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This Week in Tech 1015: Smarter Than a House Cat
03:03:17
TikTok, Trumpcoin, Samsung Unpacked 2025
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Jason Heiner is here, editor in chief of ZDNet. Molly White of the Web3 is going just great website. And from this week in Google, Paris Martineau. We're going to talk about, of course, the Trump coin. And now the competing Melania coin. I kid you not. Molly will explain a little bit about the technology behind Meme coins. We'll also talk about insurance spying on you. Isn't that a good way to bring down premiums? Maybe not. And what Apple's gonna do with its AI based news alerts. I'll give you a hint. Bye bye. It's all coming up next on this Week in Tech. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1015, recorded Sunday, January 19, 2025. Smarter than a house cat. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. What a week. And what a week it is. If you're not interested in TikTok, this might not be the show for you. What a saga. Let me introduce our panel. Molly White is here. So glad to have. Molly White of the famous Web3 is going just great. Her newsletter citation needed. She's an expert. She's a longtime Wikipedia editor. I brought you on because we were thinking about Wikipedia, but then things happened and there's other things to talk about. Very nice to have you, Molly. It's great to see you. Thanks.
- [01:47]
Molly White
Good to be back.
- [01:48]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Jason Heiner is also here. Editor in chief of ZDNet, longtime friend of the show. One time you elected me President of the Internet. Of the Internet. Well, at the time, that was really the most important thing to be president of. But that's true. Times have changed. Welcome back. Good to see you, Jason.
- [02:06]
Jason Heiner
Always a pleasure.
- [02:07]
Leo Laporte
Also from this week in Google, the wonderful Paris Martineau. Hello. Wait.
- [02:13]
Paris Martineau
So, Leo, is it you who's getting inaugurated tomorrow?
- [02:16]
Leo Laporte
Tomorrow I will be. No, my term as president of the Internet ended and no one replaced me. Right, Jason?
- [02:22]
Paris Martineau
Huh? That makes a lot of sense.
- [02:24]
Jason Heiner
Actually, it was unending. The term never ended. You are still the president of the Internet. I mean, I'm surprised you haven't crowned yourself king at this point.
- [02:33]
Leo Laporte
It was a smaller time then. Well, you know, Leo, I've got some.
- [02:35]
Paris Martineau
Notes for you on your tenure then.
- [02:38]
Leo Laporte
I take no responsibility for anything that happened after 1998. I should have, as it turns out, created my own meme coin. And I could have been rich.
- [02:50]
Jason Heiner
It's true.
- [02:52]
Leo Laporte
So stay, we'll do the TikTok. We'll get to the TikTok. I'm waiting to see what happens. There's something could happen the next 10 minutes, so I just want to make sure we get the latest news.
- [03:03]
Paris Martineau
I've heard it's been going in and out since we got on this last night.
- [03:09]
Leo Laporte
I'm watching the football game and somebody says, TikTok's down. I said, it's only 7:30, it's supposed to end at midnight. And of course TikTok, they shut down early. And it's really clear at this point it was a stunt, right, that they wanted everybody in the world to know that it was, you know, the US Government shut us down. And it even said, fortunately, President Trump says he's going to save us. So stay tuned. This morning. I get up, he's not president by the way, President elect Trump saved him miraculously. And it's back up.
- [03:48]
Paris Martineau
But it says in the message, president Trump saved us, which I think is a bit telling. It's just incredibly odd how heavy handed they are being with the political theater here. I mean, I think anyone watching this kind of understood intuitively that even when Tick Tock signaled earlier this week, messages to employees that were reported on first by the information like that, hey, we're going to go dark on Sunday. Which they technically didn't have to do that.
- [04:20]
Leo Laporte
They didn't. I mean, the law didn't require it, I guess. Huh.
- [04:24]
Paris Martineau
Well, it's. Judging by the fact that right now they're no longer dark, I would say that throws into question the whole thing because yes, the law requires them to like, what is happening here is the law penalizes both ByteDance, TikTok, the company, for remaining active in violation of this law, as well as everybody downstream and upstream of them, the App Store like providers, as well as like hosting companies like Oracle. And I'm forgetting the other one, it starts with an A. And those penalties range anywhere from I think like $500 per user per instance to like $5,000 per user per instance. And it's not just unique downloads. So that adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars of potential liabilities for these companies. And nothing has changed except for TikTok says that, um, Trump essentially reached out to Oracle and the one other Internet service provider kind of working on the back end and assured them that he wouldn't come after them for those fines. Which is a bit of a question mark for me because I'm not sure that Trump has the power to do that or not if he was president.
- [05:36]
Leo Laporte
So this is a law that was duly passed by Congress, signed by the president, took effect on the 19th today, as we record, of course, TikTok appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, nine to nothing, said the First Amendment does not protect you because you're a foreign entity and you're an enemy of the country. And for security reasons, security reasons Trump the First Amendment. And they voted nine nothing. I mean, this was a very clear vote that, no, you're going to be shut down on Sunday. Justice Kagan and we talked about this on Wednesday, Paris, with our friend Kathy Gellis, who is admitted to the Supreme Court, was at the oral hearings and she told us, Justice Kagan said it would be problematic if a president could just unilaterally say, yeah, we're not going to do that. We don't want to put the president in a situation where he overrides Congress and the Supreme Court. Trump's not even president, but apparently can do that.
- [06:45]
Jason Heiner
I think it's an executive branch sort of thing. Like the, the job of the executive branch is to carry out the law, enforce it.
- [06:53]
Leo Laporte
So you can say, I'm not going to enforce it.
- [06:55]
Jason Heiner
Right, right. So I think on a technicality, that's their stance. But it did go. I mean, even Apple released a statement last night, you know, saying, quote, unquote, quote, Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications act. Apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. And its subsidiaries, including Tik, Tok, Cap Cut, Lemonade and others, will no longer be available for download or updates on the app store starting January 19, 2025.
- [07:26]
Paris Martineau
So it's worth noting that that hasn't changed despite the fact that TikTok is now available to people who already had it downloaded.
- [07:34]
Jason Heiner
That's right.
- [07:35]
Paris Martineau
The app stores still haven't blinked on this. And I fascinated as to what the internal conversations are like, happening behind closed doors at a place like Oracle, because technically they're taking on hundreds of billions of dollars of liability. And these financial provisions, as misguided as many people believe they are, they do have like, provisions in them that the government told the Supreme Court last week that it could conceivably enforce these financial penalties up to five years later. So, like, hmm, Oracle could be penalized under whoever the next president is.
- [08:11]
Jason Heiner
They're taking on a lot of risks.
- [08:12]
Molly White
Yeah, that's a huge Ellison. The Oracle guy is a big Trump guy too. So, you know, he may be making this into a political thing or at Least very willing to listen to Trump's promises.
- [08:24]
Leo Laporte
Well, I mean, yeah, if you want to pull that thread. One of the big investors in TikTok is an American and a Republican donor, Trump donor Jesse, who owns 15% and did, in fact talk to Trump shortly before he changed his mind on TikTok. There's Jeff Yass. There's also the fact that the CEO of TikTok went to Mar a Lago and sat down and broke bread with President Elect Trump and Elon Musk. And then there's the invitation to sit next to Musk in the inaugural dais tomorrow. So there's very clear message. But, you know, this is what America wanted, right? This is not what Congress wanted, not what Trump wanted in 2020 when he first declared that he was going to ban TikTok, not what Biden wanted when he signed the law, not what the nine justices of the Supreme Court wanted. But 171 million Americans who use TikTok seem pretty clear. I asked my son who, you know, and I've said this before, and I should probably say it again, I have a conflict of interest on this because my son is a TikTok chef who has a career, a very good career, because of TikTok. Clearly, because of TikTok. He decided to start posting videos of him making sandwiches on TikTok. Went from a few thousand followers to two and a half million followers in a matter of months. Parlayed that into a cookbook. Oh, by the way, he wasn't dumb. He parlayed that into an Instagram account as well and is opening a restaurant in Manhattan in two months. All because of TikTok's algorithm. I asked him today, do you think that could have happened on Facebook, on Instagram, Facebook's Instagram? He said no. He said, TikTok's algorithm is what made me. The algorithm is much better than anything else. But he was also smart enough to move to Insta. He says he knows many, many people who are telling him, going to have to go back to work. He had a friend who quit his job last week because TikTok was making him money. And he says he's going to have to go back hat in hand to get his job back. Many millions of Americans made money on TikTok. Henry never got much money from TikTok directly, but the advertising he sold on his TikTok channel made it so he never had to work. Right. It's been a huge success. So TikTok is. There would have been a lot of creators disenfranchised by this ban.
- [11:00]
Paris Martineau
Something I think that is interesting about this. I mean, it does seem like assuming everything plays out the way it seems poised to right now, which is kind of a silly statement, because I'm sure that will change about 20 times during the recording of this show. But if Trump somehow manages to block the, or stop the enforcement of this from his perspective, I'm curious as to what is going to happen, because it seems like people, there are still a number of parties out there that technically have standing to sue to challenge the lack of enforcement of this in court. Like, it's unclear exactly who that would be, but maybe like TikTok users who supported the ban or, you know, competitors of TikTok, they could ostensibly sue and say it's like they're having harm for the fact that the government is not following the law and enforcing this. And that could result in financial penalties for all these companies too, as well as, like, a lengthy, costly legal battle. I'm just baffled that this is in this strange limbo right now.
- [12:06]
Leo Laporte
It's not in limbo. Well, I don't know if it's in limbo. There may even be a constitutional crisis created by Trump not enforcing the law.
- [12:15]
Molly White
Tick tock. Constitutional Crisis. Welcome to 2025.
- [12:18]
Leo Laporte
Isn't that funny, Molly boy?
- [12:21]
Molly White
I do.
- [12:22]
Paris Martineau
My friends was joking.
- [12:23]
Leo Laporte
We've been talking about this. I'm sorry, you started saying something and I interrupted you. What, what's the thing?
- [12:29]
Molly White
I was just gonna say, I think it's really interesting that the Supreme Court sort of took the stance that this is about whether or not like, tick tock or China has an right to freedom of speech. And they sort of didn't address the freedom of information aspect of it. Where, you know, Supreme Court decisions in the past have established that people have a right to receive information. And, you know, the, the idea that this needs to be blocked because it is like China, who doesn't have a free speech right, just seems really out there to me, especially compared to past decisions.
- [13:08]
Leo Laporte
Well, as Kathy Gillis has said, it's not the free speech of China, it's the free speech of the 170 million Americans who are on TikTok.
- [13:15]
Paris Martineau
Right.
- [13:16]
Leo Laporte
You are shutting them down.
- [13:18]
Molly White
Yeah. And a lot of the, but a lot of the conversation about the Supreme Court decision has been basically like, well, China doesn't have a free speech right, which seems like, very, very misguided as far as, you know, the, the, the, the way that speech even happens online.
- [13:33]
Leo Laporte
We don't make our laws based on what China does and doesn't do. I'm saying.
- [13:37]
Molly White
Well, we apparently do.
- [13:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. That that's not a good basis for making or not making a law. There is the question of whether TikTok is security risk. And the Supreme Court said it overrides any First Amendment concerns that the Congress has decided that there is. Congress and the intelligence agency have never given us those reasons. They've just said, take it on faith. It's a Chinese company, so it's a problem.
