, no problem, we implant electrodes into brains all the time it is well, and they are planning to introduce a sleep mask that supposedly will help you, uh, lucid, achieve lucid dreams the electrodes that he implanted have since been removed by a licensed neurosurgeon okay, rfk, jr will uh make this all legal now.
02:16:43 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I want it to be true. Didn't micah sergeant um?
02:16:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he used to do a podcast on uh, on sleep and so forth. I don't know if he was able to lucid dream. Were you able to lucid dream, micah? I don't know. I've always wanted to, but, uh, it's always failed for me. But you know part of the problem I don't think I'll ever be able to because I don't even. I don't even see, uh, I can't, I'm uh, I'm a what is Aphasic. I can't see images. When I close my eyes, my dreams are just conceptual. People say do you dream in color? I don't even dream in things, I just dream in concepts.
02:17:23 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't know about you guys, but I, you know, I almost never remember dreams, Almost very, very Well that you could fix.
02:17:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You keep a dream journal. Eventually, you will remember your dreams. Did you know that? How do you keep a dream journal? Eventually, you will remember your dreams. Well, how do? You keep a dream journal, if you wake up and you can't remember well you just bit by bit, so you wake up, you write down what you can remember, and then you go back to sleep and then but if over a period of days months and years, you will eventually remember your dream.
02:17:47
You get better and better at it. I notice ed is wisely recusing himself from this entire conversation.
02:17:58 - Ed Bott (Guest)
You know, I, I have, um, I, I, I am not a lucid dreamer, but I do have very vivid, uh, dreams and I often remember them when I wake up. But what's interesting? And the dream journal, the thing about the dream journal technique that that does work is because those don't go to the portions of your brain that store memory and and so five minutes later you're going wow, that dream was really intense and I can't remember exactly what happened, Don't you know, but when you wake you know exactly what happened, don't you know?
02:18:33
but when you wake, you know. When you wake up, you know when you wake up, you can remember everything. And you know, I'll sometimes write it down right away yeah, or record it.
02:18:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I'm going through your stories now, owen. That was the first. Should we do? When san francisco actually this is a chronicle story when san francisco fought pac-man, did you know? The city declared war on video games. When was this? In the 80s?
02:19:06 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
82 yes, kind of the, the height of the you know-Man fever.
02:19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We know it's a long time ago because all the pictures in this story are in black and white.
02:19:15 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I mean what you know. The kind of through line between San Francisco of 1982 and San Francisco of 2025 is that someone proposed something new and neighbors all opposed it.
02:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's called NIMBY. Yeah, it's as old as the hills.
02:19:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Wait, would that be nintendo in my backyard?
02:19:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
nintendo in my backyard, clement street, fought off space invaders. Yesterday, wrote chronicle reporter harry jupiter by the way, best name ever and lots of other coin devouring video games. More than 50 neighborhood residents and merchants went to a police permit hearing to oppose the 30 machine arcade that was intended on 831 clement street. As the chronicle points out, an arcade today on clement street would be welcomed, even celebrated. We have downtown in petaluma, there's a store that specializes in antique video games and arcade games, and they've got two Ms Pac-Man games you could do a great remake of the music.
02:20:22 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Man set it in the 80s. Uh, we've got trouble right here in River City Street yeah, uh mayor capital p led the stands for pac-man diane feinstein led the charge.
02:20:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anti-arcade laws made it harder to launch a video game outpost than it was to open a liquor store. See, this is that moral panic that jeff jarvis is always saying. Oh, you know, you're worried about social media. In 82 it was pac-man right didn't.
02:20:53 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think we survived did, we did yes except now we have, you know, a video game player at the, you know, basically in the halls of power of the white house but is he?
02:21:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is he really a video game? Is he any good?
02:21:11 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
we don't know we only have grimes say so, and grimes says he is so I believe it well, I mean, you know we, we walk around with dozens of video games in our pocket all the time.
02:21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh yeah, that's a good point. The arcade has come to our pocket it's literally called apple arcade. You can't you can't get away from it. That's a very good point. Not my backyard, not my back pocket, but it is, and that's, and that's a good thing. So so, uh, tell me about, this is the story you wrote. Uh, julia hearts, eventbrite, is still around.
