This Week in Tech Episode 1062 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.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Ian Thompson is here. Jason Heiner, he's got a new job. We're going to find out about that. And Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times will talk about the AI Wildfires are going to burn us all to the ground. Border Patrol agents using Meta's Ray-Ban glasses to record raids. And who is going to buy CNN? All of that and more coming up next on TWiT.

Owen Thomas [00:00:27]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Leo Laporte [00:00:31]:
This is TWiT. This is TWiT This Week in Tech, episode 1062, recorded Sunday, December 14, 2025. The Architects of AI it's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. It is what I would consider a classic panel today. No newbies, just people who've been part of the fam for a long, long time, like this man right here, Ian Thompson, formerly of the Register, soon to be of. What is it you're calling it? The Silicon Limey.

Iain Thomson [00:01:11]:
We'll be launching Siliconlimey.com but I've just been building up some freelance stuff in the meantime, just so we've got something to show on the side.

Leo Laporte [00:01:19]:
Yeah, nice. So you're doing well. You got. You got a. You got a little. A little check. So you could take it easy for a while, I hope.

Iain Thomson [00:01:26]:
Oh, well, yeah, but I mean, I've. I'm starting a monthly column with PC Pro in the uk.

Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
Oh, awesome.

Iain Thomson [00:01:32]:
A letter from America. Just trying to explain to the Brits what exactly is going on over here, which is doing my head in.

Leo Laporte [00:01:38]:
But you're pulling an Alistair Cook. That's great. I love it.

Iain Thomson [00:01:42]:
Well, yes, although he's originally called Alfred and he changed his name for it for radio purposes, presumably Alf Cook sounds.

Leo Laporte [00:01:51]:
A little less Alfie's Laugh from America. Yeah, yeah, he was. I was a big fan, of course, Masterpiece Theater host and then. But he did a thing called. I think it was called Letter From America, didn't he?

Iain Thomson [00:02:05]:
It was called Letter From America. He did it until 2004, just before he died. And I'll be recording a podcast on that as well. But the pro column will be running for those of you in the UK who want to understand what exactly is going on over here.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Good luck.

Iain Thomson [00:02:20]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:02:21]:
Good luck. We don't understand. We're going to try this, what this show's all about. Not just Ian, but Owen is also here. From Thompson to Thomas Owen, longtime friend of the show, managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. Only for two years. I thought for some reason you'd be there a lot longer. And while Ian is wearing a festive floral shirt you are wearing.

Leo Laporte [00:02:40]:
It looks like we're at the party is beginning. Is there a party right after the show. Look at that.

Owen Thomas [00:02:46]:
I think I did use this for last year's work holiday party, but I can't repeat so I'm going to have to come up with something else.

Leo Laporte [00:02:54]:
Do you have a. Is. Is tonight's work a work holiday party?

Owen Thomas [00:02:58]:
No, it's. It's in a couple days. I just have this jacket literally at the office.

Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
Yeah. You know to do any big media hits with CBS or something. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:09]:
In case of emergency.

Iain Thomson [00:03:10]:
Yeah, exactly.

Owen Thomas [00:03:11]:
It's from a great company called Opposites. Like opposite.

Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
Oh, I have a bunch of their stuff I love. I have a. My New Year's Eve suit is from then it's stars and stuff. Yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:03:22]:
Oh my stars and garters.

Leo Laporte [00:03:24]:
Star. Oh my stars and garters. Oh, and it's good to see you. And now ladies and gentlemen, for to complete the. What is it? What's a quad? A quadrangle. I don't know. To compete complete the forces.

Owen Thomas [00:03:37]:
Square the circle.

Leo Laporte [00:03:38]:
To Square the circle. Mr. Jason Hana. Hello, Jason. Wait a minute. Oh, hello. Where's all the. You'd nodded.

Leo Laporte [00:03:46]:
ZD is eating that anymore?

Leo Laporte [00:03:48]:
That's. That's exactly right. Yeah. The beginning of this month I December 1st, I ended my time at ZDNet.

Leo Laporte [00:03:56]:
How long were you there?

Leo Laporte [00:03:58]:
I. So this is crazy but it actually I was with a company, the company essentially for 24 years from I started Tech Republic because I started Tech Republic. And by the way, when I started Tech Republic they were losing $2 million a month. So I didn't know how long it would last. I just knew I'd learn a lot and I thought well, you know, I'll learn a lot and I'll have to get another job. Right. Not in a year or two. And then they got bought by CNET.

Leo Laporte [00:04:25]:
CNET got bought by CBS. CBS got bought by CBS, sold our brands to. To Red Ventures. Red Ventures sold ZDNet and CNET to. To Ziff Davis. And in that whole line essentially my start date was still the beginning. My first day, you know, at Tech Republic. So it lasted a lot longer than I thought.

Leo Laporte [00:04:48]:
I mean I had of different jobs in that. In that time but ended up at.

Leo Laporte [00:04:52]:
The top editor in chief of ZDNet. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
Yeah. So ZDNet. I, I ran ZDNet for four years. Loved it. Had an amazing team. We reimagined ZDNet for the next decade. And in 2022, when I came back, we did the biggest, you know, boldest redesign in the history, changed the mission, you know, re. Reimagine the team and.

Leo Laporte [00:05:13]:
Yeah, but, you know, all good things come to an end and it was time I had this opportunity to. I met a founder that I really was impressed with and you know, I realized that I wanted to go. I didn't, I wasn't looking to leave. But when I talked to this founder of the Deep View, which was an amazing publication that has grown, it's only around, been around for two and a half years. Yeah, it's new to me.

Leo Laporte [00:05:44]:
I, I'm glad to learn about this.

Leo Laporte [00:05:48]:
Yeah, they, they've created a newsletter. It's over, you know, 600,000 subscribers. It really focuses on the, the AI space primarily.

Leo Laporte [00:05:58]:
Wait a minute, 600,000?

Leo Laporte [00:06:01]:
Yes, 600,000 subscribers.

Leo Laporte [00:06:03]:
Huge.

Leo Laporte [00:06:04]:
You know, in two and a half years, which is remarkable and you know, growing rapidly. And you know, my thesis, I've had this thesis that I've been working on the last few years, which is that the future of media is direct relationships.

Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:06:20]:
With more specific audiences.

Leo Laporte [00:06:22]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:06:23]:
I was working on ZDNet and this gave me a chance. And also I've been working on, I've been covering AI for over a decade, since 2013. And I wanted to do two things. One, I wanted to, this was the opportunity to go much deeper on that thesis. And then it was also an opportunity to go much deeper on AI because I think there are a lot of big questions about AI that we're going to have to, you know, grapple with over the next few years. And then when there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of hype, there's a lot of uncertainty and disruption. And where there's all of those things, there's amazing work for us to do as journalists. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:06:59]:
When, when there's a lot of confusion and disruption out there. So I, I took that on as a mission and said, you know what, I would love to spend all my time thinking about that every day and building a team to.

Leo Laporte [00:07:11]:
Nice. So how much does this cost to subscribe to free? What?

Leo Laporte [00:07:16]:
Yep, it's free to subscribe.

Leo Laporte [00:07:18]:
What?

Leo Laporte [00:07:19]:
Yeah, but it is. Look, they have a, they have a really good business model. It's, it's, it's bootstrapped. It's not, it's founder, you know, funded. It's self funded essentially by the, by, by the money that the business has made. You know, it's been profitable from the very beginning. So it's. It's a.

Leo Laporte [00:07:38]:
It's a great.

Leo Laporte [00:07:38]:
So it's ad supported or. Or. No, it is.

Leo Laporte [00:07:41]:
Yeah. So there. There are ads in the newsletter, but much more, I think ads that are. That are more organic and more. And less, you know, Times Square.

Leo Laporte [00:07:51]:
I'm signing up for all the newsletters, so I hope you don't mind.

Leo Laporte [00:07:54]:
Amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:07:54]:
Look at this.

Leo Laporte [00:07:55]:
Amazing. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [00:07:56]:
You even have a newsletter about AI in the movies, which is very interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:08:00]:
Yeah, yeah. To be.

Leo Laporte [00:08:01]:
All right. Signing up. Oh, is this. Is this like a week or PC week? While I have to qualify?

Leo Laporte [00:08:09]:
No, no, you do not have to qualify. Everybody that's interested in. Look at.

Leo Laporte [00:08:14]:
It's doing something. Your AI readiness score is a mere 32% can help you with that for sure.

Leo Laporte [00:08:21]:
I'm sure it's higher than that, Leo Laporte. Like, you probably answered some of the questions pretty quickly.

Leo Laporte [00:08:27]:
What. I believe I'm readier than that. Anyway, congratulations, Jason Snell. That's really good news. So we got two people who have moved to independent. I've moved to Independent 20 years ago.

Leo Laporte [00:08:38]:
Years and years. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:08:39]:
Yeah. And I'm a big believer in what you're doing and what. What we're doing. I think it's really. It's the future of media, isn't it? These big media.

Leo Laporte [00:08:48]:
You inspired me and other people that I've been on this podcast with, you know, William, Ian, you know, inspiring. Inspiring me to think differently.

Leo Laporte [00:08:55]:
Well, increasingly our guests on the show are independents. More and more. You know, when we started, it was all people working for PC magazine and stuff like that, Tech Republic. And now it's more and more just people who have a newsletter or have their own thing. All right, let's talk about the news. And since you're an AI expert, Jason Snell, I expect you to weigh in. Time magazine's Person of the Year. By the way, a lot of people on the.

Leo Laporte [00:09:26]:
On the betting markets said that AI would be the Person of the Year. You could go to those, you know, Poly Market and the other, you know, what do they call those? The. The.

Leo Laporte [00:09:38]:
Yeah, Prediction markets.

Leo Laporte [00:09:39]:
Prediction markets. And you could have bet that AI would be the Time Magazine Person of the Year, which would make sense. The PC was. I mean, they've done it before.

Leo Laporte [00:09:50]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:09:51]:
Polymarket saying, no, it's not AI, it's the AI architects.

Leo Laporte [00:09:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:09:58]:
You'd lose. And there are a lot of people very mad about that. I have to say, though, it makes sense, certainly if you're going to. By the way, when you go to Time Magazine, the very first thing you get is an AI box saying, hey, ask me anything. So do we agree? Is this the Person of the Year?

Owen Thomas [00:10:20]:
Well, so if I can jump in as someone who has actually worked on the Person of the Year during my stint at Time Magazine.

Leo Laporte [00:10:28]:
Ah, well, you know how this works then.

Iain Thomson [00:10:30]:
Total.

Owen Thomas [00:10:31]:
This is a total cop out by the editors of Time. They could not. They couldn't settle on you. And so they went with, you know, they went with this hand. Wavy architects of AI. Multiple. Multiple people.

Leo Laporte [00:10:46]:
If you look at the COVID there's two covers. There's one with AI being architected with scaffolding, which looks like my house right now. The other has eight people on it.

Iain Thomson [00:10:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:10:56]:
I mean, like, how.

Owen Thomas [00:10:57]:
How is that an editorial? How is that an editorial decision? How is that an editorial?

Leo Laporte [00:11:02]:
Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of AMD. Was it Lisa Su? Is that her name? Elon Musk.

Leo Laporte [00:11:10]:
That's right, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:11:11]:
Jensen Huang. Sam Altman. That's a. Demis Hassabis. Demis Hassabis, yep. Who is the. Who are these last two? I don't know if I.

Leo Laporte [00:11:20]:
Looks like Dario.

Leo Laporte [00:11:22]:
Yeah, Dario of Anthropic.

Owen Thomas [00:11:25]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:11:26]:
And who's the last woman? I don't know who she is. She's barely got on the COVID She's fallen off the girdle.

Leo Laporte [00:11:32]:
Fei Fei Li. Who's the.

Leo Laporte [00:11:33]:
Oh, Fei Fei Li, of course.

Leo Laporte [00:11:35]:
Stanford. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:11:36]:
Yeah. She created imagenet. One of the. She's an expert on all this stuff. She's actually been interestingly lately saying LLMs are not the be all and end all because they only cover language we need to get.

Iain Thomson [00:11:47]:
I think she's down right on that.

Leo Laporte [00:11:48]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:11:49]:
World models are the thing, she says.

Leo Laporte [00:11:51]:
Well, I would. I would say no one would deny that AI was the. For us anyway, the big story of the year. We even took one of our flagship shows This Week in Google and made it an AI show in February. The Intelligent Machines. Because it's clearly the. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but the most important and exciting thing that's happened in technology since the PC. Yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:12:14]:
You know, but what this reminds me of is in 1982, Time magazine was all set to make Steve Jobs Person of the Year at the time. And instead they made the personal computer Machine of the Year.

Leo Laporte [00:12:31]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [00:12:31]:
Again, total cop out, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:12:33]:
Pissed people off a little bit, I remember.

Owen Thomas [00:12:35]:
Yeah. I think frankly, they thought that Steve Jobs character was a little too flawed to get the.

Iain Thomson [00:12:45]:
Which is kind of ironic considering that Time magazine made Adolf Hitler their Person of the Year in.

Owen Thomas [00:12:50]:
I was about to say.

Iain Thomson [00:12:52]:
I was about to say just.

Leo Laporte [00:12:53]:
It doesn't mean the best person of the Year.

Owen Thomas [00:12:55]:
It just means most important, influential, and that's important. It is not an honor. It is not an award. That's something people inside Time talk about a lot and try to explain to the outside world. But it's kind of a hard thing to grasp because you're on the cover, you're Person of the Year. It feels like an honor, but. But it is fundamentally not, or it's not intended as such.

Leo Laporte [00:13:23]:
First. It started almost 100 years ago in 1927 with Charles Lindbergh was the first. Yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:13:29]:
Hardly a. Hardly an upstanding.

Leo Laporte [00:13:32]:
Yeah. As it turned out. Yeah. Once we learned.

Owen Thomas [00:13:34]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:13:35]:
Trump has been Person of the Year last year and in 2016, twice. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, President's, you know, pretty often get in there.

Iain Thomson [00:13:45]:
Stalin. The Russians.

Leo Laporte [00:13:46]:
Yeah. Stalin, Hitler, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Andropov.

Iain Thomson [00:13:51]:
Ma. Dung make it in there.

Leo Laporte [00:13:52]:
But Deng Xiaoping did, but not Ma.

Owen Thomas [00:13:57]:
And Steve Jobs actually never got Person of the Year.

Leo Laporte [00:13:59]:
I think that's unfortunate. He doesn't.

Iain Thomson [00:14:01]:
God, that's got to have rankled with him so badly.

Owen Thomas [00:14:04]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:14:05]:
Queen Elizabeth in 1952, Winston Churchill in 1940, and that was it. It's over now.

Leo Laporte [00:14:11]:
So on this. Sorry, go ahead.

Owen Thomas [00:14:14]:
No, well, yeah, I'll throw it out to the panel, though. Who would you have picked among these?

Leo Laporte [00:14:19]:
Yeah, I think it should have been either Jensen Huang or Dario Amadi, a lot of the others, because they were the ones that were driving a lot of this forward in different ways. One Jensen, really driving a lot of this, like, AI factories movement, you know, forward, which is where. Which is depending on who you talk to. Right. Like the thing that's going to power, you know, the next generation. Or it's like this massive pyramid scheme that's going to collapse and destroy a lot of value. But I mean, the last argue. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:14:52]:
You can't argue that. It's having a massive impact even in certain industries. There are airports that can't get built fast enough because all the construction workers are building. So many construction workers are building, you know, AI factories.

Leo Laporte [00:15:04]:
Yeah. That's one of the stories this week, is that all of the. All the. All the people who really know what they're doing are building factories.

Leo Laporte [00:15:11]:
Yes, yes.

Leo Laporte [00:15:12]:
And not infrastructure.

Leo Laporte [00:15:13]:
Could be a fool's errand. And we can talk. I would love for us to dig into that.

Leo Laporte [00:15:16]:
We're going to get into it, but let's stay with the people because I understand why the time Editorial board punted because, yeah, you could make a case for a lot. Jensen Huang, you could make a case for Sam Altman. You could definitely make a case for Elon Musk. Maybe last year was his year. Not so much this year.

Leo Laporte [00:15:34]:
A lot of them are backwards, though. Lisa. So Lisa, Sue's trying to keep up with Jensen, you know, largely and is taking the leftover demand that's falling off of Nvidia. It's a great business taking over leftover demand that Nvidia can't sell. But, you know, Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, even, they're, you know, they've spent a lot of the year playing from behind. Right. Like, the GPT-5 for OpenAI was really brutal. You know, they had been used to.

Leo Laporte [00:16:06]:
Every time they came out with a new model, it pushed the industry forward. This one really didn't. It was mostly about them in one sense or another, saving money. Also, it showed that they lost their two leading tech, you know, leaders, which were Mira Moradi and Ilya Sutskever. And it showed when they released that model, like it was not up to snuff. And then you saw Google come along and do Gemini 3, and there we got. It was like they switched fortunes, right? Like, usually when Google released a model in the past, we go, oh, sorry, Google just not so good.

Leo Laporte [00:16:42]:
Elmer Glue. Elmer's Glue on Pizza, really. Google.

Leo Laporte [00:16:45]:
I know, right. So they released the model that did what. What OpenAI usually did. And OpenAI released the model that, you know, that Gemini and Google typically did. So they sort of switched places a bit. Still to be seen, like, Google's doing some good stuff, so maybe demos, you know, is up for consideration.

Leo Laporte [00:17:04]:
He's one of the actual architects in this.

Leo Laporte [00:17:07]:
This is true.

Iain Thomson [00:17:08]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:17:09]:
Actually, architects, you know, things. But so I think if you're, if you're going to make a really going to make a decision and say, hey, we've got to pick a person. You know, I think you have to think, well, I didn't, I didn't mention Dario. But, you know, the thing about Dario and what Anthropic has done is like, they have had this strategy that I'm surprised it worked, but it's worked where they're saying, well, we're going to be, we're going to do two things. We're going to be the safe model and we're going to put out standards on the ways that our things are built. And when we put them out, you know, others are going to follow and they'll have to do it And I don't know, I was skeptical of that, I'll be honest. Like, will they really? But it did come to pass, like when they put out like they're essentially constitutional AI thing, all the others quickly were like, oh yeah, the same week or whatever they came out, they're like, yeah, we're doing, we've done the same that, we've checked that box too. So I think that's been influential.

Leo Laporte [00:18:05]:
And then the other thing is, you know, he's not doing sort of the crazy data center build out strategy. Instead they are making huge investments in the enterprise and are selling to companies and because of that they keep 10x in their business every year. They went from two years ago, they went from 100,000 to 100, sorry, 100 million to a billion. This year they're going to go from, you know, a billion to 10 billion. It's pretty, it's pretty nuts to be able to reach that scale and to keep 10x scene. But they're, but they're doing it and it's, they are going to be profitable within a couple of years. Whereas, you know, Open Air is sort of playing the Amazon game. We're just going to scale to infinity and we're going to put profitability off for a decade or something.

Leo Laporte [00:18:53]:
You know, that's what Amazon did and they did it very successfully. But they're one of the only companies in history that's ever, you know, really done that successfully. So we'll see. But I think you have to, if you're going to pick, I would say to Owen's question, I would say you have to. Jensen, Dario, maybe Demis. But I think it's still pretty late in the year that they came and showed that they are ready for, ready to compete with the others.

Leo Laporte [00:19:17]:
Faith Lee, also an architect, both Demis and done fundamental actual work in the field. The rest of them are either leaders or money raisers. They're business people for the most part. It's weird. The picture of Mark Zuckerberg is the most animated I've ever seen him. So he's like smiling.

Iain Thomson [00:19:37]:
I don't know. I mean he looked. There were some interesting facial expressions at the inauguration ball. Some of the pictures of him there were just like, yeah, that masculine energy really isn't working out for you, is it?

Leo Laporte [00:19:48]:
But this is not the Mark Zuckerberg I know. I just gotta say, and I don't know what Elon's doing. It looks like he's holding Lisa Laporte from falling off the girder. All of them, the only one who has a computer. Is Sam Altman trying to raise money for other projects? Probably Demis is on the phone. It's a very strange. This is a painting. It's a very strange painting.

Leo Laporte [00:20:10]:
It's of course, a takeoff on a very famous picture of a construction worker sitting on a girder over New York City with their lunchboxes. Okay. I think you're right, Owen. I think the, the. Have you, have you actually been in the room during the conversations for these?

Owen Thomas [00:20:28]:
I, you know, I was a very junior editor, to be clear, but yes, I was in conversations.

Leo Laporte [00:20:36]:
Dvorak would always mock these lists because he was in the room often with PC magazine and other places. And he said it's all, it's all, it's all marketing. It's all, it's all to sell copies of magazines has nothing to do with news in any real way. And I think you'd probably agree with that, Owen.

Owen Thomas [00:20:52]:
Well, yeah, except that, that, you know, new sense else. Except maybe at airports aren't really.

Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
I guess you're right. It doesn't matter anymore.

Iain Thomson [00:20:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:20:59]:
I mean, here we are talking about it. So.

Owen Thomas [00:21:01]:
Absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, the COVID of a print publication in this day and age is a, is a cop. Well, it's a conversation starter. It's a like, it can, it can make a statement about a story in a way that, you know, just a headline and a URL can't. And I, you know, yeah, I think it's clever. I mean, you know, certainly, certainly time knows that Person of the Year is always going to get talked about.

