This Week in Tech 1009: Andy Giveth & Bill Taketh Away

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Tech 1009: Andy Giveth & Bill Taketh Away

Release Date: December 9, 2024
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Harry McCracken, Lou Mareska, Christina Warren

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Introduction

In Episode 1009 of This Week in Tech titled "Andy Giveth & Bill Taketh Away," host Leo Laporte brings together a panel of esteemed technology personalities to discuss a myriad of pressing tech issues. The episode is marked by the special appearance of Christina Warren, who balances her time between her role at GitHub and attending the final Taylor Swift Eras concert.

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Christina Warren’s Attendance at Taylor Swift's Final Eras Tour Concert (00:58 - 03:12)

Christina Warren shares her excitement about attending the last concert of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in Vancouver, British Columbia.

• Christina Warren (02:04): "The flight attendants were getting in on it when we were flying out this morning. The whole downtown area, it's a big deal everywhere."

• Leo Laporte (02:09): "The world economy is going to tank now that she's not bringing all of that money into the ecosystem."

Christina reflects on the economic impact of Taylor Swift's tour, highlighting the significant influx of income into local economies.

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Silicon Valley Billionaires in Trump’s Transition Team (03:17 - 27:22)

The episode delves into the influence of Silicon Valley magnates within the Trump administration's transition team. Figures like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison play pivotal roles, raising questions about their impact on governmental policies and national security.

• Harry McCracken (04:06): "One of the great things about these other social networks is you don't need Twitter numbers to get right something that's a lot better than Twitter."

• Leo Laporte (06:14): Discusses Steve Gibson's concerns about Microsoft potentially using personal data for training Large Language Models (LLMs), which are later refuted by Microsoft's assurance.

The panel discusses the appointment of David Sacks as the White House AI and Crypto Czar, emphasizing his lack of direct experience in these fields but noting his ties to the PayPal mafia.

• Lou Mareska (07:18): "We focus a lot on synthetic data and we generate synthetic data that actually is relevant to the things that we're trying to do for inference."

Concerns are raised about the intertwining of private sector expertise with public governance, particularly regarding AI and cryptocurrency regulations.

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NASA’s New Director: Jared Isaacman (32:10 - 35:49)

Jared Isaacman, a CEO with a passion for space exploration and ties to SpaceX, is highlighted as the new NASA director. His vision aims to cultivate a thriving space economy and transition humanity into a true spacefaring civilization.

• Leo Laporte (32:10): "He envisions a thriving space economy and vows to usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization."

• Harry McCracken (35:35): Raises concerns about Elon Musk's influence and potential conflicts of interest within the administration.

The panel debates Isaacman's potential to revolutionize NASA by reducing bureaucratic inefficiencies and enhancing collaboration with private aerospace companies.

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Cryptocurrency Developments (07:48 - 19:37)

The discussion shifts to the fluctuating landscape of cryptocurrency, highlighting significant events and the general sentiment towards digital currencies.

• Harry McCracken (14:15): "My investment in bitcoin and Ethereum is finally up. Maybe two years ago I spent $80 on cryptocurrency."

• Leo Laporte (14:53): Expresses caution, likening Bitcoin investment to gambling due to its speculative nature.

The panel examines the meteoric rise of Bitcoin, influenced by political contributions and the involvement of high-profile figures. They also discuss the volatile nature of meme coins like Hock, which experienced a rapid pump-and-dump crash.

• Christina Warren (12:54): "No, no. But if what she says is true... it's almost like, okay, they spray really dumb people who are not even going to be part of the rug pull."

Concerns about the ethical implications of cryptocurrency investments and their association with regulatory challenges are emphasized.

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AI Advancements and OpenAI's New Initiatives (20:35 - 103:47)

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly focusing on OpenAI's new offerings and the integration of AI into various platforms.

• Lou Mareska (05:16): "I'm film app or whatever it is. Yes. So it's FilmGirl one word."

• Leo Laporte (13:50): "Have I been way down? So I'm rolling in dough mainly from bitcoin being at $100,000."

OpenAI's $200/month Plan:

• Lou Mareska (06:12): "Copilot for Excel and Python... it's really fun."

OpenAI introduced a premium plan offering enhanced reasoning capabilities and priority access to new AI models.

• Harry McCracken (14:11): "As far as I can tell, it's pretty much a high stakes slot machine."

Copilot for Excel with Python:

• Lou Mareska (125:40): "You can write Python code in Excel now."

This integration allows users to perform advanced data analysis and visualization directly within Excel using Python, significantly enhancing productivity for data scientists and analysts.

• Lou Mareska (126:03): "Now Copilot will actually write it for you..."

Notebook LM and AI in Content Creation:

• Harry McCracken (93:00): "I am still trying to teach ChatGPT TRS 80, level 2 basic."

The panel explores tools like Notebook LM, which leverages AI to organize transcripts and notes, proving invaluable for journalists and content creators.

• Harry McCracken (100:11): "He likes doing the questioning of stuff that wasn't able to with other models."

AI-Generated Voices and Ethical Concerns:

• Leo Laporte (116:45): Demonstrates AI-generated voices from 11 Labs, showcasing their capability to emulate voices of famous personalities.

The ethical implications of AI-generated content, especially concerning voice synthesis and intellectual property, are debated.

• Christina Warren (120:29): "I don't like the way this was carved out."

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Microsoft’s Privacy Policies and Data Use (05:24 - 07:02)

The conversation touches upon Microsoft's stance on user data privacy, especially in the context of training AI models.

• Lou Mareska (07:02): "We don't need people's data."

Microsoft assures that personal content will not be utilized for training their LLMs, focusing instead on synthetic data to maintain user privacy.

• Leo Laporte (06:14): "Microsoft made very clear we now have never and will not use your personal content to train our LLMs."

The panel commends Microsoft's approach to data privacy amidst growing concerns over big tech's data handling practices.

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Intel’s Struggles in the Chip Industry (77:12 - 87:56)

The episode scrutinizes Intel's declining dominance in the semiconductor industry, juxtaposed against competitors like AMD and Nvidia.

• Leo Laporte (73:38): "They were like, it doesn't matter that our Atom stuff is terrible and that can't be used in phones."

• Harry McCracken (75:07): "Pat Gelsinger had some good plans. I don't know if anybody could have done this turnaround."

The discussion highlights Intel's failure to innovate effectively, missing critical trends like mobile computing and AI, leading to a loss of market share.

• Lou Mareska (79:57): "I hope they stay around. There's a competition that we need to keep them."

The potential impacts of Intel's restructuring or possible acquisition by other tech giants are explored, emphasizing the broader implications for Silicon Valley's ecosystem.

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DeepMind’s Weather Prediction System (92:35 - 107:16)

Google's DeepMind unveils a groundbreaking weather forecasting system that surpasses traditional models in accuracy and reliability.

• Harry McCracken (106:35): "They had an earlier one which I did mention, which itself was impressive. But this one is like on a whole another level."

• Leo Laporte (107:35): "Faster, more accurate forecasts up to 15 days ahead of time, and they are better at predicting extreme events."

This advancement is lauded for its potential to revolutionize industries reliant on precise weather data, from agriculture to disaster management.

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AI in Content Creation and Ethical Implications (107:36 - 117:56)

The panel discusses the rise of AI in generating content, including podcasts and audiobooks, and the accompanying ethical dilemmas.

• Leo Laporte (114:43): "There's this czisme voice that looks just like me, but sounds just like me."

• Christina Warren (117:15): "I do feel bad because we can do it faster.”

Concerns about the displacement of voice actors and the authenticity of AI-generated content are raised, highlighting the balance between technological innovation and preserving creative professions.

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Data Protection and Security (03:35 - 122:46)

The importance of data security in an increasingly digital world is emphasized, with mentions of tools like Thinkst Canary.

• Lou Mareska (07:18): "We generate synthetic data that actually is relevant to the things that we're trying to do for inference."

• Leo Laporte (07:29): "Our show today, brought to you by a tool everyone should have in their business, a Thinkst Canary."

The panel underscores the necessity of proactive security measures to safeguard against cyber threats, discussing practical solutions for businesses to monitor and protect their networks.

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Closing Remarks and Sponsors (122:46 - End)

In the final segments, the hosts express gratitude to their guests and supporters, while also highlighting sponsors like Thinkst Canary, ExpressVPN, ZipRecruiter, Lookout, and Veeam. The importance of community support through Club Twit is reiterated, encouraging listeners to contribute to the show's sustainability.

• Leo Laporte (155:03): "We are working hard to get Christina Warren out of here before the ERAS tour begins."

• Christina Warren (147:56): "But all I'm saying is at this point, because just my own, similar to Harry, I put $2,000 in a Robinhood account a few years ago..."

The episode concludes with light-hearted discussions about technology’s future, accurate timekeeping, and the auction of the original ruby slippers from "The Wizard of Oz."

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Notable Quotes

• Christina Warren (02:09): "The world economy is going to tank now that she's not bringing all of that money into the ecosystem."

• **D

avid Sacks (David Zacks never directly quoted):** "OpenAI is a piranha, that a for profit piranha."

• Harry McCracken (14:53): "My investment in bitcoin and Ethereum is finally up."

• Lou Mareska (07:18): "We generate synthetic data that actually is relevant..."

• Leo Laporte (116:45): "He chooses to have control without being influenced by foreign actors."

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Conclusion

Episode 1009 of This Week in Tech offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between technology, politics, and society. From the integration of AI into everyday tools like Excel to the geopolitical ramifications of tech moguls entering government roles, the panel provides insightful analysis into the current tech landscape. Ethical considerations surrounding AI content creation and data privacy further enrich the discussion, making this episode a must-listen for tech enthusiasts seeking to understand the complexities of modern technology.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Great show for you today. Harry McCracken is here from Fast Company. Lou Mareska, former host of twyet. Lou works now he has for some time at Microsoft. He's in charge of Excel, Copilot plus Python. We'll talk a little bit about that. It's fascinating. Also, she's on her way to the last Taylor Swift eras concert tonight, but Christina Warren is going to make an appearance. We're so glad to have her. Lots to talk about. Silicon Valley's billionaires are moving into the White House. Is that good? I think it might be. The new NASA director is all about space exploration, the 12 days of open AI. And now Google can predict the weather better than the best weather prediction systems in the world. Plus, John Wayne can read you your bedtime story. All that and more coming up next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Harry McCracken]

This, this is TWiT.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1009, recorded December 8, 2024. Andy Giveth and Bill taketh away. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the great news of the week, the tech news of the week with my dear friends, every one of them a dear friend. But this is a special occasion because Christina Warren is here, above and beyond. Christina, first of all, I said, is that really your backdrop? And she said, yes, that is not fake. Christina, where are you?

[Christina Warren]

I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm in Canada. I am a couple hours away from going to the very final Taylor Swift Eras tour show.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow. Yeah, the very, the last one. Oh, come on. She's going to add another leg.

[Christina Warren]

No, this is it. This is it for this tourist. This is going to be, this is huge breaking tour. Yeah, this is huge. This is, you know, almost 200 shows and just crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

The world economy is going to tank now that she's not bringing all of that money into the ecosystem.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, honestly, Vancouver, it was wild at the airport when I landed. They had all kinds of stuff up in the airport. The flight attendants were getting in on it when we were flying out this morning. The whole downtown area, there's, it's a big deal everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah, like they, they, they know what this is doing in terms of what income it's bringing in and they are embracing it big time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, you've got a nice hotel room. Do you think that this will be, this will certainly be at the end of it, teary and special. Yes.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I mean, that's. Otherwise I wouldn't have. I thought about. Do I want to go? No, I'm not going to go. This is dumb. This is dumb.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I was in Korea two days ago, so that was part of it. I was like, am I going to be able to stay awake? Am I going to be able to be alive? And then I was like, my mom was the one who was like, just do it. You will regret not going.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. You would be sitting there sad, so.

[Christina Warren]

Glad I'd be watching on TikTok and I'd be very sad that I wasn't there.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're going to get through this and get you there.

[Christina Warren]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Fourth time. So you know what you're going to see. It's not going to be a surprise.

[Christina Warren]

No, no. It is a different set list than when I saw it last. But I've seen it, you know, on online.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they still roll her out in the janitor cart to get her to the stage or is that. Everybody knows that now?

[Christina Warren]

No, yeah, they all know that. But she, she comes out in like various ways. They have all kinds of.

[Leo Laporte]

They have different methods because they have to. The stage is surrounded by people, so they have to get her there sneakily. Otherwise she, you know, everybody say, oh, oh, I'm so happy for you. We're going to get this done fast just for you. Christina, I'm going to get you out of here in an hour and a half. It'll be the shortest way to in the last 20 years. Harry McCracken is also here. Always great to have Harry on Fast company and we're working to get Harry a big following on Blue Sky. How many people do you have on Blue sky now?

[Harry McCracken]

I have like 5,500 or something. So I, I've been on it for a while, but I didn't really.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not going to get Twitter numbers? Do you think you're going to get Twitter numbers?

[Harry McCracken]

Well, you never. I mean, one of the great things about these other social networks is you don't need Twitter numbers to get right something that's a lot better than Twitter. I mean, I think in terms of people commenting on my stuff and likes and whatnot, I've already surpassed present day Twitter with, with a fraction.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that awesome?

[Harry McCracken]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Well, we're going to get you to 10,000 today. Tonight.

[Harry McCracken]

Done.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what we're going to do. Everybody Follow Harry McCracken.com is his official handle on Blue Sky. I'm Leolaport Me. So, yeah, I understand what you're doing there. That's a nice thing about threads. What are you. Christina, we might as well give you a plug.

[Christina Warren]

I'm a. I'm film app or whatever it is. Yes. So it's FilmGirl one word. Because they don't do underscores, unfortunately. So it's FilmGirl one Word. I have a bunch of domains, so I'm probably going to wind up mapping it. Yeah. And I thought about doing that, but then I'm going to have to probably still squat on the old one because I've been on Blue Sky.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it keeps your. I think you keep everything. I changed it, I think. So you can switch. Yeah, you could switch.

[Harry McCracken]

I was. I was Harry McCracken at BSKY Social. The first.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Lou Mareska is also here, another dear friend, longtime host of this Week in Enterprise Tech and a huge Taylor Swift fan.

[Lou Mareska]

Oh, you know it. I travel. I travel far and wide for Taylor Swift.

[Leo Laporte]

He's like, he's in the bus following the band. Principal engineering manager for. Hey, this is good. Excel Copilot. You're on the hot seat these days. That's awesome.

[Lou Mareska]

We are.

[Leo Laporte]

So you were Excel, but you've now kind of specialized in the AI portion.

[Lou Mareska]

Yes, I was on the Office platform Groups. This is a group, like doing all the programming interfaces within Office. And then we kind of rolled into Excel Copilot for Excel and Python. So my team focuses on the Python side of things.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah, it's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Really cool.

[Lou Mareska]

Really fun. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have lots of questions, but we'll get. Actually one question we're going to flatten. Two weeks ago, Steve Gibson on Security now followed along with a lot of blogs railing against Microsoft because it seemed that they were going to start using your personal content to train their LLMs. I talked to Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell immediately and the show the next day, and they said, oh, no, no. It's always said this is not going to. We're not training our LLMs on it. But the following week, this past week, Microsoft made very clear we now have never and will not use your personal content to train our LLMs. They wouldn't want to. They won't. They don't want my personal.

[Lou Mareska]

That's your organization's content. Right. I think that's saying it would kill business.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Lou Mareska]

Right. Yeah. I think we focus a lot on synthetic data and we generate synthetic data that actually is relevant to the things that we're trying to do for inference. And it actually allows us to really fine tune These things to whatever we want, so we don't need people's data.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. Yeah. Steve backed it down, which I was glad, because. Yeah, I think that's been pretty clear. By the way, Christina, thank you. I got my GitHub Universe name badge.

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is a Pomeroni. Yeah. That's three years in a row now. Thank you.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, yes. Well, we love you. We love you. And if anybody else wants to buy those, we've actually, for the first time ever, put those up on the GitHub shop.com and so we still have some. So you can go to the GitHub shop.com if you want to get your own hackable badge.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a processor, by the way. I love the circuit board, but it's a processor, so you can plug into it and modify it, change it. It's got switches. It's a Pomeroni. So you can.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, exactly. You can plug in a screen, battery, a whole thing. So by defaul, we have that LED screen, but if you wanted to put in, like, a color screen or something, you have to do that. You can connect it to a battery if you want to be able to change things on the fly. So it's pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Maybe I'll put Tetris.

[Christina Warren]

You can put Doom on it. People have put Doom on it, actually.