02:21:46 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I, you know I was. I was kind of looking through publicly traded companies that we had not written about recently. Eventbrite actually had a pretty successful IPO a few years back. Julia Hartz, the co-founder, took the company public. She was the second youngest woman to take a company public at the time I believe 2018, not that long ago. So kind of surprising that so few female founders have rung the bell at the New York Stock Exchange or press the button or whatever they do at NASDAQ.
02:22:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not since Elizabeth Holmes actually, oh bad example.
02:22:32 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Bad example we have, you know, but you know there are actually you know more, I think, more positive examples of women very, you know, very successfully running tech companies Not a founder, but Fiji Simo at Instacart that company has been on an absolute tear found a connection particularly with, like event planners they call them creators. You know people, people who organize meetups, events, sell tickets, and Eventbrite has really kind of figured out how to cater to them. And you know Julia told me that what they, what they think about, is kind of life phases. So, especially right now, what's really important is, you know, people come to a city like San Francisco, they don't really know where to go, what to do, how to meet people, and you know she sees Eventbrite as kind of helping them do that.
02:23:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and you know, obviously Is Eventbrite. It's funny it seems like there were so many open source alternatives to Eventbrite. It's funny it seems like there were so many open source alternatives to Eventbrite, but Eventbrite has triumphed. It's survived and it's better. Is it the biggest one still?
02:24:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I don't. You know actually I should know, Marcus there is an upstart competitor called Partyful. That is very popular because it's kind of very oriented around text messages.
02:24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used Partyful in the last Tech TV reunion. That is very popular because it's kind of very oriented around text messages. Yes, you know a problem.
02:24:17 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
We used Partiful in the last Tech TV reunion.
02:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and you know part of the problem is like it's really more. It was more like messaging. That's exactly right. It was more like and the pictures were posted there and so forth.
02:24:24 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, I mean a lot of the conferences and stuff that I attend. You know I end up getting tickets issued to me through Eventbrite, so I know it gets used by a lot of businesses and larger event planners.
02:24:39 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's found that sweet spot and kind of that next level up from just like a party with friends, Right right, yeah, the Partiful was actually very cool.
02:24:51
I thought it was a pretty neat app for that event. Another part of the conversation that I really enjoyed with Julia was talking about like, why stick with San Francisco? Eventbrite is still headquartered in San Francisco after all these years. They're obviously global, they've got a distributed workforce. You know they've got a distributed workforce, but Julia said San Francisco is part of the company's DNA, the creativity. You know the AI boom that's happening around them right now. By being in San Francisco they can tap into that in a way that if they were, you know if they had moved to Austin or, you know, or Charlotte or wherever, or North Carolina the research triangle.
02:25:31
Yeah, you know, and they do have an office in Nashville, by the way, but being in San Francisco lets them kind of tap into that wave of innovation.
02:25:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For a while, people were abandoning San Francisco, and the downtown and the commercial district felt like a ghost town. Has that turned around at all?
02:25:49 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I've got to say anecdotally I look out on Battery Street, which is kind of the funnel to the Bay Bridge, and traffic is routinely backed up. Yeah, that's the worst.
02:25:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You never want to be there at rush hour yeah.
02:26:00 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
But you know, the only reason why it's backed up is because there are people who obviously drove in to work you know work all day in San. Francisco and now they're headed home. So you know they're returning to the office.
02:26:11 - Benito (Announcement)
Let's be honest, though Battery Street doesn't take a lot to back up Battery Street Well that's fair.
02:26:18 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
But we also did a survey of some of the top tech employers and it seems like the most common pattern is they're retaining some kind of hybrid work, but they're tightening down and they really want you in the office. Three to four days a week is typical. So I go into the office on Fridays just because I don't like working from home and I live pretty close. So, you know, might as well walk my dog and you know, and get a change of pace. You know and get a change of pace. Uh, definitely, fridays are still pretty quiet and that's a struggle for downtown businesses because they have to, you know, they have to staff for five days a week. Um, yeah, yeah, but you know it's really interesting to see.
02:27:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, our federal government demand that government employees return to work. Uh, but, and and I think there are people like elon musk who are very much in favor of making people come to the office- which is amazing, because elon musk is never by definition, he can't possibly be in the office every day.
02:27:26 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, the rules for thee, not me yeah, I mean, like xai has a big office in san francisco, even though he's moved x corp. Uh right, you know the former twitter out. His ai company is in san francisco because that's where all the hot ai companies are.