- [14:02]
Molly White
Yeah, but I mean, there have been plenty of cases that have gone to the Supreme Court in the past that have made those arguments that have not come out in that in favor of the government. I mean, the Pentagon Papers case is a good example where they argued, this is a security risk. You can't publish this. And the Supreme Court didn't shut down the New York Times. They said that people have a right to receive information, and this is something that you can publish. And we ended up with the Pentagon Papers. And now it seems like a total reversal of that stance based on hand, wavy, national security concerns that have not been really discussed. I mean, I sort of understand that, you know, the government can't just come out and say, you know, detail every national security concern that they have, but there is a lot of just sort of like, no, trust us, China is doing something nefarious that we can't tell you about. And there's been no reporting, really, of what that might be.
- [15:02]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, I think perhaps the reason that the Supreme Court acted the way it did because it was. It was a little bit of a separation of powers issue, potentially. Because. Because the Congress had passed this, you know, we can debate the merits of it, and the president signed it. I think for the Supreme Court to overrule it and uphold it, it would have to be. My understanding is there would have to be, like, overwhelming evidence that this encroached on. This encroached on constitutional rights or very clear, very clear, you know, abrogation of. Of laws. And I think that because there was some lack of clarity and confusion, my interpretation was the reason why the Supreme Court didn't act was because. Because it is so gray. And for them to overrule the. The votes of the. Of the Congress and the signature of the President, it would have to be something that was really clear and essentially kind of egregious for them to do it. That's how I understood it from just like a legal standpoint, let alone sort of the merits of it. Because there are some real. There's some real interesting issues. You know, debates at the, at the heart of this that I think are worth talking about, but I think that's why they didn't act.
- [16:33]
Leo Laporte
There are constitutional issues that are raised by it, though. And Kathy Gellis has said, and somebody is pointing out we're not attorneys and we're not, we're not attempting to be attorneys. But Kathy Gellis is admitted to, in fact, to talk before the Supreme Court. So she presumably knows of which she speaks. She said that the Supreme Court's decision raises some serious issues and the court has perhaps undermined, not only undermined the First Amendment, but also given the president some powers that he didn't previously have. Not that that's the first time they've done that. So it's just a weird situation. It's pretty clear TikTok brought itself down as a stunt. Right. Last night, knowing that would get people up in arms and get everybody's attention because they didn't stay down for very long.
- [17:27]
Jason Heiner
I mean, they played their cards really well for all again, sort of the values of the thing aside, Tick tock played this thing really well. They said, like, look, if they, if they pass the ban, we're just shutting down. Like, we're not going to keep appealing and all that. And I think they counted on the fact there would be an outcry. Right.
- [17:45]
Leo Laporte
The big losers on this are the Democrats, frankly, and Biden. Trump comes off looking like a savior. And TikTok's, by the way, particularly crazy.
- [17:55]
Paris Martineau
Because he's the one that started all of this. He's the one who instigated the TikTok ban. And yet he continued. He gets the credit for stopping what he started.
- [18:05]
Molly White
I feel like the national memory is a little bit shorter than it's a couple of years.
- [18:11]
Leo Laporte
It's wild. Yeah. So there are people. So what will probably happen? We don't know. Trump is going to have to issue an executive order. Honestly, I don't think this is the most important thing he'll be weighing in on on January 20th. But, yeah, there are a few other things. Deporting everybody in Chicago apparently is also on the agenda. But he apparently what he's going to do is extend the deadline, which is the least legally troubling thing he can do, rather than saying, I'm just not this, I'm this, I don't like this law. I'm not going to enforce it. He's going to extend the deadline and give an American company a chance to buy. There are a lot of suitors. It's not clear who's going to win in this one, Larry Ellison, of course is there, but so is Elon Musk. They've the TikTok ByteDance has denied that, but there have been reports that Musk is interested in buying at least a part of TikTok. Well, so are many others. Perplexity, an AI company called Perplexity has put its hat in the ring. And of course the former owner of the LA Dodgers, Frank McCourt says, I got 20 billion right here. I'm ready to throw it at you. China has said we're not going to let TikTok sell the algorithm.
- [19:30]
Paris Martineau
Something that I think is interesting though is if Trump wants to use the option, you can trigger this 90 day extension. In order to do that, he has to certify to Congress that TikTok has agreed to sell. And I don't know if that's entirely correct that TikTok has agreed to sell, because I think in order to sell TikTok, you'd have to sell parts that China has said TikTok cannot sell.
- [19:54]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [19:56]
Paris Martineau
Namely the algorithm.
- [19:58]
Leo Laporte
And what's sad is, okay, to me, TikTok is the least danger. I mean, China is allowed to propagandize us on X, on Elon Musk's own platform, as is Russia and on Meta, and nobody's doing anything about that. If you're concerned about China propagandizing us, Americans are the most thoroughly propagandized people in the world. I think at this point, on all sides we're fed misinformation from all directions. So that's not a really good argument. The second argument is, oh well, they're getting all of our data. That's a terrible argument because Congress is clearly unwilling to pass and this was TikTok's argument for the Supreme Court. Congress, if they wanted to, could protect us by passing a comprehensive data privacy bill. They clearly don't want that. And anyway, China doesn't need TikTok to get all that information. They just can buy it on the open market because Meta is collecting it and selling it on, as is everybody else, data brokers have all that information.
- [21:05]
Jason Heiner
I mean, I think we know that China doesn't have to buy it, that they've, for years they've get it all sorts of tnt. They've, you know, they've, they've exfiltrated data. You know, I guess the, you know, I think the data argument is there is some, it is a little bit compelling though, because the ease at which they can, you know, their sort of government sensors could, could have access to the data is A little bit different it. From, from that standpoint. Now, supposedly it's because of data sovereignty and Oracle now the way they store the data and that. But so, you know, who knows what the reality is? I think, I think there's not many people who do. But, but I think that the access, the ease of access to data and the ability to manipulate the algorithm, I think there's, there is something to that. I mean, you've. There have been so many videos that talk about channels that just as an experiment that they, they went to TikTok, they created a huge following. They said one negative thing about the Chinese government and like overnight, 90 drops of.
- [22:14]
Leo Laporte
There's no, there's no question about that. But you can't say pixels meta either.
- [22:18]
Molly White
I was going to say, yeah, you can really replicate that experiment anywhere else. I mean, say cisgender.
- [22:23]
Paris Martineau
Those are American sensors, guys. That's different.
- [22:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, and, and I. Okay, so maybe there is a threat from TikTok. It does seem weird that our, that our government's focused on that instead of so many other things that are so threatening. And we're spending so many cycles on this subject. It's just a social network. It's not that important.
- [22:54]
Paris Martineau
I mean, I do think it's the consequence of this increased. Not to, you know, bring up a phrase from speaking Google that we use, but this phase of moral panics that we've been seeing over the last couple of years.
- [23:07]
Leo Laporte
You've been listening to Jeff Jarvis.
- [23:09]
Paris Martineau
Think of the children. Think of like there has been this huge whipping up of fear and rage over companies like TikTok. And it also is coming at a time of increased, like xenophobia and fear of anything that is foreign. And it makes sense, of course, that the natural conclusion of this would be the kind of first foray into something actually happening, a ban of a foreign social media platform that spirals out of control, where none of the people actually enforcing it seem like they want to be enforcing it, but we've gotten to this point anyway.
- [23:44]
Molly White
Yeah. And I think there's also just sort of the larger conversation about, you know, access to information and sort of the ability to, you know, disseminate and receive information. That is really being. Is really changing in recent times, you know, where Republicans were sort of once the, the party of free speech and now, you know, we're seeing these sort of unprecedented attacks on the press from Donald Trump and other allies. There's been sort of bipartisan attacks on speech, you know, with tic Tac, with TikTok, you know, with other Proposed bills around moral panics with, you know, kids, online safety and, you know, those types of bills. Age verification, you know, access to content that's deemed obscene or, you know, otherwise inappropriate for minors. And so it does feel like it's a part of sort of a broader pattern of cracking down on access to information that is really concerning. I think, especially going into this new administration where it seems like those types of things are going to heat up even more.
- [24:50]
Leo Laporte
It's we. We don't mind social media as long as we control its use. In other words.
- [24:58]
Molly White
Right?
- [24:59]
Jason Heiner
As in, who. Who's the we in that scenario, Leo? Like, as a society.
- [25:06]
Leo Laporte
No, people in power.
- [25:09]
Jason Heiner
People in power. Okay.
- [25:10]
Leo Laporte
I think we call them the oligarchs. I'm going to call them the oligarchs.
- [25:13]
Jason Heiner
The oligarchs.
- [25:13]
Leo Laporte
The oligarchs. It was also interesting, the reaction of TikTok users. The number one app all week was Little Red Book. Or actually they called it. What do they call it? Red Notebook. But it's. Xiao Hongshu is Little Red Book. The CEO says that's because I went to Stanford. But I think it's maybe more than a nod to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Anyway, Little Red Book was suddenly, even though it was mostly Chinese, suddenly the number one download on Apple's store.
- [25:45]
Paris Martineau
And it was interesting seeing. I mean, on various. I didn't download it myself, but I saw a variety of, like, posts from users who tried it out on various social networks. And the thing that struck me is many people were saying, I came to this new platform because on TikTok, I, you know, really found a place for the LGBTQ community and to find, like, fellow people in my community and express my sex identity. And you cannot do that on RedNote or RedBook, whatever it's called.
- [26:18]
Leo Laporte
They literally do it on TikTok. Can you maybe they.
- [26:21]
Paris Martineau
No, you can on TikTok, but they. You literally, like, cannot use. Most hashtags in that are like, yeah, they're very stringent about that. And so I saw a bunch of people from these communities that I'm in posting, oh, well, you know, on redbook, you've got to do hashtag le instead of lesbian, because you can't put lesbian, because then you get taken down. And I'm like, how is this better?
- [26:44]
Leo Laporte
How.
- [26:44]
Paris Martineau
How are you jumping into?
- [26:47]
Leo Laporte
It's a gesture. They know it's not better. It's a gesture. It's saying, go ahead and stop us. You know, what are you going to do? You're going to stop everything? What are you going to do? And I think that that's a strong signal, really. The biggest losers here are the Democrats who, who fell for the. Fell for Trump's faint. He did a head faint. He said, we're gonna ban TikTok. Right. And they all fell for it.
- [27:15]
Paris Martineau
I mean, I would argue, I think it's less. I think positioning it as Trump be playing some 4D chess here is probably a little malformed in the sense that, I don't know, we can say for certain that Trump had any idea that this was going to play out the way it did when he made that first executive order. I think that everybody was just reacting in terms of this, I don't know, wave of moral panic we've seen rise and no one really thought about the consequences. And it ends up being the Democrats are left holding the bag in this.
- [27:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, they're the. I mean, look, they made some, they made some real enemies among, among millennials. And, and what is. What's younger than millennial Gen Alphas? Z. What's the youngest? I don't know. I never liked those labels.
- [28:01]
Jason Heiner
Then beta, is it like. That's like the ones that are just being born now.
- [28:05]
Leo Laporte
Gen Beta. You all's just jealous of us baby boomers because we have a legit designation and you all just trying to get, you know, your own. But no, there's no.