[Lou Mareska]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're supposed to wear that around your neck at the GitHub universe.

[Christina Warren]

You can use it any other conference you want to go to. I mean, obviously make it say anything you want.

[Leo Laporte]

The first one I got had my Twitter handle and account on it. I don't think this one does. Oh, it does. It has Twitter. Well, I'm at Leo laporte everywhere, so. Okay, that's. That'll work. It's not. It's not. It's agnostic. All right, so I guess we should talk about the news. I've been putting it off. You know, this election ended up being very interesting. Turns out Elon Musk, now with the fec, you know, information has come out, donated a quarter of a billion dollars or very nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to President Trump's campaign. And he got a good payout for. I think he got his money's worth because he is very much part of the transition team. New York Times story, I think, a couple of days ago, actually says it's not just Elon, but it's Elon's buddies. And they are not just, you know, doing doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency. They are in on the interviews right at the beginning, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison of Oracle were house guests. Went to the trans. The first transition meeting. I brought the two richest people in the world today. Trump told his advisors. What did you bring and miss? His mom, May Musk has actually been in, apparently on some of the meetings. So Elon brought his mom. He also brought a whole bunch of people, including this Jade Birchall. He's the head of Elon Musk's family office. He's been interviewing candidates for the job, for jobs at the State Department, even though that's not his bailiwick. Ftc, fcc. Marc Andreessen is there, of, of course, the guy who invented Netscape Navigator when he was a student at, you know, whatchamacallit in Illinois and at the NCSA in Illinois. And he. Let's see, who else. Sean McGuire, who is a Caltech PhD in physics and investor at Sequoia Capital. He's been interviewing candidates for Defense Department jobs.

[Harry McCracken]

David Sachs.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that's the big story. David Sachs, who spoke at the Republican convention, is the host of the all in podcast, is now the White House AI and crypto czar. Despite the fact that he actually as active as he is, he's a part of the PayPal mafia. He doesn't really have any active participation in an AI company or a crypto company. I guess that's good. I guess that we know of. That we know of all of this has done one thing for sure that we can see, which is propelled bitcoin. Well over $100,000 a coin. This is good for crypto. Doge is up. Everything's up. Meme. Coins are up. Hock to a coin is up.

[Christina Warren]

Not that one.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not that. That one's up and then down. But that's another story. You think I'm joking? There actually is a Hawk coin.

[Christina Warren]

No, I know, I know. And they rug pulled everybody, right? Was that what happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they dumped 90%. And she, Haley Welch, who is the Hochtua woman, is getting a little controversy because she says, I didn't do it. I didn't do it. Nor did my team do it, but somebody did, was pumped up. Launched on December 4th at 10:00pm, quickly rose to a market cap of, get this, $490 million, then went down 91% in three hours. Kind of a classic pump and dump, I would guess. But who did it? We don't know because it's a cryptocurrency get rich quick. Yeah, this is her Hawkonomics slide deck. It's Short and sweet. So she apparently didn't make any money on it, which just shows, you know, she's not. She's not. I don't know what it shows.

[Lou Mareska]

Anyway, people did snipe it though. So there's. Somebody did make. Somebody made a ton of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you. $490 million is.

[Christina Warren]

I was gonna say somebody made money. And if she didn't, then. Then she was a victim as well as being used to bring more people into the scheme. No, she's not. To be clear, she's not. Except. No, no. But if what she says is true, and who knows, she could have actually cashed out, then in some ways it's almost like, okay, they spray really dumb people who are not even going to be part of the rug pull that they're putting their reputation up to screw people over on reputation of the hock to a girl.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's talk about a real coin, Bitcoin, or you could talk about all the others that have gained eth.

[Lou Mareska]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And all the other stable coins and so forth. But let's talk about bitcoin. Would you buy it? Today?

[Harry McCracken]

My investment in bitcoin and Ethereum is finally up. Maybe two years ago I spent $80 on cryptocurrency. I got those and a couple of other ones which are still down. But my $80 is finally up after two years. Have I been way down? So I'm rolling in dough mainly from bitcoin being at $100,000.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. I have 7.85 bitcoin I cannot access.

[Harry McCracken]

Oh, no.

[Christina Warren]

We don't like to talk about this, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I know we don't like to talk.

[Harry McCracken]

About this, but I don't think I would not buy a lot of bitcoin personally because it's gambling.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay. So the conventional wisdom is certainly what we've been saying for the last few years is because it's not tied to any real value, it's not. It's not even gold. It's not even silver. It's definitely not a company. It's just speculative that when you buy it, it's purely speculative. There's nothing. It's whether people think it's worth whatever it's worth, which means it's risky.

[Harry McCracken]

As far as I can tell, it's pretty much a high stakes slot machine. And in terms of investing in it, and that's not a blanket statement about the idea of cryptocurrency, which I certainly don't dismiss out of hand in general, but as an investment vehicle, if you have enough money that you don't care all that much whether it goes up or down. Maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. On the other hand, I could see being bullish right now in crypto, given what's happening in the new administration.

[Harry McCracken]

That is true.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

We may be in for four years of cryptocurrency being looked on with a lot more positive vibes than it has over the past four, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

My advice would be, if you do buy it, get out of it by January 20, 2029. One of the things now I've seen bitcoin advocates say is, oh, and by the way, as many companies have done, including Venezuela, always a paragon for us here in the United States, you should eliminate capital gains taxes on bitcoin profits. Just don't tax them. Just let them all roll in. And I feel like that's the kind of thing we're talking about here. This is, in a way, the. All right. It almost feels like the scammers are now in charge of the country.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, it reminds me of the 90s when a lot of people said essentially that the Internet should not be taxed, which certainly did not last forever. Forever as an idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That made a little more sense because you have a nascent technology, you want it to grow, you want Amazon and companies like it to do well, and then eventually you can tax it as they did, you know, sales tax and so forth. This, though, why do we want Bitcoin to grow unless we're holding it?

[Lou Mareska]

Unless I'm a skeptic here, I actually. Yeah, I mean, I actually like the competition for banks because I'm not a big bank person. And so, like, having them have some level of competition that goes around this type of thing. You know, there's. There's actually data that shows, like, potential interest rates could drop because of it. There's, you know, there's better efficiency when it comes to actually cryptocurrency, which would help force kind of banks like Chase and some other banks to be more efficient. So, I don't know. I'm hoping that this will somewhat push them in that specific direction. I'm sure there'll be some negatives. Like, there's volatility and impact on other, smaller banks that are out there that, you know, so. But I do feel like there's going to be something like. I feel like it's going to definitely push in some direction. I'm hoping somewhat positive.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I am. If you're an optimist, I think it would be a good time to say, you know, maybe this is all going to work out. The government's going to get much more efficient. That bitcoin is going to end up. Maybe the US Will create a digital coin itself, a stablecoin, that would then kind of. I don't know. I don't understand economics well enough to know what the impact of that would be. I don't think anybody does.

[Harry McCracken]

To me, it looks like we might end up with a cryptocurrency reserve, and I don't understand the implications of that.

[Leo Laporte]

President of El Salvador is very happy about his cryptocurrency reserve. Right. You're happy until it collapses.

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, it reminds me a lot of Vegas, you know, those beautiful big buildings. But then they always put up a billboard of the guy who won a million dollars at the slots. What they don't show you is the 999,000 people who lost money as the slots to pay for that.

[Christina Warren]

Right. Or how much did it cost that person to win the million?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. You don't ever talk about that.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. But having said that, like, I mean, I'm kind of with Lou here, I'm certainly not bullish, and I'm certainly thinking if you don't have money to lose, then you shouldn't be investing in any of these things. But just being completely candid, I don't think that it's a bad idea to talk with whoever handles your investments or if you do it yourself, to look at diversifying into crypto if you're looking for the next.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to touch it. I just don't like some. I agree. I'm dumb. I mean, there's a lot of bitcoin billionaires, a lot of them. A lot of that money went into the campaign in 2024. So I'm obviously dumb. But I don't want to buy an asset that I don't understand why the asset is valued at what it's valued at. That it's just a random. To me, it's buying a lottery ticket.

[Harry McCracken]

Just don't put all of your retirement funds into crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's. Sure.

[Christina Warren]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Not only put stuff you could afford to lose.

[Christina Warren]

Exactly. But even then, I mean, all I'm saying is at this point, because just my own, similar to Harry, I put $2,000 in a Robinhood account a few years ago, and a lot of that was in Doge when Doge was cheap. And then I didn't sell the Doge when it was at a really good price because my nephew had just been born. And I wound up like, it wound up being underwater on the investment for the better part of three years. It is now I've had an 85% return, so I've made money, so to speak. And it's small amount, it doesn't matter. But you know, it. It is one of those things that for me, I was like, okay, I put this money in just for fun gambling. Genuinely, I now with enough time has passed because of the changes that have happened for various reasons, I have a good return, but I certainly wouldn't stake my retirement or anything important on it. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

My wife, well, every time we go to Vegas or reno, she has 20 bucks. She said, I'm gonna play this slots till it's gone. She's twice now won six hundred and nine hundred dollars. So she's way up. Right. And now any. The temptation is then for me to say, wow, I gotta get into this. This is great. You're making a mint out of this. But we know what the reality is. There's also. And I worry about bitcoin and maybe I'll address this to you because you're more bullish on it, Lou. But I worry that what. What bitcoin has done is enabled ransomware and all sorts of crime because it is close. As close to untraceable, almost as close to untraceable as cash. And it's a lot harder to transfer a million dollars in cash from your headquarters in Virginia beach to Hungary. But it also costs a lot in terms of energy use. There are gas fees, even though Hochtua maybe hadn't invested in her own coin or it wasn't doing insider trading. She made lots of money on the fees. Right? Because there's fees. And so all of these things and the speed with which a transaction happens is unpredictable. It's slow unless you pay more to the miner to validate it, Even though now they've got proof of work. So it's not as bad as it was. I think the whole thing has lots of negatives that people don't even know about or don't consider. They're mostly just saying, oh, but I could make so much money. I feel like we're promoting a technology that is not an ideal technology.

[Lou Mareska]

Not understood yet too. I mean, there's. That's. That's. You're calling all the negatives. And that's all makes sense because, you know, I don't even. The hawk to a thing drives me nuts. Right? Because these are.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's a perfect example.

[Lou Mareska]

It's a perfect example of like, you know, just like, you know, other companies coming up with new AI ways of doing something stupid. Right. Like, I think this is another example of, you know, allowing somebody to go and create their own cryptocurrency, you know, and then of course, you know, so I think this is, this is. That's the bad thing about it. Right? I mean, there's got to be some level of correction that needs to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

And so maybe that's why government should get involved.

[Harry McCracken]

And some of this stuff is solvable or at least partially solvable, like the sustainable sustainability aspect. There's already been some progress with some cryptocurrencies and there's a lot more that can be done and their startups working on it since the original way that the stuff was verified was incredibly energy efficient. But that's just not like a given for this whole idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll find out because the anti. Well, many considered anti cryptocurrency chairman of the Fed. I'm sorry, of the sec, Gary Gensler will be replaced now by a guy named Paul Atkins. And he is, as far as we can tell, pretty pro cryptocurrency. Right. And so while Gensler has been kind of saying, and I kind of agreed with him, cryptocurrency should be regulated as securities, but the crypto community does not want it to be seen as a security. And I think that they're going to get their way with this new guy, Paul Atkins, the Bukele president. Bukele of El Salvador has now got a crypto treasury of $600 million from his initial investment in bitcoin. Trump wants to do the same thing. He says, he has said in the campaign trail. He said he wants to make the US the crypto capital of the planet and create a similar strategic reserve of Bitcoin. Of course, if you hold Bitcoin, all of that is great news. It means your assets will go up. Right?

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But is it great policy?

[Christina Warren]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the people who are looking at this aren't considering that. They're just saying, well, I don't care because I'm gonna make my. I'm gonna make a mint.

[Christina Warren]

I'll get mine. I don't understand. I don't understand. Even if you're bullish on this stuff, I don't understand. I mean, other than the greed aspect, I don't understand why this would not be a security. That's the thing that I've never understood.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems to me that it is.

[Christina Warren]

I've never understood that arguments, you should.

[Leo Laporte]

Have capital gains taxes on it, which you do currently.

[Lou Mareska]

Absolutely, yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

We are talking about a guy who went bankrupt running casinos, so I wouldn't put too much stock in his take on this whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, now. So what's really interesting to me is it really looks as if. And I'd like to know what you think. President Elect Trump has handed over the transition to Silicon Valley to the Silicon Valley billionaires. They have moved into Mar a Lago, they're doing the interviews, they're, you know, Elon is sitting in phone calls with Zelensky and others. You know, there was a conspiracy theory before the election that Trump didn't really want to govern. He liked being president and he, you know, liked the benefits of it, including putting all aside all of his convictions, which it apparently has. But he didn't really want to run anything. That's too much work. So he was very glad to have people like Elon come in and do it. And that's. That was the conspiracy theory that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were funding Trump because they knew that he would take a back seat, he would enjoy the trappings of power without actually having to worry about it. JD Vance, who was a teal protege, would be the vice president. He'd be sitting there with Musk and Thiel and all of these people running the country. It kind of looks like maybe that wasn't a conspiracy theory, or at least that's what happened. I'm not even sure whether that, though, is that a bad thing. Maybe these guys, I mean, they're all great businessmen, right? They know how to run companies, they know how to launch rockets, they know how to. So maybe they should be running the country.

[Harry McCracken]

I'm not even sure if it was ever a conspiracy theory. It seemed kind of manifestly obvious from the get go. I mean, trying to be a plan. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, certainly you can make a strong case that a business background is not inherently a great background for running a government. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm worried because a lot of these guys have big egos because they've stumbled into money. I don't know if a lot of them are billionaires just because they were in the right place at the right time, but they think they're geniuses. And there's a certain arrogance that comes with that that worries me a little bit. These are all to JFK bringing in the Harvard elite, the best and the brightest. Right. Or Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals bringing in the best minds to help run the country. And maybe that's what's going to happen.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, they are. I mean, yes, they are arrogant, but so is virtually everybody else at that.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't get to be president without being a little arrogant.

[Harry McCracken]

Trying to be optimistic. I would hope that maybe there's the potential for them by sitting in on these meetings, to soak up some knowledge they don't already have, and that they have enough of a humble side to realize that they are not experts on foreign policy or all these other things outside of their wheelhouse.

[Leo Laporte]

They're in there for the interviews, maybe just to make sure that the person is competent and smart. And then somebody else is going to do the other part of the interview. We don't know.

[Harry McCracken]

It's also not clear how long this will last, because historically, Trump doesn't get along well forever with other people who are as needy as Elon Musk is, and that this couldn't get as much attention right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, this took it off with him. This took it off. Could be kind of brave.

[Christina Warren]

He was in love with everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

He was in love with Kim Jong Un as well. And he seemed to like Putin quite a bit.

[Harry McCracken]

And there are all these other constituencies, like the Project 2025 People who are also jockeying for power along with the Silicon Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I bet this happens in every transition. All of the different constituencies say, hey, we have a seat. Now we want it. This is our agenda. And it's up to the president and his staff to kind of keep them out of the, you know, control it. Right, right. And so we. And because we're not sitting in the room, we don't know what's going on. And we'll find out. One way we'll know is because David Sacks, who's now. Whatever this means, AI and Crypto Czar, that is a new title. Don't. Has no congressional power, has no more power than any other. I guess Executive Branch Czar is not a fan of OpenAI. And if you want to recuse yourself on this one, Lou, you can.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, I was going to say I'm going to have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, you work for Microsoft, too, in a way, because you work for GitHub. I forgot about that. Yeah, we got two Microsoft on here. So recuse yourself if you wish. But David Zacks has said on the all in podcast that Open AI is a piranha, that a for profit piranha. And it could be bad news if Sachs is. Again, I don't know what powers he's going to have, but if he's The AI czar, we know that he likes Elon Musk and his ex AI, but he doesn't like Sam Altman and his Open AI. Well, we know that will be maybe a litmus test of what's to happen. What do you think, Harry? It's just you and me on this one.

[Harry McCracken]

Well, and Elon Musk, despite being a co founder of OpenAI, is also not a fan of what's become of it. So I mean, the cynical expectation is that they will knowingly use the power they have to make life tough for Sam Altman. There's also the possibility they won't do it on purpose, but it will color their what they do really cynical prospect is that they go out of their way not to let their own personal interests affect things, which I'll allow that there's a possibility that will happen. I'm not entirely sure what they would do right now to make life tough for OpenAI through the power they have, but it's certainly possible and I can certainly see that the fact they have Trump's ear leading to Trump not being a fan of OpenAI and that having implications.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I feel bad. I don't want to talk too much about this since both Christina and Lou have.