Leo Laporte [00:21:29]:
Maybe next year it'll be the AI crash will be the Person of the Year. Let's take a break and let's talk about that. This is a piece from Dion Lim, CEO, Dinner Insights. The AI wildfire is coming. It's going to be very painful and incredibly healthy. This is. I've seen a lot of takes saying it's just a bubble and it's going to burst and the stock market's going to crash and it's going to be a mess. I've also seen a lot of takes saying AI uses obscene amounts of water and energy, some of which is not strictly accurate.

Leo Laporte [00:22:02]:
I've also seen, as you just mentioned, Jason, people saying, you know, this AI network center boom, data center boom is going to kill us in other ways. And certainly power costs have gone up. I can't believe my electricity bill. Not that I blame AI for it. I blame Pacific Gas and Electric for it.

Iain Thomson [00:22:22]:
Don't we all, mate? Don't we All.

Leo Laporte [00:22:26]:
And then there's the issue of nuclear power plants coming online. Energy and RAM. So there are all these consequences. RAM prices Framework just announced they're going to raise their RAM prices 50%. There's a local computer store in San Francisco, Central Computer, which I used to hang out at all the time. They did a video for them 30 years ago. I love them a lot on how to build a PC. Great place they have, they have a sign in the window saying from now on RAM is.

Leo Laporte [00:22:53]:
Prices change daily. It's market price. Like on a menu for lobster. It's market price. We don't know what it's going to be.

Leo Laporte [00:23:00]:
Can you imagine like gas just have like a thing instead of ram, you know?

Leo Laporte [00:23:04]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:23:04]:
I mean ironically the last time that happened at Central Computer, among, among others. But that I was at the Chronicle and that was the place we went to for you know, the.

Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
Yeah, it's just the local, the local angle.

Owen Thomas [00:23:16]:
It was bitcoin mining.

Leo Laporte [00:23:18]:
Oh wow.

Owen Thomas [00:23:21]:
It was still GPUs, it was still Nvidia, you know, before, before the AI boom. So you know, these kind of like trend driven shortages have, have. We've definitely seen them before. But this is, this is definitely at an extreme global level where it's becoming geo strategic, you know, and inflaming relations between countries.

Leo Laporte [00:23:44]:
Well, let's talk about it in just a bit. We're going to take a little with Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Jason Heiner from his brand new publication, the Deep View. Editor in Chief. I'm gonna. Do you have an art. You have RSS fees. I'm gonna add it to my, my daily news beat check.

Leo Laporte [00:24:01]:
There's some great stuff on here. I'm thrilled. Very good. They need you, Jason. They need somebody with your gravitas. And soon to be part of his letter. It's a letter to America from, from Ian Thompson. Soon to be the Silicon Light.

Iain Thomson [00:24:20]:
Well, someone's got to explain the rebellious colonials to the rest of the empire. So.

Leo Laporte [00:24:24]:
Yes. Have you watched. I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary on the revolution. Have you been watching? I haven't.

Iain Thomson [00:24:31]:
Very good though.

Leo Laporte [00:24:32]:
Oh yeah, it's really good. It's really good.

Iain Thomson [00:24:35]:
Yeah. I mean I do feel we should clear up some things about the revolution and that we never herded people into churches and burnt them down. We did however do these smallpox blankets to Native Americans. So out in the end, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:24:47]:
There was bad stuff on both sides and you know, there were good people on both sides. That's just the way. Yeah. Actually we might have lost the revolution if General Howe hadn't been kind of a fan of the Americans. And in at least two cases of Ken Burns documents, when he could have destroyed the Continental army, he said, yeah, we'll just let him go. He was a fan.

Iain Thomson [00:25:14]:
It's a very lovely place. I've been here 15 years, so, you know, it kind of grows on you.

Leo Laporte [00:25:19]:
It's history that they didn't teach you in the history books, that's for sure.

Leo Laporte [00:25:22]:
He was in parliament and argued for the Americans. In Parliament. In Parliament before, you know, becoming the general that was sent to smite the Americans.

Leo Laporte [00:25:31]:
A: It's wild stories. Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll come back with more on This Week in Tech. We're so glad you're here in the holiday season celebrating our holiday spirit. I haven't really decorated the place. I did shrink my Mac, though. It's a little smaller than it used to be.

Leo Laporte [00:25:47]:
Actually, Burke has. Has taken it because I. I had a. I have the original Mac back here, as you may remember. And it started smoking.

Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
Oh, dear.

Leo Laporte [00:25:58]:
And I decided maybe I should unplug this and give it to Burke and see what he can do with it. So I have a little mini Mac in its place. But maybe Burke's not making any promises. Maybe he can fix it. And while you're at it, Burke, would you put another 128 kilobytes of ram in there? That would be great. Our show today, brought to you by Shopify. I have an actual soft spot for Shopify. I'll tell you about that in a second.

Leo Laporte [00:26:25]:
Imagine you're lying in bed late at night. You're scrolling through, I don't know, a new site you found or social network, and you found something you really want. And you hit the add to cart button on that item you've been looking for. And you're in bed. You're ready to check out, but you're in bed, you're in your jammies, and you remember your wallet's in the living room downstairs, and you don't want to get up and go get your credit card. Just as you're ready to abandon your cart, bam, bam, boom. You see it. The purple shop button.

Leo Laporte [00:26:56]:
Don't need the wallet. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. And that purple shop pay button you see at checkout makes buying so incredibly easy. There's a reason so many businesses sell with it, because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Oh, I hear that sound already. We made another sale. The story of course, is that my son Salt Hank, TikTok superstar famous for his sandwiches. He's got a sandwich shop in New York City.

Leo Laporte [00:27:26]:
It's my daughter, same thing. She's selling T-shirts and jerseys and books and it's through Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform not just behind my kids, but behind 10% of all the e-commerce in the United States.

Leo Laporte [00:27:58]:
Household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started like Salt Hank. Shopify gives you that leg up from day dot with hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates to express your brand style and forget about the code. Tackle all those important tasks in one place from inventory to payments to analytics and more. Spread your brand's word with built in marketing and email tools to find and keep new customers and. And did I mention that iconic shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world? It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. Your customers already know it, they already love it. So if you want to see fewer carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today.

Leo Laporte [00:28:45]:
Shopify.com TWiT Go to shopify.com shopify.com TWiT we love them. Thank you Shopify.

Leo Laporte [00:29:24]:
I think that's a fair assessment. There's for, you know when I keep hearing about this, oh, it's a bubble, it's going to crash. I keep reminding myself, I keep saying in fact out loud. But there's such value in it and we've seen the value and I use AI every single day, all the time for all sorts of things. Now Ian, sounds like you're an AI gloomer, not doomer necessarily. Are you a gloomer?

Iain Thomson [00:29:59]:
There we go. Sorry, new microphone.

Leo Laporte [00:30:03]:
I know it sounds good though. People already picked up on that in the chat room, said, oh, Ian's got a microphone.

Iain Thomson [00:30:08]:
They pay close attention. Yeah, no, exactly. I've had carefully hidden the, the, the brand name, but you can probably guess.

Leo Laporte [00:30:14]:
Oh, we saw it.

Iain Thomson [00:30:16]:
Yeah. Okay, well, I mean, look, when the dot com boom kicked in, then it was, you know, we left, we had all this dark fiber lying around which had been built up and we then got to use data centers. If they actually get them built, fair enough, you know, somebody will and they're selling those services off cheap. Again, that's fair enough. But it's a question of whether that will actually transfer in the same way that the dot com bubble did. I think an awful lot of AI engineers are in for a very rude shock when it does burst and an awful lot of stockholders are going to lose money. But I mean, I bow to Jason's knowledge on this because, you know, it's, it's, I don't know, I just get, whenever you see, you know, stuff like this going on, my instinctive reaction is, yeah, there's going to be a market correction. The winners will win, the losers will lose.

Iain Thomson [00:31:07]:
We'll see how it turns out.

Leo Laporte [00:31:10]:
Yeah. Jason, what do you think?

Leo Laporte [00:31:11]:
So the interesting thing, so I did a story on the Deep View. Literally my first story, it was an exclusive with a CEO of Neurometric AI and they released this leaderboard of thinking models. Thinking models are, you know, the models sort of on top of the thinking algorithms, I should say. So it's down there in the startups area. Yeah, the first one on the left. So these are mostly open source models in this, in this algorithm. But what the real winners are in this, and this gets to this question, the real winners are the small models. So it's not so much that there's this thesis that's been powering the AI boom and that's been powering this data center build out, which is that these big models needed to kind of solve everything and they're very power hungry and they need to, you know, we need to build capacity because if we keep scaling the way we are now with more people using these things, because what happens is it's not only, only like 10 to 15% of people have even started using AI on the planet, right? So you can, you can guess like these other booms like phones and the Internet. It's going to really grow over the coming years. But also, as people use them, they use them more. So all of this, this boom is built on this idea that we need to run everything on these big models and the big models require the latest hardware. Well, that. In the last half of 2025, that argument has started to fall apart. What, what's happening now is when companies use smaller models, they can. They are more efficient, meaning they're faster and they're a lot cheaper to run when they're. Yeah, smaller models that are more specific for running, you know, specific workloads that you have.

Leo Laporte [00:32:25]:
If your company needs AI to do, you know, X. Right. To run a data. A data model, if they need people to help create, you know, CRM applications or those kinds of things. So what that means is that a lot of the workloads for that we're going to be growing over the coming years are going to run on these smaller models. In these smaller models, they don't need the latest hardware. Like you can run it on a generation of hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:33:04]:
If your company needs AI to do, you know, X. Right. To run a data. A data model, if they need people to help create, you know, CRM applications or those kinds of things. So what that means is that a lot of the workloads for that we're going to be growing over the coming years are going to run on these smaller models. In these smaller models, they don't need the latest hardware. Like you can run it on a generation of hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:33:37]:
Don't you need it to train it? No, not even that.

Leo Laporte [00:33:41]:
This is just inference, not training. So inference is just when somebody does a search or uses generative AI to do something, to do a task like.

Leo Laporte [00:33:49]:
Perplexity or COGI Assistant, all of these, these orchestrators, which actually aren't AI models, they're doing searches and then apply AI to the results.

Leo Laporte [00:33:58]:
That's inference. Right?

Leo Laporte [00:34:00]:
That's.

Leo Laporte [00:34:00]:
That's using, you, me, all of us using AI to do something. That's sort of, the, the sort of, the search and inference training is when you use. To train the better models, for the models to get better and smarter over time. That's what. Only essentially, that's what really the. Yeah, that's what they're doing. The frontier model companies. So the frontier model companies need that latest hardware.

Leo Laporte [00:34:26]:
They need the latest Nvidia stuff. The other models don't. They can run on hardware that's four or five generations behind, potentially.

Leo Laporte [00:34:34]:
The Chinese proved that with Deep Seek, that was a big eye opener earlier this year, that they could do such a good model without having access to the latest Nvidia H200 chips. Ironically, last week, President Trump, after talking to people and so forth, people with big pockets decided, you know what? Let's have them have those chips. Jensen Huang had been lobbying for that like crazy. And then China said, you know, we don't want those chips after all, because they want to develop their own and we don't want to be dependent on American technology. So. So lesson learned, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:35:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:35:14]:
There's also, we've talked to a number of people on Intelligent Machines who are creating small models, little models for, as you say, purpose built, specific, specific stuff. There's a company that is doing it, they call it ChatGPT for doctors. It's called Open Evidence. They are one of the latest unicorns. They just went to a $12 billion valuation. Why? Because they're making money. Part of the way they make money though is they sell ads to pharma.

Leo Laporte [00:35:44]:
Pharma companies, pharmaceutical companies.

Leo Laporte [00:35:46]:
Yeah, yeah, but, but Doc, but what, what? The point is that doctors are using this. And I think my doctor. I think many doctors have been using AI for a while. There's a sign in my doctor's examining room that says, just so you know, I'm using AI to transcribe our conversation so I can pay attention to you instead of sitting at the keyboard typing. But don't worry, we throw it away as soon as it's transcribed. We don't keep the recording. Okay. I imagine a lot of doctors are doing what a lot of us do.

Leo Laporte [00:36:17]:
If I have a health concern or problem, I immediately do an AI search. And I've often got a lot of. Now, you have to be careful, obviously, because as we know, AI isn't always right, but it's often very useful and especially in that inference vein where it's. It's combining real information from the web into a synthesis that's of real use.

Leo Laporte [00:36:41]:
I have two friends this year that both were diagnosed with that they had. They had essentially a growth, right? Potentially tumorous growth.

Leo Laporte [00:36:53]:
They're worried about cancer.

Leo Laporte [00:36:54]:
Yeah, they were. They were worried about it. They went in, they got the test done, they sort of could see their test results unreadable by a human being, right? But then they had appointments that were like three or four weeks later.

Leo Laporte [00:37:07]:
And now you gotta sit for a month, wait for the doctor to explain it. In many cases nowadays, with health care being what it is in the United States, you don't even get the doctor's explanation. You get a letter in the mail that is as incomprehensible as the lab results. You're on your own. People are turning to AI for these answers. I've done it too, these things.

Leo Laporte [00:37:26]:
Two separate people went to, got their download, downloaded their report, both of them uploaded it, you know, to an AI, got the results, and in one case they didn't mention it to the doctor. But when they got the information from the doctor, they said essentially exactly what they had got from GPT, you know, in that case, and the other one who I think may have used Claude for it, you know, Anthropics chatbot, they took it to their doctor and they said, hey, here's what I got when I, because I, you know, I was waiting forever. I didn't want to be, I was worried sick. And so I, I, and the doctor's like, this is pretty good.

Leo Laporte [00:38:09]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:10]:
Tell me again, where did you, let's, let's go on this together. Tell me what you did. What did you prompt it? How did you ask and showed? Because, because they were really impressed and they thought that there's a lot there. And in fact, I sort of got the impression that maybe there were things there that they were like, oh, I hadn't thought of that. Right. As well. And so, and I loved to hear that the doctor was, you know, pretty forthright about the fact that this is good and it was helpful if you think about it.

Leo Laporte [00:38:36]:
I've talked. A good friend is a physician who's very bullish on AI and he said, you know, the hardest thing being a doctor is the diagnostic part because there's a lot to remember. Right. And you're gonna, you're afraid of missing something. He said, the most important part of what I do as a doctor is relating to the patient, explaining to the patient, hearing what the patient has to say and that. And AI does not do well. I do that.

Leo Laporte [00:38:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:59]:
But the AI can be very helpful in the diagnostic arena because it has. So this company, Open Evidence is, they say, accurate. It's not aimed at consumers, it's only aimed at doctors because it's based on medical journals. They licensed the New England Journal of Medicine and many others. So it's basically synthesizing peer-reviewed studies to answer medical questions. That's what a doctor would try to do. A doctor go home with a stack of JAMA and AMA and so forth and try to read all this stuff. But AI does it better, faster and more accurately than the doctor's memory.

Leo Laporte [00:39:36]:
I think that makes sense. Sense. You don't want to replace the doctor, but in partnership with a physician, I think this is a very good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:39:42]:
They could also, the doctor could have some more control and agency in it. Right. You know, the doctor could take your results, go to Notebook LLM create, upload a certain number of journal articles and that, and then cross reference it. Right. And ask it questions. And then it has sort of collated the sources for, for it. And then it's, you know, letting the, the LLM do what it's really good at, which is taking language and, and bringing you the exact information you need and synthesizing it.

Leo Laporte [00:40:15]:
Yeah, I, I'm a, I'm a fan, so I don't. So to, to go back to this fire, I understand that AI is, is, you know, very expensive, maybe too expensive, maybe impossibly expensive. It's both environmentally and money and also in data centers and stuff. But I also see there's real value, genuine value being created by it and more so than in a lot of technologies and faster than a lot of technologies I've seen in my career over the last 50 years covering this stuff.

Iain Thomson [00:40:46]:
I mean, absolutely. I mean, if you remember back to sort of pre Internet days, I can still remember journalists saying, why the hell do I need the Internet? I can't trust it. I can just go down to the library, get the microphone microfiches out, scroll through, you know. Yeah, that takes that a while. Yeah, exactly. But you know, they were just like, no, no, you can only trust, you know, certain sources. But with AI, you can, you know, go through an awful lot of sources. You don't have to trust it particularly, but it does give a very good way of scanning large data sets.

Leo Laporte [00:41:14]:
So how do we solve this? Because we do. Maybe the solution is, as you said, Jason, is small models that are less expensive and more purpose-built.

Leo Laporte [00:41:22]:
Well, and, and going to soak up a lot. So go ahead.

Owen Thomas [00:41:25]:
Yeah, and the thing is, a forecast about technology based on current technology is always going to be wrong. So this idea that we're going to build so many data centers that they occupy the entire state of Texas or whatever, that's sort of like when at&t forecast that everyone in America was going to be a switchboard operator because the number of calls were going up and they needed more switch operations operators kept hiring more switchboard operators. Well, they automated it and like automation efficiency, you know, better, better chip technology, that's all going to happen to AI. So the, the costs, they have to come down.

Leo Laporte [00:42:05]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [00:42:06]:
Because even though these AI companies have billions of dollars in revenue, in some cases they also are not, you know, not profitable. That curve has to, you know, the, the lines have to cross on that curve. At some point the cost will come down. I mean, that's just always the, they have to, you know, the trend in Tech.

Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
Right, right.

Owen Thomas [00:42:26]:
Better, cheaper, fast. But you know, we're not just as, like, we're not all working as switchboard operators. I don't think we're, you know, I don't think this forecast of, you know, we're, we're going to burn the planet down with our with our data centers is, you know, it's not just alarmist, it's ignorant of the way technology works.

Iain Thomson [00:42:48]:
Also on the power front, I have to say this has given a welcome fillip to nuclear power because for decades it sat on the sidelines.

Leo Laporte [00:42:56]:
Welcome for some. I'm not sure it's universally agreed that we want to, we want to go, go nuclear.

Iain Thomson [00:43:03]:
Well, no, small mod, small modular reactors are looking very good at the moment. There's some very interesting fission ideas coming through and the fact is the US power grid can't handle this. Chinese one probably can, but the US can't at the moment because they've got a whole lot decades of underinvestment.

Leo Laporte [00:43:18]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:43:19]:
And by the way, streaming still uses more data center capacity.

Leo Laporte [00:43:24]:
Exactly. Than what we're doing right now is worse than AI.

Leo Laporte [00:43:28]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [00:43:28]:
But you know like no one, no one complains about that because we all, we all take it absorbed that we need our Netflix.

Leo Laporte [00:43:34]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:35]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:35]:
Right.

Iain Thomson [00:43:35]:
We are planetary traitors.

Leo Laporte [00:43:37]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [00:43:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:38]:
Right. Yeah, I, I think, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:41]:
So there's probably not a bubble with a capital B but there are bubbles. I think you know, when they're. The thing that, the thing that makes me less concerned about a bubble with a capital B is that when people are running around saying that there's a bubble, there's usually not a bubble. Bubbles usually sneak up on you where it's just like everything's up into the right. Right. Like during the there while there were a few doomsdayers during the dot com bust mostly people were like this is the future and it's happening and we need it and it's going to keep going up and up and up. Same thing with the mortgage thing is like giving everybody the ability to afford get affordable housing is an amazing thing. And it's just all up and to the right.

Leo Laporte [00:44:25]:
We're just going to everybody we're going to get more and more people into houses and we sort of ignored some of the underlying. Most people ignored the underlying unhealthy parts of it. So I, well I think that there are some bubbles we sort of are generate. The past few generations have been burned by these things and so we're really conscious of the fact that when things start really cooking that it could be a bubble. I think that some of the valuations do look bubbly but some of them aren't even close to where we were during some of the dot com like insane, you know, valuation. So yeah, there is a lot of.

Leo Laporte [00:45:04]:
You know, go ahead on.

Owen Thomas [00:45:05]:
Oh there is a lot of financial engineering Happening like look at the Disney Open AI deal. Like so open AI is going to pay Disney for, to license its characters for Sora.

Leo Laporte [00:45:16]:
Sora.

Owen Thomas [00:45:17]:
Yeah, but Disney is investing a billion dollars in OpenAI. So OpenAI can pay, you know, can pay Disney, you know, and there's a.

Leo Laporte [00:45:25]:
Lot of those circular deals. Nvidia, Microsoft, Jensen Huang giving money to somebody to buy chips from Jensen Huang and so forth.

Iain Thomson [00:45:32]:
Yeah, well, I mean, Speaking of the 2008 crash, I mean Michael Burry just completely canceled his short options on this because he said he couldn't understand the market. This amount of, of you invest in me, I'll buy your chips. He was very, very down on this. And then he was just like, right, I'm shutting down the front, I'm getting out this market makes no sense.

Owen Thomas [00:45:52]:
That's what killed a lot of that was a big contributor to the 99.com bubble and the subsequent 2000 shorts. Well, the shorts gave up because the shorts had their shorts handed to them.

Leo Laporte [00:46:06]:
Right?

Iain Thomson [00:46:07]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [00:46:07]:
You know, and like it's a good.

Iain Thomson [00:46:09]:
Phrase, I'm stealing that.

Leo Laporte [00:46:10]:
Yeah, right.

Owen Thomas [00:46:11]:
You know, it's because with, you know, with a, with a short, you've got, you know, essentially unlimited downside and limited upside. That's the, that's the structural problem with a short strategy. You could, it can only go down so far whereas your, you know, your obligation, if it goes the wrong way, just keeps ballooning. So that would be a danger, right, if the, you know, if the shorts start giving up and it's all the, you know, and the AI bulls just take over.