- [28:16]
Jason Heiner
They're all piggybacking off the Gen X.
- [28:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but that Gen X wanted to be baby boomers. That's all. They just didn't like it that we had it done. Yeah.
- [28:24]
Paris Martineau
Everyone wants to be baby boomers.
- [28:26]
Leo Laporte
Everybody wants to be baby boomers. You know that. All right, all right. We're going to take a break and when we come back, why, there's just, I don't. All right, we're gonna do. We're gonna talk about. I want to find out. Molly's gonna explain what Solana is. Right. And then. And then we're gonna find out.
- [28:46]
Paris Martineau
This is your cross to bear, Molly, that you have.
- [28:50]
Leo Laporte
Sorry, Mom.
- [28:51]
Molly White
Taken upon myself.
- [28:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're the crypto expert here. You're watching this Week at Tech. Molly white is here. Web3 is going just great. And of course, citation needed, which is an excellent newsletter you should all subscribe to. Find it all@mollywhite.net or mollyfxoo. Right. Did I get the right Molly?
- [29:10]
Molly White
0Xfff fff yep.
- [29:14]
Leo Laporte
My hex is so bad. 0xfff which is hex for white.
- [29:20]
Molly White
White.
- [29:20]
Leo Laporte
Clever. Thank you for being here, Molly. Jason, heiner from ZDNet. He is the man in charge, editor in chief at ZDNet. You've risen to the top, my friend.
- [29:33]
Jason Heiner
I mean, of a sorts.
- [29:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. Congrats. It's good.
- [29:40]
Jason Heiner
Thank you.
- [29:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [29:41]
Jason Heiner
Always good to be here.
- [29:42]
Leo Laporte
I know no one who deserves it more than you. You're fantastic. And of course, the wonderful Paris Martineau who works for the Information, who had the. You mentioned it, but let's emphasize this. The scoop that TikTok was going to.
- [29:56]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, not me, but my colleagues. I've been all over it all weekend. I've been watching. I mean, they're working right now. I.
- [30:04]
Leo Laporte
It's a changing story. Yeah.
- [30:07]
Paris Martineau
It's truly so impressive. I mean, and it's times like these that I'm happy to be in a newsroom that has a great China team as well.
- [30:16]
Leo Laporte
So it was actually Oracle that started shutting down the servers, which is interesting.
- [30:22]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. I mean, that's part of the reason why TikTok went offline last night and part of the reason that it's so interesting that it came back today because it seems to be as a result of these backroom negotiations between Trump giving these assurances and companies like Oracle. And again, I'm forgetting the name of the other one. Commie or something.
- [30:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Wild, wild, wild story.
- [30:43]
Molly White
Probably Akamai.
- [30:44]
Paris Martineau
Akamai.
- [30:45]
Leo Laporte
Hey, that's it.
- [30:46]
Jason Heiner
Yeah.
- [30:47]
Leo Laporte
They probably weren't hosting it, but they were providing cdn, I'm sure.
- [30:51]
Molly White
Yeah. Cloud services.
- [30:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Our show today, brought to you by Delete Me. Boy, you know, we're talking. I mean, there is no national data privacy law. There doesn't. It's not. Seems not likely that there ever will be one. So it's up to you, it's up to all of us to protect our privacy online. Have you ever searched for your name online? Oh, it's depressing how much is right there in a search. And there's so much more, even up to your Social Security number, that data brokers can quite legally sell to anybody who wants it. Maintaining privacy is a concern for all of us, whether you're an individual, a business, even for your family. And that's why I recommend we use Delete Me. It came up because our CEO was sending out. Well, they were spear phishing attacks. She wasn't sending them, but messages from our CEO were going to her employees saying, quick, buy me some Amazon gift cards and send them to this address. I'm in a meeting right now. Now, we, you know, our employees aren't dumb. They knew that was bogus because it's a small company. But. But it raised the issue for me. How do they know a who? Who. What Lisa's phone number is, what her direct reports are, what company she works with. How do they have all this information? It's easy to get online. And that's when we signed up for Delete me. And it works. And if your family is worried about privacy, you should check out DeleteMe's family plan. They have corporate plans, they have a lot of plans. But the family plan makes it possible for everyone in the family to stay safe online. Why do you delete this stuff? Well, as I mentioned, there's a cybersecurity element, but there's also identity theft and there's harassment, and there's just plain old privacy. Why do you close the door to the bathroom? You just deserve some privacy. Delete me. Experts will find and remove your information from hundreds of data brokers. You know how we know it worked? Because when the national public data breach happened and literally hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers were revealed, Steve Gibson and I searched for our records, found our Social Security numbers in the breach. Then I said, oh, let me try. Lisa and hers were not in there. She literally was not in the national public data breach because of DeleteMe. With the family plan, you can assign a unique data sheet to each family member. It's tailored to them because everybody's a little different. Easy to use controls, which means account owners can manage privacy settings for the whole family. The main thing, whatever plan you get to know, is delete me not only will remove that information, but then they continue to do so. They continue to scan and remove your information regularly because those dossiers get repopulated. You can delete them, but you're still using the Internet, right? Unless you delete them and move to a cabin in the woods, it's going to come back. And so you need to continually scan and remove this stuff. Plus, there's always new data brokers. Every day, new data brokers. Delete me removes everything. Addresses, photos, emails, relatives, your phone numbers, your social media, the value of your home. All of this stuff is out there. Protect yourself. Reclaim your privacy. Visit joindeleteme.com twit the offer code twit will get you 20% off. That's joindeleteme.com TWIT and don't forget the offer code. TWIT for 20% off. That does two things. Gets you 20% off, but also lets them know, hey, they saw this on Twit. And that helps us join delete me.com twit offer code twit for 20% off. It really works. We know we used it. So this is kind of unprecedented. I don't even know what to say. Thank goodness Molly White is here. And it's right at the top of web three is going just great. President Trump. President Elect Trump, the day before his inauguration, created a meme coin. Trump, it's called. You call it an S coin, I'll call it a meme coin. Dollar sign TRUMP. If you go to gettrumpmemes.com you can buy it. And I'm not hiding it because so many people have done so. It is now worth, what is it, $32 billion.
- [35:09]
Molly White
Well, there's actually some sort of breaking news that changes that, which is that Melania Trump just launched her meme coin.
- [35:17]
Leo Laporte
What? No.
- [35:18]
Molly White
And the Trump meme coin has crashed like 65%.
- [35:23]
Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. People sold Trump to buy Melania?
- [35:27]
Molly White
Yes.
- [35:27]
Leo Laporte
No. Come on, you're teasing us.
- [35:29]
Paris Martineau
Down, Melania up.
- [35:31]
Molly White
I am not joking.
- [35:32]
Leo Laporte
What is the name of Melania's coin?
- [35:34]
Molly White
Melania.
- [35:36]
Leo Laporte
Boy, that's like a year ago. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like there's trouble in paradise. Here's a.
- [35:43]
Molly White
What? No. Between them.
- [35:46]
Leo Laporte
Camelot man. Here's the post from the new, soon to be new president. My new official Trump meme is here. It's time to celebrate everything we stand for winning. Get your dollar sign Trump. Now go to TrumpMemes.com have fun. Oh, boy. Let me just see what it costs. Do I have to give him money? Oh, you could buy it with a debit card or crypto. What? And it's based on Solana, is that right, Molly?
- [36:19]
Molly White
That's correct, yes.
- [36:20]
Leo Laporte
What is Solana?
- [36:22]
Molly White
So Solana is another blockchain, Sort of like there's the bitcoin blockchain Ethereum, and then there's Solana. It was very popular around the Sam Bankman Fried era. He was very into Solana. And then it sort of had a nosedive around the time those things fell apart. But it's been back and a lot of the recent meme coin trend. Trend has taken place on Solana.
- [36:49]
Leo Laporte
Was hawk to a coin on Solana?
- [36:52]
Molly White
I believe it was, yes.
- [36:54]
Leo Laporte
So what that means is I don't. I could create a dollar sign Leo coin, but I wouldn't have to actually do any math. There's no math involved. Right. I don't have to come up with miners or anything. This is all handled with this Solana.
- [37:10]
Molly White
Does it yeah. And there have been sort of these recent platforms developed to make it very easy for anyone to create a meme coin on Solana without necessarily having to have a ton of technical expertise. You've always been able to create your own, you know, token on an Ethereum or Solana or anything like that. But some of these new platforms to really try, that really try to make it easier, have caused this sort of explosion in interest in meme coins over the years.
- [37:43]
Leo Laporte
So, one hour before we went on the air, Melania released. Melania. It has grown 4,487% since. In the first hour. Oh, it's down a little now. Are people, you think, selling Trump to buy Melania potentially.
- [38:02]
Molly White
I mean, or people are getting out of Trump for other reasons and they think that, you know, this is all, you know, a bad sign for the Trump financial world. I don't know. You know, they're worried that the Trump meme coin is about to crash or something like that.
- [38:18]
Leo Laporte
Trump is right now worth $45.47. But you're right, it did drop. It was started the day it's almost $70. So it is down 34%.
- [38:30]
Paris Martineau
That's got to be the set price, right? Because 45, 47. His president numbers.
- [38:35]
Leo Laporte
Oh, everybody's aiming at 47.
- [38:38]
Molly White
I think that's actually coincidence, but that's crazy.
- [38:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's funny. So the concern on this, I mean, my son, I'm talking to Henry about TikTok, and he said, by the way, is that legal?
- [38:53]
Molly White
It is now.
- [38:55]
Leo Laporte
And that was one of the things, and one of the reasons the crypto industry was all in on on Trump, because he said, we're going to fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC that's been saying that cryptocurrencies should be regulated like securities, which, I mean, that seems sensible to me. So. But it's very clear that under this new administration, they will not be regulated like securities, if at all. Which means, and I guess the President elect is basically announcing this by creating his own coin, as is Melania. Here is the bank of Trump. And if you decide you want to contribute to the new administration without, you know, all these rules and things, you just buy Trump coin. And presumably the President elect has a big stake. Do we know how much?
- [39:48]
Molly White
I think 80% of the token is currently.
- [39:52]
Leo Laporte
When the price goes up, his money, his value, his value goes up. And it's paper money, but so is Tesla stock. I mean, it's paper money, but it's a way of kind of indirectly giving money to our leader, I would say rather directly, actually. Yeah. Well, I mean, the only thing more directly is if you just write him a check, but there's all sorts of stickiness around that, so.
- [40:20]
Molly White
Right, yeah, that's a regular.
- [40:21]
Jason Heiner
This is not.
- [40:23]
Leo Laporte
This is not regulated.
- [40:25]
Molly White
Yeah. I mean, and it's not that much of a. You know, the newest Trump meme coin is really not that much of a departure from his previous actions where he.
- [40:34]
Leo Laporte
Had a meme coin, didn't he's.
- [40:36]
Molly White
There were Trump themed meme coins, but I don't know if any of those were ever official connected to him. There was actually a lot of coin.
- [40:45]
Paris Martineau
That Baron did with.
- [40:47]
Leo Laporte
Baron has a coin?
- [40:48]
Paris Martineau
No, Baron was the czar of a coin or something like that. He was the crypto officer.