[Lou Mareska]

Well, I do want to add one perspective though, Leo, and this is not necessarily anything to do with the story, but I think the case of him suing OpenAI, I kind of go back to the stories that come out around Elon kind of handing over all of his patents to BMW and saying, okay, I rather another company build a better electric car than me, then the world kind of benefits from it. And I think he kind of goes back to that theme anytime he talks about any type of technology. And he's really pissed off that Open AI is doing this closed door for profit model. And I think he'll continue to do that if he can afford to go and fight the fight. He's going to fight the fight. And I think that's the interesting part about this, is to see where they go because again, Opening AI is on top. You know, these are companies that are people like Anthropic and other companies are striving for what they're achieving and I think it's a hard thing to follow. And even X, I mean X is using existing models that are out there. I hope the open source community really succeeds here. Like I'm really like meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Like meta, you mean?

[Lou Mareska]

Or any of them. Like there's, there's like there's. If you go to deepseek,.com, there's lots of open source models that are there that are, you know, that are in some cases actually doing better than some of the OpenAI models. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, certainly competition and of let many flowers bloom is obviously best for everybody, including Copilot and GitHub Copilot, because. Yeah, yeah, I could see that. One thing that may be very good is his pick for NASA, but again, this is going to be interesting. He picked Jared Isaacman, whose name you may remember. Now, he made his money as the CEO of a payment processing company, Shift4 Payments, but he has sponsored a couple of SpaceX missions. You remember the Dragon mission where he rode with three others into space. And then he did the first ever privately funded spacewalk last September. So this guy is a man who loves space. He has close ties with SpaceX, admittedly, but he is the President Elect's pick for running NASA. I presume he has to be confirmed, but I would imagine of all of the nominees so far, he would be the quickest to confirmation. He says he envisions a thriving space economy and vows to usher in an era where humanity becomes a true spacefaring civilization. I believe it because of his background. Garrett Reisman is a retired NASA Astronaut, advisor to SpaceX. Says that Isaacman is definitely going to push NASA, but he'll do it in a positive way. Elon Musk said he's a man of high ability and integrity. This might be a great choice. NASA has been hamstrung by the fact that Congress gives it money, but uses it really for pork barrels. So the Space Launch system rocket, the SLS, which has been a massive failure and $24, $24 billion, but it's massively over budget. Part of the problem is that it's made in all that every different state in the Union, practically, it's piecemeal so that every member of Congress could get their little pork barrel in. And that is not the way to run a space agency. So maybe that maybe this will be good for NASA.

[Lou Mareska]

Maybe they'll fix the Hubble.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, there's some. The SLS is a real problem. Now remember though, this guy has close ties to SpaceX. And this is, you know, the norm in government is you kind of recuse yourself. You step back from your investments, you step back from your ties and you act on behalf of the people, not any individual company or person. I don't know if Isaacsman would do that. I don't know. We'll have to watch again.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, there's this overarching Question of the fact that Elon Musk controls SpaceX and is now involved in all these other aspects of the government and American life in general and global politics and ultimately, whose interests is he going to serve once he knows all this stuff? He is likely to know as a Trump confidant. Is he going to leverage that for his own private interests?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. NASA's current administrator, Bill Nelson, this is quoted by Reuters, said he thinks the relationship between Elon Musk and the President Elect is going to be a benefit to making sure the funding for NASA is there. So I see that as a positive.

[Harry McCracken]

Seems like a cut, I guess, if.

[Leo Laporte]

Really your chief and only interest is we got to get into space, this is the right way to do it. Right. Get it, you know, get the. What we've shown is that commercial space is more effective. I would love.

[Lou Mareska]

We'll have to get your SpaceX stock now, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, to the moon, literally. So I guess really we're just going to have to wait and see. There's there. My temptation is to say, oh, this is a disaster, but maybe it's not a disaster. Maybe these guys are smart. Maybe we're going to get better people in there. Maybe government will be more efficient. Maybe they won't cut my Social Security.

[Harry McCracken]

All these guys have a big interest. I'm sorry for calling them guys, I guess the ones we've been talking about, our guys. But they all have a huge interest in business deregulation, which in some cases could be great. There are also lots of instances where it could be a major problem. But I would expect that's what motivates a lot of people in the private sector to get involved here and they will push Trump to make it happen.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's his natural inclination anyway, is deregulation. This is what America voted for, frankly. That's what the Supreme Court's been pushing. I mean, this is where we're going.

[Christina Warren]

I think ultimately the real thing to see, because what we saw eight years ago obviously was different in terms of the types of people who were brought in. Although you did have some private sector folks who he put in his cabinet too, and some of those actually did better than some of the Washington types. But I think even if we take the most positive view about this, it's just kind of that the uncertainty is kind of what Harry mentioned before, which is kind of the capriciousness of the President elect and how well everyone's going to continue to get along. And I think that's, that's really the thing that is the Big, you know, waiting game. It's like, okay, these are the people who are in place now. Is this going to be a repeat of what we saw eight years ago, where you have administration roll over after administration rollover, or is this going to be consistent? Because, you know, I.

[Leo Laporte]

You're asking how many Scaramouches, Right, Exactly.

[Christina Warren]

Is this going to take kind of. Right. I mean, you know, and. Because in some cases you're like, okay, some of these appointments make sense and they could be good things. And, you know, maybe these are smart people who could potentially enact some positive changes. Who knows? But it could also be all for nothing if people last a few months. And that's, to me, is the big unknown. We just don't know how long any of this is going to last before we can even assess whether this is going to be good or bad.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm going to take a break because I promise to get you out of here fast. And I know you're in one ear. Are you listening to Taylor Swift music?

[Christina Warren]

As I'm not plugged in right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I love you, Christina. This is such a sacrifice. She flies in from South Korea, is going to a concert tonight, but makes time for us, and I'm so grateful. Thank you.

[Christina Warren]

I love you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course, Lou has 23 children, so he is also.

[Christina Warren]

He's also. Look, Lou's sacrificing way more than me.

[Leo Laporte]

Five, right? Five boys.

[Lou Mareska]

I have five boys. That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Five boys. Yeah. Five boys is like 23 children.

[Lou Mareska]

It sometimes is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Lou, we love having you here. Former host of this Week in Enterprise Tech and a very smart guy. Great to have you on. And of course, the technologizer himself, Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Our show today, brought to you by a tool everyone should have in their business, a thinks canary. What's a canary? It's a honeypot. It's a good name, right? The canary in the coal mine. The things canary is a honeypot that you configure to look like anything you want. It can be a Windows server, it could be a Linux server. You can have all the services turned on like a Christmas tree, like those guys behind me. You could have it just be some specific little ports open that you know will attract the Wiley hacker. It can be a SCADA device. Mine is a Synology NAS and it looks just like a Synology nas. The Mac address is correct. The login screen looks just like DSM 7. I mean, it is down every detail. These things don't look vulnerable to a Bad guy. They look valuable. And that's the key to the thinkst Canary. A honeypot that's easy to configure, can be deployed in minutes and will let you know if there's somebody inside your network, whether it's a hacker or a malicious insider. If they're snooping around your network, you will get the alert that matters. No false alerts, just the alert that matters. You can also make lure files with your Thinks Canary, Little PDFs or DocX or Excel, whatever you want. Text files if you want, give them provocative names. And if somebody tries to open them, they're not real files. They'll alert the things to Canary, which will alert you. I have a few Excel spreadsheets spread around that say things like employee information. I mean, I'm not blatant. I don't say Social Security numbers here. Look here. You could if you want to. Some big operations might have hundreds of things canaries scattered all around. A little business like ours might have a handful. These things canaries are so awesome because if somebody accesses your Think Canary brute forces your fake internal SSH server, let's say, or opens one of the LUR files, the Thinks Canary will tell you immediately you have a problem. And they'll tell you in the way you want. Sms, text messages, email. They support Syslog, of course they support. You have your own console. You could look there, you can get. There's an API, you could have alerts any way you want. They support webhooks. I mean, you could get a Facebook notification if you wanted. Whatever works for you. The point is, if you get an alert, there's somebody inside the network. Choose a profile for your Thinks Canary device. Register with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications. Then you wait. Attackers who have breached your network, malicious insiders, adversaries of any kind, will make themselves known by accessing the thinkst Canary. They can't help it. They have to. They have to try to get in. Get yourself a Thinks Canary. Now. I. You know, the price will vary depending on how many you get. I'll give you an example. Go to canary tool/twit5 thinks canaries will be 7,500 bucks a year. You get your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance for the whole year. And by the way, if you use the offer code twit in the how did you hear about us Box, you're going to get 10% off the price for as long as you use thanks canaries for life. 10% off for life. Now, here's another thing that maybe will reassure you if you, if you're at all skeptical, you can always return your thanks. Canaries. They have a very generous 60 day, 2 months money back guarantee for a full refund. 60 days. Plenty of time to see if you like it. But I have to tell you, in all the years we've done these ads, it's almost a decade now, no one has ever asked for a refund. Because once you get your things canaries, you're going to go, oh yeah, of course. How did I live without them? Visit Canary Tools Twit. Don't forget twit in the how did you hear about us Box. And if you want to see other people who love their thinks canaries, go to Canary Tools Love and there's some great posts there. Canary Tools slash Twit. The thinkst Canary is an awesome product. Everybody, everybody should have one. If you got perimeter defenses, that's fine. But what happens when somebody gets through those? That's what really matters. All right, back to the show we go. Let's talk about tick tock. The clock is ticking, I guess, right? A court has ruled that that law that says divest or shut down in the United States is legal, is valid. And now it's coming down to January 19, the day before Inauguration Day. It's for real this time. New York Times says TikTok creators flooding the social network with videos on Friday after judges upheld that law. You have, you must have a tick tock. You even said that you knew that if you didn't go to the Taylor Swift concert, Christina, that you'd see it on TikTok.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, yes. I don't post on TikTok much, but yes, I have a TikTok and I consume a lot of TikTok. And I've also been on record as being very uncomfortable with this legislation, this new law, whatever concerns privacy concerns you have about people have about TikTok, and I'm not saying they're invalid, I think those same privacy concerns frankly exist for all of our social networks. And if we really want to address those things, then we should address them in terms of data protection, sharing and whatnot. I don't like the way this was carved out. I don't like the specificity in which this law targeted one specific company for what I think are pretty gross reasons. I felt that way in 2019 under the Trump administration. I felt that way under the Biden administration. And this is going to be interesting. I mean, TikTok has already said they're going to appeal this to the Supreme Court and we'll see if they can make any sort of decision before January 19th or if there will be any stay in lieu of hearing that. Assuming the Supreme Court wants to hear this case.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they may not get there. I mean, this is the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denying its petition to overturn the law. So all they can do now is say, yeah, we're taking it to the highest court in Atlanta and then it's up to the Supreme Court to give them cert. And this all has to happen before January 19th, right? Yeah. I wonder. Look, I have mentioned this before. I have a little bit of a dog in this hunt. My son became a TikTok star a year ago. TikTok gave him his business. If it weren't for TikTok, nobody would have ever heard of Salt Hank. But he became, he had two and a half million followers on TikTok has done the same on Instagram, had a best selling, has a best selling cookbooks in stores right now, all because of TikTok. In fact, he's opening his first restaurant in New York City in the spring or in the early summer. Again, all because of TikTok. And the key with TikTok, Bonito once said this. Our producer, who's on vacation, by the way, I hope he's having a good time in the Philippines. Anthony Nielsen filling in for him today. Benito said, you know, if you're going to start something these days, you better start it somewhere where you can go viral, whether it's a podcast, videos, what book, author, newsletter. Because there's so much content, unless you're on a platform that can promote you virally, you don't have a hope, a chance. Right. Is that true?

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, TikTok has an amazing generational reach. It's, it's forcing cultural trends, it's forcing creativity, innovation. So I think it's got, it's got a lot of positives. I think it's, you know, it's interesting that they, it's, they're focusing on the negatives here.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I mean, people would say, oh, well, your son could just have done the same thing on Insta with reels. Which is, I guess, true. But then that raises the issue. Is that the real reason that we're shutting down TikTok because we want to. Mark Zuckerberg's. He's a, it's a US Company, after all.

[Christina Warren]

Right. Which is my issue with it, frankly. Right. Is that, is that what is the real reason we were told, you know, very nebulous, without any specific specificity, you know, national security concerns. We're given no proof. We're not, you know, told anything beyond just, oh, we think this is bad. You know, meanwhile, technologists who actually look at this, and let's also be honest, there are many, many, many thousands, tens of thousands of Americans who work at TikTok, who work at ByteDance, you know, who are saying, this is not how this works. This is not exfiltrating your data. We're not selling things to China. I'll also point out your data is already being sold to China and other countries and your Internet service provider is doing it. And that's fully legal.

[Leo Laporte]

And data brokers.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, correct, Correct. This is already happening. So if this is what we're against, I'm in full agreement. Let's pass that legislation. I don't like how this is being targeted against one company in what, yes, does look like. It was very clear in 2019, which, granted, I know is a different situation than this current law, but in 2019, when the first movement of they have to divest or be sold to a US Company thing, that was a very clear. We don't like that another company is making money in these platforms and is building momentum. And we don't like that we don't have a piece of the pie. That was what the situation was.

[Leo Laporte]

And even worse, if it had been, maybe, I don't know, a Scandinavian company like Spotify, maybe we wouldn't worry about it so much.

[Christina Warren]

Maybe we wouldn't worry about it at all.

[Harry McCracken]

Well, I mean, the thing that does concern me, and I think there is some evidence for this, is that stuff that the Chinese government would prefer you not think about does appear to be harder to find on TikTok. That is concerning to me, it's not the only thing that concerns me. I'm also concerned about the fact that on Twitter, stuff that Elon Musk would prefer you to not think about is.

[Leo Laporte]

Increasingly hard to them as NBC section234 though, right?

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say. I was going to say, can we make. Can we make. I mean, you're not wrong about that, Harry, but can we make be upset and be waving our hands about how awful it is that certain content is being, you know, like suppressed on one platform? When we mentioned that about other platforms, and the response is, well, it's the platform's choice about what to do. Now, again, if we want to have, you know, laws out there about how those decisions are shown to people. So that they are aware that things are being suppressed or that they are aware that there's a point of view, then I'm fine with that.

[Leo Laporte]

What is?

[Christina Warren]

I just don't see the difference between what, you know, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, you know, anything else that is not just purely, you know, determined by a chronological feed. Anybody that doesn't. Algorithmic determination. I don't understand, like, what the real difference is, other than this is the Chinese government ostensibly, versus this is. You know, what if you could wave.

[Leo Laporte]

A wand and say you should only be able to access a social network that is created in your country by people in your country, whatever your country is. China, Venezuela, the United States, Mexico, Canada. If you're Canadian, you have to use a Canadian social network. What if we did that? Then you wouldn't have to worry about influence campaigns. You wouldn't have to worry, right? Or maybe not. Actually, no, because Twitter is the United States and there's plenty of influence campaigns going on from Russia and China. But let's say you did that. Is that a good thing? No, because a social network is about a global community. That's the good thing about it.

[Harry McCracken]

I have to say I feel a little bit less blithe than maybe you folks do about a social network under the influence of the Chinese government not being something to have concerns about. That said, as far as I know, there's not a lot of evidence that they are mining people's data or doing stuff that's harmful to individual users. But I don't think the concern about it is unreasonable. And I don't think Sweden and China should be considered in exactly the same way.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fair. I don't want to diminish your concerns, because that's true. This is what the court said.

[Harry McCracken]

That said, I feel like I don't know enough about this to say, yes, I think this is a great idea to pull it away from the current owners. I acknowledge the fact that I don't understand everything about it.

[Leo Laporte]

The US District Court, which presumably may have seen more than we see as private citizens, TikTok, argued the law unfair. This is from the New York Times. Unfairly singled out the company. A ban would infringe on the free speech rights of American users. The judges said the law was, quote, carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary, end quote. It did not run afoul of the First Amendment. The ruling acknowledged Americans would, quote, lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community, and even a means of income, end quote. But that Congress had weighed those risks against national security concerns. And that's. I guess that's really what you're saying, Harry, is if given all the evidence, the national security concern is genuine, that outweighs all the other things, especially since they're all alternatives to TikTok, like YouTube shorts and Facebook reels.

[Harry McCracken]

I'm not going that far because I'm not sure whether it's really been proved that the national security concern.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know because they won't tell us. They will only tell Congress.