Leo Laporte [00:46:44]:
You know, but that's a financial crisis as opposed to a real problem underlying the.

Owen Thomas [00:46:52]:
Yeah, I mean, technology. You know, the thing is if, if the infrastructure, like if these companies get washed out financially, the infrastructure still exists, someone can come along and take advantage of it.

Leo Laporte [00:47:04]:
But as we've said, I mean right now AI is the building of the network centers is sucking away construction skills and dollars investors. You know, if you look at the stock market, it's driven entirely. This year's growth in the stock market driven entirely by AI stocks. A magnificent seven venture capitalists putting almost all their money into AI. Which means presumably some really great ideas are not getting funded. I'm just bringing up the negatives cuz I'm ultimately pretty bullish on it, but it's gonna be somewhat disruptive. Now one advantage is the federal government is pretty much pro-AI. Trump this week signed an executive order of dubious legality.

Iain Thomson [00:47:54]:
I was gonna say you almost said a law there. And I'm sorry, he's not king yet.

Leo Laporte [00:47:58]:
Yeah, which is. Mike Mazick says it's basically a memo, but it's a memo to people who do his bidding, his. The agents, federal agencies, that we don't want any state AI regulations. And I understand that if you're David Sacks, the AIs are. Or if you're Sam Altman or on and on and on Jensen Huang. You don't want a patchwork quilt of 50 different regulatory bodies to try to figure out what to do. You'd like a single national law, not that we'll ever pass such a thing. So basically, right now, AI is unregulated, is that right? States.

Leo Laporte [00:48:36]:
States, by the way, say. Yeah, go ahead.

Iain Thomson [00:48:39]:
Oh, Gavin, got the memo based on this one.

Leo Laporte [00:48:42]:
Yeah, we got the memo. But California, Illinois.

Iain Thomson [00:48:47]:
Well, and this came in just before Texas was about to. Texas do its own specific law on this as well. And I think the states are really angry about this because it's just like, hang on, states rights. You've been banging the states rights drums for the last 20 years, and now it's just like Daddy Knows Best.

Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
Even Steve Bannon says this is terrible and says David Sachs is completely misleading Trump. He's got his ear. He's whispering in his ear.

Owen Thomas [00:49:16]:
The irony to me of David Sacks making this argument is that PayPal, he led a strategy where PayPal got licensed to be a money transmitter in almost all but 50 states. I think Louisiana was giving them a hard time. They had to because they wanted to go public. So basically, Peter Thiel and David Sacks gave up their libertarian, anti regulatory state rhetoric when the SEC told them, you need to do this if you're going to make your debut on Wall Street.

Leo Laporte [00:49:50]:
You know, furthermore, as. Who was it? I can't remember. The New Yorker. Oh, no. The Washington Post said he's got several hundred AI investments himself. So he's slightly conflicted in all of this.

Owen Thomas [00:50:03]:
But it's getting pretty vicious, too, because Anthropic as the safe AI, the pro regulation API.

Leo Laporte [00:50:10]:
They want regulation.

Owen Thomas [00:50:11]:
Yeah. They're getting beaten up by Sachs, among others, as seeking regulatory capture. That's where a company gets essentially a regulatory regime that's friendly to the way they do business or maybe pulls the.

Leo Laporte [00:50:25]:
Ladder up behind him in effect.

Owen Thomas [00:50:27]:
Yeah, but that's exactly what David Sacks did at PayPal.

Leo Laporte [00:50:30]:
Right.

Owen Thomas [00:50:31]:
So he knows this playbook very well. That's ironic to me.

Leo Laporte [00:50:37]:
Here's one of the interesting ways AI is entering our culture. This is from Axios. It's beginning to look a lot like AI. Christmas. Churches across the US and abroad are experimenting with AI-generated Christmas content. AI-generated nativity visuals, kids' lessons, sermons. AI tools are becoming more and more a part of using churches.

Iain Thomson [00:51:05]:
I'm sorry, the sermons thing really got my goat because, you know, I'm a member of the Church of England and you do expect the vicar to put some work in at the end of the day.

Leo Laporte [00:51:12]:
But it's not week, Ian. Every weekend, week out. How many times can you say be nice? So I've actually talked to do a lot. Yeah, no, I agree. This is exactly the antithesis of what you want AI to do. Let's give you a sermon on a Sunday. Here's an article, 5 Ways to Use AI for Christmas at your church. This is from the Church Communications Group.

Leo Laporte [00:51:41]:
The most wonderful time of the year is fast approaching and churches all around the world are gearing up to celebrate the birth of our Savior. Well, come along to 5 Creative Ways to Use AI for Christmas at your church.

Iain Thomson [00:51:55]:
I'm sorry, but why not personalized Christmas greetings? They're not personalized if you're using a computer to write them. You know, personalized is. Thank you so much for seeing me at such and such point. I really like you. Blah, blah, blah, Just like feed it into an AI engine. That's not personal at all. This is what kind of gets my goat about this.

Leo Laporte [00:52:12]:
How about AI-powered nativity storytelling? Well, virtual Christmas concerts. Why write music? Why even hire a band when Suno can do it so well? And they even have links to all the different AIs to try. Hi.

Iain Thomson [00:52:29]:
This has been solutions to problems that don't exist.

Leo Laporte [00:52:34]:
Yeah, you're right, you're right. But this is, I think this is the other side of AI Doomerism. There is a boosterism that's very sincere. Well, it always works. Amazon, you may remember, a couple of weeks ago announced they were going to do AI-powered video recaps of their shows so that you could, you know, catch up without spoilers. Actually, Amazon's doing the same thing in their Kindles. They're going to do AI.

Iain Thomson [00:53:03]:
I was going to bring that up because yes, that's absolutely insulting.

Leo Laporte [00:53:06]:
But yeah, Amazon prime had to stop the video, stopped it because it would get things wrong, including about their own show. Oh, boy. Fallout season one recap says that it takes place in the 1950s, which of course everyone knows it looks like the 50s, but it's really 2077. So maybe this is the same thing. Google with the Elmer's glue on the pizza, there's just. You're gonna have a few of these.

Iain Thomson [00:53:36]:
The Kindle thing really got my go because they're basically saying, well, you can ask your questions about the book, no spoilers. But do the authors have any say in this?

Leo Laporte [00:53:44]:
No. Amazon has told the authors, you cannot turn this off.

Iain Thomson [00:53:48]:
Yeah. Which is quite frankly, for the person that's creating all this content, massively insulting and also potentially damaging to their own personal brand. It's quite frank, frankly, ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [00:53:59]:
I don't know. I like it. I mean, you know.

Iain Thomson [00:54:03]:
Yeah, but then having someone else explain it to them in using hallucinations or, sorry, what we used to call mistakes, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:54:11]:
Yeah, but I mean, as the author, you made the assumption that your reader would understand what you're talking about. And if they don't and they decide to go, look, we used to have Cliff Notes. Do authors hate Cliff Notes? I'm sure Charles Dickens really didn't think Cliff Notes were a good idea, but many a student is very grateful and myself included. But at least remember classic comics. Did you ever read at least with.

Iain Thomson [00:54:37]:
A paperback novel when you've got the, the precis on the back, the author actually wrote that and the author had control over what that was. At the moment it's. Amazon is basically saying, yeah, okay, we're going to scan the thing, run it through an AI engine and you have no control whatsoever over the work that you created. Fundamentally seems unfair.

Leo Laporte [00:54:54]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:56]:
These things do. You know, you find the hallucinations pretty quickly in many cases or the worst part is if you're unaware of the hallucin hallucinations. But the thing that's interesting right now is you start to, you know, the more you use these things, the more you start to realize what kinds of prompts are, are very open to hallucination and what things you can, the ways you can prompt it to make sure it sort of sticks to its knitting a little better. I think that's likely to improve over time. But we still, we still are in a world where, you know, these. Gemini 3 is really good. For example, Gemini 3 is super, super good. I have a prompt that I use every time there's a new model that gets almost every one of them to hallucinate.

Leo Laporte [00:55:46]:
And Gemini 3, as good as it was on the first day, it was closer. But I still was able. It hallucinated completely made up something completely ridiculous. And this one, Leo Laporte will appreciate this one because in a book that I wrote 10 years ago before a lot of this was not all online, you know, It's. I featured 10 people. This was, it's called Follow the Geeks. It was really anticipating the influencer revolution because it was showing people that went independent and went were incredibly successful doing it. Leo Laporte was one of them.

Leo Laporte [00:56:19]:
And the thing is, is on the Internet, the book is not longer in print and it was self published. Thank you, Leo. And so because of that, it's a great way that I can test the LLMs. I can say, tell me, give me a summary of all 10 people who were in the book. Because it's not out there very, very readily on the Internet.

Leo Laporte [00:56:43]:
But you know, this was absorbed, right? Don't you think this was absorbed by the AI or.

Leo Laporte [00:56:48]:
No, you would think it was, but almost like somewhere between. They usually get 7 to 9 of the people, right? And they'll hallucinate, they'll bring in other people that kind of were related to people. Leo is almost always in there and usually the first one, because we've talked about it on the show, like it's been mentioned by many people. But a lot of the other ones get left off every time it brings in people who weren't in the book but were kind of like similar to some of the people who were. And in the, in the Gemini example, Gemini 3 example, it completely made up the name of somebody and made a bio for them and talked about the fact that I, you know, was, you know, enjoyed talking to them very regularly. Made up a whole persona for this person that does not exist, was not in the book and as far as I can tell, is not a real person. So you sort of start to learn.

Leo Laporte [00:57:39]:
I think one of those things that is going to be interesting as we get used to using these things more, you know, we start to learn the questions that are good to ask and the parameters we can give to it and then the things that, you know, it's likely to hallucinate around.

Leo Laporte [00:57:54]:
Yeah, that's. Boy, that's. You've got an interest now. You know that the. I got the mail from the lawyers in the Anthropic settlement. Anthropic agreed to pay 1.5 million.

Iain Thomson [00:58:07]:
How are you making money on this?

Leo Laporte [00:58:09]:
Well, I'm conflicted. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors. Might end up being as much as $3,000 a book whose books were ingested by a pirate book database. Very large one that was by the way used for training by pretty much everyone as far as we can see. Certainly Meta used it. Anthropic got caught. They had used a variety of other sources though, and the judge. It was interesting we talked about this when it happened.

Leo Laporte [00:58:34]:
The judge ruled that when they bought the book, even though they bought the book from a used bookstore, that that was fair use for them to ingest that with the AI. But ingesting the pirated books was not. So authors with books in that database are owed compensation from this $1.5 billion fund. So I got the mail this week. I haven't. I don't want to be tempted. I haven't actually looked it up. I'm sure I have 13 books.

Leo Laporte [00:59:00]:
I'm sure more than a few of them are in there. Gosh, $3,000 times 13. That adds up. I could buy a nice lunch with that. I think the lawyers get a good chunk of that. Plus I'd have to pay my co-authors and my publisher and probably wouldn't end up being much. But I feel in a way I'm conflicted. I don't want to take the money because I feel like.

Leo Laporte [00:59:23]:
Well, no, I'm happy to. Like, for instance, all of our shows, hundreds of thousands of hours of content are freely available for AI to ingest. They're Creative Commons. I don't care. I want them to. I want AI to be better. Yeah. So I'm conflicted about taking the money.

Leo Laporte [00:59:38]:
Everybody's saying take the money. Jeff Jarvis said, give it to charity if you feel so bad, but take the money. It's going somewhere. I'll donate it to Creative. Comments. You're right.

Iain Thomson [00:59:49]:
It is remarkable how some technology companies went from, you know, the Napster. Generation of content is absolutely key and you should never steal content and that sort of thing to, you know what? We need this for training, so get over it. But hey, great that you got some money out of it. But yeah, give it to charity if you don't want it. Otherwise. Well, given petaluma prices, maybe go out for two meals.

Leo Laporte [01:00:13]:
Let's take a little break while five more in just a little bit. You're watching this week in Tech. So glad you're here along with Ian Thompson, Owen Thomas that's confusing the Thompsons and the Thomases and of course, Jason Heiner. Great to have all three of you. Our show today, brought to you by netsuite. There's a name you ought to know. Every business these days is asking the same question. How do we make AI work for us? Right.

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Leo Laporte [01:01:15]:
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Leo Laporte [01:02:02]:
Actually, you know, I'm thinking almost all of our ads now are for AI companies of some kind. So if it is a, if it is a bubble, I'm in trouble. That's probably true for all of you, right? I mean, AI is, is driving our economy these days.

Iain Thomson [01:02:20]:
Well, I mean everyone's. You can't launch a company or run a company without mentioning AI somewhere in the press release. I'm sure and Jason are familiar with this. It's just you have to have it.

Leo Laporte [01:02:31]:
Jason's new publication.

Iain Thomson [01:02:33]:
Well, I mean, yes, exactly. Right, but I mean, that's at least a specific thing. What really gets my goat is when you get like, you know, I was reading an article in the Times about accountancy firms and they were all, we're AI, we're AI. And it's just like, that's probably the last business I'd want to put AI into. But hey, you know, you got to say it.

Leo Laporte [01:02:54]:
Well, I for one am on the AI side. Now here's a piece from Tim Wu, the weekend essay in the Financial Times this weekend. Could America win the AI race but lose the war? As we've just been saying, the US has gone all in on artificial intelligence. But the idea of an end of times battle with China over tomorrow's key technologies, part delusion, part lobbying tool for Silicon Valley, it's, it's. You know what this is? This is, there's from time immemorial we've had the Other being the threat. Right. And we got to put all our money into something because of the other, whether it's a space race or computers or now AI. US companies, Wu says over the past year have spent $350 billion on AI infrastructure with projections of over $400 billion for next year.

Leo Laporte [01:03:51]:
Four times what China is spending. These are estimates, but still.

Iain Thomson [01:03:57]:
Well, I mean China is taking the Apple model. You let everyone else make the running and then do a second generation product which beats everyone else like a redheaded stepchild. I mean, you know, it's admittedly Apple has screwed up a bit when it comes to AI by pursuing this policy, but honestly I'd put my money on China at the moment. You know, America will make the innovation.

Leo Laporte [01:04:19]:
Interesting is that AI leaders in the US are using China as a straw man to get more investment, to get more government support. He says China is somewhat less committed to AI than it's portrayed to be. While it is a strategic priority, the state and its major companies are spending much more money to secure dominance in other domains. Electric vehicles. China's is clearly number one in EVs technology wise. Right. And it's one of the reasons you can't buy one in the US because our car companies are terrified of them. Batteries, robotics, solar panels, wind turbines, advanced manufacturing.

Leo Laporte [01:04:59]:
Wu says these sectors may be less glamorous, but their returns are far less speculative than AI. China is very happy to spend.

Owen Thomas [01:05:08]:
Reality.

Leo Laporte [01:05:09]:
The reality is that, you know, the US and China are making each other better in AI. Like it is not a zero sum game where one wins and one loses. One of the really interesting thing is things is in the sort of 2015-2020 era when deep learning and you know, the sort of the proto generative AI stuff was happening. China was graduating something like 8 to 10 engineers focused on this stuff to the U.S. right? And, and there was this narrative and granted it was in the sort of the high tech space and not sort of part of the larger narrative that it is that AI is now. But the narrative was like this is going to be next and China is going to, is going to crush us because they are, is going to crush the US because they are graduating so many more engineers, so many more scientists, scientists and they are way ahead. And what happened was all of the generative AI, the technology that is driving it was mostly invented in the US in Silicon Valley and to almost everybody's surprise, including China's now, now that that's happened, you know, China is getting really efficient with the models, you know, deep seek and Quinn like they are, are able to train them on a lot less compute, they're on much cheaper technology, much cheaper hardware and that's causing all of these other US companies to really again put a, you know, put a pin in this idea that oh, it's the larger models trained on the latest hardware that's going to drive all of the innovation and everything else Downstream team is not where a lot of the great stuff is going to happen when in fact like that's what I said the second half of 2025 we started that, that started to fall apart. We started to see that these smaller models on more specifically trained for certain tasks are actually much cheaper and much lower power and much more performant.

Leo Laporte [01:07:15]:
So you know, that's only because in one sense in the first half of the year especially Deep Seek, you know, made this, this, this big breakthrough. So I think they only competition is always good. They make each other better, they have different strengths and ultimately that's going to make the, that what Owen talked about. Like we have to get to a more efficient, you know, more cost effective version of the great things that these models are doing. But competition is what's going to, what's going to drive that and right now it is driving it. You know, the competition between the two of them. And look, look, others want a piece of it too. Surprisingly, the EU just passed some legislation to, to allow AI to develop in a, in a less regulated way for AI data centers to, to, to be able to spin up in Europe in ways that weren't really practical before.

Leo Laporte [01:08:07]:
And you know, Europe has a very, very educated populace. There are a lot of scientists, there's a lot of innovators, you know, they're going to have a piece of, piece of this. They're way behind right now. But you know, we've seen in other parts of this, you know, the European group of countries find some really unique ways to, to be part of the, the conversation as well. And I'm sure it's going to happen again as in this Wu has a.

Leo Laporte [01:08:32]:
Little bit of an ax to grind. His most recent book is, is called the Age of Extraction. This and I think the subtitle tells you even more how tech platforms conquered the economy and threaten our future prosperity. But his position, and I'm not sure he's completely wrong, it has to do with that regulatory capture we were talking about is that AI companies are more concerned about AI startups in the US than China. They want the government to back them. They're using China as the threat. But really it has much less to do, he says, with US-China competition than with a desire of powerful companies like Amazon to entrench and Google to entrench their positions.

Iain Thomson [01:09:16]:
I do worry that if or when the bubble bursts, the threat of China is going to be used to encourage a government bailout of AI companies.

Leo Laporte [01:09:25]:
Absolutely.

Iain Thomson [01:09:26]:
And I think that would be incredibly damaging because you've got to let the free market sort this out. There's no use propping up companies who are spending way too much with way too little returns. Let the market sort it out.

Leo Laporte [01:09:38]:
But remember, and this is, I agree with you, but I also remember that OpenAI was started, I don't know if it's current plan, but was started because Sam Altman and Elon Musk were afraid of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others dominating the big entrenched incumbents dominating AI. They wanted an open AI that would be not beholden to these big companies. But the problem is that these big companies have a revenue stream, a vast revenue stream. In most cases, Meta Google from advertising. That means they don't have to succeed, they don't have to make money at AI. OpenAI and anthropic too, have only one choice. They have to make it as AI companies. And so in some ways, I think we also want to defend Anthropic and OpenAI because they are the best defense against Google dominating the whole place.

Leo Laporte [01:10:37]:
Right. Do we want that? Do we want Amazon and Google and Meta to own AI? That seems like a dystopian nightmare.

Owen Thomas [01:10:45]:
I mean, you know, here in San Francisco, there's obviously a lot of bullishness about the AI boom.

Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
And it's, you know, you're in AI city. Yeah, right.

Owen Thomas [01:10:56]:
It's, you know, it's great for, for the local economy. It is a question of how much of that boom is coming at the cost of extraction of venture capital, Say, how much venture capital is not going into startups doing medtech in Minnesota because it's kind of getting sucked into the AI sector. I think the extraction question is an interesting one. It's, you know, it's something we kind of need to grapple with as a society. I obviously, you know, covering San Francisco, the San Francisco economy, it's, it's good to see the, you know, the, the influx coming back, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:11:46]:
Yeah, coming back.

Owen Thomas [01:11:47]:
Well.

Leo Laporte [01:11:49]:
It was a ghost town for a while there.

Owen Thomas [01:11:52]:
Yeah, it was, I was, I was, I was rattling around downtown for a while in 2021 and 2022.

Leo Laporte [01:11:59]:
Yeah, it was scary. It was very sad to me because I love San Francisco.

Iain Thomson [01:12:02]:
Yeah, yeah, we Shut down our office. And when. When lockdown came, I went back three months later just to pick up some old kit. And you're right, it was, you know, the specials came to mind. It really was a ghost town. It's just. But it's come back, it's bounced back, and I think AI is largely to help with that.

Leo Laporte [01:12:20]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [01:12:20]:
Not to. Not to, you know, not to change the topic to that, but Union Square actually saw a better Black Friday this year than in 2019.

Leo Laporte [01:12:29]:
Now. Wow. We were talking about this last week, and somebody pointed out, is that in dollar volume because certainly inflation is going to. People are buying less and spending more. So, yeah, the dollars are up, but you're not getting quite as much for what you spend.

Owen Thomas [01:12:46]:
Yeah. You know, I think you do need. You know, I don't. I don't think inflation has been. Been that extreme over. Over six years. You know, it's not, you know, yes, it's been a little hot, but it's not been. You know, it hasn't even been double digits.

Owen Thomas [01:13:01]:
As best I can track the numbers.

Leo Laporte [01:13:03]:
But add tariffs to that and it does.

Leo Laporte [01:13:05]:
Look at this.

Leo Laporte [01:13:06]:
Look at this. I mean, I don't think the RAM thing is just AI. I think it's also tariffs.

Owen Thomas [01:13:10]:
But, you know, I al. You know, I also think that people. There's a bit of a. There's a bit of a backlash. There's a bit of nostalgia. People are maybe a bit burnt out on.

Leo Laporte [01:13:21]:
Yeah, we want to be happy, don't we?