- [40:54]
Molly White
Yeah. So there's a couple of different things. There was a Trump themed meme coin that was believed to have been backed by or like that Baron Trump was speculated to be involved with, but that was all going off of claims by, like, Martin Shkreli.
- [41:09]
Leo Laporte
Well, there's a reliable source.
- [41:11]
Molly White
Yeah. And so he was never really definitively linked to that. But there is a project called World Liberty Financial, which is a crypto project that that Trump is basically a beneficiary of. But he's not technically an officer of the company, even though he clearly has a strong say in the control of and direction of the project. But he makes like 70, I think 75% of protocol revenues off of that. And so people were already basically funneling money to Trump through that project.
- [41:46]
Leo Laporte
What are protocol revenues? What is that? Is that like gas fees? What is that?
- [41:51]
Molly White
Yeah. So the thing with World Liberty Financial is that theoretically it's supposed to become a defi protocol where you could actually, like, use the app to do crypto trading. And if you were to do so, that would generate revenue for the protocol and then a percentage of that goes to Trump.
- [42:11]
Leo Laporte
So they rake off a little bit.
- [42:14]
Molly White
Yeah. But in its current form there is no functionality, so basically it doesn't really do anything.
- [42:21]
Leo Laporte
But this is more direct, the Trump Coin.
- [42:24]
Molly White
This seems to be very direct. Yes. And there is really no business behind it in the way that World Liberty Financial at least claims that there will be some sort of app or something that you could use eventually. Maybe.
- [42:43]
Leo Laporte
Of course, immediately on X. There are pseudo accounts created.
- [42:48]
Molly White
Yes. Like Trump Meme Coin. Coin Saw the tweet about the Trump meme coin. I thought that Donald Trump's Twitter account had been hacked. Like, that's what I assumed. Because on Twitter this happens all the time. Where celebrities accounts are compromised and then they pretend to launch a meme coin and the hackers hacker makes off with whatever revenue there is. And then eventually the person regains control of their Twitter account and it turns out it wasn't their meme coin, it was just some person. And I assumed that was what was happening with the Trump coin, which I don't know why I didn't think it was likely that he would pull a stunt like this, which in hindsight seems very in character for him.
- [43:27]
Leo Laporte
So there's only a 10% public allocation of this meme coin. 80% of it is the President elect's money. 10% is going to somebody else. I don't know, maybe that's Solano gets a cut or something. 10% goes to the public.
- [43:47]
Molly White
The idea is that over time the 80% allocation would be released to the public, I believe. But at the moment that is the case. Yes.
- [43:59]
Leo Laporte
So, and this is so if you listened to or read the interview that the New York Times Rest, Utah did with Marc Andreessen, Mark's company. As you know, Mark Andreessen created Netscape Mozilla before that, made a lot of money when Netscape went public and has become a venture capitalist. Many of their investments at Andreessen Horowitz are crypto companies. Web3, they were a big Web3 proponent. And Andreessen says this is why he's become radicalized. He was a Democrat his whole life, but he, but he realized the Democrats wanted to kill crypto. He's the one who talked about debanking of crypto companies on Joe Rogan. The Democrats wanted to kill crypto. And so he's become a, a, a real supporter of the Republicans and especially of Donald Trump, because Donald Trump's pro crypto. But you can see the problem with crypto right here, that it is un. Because it's unregulated. It's a really easy way to scam people like crazy. Not to mention it's facilitated ransomware. I mean, the ransomware explosion is, is primarily because they can get their ransomware in Bitcoin. A lot of people made a lot of money. I'm not saying they haven't, but I imagine there's also a lot of people who lost money. It's a zero sum game.
- [45:29]
Jason Heiner
Yeah. For people to make a lot of money, a lot of people have to lose a lot of money.
- [45:32]
Leo Laporte
I mean, I know there's more bitcoin being created all the time. So it's not exactly zero sum. That's true.
- [45:37]
Jason Heiner
That's true.
- [45:38]
Leo Laporte
But it's pretty close to it. How does this Trump coin work? Is there more Trump coin being mined or is there a, a set pool of Trump Coin?
- [45:51]
Molly White
There's a set pool of it and like I said, there's that initial allocation to the team and I think the idea is that the team will sort of distribute more of it over time. But it's.
- [46:01]
Leo Laporte
Why would they do that for all?
- [46:03]
Molly White
Why should they do that to make more money?
- [46:06]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, because if they do that then maybe more people will buy it.
- [46:10]
Molly White
Yeah. I think there's, I mean, I think, I think there's probably not much of a long term plan with this. There doesn't tend to be with meme coins. They're sort of like, yeah, you know.
- [46:19]
Leo Laporte
Can you still buy Hawk Tua? I don't think you can. You can.
- [46:23]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [46:23]
Leo Laporte
Why would you.
- [46:24]
Molly White
They're all basically tradable forever. But it's just the question of does anyone actually trade them?
- [46:30]
Leo Laporte
Do people understand this when they're. I think certainly the people who are buying Trump coin are not looking at this allocation table and saying, oh yeah, okay, well there's eight total groups. The total admission duration is 36 months. Circulating supply at TGE 200 million. The maximum card supply is 1 billion. I'm going to make money on this. I think this is good. What is the emission schedule? What the hell does that mean? Is that when they release their 80%?
- [46:56]
Molly White
Yeah, that's about new tokens being released.
- [46:59]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. Not mined, right? Well they're not.
- [47:03]
Molly White
Yeah. So Solana and some other blockchains have a different consensus mechanism. So Bitcoin is a mining network where it's all about a lot of computers doing a lot of calculations at once. Solana, Ethereum, some of these other blockchains use a different process called validating to validate blocks instead of mine blocks. And it's more eco friendly and all that kind of thing.
- [47:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, and the basic idea is you have a decentralized ledger that everybody can see of who owns what and it's validated somehow magically, whether through mining or validation or proof of work or proof of stake or whatever it is. But it's interesting, you can just wave your hand and say, yeah, I'm going to create a billion Trump coins and they magically appear.
- [47:57]
Molly White
Yeah. I mean in fairness you've been able to do this for a long time. The Ethereum network has been doing this for a long time and people have been launching new tokens on all sorts of different blockchains.
- [48:07]
Leo Laporte
Do you, do you have to back it up. Do you have to like buy some Solana to back it up?
- [48:13]
Molly White
Not necessarily, but you know, in practice, most people will set up what's called a liquidity pool so that if someone wants to buy some trump tokens, there is someone on the other end of the trade. But, you know, as time goes on, other people will sort of join into those activities and become liquidity providers.
- [48:33]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's what the other 10% is, by the way, is liquidity. Yeah, so it's 80% Trump, 80% liquidity, 10% public distribution. I don't understand what any of this means, by the way. And I'm going to bet that 99% of the people who are buying it don't. And therein lies the problem.
- [48:52]
Molly White
Yeah, I mean, meme coins are really just based on vibes. There is no business or anything behind it. There is no sort of project underlying it, even in the way that a lot of crypto projects, like, I don't know, a year ago they at least claimed to be doing something and most of them didn't, but they claimed to be. And now there's meme coins, which is just like maybe number go up and that's sort of the whole philosophy behind them. And people are just trying to get in quickly enough and like pick the right meme coins so that they're the ones buying low and selling high and not the part of like 99% of people doing the opposite.
- [49:31]
Leo Laporte
But just to make you feel better, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the page@gettrumpmemes.com which I'm gonna bet is mostly hand waving, but it makes it feel like this is somehow regulated. Trump memes are intended to function as an expression of support for an engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol, dollar sign, Trump and the associated artwork and not intended to be or to be the subject of an investment opportunity, investment contract or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political, has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or government agency, because then the FEC would rule in. CIC Digital llc, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the trump cards and are subject to a three year unlocking schedule. CIC Digital LLC and Celebration Cards LLC, the owners of Fight Fight Fight LLC, will receive trading revenue derived from trading activities of Trump meme cards. Those are those fees you were talking about, Molly. See Terms and Conditions here. Okay, I'm gonna click Terms and conditions.
- [50:34]
Paris Martineau
Sometimes I Just I see something like this, and I want to go, like, find a way to print this out and send just a screenshot of that back in time. A decade and one shot. Kill me. You know, like, imagine reading this, like a decade ago. No context. I don't think I would survive. I think my brain would explode trying to comprehend it.
- [50:54]
Molly White
But you see these disclaimers on basically every crypto project website because they sort of think they've found a get out of jail free card where, like, if you put this at the bottom of the website, then the securities Exchange Commission can't come after us. And in this case, I guess it's probably true because of the, you know, Trump administration changes to the sec. But it is just sort of this, like, it's like when financial influencers are like, not financial advice, and then they proceed to give you, like, give you some financial advice.
- [51:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, financial advice. Please be aware. This is in the tnc. Please be aware that price of Trump memes may be extremely volatile. Well, we just found that out when Melania released hers. And you may experience substantial losses in connection with the sale or other disposition of Trump memes. We make absolutely no promise or guarantee that the Trump memes will increase in value or maintain the same value as the amount you paid to purchase. Same. There remains your sole and exclusive responsibility. Go ahead.
- [51:52]
Molly White
I was going to say, I believe there's also a clause about class action litigation against the.
- [52:00]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I bet there is.
- [52:01]
Molly White
Project, which is sort of a legally controversial clause where, you know, you're only allowed to. I forget what the terms are, but it's something like, you know, you have three weeks to file a lawsuit, and then you basically automatically waive all class complaints.
- [52:18]
Leo Laporte
So, I mean, I feel bad because obviously the people who buy this. Well, there's two categories of people are gonna buy this are people who love Trump or Trump supporters, like my in laws, who have his flag flying over their house. And they. They just. They say, you know, we're in. This is great. We're gonna give them. And they are on a fixed income. They don't have a lot of money. They're gonna give them. Give them some money just to show their support. Right. There's a second category, which are foreign actors, nationals, people who want influence with the government who will. When you buy this, it's public, right? It's not hidden. They know you just bought some, right?
- [53:03]
Molly White
It's public in the sense that people can see your blockchain address, but there you would have to connect the blockchain wallet address with the actual person.
- [53:13]
Leo Laporte
So if you bought it with crypto, there wouldn't be. But they do allow you to buy it with a debit card. So you.
- [53:19]
Molly White
Yeah, there is the added portion of this, which is not a feature of most meme coins, which is that you could buy it with a credit card or a debit card or whatever it is and then they would. I assume that goes through some sort of, you know, they've got a partnership with, I don't know, coinbase or something who is doing, who's facilitating that. But that is probably not as public because of the traditional financial end of things.
- [53:44]
Leo Laporte
By the way, it's your sole and exclusive responsibility to assure the purchase and sale of Trump memes and the use of cryptocurrencies complies with laws and regulations in your jurisdiction. That's your problem, buddy, not my problem.
- [53:58]
Molly White
It turns out though that it is actually very much their problem. Yeah, I don't think you can just disclaim that away.
- [54:03]
Leo Laporte
I don't think it's any accident that this was introduced the day before inaugural.
- [54:09]
Molly White
It was also introduced on the day of the crypto ball in D.C. which was a black tie event put on by the crypto industry. $2,500 tickets, dinner will not be served.
- [54:21]
Leo Laporte
Reporters are strictly forbidden, and incidentally was headlined by Snoop.