02:27:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, they're building a data center in memphis, you know there's something to be said for having an area where there are a lot of companies, a lot of people and there's this uh kind of intermingling, cross-pollinization of ideas or even just this energy around, and san francisco really used to have that and you know we just had the jp morgan healthcare conference different sector, biotech and healthcare uh, really busy, um, you know you could.
02:28:12 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You could just see it in kind of the number of suits on on the street. Yeah, you usually don't see that many, many people in suits and ties, except for jp morgan week, right you're actually one of the few people who ever comes on this show who has an office.
02:28:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, sam, your work from home? Yeah, I haven't. I haven't worked in an office for over a decade, and most, almost all the people who come on our shows are coming to us from their houses.
02:28:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But but it's interesting what you said, leo, about you know that that intermingling. You know I'm based in the detroit area and I have not worked out of an office in a decade, but I regularly meet with people in person you do need to be where you are.
02:28:53
Yeah, yeah, because the industry that I cover, the auto industry. You know it's not just the Detroit automakers, you know, which is only three companies, but a lot of suppliers, a lot of companies. You know a lot of Japanese and Korean companies and and and other other and European companies have offices here and you know they have tech centers in this area, and so I regularly and also other reporters and analysts that I go to events to and I talk to people, and so I do interact with a lot of these people in person on a regular basis, often several times a week. Person on a regular basis, often several times a week. And so there is a value to that intermingling, as you said, but it doesn't necessarily have to be in an office, right?
02:29:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am not a big return to work guy. We're a completely remote company now, more for economic reasons than because we want to be. I like the social environment of a workplace, but it works, it works.
02:30:00 - Ed Bott (Guest)
You know, I've been at CDNet for 19,. It'll be 19 years in a couple weeks and during that time I've had two basically managing editors who I'm friendly with. We work in a super collegial fashion. They're great people. One of them I've never met and the other one I just met for the first time a couple months ago because she happens to live in North Carolina. But but there's, you know, there's a whole bunch of you know, there's dozens of people that I work with who I've never met in in person. And it's, it used to be strange, it's, it's now normal. But but I miss, I miss that, that uh, social aspect of it. I mean just the, the accidental, the accidental contact that you get with people where you know you have a, you just have a conversation and you and you talk about stuff, and it's not task related, it's just because you're hanging out waiting for something to happen and you're just shooting the breeze and and you learn things about people and that fosters a better relationship in many ways we are social animals.
02:31:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we need to be in a society of some kind. It could, and for many of us it was for years our workplace. I have the fondest memories of tech, tv and everybody working in the same place. It was really great. And of course, to do a TV show, you kind of do have to be in the same place, not to do a podcast. As it turns out, I've been doing those for about 20 years now, I don't know. I have mixed feelings. I think it's a big mistake for companies to force employees back to work. I think your best employees are going to say, yeah, I don't think so, and you're gonna, you're gonna have a brain drain as a result. But then you know, do you miss working in in the studio?
02:31:59 - Benito (Announcement)
no, uh, no, I mean I the only thing I really miss is like having a studio. Yeah, that's, it's nice having a studio you know like to do you don't miss the camaraderie. You don't miss yeah, I miss hanging out, you know that's.
02:32:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the stuff that you sing happy birthday while we eat bad cake.
02:32:15 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, that's. That's the kind of stuff you miss. It's just like the hanging out and uh, that, the stuff that's more fun to do when you're all together, oh, and are you mostly in office?
02:32:23 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I, I'm mostly in office. Uh, our, you know our, our policy, for what it's worth is three days a week.
02:32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's maybe a good compromise, but are all your writers there?
02:32:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
No, probably not they are. You know what we've worked out is. It's a little odd in that the sales side is here, I believe, monday, tuesday, wednesday. The newsroom is here Monday, tuesday, Thursday.
02:32:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's definitely a good idea. Keep the salespeople away from the-.
02:32:55 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, we kind of Right.
02:32:56 - Benito (Announcement)
Ed yeah.
02:32:58 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
That's the Chinese wall.
02:33:00 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Church and state. I'll come in on-.
02:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unfortunately, I sleep with our sales manager, so it's not a good thing.
02:33:08 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'll come in on a Wednesday and it's like just me and you know, maybe one other reporter who has a meeting downtown and then you know, on this side of the office and then on the other side of the office it's, you know, it's a hoot and a nanny.