Leo Laporte [01:13:23]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [01:13:24]:
You know, just go out, have a little fun.

Leo Laporte [01:13:27]:
I feel more festive. I think people are more festive this Christmas season. Is that just me? It seems that way, doesn't it? But my whole neighborhood's lit up in a way that it hasn't been in years past.

Iain Thomson [01:13:38]:
Maybe. I don't know. Owen, were you in town last night? Because it was SantaCon, and that's usually a sign of what's going on. And looking at the pictures, it was just, okay, this is my time to stay out of the city because. Explain people.

Leo Laporte [01:13:51]:
Not as good as it sounds.

Owen Thomas [01:13:52]:
SantaCon is basically a big, you know, unorganized, anarchic bar crawl by people, men typically wearing Santa hats and Speedos and hopefully socks, especially given the weather and, you know, other others wearing, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:14:15]:
Basically a bunch of drunken Santas.

Owen Thomas [01:14:18]:
It is a bunch of drunken Santas.

Iain Thomson [01:14:21]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [01:14:21]:
God bless them all.

Iain Thomson [01:14:23]:
My favorite SantaCon story came in 2014, where during the SantaCon celebrations, a guy in. In the costume robbed a bank and then basically grabbed the money, ran out into the crowd, merged into it. And he's never been.

Leo Laporte [01:14:39]:
Good luck finding him.

Iain Thomson [01:14:40]:
It's just. I mean, I know this is. This is a criminal that should be in a movie.

Leo Laporte [01:14:44]:
That's great. I love it.

Iain Thomson [01:14:48]:
But, yeah, it's. If you're a bartender, it's the worst night of the year, but a lot of people have fun with it.

Leo Laporte [01:14:54]:
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I. I seem to think my son might have participated in one or two of those.

Iain Thomson [01:15:02]:
If he did, he probably didn't tell.

Leo Laporte [01:15:04]:
Dad the whole story, but apparently his generation. He's 32. Has come up with all sorts of novel ways to get drunk. And he also. Like, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving or the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, there's a thing where they all come back home and then they all go out to the bars that night and get wasted the day before Thanksgiving. There's a name for that, too. They're very creative, that generation, looking for ways to celebrate. Anyway, santacon.

Leo Laporte [01:15:36]:
Did you. Oh, and you look like you might have gotten a Santa outfit.

Owen Thomas [01:15:40]:
I. I will confess, I have done SantaCon in the past, not yesterday. So this is the coldest December in a century.

Iain Thomson [01:15:48]:
I. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:15:49]:
Okay. Thank you. Because I keep saying how cold it is, and my wife says it's just because you lost weight. It's not that cold. It's cold.

Iain Thomson [01:15:57]:
Okay.

Owen Thomas [01:15:58]:
That's real, too. Because, like, like, you lose, you lose.

Leo Laporte [01:16:01]:
I don't have the blanket I used to have.

Owen Thomas [01:16:02]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The adipose blanket.

Leo Laporte [01:16:05]:
Maybe I should dress up like Santa for the rest of the month.

Iain Thomson [01:16:08]:
Oh, you California wusses. By British standards, this is positively balmy. Thus the shirt, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:16:14]:
So this is the coldest winter we've had in a century.

Owen Thomas [01:16:17]:
For San Francisco. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:19]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:16:19]:
It broke the record.

Leo Laporte [01:16:21]:
Yeah. Okay. It feels that way. I just thought it was me.

Leo Laporte [01:16:24]:
Even colder than August.

Leo Laporte [01:16:27]:
Worse than August.

Owen Thomas [01:16:28]:
Coldest December now.

Leo Laporte [01:16:29]:
Hard to believe. Hard to believe. Google.

Iain Thomson [01:16:33]:
Do you love summer over here when you see tourists wandering around with hastily bought hoodies who came over in June and it was just like, this is California. It was supposed to be hot.

Leo Laporte [01:16:41]:
I love driving across Golden Gate Bridge to watch the tourists in July in their shorts, freezing the oh, crap shirts.

Leo Laporte [01:16:51]:
They sell a lot of those. Yeah, the oh, crap hoodies, I should say.

Leo Laporte [01:16:56]:
That's what they're called. Oh, crap.

Leo Laporte [01:16:58]:
Yeah. Like, you get here and you're like, I just pack. Yeah. I didn't pack for this. You know, especially in August. I didn't know about that. A Mark Twain thing of, like, the coldest winter I ever spent Was a summer in San Francisco, you know, that's cold.

Leo Laporte [01:17:10]:
So Google, by the way, it's funny because they. You nailed it. They went from being an also ran in all of this. That kind of almost the laughing stuff to dominant. Gemini's fantastic. People are raving about their new anti-gravity code editor. And all of a sudden after saying, yeah, we're not really interested in glasses. Earlier this year they got all these partners making XR glasses.

Leo Laporte [01:17:44]:
First glasses with Gemini will arrive in 2026. Xreal is one of their partners. So of course is Samsung with a Galaxy XR headset. Warby Parker, the glasses manufacturer. Gentle Monster. I don't know who that is. Is that Lady Gaga's fan club? I don't know who that is.

Leo Laporte [01:18:04]:
It's a luxury brand of glasses frames.

Leo Laporte [01:18:09]:
That's why I don't know who it is. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure Lexotica is in on it as well. They make the Ray Ban Meta glass.

Leo Laporte [01:18:16]:
Well, they're not. They haven't exclusive with Meta.

Leo Laporte [01:18:18]:
They can't.

Leo Laporte [01:18:19]:
They've also invested in Meta and vice versa. Or, you know, no. And Meta invested in them.

Leo Laporte [01:18:24]:
Sorry, I'm a fan.

Iain Thomson [01:18:25]:
And they also control so much of the market, but yes. Which for a couple of pieces of plastic is a fantastically lucrative operation.

Leo Laporte [01:18:32]:
Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte [01:18:33]:
Glasses. Sell something in yours. They're so expensive. I, I got.

Leo Laporte [01:18:37]:
Oh no, I bought.

Iain Thomson [01:18:38]:
I bought these from the pharmacy for 30 bucks. I'm fine.

Leo Laporte [01:18:43]:
Well, I. These cost a little bit more. These are the Meta Ray-Bans, not the new mops. I'm waiting because I think we're not quite there yet. But I'm very interested what Google is planning given how good their AI is these days. They're also, by the way, going to appear next year on Apple, iPhones, the new series Gemini. That's the rumor.

Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
I'm probably white boxed.

Leo Laporte [01:19:05]:
I won't say Gemini.

Leo Laporte [01:19:06]:
That's right.

Iain Thomson [01:19:07]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:08]:
But you'll notice I was going to say I'm smarter than Siri much.

Iain Thomson [01:19:12]:
Well, yeah, I'm seriously considering going to CES this year for the first time in over a decade. Because on the X XR front it's looking really interesting. I was a judge at the MIT XR competitions last year. Oh, sorry. Earlier this year.

Leo Laporte [01:19:26]:
That stands for some of the. What does that stand for? It's not ar, it's not VR. It's reality.

Iain Thomson [01:19:32]:
Yeah. Extended reality. It's basically. Let's take all these marketing terms, bring them into one. But I spent three days with MIT students and others who were coming up with new ideas for this stuff. These people are brilliant and there's some really good hardware coming down the line.

Leo Laporte [01:19:48]:
I'm excited. This is what I've wanted for a long time. I wore for a while all of those AI pins. The most recent one. Sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:19:57]:
I'm so sorry.

Owen Thomas [01:19:58]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [01:19:59]:
B computer, the first one, I was really excited. This is from CES last year. There was a bunch of these got announced last January and I bought the B computer. Then they got sold to Amazon. So then I got the Limitless pin.

Iain Thomson [01:20:14]:
I think I gave you some hard, hard time about that as well.

Leo Laporte [01:20:17]:
Yes, My wife especially. I stopped wearing them because she said you're recording all the time. Yeah, but that's. But just for me, it's just for me it's so I have. I know I have a record. I don't know why. So Limitless got bought. Just got bought by Meta.

Leo Laporte [01:20:34]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:20:34]:
So that's out of the window. The problem is maybe do we trust Google? Is that going to be. We've talked about Apple being the trustworthy company but they don't seem to be moving very quickly in any.

Owen Thomas [01:20:47]:
They are. They've been quietly shaking up their AI leadership. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has been really.

Leo Laporte [01:20:54]:
Yeah. They got rid of John G. Yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:20:56]:
They've had a massive change of management on that front. I mean an awful lot of people have come and gone in the last month. It's. It's looking like they had.

Leo Laporte [01:21:05]:
Mark Zuckerberg is writing big checks to everybody. Insane. You know over there. You want to work over here? Alan Dye, their head of ui, just left for Meta.

Leo Laporte [01:21:16]:
The.

Owen Thomas [01:21:17]:
The most incredible thing. I don't think I realized this when the deal was done. Did you know that Meta, in order to get Alex, Alex Wong, the CEO of Scale AI.

Leo Laporte [01:21:29]:
26 year old CEO of Scale AI.

Owen Thomas [01:21:31]:
They bought who's now running all of AI at at Meta. They bought 49% of the company and they took non voting shares. So they have absolutely no say over their investment.

Leo Laporte [01:21:45]:
That's ironic considering how good Mark Zuckerberg has been in maintaining his shares.

Iain Thomson [01:21:51]:
Being the emperor with his masculine energy.

Owen Thomas [01:21:53]:
I guess it's a game recognized game.

Leo Laporte [01:21:56]:
Or maybe that's it. He says, Mikah, I'm going to make you the next Mark. But he's a kid. I don't know if they're going to get what I feel like sometimes. I've seen this before with companies that got big venture investments. Having a lot of money is not necessarily a good thing. It means you can write big Checks, but doesn't mean you're strategically spending the money wisely. I'm not convinced.

Leo Laporte [01:22:19]:
It's sort of like a writer who gets really big and then they don't. Nobody edits them anymore. Yeah, everybody.

Iain Thomson [01:22:26]:
Neal Stephenson, case in point. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:22:29]:
Google just told me there was a big earthquake 11 miles away. I haven't felt it. There, right there.

Leo Laporte [01:22:35]:
It's coming.

Leo Laporte [01:22:36]:
If shaking intensifies, drop cover. Hold on, hold on.

Iain Thomson [01:22:42]:
Well, considering my house is half a mile away from the Haywood fault, that's really not encouraging news to hear. So if I disappear from the screen.

Leo Laporte [01:22:49]:
This is where I live, is Geyserville. Geyserville is a place for geysers. Maybe if I shake the camera. Google Translate is. This is actually a smart thing. Google, which announced this originally for its own earbuds, is now saying it's going to work on all Android earbuds. Yeah, I think it's really interesting.

Iain Thomson [01:22:53]:
Santa Rosa's been getting a lot the last few weeks. And of course, Geezerville, sorry, Geyserville, or whatever you call it over here is.

Leo Laporte [01:23:01]:
This is where I live, is Geyserville. Geyserville is a place for geysers. Maybe if I shake the camera. Google Translate is. This is actually a smart thing. Google, which announced this originally for its own earbuds, is now saying it's going to work on all Android earbuds. Yeah, I think it's really interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:23:23]:
I do think that, that, you know, trust is big on these AI tools. Ultimately. You know, it's been shown time and time again that, that people don't have a lot of trust for, for Meta. You know, Meta has sort of gone back on its word, broken its own rules, you know, sort of thumbed its nose at the government and said, look, well, we'll sort of break the rules with people's data. You know, yeah, we'll take the fines. And so, you know, I know a bunch of people, people who've tested in the tech industry and, and that, that follow tech and that have Meta Ray-Bans because they, they want to try this out, they want to see how it's going. But it's amazing how many of them will say, as soon as Google comes out with a product, that's. That's the one I want.

Leo Laporte [01:24:05]:
Right. And it just comes down to they trust Google a little bit more than they trust.

Leo Laporte [01:24:10]:
Is that misguided?

Leo Laporte [01:24:12]:
So, right. They are in essentially the two companies that people trust.

Leo Laporte [01:24:16]:
Google's a big ad company because they.

Leo Laporte [01:24:19]:
They make all their money off of. Of people. Right.

Iain Thomson [01:24:23]:
I'm just remembering the glass holes. So.

Leo Laporte [01:24:25]:
Yes, yeah, yeah, but, but I agree with you. Just, there's something in my psyche that says, well, Apple or Google. Yes, but that was ironic that those two pins were sold to the two Companies I least trust Amazon and Meta.

Leo Laporte [01:24:38]:
Amazon and Meta, Yeah. So you know the, the pin thing I, I am convinced too that OpenAI what they were working what Jony, I've a pin. And then they saw how badly the pins were, the humane pin and all that and then they started to change it.

Owen Thomas [01:24:54]:
Like we're, we're.

Leo Laporte [01:24:55]:
Well we're not saying what we. But it, but it's not a, it's not glasses.

Leo Laporte [01:24:58]:
It's not a really.

Leo Laporte [01:25:00]:
And so, and you know they say things like you're going to be amazed at how simple it is. Well it, it all sounds like a pin. Right. Like ultimately. But I think they want a little bit of distance from the sort of the failures that we had in 2025. I've with those products and then I think they're going to come to market now they're saying they're going to have multiple products. Right. So we'll, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [01:25:23]:
I think they're probably going to learn. Jony, I've obviously knows it but he is a designer, not a, you know, manufacturer. They're going to learn how hard it is to do hardware well, especially profitably.

Leo Laporte [01:25:33]:
No kidding.

Leo Laporte [01:25:34]:
So you know I don't have a whole lot of confidence in that. But it is interesting that they are, they're doing something and we'll see. I think that Apple will do glasses. You know Zuckerberg, not Zuckerberg Mark, the other Mark, you know from Bloomberg said that they are working on it. They, they shifted the people who are working on Vision Pro, the next version of Vision Pro over to glasses because you know they see that this form factor taking off and I think they saw it as a longer term thing and they've made it potentially a shorter term thing. People do trust I think the closed nature of Apple, once they realized that they weren't very good at data they decided to make that a strength and not a liability. They're like we're the company that's going to be about privacy. So I think because of that, you know they have a chance to, to really succeed in the glasses space.

Leo Laporte [01:26:28]:
And it is interesting, I mean Meta has done some interesting things with the product and shown us that there's, there's more to it than I think we, we thought there would be especially by this point.

Leo Laporte [01:26:37]:
And we're going to see a lot of complaints about privacy. Right. I was, you know, I heard from a lot of people who said don't wear that pin around me and I You know, Alex Lindsay said, if you sit down at the dinner with me at a restaurant wearing these Meta Ray-Bans, I'm gonna say take them off, put them away. 404 Media just had a report that a border patrol agent was caught recording a raid. Look at that. He's wearing Meta Ray-Bans. The lights on. He's recording.

Leo Laporte [01:27:08]:
Wow. I mean, this is inevitable, right?

Leo Laporte [01:27:12]:
One of the cruise lines just banned smart glasses because really privacy concerns.

Leo Laporte [01:27:17]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:27:17]:
Just this week.

Leo Laporte [01:27:18]:
Wow. Get a lot of pictures of drunken.

Iain Thomson [01:27:21]:
People falling in the pool, all throwing up from nonovirus. But yes. You know, I mean.

Leo Laporte [01:27:27]:
Or norovirus. Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte [01:27:30]:
But yeah, I mean that they were only. The cruise line said such technology. Technology is only permitted in cabins ashore and other non public spaces.

Leo Laporte [01:27:39]:
You know, I think that's correct. But I wonder how long they're going to be able to hold the line on that. I mean, you're carrying around. You know, every time I go to a museum that says no cameras, I go, okay, I'll just bring my iPhone with me. No cameras. Everybody now has a recording device in their pocket at all times. I don't, I just, I think eventually these bands just aren't sustainable.

Owen Thomas [01:28:04]:
Yeah, Snapchat is. Snapchat is coming out with a new version of its spectacles next year. So they're. They're still at it.

Leo Laporte [01:28:12]:
I've had a couple of versions of those.

Owen Thomas [01:28:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:28:14]:
I like the metas. I mean, the sound is very good on them.

Owen Thomas [01:28:18]:
I just, I never understood what I Google, you know, abandon it. Well, the form factor was dorky, right? It was, it was like inherently unbalanced. So you're always going to look like, you know, look a little wonky. Yeah, yeah. Like a off kilter robot.

Leo Laporte [01:28:35]:
Worse.

Owen Thomas [01:28:37]:
But you know, it's like when, when you get the form factor down to like this basically looks like a chunky pair of, you know, of sunglasses. Like it, you know, it makes sense. It's a lot more tolerable to a mainstream consumer.

Leo Laporte [01:28:49]:
Yeah. And these Google glasses are for sure chunky. Victoria's Song, who was very excited about them from TWiT and was talking about them on the show a couple of weeks ago. She has pictures of her in them and they're very chonky.

Leo Laporte [01:29:04]:
The displays. The Meta Ray band displays. The new ones with the displays.

Leo Laporte [01:29:08]:
Yeah. And the Google ones too.

Leo Laporte [01:29:09]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The regular ones. The regular Oakley and Meta Ray Bans. Oakland Oakley, Metas and Meta Ray Bans. Those look, to Owen's point, you know, pretty normal. The Meta Ray Bans display. And I also demoed these, you know, at their event in the fall when I was at ZDNet. And yeah, they, they look much more like you're wearing, you know, a piece of technology.

Leo Laporte [01:29:37]:
They're a lot bigger and thicker. They're also a lot heavier too. They're like 79 grams versus 49 grams.

Leo Laporte [01:29:46]:
Yeah, but we'll get used to it.

Leo Laporte [01:29:48]:
Or like 35 grams.

Leo Laporte [01:29:49]:
It's a sensible form factor. I think earbuds are also a sensible form factor, but there's something about wearing them on your face where you could have a heads up display, you could have cameras and you can still hear. I think that's a sensible way to do it. So you're going to ces, Ian. Jason, are you going to.

Iain Thomson [01:30:06]:
I haven't decided yet. Let's see if I can make it pay, to be honest. But when I joined the Register 15 years ago, I did so on the understanding that I would never have to go to another bloody CES again. Because I loathe that. A, I loathe Las Vegas, and B, it's a sales conference. It's not really a technology conference. But on the other hand, it's fun.

Leo Laporte [01:30:25]:
To see this and there are some.

Iain Thomson [01:30:26]:
AI things to see.

Leo Laporte [01:30:27]:
It'll be the AI conference this year for sure. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:30:30]:
I'm going mostly to take meetings. I'm going for half the amount of time that I would have if I was, you know, still doing it. Working at a tech publication. Yeah, yeah, a tech publication. I would have been there for eight days. I'm only going to be there for four days.

Leo Laporte [01:30:42]:
Eight days. Oh, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte [01:30:44]:
Eight days in Vegas is like a.

Leo Laporte [01:30:45]:
Month, you know, It's a year in any other place. Oh, my God.

Leo Laporte [01:30:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:49]:
Three days.

Iain Thomson [01:30:50]:
Eight days in Vegas keep me away from sharp implements, you know. Yeah, it's a horrible town, it's a horrible conference. But on the other hand, it's where, you know, the world goes. The tech world goes dancing. Also, Vegas in January.

Leo Laporte [01:31:03]:
Yikes. Yeah. It's cold, it's damp.

Iain Thomson [01:31:06]:
Oh, come on. It could be worse. I've. I've gone to the last. Got 10 or 12 defcons and black hats in Vegas in August. And the last five years it hasn't gone below Triple D, triple digit temperatures at any point on the visit.

Leo Laporte [01:31:20]:
Yikes. All right, let's take a little break. We'll come back. I wanna, I feel like I want to go to CES this year now. You kind of gave me the itch because it is. Will Padre be There Padre is going to cover it for us. In fact, he's going to be on the show the week after to report and he's going to be doing video content for us. So, yeah, we'll have our own coverage of it.

Leo Laporte [01:31:44]:
But there is something about going and seeing this stuff and, you know, weird robots and, you know, there's just going to be stuff. You look at it, you go, this is not a good idea. This is a bad idea.

Owen Thomas [01:31:56]:
The CNET still do the best stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:31:58]:
Is the bad ideas. The bad ideas are the best things.

Leo Laporte [01:32:01]:
I know. Like the toilet paper robot they had a few years ago, right, that would. Oh, yeah, from Kohler or something.

Iain Thomson [01:32:07]:
Do you remember the 3D TV demo that Sony gave? No, where that was. You remember when CES, I think this is about what, 10 years ago. CES is all about 3D TV. This is going to revolutionize the TV.

Leo Laporte [01:32:19]:
And I was a skeptic even that I hated.

Iain Thomson [01:32:21]:
Yeah, likewise. And they got Taylor Swift on stage with the head of Sony, who's a very creepy Englishman who would basically, and she was quite young then, putting his arm around and go, I would take you shopping, my dear. And it was. Every single journalist was just like, oh, no, just don't touch her. You know. But yeah, 3D TV died a death. I don't think AI glasses are going to. I think but there's going to be some very interesting models which will fall by the wayside which might, you know, I have blend through into the rest of the market.

Leo Laporte [01:32:51]:
It. I have my old LG TV over here and somewhere there's. There's two dusty pairs of 3D glasses behind it. Never used, but they came with the TV. Now it's coming with LG TVs. They just announced they're going to put Microsoft Copilot on all the LG TVs.

Iain Thomson [01:33:07]:
Oh, joy.