- [54:28]
Molly White
Yeah, apparently he's a Trump guy now.
- [54:30]
Leo Laporte
Who was even as recently as the day of the election and very anti Trump. There is now a Cancel Snoop movement, I might add, because he has been.
- [54:43]
Molly White
Into crypto for a long time. So that wasn't too much of a surprise.
- [54:46]
Leo Laporte
But so that's really what you're seeing here is the crypto community is extraordinarily happy. And I'm not saying it is. If it were a pyramid scheme and you had put a lot of money into it, you would very much like more suckers to come along and buy out your share, wouldn't you? I mean that's how pyramid schemes work for sure.
- [55:10]
Molly White
Yes.
- [55:11]
Jason Heiner
I mean, more like a Ponzi scheme.
- [55:13]
Leo Laporte
Ponzi, you know.
- [55:14]
Molly White
Well, I think some of both, I think.
- [55:15]
Jason Heiner
But yeah, that's true. You're right, you're right, it is both. Yeah. I mean, crypto, any of these things, just like meme stocks, just like penny stocks, you know, a lot of it's like finding someone, whoever can, you know, we're finding the demand to buy the next one. Right. Like that's the, the, that's, that's what it's always about. And, and so this thing is short lived. I Think it's, it's a, it's interesting in that it's likely to be a. It's likely to create a bunch of blather around crypto for the next, you know, few months. But at the same time, you know, when people put some money in and they see something that they put, you know, even $500 in, and then it's worth, you know, 25 cents two months later, like, they tend to, you know, say, well, I'm never doing that again. That's what sort of typically happens in these meme coin, you know, rises and falls. And so, so do you think it's.
- [56:11]
Leo Laporte
A shrinking pool of people who will put money into this stuff?
- [56:14]
Jason Heiner
I mean, there's a lot of people that have gotten a lot of the sort of. The average folks that have gotten burned by crypto in that sort of 20, 21, you know, rise and fall 22. And so I think that, yeah, there it's like a new pool of, of people who maybe are now giving it a try. But what tends to happen with meme coins is what happens every time is like, again, people put in 100 bucks and then they find how is what I, what was 100 bucks, you know, two weeks ago now worth 75 cents? And. And then people are like, well, I'm never doing that again sort of phenomenon.
- [56:48]
Paris Martineau
Well, that's the rational response. And in most cases that does happen. But I think as we've seen from the whole original meme style craze and everything that's currently going on with GameStop stockholders and former Bed, Bath and Beyond stockholders who believe they still have stock, there is a small but mighty percentage of people that this just sends them into a whirlwind of conspiratorial thinking that it's just. I mean, it's. And I'm interested to see how that plays out when you combine something like as volatile as politics and these sort of communities. Because, I mean, I've been looking at, I guess, the. I've just with idle fascination, but interested in this phenomenon within, like the GameStop, Bed, Bath and Beyond people, because it reminds me of the conspiratorial thinking you see with QAnon. But if you have the Venn diagram of people who believe in QAnon and who also are potentially prone to that, it becomes a strange circle. And I'm. I'm morbidly curious to see how that turns out.
- [57:53]
Molly White
I would also say there is sort of a third demographic here, which is people who are prone to gambling addiction who are you know, who see a big loss on something like a Trump meme coin, and they aren't like, oh, God, that was a bad idea. I should never do that again. Their reaction is, I picked the wrong one. I gotta get the right one next time. Yeah, and I'll make it.
- [58:14]
Paris Martineau
That wasn't fast enough.
- [58:16]
Molly White
Right. And there is so much of that in the crypto world where there is, like, there is this tendency for people to really, like, blame themselves in a way that is very unusual, where it's like, oh, I shouldn't have done this and my wallet was hacked and that was all my fault, or, oh, I just picked the wrong token, I made the wrong trade. But it's never, you know, they. They don't sort of see the flaws in the system. They often just attribute it to their own personal failings and then believe that. That if they just trade better or if they just behave in a different way, you know, that they can suddenly become the Lamborghini driving people that they follow on Twitter.
- [58:53]
Leo Laporte
Should this be regulated?
- [58:56]
Molly White
Well, I think there's reasonable arguments to be made in sort of both directions. You know, there is this enormous market such that it is. That is a wild West. And so, you know, it would be nice if there wasn't this blatant fraud happening. And I would point out that you can handle fraud without bespoke regulations, like stealing is still illegal, even if you do it with crypto. But there is sort of this argument, which I am sympathetic to, which is that the more you regulate it, the more you legitimize it and the more you sort of make it look like a sound investment. But I also wonder if maybe that ship has sailed a little bit. You know, we already have. Have Bitcoin ETFs, for example, and so we've already legitimized it to some extent, and maybe it's a better.
- [59:44]
Leo Laporte
That's something that worries me a little bit, because ETFs make it very easy for you to put bitcoin in your ira, in your retirement funds. Yeah, it's easy to Invest.
- [59:54]
Jason Heiner
Maybe not 401k, but yeah, certainly an IRA.
- [59:57]
Molly White
They are getting to that point, though, where 401k managers are considering adding Bitcoin ETF options.
- [60:04]
Paris Martineau
So something that's worth keeping in mind here is like, I think there's this tendency, and I certainly fell prey to it, like when we're talking about meme coins and this whole kind of Wild west of an industry, to view the victims and losers of this as people who had it coming or Just made a poor choice. But as these products get more and more popular, and they're extraordinarily popular right now, oftentimes the average, you know, victim of these financial scams are like everyday, well meaning Americans who suffer huge like financial losses that are devastating to them and people who like, support them. And I think when we're thinking about regulation, part of the reason to do something like that is to protect the average consumer from harms that they may not realize they're getting themselves into.
- [60:53]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, I mean, Americans love a get rich quick scheme, right? Like, yeah, I mean since 1850 it's been like a long string of them.
- [61:00]
Molly White
Yeah, yeah.
- [61:02]
Leo Laporte
Different when it's in the White House.
- [61:04]
Molly White
Yeah, your point is really well made because I, I hear that a lot. As someone who covers crypto scams, I get a lot of people saying like, oh, they had it coming, they shouldn't have been so dumb. Like anyone who puts money into a meme coin deserves everything they get and so on. But like watching the crypto world for the past couple of years and seeing the victims of these scams, it really, people really do not understand the types of people that we're talking about, you know, when, and the types of things that people believe about that are just like they believe to be inherently true about anything that is available for them to buy. This is particularly the case with Americans where people believe that because they can buy it, it is regulated, that there is. Yeah. And there is someone making sure that it's not a scam. And so when, when companies like Celsius and Voyager collapsed, for example, in 2022, those were two large crypto companies based in the United States. There were all of these people who believed that they had like FDIC protection on their Celsius accounts because Celsius kept saying that it was safer than a bank. And so people just assumed that they had protection from those types of losses. People believed that if it was a scam, they wouldn't be allowed to be registered in the United States. And so they, I mean people do not expect like CEOs to just lie to their faces, even though they do it very frequently. And so, you know, I think there is this misunderstanding that like everyone who's involved in crypto and loses money is like some 20 year old guy who has money to burn, who is very technologically savvy, who, who understands what he's getting into and understands the risk that's involved. And therefore you shouldn't feel bad for him when he loses everything. But if you actually look at it. I mean, there are retirees who are told that this is the only way that they're gonna be able to retire comfortably. There are people who are trying to pay medical debts. There are very compelling stories of people who are in a bad situation and trying to get out of it, who believe that this is kind of the only way that they can get out of it, and often really don't understand what they're getting involved in.
- [63:18]
Leo Laporte
Are there any regulations at all? Is this regulated in any way?
- [63:22]
Molly White
Well, like I said, stealing from people is illegal. So you, you know, there are.
- [63:27]
Leo Laporte
I don't ask you one. A single. Well, I guess Samuel Bankman Fried.
- [63:32]
Molly White
Yeah. And Celsius. You know, there's the. There is. But that's usually. Unfortunately, that usually happens after the fraud.
- [63:39]
Leo Laporte
It's too late.
- [63:40]
Paris Martineau
It's not as many pump and dump for a mean coin, is that. Yeah, it.
- [63:46]
Molly White
And, well, there is some debate over who is in charge of that regulation. But pumping and dumping is also illegal, although people, I think, sometimes forget that in the crypto world. And so the SEC has brought cases about pump and dumps, but because they're so frequent and prevalent, they really only bring them against, like, high profile cases where they feel like they can send a message. So, for example, they went after Kim Kardashian. They've gone after, you know, a couple of other celebrities for getting involved in these pump and dumps or for undisclosed promotion of these tokens.
- [64:25]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, that's right. I remember. They, they went after the celebrities that fortune favors the brave. You know, all of those ads on the super bowl, but nothing ever happened. I don't, you know, Matt Damon's not in jail.
- [64:40]
Molly White
Well, I think those were class action and not coming from the sec.
- [64:44]
Leo Laporte
They were regulated. Regulation. Okay.
- [64:46]
Molly White
Yeah, but, so they do do those types of lawsuits, but I think they've unfortunately just sent the message that, like, if you're not a celebrity, no one's going to come after you. And so there's all of this meme coin activity.
- [64:58]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, also when, when the president elect does it, it is a very strong signal.
- [65:05]
Jason Heiner
Right.
- [65:06]
Leo Laporte
You know, come on in, guys. The water's great. I'm looking. There are 66 political coins on coin ranking right now@coinranking.com Number one, of course, the official Trump coin that came out yesterday. But there is a Maga coin. Actually, there's quite a few. There's a peppercoin, there's a Doland tremp coin, a Geobottom coin. There's a Pepe coin. There's the Trump token. There's Trump, AI Trump maga, MAGA fight for Trump baby Trump, Tooker, Carlson MAGA Trump huge MAGA VP baby Trump, son of Trump. You can not only can you buy these, they have a market cap. JD Vance. There's a Vance coin. Doesn't mean Vance did it. Right. Just somebody else just named it that. There's a Kamala Harris coin. Make America great. There are quite a few MAGA coins. Are these scammers trying to take advantage of. I mean, there's a real Donald Trump coin, but I don't think it's really Donald Trump. Nobody says you can't do that.
- [66:12]
Molly White
Yeah, no, I mean, these, these tokens have been around for a long time. You know, even before Trump was launching meme coins, people just will launch a meme coin about anything and everything they can think of. And there have been a bunch of them that are politically, you know, involved with some political thing. But people, you know, anything that happens, like if there's some big news, there'll be a meme coin about it immediately. It's just sort of a free for all.
- [66:38]
Leo Laporte
That's what I mean by it's not. It's not any practical way regulated.
- [66:42]
Molly White
Correct. I would agree with that. And especially with the way things are looking like they'll be going. I would not expect that to change much.
- [66:49]
Leo Laporte
When they say the market cap of Trump coin is 9.25 billion, that's the current market cap, does that mean there's actually nine point, not that many people bought it, or does that just some made up?