[Harry McCracken]

Exactly. I mean, I think being concerned about it is legitimate, this action. I'm not saying I support, because it is pretty fuzzy, and I think it would be a shame if TikTok goes away versus it continuing on or somebody else taking it over in a way that's not too big a blip for all the people who love it.

[Christina Warren]

The thing that bothers me about this, and I said this months ago, so I'm repeating myself. If people have heard me say this before, I apologize, is that I agree that we shouldn't just dismiss the security concerns. And if there is real evidence there that we haven't seen and that for whatever reason they haven't shown us mea culpa, I will take that on. However, there has been a process. Historically, there is a process in the United States government known as cfius, and it's. CFI US is, I believe, the acronym.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the Committee for Investment in the United States, for Foreign Investment in the.

[Christina Warren]

United States, for Foreign Investment in the United States. And that has before forced companies to either decouple from foreign ownership. There is a process. TikTok has been basically in that process for years, years under two administrations. It has not moved forward, presumably because the evidence, you know, shown hasn't gone anywhere. This isn't. To me, this isn't a situation like, like ZTE or Huawei, where I think there are very real concerns and very real evidence, especially with zte, which is why that equipment is not allowed in the United States or many other countries. Same with some of Huawei's equipment, where you should say, yes, a ban is absolutely, you know, correct here. And there are real national security concerns, and the companies have things that are hiding what they're doing. But again, the CFIUS process, which has forced foreign divestment before, this is a known process, has been going on. I think at this point, I think it's five years. And I'm bothered by the fact that we are now potentially losing access to something for reasons that even if we're talking about the best case scenario, I Don't have any confidence that that's the case. Basically the government has said, Congress said, trust me. And I'm just going to be honest. Me, CHRISTINA Warren Individual CITIZEN I don't trust you. And that's a big problem though in.

[Leo Laporte]

Our polity in general is that we have now decided we do no longer trust politicians of any stripe.

[Harry McCracken]

Well, Donald Trump has managed to take both sides of this issue, so who knows what lies.

[Leo Laporte]

He was the one who precipitated all of this in his last administration and.

[Christina Warren]

Now he likes TikTok and then he said, oh, I won't ban it. But then he's been kind of demurred. But then of course, the deadline is the day before Inauguration day, so who knows the opportunity?

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, we almost had TikTok, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle.

[Christina Warren]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, Oracle Project Texas, which was TikTok's kind of attempt to appease Congress, was in fact to store all the data in Texas in Oracle servers and see, but it was pretty clear that the Chinese government could access that. And that's really the problem is that any country, any company run out of mainland China is partially owned by the Chinese government. They, they mandate that and there's nothing for them to defend themselves against in Chinese government intrusion. So I mean, not that that's so different in the U.S. china could say the same thing about all of our US Social media probably does in fact does. They block Facebook, don't they? They block X. They block all of those.

[Harry McCracken]

I used to edit PC World magazine. We had a Chinese edition which was literally a joint venture with the government and which literally had an on site sensor.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there you go. Right.

[Lou Mareska]

One of the biggest differences about the especially social networks like Tic Tac though is the interesting thing is that's different than some of these other like Huawei and so on is obviously you give them your data, data stored somewhere and probably in the region that you're in, but then you don't know what happens behind the scenes. They can go and take that data and exfiltrate it and send it over to mainland. Right. I mean with these hardware vendors, they're tracked and by compliance officers and they can, they don't. There's no kind of like service that the data is going to. And so they could.

[Leo Laporte]

But presumably a Huawei switch could be modified, the firmware could be modified by the Chinese government.

[Lou Mareska]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

To suddenly exfiltrate everything that happens on that switch.

[Lou Mareska]

Right. That would be, that's, that's easier to detect. Right. I mean that's These are, these are networks that can detect it. Right. But with, with social network, you don't. You know how your data is going to. Right. I mean, it could be.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but that's what. We have no evidence. Right. Because we don't know. That's really the truth that I bet Congress doesn't know. We don't know.

[Christina Warren]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Nor do we know if there have been influence campaigns. It's interesting. On Friday, the European Union sent TikTok a request for more information that because Romanian intelligence files suggested that Moscow had coordinated influencers on TikTok to promote an election candidate who suddenly became the front runner, the far right populist Kalyn Georgescu came out of nowhere in the election. The court, the top court, Supreme Court of Romania overturned annulled results from the first round of voting because of that. And now Romanian authorities think that Russia used Telegram to recruit thousands of TikTok users to promote Georgescu. Now, whether that happened or not, they're investigating it, but that just shows that's not China. No, it's Russia doing that. Any social. This could happen on this.

[Christina Warren]

Right. I was going to say, I mean, and I think that, and I understand that the district court rejected the First Amendment appeal and maybe it was because of the narrowness of, of how the argument was presented. I'm not a lawyer, I don't know how that works. But I do feel like there is something to be said which is people are voluntarily giving their information to these services, whether it's Facebook, Instagram and Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're voluntary giving your information to data brokers who are gladly selling it on to China. And there's no law against it.

[Christina Warren]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Stunningly, the FTC is considering it's not even illegal. They're considering limiting the ability of data brokers to sell your Social Security number. Currently they are allowed to do that. It's not illegal. So data bro, this, we found this out in the national public data breach where my Social Security number was in it a lot. A million, was it 300 million people. Social Security number was in that breach. We don't know the actual number because there's duplication, but there was a lot. And those guys were selling that, in fact to not only China, but to the United States own intelligence agencies and law enforcement. And that's the real reason there's no law against it because law enforcement will never let that happen. They need it, they use it. They don't have to spy on us illegally. They just let our ISPs do it legally and Then they buy it.

[Harry McCracken]

If you go back in time. I mean, Social Security numbers should never have been, never been used. Any. Anything but a number that is known by you and the government. It's so many problems.

[Leo Laporte]

Apartment. You have to give them your Social Security number. Who knows what that apartment rental agency is doing with it, right? You know, forget it. And it says on the card not to be used for identification. It doesn't matter. All right, but that's. Now we're beating a dead horse. All right. I don't know what will happen to Tick Tock. There is a guy named Frank McCourt not the author of the fabulous books Angela's Ashes and Tiz. That's a different Frank McCourt. Frank McCourt is a billionaire who has something called Project Liberty. And he's trying to put together a consortium of investors to make what he calls a people's bid for TikTok. Okay, this might be a. I don't know. Project Liberty includes a for profit company and a nonprofit institute. Sounds like OpenAI. It was founded to build. Help build an advent, advocate for a safer and more equitable Internet. He says we've got informal commitments of more than $20 billion and that they are going to. They're going to do an investor roadshow early next week in New York City and San Francisco, in case you want to put some of your money in. Tim Berners Lee supports it. David Clark, MIT computer science and AI Lab senior research scientist, supports it. I don't know. I don't know if this is the. I don't know who Project Liberty is or Frank McCourt, frankly.

[Harry McCracken]

But I mean, he has given a lot of thought to this. One of the big unanswered questions is what happens if you have a TikTok in the US that's not based on the original algorithm? It might be way less compelling.

[Leo Laporte]

China has said we will not. That is not for sale. You cannot get our algorithm.

[Harry McCracken]

It might be way less compelling. And you can argue that that would be either a good thing or a bad thing or maybe somewhere in the middle. But you can also argue that there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing magic in the algorithm.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, McCarthy does say that he's thought about this as some sort of strategy where you can have TikTok in the US which he's very big on, the notion that the social networks we have are unhealthy and he's partially motivated by wanting to have control over a large social network that is healthier and says he has a strategy for making TikTok compelling and interesting and fun, but also not addictive and, and not dependent on the algorithm it already has.

[Leo Laporte]

According to Axios, McCourt says the technology we're building respects individuals by returning to them ownership and control of their identity and their data. That's important. I don't know how he's going to do that, but anyway, but by survey and not by surveilling them. This is possible because we're not influenced by foreign actors, we're not beholden to big tech, and we've built the necessary technology that can support this powerful platform loved by more than 170 million Americans. Maybe he's the white knight that's going to save this whole thing.

[Christina Warren]

Well, I mean, I think the big question though would be, would bytedance want to sell? Right. Because it's one thing to have a consortium, assuming you can get the money together, assuming you can have everyone ready to go.

[Leo Laporte]

20 billion seems low, to be honest.

[Christina Warren]

It does. It seems extremely low. And so, but let's assume that that's not an issue and that the money can come together. Can you. Does China want to sell? Because, you know, if, let's, let's just flip. Professor, flip perspectives. If the Chinese government said to us that, you know, basically Facebook meta had to be sold in order to operate on in China and to be able to, you know, continue to work there, let's assume they had a relationship or Google or Microsoft companies that do have granted their joint ventures but had things that they had to be sold and had couldn't have any of their current investment from the United States. I think that both the U.S. government and those companies would individually say, screw you, we don't need to be in your country. Right. So that's always an option. They can just pick up their ball and go home. And I actually think that is a potential negative thing for the supposed national security concerns, which is, okay, let's assume that there's no stay of execution, that TikTok is not allowed to continue to operate after January 19, at least in the United States. And let's assume that they move their infrastructure to other countries and they still are running in other countries and you can still log in. So what, you know, short of really forcing, you know, ISPs and VPNs and things like that, to do things that those tools can't do, you know, are you going to, are you going to talk to all the cellular networks and say, you know, nobody can access any of these tools or whatnot, people are going to use VPNs they're going to access the service anyway. If as long as it's still running, pretending to be in other countries, even creating accounts that make it appear as if they're in other countries but are still located in the United States, the data is still going to be sold to foreign adversaries, potentially even more so. And now you don't even have the people working in the United States as engineers on anything. So it's even more of a black box. So if this does happen the way that it's like the worst case scenario, I don't see a positive outcome assuming TikTok still stays operating because people are still going to find ways to use it and now their information is going to be even less protected.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. By the way, McCourt is the former owner of this, of the LA Dodgers. It's the same Frank McCourt who is, according to Surge Strip in our discord, one of the most hated men in Los Angeles. But he did develop, or this Liberty Consortium has developed, apparently a protocol designed to do exactly what he's talking about, which I think is kind of interesting. It's not. It's called the decentralized Social networking protocol. I think Harry McCracken, you need to do a profile on this guy. I think the, I think this is something right up your alley.

[Harry McCracken]

I have, I have talked to him and something like that could, could happen because he is, he is an interesting guy and it's, and I think it's fair to say he's not in it purely because it's potentially a big business opportunity and he does have a pretty long history of thinking through some of these issues over the last last few years.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to know more. He also owns the Marseille soccer club. I'd like to. Football club. I'd like to know more.

[Harry McCracken]

He's like, he's like a longtime big time Boston, Boston businessman and well known there.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah, well, that's right up your alley. Harry McCracken is here. He does cover this kind of thing. He does really great [e-mail] I also, and I've told you this before, I love your nostalgia pieces about old, old school tech and so forth. Really great stuff. It's great to have you on as always, Harry McCracken. Give my love to Marie, by the way.

[Harry McCracken]

I will.

[Leo Laporte]

When we had a studio, Harry and Marie used to come up and visit the studio, as did many of you. And I'm sorry that we don't have.

[Harry McCracken]

A studio anymore, but she's in the other room. Right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Sending my love. We are gonna. We are working hard to get Christina Warren out of here before the ERAS tour begins. Christina Warren's here. She is a Developer Relations senior developer advocate at the GitHub, which we all love, and a really good example of how AI can be used for coding. It's really GitHub. Copilot is remarkable. Great to have you. And also from a Microsoft joint principal engineering manager of Excel, Copilot, former host of this Week in Enterprise Tech, the great Lou. Mm, Lou Moreska.

[Lou Mareska]

Thank you, Louis.

[Leo Laporte]

Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. If you're going to China, bring ExpressVPN along with you. Actually, everybody who listens to this show probably knows about VPNs and what VPNs virtual private networks do. They encrypt your traffic from your computer to their server and then out into the. Into the public Internet, thereby giving you some anonymity, some. Absolutely. Some security. But there's one more thing that a VPN can do that's pretty awesome. Because ExpressVPN servers are in over 100 countries around the world. You can emerge under the public Internet from any one of those countries, which has an interesting, wonderful side effect. Let's say you have a Netflix account. Who doesn't these days, right? And you've watched all 6,000 of the Netflix shows available in the US or at least you've watched most of them, and the rest of them you don't want to see. Netflix has three times that number of titles available globally. You're missing out literally on thousands of great shows. But if you use ExpressVPN, by the way, the only VPN I use and Trust, how does ExpressVPN work to unblock content? Well, they hide content based on your location. You can then emerge into your country of choice. Let's say it's the UK and watch the shows on Netflix uk. Now, I asked Netflix, is that okay? And they said, hey, you got a Netflix account, it's okay with us. They don't. They say, we don't recommend it because a VPN isn't fast enough to watch high def content, right? Wrong. You can watch HD video anywhere in the world from any of their servers. That's amazing. It means you can access worldwide ESPN plus or Fubo or Disney plus or HBO Max in other countries, YouTube, Hulu, Showtime, DirecTV, and of course Netflix in any country of your choice. Let's say you want to watch, I don't know, Yellowstone open. Yeah, you can't see Yellowstone on Netflix in the US, but you open ExpressVPN, select a country where you can see it, I don't know, Germany, Greece. Tap one button to connect, refresh Netflix and all of a sudden you're seeing Yellowstone. This is a really cool side effect of having a Great VPN like ExpressVPN. They invest that money also to make sure that you're secure. They rotate their IP addresses regularly. That's one of the reasons this works, because those, those companies can't see that you're coming in on a vpn. They also make sure that their servers do not record your visit. They develop something called Trusted Server, which has been audited by third parties. It spins up in RAM when you press that big Button on your ExpressVPN app, on iOS or Android, Mac, Windows, Linux. Even on a server, even on a router. When you press that big button and you spin up a server, it runs in ram. It's sandbox, it can't write to the hard drive. And as if that weren't enough, which it is, third party audits have proven. But even then they run a custom Debian distribution which erases the entire hard drive every morning. Reboots, starts fresh. So there is no trace of your visit. I like it because ExpressVPN is absolutely committed to your privacy. Believe me, I wouldn't Travel anywhere without ExpressVPN. It why is ExpressVPN the best of the VPNs? Because it works on all your devices. Your phone, your laptop, your tablet. Blazing fast speeds, rated number one by CNET and the Verge. It keeps you secure, it keeps you private. It does the job right. And you can watch Yellowstone right now. You can take advantage of ExpressVPN's Black Friday Cyber Monday offer to get the absolute best VPN deal you'll find all year. Just go to expressvpn.com TWIT expressvpn.com TWIT you'll get 4 extra months with a 12 month plan or 6 extra months with a 24 month plan. Absolutely free. Expressvpn.com TWIT an extra 4 or even 6 months of ExpressVPN. No cost, no additional cost to you when you subscribe for one or two years. And that's the way to do it. Keeps the price down and you get the benefit all year long. ExpressVPN.com Twitter we thank them for their support. I'm really tempted to go off script and ask Christina if she's excited about severance coming back, but I'M not gonna.

[Christina Warren]

Okay. I am. I am, though. I am.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa, yesterday, she says, coming back, I said, I know in January, January, half the time when I'm. When you're on the show with Christine, I just want to talk about TVs and movies.

[Christina Warren]

I mean, yes, good stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Content, Taylor, whatever. You know, it's good stuff. But. All right, let's focus on some tech news here. We were talking about RIP and replace. The idea of getting those Huawei switches out of the United States. And infrastructure. It's expensive. It's estimated to be almost $5 billion to do that. House of Representatives will be voting next week on the annual defense bill that includes another 3 billion for U.S. telecom companies to remove equipment from Chinese telecoms like Huawei and zte. That's probably good news. The FCC says it's going to cost as much as 4.98 billion. Congress had only approved 1.9 billion. So we're getting close now with this additional $3 billion. In fact, I think this gives us the full amount that the FCC says we will need. It's interesting because this is not only on the agenda of the current FCC and his chair, Jessica Rosenworsel, but it is also Brendan Carr's goal, he says, to do fully fund RIP and replace in the next administration. So I think that that's going to go forward. I think that's what you brought that up, Lou. I think that's one thing we can all agree should be done.

[Lou Mareska]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of other hardware companies that can offer similar technology, if not better technology that are in a better hand. So I think this is a better opportunity for us to get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was the question in the beginning was is there anything as good as the Huawei and zte? And you think there is from other. Other countries or is there any US Companies?

[Lou Mareska]

Definitely by now. I mean, there used to not be.