Leo Laporte [01:33:09]:
And again, another one of those things you cannot turn off. There's no way to not get it. Take a break. We'll come back with more in just a little bit. Tommy on trip in our Discord chat says IFA was taken over in Berlin by Chinese companies this year. There'll of course be a lot of Chinese companies in the CES, I would imagine. Should be. Should be very interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:33:35]:
It's probably too late to go so I don't have to think about it.

Leo Laporte [01:33:38]:
It's not too late, Leo. It's not too late.

Leo Laporte [01:33:40]:
You're bad, Jason. Well, you got a room for.

Leo Laporte [01:33:44]:
I just want to. I just want to, you know, meet you for coffee.

Leo Laporte [01:33:47]:
Coffee and say, hey, oh, would that be fun? That's really the reason to go to those shows.

Leo Laporte [01:33:50]:
It is. That's why I'm for the in person meeting. Everybody is there, like the PR people, the people you work with and collaborate with. That's, that's.

Leo Laporte [01:33:58]:
Well, nowadays now we all work remotely, just seeing people. And we had, we had a dinner for our company, which is completely remote and I hadn't seen most of these people in about a year and it was like, this is weird.

Iain Thomson [01:34:18]:
No, no, I mean, I can see.

Leo Laporte [01:34:19]:
The back of your head.

Iain Thomson [01:34:21]:
I worked with a colleague at the Reg, who I worked with him for four years. We never met. You know, I mean, he was in Kentucky, I was in California. I love the guy dearly, but we never actually met. Met and shaken hands. It's a really odd thing to do, but hey, life post lockdown.

Leo Laporte [01:34:37]:
Yep. Our show today, brought to you by Vention. Yes, it's another AI. Another. This is a great company. Vention's been around for a long time. They are engineers first and foremost. In fact, 20 plus years of global engineering expertise.

Leo Laporte [01:34:54]:
And one thing they've seen in this AI era is that while companies adopt AI to make things easier for their developers, for most teams, it's making the job harder. That's where Vention's expertise comes in. They build AI enabled engineering teams to make software development faster, but also cleaner and calmer. Clients typically see at least a 15% boost in efficiency. And we're not talking AI hype here. This is real engineering discipline. That's what Vention does. The other thing that I want to tell you about that Vention does, besides coming in as a partner in your development, they also have, and I would highly recommend this, AI workshops.

Leo Laporte [01:35:37]:
This is a great way if you are kind of on the precipice of doing something with AI, of learning about it. And they're very interactive, these workshops. So you work with the Vention team to kind of plan it, to think about it, to help your team find practical and safe ways to use AI across the entire enterprise. It's a really great way to start with Vention to test their expertise. Whether you're a CTO or a tech lead or a product owner, this saves you so much time, you don't have to spend weeks kind of figuring out what tools do we use. There's an infinite number now, right? What architectures. Even choosing which models to use is crazy. But Vention knows all about it.

Leo Laporte [01:36:22]:
They can help assess your AI readiness and they do this interactively with you. Clarify Your goals and then outline the steps to get you there without the headaches. And if you need help on the engineering front front, their teams are ready to jump in. As your development partner or your consulting partner, whatever level that works for you. This is a great next step to take after you do a proof of concept. Let's say you've built a, a prototype on lovable. All right. And it's running.

Leo Laporte [01:36:48]:
You got it running, it runs well in tests. But now what do you do? What's next? You can't ship it yet. Do you open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving? We got a team. We got to build a team. We got to build a team. Or maybe instead of running around like that, you bring in a partner. Someone who's done this before many times across many industries. Someone who can take your idea and expand it into a full scale product but without disruption, without disrupting your systems, without getting in the way of your team.

Leo Laporte [01:37:19]:
That's what Vention does. 20 plus years of global engineering expertise. It makes a big difference. They're not newbies here. Here this is, these are the pros, Vention. Real people with real expertise and real results. Learn more@ventionteams.com see how your team can build smarter, faster and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today.

Leo Laporte [01:37:42]:
Eventionteams.com TWiT that's V E N-T-I O-N teams.com TWiT ventionteams.com Twitter TWiT we thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. I want to also thank. We are in the holiday season right now and I, I really want to take some time to thank our Club members who have made this year possible on TWiT. I don't, I don't, you know, share the details of our financial situation except to say that 25% of our operating costs now are paid by the Club. That's, that's a huge deal. Without your contribution, without your support, we would have to cut back, we'd have to cut shows, cut personnel and we've already cut back a lot. Right. We closed down the studio, we had to cancel some shows, get rid of some people a few years ago and, and I don't want to do that again.

Iain Thomson [01:38:38]:
And if you appreciate some delightfully salty co's on there as well. I do like the chat, you know. They are very loved theory, serious snark going on sometimes.

Leo Laporte [01:38:48]:
I call it the Club TWiT Disco because it's just a party in there. So that's one of the benefits. Here's the deal. $10 a month, $120 a year. Although there is a coupon for 10% off the annual plan and it's only going to be there for 11 more days through Christmas. So this would be a good time to get it for. As a gift for a geek in your life or for yourself. Go to TWiT.tv Club TWiT.

Leo Laporte [01:39:09]:
You get 10 bucks a month or less than that. I guess that's nine bucks a month. If you use the coupon, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You do get access to the Discord, which is. I mean, we've always had chat, but this is. It's very fun chat. It's very. It's very graphical.

Iain Thomson [01:39:29]:
Trunk nerds, free cover.

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
Yes. Come on in. Come on into the disco. The Club TWiT disco. We also, it's not just during the shows we talk. We have, of course, forums for all the shows, but we also talk about AI. We have a great AI user group.

Iain Thomson [01:39:44]:
Group.

Leo Laporte [01:39:45]:
We have 3D printing group. There's, there's. Let's play where we play Minecraft. We have a couple of Minecraft servers. We also will talk about. Well, for instance, we're all. And just finished the advent of code. We have a lot of coders in there working on that coding challenge.

Leo Laporte [01:40:02]:
We have the book club. We have so many events too. That's another thing that is a lot of fun in Club TWiT. We're going to do a Home Theater Geeks recording tomorrow with the chat room. You get to ask your questions. Mike's Crafting Corner. It's coming up on Wednesday, where Mikah chills. You can chill with him.

Leo Laporte [01:40:17]:
He's doing Lego, but you can do needlework, knitting, cooking, programming, whatever it is you do. We're gonna have a special interview. I'm a big chess buff and as you might know, AI and computer chess has changed the game. We're gonna have British grandmaster David Howell and the CEO.

Leo Laporte [01:40:40]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:40:40]:
Yeah, really great guy. CEO of Take Mats Andre Christensen on Thursday at 9am that's an early morning pre record for Intelligent Machines, but I wanted to let you know about that. And then I got an email from a guy named Mark Malkoff, who's a New York City comic and just wrote a book called Love Johnny Carson, which is funny because I do love Johnny Carson. And I had just bought the book and he said, I know you cover tech. He's a listener. I know you cover tech, but do you think you'd ever want. I said yes. I love Johnny Carson, so I'm going to interview him just for fun.

Leo Laporte [01:41:15]:
January 2nd, the day after New Year's Day. That'll be a lot of fun. Our AR users group is back that day as well. Just so many great things. The book club. We got to schedule a book club. Reading a really interesting book called Underneath Hollow London. It's really interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:41:32]:
All of this is fun and wonderful, but the most important thing that Club TWiT does is it supports us. So it's kind of a way of voting for our programming, our style of programming for independent tech journalism. TWiT TV Club TWiT. I just want to encourage you to consider joining the club. I'm stalling a little bit because I got a message from Owen saying he's got to walk the dog. Fitz. Fitz is getting antsy, so Owen, I think is out walking the dog right now.

Iain Thomson [01:42:06]:
Well, it's either that or you get a mess on the floor. So.

Leo Laporte [01:42:08]:
Yeah, now you're a cat though, right? You're not.

Iain Thomson [01:42:13]:
Well, Stumpy has already made an appearance on this. On today's show. You may have seen the tail going backwards and forwards.

Leo Laporte [01:42:19]:
Oh, I missed it.

Iain Thomson [01:42:19]:
Oh, well, it could be worse. The last time I was on, she took an enormous dump in the litter tray just before the end of the show. Just like hold it together. Together. Hold it together.

Leo Laporte [01:42:29]:
You did. I had no idea.

Iain Thomson [01:42:30]:
Through the mouth, not through your nose, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:42:32]:
So I'm very curious. First of all, condolences to our dear friends in Australia. Tragedy in Bondi Beach. Horrific. Yeah. And it's, it's really particularly sad because Australia had a mass gun incident in Tasmania many years ago and took very seriously and they got people to. The bot, bought back people's guns and they really took gun control seriously and they haven't had problems since. But I guess nobody's immune these days.

Leo Laporte [01:43:01]:
And so.

Iain Thomson [01:43:02]:
Well, my mum just flew out from Sydney yesterday evening. She entered San Francisco. My wife's just picking her up at the airport now. And so we have a lot of friends in Australia and yeah, I mean on one level, this is one of the first they've had since the portal shooting and the gun restrictions came in.

Leo Laporte [01:43:20]:
Right.

Iain Thomson [01:43:21]:
And the murder wandering bastards that did it. Sorry, I'm sure I should say that, but could only get hold of very low level guns.

Leo Laporte [01:43:29]:
They still.

Iain Thomson [01:43:30]:
There was a shotgun, I think and a single rifle, but still. 12, 14, 16 dead. We just don't know yet.

Leo Laporte [01:43:35]:
Yeah, I think it's 15 now. Yeah. Horrific. Yeah, I mean It's a Hanukkah celebration on the beach. It's just, you can't imagine anything worse.

Leo Laporte [01:43:44]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:45]:
So anyway, our condolences to our dear friends in Australia, but also condolences to people under 16 in Australia. Australia. Who have no idea that that's happened because they have no social media.

Iain Thomson [01:43:55]:
Oh, please. They do, they just don't. This ban is completely unenforceable. I mean, New Zealand is now talking about it, Britain is now talking about it.

Leo Laporte [01:44:05]:
Denmark.

Iain Thomson [01:44:06]:
Are you going to enforce this? So, you know, are you going to go to everyone's phones and automatically remove it? You're going to force them to sign on?

Leo Laporte [01:44:13]:
This is the interesting thing. It's neither the parents nor kids are liable. It's not up to them, it's up to the platforms. And of course the platforms can do something.

Iain Thomson [01:44:23]:
They can't do anything about it.

Leo Laporte [01:44:24]:
Well, they're trying on YouTube, that's. That is cruel and unusual punishment to take YouTube away from a teenager. X. Fine. Facebook, fine. Instagram, almost as bad as YouTube. What's already started and you're starting to see this is companies have started to put age verification gates on their social networks.

Iain Thomson [01:44:51]:
Verification. Or is it a button saying I promise I'm over 16, swear to God.

Leo Laporte [01:44:56]:
Pinky finger pose for a picture or, you know, we're going to take a video of you and guess how old you are.

Iain Thomson [01:45:02]:
Oh, for goodness sake. Yeah. I mean, you could look at me.

Leo Laporte [01:45:05]:
And guess that I'm over 16, but I think if you're 17, it might not be that obvious. Right.

Iain Thomson [01:45:10]:
Well, they tried this in the UK when they were doing this for other services, I think for the porn verification services. And in true British style, people just took the piss, you know, I mean, you pictured put up pictures of their cat and that sort of thing and some of them passed. You know, these systems are not perfect by any manner of means.

Leo Laporte [01:45:26]:
Oh, no, it's terrible. And of course one solution will be. And I imagine I haven't seen sales figures, but sales figures for VPNs in Australia must be through the roof.

Iain Thomson [01:45:36]:
No, they are in the UK as well. Some government is trying to ban there, but they use.

Leo Laporte [01:45:41]:
Well, and that's the scary thing is, that's the obvious next step because this is only enforceable if people can't pretend to be in another country.

Iain Thomson [01:45:51]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:45:52]:
So you got to ban VPNs, but you can't ban VPNs because, well, people use them to go to work.

Iain Thomson [01:46:00]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:46:01]:
And for legitimate reasons. To protect, you know, themselves.

Leo Laporte [01:46:05]:
For security. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:46:07]:
You know vulnerabilities.

Leo Laporte [01:46:09]:
So technology companies aren't particularly happy about this, but most of them have said they'll comply. Snap said disconnecting teens from their friends and family doesn't make them safer. It may push them to be less safe, less private messaging apps. I think that's a legitimate point. Well, yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:46:30]:
I mean, honestly, look at Telegram, for goodness sake. That's basically an offshoot of the Russian state. If you're encouraging kids to get on that, then you're doing more harm than good.

Leo Laporte [01:46:39]:
Right. Well, they can. They can. And then, of course, there's this issue of, you know, even adults will have to use age verification because. Right. Everybody will have to. You can't just say, well, are you under 16? Okay, you better verify that. Yeah, everybody will.

Leo Laporte [01:46:57]:
And that means there will be a massive risk of privacy. See, you know, you saw that Discord lost 70,000 user accounts that had been. Because they had been age gated. That's a drop in the bucket.

Iain Thomson [01:47:16]:
Yeah. I mean, I feel that we're losing anonymity online and that's a really big thing to lose. Yeah, you know, it's like, well, you should just be, you know, be proud of what you say and the rest of it. But the whole basis of anonymity online was one of the things that made the Internet so good. So government crackdowns like this make me intensely nervous.

Leo Laporte [01:47:37]:
I completely understand the drive to do this. I mean, but there isn't a lot of evidence that social media is bad for kids. Not real hard evidence, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. And all of us have seen kids who are addicted to their iPads, little kids, 8 year olds, 9 year olds who can't spend a minute at. Oh, Fitz is back and better. Is he okay?

Owen Thomas [01:48:02]:
I think the question, Leo, is the Internet bad for dogs?

Leo Laporte [01:48:06]:
No, it's good for dogs. Look at that little puppy. Hello. You're a good boy, aren't you a good boy? Yeah, he just needed his walk.

Owen Thomas [01:48:15]:
He just needed walksies.

Leo Laporte [01:48:16]:
Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. I stalled for you. So we're talking about the social media ban which went in effect three days ago in Australia. I have it. Heard howls of pain yet?

Iain Thomson [01:48:28]:
No. I mean, I've got relatives over there and no one's particularly complaining about it because no one's complying with it that much. I mean, there is a great argument to be said for banned smartphones in schools, for example.

Leo Laporte [01:48:41]:
There is some evidence that does improve test scores. That improves a lot.

Iain Thomson [01:48:45]:
Yeah. So you hand it In. In the morning, you get it back at the end of the day. I'm all for that, but, you know, I just don't see this as enforcement as much as the rules come in, then somebody will find a tech way to get around them. I mean, look at Archive is, you know, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:49:02]:
Right, Yeah.

Owen Thomas [01:49:03]:
I mean, our, you know, although he's.

Leo Laporte [01:49:05]:
Being sued, you know, I mean.

Iain Thomson [01:49:06]:
Yeah, no, he is. Every service is doing it as well.

Owen Thomas [01:49:10]:
Is every teenager going to, you know, going to get a vpn?

Leo Laporte [01:49:16]:
Well, no, that's the thing. And probably the ones that are most vulnerable will not be able to get. Get around this. And again, every adult's going to have to pose for the camera and give, you know, biometric information to these platforms. Oh, well, we'll watch it with interest because it is the first time and it's an experiment and I think it'll be very interesting to see what happens. And I hope other countries that are considering this watch and learn and don't do it.

Iain Thomson [01:49:44]:
Well, Australasia has traditionally been the place where, you know, they try new things. New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, for example. Example. So, you know, I mean, it's. It's an interesting testing ground.

Leo Laporte [01:49:54]:
Yeah, look how that worked out. Oh, no, that worked out pretty well. Never mind.

Iain Thomson [01:49:58]:
That worked out really well.

Owen Thomas [01:50:00]:
Thank you. Okay, calm down. Peter Thiel.

Iain Thomson [01:50:05]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:50:06]:
He doesn't. He actually said it's. Didn't he say that. That women shouldn't have the right to vote? Yeah, he.

Owen Thomas [01:50:11]:
Well, he. What he said was. He said that basically capitalist democracy had no. Had no chance of success after women got the vote.

Leo Laporte [01:50:22]:
Oh, my God. Is he a weirdo? That is just.

Iain Thomson [01:50:25]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:50:25]:
Bizarre.

Iain Thomson [01:50:27]:
Well, you heard about his Antichrist lectures recently? Yeah. It's like the Antichrist is here on.

Leo Laporte [01:50:31]:
Earth and you're in San Francisco. A series of lectures.

Iain Thomson [01:50:34]:
Yeah, the Commonwealth Club. And I didn't actually manage to get a ticket, but it was just like.

Leo Laporte [01:50:38]:
Yeah, it sold out right away.

Iain Thomson [01:50:39]:
I'm not sure I want somebody with these kind of opinions having that much of a hold over the levers of power.

Leo Laporte [01:50:45]:
I think he said they're quite. Greta Thunberg was the Antichrist, which is.

Iain Thomson [01:50:49]:
I didn't hear that one. It was just. Honestly, if you're talking about the Antichrist in public, you're kind of like, unless you're a religious preacher, maybe keep your opinions to yourself. At least show some proof.

Leo Laporte [01:51:01]:
Wooden box, go down to Hyde Park. Little megaphone.

Iain Thomson [01:51:05]:
Yes. Speaker's corner. One of the Great British traditions is this.

Leo Laporte [01:51:09]:
Do they still do that at Speakers Corner?

Iain Thomson [01:51:10]:
Oh, no, no, they still do it. You know, it's for all the British police's penchant for cutting down on social. On social media and arresting people for that. Speaker's Corner is still a thing and good on it because, you know, yeah, you need to have somewhere to go out and rant and for other people to watch you and take the piss occasionally.

Leo Laporte [01:51:28]:
Now, did you get your citizenship? Did you. Were you able to do that whole process?

Iain Thomson [01:51:33]:
It's in processing, so I for one would like to praise our maximum leader, Donald Trump. And I will say nothing at all.

Leo Laporte [01:51:40]:
S hole countries either. You're a nice white boy, so it's okay.

Iain Thomson [01:51:44]:
Well, yeah, for the moment. But as you just put it on the screen, that the times they are. Are changing.

Leo Laporte [01:51:49]:
Well, and this is what I was curious about US is considering in the. With the ESTA visa waiver program, by the way, countries. Not just the S hole countries, but Australia, France and Japan.

Iain Thomson [01:52:02]:
Well, all of Europe and the U.K.

Leo Laporte [01:52:05]:
You know, it's pretty washed, considering before allowing entry as a tourist. Five years of social media history.

Iain Thomson [01:52:16]:
Yeah. Now, you see, my mother came over here for Thanksgiving and spent 10 days with us and she had to pay extra for arrested because they've just up the. Up the rates. And at the moment, they do have a box for filling your social media over the last five years.

Leo Laporte [01:52:29]:
But it's optional.

Iain Thomson [01:52:29]:
But it's. It's Vol. It's. Yeah, it's optional. Plus, my mother's 86. It's not as though she's been. Apart from Facebook, there's nothing else she's been doing.

Leo Laporte [01:52:37]:
Get off.

Iain Thomson [01:52:38]:
But now they're talking about.

Leo Laporte [01:52:39]:
Because you're leaving a paper trail.

Leo Laporte [01:52:42]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:52:43]:
I mean, now she's. Now they're talking about making it mandatory. They're Talking about the U.S. state Department, details on your friends and family, and even possibly DNA swabs.

Leo Laporte [01:52:52]:
That's really scary.

Iain Thomson [01:52:54]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:54]:
And all of this is in the name of preventing terrorism. Right. And illegal immigration. The US State Department will conduct online online presence reviews, in other words, in person, for applicants and their dependents, and require privacy settings on social media profiles to be made public. You got to make your Instagram public. Applicants must list all the social media handles they've used over the last five years. I don't even. I don't think I could do that.

Leo Laporte [01:53:20]:
And if any.

Iain Thomson [01:53:21]:
If you look at the list on it, it's hilarious. They ask for MySpace profiles and you're like, really? You know, it's 2025. I forgot to say, if any information is admitted.

Owen Thomas [01:53:30]:
I thought all the MySpace profiles were accidentally deleted.

Leo Laporte [01:53:34]:
Was.

Owen Thomas [01:53:34]:
Was that just the photos?

Leo Laporte [01:53:36]:
I. I hope not. I want my MySpace profile. I hope not.

Iain Thomson [01:53:42]:
Said no one ever. But.

Leo Laporte [01:53:45]:
If any information is omitted, it could lead to the denial of current and future visas. Sorry, you can't come here. Now, remember, Donald Trump just got the. The fake Nobel Prize from FIFA. We are the host of the World Cup this summer.

Iain Thomson [01:53:59]:
Please. It was a participation prize.

Leo Laporte [01:54:02]:
The fake Nobel Prize. So I. Is this. Now, Trump did say, if you buy a ticket to the World Cup. Oh, that's fine. Just come on in. So there's a little hint to terrorists. Just a little, you know, little hint.

Leo Laporte [01:54:17]:
But this could be a lot of people from Europe and around the world coming to America, coming to Los Angeles and the. In the summer.

Iain Thomson [01:54:25]:
Well, Los Angeles, yes. Not San Francisco, because we've got the really bad games of the World Cup. But, you know, I don't think we're lining up to watch the KIRI football team going in. But.