- [67:00]
Molly White
Yeah. So I actually wrote a piece about this on my blog a long time ago about cryptocurrency market caps, which people like to say, big numbers. And so they'll say things like there's a $15 billion market cap or something like that. And the way that those market caps are calculated is very naive. So it basically means what they're doing is they're taking the current price of the token and they're multiplying it by the number of tokens in circulation in some time. They even, in some cases. I actually saw the New York Times do this recently, which was really kind of horrifying. But they actually were. They were multiplying the current price by the. What's called the fully diluted valuation, which is like, if every token in existence were to be created, multiply that by the current price and you get these huge numbers, like almost trillions of dollars in this case. But it's nowhere connected to reality. Like, you could not in any reasonable world, actually cash out something close to that. I like to give the example of basically like, if I were to create a Molly coin and I were to sell one Molly coin to somebody else for a dollar, and then I had a million Molly coins that existed, they would be saying that the Molly coin market cap was a million dollars, even though $1 went into that ecosystem. So it's really.
- [68:24]
Jason Heiner
You have to find a million people to actually buy it for a dollar. Right. In order for it to happen.
- [68:30]
Leo Laporte
And it's too bad they use market cap because that's a well known phrase in the stock market in equities, and it means something in an equity. Now they also also use trading volume, and I think this is real. The value of all trades of Trump coin in the last 24 hours is $18.9 billion.
- [68:49]
Molly White
So I would put an asterisk around that too, because really that's. Trading in crypto markets is unbelievably endemic. Like it is just a normal activity practically. Like you can.
- [69:02]
Leo Laporte
What are they doing? They're selling it to themselves and then back again or.
- [69:05]
Molly White
Yeah, pretty much they're. They're faking volume for that exact reason because it makes it look like the token is more liquid than it is. Like there's a deeper market for it than there is.
- [69:14]
Leo Laporte
So it's fake. Could be fake. We don't know.
- [69:17]
Molly White
It often is fake, I would say.
- [69:19]
Leo Laporte
We don't know. Yeah. Okay. Well, I just. It's a little sketch to be doing this, to be honest.
- [69:25]
Molly White
A little.
- [69:27]
Leo Laporte
But it does send a signal that this is going to be a great four years for crypto.
- [69:32]
Molly White
Well, I would actually point out you mentioned this earlier. You made a comment about how, you know, crypto is very excited about this, but I've actually seen a surprising amount of sort of shock and horror from the crypto world about the Trump meme coin. I think the crypto world has really come to expect, expect something very different than what they're going to get with the Trump administration. And they are kind of horrified to see what looks like a total grifty cash grab. It's obviously not great for the reputation of crypto when Trump is out there doing these types of things.
- [70:04]
Paris Martineau
People, real leopards eating faces, Mom.
- [70:08]
Molly White
It is very much that, yes. But I think that, you know, I'm actually really interested in watching over the next couple of years how the crypto world, like, like, you know, the normal, everyday people who are buying and selling crypto react to the sort of political reality that they are, that they sort of signed up for in a way where they were like, okay, I guess we'll back, you know, we'll, we'll get behind this political project and we'll support these crypto executives who are, you know, getting in bed with Trump with the idea that those crypto executives, the like billionaire executives and venture capitalists, will do what is good for the little guy in crypto, even though history has shown repeatedly that billionaires don't usually care about the little guy very much. And I think there is going to be kind of a reckoning where maybe the people who are like Coinbase executives don't actually have the interests of, you know, everyday people in mind and they actually are more interested in protecting their bottom line or padding their wallets a little bit. And I think that this is kind of an early preview of that to some extent.
- [71:16]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, there are still true believers in crypto and blockchain who truly believe like that that this is a vehicle that will democratize finance. Remember, cryptocurrency came out of the financial collapse in 20 of the banks in 2010, 2011. And the whole idea was to create this principles based, decentralized monetization monetary system that is separate from sort of an oligarch controlled monetary system where the people in power are not accountable for mistakes that they make and then the little person pays for their mistakes instead of them having to be accountable for them. And so there are people in the crypto ecosystem that still firmly believe in those ideals and in that idea and that they're. There is a way that cryptocurrency can democratize finance in ways that especially apply to places, you know, outside of the US and places where, you know, where there are a lot of unbanked people who are still at the mercy of sometimes very corrupt money lenders and banks. So I think for that crowd seeing crypto get a bunch of publicity around meme coins and is probably one of the worst possible scenarios, right? Because it's going to, it's going to take crypto and turn it into essentially just people thinking it's just a Ponzi scheme. It's always going to be a sort of a cheap meme scop, you know, Ponzi scheme sort of place when there are people who really believe in this and are, have put their, you know, they could be working on AI, they could be working on other things, but they're invested in the crypto ecosystem because they are, are essentially true believers in the original ideals of, you know, 2010 and the Post, you know, and post Lehman Brothers and other bank collapses. And so I think that's one of the risks here for, for that crowd. This, this could be a rough, you know, this could be a rough year for them and maybe even a rough sort of couple years.
- [73:26]
Molly White
Yeah. And that crowd, I think, was looking at things like Bitcoin ETFs. I mean, the idea of BlackRock offering a Bitcoin ETF is like completely antithetical to so much of the bitcoin ethos, which is like no big finance people getting involved in this. And then so I think there were, there have been a lot of people who have seen the direction of crypto in the last, you know, five or 10 years and are sort of like, oh God, this is not what we wanted at all. But I also think that a lot of those people have either left or perhaps, perhaps, maybe abandon those ideals.
- [74:00]
Leo Laporte
Maybe it was a little naive.
- [74:01]
Jason Heiner
AI startups for sure.
- [74:04]
Leo Laporte
AI is the new crypto. All right, we're going to take a break. Great panel. It's great to have you. I'm so glad you could be here. Molly White, this is the, this is your time. It's your time. Molly white is at mollywhite.net Paris Martineau@theinformation.com and editor in chief of ZDNet. So great to have you, Jason. Yeah. Well, what a ride though, huh?
- [74:27]
Jason Heiner
What a ride.
- [74:28]
Leo Laporte
What a ride. The show this week brought to you by ZIP Recruiter. Love these guys. Well, back in the days when we were hiring, there was no better way to do it than ZipRecruiter. It's still the case is a, it's a brand new year, right? 2025, and many business owners. I know you're sitting there thinking there are a few roles I need to hire for. If you do need to hire for your business, there is no better way, I am serious to find qualified candidates than ZipRecruiter. You can try it right now for free. Ziprecruiter.com Twitter I'll give you a little synopsis of our experience. You know, it happens in any business. People move on, get a better job or a job closer to home and they give you the two week notice. And it's always a, you know, it's nice, people are very nice, but they're leaving now. We've got, the clock is ticking. We got an empty position and in two weeks if we don't find somebody, we're going to be doing that job. Last thing you want to do, right? Plus hiring your inbox, your voicemail just going to fill up with people looking for, if you're lucky, looking for work, or worse, you post the job in crickets. Neither one is good. None of that will happen with ZipRecruiter. It's the hiring site employers literally prefer the Most based on G2. So we post on ZipRecruiter. Lisa usually does it at breakfast. I'm thinking the last time this happened, when we needed a new person in our continuity department, Ashley moved on to a job closer to her house. She posted at breakfast, before lunch. She's going, wow, we got. This is a great candidate. This is a great candidate. That's tough in a situation right now where it's really, you know, there's a lot of competition for the best employees. But ZipRecruiter smart technology will start showing your job to qualified candidates right away. They post to more than 100 job sites, job listing sites. With one click of the mouse plus social, they really get the word out. But they also do something else. They have more than a million resumes on file, current resumes. Because people come to ZipRecruiter looking for work, right? So they will take their matching technology, they'll go in there, they'll look at your requirements, they'll look at the resumes they've got, and then they will send you a list of the most of the candidates that are best qualified for your job. It can be a very long list. You look at it and then invite the ones you really like to apply for your job. When that happens, by the way, when you invite somebody to apply, they're flattered, right? They go, wow, they want me. And you're much more likely to get that employee. It kind of moves you to the, the top of the line right there. It really works. It's a, it's amazing. So Lisa posts a job and within an hour she said, we got a great she. And by the way, she's worried, what am I going to do if we can't hire? We got a great cat. We got another great candidate. We got, I think three or four great candidates before lunch. Here's to a new year of hiring made easier with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. I'm not going to promise you before lunch, but that's been our experience. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive website just for us. This way they know you saw it here. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT you can try it free ziprecruiter.com TWITzipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. Thank you, ZipRecruiter. And we hired Viva and we were very happy. Very happy. That had a nice happy ending. So, boy, I can just go on and on about great stuff. Molly, you're not in the LA area, are you? No. Jason, LA area, no. And I know you're not. You're in Brooklyn, Paris. So our again, it's still burning in la and our thoughts and love go out to all of our friends in la, many, many of our listeners and many of our contributors. Kevin Rose lost his house. It's just, it's been devastating out there. So stay safe. I guess that's all I have to say about that. Let's see, what should we talk about? I didn't put these in order, so I'm just going to go through them kind of randomly. Texas is suing all state actually this is one of a number of suits over driver data. State of Texas accuses Arity, an allstate subsidy subsidiary, of collecting data about people's driving behavior through mobile apps leading to increases in driver's insurance rates. Well, isn't that how it's kind of supposed to work?
- [79:12]
Molly White
Yeah, I think you're supposed to know about it though.
- [79:15]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay.
- [79:17]
Paris Martineau
Without their knowledge or concerning from the Cashmere Hill article, I can't recall if it could have been three years ago, it could have been six months ago where she found essentially that a number of insurers were using data from like their customers cars in order. Not just their cars, just their cars, their phones, a million other things like.
- [79:40]
Leo Laporte
If you have life360 to keep track of your family members is you're right. She wrote this in June and that's where that, that's where this came from.
- [79:49]
Paris Martineau
And the important thing is unlike there are programs that these insurers have right where you sign on to do this legitimately. That's not what she's talking about here or what her investigation found. It was this whole collection of different sources that users and drivers had no idea were sending information about stuff like what time you're driving at night or are you breaking slightly quickly when you come to a you stop sign. And that was being used to increase someone's insurance score or insurance payment significantly just because they've gone out. A couple like they're, you know, Life360 app or something else would tell their insurer covertly, hey, this person's often driving after 11pm and then the insurer is like, maybe that's risky. They're going to have to pay more for their insurance.
- [80:38]
Jason Heiner
And it's really dirty. It's really.
- [80:40]
Molly White
And it's different from the. Like you said, there are programs for. The insurance company is like, hey, we'll give you $15 off your policy if you download this app that sends us your data, which, like, is still kind of gross surveillance, but is at least, you know, you opt in.
- [80:55]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, yeah, opt in to do.
- [80:57]
Paris Martineau
And one of the cases I recall from this article that I thought was the most skeevy was she had an example of a customer who I guess when they were buying whatever car they were buying, they had said, no, I don't want to sign up for the program where all of my cars data is automatically sent to the insurance companies. And the car dealership employees signed them up anyway. And that was their internal policy is no matter what the customers say, everyone's getting signed up for this data auto sharing program.
- [81:29]
Jason Heiner
Sure. They were getting a draw on it. They were getting. I'm sure they signed up. They got, you know, 100 bucks or something, you know.
- [81:35]
Molly White
Yeah, like a commission fee.