[Leo Laporte]

Cisco, anybody.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah, right. Cisco. I mean, there's definitely used to not be, but now, now there's definitely companies that come up.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Speaking of big U.S. companies. Oh, Intel. I know Intel.

[Christina Warren]

So sad. Well, it's both sad and it's kind of self inflicted, is it not?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it. For years. Right? For years.

[Christina Warren]

For decades. For decades.

[Harry McCracken]

Largely self inflicted, I would say.

[Christina Warren]

Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ben Thompson's written a lot about this in Stratechery. Intel was the original integrated chip company where they would design and build their own chips, which at the time worked really well. But then along comes companies like arm, Nvidia, tsmc, arm, and Nvidia design the chips, they don't make them, TSMC makes them. And because so much money has been pumped into tsmc, mostly cheaply, I have to say, by Apple, their technologies leapfrogged Intel's technology. And so they're better at making chips than intel and ARM and Nvidia are better at designing chips than Intel. It kind of leaves intel with.

[Harry McCracken]

And amd, Intel's traditional rival years ago, stopped making its own chips and has been on a roll recently. I mean, I'm sorry that Pat Gelsinger, the CEO, didn't get more time because he was trying to undo a huge number of mistakes made before he got there. And this is not the kind of thing you can fix in a year or two or three years. And I think he did have a pretty smart vision of what to do, but it was not something he could implement in the time that the board gave him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the board. So he says he told the board, the board when they were looking for a new CEO. He says, I'm not going to be the guy that's going to piecemeal out to dismantle Intel. You know, he goes back to the Andy Grove days of Intel. He was a chip designer himself. He says, I'm not going to be your guy to do that, but if you want to save Intel, I think I have a plan to split off the Foundry, the fabs and the design into two different kind of channels. We're going to maybe make chips for Apple. He said in a very ambitious.

[Harry McCracken]

Yes, he said Apple would come back to him at some point, at least that it could.

[Leo Laporte]

But the board only gave him three years. I mean, apparently that was up front. You have three years. The three years is up. A week ago, Gelsinger packed the box and left. He resigned. But the resignation was so abrupt and there is no successor in sight. It pretty much seems like they fired him.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, no, yeah, I think they gave him two options, either to retire or to have retirement forced upon him. I think the stuff that's happened in recent years with AI also didn't help because on top of all the stuff that intel was dealing with, there was this new big thing that was Nvidia lunch.

[Leo Laporte]

Nvidia's worth more than intel is now.

[Christina Warren]

Yes, well, AMD has been worth more. Right. Nvidia is worth more than both of them. But yeah, I mean, you talk about a company who they missed mobile completely, like massively and then were obstinate about it. I know you remember this, Harry. Like they were. They honestly, they were dismissive of the entire regime. They were dismissive of ARM chips all up. They were like, it doesn't matter that our Atom stuff is terrible and that can't be used in phones. These things don't matter. Well, now they matter. They've also missed graphics repeatedly over and over and over again. And they've had opportunities to buy reputable graphics places and have their own GPUs that are not integrated stuff. AMD bought ATI and they're not Nvidia, but they at least have, have, you know, they can do something. And now they've missed AI. And so I agree with you, Harry. Like, I think Pat Gelsinger had some good plans. I don't know if anybody could have done this turnaround. I do wonder though, because they've been, you know, supposed to be working on like their, their 18A, you know, process and that's been delayed. And I, there was kind of a part in my mind that I wondered was that what forced the board's hand? Like it seems like to me that if things were going in the right direction, the board would give them more time. But maybe if there have been more delays in that process and other things, maybe that was part of why they basically said you can leave on your own terms or we will ask you to. I don't know.

[Harry McCracken]

And also Gulsinger's vision had a lot to do with getting other companies to let intel make their chips, which I think has just been a slog. And if he had had more big wins, it might have turned out differently. You're so right. Also about graphics. I mean, Intel I think strategically decided not to be all that serious about graphics a long time ago and to focus on low end graphics. It could build into processors. If it had been Serious about graphics 20 years ago, it might be Nvidia today.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe it's too little too late, but Intel Graphics has actually gotten better and better. They've had new releases that are, you know, pretty good for on chip graphics, for integrated graphics. They are going to announce this week at the IEEE Electron Devices meeting, they're going to announce some big advances in. Well, this is from Tom's hardware. I can't pretend I actually understand what they're saying. But at breakthroughs in atomically thin 2D transistors, chip packaging and interconnects. So, you know, of course they've got a R&D department and they don't stop working even if there's trouble in the stock market. And they've got some great new advances. But no matter what intel does today, it's probably too little too late. They'd also to win with the chips act. More than $8 billion flowing into intel to build plants in the United States, foundries in the United States. But it's just, just. I don't know, is it too little, too late? What's going to happen to Intel, Lou?

[Lou Mareska]

I don't know. I hope they stay around. I mean there's, it's a competition that we need to keep them. Obviously coming from a company that's put a lot of stake in both intel and AMD and arm and you know, we hope that they stick around, you know. And like you said, I feel like there are other countries that are also offering, you know, potential stake in this as well. Like, I think Germany's also offering a lot of money for people to bring foundries in and actually produce their chips there.

[Leo Laporte]

So I would imagine the entire Western world is trying to do something to get manufacture out of Taiwan and China in case, just in case. Right. Of a global world war.

[Harry McCracken]

The chances are a lot higher. Now it seems pretty obvious that intel will be broken up or conceivably even sold. At one point it was reported that Qualcomm was considering a bed.

[Leo Laporte]

So last week Qualcomm said.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, Gelsinger was trying to make an intel that was still recognizably intel but more modern and successful. And I think that if the board had wanted to do that, they might have stuck with them and they will be more open to other possibilities. That would be kind of sad. Even if ultimately they do make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Would it be along the lines of design and fabs? I mean, like split it down the middle like that. Who would buy their fabs?

[Christina Warren]

That's the problem. Right, because, because tsmc, you know, I mean, they all make ARM chips, right? Other than like an AMD is not going to be letting intel unless they offer them a much better price. I don't see amd, you know, letting them do that. So, yeah, that, that's the problem. It's great to have a, you know, a foundry and a fab, but you know, what's the point when TSMC is frankly better, assuming you can get time. Putting the geopolitical stuff aside, there were.

[Leo Laporte]

A couple of things that probably the board saw as writing on the wall when intel was removed from the DAO in favor of Nvidia. That's not a good thing. And then I, you know, I'm watching football and there is a big ad from Microsoft saying Our fastest, smartest, bestest computers ever. And they're built on Snapdragon.

[Harry McCracken]

Right. I mean, this, this has been. I mean, this has really been an inflection point this year that there are finally compelling non x86 Windows devices.

[Christina Warren]

They're good.

[Leo Laporte]

Although you could still get a co pilot plus PC on Intel. Right?

[Christina Warren]

It's not, it's not restrictive, I think. Yeah, no, it's on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's. It's almost a tragedy, a Greek tragedy.

[Lou Mareska]

That's. That's what I'm saying. It really is.

[Christina Warren]

It really is.

[Harry McCracken]

It reminds me a little bit of Digital Equipment Corp. Back in the day, which at one point was regarded as the vast inspiring startup success in this country and within a few years no longer existed.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. First Compaq. Right. And then HP acquired Compaq. So. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but it is sad because, you know, intel built Silicon Valley was built on, you know, by intel people. Right. Like genuinely. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, going back, the trader is 12.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah. And so it just gets sad.

[Harry McCracken]

Intel is unquestionably one of the five most important companies in the history of Silicon Valley. And you could even make a pretty compelling case it's the most important company in the history of Silicon Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I can remember, though, interviewing Andy Grove way back in the day, and even when it was Windtel, right. Windows and intel, and that looked like a kind of inextricable partnership. Grove saying he was how mad he was at Microsoft that they weren't supporting the new 32 bit chips. And then Microsoft mad at intel that they couldn't keep the hardware up with the software. And it was always a kind of a difficult relationship between the two companies. It's just, it's fascinating. I love the history of it all.

[Harry McCracken]

There was a great. There was a great old saying, Andy giveth and Bill taketh away. Meaning. Meaning the hardware kept getting better and better, and it was hard for software. For software to get better rather than to get more inefficient when it had all that power.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. Leo, fun fact. One of my first internships was at. In Shrewsbury, Massachusetts for Intel right after the Digital Corp. Came in and it was the Itanium Group. And I saw a lot of that struggle, actually.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, my gosh.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that was. Maybe you could say that was the beginning of the end.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because Titanium was the next generation. It wasn't x86, it was some 64.

[Christina Warren]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And the whole idea is, here's the next generation. And the damn things were practically melting because they, they couldn't run at the speed that they were designed for. Intel realizing they're not going to be able to sell these chips looked to this little skunk works they had going in Israel where they were working on the core processor and they moved the core into the mainstream and said titanium is not going to happen.

[Lou Mareska]

And Itanium just disappeared.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

And for a long time that worked really well. I mean it did.

[Leo Laporte]

The core was amazing.

[Harry McCracken]

It didn't seem like x86 would go on forever. And no matter how often people predicted that it would hit a wall.

[Christina Warren]

No, totally. And the thing is that x86 arguably hasn't hit the wall. It was Intel's process. Right. Because AMD with, you know, their, their, their, their couplet technology with, with, with Zen, they were able to, you know, really revolutionize the way they were able to get, you know, integrate the circuits and do all the stuff to get far more power efficiency, far more performance. And, and that was, you know, Lisa Su and like that was you know, only like eight, nine years ago. But yeah, you're right, like the, the core thing was great. I do wonder kind of going back to like when we look at like the mistakes if the success there maybe helps them have that hubris to continue to ignore more probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Senor Vet is dilemma, isn't it? Yeah, it's always bad to be successful and so reckon 5 says. I didn't realize we were going to have an open casket wake in today's show. But it does raise an interesting question because sometimes I think we're like, you know, fish don't know they're in water. It's just what they breathe. It's. And I feel like sometimes we're in the middle of this big tech revolution and we almost don't see that the business cycle still holds. Right. That these, that Google and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon will just go on forever. But there is a business cycle. IBM fell victim to the business cycle. It's not gone, but it's a shadow of what it was before. It looks like intel has fallen. Pray there's a business cycle. Right?

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean Apple and Microsoft are rare examples of companies that were on top of the world and then faced real challenges to the things that made them successful and figured out how to continue to be extraordinarily successful.

[Leo Laporte]

But they reinvented themselves while not being.

[Harry McCracken]

Exactly this thing they once were. And there just aren't all that many examples other than those two companies.

[Leo Laporte]

They're the exceptions to prove the rules almost.

[Harry McCracken]

IBM at One point was too. Remember, like when Lou Gerstner came in, IBM was in real trouble. And Gerstner pushed it away from hardware and towards services, which worked quite well for quite a long time.

[Lou Mareska]

There's tons of examples, like Xerox is another one. They keep trying to reinvent themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Kodak, Polaroid, Sears, General Electric. You know, there is no General Electric Corporation anymore.

[Harry McCracken]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, who would have thought that, right? These were titans. The world marches on. And so does this show. We are half an hour to the ERAs concert, so we got to keep going here. Christina Warren, great to have you. We will get you out of here, I promise.

[Christina Warren]

I appreciate you guys. If you guys need to keep going. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

I gotta get going here. I gotta get going. I'm excited for you. I wish. I mean, I didn't realize this is the last one. That's pretty damn exciting. Wow.

[Christina Warren]

It's fun. It's gonna be really fun, Christina.

[Lou Mareska]

I live really close to Westerly, where, where, you know, she has her house. So you never. You never know.

[Leo Laporte]

She lives in Westerly, Rhode Island.

[Lou Mareska]

She has a house in Western.

[Leo Laporte]

Taylor Swift.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

She's a huge house.

[Lou Mareska]

Yep. Huge house. It's on the Ocean House. Ocean House is a great resort.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on the ocean. It's one way or the other.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I grew up near Westerly. Who would have thought, right? Is that her main place?

[Lou Mareska]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

One of hundreds, probably.

[Christina Warren]

I think like seven. But yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we. I once had dinner with Paul Simon and his wife, Edie Brickell. It's a long story, but Lisa. Wow, that's kind of a name drop.

[Christina Warren]

That's amazing. That's so good.

[Leo Laporte]

But. But there's a point to this. So Lisa and Edie got really. Got into it and they were having a great time. And Lisa starts selling Petaluma to Edie. And Edie says to Paul, hey, Paul, we ought to get a house in Petaluma. And Paul Sundays, we have six houses already. We are not buying a house in Petaluma. So there but for the grace of God, I could be Paul Simon's next door neighbor. Let's take a break. Also with us, Harry McCracken from a fast company, Lumareska of Microsoft and the Excel Copilot Group. Our show today, brought to you by Lookout. Look out.

[Harry McCracken]

Look out.

[Leo Laporte]

At a time when the majority of sensitive corporate data has moved to the cloud. Right. Your data is almost everywhere. Traditional boundaries no longer exist. And the strategies for securing that data, well, they've changed completely. It's all different now. Today Every company's in the business of managing data. That's your business. That means every company's an increased risk of data exposure and loss. You know that. Just look at the headlines. Cyber threats, breaches, leaks. And the bad news is cybercriminals are getting more sophisticated every day. Modern breaches now happen like that. Not, not, not days or months, but boom. Enter Lookout. From the first phishing text to the final data grab, Lookout stops modern breaches as swiftly as they unfold. Whether on a device in the cloud, across networks, or working remotely at the local coffee shop, Lookout gives you clear visibility into your data. At rest and at motion. You'll monitor, assess and protect without sacrificing productivity for security. And with a single unified cloud platform, your IT department will love it. Lookout simplifies and strengthens it reimagines security for the world. That will be today. It's happening right in front of our eyes. Visit Lookout.com today to learn how to safeguard data to secure hybrid work and reduce IT complexity. That's Lookout.com we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech and invite you to support us by going to lookout.com and if they ask you, make sure you say, I heard it on twit. That's good news. Let's talk about AI. The 12 days of OpenAI. It's an advent calendar of artificial intelligence. The only story I saw was, was that OpenAI will now have a $200 a month plan. That seems like a lot. Is there a market for. I mean, I understand how expensive AI is. I pay for the $20 open AI plan and I use it, by the way, a lot. In fact, I use it for coding. Maybe not necessarily what you would think of OpenAI is doing, although I imagine. Is it. Is it what's behind GitHub copilot or no? Is that it?

[Christina Warren]

Is. It is. Well, actually now GitHub Copilot is multimodal, so the default mod GPT4O, but you can choose to use the O1 mini or 01 preview.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but it's all OpenAI.

[Christina Warren]

Well, yes, but as of a couple of weeks ago, we also introduced support for Anthropic and Gemini Pro. So it's multi model now. So. Yes, but historically, going back to the very beginning, it was built in partnership with OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're in the middle. In December, you've got your 12 days of OpenAI but we've got our 25 days days of the advent of code, which is a monthly, yearly coding challenge that a number of People in the club do, and we've been having a lot of fun. In fact, I streamed the first four or five days, but now I'm falling hopelessly behind. But I use, and in fact I use it on the stream. Yeah, my Chat GPT I gave. I use Rag for ChatGPT, and I gave it the full bookshelf because I use a language that's so old that all of the basic texts are available as open source PDFs, as public domain PDFs. So I loaded up with like 20 books and I created a little Lisp tool that I use, and it's fantastic. If I can't, instead of going, you know, and I don't know, you're a professional coder, so you probably don't have to do this, but if I'm coding, I have to always go back to the book and say, what's the syntax for that? Or how do I do this?

[Lou Mareska]

I do that all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. It's not just me.

[Lou Mareska]

And that's why the beauty of it is because it doesn't for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I put those books in the, in the, in the, in the chat GPT and it knows them all. But then the funny thing is then I tried it with Copilot, and I tried it with Gemini, and it knew them all too. So I don't really need to do it this way anymore. The one advantage of it is I say, don't make, don't say anything that's not in the books I gave you. So can't hallucinate me. Right?

[Harry McCracken]

I am still trying to teach ChatGPT TRS 80, level 2 basic.

[Leo Laporte]

There not enough books for you? That's the problem.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, there are quite a few and they're all in the Internet Archive, like, without being trained on it. It's terrible, just because it needs more material. But at some point I'm going to upload those PDFs in and see whether it's as good at programming BASIC as.