Leo Laporte [01:54:34]:
No, I don't want to watch.

Iain Thomson [01:54:36]:
This is basically going to kill tourism in the U.S. I mean, it's already some of the key.

Leo Laporte [01:54:41]:
Sorry, it's already on the decline from Canada.

Leo Laporte [01:54:44]:
It's by design, Right? To a degree. Right. Because it's mostly. They don't want tourists coming in because what, what happens is people come in at tourists and then they don't leave. And their visas, you know, well, that's.

Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
The dirty little secret of illegal immigration, that most of the illegal immigration is people overstaying their visas. Yeah. It's not coming in over the border.

Leo Laporte [01:55:04]:
It's. It is by design. You know, I think the, the challenge with the rhetoric around immigration is, you know, it. It really has lost the narrative. You know, the narrative has gotten so out of control and so outside of reality, you know, and. And if we, if we really. Yeah. If we really looked at the numbers, if we really dealt with the reality, and if we could really have a conversation about the fact that immigrations add so much.

Leo Laporte [01:55:35]:
The only difference between the US Economy and the economies in Europe and Japan is our immigration. Right. That's the only reason that we're growing and shrinking. But the problem is we also don't have an honest conversation about the fact that immigration creates challenges. It puts strains on systems. It creates, you know, pockets of population that need extra support, that need the ability to. To. To integrate in ways that are often challenging for communities.

Leo Laporte [01:56:06]:
And because we can't really have a sane conversation. It's like many things in the U.S. today, we can't have a sane conversation about the things and about the honest trade offs and about how it goes. And it just becomes very bifurcated into like the for or against camps. Then, then all of a sudden, you know, we, we end up in where we are, which is that we just don't have intelligent dialogue around really difficult issues, and so that the can gets kicked down the, you know, the road longer and longer.

Leo Laporte [01:56:36]:
But we're all immigrants, unless we're Native Americans, and even Native Americans came over the Bering Strait some millions of years ago. I mean, we're all immigrants.

Iain Thomson [01:56:43]:
Yeah, I mean, well, I'm sorry, I mean if you, if you take the strictest definition of the law, then Melania came over here as an illegal immigrant. So did Elon Musk, right?

Leo Laporte [01:56:54]:
You know, a student visa when he.

Iain Thomson [01:56:56]:
Wasn'T, he was on a student visa when he came into town. But you know, and then has benefited enormously from government benefits. But you know, I mean, America is built on immigration. Now, having had to jump through 10 years of legal hoops to go for my American citizenship, I would say by all means give people a legal path to immigration. If someone's just overstaying their visa and you know, doing bugger all for the, for the economy, then fine, I've got no problems with that. What worries me in particular about this is that it's, how can I put this politely? If you're brown, you're in trouble. If you're white, you're all right, you know, and that's, that's fundamentally stupid. You know, I mean it's, if you look at the leaders of tech companies, a lot of them are immigrants, a lot of them were founded by immigrants.

Iain Thomson [01:57:43]:
You know, we need to acknowledge that and sort out the system once and for all.

Leo Laporte [01:57:49]:
So Reddit, even though I don't, well, I guess because it's in Australia, they weren't one of the, one of the social networks that was mentioned, but Reddit is already proactively going ahead with quote, new experiences and policies designed to confirm age responsibly and securely. So, and if you are under 18 anywhere in the world, you will get a version of Reddit with more safety features built in, stricter chat settings, no ads, personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.

Iain Thomson [01:58:25]:
10.

Leo Laporte [01:58:28]:
So they, I mean, I think that a lot of companies, Reddit's of course owned by Conde Nast and I think they're just trying to get ahead of this. Right. They.

Owen Thomas [01:58:35]:
No, they. They were actually spun out in an ipo, so.

Leo Laporte [01:58:38]:
Oh, they're not Conde Nast anymore. Okay. All right. I think they still have that kind of mainstream mentality, though, these days. Steve Gibson's doing very well.

Owen Thomas [01:58:48]:
Yeah. I mean, I think. I think being answerable to Wall street is probably more of a more mainstream influence.

Leo Laporte [01:58:54]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [01:58:54]:
Even more investors and advertisers tend to do that to companies.

Leo Laporte [01:58:59]:
Speaking of Wall Street, what's going to happen with Warner Bros. Discovery? When we had this last week, when we did the show, we thought Netflix had bought them on Friday. A week later. No. Netflix now is being undermined by a hostile takeover bid from the folks who just bought Paramount, CBS, plus your old employer, Jason, they have made an offer. I think it's much higher than Netflix offered $82.7 billion. Skydance is now offering 108 billion in cash. Not stock, cash.

Owen Thomas [01:59:40]:
Two words are complicating this revocable trust. So Larry Ellison is, of course, the father of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, and he is fronting a lot of the money for the bid, as is.

Leo Laporte [02:00:00]:
Sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Dubai.

Owen Thomas [02:00:03]:
Yeah, they've lined that up. But reportedly the hitch with that offer is that it's being done through a vehicle called the Larry Ellison Revocable Trust. And what that means is, is Ellison can basically revoke it. Yeah, he could dissolve the trust at any point and the money goes away. So it's not a personal backstop. Now, when Elon Musk bid for Twitter, he actually did it with a personal guarantee, which is part of why he ended up getting sued by Twitter to actually complete the deal and was forced to go through and buy the thing and. Well, we know the rest of that story, but the, you know, the Revocable Trust structure essentially gives Ellison an out. He could, you know, pull the shares out of the trust and say, Larry, not.

Leo Laporte [02:00:54]:
Sorry, the dad could say, no, no, the dad. The dad wants this.

Owen Thomas [02:00:59]:
He.

Leo Laporte [02:00:59]:
I mean, he wants to call. So he's already got Warner Bros. Discovery. I mean, he's already got Paramount, which means he has CBS and he wants CNN, which is Warner Bros. Discovery. He's apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, promised President Trump that if you would just let us buy CNN.

Owen Thomas [02:01:22]:
I'm not sure anyone really wants cnn.

Leo Laporte [02:01:25]:
No, in fact, it probably would be spun off, wouldn't it? It would be, but they're using his leverage. David Ellison, according to the Journal, told the Trump administration if he bought Warner, he'd make sweeping changes at CNN.

Iain Thomson [02:01:40]:
Then Barry Wise speak.

Owen Thomas [02:01:43]:
I mean, I could see. And, and that is the thing now. I, I say that having enormous respect for CNN as a journalistic institution and as an incredibly important American and global institution, but right now it's a political hot potato. All these deals require some level of government sign off. You know, especially.

Leo Laporte [02:02:08]:
Well, this would be such a huge media consolidation. I would, I would expect the government to say no. Right. They, they just doubt it.

Leo Laporte [02:02:17]:
Paramount because the, you know, the audiences have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk for all of these. Like, it's so much of the audience, you know, has, has moved away from these vehicles now. They still have huge audience audiences. Like, there's, there's no doubt. But it's not like, you know, it was not even close to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years, 30 years ago. Like, it, it's become so small in comparison. Right. It's like 20 of what it was a couple decades ago.

Leo Laporte [02:02:48]:
So I, so I think there's a, there is an argument. To me, I don't know how hard they would make the argument or not, you know, the current FCC, but I think that they would look at it as, say, like, how much of a public harm is it really? Because it's so small. It's so small.

Leo Laporte [02:03:05]:
That's the argument that Ellison is, David Ellison has been putting forth saying, you know, Paramount by itself is too small to compete against Netflix and Disney. We need more content in Amazon. We need more content. We need to be a bigger company to compete.

Owen Thomas [02:03:20]:
And by the way, which would be.

Leo Laporte [02:03:22]:
The argument against Netflix winning this deal.

Owen Thomas [02:03:24]:
But that's the argument Netflix is making. But Netflix is saying we're too small compared to you, YouTube, which is actually bigger on.

Leo Laporte [02:03:31]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:03:31]:
You know, in the living room than Netflix.

Leo Laporte [02:03:34]:
Yeah, yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:03:35]:
And you know, and then there's the mobile universe where arguably TikTok is competition for Netflix as well as HBO Max.

Iain Thomson [02:03:43]:
Although Oracle is now, wasn't TikTok.

Leo Laporte [02:03:47]:
Wasn't this supposed to be the TikTok thing? Supposed to be over months? What's going on with that?

Iain Thomson [02:03:52]:
It's been kicked down the road. I mean, Oracle is still, still, you know, standing to try and get a stake in TikTok as well, which.

Leo Laporte [02:03:59]:
You know, but I know Trump keeps extending every 90 days, but I haven't heard a word about it. A month or two ago he met with President Xi and that was supposed to seal the deal and it was over. And then we haven't heard anything.

Iain Thomson [02:04:13]:
Yeah, it's kind of like an Elon Musk deadline, they just carry on down the road and down the road and down the road.

Leo Laporte [02:04:19]:
Very strange, strange times.

Owen Thomas [02:04:22]:
I don't know.

Iain Thomson [02:04:22]:
I just can't help feeling that more media consolidation is a bad thing.

Leo Laporte [02:04:26]:
I agree.

Iain Thomson [02:04:26]:
You need more independent voices out there. You need more.

Leo Laporte [02:04:29]:
I agree.

Iain Thomson [02:04:29]:
Fresh voices out there.

Leo Laporte [02:04:30]:
I'm proud of both of you guys for going independent. That's why I'm proud to be doing what we do. The more voices, the better. The less that they are beholden to government or Wall Street. Better.

Iain Thomson [02:04:43]:
The more competition. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:04:45]:
Audiences are. Audiences continue to splinter. Right? Like, like it's. And the fact of it is, and sorry to do this philosophically, but, you know, is that it's harder and harder to trust large entities. Right? And the trust over larger, you know, media entities has, you know, continued to drop and drop and drop. And part of that is, rightly so, you know, necessary and somewhat, and somewhat natural because you don't know who, who it is or who they are or who controls it or what their biases are. And so it becomes natural to trust them less. Right.

Leo Laporte [02:05:23]:
It's, you know, like I said, I started this. Like, my bet is that longer term, you know, the, the future of media is deeper engagement with more specific audiences. And I think that that can be a niche topically, but it can also be locally or even hyper locally. Right. And so because when you know and understand, like who is giving you the news, it's much easier to trust it. You know, we've lost a lot of trust in mass media that we used to have. And this is, I think you're only going to see more of these kinds of things. I'm not as, I'm not as worried about them because I think audiences are already moving away from a lot of these, these platforms.

Leo Laporte [02:06:10]:
We do lose something, right? We do lose a bit of a shared experience where we, we aren't watching the same thing. And so we have a different, you know, understanding and take on it. And. But I think part of that is some of the creation of communities around, around topics, around issues, around conversations. And some of that is also finding new ways to express itself. Right. In the, in the age that we're in. But I, I don't think that Paramount buy, if Paramount were to own Warner Brothers, that, I don't know that it does that much harm.

Leo Laporte [02:06:46]:
I think a lot of the harm's already been done.

Leo Laporte [02:06:48]:
Yeah, well, and everybody's watching YouTube. YouTube, TV, rather. YouTube just rolled out a TV lean back experience, improved experience because they realized that so many people now watching their big screen TVs for sure. So they've changed the interface from.

Leo Laporte [02:07:06]:
And the app experience is not great on TV. On most TVs.

Leo Laporte [02:07:09]:
Yeah, right, yeah. So they're very aware of that and they're updating it.

Leo Laporte [02:07:14]:
On a recent vacation with my family, we logged into YouTube on the TV. Never logged into any other streaming services. We only watched YouTube. And that was like the first time that I can remember that happening. But we were all kind of perfectly happy, happy doing that. I thought that.

Leo Laporte [02:07:30]:
Have you ever watched Whatnot? You know what Whatnot is? I think Owen might know Whatnot. This is from Information Week Whatnot Schlock empire shows digital live shopping can thrive in America. This is suddenly hot, hot, hot live. It's basically home shopping on your phone.

Leo Laporte [02:07:53]:
QVC.

Leo Laporte [02:07:54]:
Yeah, QVC on your phone. Whatnot has an $11.5 billion valuation. I've never even heard of it. It's a reseller market. Sellers auction off items like sports cards, last year's suede sneakers and off brand cologne through videos, live streams. It's eBay crossed with TikTok. This is from the Information.

Leo Laporte [02:08:17]:
And as. As with any good kind of niche media, there are little code words. So if you hear sudden death, that means there's a time limit on how long buyers can submit bids in the auction. If a seller says lots of big rips here, they're talking about sealed packs of trading cards which they are literally ripping open. A shoplifting special is a deal so good. It's. Well, you get the picture, writes the Information.

Iain Thomson [02:08:48]:
This was on the list. I, I popped my head around and took a look at it.

Leo Laporte [02:08:51]:
Did you watch it?

Iain Thomson [02:08:52]:
It made me. I, I tried and then I turned it off because it was just so frustrating. It's kind of like the Skymall magazines used to get an American. You know, it's. It's like that but with video and terribly bad pushly promotions. But I'm sure people will go for it.

Leo Laporte [02:09:10]:
It's authentic. Yeah, it's worth eleven and a half billion. Is it an app or is it a website?

Iain Thomson [02:09:18]:
I wouldn't go on.

Leo Laporte [02:09:20]:
Yeah, you don't need an app, I guess. Oh no, I'm firing.

Leo Laporte [02:09:23]:
It's so amazing what the kids are doing these days. Wow. But I keep seeing these stories in more than one outlet about live shopping now. All right, well, you know, Whatnot.

Leo Laporte [02:09:30]:
It's so amazing what the kids are doing to these days. Wow. But I keep seeing these stories in more than one outlet of about live shopping now. All right, well, you know, Whatnot.

Iain Thomson [02:09:47]:
It is depressingly easy to actually get. It is depressingly easy to get coverage that way. We've just had a very expensive English pub open in San Francisco, which has been all over the socials, and they're charging $36 for one piece of cod on a handful of chips. But if you look on the social media feeds, then it's just like, oh, my God, this is the best thing ever. It's like, take a trip to London. Seriously. Buy a flight there.

Iain Thomson [02:10:12]:
You'll probably save money.

Leo Laporte [02:10:13]:
But I can tell you it cost you in London. How much does the same meal cost you in London?

Leo Laporte [02:10:16]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:10:16]:
Not 30 fish and chips in London. You can get it for a tenner. You know that. So that's what, 12 bucks? And it's good fish and chips, not artisan fish and chips.

Leo Laporte [02:10:26]:
Well, have you tried the artisanal fish and chips? Maybe. It's very good. My son charges $32 for a French dip sandwich in New York City, and he's got lines around the block.

Iain Thomson [02:10:37]:
Really? What is a French dip sandwich?

Leo Laporte [02:10:39]:
Henry started his own. Has a little restaurant in New York City called Salt Hanks, and it's all the rage. He's been on Seth Meyers, Drew Barrymore live with Kelly and Mark. He's. He's like the sandwich king. Did you know this?

Iain Thomson [02:10:53]:
I'm just. I'm just looking up what a French dip sandwich is, because I'm.

Leo Laporte [02:10:57]:
Oh, okay. All right, now. Now you did it. I'm gonna have to show you.

Iain Thomson [02:11:03]:
Yeah, let's have a look.

Leo Laporte [02:11:05]:
I will show you. It's called salt Hanks, and it's on Bleecker Street. Everybody is watching the show.

Leo Laporte [02:11:13]:
French dip sandwich. Like roast beef that you dip in, like prime rib?

Leo Laporte [02:11:18]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:11:18]:
Oh, my God. No wonder America's life expectancy is going down. I mean, it looks delicious, but. And as a Brit, I'm the last person to criticize other people's foods.

Leo Laporte [02:11:28]:
Go to.

Iain Thomson [02:11:28]:
I have to say, dipping a beef sandwich in. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:11:33]:
New York Times. This is. This is Hank's sandwich featured in the New York Times. Oh, damn.

Iain Thomson [02:11:38]:
That does actually look rather good.

Leo Laporte [02:11:39]:
It's. This is super good. Very expensive prime rib with a garlic aioli and caramelized mustard. Onions have been cooking all day. And the French.

Iain Thomson [02:11:49]:
Is that a meal for two? Because that. Yeah, you.

Leo Laporte [02:11:51]:
That's why you could. You could. You could actually. You could actually just go in there and split it, because it's a. It's a lot.

Iain Thomson [02:11:58]:
It's. It's interesting. So my mum's been over and she's a war baby, which means, you know, for the first 17 years of her life, she lives under rationing. And whenever she comes over here, the size of the portions defeats her entirely. But she can't bear not to eat it all.

Leo Laporte [02:12:12]:
Well, this is so she'll be there.

Iain Thomson [02:12:14]:
No, no, no, I'm fine, Mum. We have doggy bags over here. They're here for a reason.

Leo Laporte [02:12:19]:
There's my son right there. There's. There's salt. Hank himself. This is a New York Times documentary they did on him. Wow, it is really good. Yeah, yeah. There he is.

Leo Laporte [02:12:30]:
Look at. That's the caramelized onions. They cook them all day, the way.

Iain Thomson [02:12:36]:
Caramelized onions should be done.

Leo Laporte [02:12:38]:
Yeah, yeah, it's good.

Iain Thomson [02:12:40]:
By the way, did I see Bourdain in there?

Leo Laporte [02:12:43]:
Yeah, but Bourdain's no longer with us.

Iain Thomson [02:12:45]:
But yes, true.

Leo Laporte [02:12:46]:
Every celebrity in New York is come into the shop now to eat this.

Iain Thomson [02:12:50]:
Excellent.

Leo Laporte [02:12:52]:
How do we get started? Oh, yeah, live shopping. I was going to whatnot.

Owen Thomas [02:12:57]:
I was going to say, didn't ebay buy Skype? Because live shopping was the future.

Leo Laporte [02:13:01]:
Oh, is that why? I never understood.

Leo Laporte [02:13:04]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:13:04]:
Meg Whitman. Meg Whitman went to China, and apparently folks were using Skype to, you know, to sell stuff.

Iain Thomson [02:13:11]:
And, oh, there was a good friend of mine for. A good friend of mine from ZDNet actually got his comments on the BBC the expunged about the ebay buy because they asked him onto the show and it's like, so why do you think Meg. Meg Whitman did this? And he went, well, we've all got drunk and bought something on ebay. And that line was very carefully cut out.

Leo Laporte [02:13:35]:
Yes. All right. They say, now what am I shopping for? Electronics, Trading card games, Pokemon cards? Beauty. Beauty's gonna be the most. Beauty's gonna be the most fun. All right, let's go, let's go. Oh, I gotta give them a phone number. No, no, I'm not gonna give you a phone number.

Leo Laporte [02:13:55]:
They want a phone number. I'm never gonna have to.

Iain Thomson [02:13:59]:
This is what we need to.

Leo Laporte [02:13:59]:
I'm gonna regret this. I am gonna regret this, aren't I?

Iain Thomson [02:14:02]:
You need a Google Voice number just for stuff like this, Leo. Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte [02:14:07]:
We had a sponsor actually have fake phone numbers from one of our sponsors, MySoup.

Leo Laporte [02:14:14]:
Is that a burner number that you put in?

Leo Laporte [02:14:16]:
Yeah, it's like a burner, actually. It's really cool. They're not a sponsor anymore, but I'll give them a free plug because you can have a different number for every service. And then you can say what happens to phone calls and text messages. And it's all in this app. It's really a sweet way of getting around things like that. Yeah, things like that. The military almost got the right to repair.

Leo Laporte [02:14:38]:
And then Congress said no. Ah, this.

Iain Thomson [02:14:42]:
This grips my muffin. It really does. I mean, the worst.

Leo Laporte [02:14:46]:
Come on.

Iain Thomson [02:14:47]:
You know, bad enough that farmers are having to download Ukrainian software to run their tractors because John Deere are being absolute right pillocks about this. But for the military, you know, it's kind of like the people who are defending the homeland and they don't have the right to repair their own kit when they could do it perfectly. Well, when this came up. The what? The. What's the new carrier called? The Carter one one. They found that six out of the eight ovens weren't working because they had to wait for a contractor to come on board when they knew how to fix them themselves. It's completely ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [02:15:21]:
This is part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which was finally marked up on Sun last. Last Sunday. The House version of the bill. Repair advocates worried could have implemented a data as a service relationship with defense contractors that would have forced the military to pay for subscription repair services.

Leo Laporte [02:15:45]:
So that was taken out. But also the provision that said, you know what? The military employees can fix machines. It's okay. It's a blow to the right to repair movement, of course. And it's just. Just amazing.

Iain Thomson [02:16:02]:
Yeah, you should have Cory. Cory doctor on this to talk about this because he goes incandescent about it. And for good reason.

Leo Laporte [02:16:08]:
Right.

Iain Thomson [02:16:08]:
You know, they can repair themselves. I mean, the whole Marine Corps engineering department is built on repairing stuff that no one else wants. They can do this stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:16:20]:
Let's take a little break. You're watching this week in Tech. Oh, we lost Jason Heiner. He's disappeared. Walking his dog now. Okay, everybody's walking their dog. Dogs. Oh, there he is.

Leo Laporte [02:16:28]:
We're gonna take a little bit. Sorry. You can go. We're gonna take a little break.

Iain Thomson [02:16:31]:
I have a cat on the lap, so.

Leo Laporte [02:16:32]:
Oh, hello, Stumpy. Ian Thompson with this kitty cat, Stumpy. And Owen Thomas with his really sweet little dog Fitz. Fitzy. You call him Fitzy?