02:33:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm. In general, I think people should be able to be flexible and do what works best for them and their business. I'm not. I think making a rule like you got to be in the office is pretty industrial era. And we're not in the industrial era anymore, we're in the information age. We got to take a break. Final story Bill Gates says if I were born today I'd probably been diagnosed autistic. We'll talk about that in just a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, zip Recruiter. Oh man, when it comes time to hire, you'll be so glad to have ZipRecruiter on your side Brand new year right.
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02:36:16
Four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. For us often it's before lunch. We'll post in the morning and it's boom. Lisa goes wow, look, this is a great. I mean, it's really, it's cool. You should see for yourself. Go to our exclusive web address. You could try Zip Recruiter for free. Ziprecruitercom slash Twitter. Again, that's ziprecruitercom slash twit. Zip Recruiter is the smartest way to hire. Uh. Interesting interview in the London Times Alice Thompson, alice thompson got a, got a scoop.
02:36:56 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
That is the times of london, I'm sorry.
02:36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The times, just the times, that's all you have to say. The times, there's only one. But if I say the times here, people think new york times. So the times of london. Thank you for the correction, sam. Bill gates, trump musk and how my neuro diversity made me I didn't know gates was not a successful student. I thought he was actually. He got to harvard, can't have been. He couldn't have failed too badly. He says he failed frequently at school. He was a weirdo, he said. Uh, if I had been born today I'd probably been diagnosed as autistic, he would not be alone. I think there are definitely many people on the spectrum in the tech business and it kind of makes sense because it might be easier to relate to a computer than another human being in some cases, right.
02:37:54 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Right.
02:37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg sitting in a recreation of Zuck's Harvard dorm room. Somehow they've gotten gigantic. Harvard boys both of them dropouts, right. Harvard boys both of them dropouts, right. Uh, he, uh.
02:38:16
The author says we were wandering. We are wandering around gates, old high school lakeside in his hometown of seattle. It used to baffle me, it was nowhere near a lake, says the hyperfactual gates. He showed her where he had his first cigarette, where he got drunk for the first time, where he had his first joint. We end up, she writes, at what his youngest daughter calls the shrine, a room with an ancient terminal attached to an early computer and the desk where gates spent hours writing code with his buddies, kent and an older pupil named Paul Allen. I remember I was in a boarding school at a similar time. I wasn't boarding, but it was a boarding school and the moms had gotten together, just as they did at Lakeside School, with a cake sale and so forth, to buy a terminal connected to a big time-sharing computer. And I remember going by that room thinking that's pretty cool. They got a computer. I never went in, damn. Bill gates went in and learned to code.
02:39:19
Um, you just weren't a weirdo I wasn't weird I. Maybe I just wasn't weird enough. You did all right for yourself. I did okay, but and honestly I I was into chess at that time. Had computing been as accessible as these personal computers behind me, I might have been much more likely to do it.
02:39:38 - Ed Bott (Guest)
But that teletype, you know, and all of that, I just maybe it was just and punch cards, and punch cards and paper tape was my era.
02:39:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you're older than you look.
02:39:51 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Yeah, I think. I am.
02:39:56 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I had to fill in the bubbles on cards. Yeah, with pencil, we didn't. Yeah, no, this cards we like.
02:39:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like I said, we had a teletype so you didn't have to use uh punch cards, but it had, you know, the tractor feed and you would type and it would then. What's weird is, I found out later, is when you type the letter it would then go to the mainframe, which would then go back to the teletype and put it on the paper, so there was always a little latency when you were typing on it. He says I don't like to look back much, but it's funny. He has written an autobiography called Source Code, which is why he's doing interviews. Gates turns 70 this year, microsoft turns 50, the Gates Foundation is 25, um, but this is the most candid interview you've. You've interviewed Bill, I'm sure, ed, right uh, no, I never have.
02:40:45 - Ed Bott (Guest)
I've interviewed several other high-level executives. You know Balmer, and and and others, but I've, you know, I've met Bill once or twice.
02:40:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I danced with him. The one time I was offered an interview with Bill Gates, they wanted to see my questions and approve them in advance, and I said no, so that's why I've never interviewed him. I didn't. My experience has been interviewing people like that is never very productive, because they're so coached and polished they're very unlikely to say anything interesting.
02:41:18 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Especially at my, especially at Microsoft. You're going to get um they they have been trained. You're going to get three. We have three key messages and they're just going to repeat them over and over again and the and the good ones will not say one, two, three, um, you know but you can hear it, it's implied, yeah, yeah I've been fortunate enough to interview some some interesting people um I interviewed alan malali at ford.