[Leo Laporte]

I am, I don't use it. And just to be clear, actually there's a little bit of a controversy around the advent of code because, you know, it's a timed coding challenge. I do not do it for time, but there are people who are solving these daily challenges in minutes. But all of a sudden, a few have come along. In fact, the very first one solved it in nine seconds.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it became apparent that that person had just fed the course, it's a text problem, fed it into OpenAI or something, copilot, and had it write the code. And it worked. And he got the answer in nine. I don't even know how you cut and paste in nine seconds, but he somehow did it. And there's still a kind of ongoing controversy because there's the leaderboard and there are a few people on leaderboard who are really unreasonably quick seconds instead of minutes. So they are. But I don't cut and paste code from it. It's mostly for me, a reference work.

[Harry McCracken]

I also do like PHP and css.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

In that case, usually I've written code that doesn't work work. And one time out of 10, it's completely confused and gives me terrible advice. But most of the time it quickly helps me get to where I'm trying to get.

[Leo Laporte]

One thing I've done that is great is I've given it a block of code. So what does this do?

[Christina Warren]

Yes, it's great.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very great for that great expression for irregular expressions. You can give it the most complicated.

[Christina Warren]

But to explain and to write them, because I'm terrible at regular projects and that's one of the things I use copilot for so much. I'm like, please write this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a natural.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. The interesting thing about 401, which is why this has cost so much, 200amonth, is the 401 model. I've been. Had a chance to play with this and utilize it for a while, and it's really impressive with coding. You can give it. I could. I could say, give me a web app or give it some parameters. It'll go do some reasoning and it'll dump out code that actually works the first time. It'll give you explanations. You know, I'll tell it new features like, I want swipe left, swipe left, swipe right, right, delete, that kind of thing. It'll actually go and adjust the code for you and re. You know, like, if you do that in four. Zero, it actually, you know, you get weird responses, you get some strange errors in the code. So, like, I would say that's the biggest thing that people are paying for is just, you know, the additional reasoning that's going on and the correctness of it.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they've only announced. So just to be clear, you said 01. There was chat 40, which they had that video. They were talking to it and Scarlett Johansson got pissed off and all of that. That was 4 0, which is a more conversational one, but they've gone beyond that now. So what are the models now?

[Lou Mareska]

So they 4 0, but they have six versions of 4 0. So they come out with different versions of it. You notice there'll be a May version and August versus and which actually are better. They have better.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're good at reasoning. Isn't that what they said?

[Lou Mareska]

They're better at reasoning.

[Christina Warren]

That's the new ones. That's the new model. So this is the.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to give them more time though, right?

[Christina Warren]

Yes.

[Lou Mareska]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Lou Mareska]

Right. Well, it depends. That's why the $200 ones exist. It's actually not more time, more GPU.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, TPU. Oh, that's interesting. So you're paying 200 bucks so you can have access to more hardware resources so it can do it faster. That makes sense. All right.

[Lou Mareska]

Right. Because the original models in the preview days you used to run it, it could take 30 seconds to a minute for it to come back with you. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So is it. It's not practical to do it in a timely way on. On your own local hardware at this point?

[Lou Mareska]

Oh, no, not at that level.

[Christina Warren]

Not at that level. No. I mean, you can do some pretty impressive things with LLAMA if you have, you know, a 4090 or even like a cluster of them or even Mac Minis, Right? Like. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who doesn't have a cluster of Nvidia 4090s?

[Christina Warren]

Well, no, but lying around, even on like local Apple Silicon machines, especially if you have like multiples or even if you have ones that have like high RAM things, you can get pretty good results from some of the Llama and some of the tuned Llama like versions that people put on hugging face. Now, is it going to.

[Leo Laporte]

And when they're tuned, they're tuned to.

[Christina Warren]

Specific tasks or for specific sizes. Yes. Right. So what people will do is they'll basically be like, okay, we know that this, you know, this many parameters won't run on your hardware, but we can maybe remove some things that we don't think you want want for a specific task and also to fit in a specific size.

[Leo Laporte]

This is one of the biggest and most interesting developments to me in AI is these different size models so that you can run some models on a device like a smartphone, which Apple does with Apple intelligence. And then if it's too big for that, it goes to Apple's own servers which they're building out. And if it's too big for that, then they say, okay, we can't do it, but maybe OpenAI can do it. Or Claude. Well, they don't have Gemini or Claude yet, but maybe OpenAI can do it. Beware now we're going to be sending your data to third party servers and then they let them do it. I think that's fascinating. And you can now locally play with these different models by downloading them. There's a number of programs on. I've used Olama on Mac.

[Christina Warren]

Olama is awesome. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What's it called? Any Anywhere Anything, Any something. There are a couple of them that let you download the models and then play with it. It's nice to have it locally but honestly I don't mind paying 20 bucks too. Google for Gemini for Claude and Sonnet, Open AI and Perplexity I pay for too and they're a multi model. So Yeah, I have four different. I'm wasting 80.

[Lou Mareska]

All have their Avengers, you know.

[Harry McCracken]

Totally. I'd like like a $30 version of ChatGPT that's just a little faster. Just a little and a little less limited because I do sometimes max out my access to the so do you.

[Leo Laporte]

Use it for writing, Harry?

[Harry McCracken]

Not really. Maybe occasionally if I'm trying to think of a word and I use it as like a super powerful thesaurus. Notebook LM though which is this Google tool based on Gemini that lets you organize your transcripts and notes. I do use that and it's been super helpful when I've interviewed a dozen people and I'm trying to remember who said something interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that'd be so useful.

[Harry McCracken]

It's great. In fact, I did a big Story on Google DeepMind which has been up on our website for a couple of weeks and it is our new issue that's just coming out and since that was about Google DeepMind and Gemini, I went all in on using NotebookLM to help me put it together and it really was extremely helpful and solved some long standing problems I've had with not remembering who said what lot.

[Leo Laporte]

So the 12 I want to get. We have stuff about DeepMind and we have stuff we have. I want to talk about all that stuff in a sec but I do want to finish this. 12 Days of OpenAI there's only been one so far, right? Is that right, Lou?

[Lou Mareska]

They're taking the weekend off actually I think there's two. There was two so far but yeah, yeah but you're right, they are taking some time off and I'm wondering if they're leaving to the best the last we'll have to see.

[Leo Laporte]

So the first one was 01 and ChatGPT Pro, right. And there's Sam Altman on the left with his. With his team and what was good about the Pro is that the $200 one.

[Lou Mareska]

That's $200 one. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And what is 01 good for?

[Lou Mareska]

01'S the reasoning model, the chain of thought model. Right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Lou Mareska]

And that's the one that you'll get amazing results with, with correctness and so on.

[Leo Laporte]

And it can do math, which was hard to do for a language based LLM because all it was doing is predicting the next word. And it turns out one plus one isn't always two.

[Lou Mareska]

It's multimodal too. So it supports images.

[Leo Laporte]

Images as well. Okay. And then the next announcement, the day two announcement was OpenAI's reinforcement fine tuning research program. Anything to tell us about that does that?

[Lou Mareska]

I don't know too much about that, but I do know, I think there was also another thing. It's kind of a minor as well.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess if you're going to do 12, you've got, you're gonna throw in.

[Christina Warren]

Look, not everything's gonna be a hit, Right. It is an advent calendar, you know. Is this the same thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Sometimes you get a chocolate, sometimes you get a plastic toy. You don't know.

[Christina Warren]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Christina Warren]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Christina Warren]

Sometimes it's just like a little like card. We love you.

[Leo Laporte]

We love you. It's like Cracker Jack. When I was a kid, you'd get actual toys you could choke to death on. Now it's little pieces of paper. It's not. All right, so we'll watch. Do you anticipate any big announcements? I know both of you probably already know a lot, so don't say anything.

[Christina Warren]

I don't actually. I know nothing. So I don't know. I mean, I think this is a great marketing. I think this is a great marketing opportunity. Honestly, I think it's a fun way to show off. Yes. And because I think it's two things. Like, one, I think it's a fun marketing thing. And two, I think that this is especially given all the very good competition that's out there from companies like Anthropic and Google. And of course, no matter showing like how much they're able to innovate and how much they're able to ship. Like, I think that's, it's, it's. So it's kind of two things, right? Like, I think it's, it's good for the consumer to, you know, maybe put out new things and get awareness. But I also think that it's almost, maybe a secondary thing is almost probably for the investors where it's like, look at all the stuff we're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, especially now because it looks like there may be some headwinds with the next administration. Now might be a good time to kind of say, hey, remember, we're still number one one. We're still the best. We're still out there. We still have the Microsoft deal.

[Harry McCracken]

Sam said not to expect GPT5.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, okay. He did. Also, though, I saw somebody. Did he not say that they already have AGI in the lab?

[Christina Warren]

I think he's adjusted the definition of what AGI is, I think. But then I saw a story that.

[Leo Laporte]

Said they were trying to kill one of the models, and it didn't, and it didn't want to be killed.

[Christina Warren]

This sounds like this is 2001.

[Leo Laporte]

This sounds like BS to me, but all right. I am still. I come and go with AI. Like, obviously, there's uses. We just showed many valuable uses. At the same time, I don't know if we'll ever get HAL 9000. And maybe we should hope we don't actually, come to think of it, exactly.

[Christina Warren]

Do we need it? Maybe the question isn't will we? But should we?

[Harry McCracken]

Should we?

[Leo Laporte]

We. All right, let me take another break. I'm trying to get out of here. I have a lot more AI stories, though. I want to do some more AI stuff in just a second. But first, a word from Veeam. This is a sponsor you want to know about, because Veeam, get this, Veeam is used by 77% of the Fortune 500. What is Veeam? You ought to know. They just raised a whole bunch more because what they do is so important. They are the experts in data resilience. I've always wondered, when you hear, oh, this company just paid a $5 million ransomware fee to get their data back, or this company has been down for three weeks because they got hit by ransomware. I would say, well, don't you have backups? Don't you. What is going on? Well, it turns out it's a hard thing to do, but that's exactly what Veeam does. See, without your data, look at that $15 billion valuation. They do something really important. Without your data, Data your customers trust turns to digital dust. Veeam's data protection and ransomware recovery ensures you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it. And no matter what happens, they are the number one leader globally in data resilience. As I said, 77% of the Fortune 500 uses Veeam to keep their businesses running. When digital disruptions like ransomware structures strike, Veeam does three important Things, of course, it lets you back up and recover your data and do so instantly across your entire cloud ecosystem, wherever that data lives. That's important. Veeam actually can stop ransomware in its tracks. It will proactively detect malicious activity and stop it before it happens. The other thing Veeam does that's so important, and I know you want to do this, Veeam helps you remove the guesswork by automating your recovery plans and policies. You have a recovery plan and policy, right? Right. Yeah. Well, maybe it's time to get Veeam, get real time support from ransomware recovery experts too. Veeam has the best support, the best product. Data is the lifeblood of your business. You need to get data resilient. You know, you need to do it. Go to veeam.com to learn more. Look at all the partners, look at all the places that they can back up. V E E A M. Spell it right, Two E's. V W A M. You've probably heard a lot of buzz about Veeam this week. Good reason. It's something we all need. Ve a M.com and if they ask, tell them you heard it here. Okay. You were talking about DeepMind. I don't know if they had this out when you interviewed them, Harry, but Google has a new Deep mind weather forecast system. They published a paper in Nature that said they are better than the best European center for medium range weather forecasts. Ens.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, they had an earlier one which I did mention, which itself was impressive. But this one is like on a whole another level.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a really good use for AI, Right. Because you have weather is a chaotic system. I mean, probably at the base, at the root of it, it's deterministic. I guess if you could get all the millions of data points in there, very hard to predict weather. Obviously this is something an AI might be really good at.

[Harry McCracken]

And I think it's also Google. DeepMind's wheelhouse. AlphaFold is like probably their, their signature accomplished.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, DeepMind is the best chess player in the world, right? And they beat Go. And so yeah, they're good at this stuff.

[Harry McCracken]

This is the sort of thing that, that they are really, really great at. Sometimes they have more challenges kind of productizing and commercializing AI, although they have made inroads there. But in terms of the raw research that can do useful things for humanity, they have a great record and it'll be fun to see where it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can see how important this is. Not just because of these big hurricanes. We're getting. But if you're a farmer, knowing you're going to have dry weather or wet weather is so important. They have, they say faster, more accurate forecasts up to 15 days ahead of time, and they are better at predicting extreme events than the enemy or the ECMWF ens.

[Harry McCracken]

My story, I mean, my story touches on kind of. There's a little bit of tension now because Google used to have Google Brain and DeepMind, these two large AI research arms. And Google Brain was kind of focused on making Gmail and Google Search and Google maps better. And DeepMind was doing stuff like proteins and weather. And last year they merged them and put Demas Hassabas, the CEO of DeepMind, in charge of both of them. And he's trying to continue to pursue the stuff like weather. That's really important, but not necessarily like an immediate cash cow for Google, while simultaneously keeping up with Apple and Microsoft and Meta and all these other companies who are. Are much more focused on the product productization side, which Google had been struggling with a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Very interesting.

[Harry McCracken]

And I think, I mean, I think at the moment they are. They've made progress on the product side and they are continuing to do the deep research. So it's possible they'll be able to do both. But it's kind of a new twist and a new challenge for Demosabus, for Super Cool, for Sir Demisabas, who's also became a Nobel laureate recently and.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobel. That's right. Yeah. Pretty amazing. And then you mentioned Notebook lm. One of the features that got a lot of attention was Notebook LM starting to do podcasting.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Taking your documents and turn it into a male and female pair of podcasters. I am not threatened by this. I know maybe some musicians are threatened. Threatened by the idea that AI can make music. I don't think they really are as good as Sora is. It doesn't replace real musicians like the wonderful Taylor Swift, who about to perform in about three hours. No, she will not be replaced by AI. And I'm hopeful that podcasts won't be replaced by AI.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah, I mean, the ones that Notebook LLM puts together, just in terms of how they sound and the conversational aspect, they're astounding.

[Leo Laporte]

It is amazing, isn't it?

[Harry McCracken]

They're really shallow and they do hallucinate a little bit. So, yeah, they're stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

But they. But they sound great.

[Christina Warren]

They do. They sound great. And, you know, if you wanted just kind of a. Like, it's one of those things that's obviously early and it's not perfect, but it kind of takes the idea that we had like a decade ago with Instapaper and Pocket and things like that, where, you know, we were like, oh, well, what if I could turn this into an audio digest? And there were a number of starters, startups that have come out over the years that, you know, would hire voice actors or sometimes use AI to read those articles to you. And this is kind of like the next step of that, which is to a. The, you know, the AI voices have gotten good enough and it is a threat, frankly, to, you know, voice actors, unfortunately, but, you know, for things like audiobooks and stuff like that. But, you know, consolidating several sources and kind of giving you a digest. It's not perfect, but I like the idea of what it is. It's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

And we are all, all old enough to remember early voice synthesis sounding like, yeah, mine. Yeah. And Harry, you're probably old enough when we're like, Castle, Castle Wolfenstein on the, on the Apple 2 and the German.

[Harry McCracken]

Soldiers are going, yeah, I mean, on Blue sky recently, I. I shared the TRS 80 voice synthesizer, which was, I think 400. And you could barely understand that. And then there was this long period of an uncanny valley, like from, you know, in recent. In recent years, the voices have been about 90% towards being great, but that last 10% was really hard on your ears. We finally have voices which you might listen to for an hour without ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Winning enough to be indistinguishable, probably.

[Lou Mareska]

Leo, this might be your chance to localize, go global. They can actually turn into different languages.

[Leo Laporte]

I know I can. Could. The technology now exists to take all of our podcasts and put them out in Chinese with my lips matching and everything. And eleven Labs has just announced a similar podcast tool. They do amazing voices. We've used some of them.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, those are really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't Anthony, didn't you use 11 labs to do AI Leo's voice? Yeah, yeah. So I have a little imaginary friend who sounds just like me, but so I. So I have 11 labs. They bought my favorite news reader, which called Omnivore. They just recently bought them and so I'm now going to have to use the 11 reader. But they just added a new voice, which cracks me up. Let me see if I can find it. They just added R. So they have. I'll play a few of them. Like, they have John Wayne's voice. They licensed being scared to death but saddling up anyway. Sure, I say that all the time. And they have you know, they. So they've, they've, they've. There's Lawrence Olivier. To be, not to be. That's not a recording of Olivier. That's a synthesized voice. Okay, you could stop talking, Sir Lawrence. But now they have. I gotta play this for you. This is hysterical. Oh, where are the voices? Shoot apps. I just, I don't understand them. Oh, here they are. They have Richard Feynman. You want to hear Richard Feynman? This is hysterical. I don't know why you'd want a book read in this, but it's pretty cool. I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. That's Richard Feynman. They must have got Jerry Garcia. Sometimes the light's all shining on me Other times I can barely see Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been. I don't know what Jerry Garcia, if he really sounds like that, but I.