Owen Thomas [02:16:43]:
Fitzy is mad about doggy bags because he says it's false advertising.

Leo Laporte [02:16:47]:
He doesn't ever get that.

Owen Thomas [02:16:49]:
Yeah, humans always eat it.

Leo Laporte [02:16:51]:
The humans keep eating my bag. Yeah, just not right.

Owen Thomas [02:16:55]:
That's his steak.

Leo Laporte [02:16:58]:
Burke. And our. Who does all of our right to repair stuff? Does all our fixing he's fixing the Mac right now. Says. Well, then what do you have a tech tank mechanic for if you can't fix it?

Iain Thomson [02:17:08]:
Yeah, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:17:09]:
I don't know. I don't understand.

Iain Thomson [02:17:11]:
What are they going to do in a wartime situation? Oh, excuse me. I'm just going to call, you know, Lockheed.

Leo Laporte [02:17:15]:
Oh, we gotta get a.

Iain Thomson [02:17:15]:
Tell them to send someone over.

Leo Laporte [02:17:17]:
Yeah, we gotta get a contractor out here. What? The subscription is not paid up.

Iain Thomson [02:17:24]:
Military, back to you in 90 days.

Leo Laporte [02:17:26]:
I need to get lobbyists.

Iain Thomson [02:17:28]:
Well, no, it's the.

Leo Laporte [02:17:29]:
This episode.

Owen Thomas [02:17:30]:
We do have something very cool, though, here in America. It's a thing called advertising that makes it possible to do this podcast. So I want to thank America for letting us do this. This episode of This Week in Tech, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. So it's so interesting when you hear us talking about this, there are both benefits and downsides to AI. The potential rewards are huge. Every business has to consider. But there's also risks, whether using public or private AI.

Iain Thomson [02:17:31]:
They're the ones getting the money to fix the things, so they're the ones.

Leo Laporte [02:17:34]:
Who are benefiting things and they're the ones who donate to Congress. Got to get money out of politics. I think that's a problem. I really do.

Iain Thomson [02:17:44]:
Absolutely. Well, come on, it's America. You've legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. I mean, it's just. This is the way it is.

Leo Laporte [02:17:50]:
We do have something very cool, though, here in America. It's a thing called advertising that makes it possible to do this podcast. So I want to thank America for letting us do this. This episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. So it's so interesting when you hear us talking about this, there are both benefits and downsides to AI. The potential rewards are huge. Every business has to consider. But there's also risks, whether using public or private AI.

Leo Laporte [02:18:24]:
The risk of losing sensitive data. Well, as an example, there were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked through legit SaaS, AI applications, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations last year. Generative AI also means the bad guys can use it to make themselves more effective and more efficient. They're using AI to create phishing emails that are just indistinguishable from the real thing. To rely, right malware, even to automate data extraction so they can. They can get the data out of your system fast once they've broken in. There are upsides and downsides to AI, but there is a way, way to mitigate a modern approach. Zscaler's Zero Trust plus AI.

Leo Laporte [02:19:17]:
Zscaler Zero Trust eliminates your attack surface because you don't need big firewalls and VPNs to get through. It secures your data everywhere. It safeguards your use of public and private AI in the company so you don't start exfiltrating that vital information, protects against ransomware, protects against AI powered phishing attacks. We got a great video. Siva, who is the director of security and infrastructure at Swara says this about using Zscaler Watch.

Leo Laporte [02:19:46]:
AI provides tremendous opportunities but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security. The benefit of Zscaler with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various gen AI tools. So IBM's ability to monitor the activity and make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to, you know, companies' data classification does not get fed into the public LLM models, et cetera.

Leo Laporte [02:20:15]:
With zero trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition and you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more at Zscaler.com. Secure that's Zscaler.com Security we thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. You support us when you use that address by the way. So make sure you use it so they know you saw it here. Zscaler.com Security Scathing, scathing. You're laughing. You already know where I'm going.

Iain Thomson [02:20:52]:
Oh yeah, no, I've been looking forward to this one.

Leo Laporte [02:20:55]:
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers back in April said that Apple was in willful violation of her 2021 injunction to open the iOS App Store. Apple appealed. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now upheld it. The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple's attempts to charge a. So remember Apple was charging 30%. They said, oh okay, your honor, we'll charge a 27% to developers using outside payment operations. The panel said it had a prohibitive effect. It was a violation of the injunction.

Leo Laporte [02:21:40]:
Similarly, Apple's restrictions on how outside links in apps had to be designed were overly broad. They said Apple acted in bad faith. Judge Rogers was right by refusing to comply with the injunction. This is bad. Yeah. Tim Sweeney of Epic, who brought the lawsuit, says, you know, victory. The Ninth Circuit Court has confirmed the Apple tax is dead in the US, the beginning of true untaxed competition and payments worldwide. In iOS, it's not just the US, of course, EU and all over the world people are saying Apple, you know, this is unfair.

Iain Thomson [02:22:22]:
In fact, Japan, the EU is very strong on this as well.

Leo Laporte [02:22:25]:
Japan.

Iain Thomson [02:22:26]:
But Apple has basically thrown up an awful lot of sort of what we call.

Leo Laporte [02:22:32]:
Barriers to malicious compliance. Is the.

Iain Thomson [02:22:34]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:22:35]:
I like exactly. Oh yeah, we'll pay that fine in pennies.

Owen Thomas [02:22:39]:
And one, I, I saw a recent decision where Essentially, you know, Epic and other, other, other app makers could use a, an external payment mechanism, but they'd have to pay some kind of commission.

Leo Laporte [02:22:57]:
Yeah, 27% instead of 30. It's like, whoa, thank you Apple, you're so generous.

Iain Thomson [02:23:02]:
So Japan Master for you, I will tug my fall out.

Leo Laporte [02:23:07]:
Thank you. Starting December 18th in Japan, Apple and Google will be prohibited from blocking third party app stores on iPhone and Android devices. Yeah, that's going into effect in four days in Japan.

Iain Thomson [02:23:21]:
From a security perspective, that's not entirely great, but at the same time that's what Apple says.

Leo Laporte [02:23:28]:
I'm not sure I buy that. Is the, is the Apple Store so very secure?

Iain Thomson [02:23:33]:
Oh, no, there's always, there's always malware that gets into both stores. Admittedly more for Google than for Apple. Apple, at the end of the day, it's that trade off between do you allow a good market to develop or do you just allow Apple to skim 30% off the top of everyone?

Leo Laporte [02:23:49]:
Right, well, there's competition coming.

Owen Thomas [02:23:55]:
I'll go back to what I've said before, which is there's probably a right number here and it's probably not 0% and it's probably not 30%. There's some value.

Leo Laporte [02:24:05]:
In fact, I'm surprised Apple doesn't bring this up. They based on what Microsoft and Sony charge in their game stores. I mean this 30% is kind of was the going rate.

Owen Thomas [02:24:14]:
Yeah, but that was to essentially subsidize.

Leo Laporte [02:24:17]:
Hardware, you know, and they don't have a monopoly in the same way that Apple does. Well, I guess they do, yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:24:23]:
If Apple allowed side loading properly then, you know, you could possibly make a case for that.

Leo Laporte [02:24:28]:
That's what surprises me is that they haven't done that or, or just say you could have do better support for browser apps or something. Seems like Apple there'd be ways to app for Apple to make this more open, but they just, they've decided we were going to scrape every penny we can out of this.

Iain Thomson [02:24:47]:
It's not really Apple's business model though, to be that open, you know, I mean.

Leo Laporte [02:24:50]:
Yes, thank you.

Iain Thomson [02:24:52]:
And we were talking about their privacy policy earlier. Privacy policy is great. If you're in a Western nation like the United States. Try that argument in China. Slightly different.

Leo Laporte [02:25:03]:
So I don't know. Now do we go to the Supreme Court with this or have we already been there? I think we've already been there and the Supreme Court sent it back down to the Ninth Circuit, which then sounds like this is a done deal.

Iain Thomson [02:25:16]:
Yeah, it's Kept a lot of lawyers in very nice summer houses.

Leo Laporte [02:25:22]:
Anyway, we'll see what that does. Maybe won't make a difference. I. I don't know. Happy birthday. Excel, 40 years old this week. The spreadsheet remains stubbornly unlike unkillable, says Bloomberg. Why we can't.

Leo Laporte [02:25:43]:
Critics. The bean counters still love it. They're still like, yeah, we can't do it. I remember in the last couple, in several companies that I had where we were on Google, you know, Workspace, all the finance department, all still had Excel.

Leo Laporte [02:26:00]:
They rebelled. Isn't that funny?

Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
Formulas.

Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
Yeah, because we use Google sheets for almost everything. You know, our rundown today is in a Google sheet. But I bet you. I bet you our finance people are all using Excel.

Iain Thomson [02:26:13]:
Yeah, but we're still having, you know, we're having Excel competitions at the moment. You know, Brit was terribly excited because he made it to the finals of the Excel competition.

Leo Laporte [02:26:23]:
That's right.

Iain Thomson [02:26:23]:
Which I think you covered earlier. Earlier.

Leo Laporte [02:26:25]:
It's going to Vegas, I think, isn't it? Where's it going?

Iain Thomson [02:26:28]:
Grief. I'm sorry. Vegas has, you know, Vegas is all about high rollers and funsters. You don't get Excel. People coming down as the high rollers in Vegas. I mean, they're highly skilled people. I'm sure they're wonderful. But at the same time, yeah, it's.

Iain Thomson [02:26:45]:
It's kind of like to come back to CES. I was talking to a lady of negotiable affection there, and she's like, yeah, we jack up our prices 30% during CES because the geeks are in town.

Leo Laporte [02:26:57]:
Well, yeah, during Comdex, no. 1. They would put tarpaulins over the blackjack tables because the geeks didn't gamble.

Iain Thomson [02:27:06]:
Oh, no. One of my favorite things, I was at DEF CON. What about what was in 2017? And we got into a conversation with a bartender, and there was a bunch of people from the crypto panel. We were just getting drinks, and he goes, the bartender was like, you know, we hate you people because you don't gamble. And a guy whose name I won't mention but is very big in the crypto field just said, yeah, we studied math in high school. You know, they do not like geeks there.

Leo Laporte [02:27:35]:
It was last week, we missed the. The finals in Las Vegas, but I'm sure there's video on YouTube we could all watch and. And enjoy. They treat it like esports. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:27:46]:
It's not quite Formula one, but I have to say, for a certain audience, it's. It's pretty damn good.

Leo Laporte [02:27:50]:
Microsoft Excel World Championship. That's amazing. According to the cab drivers and Uber drivers in Las Vegas, like everything has gotten too expensive in Las Vegas and yeah, their tourism is down by like 30% and so a bunch of them are ready to leave. That's the one thing that I'm gonna miss when you know, eventually they automate all of the, you know, the Ubers and cab drivers. I get all my best intelligence. I love like talking to Uber drivers and cab drivers, sort of asking them about, about things and how things are going and their perspective on things. Like some of my favorite conversations, you know, week in and week out are with Lyft and Uber drivers and so I couldn't agree, I couldn't.

Iain Thomson [02:28:34]:
Agree with you more. I mean these people are absolute gold mines for information about what's actually going on on the ground. Around 100, you know, I mean 100 they see it, you know, up front and yeah, when Waymo and Uber and Zoox all come in and put them out of, out of, out of a job, then yeah, it's go. We're going to lose a valuable source of information.

Leo Laporte [02:28:55]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:28:56]:
You think Apple. Well, somebody's suggesting. Larry's in our Discord. Suggesting Apple should buy the rights to the Excel Esports World Championship just like they did.

Owen Thomas [02:29:05]:
Oh God.

Leo Laporte [02:29:05]:
Formula 1 1. They can make it interesting. Was it, wasn't that final something, Ian?

Iain Thomson [02:29:12]:
It, it really was. And I, I do feel for Kimmy Antonelli because when he was coming in he just realized that the mistake he'd made the previous Grand Prix had just basically handed the World Championship some people.

Leo Laporte [02:29:25]:
Might not have watched. So we won't say who the World Champion.

Iain Thomson [02:29:28]:
Oh, come on.

Leo Laporte [02:29:30]:
Right, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:29:32]:
This is a spoiler free show. That's amazing.

Iain Thomson [02:29:34]:
Yeah, true, true. Say, let's just say that, you know, three people could have won the World Championship on the last race. The winner of the race, worthy winner. And the winner of the World Championship was a worthy winner.

Leo Laporte [02:29:47]:
Yes. Very excited. So, yeah, I know everything changes because not only are the rules all changed and the cars are going to be completely different, but Apple is taking over in the United States. The broadcasts.

Iain Thomson [02:30:00]:
Yes. I'm not pleased about that. Raise my bills.

Leo Laporte [02:30:05]:
Well, wait a minute. I was paying for F1TV. I was paying 150 bucks a year. I think Apple.

Iain Thomson [02:30:09]:
Yeah, you're paying for the, for the absolute top level service. So you're actually looking at a cost saving. Those of us who are paying for the mid level service, we are facing a cost hike. And I'm sorry Apple's not going to screw the consumer too much, but it is go. The prices are going to go up year on year. On year. Year.

Leo Laporte [02:30:30]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:30:32]:
I don't know, Jason and Owen, you. Do you watch F1 or.

Leo Laporte [02:30:36]:
I don't.

Owen Thomas [02:30:37]:
Every time.

Leo Laporte [02:30:39]:
Conversation. We turn people off. I'm.

Owen Thomas [02:30:41]:
That would be a. A sports ball, right?

Leo Laporte [02:30:42]:
Yes, It's a form of sports ball.

Iain Thomson [02:30:44]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's. It's basically. Yeah. It's a car race where they turn right occasionally. So, you know, that's what I like about it.

Leo Laporte [02:30:53]:
It's not an oval track. It's a. It's a much more interesting track. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:30:59]:
Although, I mean, you've been to Vegas to watch it.

Leo Laporte [02:31:01]:
I went once. I've been to F1 race once. It was in. Wasn't years ago. Yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:31:05]:
Wasn't Sam Altman fired when he was in Vegas for.

Leo Laporte [02:31:08]:
He was, yeah. He was there at the same time I was. I didn't know this at the time. And he had to rush.

Iain Thomson [02:31:13]:
Oh, that was when it broke.

Leo Laporte [02:31:15]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:31:15]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:31:16]:
It was. Because I'm sitting there and the story's breaking that Sam's been fired. I'm going, whoa. But what. I Little did I know he was in the hotel right behind me. He had to rush home.

Iain Thomson [02:31:25]:
Missed.

Leo Laporte [02:31:26]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:31:27]:
Missed it by that much. I was looking at the cards. Go. Let Microsoft is promising more bug payouts with or without a bounty program. You put this in, Ian?

Iain Thomson [02:31:42]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:44]:
They're not getting rid of their bounty program.

Iain Thomson [02:31:47]:
No, no, not at all. I mean, a. A blackout this year. I chatted with the head of their bounty program. And, you know, MSRC is now. Microsoft fought against bug bounties tooth and nail.

Leo Laporte [02:31:59]:
So did Apple. So did Apple. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:32:01]:
And it took Casey Mazouris to actually join Microsoft and convince them that bug bounties were a good idea. And now they've embraced them with both hands and they're paying out. I think it was, what, 31 million last year?

Owen Thomas [02:32:15]:
Year.

Iain Thomson [02:32:16]:
Because they've worked out, you know, the logical solution is that people that do this for the love of it actually expect to pay out at the end of it, considering the amount of savings they take. And getting that volunteer support in is huge. And this is a really interesting case of basically companies saying, yeah, break our code, show us how it's done, and we'll pay you, because we're not expecting you to do it for free. And far too many companies still are.

Leo Laporte [02:32:45]:
There's a larger risk, of course, because if Microsoft doesn't pay these guys, there are other companies that would gladly pay them even more because especially for iOS exploits because then you can sell them to a nation state and it's really lucrative. So I think as a company you've got to step up and offer at least something because if you don't, the dark web, risking it being sold to the bad guys.

Iain Thomson [02:33:12]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:33:12]:
The dark web will pay it 100%.

Leo Laporte [02:33:14]:
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:33:15]:
I mean, well, not even the dark web. I mean companies like Zero Diem will pay a million for a zero click iOS exploit. It was really interesting that, you know, the pawn to own competition in Dublin this year that's, that's run kind of by Trend Micro. They were offering a million dollar payout for a zero click way to subvert WhatsApp. And that's below what the competition is paying, paying. But enough people don't want to deal with shady brokers and would rather go through a legitimate competition and that's what savings at the moment because you know, these things are hugely, hugely profitable for the companies that can sell them. Yeah, I mean it's, it's scary times out there. And the only reason that we haven't actually had worse problems is that fundamentally most hackers are good people, in my opinion at least.

Leo Laporte [02:34:03]:
No, I think you're right. I think they, they want to do the right thing. But you've got to, you've got to give.

Iain Thomson [02:34:09]:
You can't say, oh, we'll give you a T shirt if you think and someone else is going to give you a million bucks, who are you going to go to realistically?

Leo Laporte [02:34:17]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's take one last break. We have a few other stories to talk about. You're watching This Week in Tech. Great to have Owen and Fitz on the show. Owen Thomas and his little. Is he a wiener dog? What?

Owen Thomas [02:34:33]:
He's a Min pin Chihuahua.

Leo Laporte [02:34:35]:
A min pin Chihuahua.

Iain Thomson [02:34:37]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:34:38]:
Three different. Three good flavors in one.

Owen Thomas [02:34:41]:
I call him a dainty Doberman.

Leo Laporte [02:34:44]:
He's really cute. He's got beautiful, soulful eyes. It's great to have you. As do you, Owen Thomas. And that's somewhat less soulful, Jason Heiner, managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times. Actually, I want to ask you, there's some good articles from the Times that I want to ask you about in just a second. Yeah, yeah, don't go anywhere. We also have the wonderful Jason Heiner who is now editor in chief of The Deep View at the deepview.com and no paywall.

Leo Laporte [02:35:13]:
I love that.

Leo Laporte [02:35:15]:
No paywall. You know, eventually if we add value, you know, we, we could do it. But right I also, I forgot to say at the top that I haven't announced it publicly. It's getting announced publicly. There's a press release going out tomorrow morning, so. So here on Sunday, December 14th.

Leo Laporte [02:35:31]:
What?

Leo Laporte [02:35:31]:
This exclusive that I've mentioned publicly, anyway.

Leo Laporte [02:35:36]:
Oh, my God, I've gone.

Leo Laporte [02:35:37]:
I've only mentioned that I left ZDNet earlier this month and so.

Leo Laporte [02:35:41]:
Wonderful.

Leo Laporte [02:35:42]:
I've wondered first here on TWiT.

Leo Laporte [02:35:45]:
Thank you for the exclusive because I love Leo Laporte and. And it's. It's really a great resource, it looks like, for AI stories of all kinds. I'm going to make this a regular part of my beat check.

Leo Laporte [02:35:57]:
I love it. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:35:59]:
What? You couldn't pick a more interesting topic?

Leo Laporte [02:36:01]:
We're really focused on AI for, you know, aimed at how it's, you know, changing work and how it's changing the world, and yet really focused on, especially professionals, people who are working in AI and are dealing with AI at work and are expecting to deal with it at work. So. So that's what I've spent most of my career doing. Writing for professionals are out.

Leo Laporte [02:36:26]:
Thank you, Jason Snell. It's great to have you. And the wonderful Ian Thompson and Stumpty.

Iain Thomson [02:36:33]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:36:33]:
Sorry, you don't have to fetch poor Stumpy. Aw. How many legs does Stumpy have?

Iain Thomson [02:36:40]:
She has four, but the front two are foreshortened. She's missing a joint in the two front legs, so she's still proud.

Leo Laporte [02:36:47]:
Was it. Was it an injury or was it. Was she born that way?

Iain Thomson [02:36:50]:
I don't know. She was a feral that we rescued, so. But still a massive hunter. I mean, she still goes after the birds outside.

Leo Laporte [02:36:58]:
Oh, yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:36:59]:
She doesn't really get them these days because she's 18, but, you know, it's. It's nice to see her try 18. Well, that's what we think, judging from what the vet said.

Leo Laporte [02:37:09]:
But, yeah, we have a new rescue. Cat was a year and a couple of weeks old.

Iain Thomson [02:37:14]:
Oh, great. So you're getting woken up in the middle of the night.

Leo Laporte [02:37:17]:
Yeah, she's very. She's very. Yes. And I don't. I've never seen this before, but she likes. She doesn't bite me, but she likes to nibble, unlace his fingers, which I think is her way of saying, pet me more.

Iain Thomson [02:37:29]:
Yeah. I mean, Stumpy tried licking my eyeball once to wake me up after I stopped screaming. She never did that again.

Leo Laporte [02:37:38]:
Sandpaper tongue on my eyeball. Not good.

Iain Thomson [02:37:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:37:42]:
Wonderful to have you, Ian. And, you know, you, you, you've mentioned, but it's not official. The Silicon Limey launches in a couple.

Iain Thomson [02:37:49]:
Yeah. January, because no one's going to read it on in December. And I've spent honestly the last couple of months building up a portfolio of writing. So. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:37:57]:
Is it all you?

Iain Thomson [02:37:59]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:38:00]:
And it's.

Iain Thomson [02:38:00]:
Yes, It's.