- [81:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. What's hysterical is some of the apps that you sign up for. I mentioned Life360. There's also MyRadar, a weather forecast app, and GasBuddy, which helps you save on fuel costs. Have opt in driving analysis features ostensibly for that app. Like, how's your teenager driving? We'll let you know. But what's also happening is that data is being sent on to the insurance companies without your knowledge. Now, I'm gonna play a little devil's advocate here, but the job of an insurance company is to give you a premium that will correctly reflect the risk that you're gonna make a claim. Right. And insurance companies, you know, maybe they get rapacious and they charge you too much, but the idea is we're gonna charge you a fee commensurate with the risk. That's why teenage drivers pay more for their car insurance. And to the degree that they don't do that, we all pay. So if I'm a really safe driver, and this is why I sign up for those plans, the insurer knows that that's going to bring my cost down. Shouldn't I also think it's a good thing for the insurance companies to know who's a terrible driver because I don't want to subsidize their insurance. They should pay an insurance premium commensurate with their risk.
- [82:59]
Jason Heiner
Yes, but they. But doing it in underhanded ways where they're going and you know, essentially doing some very.
- [83:05]
Leo Laporte
You might have to. Who's going to. Who's going to let the insurance company know they're a crappy driver?
- [83:09]
Jason Heiner
Terrible driver.
- [83:10]
Molly White
I feel like.
- [83:11]
Paris Martineau
Well, we also, Leo, we also have laws around data privacy and security that say you got to get people's consent. And I know, I know it's really shocking.
- [83:21]
Jason Heiner
You have the right to not let the insurance company know you are a really terrible driver. You know, every person or at least.
- [83:28]
Paris Martineau
That should be listed somewhere in the terms of service. Hey, we're squealing on all your data to the insurance company, but it's not.
- [83:35]
Jason Heiner
Or it might be in your. And you're signing up for those. I think one of the. My. My takeaway is like really be more careful than ever about the apps that you download and the things that you and and delete stuff off your phone that you're not using. Because you know we've seen a number of apps, apps also abuse, you know the, the data that they're collecting and like we just, you know, consumers have to be more careful.
- [84:01]
Leo Laporte
And Verity's response to this is that, well, you did agree, you know that phrase, we may collect third party data and reports. That's in the fine print in your user agreement.
- [84:15]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [84:15]
Jason Heiner
They'll say that it.
- [84:16]
Leo Laporte
That's what that means.
- [84:18]
Jason Heiner
We're going to sell your data.
- [84:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And I bet you if you're going to sell it. Yeah. It often says we will share it with third parties to improve your experience and our partners.
- [84:34]
Paris Martineau
Here's one example from a New York Times article. Gas Buddy, for instance, is I guess an app you can download to help like save on fuel costs. I assume it tells you where certain fuel costs are or where the various cheaper gas you can find. And the New York Times says, for instance when you're signing up for this, you can turn on a feature that rates the fuel efficiency of their drives. A feature quote powered by area. And when you do that says the company, you agree to the privacy statement before they opt into this function. However, in this agreement is a small in small gray font font under a big red button labeled Join Drives. There's a tiny disclosure that says by clicking Join Drives you will share quote certain information with Arietti and agree to arietti's privacy statement. And this is not the area app. This is the Gas Buddy thing and the language explain what area or what it does.
- [85:32]
Leo Laporte
They disclosed it. Well notice they also they call it already not all state. I understand. Yeah, you would know who Allstate is.
- [85:38]
Molly White
Yeah, but still there are also requirements about how prominent you are allowed to make various disclosures.
- [85:44]
Leo Laporte
And like Tiny, we're gonna fix all that starting tomorrow. Don't you, don't you worry about that. We're getting rid of that. Consumer Financial Protection Board. That's ridiculous. This is what also from Kesh's article, the bigger appeal of telematics. It could more accurately predict risk for individual drivers and be a fairer way to set rates. Most insurers will charge a 24 year old man who lives in a busy city more than a 50 year old woman who lives in the suburbs. And as that 50 year old woman, I think that's a good thing. Everybody eventually will have a driving score, says one consultant. And you might prefer it. Don't judge me. This is Alan demers, founder of InsureTech Consulting. Guess what they do. Don't judge me based on everyone else. Judge me based on me. That seems fair. But all right, so then they should disclose it and you should be very clear that they are collecting that data and it should impact your insurance. Although if you're a terrible driver. Well like that.
- [86:53]
Paris Martineau
I think it's also an example that sticks with me is from I think Cashmere's original article about this in March 2024. This was the example with how automakers are sharing this data. She gives the example of this guy, ken doll, a 65 year old man who was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21% like nothing had really changed about his life. He ends up testing data. Gets back a 260 page consumer disclosure report from data broker Lexis Nexus that included over 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven their Chevy bolt over the previous six months. Include the dates of 640 trips, start and end times, distance driven. He had never gotten in an accident once over this entire time. But because he had things like he.
- [87:44]
Leo Laporte
Was breaking hard, ladies and gentlemen, he.
- [87:47]
Paris Martineau
He had two hard breaks on an early morning in June and that's why his payment went up 20%. And I think that's a little ridiculous.
- [87:56]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, I put a link in the, in the show notes here that about the skyrocketing car insurance premiums and you can see this chart. It is, it is unbelievable. So they're doing all of this data and the thing is is I don't, I don't even know how much they're using it other than to just try to increase, increase everybody's car insurance premium. Well to just insane Levels that.
- [88:19]
Leo Laporte
That's another issue. Isn't five years that, you know, are they doing what they should do, which is reducing the cost for safe drivers while increasing it for unsafe drivers? No, they're just using it as an excuse to raise everybody's rates.
- [88:32]
Jason Heiner
Exactly.
- [88:32]
Molly White
But I also feel like the sort of like if you're not doing anything wrong, you know, you shouldn't have a problem with this type of thing. Doesn't really work because, like, if you were to think, like, try to think of like an analogous situation where, you know, like health insurance example, like, you could make the argument that health insurers should put a camera in everybody's house to see like how much they're sitting on the couch versus going for a run.
- [88:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, that might be a little intrusive. Okay.
- [88:57]
Molly White
Yeah, exactly.
- [88:57]
Leo Laporte
Although they have done that. That's called a smart tv.
- [89:01]
Molly White
Right. But like, I would argue that someone just like taking the data about where I drive and when I drive is just as intrusive as someone putting a camera in my house.
- [89:12]
Leo Laporte
But I will give you the other side of that. So California a couple of decades ago had an initiative which passed limiting home insurance premiums. They actually cut them by about 20%. As a result, insurers were not able to send a signal to homeowners that were building in fire zones by raising their insurance. They couldn't. They were statutory limited to how much they could charge them for insurance. You could make the argument, as a result, in those 20 years, many people have built in areas where there were real risks, wildfire. But they weren't given the signal from the insurance company. In other words, their insurance wasn't raised. And as a result, this has happened up here in Sonoma County a couple of years ago, just happened in la. Many of these people have lost their homes and now insurers are leaving the state because the state won't let them charge the proper amount for the risk.
- [90:14]
Paris Martineau
I'll put on my devil horns a little bit and do some advocacy. Couldn't have those insurers. Couldn't have those insurers at some point just said, we're not going to insure people who build in these areas we think are risky.
- [90:26]
Leo Laporte
Well, they are now.
- [90:28]
Paris Martineau
I mean, they are now the insurance.
- [90:29]
Molly White
Companies warning people about fire zones. Like, I feel like that is something that could happen. And outside of the insurance industry.
- [90:36]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, maybe.
- [90:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I just. I think that the amount you pay for in your insurance home industry is.
- [90:45]
Paris Martineau
The group that we should be feeling bad for.
- [90:48]
Leo Laporte
Well, but the amount you pay for Your insurance is a direct reflection of, or should be, I think, a direct reflection of the risk. And when it's statutorily prohibited from that, I think that's when you get the problems that we're having right now.
- [91:08]
Molly White
I don't know if the problem. I mean, the wildfires are not because of insurance premiums.
- [91:14]
Leo Laporte
No, no, no, absolutely not.
- [91:16]
Paris Martineau
I mean, I think we can look at what's going on with homeowners insurance in Florida to see an example of what would happen in a totally unregulated area or part like, like version of this industry where they don't have caps there. And as a result, many people in these areas just have been unable to get home insurance.
- [91:37]
Leo Laporte
I'm getting this argument. I should give him credit from Nolan Gray, who is the senior director of legislation and research at California's YIMBY Institute and the author of a book called Arbitrary Lines How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. He wrote a piece in the Atlantic how well intentioned policies fueled L. A. S fires in which he refers to specifically this California. 1988. California voters passed Prop 103, reducing rates by 20%, subjecting future rate increases to public oversight. And of course, I understand why they did that. But as a result, he says, the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state's most dangerous areas, and they reduced the incentive for homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire resistant roof and siding materials.
- [92:32]
Molly White
Were insurance companies required to provide insurance?
- [92:37]
Leo Laporte
Well, what's happened? That's a good question. No, they could have. I guess they could have left. I don't know. I think maybe they were required to. Maybe they could have left. I don't know. What has happened is California has to create. Has created its own public insurer of last resort. And unfortunately, the state is the public.
- [92:55]
Jason Heiner
Insurer of last resort.
- [92:56]
Leo Laporte
The fair plan. Yeah, F A I R. Oh, interesting. They unfortunately covered in 2023, $284 billion in home value, much of that in Los Angeles. Within the next few years, Nolan writes, California taxpayers could be on the hook for more than a trillion dollars. The state insurance commissioner is scrambling to bring insurers back, but it may be too late. So insurers have left for sure. We don't actually live in a fire zone anymore, but our homeowners insurance has announced they're canceling us in June, probably because we're in California, probably because of.
- [93:37]
Molly White
The camera they put in your house.
- [93:39]
Leo Laporte
Or the camera they put in our house. That's true.
- [93:41]
Jason Heiner
That's smart tv. You got your data.
- [93:43]
Leo Laporte
They found out I'm a fire eater.
- [93:45]
Paris Martineau
And that bridge you've been chewing on.
- [93:48]
Molly White
All the wires in there, they've been.
- [93:50]
Paris Martineau
Slurping the Data from those 200 connected devices in your home. Well, they're like, no, no, no.
- [93:56]
Leo Laporte
Okay. They probably are if it. Okay. So admittedly, we don't really.
- [94:01]
Paris Martineau
They're like, this guy's a podcaster. We can't.
- [94:04]
Leo Laporte
We found out podcasting from the house. Oh, boy. But in the perfect world with perfect information and insurers that were honorable, wouldn't that be the best way to do it?
- [94:17]
Paris Martineau
I think the last point. Honorable is a hard word to apply to mega corporations in a. In. In capitalism.
- [94:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [94:27]
Molly White
I would also argue that in a perfect world, insurance companies would not have my information.
- [94:33]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [94:34]
Leo Laporte
So I would pay the same as you would.
- [94:36]
Molly White
I mean, I. So I drive like a grandma. I mean, I am like, I am a very careful.
- [94:41]
Leo Laporte
I am a grandma. So there you go.
- [94:44]
Molly White
I'm in the same demographic as you are. I don't even. I rarely drive at night. I rarely drive at all, actually. And I still don't sign up for the policy where they take however much off of my insurance because for me, the privacy aspect of it is. Is enough to. So, like, I think there is. I think there are plenty of safe drivers who don't want to be spied on. And I think the same thing goes for other forms of insurance and data collection as well.