[Christina Warren]

Have no idea what he sounds like at all.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah, you know, you got a question where Audible. You got a question where audible will be in five years.

[Christina Warren]

I was going to say. I was going to say that. That's the thing. And I do feel bad because, like, I've. A good reader can make or break an audiobook for me. And, and there, there's some, some, you know, readers who are just fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Out of work soon.

[Christina Warren]

And, And I feel like the highest end ones, like the Scott Bricks of the world, will probably always get work, but the people who are not as good, like, you know, you do wonder, like, are publishers just going to default to these voices? And part of me feels like, okay, well, if it's close enough, maybe that's progress. Maybe more books will have audio versions. But then there's another part of me that is very upset about the fact that what I do think is a real art form for people who can narrate things really well, you know, is being potentially disenfranchised just because we can do it faster.

[Harry McCracken]

This is the truth.

[Leo Laporte]

All the. In every creative realm, this is what's happening with AI. And, you know, I imagine it's already a problem that there's 18 million podcasts, but now that number is going to triple because half of them will be. Somebody was just saying that there are. I didn't know this. A lot of AI generated document documentaries on YouTube. And he says they're all kind of shallow and human, but. And I don't know, maybe that will go away also.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, but we've had those things, right? Like, you've had a lot of videos that weren't completely AI generated, but were largely kind of piecemealed. Like, you know, reading with kind of a generated voice of, you know, some snippet they've gotten someplace, you know, with kind of generic background stuff and whatnot. Like, that's been happening for a long time. We can do it faster. And so, so on the one hand that's bad because more of that can infiltrate the system and we create more spam. But on the other hand, like, it's. I don't know, it makes me feel slightly better to be like, this isn't a brand new problem. It's just maybe the velocity and maybe ironically, using AI, you know, we could, if the networks care, like, or the platforms care, they could, you know, block the uploading of some of the AI things.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's harder and harder to do that, by the way. Yes, it is, because these guys are really sneaky. They're.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah, but, but you know, doesn't mean that it's that it like, but that's an interesting challenge too, right? Which would be like, okay, how. Just treat it like any other form of spam.

[Leo Laporte]

So what you can do with Notebook lm, it's the same two voices all the time, the same woman, man and woman. But now you can do with 11 labs. In fact, somebody's done it. They took the transcript from a Notebook LM podcast, fed it to 11 labs and changed the voices. So now you could have a podcast with John W. Wayne and Richard Feynman if you want it.

[Harry McCracken]

That's going to be a real burned of the estates of all these dead celebrities.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm sure they're paying them. I hope they're paying them a lot. Judy Garland's in there. A lot of famous people are in here. We live in a very, like, I'm.

[Christina Warren]

Actually I, I mean, I'm very curious how the licensing on this works, but yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they have to pay for it.

[Christina Warren]

I assume they have to. I just, I'm just curious how the licensing has worked on this. Like, the estate is good. Well, I wonder if it's the estate or. See, this becomes an interesting question. Is it the estate or is it the, is it the studio? Because like, did they just go to MGM and license the catalog or are they going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

They're using her name. I think you'd have to.

[Christina Warren]

Then I'm sure it's her estate. But, but, but again, like, I think that that's going to become increasingly like an important point for people to have in their contracts.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, here's a. Here's Deepak Chopra. Now. He's still alive. I'm sure he's getting paid.

[Christina Warren]

Oh, he definitely is paid. Without a doubt.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's play a little.

[Christina Warren]

He chose to. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Deepak Chopra, when you align your thoughts with love, compassion, and gratitude, you open yourself to the infinite potential of the universe. That's all I need, man. I'm done. That's it. That's great. I'm adding that to my podcast voice. You don't. You won't hear me much more. Hey, I want to thank you, Lou, for putting in. We love O Malik. Used to have him on the show. Gotta get him back on. He's kind of semi retired. He's the Yoda of tech. Created gigaom and then became a vc. He has a blog now called Crazy Stupid Tech, and he writes, you wrote, you put this in here. And I think, Lou, it's a great piece which everybody should read. Will AI eat the browser? And he's talking about the evolution of technology, really. And in. Specifically in this case, he's talking about what ARC is about to do. ARC created the browser that I'm using right now. I really like it. But they are now moving to something new they call dia, which is a. I don't know what we'll see, an AI browser or something. And he interviews the head of the browser company and Josh Miller and talks about it.

[Lou Mareska]

It's impressive. Like this is the. Like the intelligent browser that understands what you like and what you enjoy and is able to weed out false information.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that would be good.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. It's just a really impressive thing. I think he's.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you trust any AI to do that? Is the question, I guess.

[Lou Mareska]

Right, right, right.

[Harry McCracken]

OpenAI has been talking about building a browser. I think we may be headed for a shakeup in browsing in general, especially if Google is forced to sell Chrome to somebody else. And I wrote a newsletter about this recently. I mean, browsers go through these cycles of being exciting and boring. And other than things like arc, the last few years have been kind of boring and we haven't seen Safari or Chrome change much. Edge has been fun to see, but even that's been around for a while and I think there's a good potential for AI to kind of shake things up. And it kind of feels right now like chrome is what IE used to be. It's the 800 pound gorilla. And it's hard to see how it would be less popular, but there's a decent chance that AI could give somebody an entry point to be the next browser that everybody uses.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and not just the browser, Harry. Search as well. Right. I mean, that's how Google really makes money.

[Harry McCracken]

Right. And the browser and search are inextricably linked to each other. Particularly with all these people not getting around to changing their default search engine.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I feel like I use Kagi, which is a. Yeah, I do too. Really? I thought I was the only one.

[Harry McCracken]

I'm paying them 10 bucks a month.

[Leo Laporte]

10 bucks a month to have a good search. That's surprising that people would do that. But interesting. How about you, Lou? What do you use for your search?

[Lou Mareska]

I don't use a search anymore. I just use Copilot or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

You say that's what Google's worried about is.

[Christina Warren]

And they should be.

[Leo Laporte]

And Kagi offered me perplexity. That's how I got involved with perplexity. And Perplexity now has a search tool that's an AI search. It's very interesting. We are, thank goodness, getting into interesting times now. We're also getting into the witching hour for miss Christina Warren Film Girl. I'm going to let you. Do you have a special outfit you're going to wear?

[Christina Warren]

I probably just because it was so last minute, I'm going to have a hat on. This is kind of a black reputation. I've got a hood.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks good. You're ready to go? I think you're ready to go.

[Christina Warren]

I'm basically ready to go. So I'm going to pass out. I'm going to leave you guys. Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you so much as always for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

We love you, Christina.

[Christina Warren]

Lou, Harry, great seeing both of you and everybody have a great evening.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Christina Warren.

[Harry McCracken]

Have fun, Christina.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a great time at the last eras show. I got to hear all about it. You'll post on Instagram, right?

[Christina Warren]

I will post on Instagram and I'll. I'll talk about it next time I'm on.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Christina. All right.

[Christina Warren]

Thank you so much. Take care, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

We do have some final stories. We'll get to those in just a minute. But first a word from our sponsor. Zip Recruiter loves. They're more than a sponsor to us. ZipRecruiter is where we go when we're hiring there. You know, there are so many things in life that take a long time, right. Sorting through countless emails, putting together a piece of office furniture or like one of our listeners Flow Connect, who's making updates to his medical billing spreadsheet. And listening to the show while he's doing it. Those things, they're time consuming, shall we say. And if you're an employer, hiring could also be added to the list. A lot of paperwork. It's very annoying. I know from our own experience, when you get that email from a employee who says, hey, I love working here, but I found a job that's closer to my house and I'm going to give you my two weeks notice, it's not just a loss of a beloved employee, but it's like, oh, no, now I got to fill that position. Until I fill that position, I got to do the work and then it's going to take me forever to. Thank goodness there's ZipRecruiter. It's been a lifesaver for us. ZipRecruiter finds qualified candidates fast. I know because Lisa will post a job opening at breakfast and within, before lunch, within hours. Hours. I'll hear her say, oh, hey, we got a great. Oh, this candidate's fantastic. And here's another one. ZipRecruiter really works. You could try it for free right [e-mail] TWIT According to G2, ZipRecruiter is the hiring site employers prefer the most. The most. And part of it is this amazing smart technology that ZipRecruiter offers. I mean, when you post on ZipRecruiter, you're posting to hundreds of job boards and social networks with one click of the mouse. I mean, that's great. You're casting the widest possible net. And all of those applications come into the Zip Recruiter interface. And you can, you can, you can rank them and you hire the right person fast. You've got, you know, screening questions you can ask them. There's a lot of useful tools in there. They don't go to your voicemail and your inbox. They're in that. Nice. They format the resumes. But there's one more thing Zip Recruiter does that's fantastic. Their powerful matching technology looks at your listing, then matches it with resumes they have on file. And they have more than a million current resumes on file because people come there looking for work, right? So they will look at those resumes and say, hey, here's some candidates whose qualifications match your requirements. You can look at those people and invite the ones you really like to apply for your job. Now that is a magical trick because when you go out, reach out to a candidate and say, hey, I saw your resume. You look just right for our position. Please apply. They are flattered. They apply. You move right to the top of the list of employers. And these days you're competing with other employers. That's a huge advantage. That's why ZipRecruiter works so well. Let ZipRecruiter find top talent for your roles in no time at all. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate it within the first day. And as I said for us, often within the first hour. It's fast. If you go to ziprecruiter.com twit right now, you could try it for free. That's the same price as laughing so hard your sides hurt or getting a compliment from a random stranger. That's it's free. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter the smartest way. Way to hire. And we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. Well, it's just down to us three guys now. We had to let Christina go to the show and actually maybe it's just down to you and me, Harry. What's going on? We have a blank spot. That's my bad. One second.

[Lou Mareska]

It's trying to get rid of me.

[Leo Laporte]

You've disappeared, Lou.

[Lou Mareska]

Thanks, Anthony.

[Leo Laporte]

Lou. Mm. Continues with the show. He is of course the product manager for co. Let me get it right.

[Lou Mareska]

Engineer.

[Leo Laporte]

Engineer, Engineering manager.

[Lou Mareska]

Pilot for Excel or co pilot for Excel in Python. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And Python or in Python.

[Lou Mareska]

Basically Python. Yeah. Copilot for Excel with Python.

[Leo Laporte]

So let me ask you about that because that's really interesting. Do you. So you can write Python code?

[Lou Mareska]

You can write Python code in Excel now? Yep, yep, that's been released. You can just go in there and just. In a normal formula, like you do in normal formula today.

[Leo Laporte]

More or macro formula. You can actually do it in Python.

[Lou Mareska]

You can still do those, but the Python is there for your.

[Leo Laporte]

Python is the number one language for data processing. Right. I mean people, right? Yeah.

[Lou Mareska]

Right. And you can basically pick any library that's in the. Well, most libraries in the Anaconda library and just dump the code in a formula and away you go. And now Copilot will actually write it for you. So you can ask it to do some advanced analysis of your. Of your data and it will go and produce some pretty amazing graphs and charts and insights in there. It's really fun to use. I think I've had a lot of fun actually playing with it.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember when they announced that Python will be part of Excel. That was a few months ago and I thought that's really interesting but I didn't understand how.

[Lou Mareska]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's really good. That's tight integration.

[Lou Mareska]

That's really super tight. Yep. And they have an editor. They just released a super cool editor analysis with all VS code based just right in Excel. So you just pop it open and click the, and click the. You type in PI into the formula and the editor opens.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this primarily for data scientists or.

[Lou Mareska]

I guess it is not. It is not. I thought so in the beginning I would say yeah, like that's basically who is playing with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Lou Mareska]

But now it's just as simple as like you go in there and say give me a distribution, give me this. Do it, you know, do an analysis of trends or give me a prediction and it will actually generate the model, the code for it and generate the model and produce the insight and dump the graph in the, in the, in the document right there. It's pretty impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

We were talking, I've mentioned the advent of code. We have a little group of people in the club that are doing that and one of them, Darren Oakey used to code for, you know, back office office stuff for data, for brokers, for finance and he's. A lot of the quants use Python.

[Lou Mareska]

So I imagine banks. In fact, if you want to be an analyst for a bank now, you have to know Python.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Wow.

[Lou Mareska]

But this is really not. I mean the copilot integration stuff that I'm doing, you don't have to know Python. This is just so you can do some really cool things with the fact that Python has some more advanced analysis capabilities than just core Excel has. So it's actually a lot of fun to play with. In fact I saw a real estate agent recently dump all of their like comps in there and do like an advanced analysis be able to do trending and they don't, they don't know any Python.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Wow. What that, that's a cool. You're in a cool part of the company. That's really neat.

[Lou Mareska]

It's a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

We had mentioned I think last week that there was a rumor that there were the government was investigating Microsoft once again. But Microsoft has denied that and then the FTC says we're no comment. I think this is a story that has no legs to be honest with you. So I'm not going to mention it. AP says FTC opens Microsoft antitrust investigation Trump Administration must carry on or drop so many times had it. A lot of Bloomberg I think started it. Everybody independently confirmed it, I guess with the ftc, but the FTC is not talking publicly and nor is Microsoft. So. And by the way, an investigation doesn't mean a, a lawsuit or a trial or anything. It just means they're looking at it.

[Lou Mareska]

Right. And it seems like it stemmed from the fact that with our partnership with OpenAI. Right. I think that was where mainly stemmed from the ftc.

[Leo Laporte]

According to this is the story from ap, FTC is investigating Microsoft's cloud computing business and related product lines like AI and cyber security, according to a person not authorized to discuss details publicly. You know, who knows what will happen. One of the things I think if I were big, a big tech company, a CEO of a big tech company like Jeff Bezos or Sundar Pichai or your own Satya Nadella, I would be pretty bullish about the next administration. A lot of that big tech, you know, prosecution I think will go away because as Trump has said about Google, the Chinese are scared of them. This is these, they, this is the playbook that Tim cook used in 2017, in the last administration to keep Trump from putting tariffs on iPhones.

[Harry McCracken]

I'm writing about this for my next newsletter right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, I think a lot of people do see Tim Cook as a model because he quietly forged a relationship and was able to get taxes repatriated from other countries at a favorable rate.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a big deal, right?

[Harry McCracken]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple had billions of dollars in Ireland.

[Harry McCracken]

And obviously if the iPhone had become a lot more expensive because of tariffs, that would have been a major problem. But there was an example, told Trump, apparently there was an exemption.

[Leo Laporte]

Samsung, this isn't good for us.

[Harry McCracken]

And it did involve a little bit of kind of sucking things up. Like he led Trump on this tour of this Flextronics plant that had been around forever in Texas, and Trump talked about how he'd opened this great, great new Apple plant.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple been making Mac pros there since.

[Harry McCracken]

2013 and nobody pointed out that it's not an Apple plant and it's not new. So I think one of the things I plan to write about is that part of the challenge of this is that being on Trump's good side involves not saying bad stuff about him.

[Leo Laporte]

Which, you know, you know what that's called politics.

[Harry McCracken]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Anytime you deal with a politician, you're trying to get, it's a deal. It's you're trying to get the best for your company. That's what a good CEO is going to do.

[Harry McCracken]

I do think it'll be a challenge if some of the worst case scenarios pan out in terms of what Trump might try to do this time around. And you also have people like employees and customers who might not be thrilled if you only say these kind of guarded, nice things about Trump.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're a stakeholder of a big company like Apple. By stakeholder, I mean you benefit. If they benefit, you're a stockholder. You want Tim Cook to do what's best for your stock, for your, for the company.

[Harry McCracken]

This is what they're, they're going to lean towards.

[Leo Laporte]

Although if you're going to, you hold your nose and you say, hey, this is politics. This is how it is.

[Harry McCracken]

Although there were a few instances last time around, like, particularly with the family separations, where you did see CEOs speak out against it. That came and went very quickly. So I'm not sure if it actually had any great impact on how that panned out, but I think it's at least conceivable it will be harder for this kind of very gingerly relationship between the CEOs and Trump to not cause new problems for the CEOs involved.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that, do you agree, though, that in the long run, it's going to be better for us technology companies, or maybe not?

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, this is potentially an area where we might be okay. Yeah, I think there is.

[Leo Laporte]

You remember that there was this whole issue with conservatives and many in Trump's court and Trump himself, who felt that Big Tech was censoring conservative speech and they were mad at Big Tech for that. It's my guess that that's going to go away. They're not going to worry about that because Zagat Elon and he's not censoring. And they're going to really look at. And this is the path that Tim Cook used so effectively last time. Time. What's best for American companies.