02:41:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was great.
02:41:48 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, I mean he was on lots you know, he was always good for some interesting quotes, yeah.
02:41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, there's people who are on point and yet, gracious and kind of, they'll drop a few little tidbits so you don't feel like it was a complete waste of time Nolan Bushnell was like he was always good yeah.
02:42:08 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Yeah, cause he was nuts but he did, he did amazing things.
02:42:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, he invented the pet rock, took that money and invented atari, created atari, founded atari. Uh, he was an amazing fellow brilliant guy. Yeah, gates told the the times, uh, that he was a challenging child who would have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum if you were growing up today. He said my parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others. That is kind of textbook, isn't it? He still rocks back and forth like a metronome as he talks, but he's learned to embrace being different. She writes, quote this might help those raising a kid who doesn't fit the norm. He agrees. I always suspected that Bill might have been on the spectrum, brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and able to work in the workplace certainly um and he had a bomb and he had ballmer there um and paul allen too right uh, yeah, but but uh paul was also on the spectrum, I think.
02:43:33
Come to think of it.
02:43:33 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Yes, exactly, they were both. They were both. You know they were, they were, they were focused on code and results and Ballmer had people skills. He was, he was. He was a marketing, marketing and sales guy and he was very, very good about listening and, you know, answering directly. Even if he wasn't going to, even if he wasn't going to completely answer the question, he would at least give you the the impression that he was, and you know he. But he was, he was good with people and I've talked to many, many people at Microsoft who who say you know their, their worst memories are bill meetings.
02:44:14
Yeah, you know it could be painful, same as Steve jobs, right, yeah, yeah the thing that people heard was that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard and and he had to be, he had to be tough.
02:44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So many stories. I remember somebody I can't remember. Well, of course, mary Jo always talked about interviewing Balmer and he knew he remembered people's shoes. That was a salesman's salesperson's trick that he used. He always looked at people's shoes and remembered what brand of shoes they were wearing, which I thought was very odd. Bill did not, was it, mary Jo? Somebody told me the story of getting in the elevator with bill gates. His mom was with him. This is when bill gates is the richest man in the world in his 40s and his mom grabbed his glasses off his face, cleaned them and put them back on his face.
02:45:03
The interview he says my mother was the real driving force, clearly an early tiger mom prototype. My mom is the central person for me. My dad was a lawyer, left really early and came home at dinner. He set us an example of always being on top of things and giving back and working really hard. But the idea of getting dressed properly, having good manners quote I'm embarrassed if you don't do well end quote was all my mom. Her expectations were very high. All their watches ran on quote mom time eight minutes early and she had an intercom installed in the kitchen so she could call them when meals were ready and remind them to make their beds.
02:45:40
But Gates' room was always messy. He often refused to put his coat on, got B's and C's in junior high school and became the class clown. This I did not know. There was even a discussion. He might be retarded. He explains. There were moments when they said hold this kid back. I had nervous energy, I was fidgeting, I was disorganized. Somebody in the discord is saying, yeah, nowadays he would have been medicated, which may have kept him from ever achieving his potential.
02:46:07 - Benito (Announcement)
Here's a picture. If he was a poor student in high school, how did he get into Harvard?
02:46:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He must have gotten better later. Here's a picture of him sitting at that terminal. Look at him. And there he is with his mom, probably, uh, taking her to prom.
02:46:20
It looks like, um, that is oh no, sorry, that was at his sister's wedding with his maternal grandmother never nevermind, I'm sorry in 1977. Anyway, I look forward to reading the biography. There's Bill Gates with his sisters and his mother and father. There he is in the bow tie, looking every bit the nerd. This actually makes him and it's probably the intent of the article in his book much more more human.
02:46:53
In the 70s no one understood about neurodiversity. If they ever invent a pill where they could say, okay, your social skills would be normal, says gates, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal, I wouldn't take the pill. Maybe I'm forgetting how painful it was, but I needed my neurodiversity to write that software. I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration. I've wrote my first code as a young teenager, on a hike in the snow when I was tired and wet, and I used it later for microsoft. Wow, on that note you neurodiversity bunch. It's great to have you. We are really. The Twit family is a neurodiverse family and I love it, I celebrate it. We need that. That's where the artists, the geniuses, the mavericks come from. God bless them. Live long and prosper. Mr Ed Bott, senior Contributing Editor at Z at zd net, great to have you. Appreciate it, appreciate you have a great uh evening. Go watch some football now, no more second half of that bills game.