Leo Laporte [02:38:02]:
It's Silicon Limey.blogspot.com, is that it?

Leo Laporte [02:38:06]:
That's.

Iain Thomson [02:38:06]:
Oh, God, you found old.

Leo Laporte [02:38:08]:
That's your old.

Iain Thomson [02:38:09]:
That's my old blog. Yes. In fact, if you look at the very first post, that was me watching Lewis Hamilton win the World Championship in 2008.

Leo Laporte [02:38:18]:
Oh, how fun.

Iain Thomson [02:38:19]:
So here's a long run. I really. I really should delete that.

Leo Laporte [02:38:24]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but there will be confusion. So what will the address for the new silicon.

Iain Thomson [02:38:30]:
It'll be silicon Limey.com. i've got the domain booked. The website is being set up at the moment.

Leo Laporte [02:38:35]:
It's actually a great.

Iain Thomson [02:38:36]:
And I'm just writing a couple of newsletters and recording some podcasts to go on there.

Leo Laporte [02:38:40]:
So you've been. You've had that name for some time.

Iain Thomson [02:38:44]:
I was surprised that I haven't had the domain for some time and I was surprised that it was actually available. Yeah. Okay. The Instagram post needs posting, needs some work, but I hate as well. Yeah, it's.

Leo Laporte [02:39:00]:
You know what? It's about time you launched out on your own. I cannot wait to see that. This is going to be.

Iain Thomson [02:39:05]:
It's going to be fun, I think.

Leo Laporte [02:39:07]:
Yeah. Letter from America or a letter to America?

Iain Thomson [02:39:11]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:39:12]:
All of us were here. Our show today, brought to you by my mattress. And I think that you should know about this mattress because you need a good night's sleep. Helix Sleep is our sponsor for this section of This Week in Tech. And how do I know that? Because everybody needs a good night's sleep. Sleep. And your mattress is so important for that, especially around this time of year. Nights are long, it's cold, you're busy shopping, hosting parties.

Leo Laporte [02:39:45]:
Sleep is essential. So don't forget, when you're out shopping for everybody in your family this season, maybe you should give yourself a little gift. The gift of a great night's sleep with a brand new Helix mattress. I realized, realized almost a year ago now that we had had our mattress for eight years. The. The advice is, between six and 10 years, you should get it. Swap your mattress out because they wear out. I mean, who knew that? But they do.

Leo Laporte [02:40:12]:
They sag. They. They don't do as good a job. And I thought, well, maybe it's time for us to get a new mattress. So I started doing a little research and I am so glad I found Helix Sleep. Some of this was from the reviews, man. Helix Sleep has won every possible award. Wired tested 100 plus bed in a box mattresses.

Leo Laporte [02:40:32]:
They said the best mattress, the best bed you can buy online. The Helix Midnight Luxe hybrid. That's the one we bought. It was very affirming. Forbes. They tested 90 beds so far this year. The best mattress for every sleeper. Their top pick, the Helix Midnight Luxe Helix is beautifully made.

Leo Laporte [02:40:52]:
Not yet. You know, a lot of these mattresses that you buy are made overseas with low quality, maybe questionable material. And then they put them in a box, put them on a, on a, on a cargo ship, a container ship, and it spends a month going across the sea. By the time you get it open the box, it smells like container ship. You don't want that. Every Helix mattress is made to order. You put in your order and they will assemble it, package it, and ship it. Not from China, but from Arizona.

Leo Laporte [02:41:23]:
American made with the best possible materials. That's why the Helix mattress feels so good. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. You won't even feel earthquakes. You will love your Helix sleep mattress. I know we do. We took the Helix sleep quiz and it asks you what your preferences are. You like soft, you like firm, but it also asks you how you sleep.

Leo Laporte [02:41:45]:
Either a stomach sleeper, back sleeper, sleep side sleeper. We put those in and it recommended which mattress we got. And I'm really glad we got that Midnight Lux. I do the sleep tracking with my oura ring every night and my anecdotal experiences. It's been a huge improvement in my overall sleep and in my most important kind of sleep, deep sleep. Significant. Well, turns out there's some science behind that. In a Wesper sleep study study, Helix measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress.

Leo Laporte [02:42:19]:
And right now go to helixsleep.com TWiT for 25% off site wide during the weekend flash sale. That's helixsleep.com TWiT for 25% off for the weekend flash sale software ends today December 14th. Make sure you enter our show name into the post purchase survey so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends still check them out@helixsleep.com TWiT Weekend Flash Sale Quick.

Leo Laporte [02:42:49]:
Participants on average sleep 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Less tossing and turning, less back pain, less night sweats. You Just feel good. Helix sleep time and time again the most awarded mattress. And right now go to helixsleep.com twit for 25% off site wide during the weekend flash sale. That's helixsleep.com twit For 25% off for the weekend flash sale software ends today December 14th. Make sure you enter our show name into the post purchase survey so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends still check them out@helixsleep.com TWiT Weekend Flash Sale Quick.

Leo Laporte [02:43:31]:
It's like what? Not quick. Get there. Buy that mattress. It's a great mattress. Congratulations to Expedition 33, the game of the year. We kind of thought it might be game awards were last night and this French kind of oddball French indie game beat all the big names. Have you played Clair Obscure? Expedition 33 it swept the game awards best independent game beating Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong already the favorite to win the grand prize but they won the first prize and then they just kept on winning.

Leo Laporte [02:44:21]:
Nine awards in total. Game of the year, the most decorated game in awards history. Anybody any of you played it? I've played it. I'm just playing.

Iain Thomson [02:44:29]:
I haven't played it. But I've got to say it's really nice to see an independent studio winning.

Leo Laporte [02:44:33]:
Like this French studio.

Iain Thomson [02:44:36]:
Nothing wrong. Okay? Traditionally we hate the French in Britain but at the same time they produce some great stuff. Well, it's just, you know, I speak to people at Electronic Arts and various other gaming companies and they're possibly the most depressed people on the planet because they are getting, how can I say this politely shafted left, right and center by management. And it's nice to see an independent company coming through creating something that people want and it's very good for the vibrancy of the gaming community.

Leo Laporte [02:45:06]:
It was. It's a fun game. It has a very interesting, unusual storyline. It's turn based so it's a little different than the first person shooter. You know, boom, boom, boom stuff. It's beautiful and it has definitely a continental kind of ethos to it.

Iain Thomson [02:45:25]:
Are we talking breasts here or.

Leo Laporte [02:45:28]:
I did not get to the breast part. There may be. I got killed pretty quick. So you know. Anyway, congratulations. It was funny. We were talking about this game six months ago and actually that's why I played it because every.

Iain Thomson [02:45:40]:
Oh God, the berets.

Leo Laporte [02:45:42]:
Look at the berets.

Iain Thomson [02:45:43]:
I'm sorry. Way to play up to the national.

Leo Laporte [02:45:46]:
Side, Nicholas Maxon Francombe and Francois Maurice.

Owen Thomas [02:45:50]:
What's this The Mime Awards accepting Dear World.

Leo Laporte [02:45:53]:
Huh?

Iain Thomson [02:45:53]:
The Mime Awards.

Leo Laporte [02:45:55]:
The Mime Awards. They are wearing mime striped mime shirts as well as red berets. They are very French now. Good for them. It's a small indie company. Nintendo had a few awards for some Switch 2 exclusives. Donkey Kong Bonanza, best family game. Mario Kart World, best sport racing game.

Leo Laporte [02:46:17]:
Grand Theft Auto 6, which isn't out yet. Second year in a row won most anticipated game award.

Iain Thomson [02:46:27]:
Still waiting for the new Half Life.

Leo Laporte [02:46:28]:
But go on for a while. Yeah. Duke Nukem Forever.

Iain Thomson [02:46:32]:
Oh, don't get me started.

Leo Laporte [02:46:34]:
Wuthering Waves, a Chinese game with a huge mobile audience, got the Player's Voice award. That was the only one that's determined by public online of votes. I'm glad to see a little indie game company get such success. Congratulations. Is this your story, Owen? I can't get in here because I'm using an ad blocker. Could a Twitter former lawyer is trying to get the trademark for Twitter.

Owen Thomas [02:47:03]:
Yeah, it's our story by my colleague Will Hicks. It's fascinating really. It's basically a former Twitter lawyer arguing that X Corp, by changing the name and really wiping out almost any reference to Twitter from its website, has abandoned the trademark and therefore it's up for grabs.

Iain Thomson [02:47:25]:
Interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:47:27]:
Call me. I'd like to go in on that one.

Owen Thomas [02:47:29]:
Yeah, so I mean, we'll see if that flies. You know, twitter.com is still very much in use by, by x.com you know, it just redirects to x.com?

Leo Laporte [02:47:43]:
I don't think it does anymore. I think that's what precipitated this because they told people. Let me see if it does.

Owen Thomas [02:47:49]:
Yeah, it still does. Still redirects.

Leo Laporte [02:47:51]:
Yeah, they told people with two factor authentication that they would have to reset it because twitter.com would no longer work. I guess you could have a redirect. So that's a good argument that maybe he is still keeping the trademark.

Iain Thomson [02:48:05]:
Yeah, it's, you know, it's going to solid read. All right.

Leo Laporte [02:48:08]:
Yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:48:10]:
You know, and, and I remember actually X.com made a, made a big deal about how they had like actually moved all the infrastructure off of twitter.com which is, you know, it's a lot of little fiddly code, ch. Code changes that you have to make. So, you know, it is, it is a fair question of like can you maintain a trademark on, you know, on a former name? I don't know the ins and outs of trademark laws, but this, it seems like this case would be A good one to test that and explore exactly what US trademark law has to say.

Leo Laporte [02:48:46]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:48:46]:
You have also may be in trouble with this one. So I was just going to say because I, I've known over, over because having had to deal with this in trademarks, you know, when I was at ZDNet, it, when we were, we used to have ZDNet in a lot of different countries as well as using certain versions of the mark and things like that. And you really do. One of the things that the, you know, lawyers over time reinforced over and over again with us is like you have to be using the mark regularly or else you're gonna have a hard time defending it, you know, in court if you're not using it. If you're not, if it's not like you're using the logo, you're using the usage of it in, in various places and you can show. So it's true like that. I don't know that the domain name is enough like. Because they really don't make use of Twitter that I, that I've seen very often anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:49:44]:
Now the public still does, but I don't think that'll count because. Because yeah, they, they don't specifically use it on, on almost anything that I've seen. That's interesting.

Owen Thomas [02:49:55]:
Yeah, but, but it seems like the, you know, the, the precedent is three plus years of non use. So I don't think X has made that, you know, hit that threshold.

Leo Laporte [02:50:07]:
He just wants to get in line now.

Owen Thomas [02:50:09]:
But the, you know, the, the other thing is, is intent. And you know, Musk has made his intent, intent very clear here.

Leo Laporte [02:50:16]:
To drop Twitter. Yeah. Now X, the Everything App. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:50:20]:
I'm just so glad he took that enormous illuminated X off the top of the building because that pissed off a.

Leo Laporte [02:50:25]:
Lot of it wasn't there very long. Did you see it? Was it really bright?

Iain Thomson [02:50:28]:
Yeah, I did see it and I felt for the people that bought very expensive apartments across from the building who are now getting drowned out by the light from that bloody thing.

Leo Laporte [02:50:37]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:50:38]:
So it was great when they took it down.

Leo Laporte [02:50:39]:
Didn't last long. I think that he, he heard from a few people, including the city of San Francisco kids. We're, we're. I think we've done enough damage to the news ecosystem for this week. Thank you, Ian, for being here. I appreciate it. Good luck with the Silicon Limey. That's great.

Leo Laporte [02:50:59]:
If I don't see you before Christmas, have a happy holiday. Do you celebrate Boxing Day and all of those silly things?

Iain Thomson [02:51:07]:
I tell you, the first year I came over because. To explain to America, because basically in the UK, from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day, everyone takes that time off.

Leo Laporte [02:51:17]:
Yes.

Iain Thomson [02:51:18]:
Apart from a few unfortunate souls who volunteer to man the office. And I can remember the first year I came over here, I was sitting on BART going into work on Boxing Day, thinking, this is just bollocks. I hate this so much. You know, you're heading into work slightly hungover, no one's going to be announcing anything, no one's going to be doing anything. So. Yes, unfortunately, however, I'm on American time, so. So I have a piece for. I can't say who, but a.

Iain Thomson [02:51:45]:
A large cloud and online soup provider to write up by December 31st. So I'll be spending the week on.

Leo Laporte [02:51:53]:
That and online soup providers.

Iain Thomson [02:51:56]:
So uk.

Leo Laporte [02:51:58]:
Oh.

Iain Thomson [02:51:59]:
So, yes. And also cooking a goose for Christmas because after Thanksgiving, I'm sick of. Good.

Leo Laporte [02:52:05]:
Do you do the British tradition of poppers at the. At the Christmas dinner?

Iain Thomson [02:52:09]:
We do do Christmas crackers when we can find them, but I'm sorry, the American. The American ones are absolute rubbish.

Leo Laporte [02:52:15]:
We have a store in town that has a wide variety of crackers. They may be rubbish, I don't know, but if they pick some up, it's.

Iain Thomson [02:52:23]:
Traditional to have a bad joke in the cracker. But some of the toys they put in there are really quite. Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:52:28]:
So no, I mean, Cracker Jack Co. Probably. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:52:31]:
We'll just be having a few friends and family over and. And you don't get much meat on a goose, so it'll be fairly limited. But what are you up to, too?

Leo Laporte [02:52:40]:
Well, we're going to have our. We are. We are doing the thing you just recommended, which is we are taking actually the first couple of days before Christmas, Christmas Eve through New Year's Eve off, we'll have best of shows. Our Christmas show is next Sunday. Paris Martineau, Mikah Sargent, Steve Gibson and I will do our annual kind of holiday extravaganza.

Iain Thomson [02:53:03]:
Always good seeing Mikah on the show.

Leo Laporte [02:53:05]:
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun, so I hope you'll tune in next Sunday for that. And then it's a best of on the 28th. Intelligent Machines. We have some of our best interviews, including Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram. Yeah, it's going to be a. It's going to be a really good episode, I think, of the kind of the best interviews from the year. We're doing that across. Across the board.

Leo Laporte [02:53:27]:
Everybody's going to take some time off. I hope that'll be nice. How about You, Jason, you don't have a company Christmas party to go to this year.

Leo Laporte [02:53:33]:
That's right. That's right. No, probably. So working on, you know, our primary thing at the. At the Deep View is our newsletter. So we're. We're working on some, you know, look back and look ahead stuff that we'll publish over the, you know, the last few weeks because they're pretty quiet, you know, people are not too focused.

Leo Laporte [02:53:52]:
There's not a lot of news.

Leo Laporte [02:53:53]:
There's not a lot of tech news or AI news or any.

Leo Laporte [02:53:55]:
This is always a hard time of year for our shows because there's not a lot that's going on. Actually, there was a lot this week, weirdly enough. But yeah, often there's not a lot going on, which is why we do the best of. Well, have a wonderful holiday with your family. Do you have a tree?

Leo Laporte [02:54:11]:
No. So. So I am. I'm Baha'. I. You know, I'm not Christian, but I have family who is. I'm going to visit in Indiana, some family, and yeah, we celebrate with them.

Iain Thomson [02:54:22]:
Is there a good Lord wrap up warm?

Leo Laporte [02:54:24]:
Yeah, yeah, it's.

Leo Laporte [02:54:26]:
It's like literally under zero up there, you know, right now.

Leo Laporte [02:54:30]:
Yeah, they're having a polar vortex. So what. Is there a. Is there a. You know, usually there is some sort of winter solstice holiday in most faiths. Is there a Baha'i holiday around this time?

Leo Laporte [02:54:41]:
So. So there's not. But in the spring, like right before. So the. The month before the last month of the year, the spring solstice is the first day of the year in Baha'i calendar. And in the.

Leo Laporte [02:54:56]:
Oh, that's a better time to have it than January 1st, actually. That makes sense.

Leo Laporte [02:55:02]:
And, and so. So yeah. So then the last month of the year is a month of fasting, and then the. Right before the fasting is sort of the big. The big holiday to. Before to. Yeah. Prepare for the.

Leo Laporte [02:55:14]:
The fasting season.

Leo Laporte [02:55:15]:
So when I was in high school, my girlfriend was Baha'i, so I.

Leo Laporte [02:55:19]:
Remember you telling me that.

Leo Laporte [02:55:20]:
Yeah, I really. I really, really appreciate it. Appreciate the faith. It's a beautiful faith. So good. Well, nice. Have a. Have a lovely winter solstice then, I guess.

Leo Laporte [02:55:31]:
Yes, yes. No, look, it's in the U.S. it's clearly, you know, very cultural too. There's lots of.

Leo Laporte [02:55:39]:
Oh, yeah, you can't get away from it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. How about you, Owen? What is your plan besides wearing that crazy jacket to all the parties?

Owen Thomas [02:55:49]:
You know, we are actually sticking in San Francisco for the holiday. And I've got the. The week between Christmas and New Year's off, and we're gonna kind of do a little staycation, check out SFMoma.

Iain Thomson [02:56:03]:
Oh, nice.

Leo Laporte [02:56:04]:
Is there a special show that you want to see there?

Leo Laporte [02:56:06]:
No, just.

Owen Thomas [02:56:07]:
We got. We got a membership this year and, you know, I haven't made enough use of it. And there's also, like, you know, every time we go out of town, I look at the calendar, there's like 50 things happening, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:56:20]:
Yeah. You know, San Francisco's really fun. There's. Yeah, there's a lot of cultural stuff. The Museum of Modern Art is great. We often will go up to see shows or go down, I guess, to see shows at SFMoma. And there's the Palace of the Legion of Honor and there's Golden Gate Park and so many wonderful things, even in the.

Iain Thomson [02:56:41]:
And of course, we went to the.

Leo Laporte [02:56:43]:
Legion of Honor decorations, right? The Legion of Honor, yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:56:47]:
We went to the Legion of Honor to see the Manet and Morisot exhibition, and that was absolutely fantastic.

Leo Laporte [02:56:52]:
Yes.

Iain Thomson [02:56:54]:
I had no idea they were so close. But there's so many good museums here, apart from, I have to say, the Science and Technology Museum.

Leo Laporte [02:57:02]:
You don't like the Exploratorium?

Iain Thomson [02:57:04]:
No, the Exploratorium is fine. But the Science Museum opposite the de Young, I didn't even. They're now charging 50 bucks a ticket. Oh, Claude. The albino alligator has just died.

Leo Laporte [02:57:15]:
Just passed. So you didn't even get the alligator.

Iain Thomson [02:57:17]:
Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's. They do do a very nice thing on Thursday evenings occasionally where they have adult nights, where, you know, with bars and that sort of thing, you can go up to the roof and they'll show you Saturn and Jupiter. But for standard visitors, way too expensive.

Leo Laporte [02:57:35]:
Yeah, yeah. I didn't realize it was so expensive for museum. That's crazy. I know.

Iain Thomson [02:57:41]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:57:42]:
That's free in the uk, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:57:45]:
And then check your social media profiles to come in.

Leo Laporte [02:57:47]:
So the difference is the government probably subsidizes them in the uk.

Iain Thomson [02:57:52]:
It's education.

Leo Laporte [02:57:53]:
I have a feeling. Not. Yeah, we're not that big on education. That's.

Iain Thomson [02:57:56]:
That's communism.

Owen Thomas [02:57:59]:
Yeah, we. We figured out that the basic membership at SFMOMA is get. You know, is basically same cost as, like, going there two or three times in a year.

Leo Laporte [02:58:07]:
That's the idea.

Iain Thomson [02:58:08]:
And that's why we got our membership as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Owen Thomas [02:58:11]:
Plus your support is supporting a good institution, Right?

Iain Thomson [02:58:14]:
Exactly. Well, and they've Got a decent cafe as well, so.

Leo Laporte [02:58:18]:
They do. They do. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, Owen. Thank you. Great to have all three of you and I hope you have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you in the new year. Okay.

Iain Thomson [02:58:32]:
Always. Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:58:33]:
All right. Thanks, everyone for joining us. We really appreciate your support all year long. Again, our holiday episode is next week and I'm looking forward to that. There's a lot of special events going on this week, too, in the Club. Find out more by joining the Club at TWiT.tv. Club TWiT. We do This Week in Tech every Sunday at 2 to 5pm Pacific.

Leo Laporte [02:58:54]:
That's 5 to 8 in the evening. On the East coast, it is 2200 UTC, so you can figure out what that is in your time zone. We stream live. That's the only reason I mentioned the live times, because we do stream it as we're doing live. Doing it right now. We're on live in the discord for our club members. We're also live on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. All right, but you don't have to watch live.

Leo Laporte [02:59:20]:
That's just, you know, that's if you like participating in the chats and stuff like that after the fact. You can get a copy of the show from our website, TWiT.tv. There's video and audio there. There's a video channel on YouTube dedicated to TWiT. In fact, if you go to YouTube.com/TWiT you can see all the shows and all the channels all lined up there and even little tidbits and best of and things like that. And of course, you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. In fact, we hope you will. That way you'll get TWiT the minute it's finished so you can have it for your Monday morning commute.

Leo Laporte [02:59:53]:
Thank you everybody for joining us. I really appreciate it. It's great to see you. We'll see you again next week for our holiday special. Meanwhile, it's my sad and solemn duty to say another TWiT is in the can.