[Harry McCracken]

We'll see. I mean, I think, you know, Trump quite recently talked about putting Mark Zuckerberg in jail. So I don't, I don't think that's true. That, you know, the chances that that's going to translate into anything happening are probably incredibly tiny.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think he's gotten over that. And I think Zuckerberg just says to him, look, dude, we're an American company. I think we want American companies to do well. Right.

[Harry McCracken]

I think it's possible that Trump will continue to say whatever he wants on Truth, Social or X or wherever he, he goes. But. But it won't translate into unfavorable situations for these companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll watch with interest. Speaking of rhetoric, this is hysterical. Of course there's this Salt Typhoon problem, which is the Chinese hacking group that has gotten into our phone system and now we know has been listening in the phone calls of the at the highest levels of the American government. You, you interpret that as you wish, but that's what they're saying it, they're still in there. The government is trying to get the phone consent the phone companies to lock down their systems. I don't know how easy that is going to be to do. In response, the FBI has warned iPhone and Android users start using secure messaging, not the built in messaging on your phone use Signal, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp. But then, and this is a great piece by Zach Doffman and Forbes, they also say, oh, but make sure you only use an encryption technology that we have a back door in what, what they call it responsibly managed encryption. The FBI says, quote, this encryption should be designed to protect people's privacy and also managed so us tech companies can provide readable content in response to a lawful court order, AKA a backdoor. Which by the way is why Salt Typhoon is in there because of Kalia. What Salt Typhoon is doing is tapping into the lawful intercepts that were authorized by Kalia almost 20 years ago. They found a back door. This is just more of the same. So by the way, what tech companies do provide responsibly managed encryption? None. None. Apple doesn't have a backdoor signal doesn't have a back door. Meta uses the signal technology and WhatsApp.

[Lou Mareska]

Right. Does iMessage.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah, imessage use signal protocol as well. So they all use that.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know that.

[Lou Mareska]

I think so. So yeah, in my understanding, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

FBI Director Christopher Ray says the public should not have to choose between safe data and safe communities. We should be able to have both. We can't have both. Collecting the stuff is getting harder. This is the going dark problem. Right? Because so much of that evidence now lives in the digital realm. Terrorists, hackers and child predators are taking advantage of end to end encryption. So we don't want the Chinese to use our own wiretapping technology to listen in on the President's phone calls. We want you to use encrypted technology, but please don't use end to end encryption because we can't listen in either.

[Harry McCracken]

That's the same old same old.

[Leo Laporte]

The hypocrisy is mind boggling. Anyway, just thought I'd pass along that advice from the FBI.

[Lou Mareska]

You have to wonder how this is going to impact these companies though. Like there's, you know, Obviously, fear mongering is a thing that does prevent people from moving forward on things. And so people think my data is gone or my, you know, I need to move something else. It could hit the profits of these companies.

[Leo Laporte]

You think Apple might say, all right, well we'll give you a backdoor to our encryption. I know. Signal never will. Right.

[Harry McCracken]

There's a news story about Apple being sued over this stuff they did to detect csam, which they ended up not actually deploying.

[Leo Laporte]

They're being sued they didn't do it.

[Harry McCracken]

Yes, well, they're being sued because they didn't do it and therefore they didn't take action to make it harder to share that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't win.

[Lou Mareska]

What stops them from. Not like there's backdoors that these companies find in. Even iOS18 has some backdoors. What stops Apple from just, just not fixing it for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they could do. Celebrate, of course, was one of the technologies law enforcement uses. Works right up until the latest iOS 18. You know, they found in this case, with the assassination of the chairman of United Healthcare, the CEO of United Healthcare, a phone was left behind. And I thought immediately, oh, the FBI is going to have to go to, whether it's Apple or Android or Google, they're going to have to go to that company and say, we want in. Unless it's an older phone, in which case, case they can use Celebrate, exploit it and exploit it. But Apple patches that every time. I guess you think they might drag their feet next time.

[Lou Mareska]

I mean, we say that they don't like agree or they don't partner with these federal organizations, but that doesn't mean that they don't have another way of doing it. So. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess, you know what? Well, see, I have nothing to hide. I guess I don't really care. Yeah.

[Lou Mareska]

Take my phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Big. You know about the cesium clock, the atomic clock is actually measuring the vibrations of cesium. It's actually transitions, not even measures measurements. Well, timekeeping is on the verge of a leap, a great leap forward. There is a cesium fountain that's used by NIST to create the digital second. It is, it is. It uses Cesium 133. They count the high frequency transitions. The transition of an electron of cesium 133 occurs in every second, 9,192,631,770 times times. And the reason that this is important is because if they could get a higher frequency transition, then mismeasurement which occurs from time to time would be less of an impact. You'd have a more accurate second.

[Lou Mareska]

Stable. Very stable too.

[Leo Laporte]

More stable second. Well, it turns out they have found a way apparently to do that in September 2021. Scientists use strontium, which has a much higher transition frequency. In fact, it falls within the range of visible light. The transition frequency of cesium is much like that of, say, a microwave in the billions. This is much, much higher. Which means by 2030, we may redefine the second. We may have a new standard for a digital clock. I don't know why I'm bringing this up. I just think it's. I think it's great.

[Lou Mareska]

Fascinating. Nothing else?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, it used to be they measured a second, like in the old days, they measured a second by like measuring the sky or so I don't know what they did. Accurate timekeeping is always. This is a great story in the Science Alert. Accurate timekeeping has always been part of humankind's social evolution. At the Neolithic monument of Newgrange in Ireland, there's a picture of it. A special opening above the entrance allows sunlight to illuminate the passage and chamber on the shortest day of the year coming up, the winter solstice, December 21st. And that's what Stonehenge did. And other. There have been other clocks like that. Then there were water clocks. Up until 1967, a second was 1-86,400th of a day.

[Lou Mareska]

I think what's really fascinating about this is this will actually have impact on scientific research, like for instance, the search for dark matter or something. Pretty interesting there.

[Leo Laporte]

You need very, very, very precise measurements.

[Christina Warren]

Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

I was going to ask what. What the downside is of the seconds we've already got.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing. Don't worry about it. You're okay. You know, it's. It's fascinating because GPS uses a clock. It's very important, right, for GPS to work to have a clock that is accurate with all the satellites because you have to measure the difference in terms transmission of the signal at different angles. But it all. But they have to make a adjustment for relativity based on the speed of the Earth's movement and the satellite's movement. It proves Einstein's theory of relativity because those relativistic adjustments based on Einstein's calculations are accurate. And GPS works only because Einstein was right. So, you know, I don't know what. Thank those physicists. I don't know. One last story. We talked on Wednesday. Annie and Ako brought up the fact that the original ruby slippers from the wizard of Oz were at auction. They have sold now. They sold this weekend for $28 million.

[Lou Mareska]

Hopefully they'll get some wear out of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not put those on. They have her name sewn into it. They went through a whole bunch of stuff to prove the provenance that these are the actual. There were three models made for the movie.

[Harry McCracken]

I thought there was more than one pair.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's one in the Smithsonian, I think. And so they compared it to that. There's a whole. It's actually a fascinating subject. Subject which we talked about extensively on Break Weekly because there was very little Apple news.

[Harry McCracken]

Are they the most iconic movie?

[Leo Laporte]

I think they're just one of the three, that's all.

[Harry McCracken]

But, I mean, are those three pair, like, the most iconic movie prop of all time?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's interesting. New York Times asks that question. The previous record holder was Marilyn Monroe's dress from the Seven Year Inch. You know, the one where she stands over the subject.

[Lou Mareska]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That sold in 2011 for five and a half million dollars. Yeah.

[Harry McCracken]

I mean, you have. You have stuff like Christopher Reeve Superman suit, although I assume there are probably a whole bunch of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. DeLorean, DeLorean, DeLorean. An auction of the Wicked Witch, Witch of the west hat worn by Margaret Hamilton, also sold at that auction. Sold for $3 million.

[Harry McCracken]

That's kind of cool that they actually bothered to keep them back then. Like, which I guess they must have done before the movie even came out. And they did not know at the time that decades later people would care.

[Leo Laporte]

The slippers actually were stolen at one point.

[Harry McCracken]

Oh, yeah. Was it this pair that were stolen or the other ones?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, the slippers were lent to the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids. They were stolen in 2005. FBI agents set up a sting operation, recovered them in 2018.

[Lou Mareska]

It's gotta be a movie someday.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is, because the guys stole them, not because they thought, oh, ruby slippers, wizard of Oz, those will be worth something. They thought they were actually made of rubies. No, they're made of glass. These. These nitwits that stole them thought, oh, we got shoes made of rubies. They weren't worth anyway. So the Judy Garland Museum said. The museum was raising money to buy them back, but they were only able to raise $100,000, which isn't enough for $20,000. Though the museum did buy a painting depicting the scene where the Wicked Witch's hands are zapped as she tries to take the slipper. So they got some something something out of it. It's $28 million.

[Lou Mareska]

Unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Folks, I think we're off to see the Wizard. It's the end of the end of the line for this show. Thank you so much, Harry McCracken. Miss you. I wish we had a studio for you to come visit, but at least we can do it this way. Zoom's not so very bad. I can't wait to read your article about the. What was it? The weather? What was it? I forgot what you were writing about.

[Harry McCracken]

Well, I mentioned too my Google DeepMind story is already up on our site. That's a big feature on that. And then I'm still writing my newsletter which will come out next Wednesday which is about these tech CEOs and how they will attempt to deal with Trump 2.0.

[Leo Laporte]

Darling Trump 2.0. And how do we get your newsletter?

[Harry McCracken]

Where is it that go online and either Google or coggy for Plugged in Fast Company and you should. You should get the page where you can sign up.

[Leo Laporte]

The name of it is plugged in by Harry McCracken on Fastest. Yeah and it is from Fast Company.

[Harry McCracken]

And you and you don't need to subscribe. You can also find a page on our site with all the newsletters.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, you do want. Now you still do that ride that you've been doing all the way up to the Golden Gate Bridge in bed back?

[Harry McCracken]

Yes. I. I went to Larkspur most recently and I need to figure out where I'm coming next and I. I have two Ebike batteries now so maybe, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Someday I'll get farther.

[Harry McCracken]

Maybe someday I will get to Petaluma by Ebike which I. I think would be doable as long as I could charge once I was there.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be fun. Yeah, you could charge here we I ride a Rad Power Ebike and I love it. It's a lifesaver because we live on a hill and I don't have to worry about it. I could just pedal up the hill. What do you. I see you have an article in your in your plugged in newsletter Bikes. Which one do you like?

[Harry McCracken]

I have a Gazelle. In fact I've had the same Gazelle for four and a half years and I've done so many upgrades I don't particularly want a new one because the one I have is exactly what I like it to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I have to take a look at it. Why do you like it so much?

[Harry McCracken]

I like the mid mountain mount motor. It doesn't have a throttle but it's really good for hills because, see, I like the throttle. The motor is built right in the pedals. It's a Dutch bike. I think that's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think Van Moof went out of business, didn't they?

[Harry McCracken]

They did, but then they were rescued at the last moment. But yeah, one of the challenges is there are so many E bike companies, and there are big ones, little ones, there are ones that do a lot of their own tech. There are ones that are basically just assembling parts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The rad power is just Chinese motor, mostly Chinese parts.

[Harry McCracken]

Yeah. The Gazelle uses a Bosch system, which a lot of nice bikes do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right. It's expensive. It's more than $5,000. So I'll have to. When it's time to replace the red power.

[Harry McCracken]

The one I wrote about was $5,000. Mine was not 5,000.

[Leo Laporte]

The teal you wrote about the T, what is it? T11 plus. All right, well, you see, every time I read these reviews, I go, I should get that. That looks good.

[Harry McCracken]

There are some great E bikes that do not cost five grand.

[Leo Laporte]

I will watch your plugged in newsletter for your article that you're working on today. Harry McCracken from Fast Company. Great to see you.

[Harry McCracken]

Thank you, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Lou Mareska. He is a principal engineering manager in charge of. Wow. What is about the coolest thing I ever heard of of Excel? Copilot with Python.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. That's really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

A supercharged spreadsheet. Excel has always been, like, amazing. I used to have a guy named MrExcel on the show.

[Lou Mareska]

He loves this too, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet he does. He loves this.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because people don't think that new stuff come to Excel, but, you know, but this is just a lot of fun to play with if you're.

[Leo Laporte]

In school and you want to get a job. If you became an Excel wizard, proficient Excel with Python and Copilot, the world would be.

[Lou Mareska]

Yeah. Like I was saying, we work with a lot of banks and I would say 90% of them. Some people even saying, hey, I'm learning Python just by utilizing this feature.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have to play with it. There is a guy on the advent of code who has been using Excel to solve the problems. But I guess if you have Python and Copilot, you probably. I mean, you know, you got everything you need in there. That's pretty cool. That's really cool.

[Lou Mareska]

Lou.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really great to see you again, Lou. Mariska, Miss you. Longtime host of this Week in Enterprise Tech One of the nicest guys in technology. Actually two of the nicest people in technology right here. And then there's Christina Warren. We miss her, but she's off probably right now in walking over to the arena so she can see the Last Era's tour. We thank all of you for joining us. We especially thank our Club Twit members who made this literally, literally, literally made this show possible. Without your help, TWIT would not exist. Club Twit is only seven bucks a month. We try to give you some real benefits for your membership, including ad free versions of every show. We do video for shows that we only put out in audio, like Hands on Macintosh, Hands on Windows, the Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks, the Untitled Linux show. We do a lot of great shows and if you want the video, join the club. You can also join the Discord, which is the best hang ever. I'm hanging out in the Discord doing the advent of code problems with a bunch of great people. See, it's not just talking about the shows. We're talking about everything that's going on in the world around us. All the technology, all the shows. And yes, there's even, there's even conversations about Minecraft in there. We've got the Minecraft server backup, thanks to a kindly club member. Lion Admiral 1981. Thank you, Lion Admiral. So if you are in the club and you want to play on our Minecraft servers, we actually have one that's a survival server, it's set, very hard to play. And then one that's a creative server that is actually the entire build that OMG Chad did on OMG craft 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and it's been added on to its incredible build. If you want to participate in that, join the club. If you want to participate in our club events, join the club. We just did a Ask Me Anything with Emily Forlini, the home theater geeks recordings. Coming up Tomorrow, we do iOS today live in there. Chris Marquardt's photo time is coming up on the 12th. Micah's crafting corner is on the 19th. And we're going to do Stacy's book club. I've been reading the newest James S.A. corey novel for this, the Mercy of the Gods. It's really good, good quick. You have time, you have a couple of weeks to read it. Really excellent. Yeah, I think even better than the Expanse. Highly recommend it. And so if you want to join us for the book club too, all of that seven bucks a month, I think that's a good deal. And if you join the club, you also have the very good feeling that you're helping us continue to do the programming we love to do and I hope you love to listen to. I don't pocket any of the money. I'm living off my retirement now, which is fine. But I want to make sure that we can pay Anthony and Benito and Kevin and the whole team. They work so hard and keep the lights on and all of that stuff. We've cut expenses to the bone, but we want to keep doing this. And in order to do it, we need your help. Twit TV Club Twit. It's only seven bucks a month and it really does make a big, big difference in the next months. Before the end of the year, we need at least 5,000 more people to sign up for us to survive. So please be one of those 5,000. Twit TV Club Twit. Thank you everybody. We do this show every Sunday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern Time. Thanks to the club members, we are able to stream on eight platforms. Of course it's in the club. Twitter, Discord. But it's also, let me Count them down, YouTube, Twitch, Kik, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook and TikTok. Eight different platforms we stream live all of all of our shows we stream. Not all of them, but most of our shows we stream live as we're doing them. And you can watch us live on all of those platforms after the fact. On demand versions of the shows are available on our website. Twit TV. If you go to Twit TV you will also see a link to the YouTube channel channel for the video for this show. A great way to share clips. If you saw something you thought, hey, I'd really like my, my brother in law to see this. You can just clip it. YouTube makes that very easy. Send it to him and it's a great way to promote what we're doing here at TWiT. Of course the easiest thing for you is probably to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll have Twit ready to go for your Monday morning commute. Thank you everybody, we appreciate your, your support. Love having you here and we will see you again next week. And as I have said now for it's going on almost 20 years now, another Twit is in the can.

[Lou Mareska]

Bye bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Now.

[Lou Mareska]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones.

[Harry McCracken]

On us in four lines for $25 a line per month.

[Leo Laporte]

When you switch with eligible trade ins.

[Harry McCracken]

All on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. Ctmobile.com.