02:48:00 - Ed Bott (Guest)
Don't anyone tell me the score.
02:48:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, shh, don't know what happened all I know is now no, you want to watch the ads. The ads are the best part. What the? There's an apple ad for the m4. That is mind-blowing. That's all I'm going to say. Uh, thank you also to you, owen thomas. You're probably just going to go home and have a nice meal, but, uh, whatever you do this evening, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for being here. He's managing editor at the san francisco business times. Thank, you for all you do. You look great, by the way. Oh, oh, thank you, you look fantastic.
02:48:34 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's a love of a good dog, I'm going to walk up, is that it?
02:48:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the dog. Yeah, so you're lifting. Right, that's the thing I am. I am, yeah. Yeah, do you want to take off your shirt and show us?
02:48:54 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know, you know, speaking of wicked, supposedly there is a. Uh, supposedly there's a deleted scene with jonathan bailey shirtless. Oh, it's gonna, just gonna put that out there.
02:48:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm holding space for jonathan bailey. That's what I'm doing. There you go, so are jonathan's bailey's pants let me tell you I'm talking
02:49:07 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
about the legs. I'm talking about the legs I. I'm talking about the legs I like the legs Shorts.
02:49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you also to Mr Sam Abelsamed, who's wondering what the hell he's doing here. He's a podcaster. Wheelbearingsmedia, telemetryagencycom. Always a pleasure, Sam, I really appreciate it.
02:49:25 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I'm glad to be here again. Always fun to be with you and to be out here.
02:49:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we didn't have any stories today, but we managed to make it to almost three hours, so there lisa said stories to have a good conversation. Lisa said don't start the show saying there's nothing to talk about.
02:49:40 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Okay, we want people to listen I said, okay, dear it's, it's inevitable that you find something to chat about for a few hours turns out.
02:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was quite a bit to talk about. We do twit sunday afternoons, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2200 utc. I tell you that because you can watch us do it live if you want. Uh, we're uh on the uh the internets, on uh discord for the club twit members. I'll tell you what club twit is in a second. Uh, we're also on twitch youtube. Yes, yes, tiktok. Right, we're on TikTok, yay. We're on Kik, we're on LinkedIn, we're on Facebook and I'm sure I've left something out, but we're on eight different streams, which is great.
02:50:22
You can watch us as you wish, but that was never the intent. You're watching us as we produce a show, but really you can watch it anytime because it's a podcast. You watch it at your convenience, or listen at your convenience, get copies of the show at twittv, our website, or go to the youtube channel dedicated to twit or, probably the best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Then you'll get a every episode the minute it's done and you can have it first thing in the morning on monday. Uh, if are a member of the club, you can get the ad free versions of the show for mere seven bucks a month. That's for all of our shows. You also get special programming that we don't put out in public. You get access to the club, to discord, but, most importantly, the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're helping us keep the show on the air. We are ad supported, but ads don't cover all of our costs.
02:51:14
The club makes a huge difference to our bottom line. Think of it as voting for your favorite content. If you like what you see, vote. Go to twittv slash club. Twit One other way you can vote. I think the survey is still up for a few more days. That's very helpful to us because it takes you 10 minutes. Go to twittv slash survey. We use it for a couple of things, of course to get to know you better, not as an individual, but as a group. We cannot track you and do not want to track you, and advertisers like to know a little bit about the audience in aggregate, and so it helps us sell advertising as well. It's very helpful to us. Twittv survey if you haven't taken the survey yet, a couple more days to uh to do that, thanks to our esteemed technical director and producer, benito gonzalez. Benito, are you editing tonight or are you? Uh, you get to watch the game kevin's doing it tonight thank you, kevin, I appreciate it.
02:52:10
Kevin king, another one of our great talented team uh, you know that they've been uh ever since we closed the studio in august. They've been worked from home and uh, it's been. I miss you guys, but it's been uh, it's worked just fine. It's been great. Thanks to all of you for being here. We will see you next time and, as I have said, this is our 20th anniversary year in April, the 20th anniversary of our very first twit. So, as I've been saying for 20 years, thank you for being here, we'll see you next week. And another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.