- [95:08]
Leo Laporte
Do you? You. So you don't mind that you're paying maybe paying the same as some hot rod and 20 year old, you know, who. No. You don't care.
- [95:17]
Molly White
I mean, they obviously go off my driving record and all the sort of, you know, the historic ways that they go off, you know, that insurance.
- [95:24]
Leo Laporte
Is that okay?
- [95:26]
Molly White
Yeah, I think so. I think that's okay. I mean, if I get into an accident, I think it's okay that people know about that. But, you know, I don't think they need date, like very deep how often you break. Yeah, but where I go and when I go there and how I break and all that kind of thing. Yeah. Because like If I pay $50 a month more, then that's fine with me.
- [95:45]
Leo Laporte
Our producer Bonito, weighing in. Yes, Benito.
- [95:46]
Jason Heiner
I feel like they're just trying to moneyball it. Right? Like that's what they're doing. They're trying to.
- [95:51]
Leo Laporte
But that's what insurance is, Benito. That's why there's people called Actuaries who figure out what the likely, your likelihood of having an accident or dying or having your house burned down is. And then in theory, the premiums reflect that so that they can make a little bit of money on top of the risk. And it works in aggregate.
- [96:07]
Jason Heiner
But the data they're collecting is arbitrary. And it's also, they're the ones deciding what makes a quote, unquote, safe driver or not. So, like, what if I work a night shift, but what if my regular circadian rhythm is fine, but I work a night shift? And so my insurance is gonna be more expensive now just because of that?
- [96:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because you're more likely to have an accident.
- [96:24]
Jason Heiner
Why?
- [96:25]
Leo Laporte
Because you are.
- [96:27]
Jason Heiner
What if I had no history of.
- [96:29]
Leo Laporte
Accidents based on stats? Well, look, I mean, I pay. If I had life insurance, which I don't anymore because I'm too old. But that makes sense, right? I shouldn't have life insurance if I'm close to death now, you might say, well, that's no fair. You're the one who needs it. You're about to die. No, that's just how it works. Life insurance is cheaper when you're younger and healthier because you're less likely to need it. That's. That's the insurance market. That's how it works.
- [96:56]
Molly White
But there are also limits to how much information we give to health insurers. Right. Where health insurers are not sitting on our shoulders every day checking if we're getting the large fries at McDonald's.
- [97:08]
Leo Laporte
They will be soon, though, don't you?
- [97:09]
Molly White
Well, and actually, they are trying to be, especially when you look at Fitbits and those types of devices. But I would love for that not to continue in that direction. And I worry about the extent to which people are sort of, you know, the boiled frog thing, where we're now just becoming okay with that data being shipped everywhere.
- [97:28]
Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, I think this is why it's important, if you care about privacy, to resist all attempts to encroach upon your, you know, data privacy. Like, I. Whenever I go to the airport now, they want to do the face scan thing. I, every time, like, I want to opt out, do the other thing. And the TSA agent inevitably is like, well, you know, we've already got scans of your face. And I'm like, I know. It's just the principle of it.
- [97:50]
Molly White
No more, please.
- [97:51]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I would just like to reduce the amount. And it's, you know, 30 seconds.
- [97:56]
Molly White
I think, also, like, the more we allow this data to be collected and the more normalized it is like the more we have to grapple with the fact that data breaches happen all the time, and this kind of data, the more and more granular.
- [98:08]
Leo Laporte
It's not going to be kept private.
- [98:09]
Molly White
It's not going to just be your health insurance that knows exactly what you're doing and where you're going and how quickly you're breaking.
- [98:17]
Leo Laporte
What if it were done by an AI?
- [98:22]
Molly White
Well, in that case. And if we put it on the blockchain, then I would be fine with it.
- [98:25]
Leo Laporte
But what if we're done?
- [98:27]
Jason Heiner
Done by the AI Put on the blockchain.
- [98:29]
Leo Laporte
What if we're done in such a way that was guaranteed to be fair? No human was ever going to see that.
- [98:35]
Molly White
Wait, we're talking about A.I.
- [98:37]
Leo Laporte
Well, all right, baby, you really tried.
- [98:41]
Paris Martineau
There for a good few years.
- [98:42]
Leo Laporte
I believe in AI you'll have to excuse me, Molly, but I. I am.
- [98:46]
Paris Martineau
An AI he's having his AI resurgent. He was, you know, he was down in the roller coaster reality with us for the last couple of months.
- [98:55]
Leo Laporte
Don't make me wear my glasses.
- [98:57]
Paris Martineau
Okay, Leo, do you want to tell the audience when you ordered those glasses and when they were supposed to arrive?
- [99:03]
Leo Laporte
And I ordered these glasses before Cashmere Hill wrote that article more than a year ago.
- [99:07]
Paris Martineau
More than a year ago. They were supposed to arrive last April. He got them this week. And they don't work.
- [99:14]
Leo Laporte
They don't do much.
- [99:16]
Molly White
Why do.
- [99:16]
Paris Martineau
They don't do anything. And he's like, look what I got them. AI is the future. AI is the future.
- [99:24]
Molly White
They look like joke nerd glasses. Like if you wanted to be a nerd in, like, a Broadway play.
- [99:29]
Leo Laporte
You know what? They're not actually joke nerd glasses. They're just nerd glasses.
- [99:33]
Paris Martineau
Do they have your prescription in them at least?
- [99:35]
Leo Laporte
No, no, they couldn't do that. That's what took so long. They gave me a discount for some clip ons with my prescription, so I can clip that on.
- [99:46]
Paris Martineau
But I'm just in case you didn't look nerdy enough.
- [99:50]
Molly White
Do you also have sunglass clip ons that can add like, a third level?
- [99:55]
Leo Laporte
You flip them up and you flip them down? Yeah, what's wrong with that?
- [100:01]
Jason Heiner
Those are the brilliant labs ones, right?
- [100:03]
Leo Laporte
How did you know? You see, he knows.
- [100:06]
Paris Martineau
Jason, this is one of, like, five AI Hype products Leo ordered last year that hasn't arrived yet.
- [100:15]
Leo Laporte
He's gotten more, by the way, since I've talked to you. Last thing, the way you charge it is it has this orange thing that you stick on the nose.
- [100:23]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, it has a clown nose. It does, it does. This is, this is.
- [100:30]
Molly White
That's amazing. Why did they have to make it orange?
- [100:35]
Jason Heiner
The humpty hump nose?
- [100:36]
Leo Laporte
So you won't lose it.
- [100:39]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, yeah. No.
- [100:42]
Leo Laporte
AI is the future.
- [100:44]
Jason Heiner
These are the open sourced ones though. Interesting.
- [100:46]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's why I'm intrigued by it. It doesn't do anything much, but it potentially could because it's open.
- [100:52]
Paris Martineau
It doesn't do anything, but it potentially could.
- [100:56]
Molly White
I've been hearing about that, about blockchains for a long time.
- [101:00]
Jason Heiner
This thing you have to. With a command line, you can. Command line.
- [101:06]
Paris Martineau
Really what you're buying isn't doing anything right now, but eventually they're going to do something.
- [101:11]
Leo Laporte
It's a hardware platform that needs software. Right now it's just got this little prism that's pointing down at a screen underneath here. So it's heads up display. It's basically Google Glass built into the lens is all it really is. And then you know, right now in theory, if I tap it, the AI comes alive and I can ask it a question, then tap it again and I could read the answer. But it doesn't, it's. I don't know, it's not really doing.
- [101:35]
Paris Martineau
Anything, but it doesn't do that. It doesn't work do what it's supposed to do.
- [101:40]
Leo Laporte
I also bought and I showed this to Paris. The wristband that records everything but Paris. I found a better one. A friend of mine has one. I didn't buy it for the longest time because it was advertised incessantly on TikTok and I thought, well, this is not gonna be good. That Plaud P L A U D.
- [101:55]
Paris Martineau
U S. Well then did you get an ad for it on Instagram? That's not good.
- [101:58]
Leo Laporte
No, A friend of mine has it. Friend of mine has it and he showed me. Makes a mind map of your conversations and all this stuff. Stuff.
- [102:06]
Paris Martineau
This thing that Leo is talking about, the wrist thing, that is not plot. He showed it to us on this weekend. It is a little weird wrist bracelet that just records all of your conversations and then, then gives you little like butt kicking summaries of your day in conversation. Like Leo was really cerebral while watching the football game. You want me to read you fantastic, fantastic points. As he was discussing plays with his big beautiful mind.
- [102:40]
Leo Laporte
You want me to read you? I'll read you yesterday's. You can see it. You can see it right here.
- [102:45]
Jason Heiner
Let's hear it.
- [102:46]
Leo Laporte
Worry for a friend turned to hope. Finding comfort in small joys and shared moments to tell you Leo Had a day marked weekends by concern for his friend H. Who was unreachable. Despite plans to meet. Seeking solace, Leo checked the weather in Petaluma, finding it to be A Partly cloudy, 54 degrees, dropping to 42 overnight later. Wow, I didn't realize. Later, Leo offered comforting words to somebody who's somebody faces a potential diagnosis reassuring her that things would be okay. As the day progressed, Leo confirmed the absence of rain.
- [103:36]
Molly White
It's very worried about the weather.
- [103:39]
Leo Laporte
Reminisced about a past event in 9:22 and ended the night impatiently waiting to leave while someone sifted sand. Okay, the sifted sand comes from the fact that I was practicing a song all day, all night. Marianne sitting by the seashore sifting sand. So apparently it confused me singing that song with me just sitting here waiting for her to finish sifting the sand. Here's the atmosphere, yesterday's atmosphere. Leo's day had an undercurrent of worry balanced by moments of reassurance and lightheartedness. Concern for somebody's well being and somebody's son created a somber tone while casual conversations about the weather and humorous anecdotes.
- [104:27]
Paris Martineau
You love the weather.
- [104:29]
Leo Laporte
I love the weather.
- [104:30]
Molly White
I product for someone with like amnesia, like who is supposed to be. Who is. Who is the I think for I.
- [104:40]
Paris Martineau
But my conspiracy theory is this is a product for a certain class of tech bro CEO that is doing so many drugs that he can't remember what has happened and he wants to look back and be like, wow, you know, I had some moments of somber reflection about the rain.
- [105:00]
Leo Laporte
I just don't understand.
- [105:01]
Molly White
Like, weren't you.
- [105:02]
Paris Martineau
It's written like a LinkedIn post conversations.
- [105:06]
Leo Laporte
Yes, but I remember them now. But I might not tomorrow or the next week or next year. This is a. It's basically keeping a journal for me now. More importantly, it also keeps track of agreements that I have made. Here we go. Here's number one on my to do list. Ensure the feather pillow with three layers ordered by Lisa arrives and is satisfactory. That's. That's on my to do list.
- [105:33]
Jason Heiner
That's. I mean, look, this is, this is the reason that we were putting all the world's best engineers to work on AI and we're using up all the cycles.
- [105:41]
Leo Laporte
That's why we're burning the.
- [105:42]
Paris Martineau
This is the reason why we were like F you to all of our climate pledges. We're just gonna, you know, know, set the earth aflame because Leo's got to remember some of this is good.
- [105:51]
Leo Laporte
Explore using Instagram as an alternative to TikTok. Especially considering.
- [105:55]
Paris Martineau
Do you need a reminder for that?
- [105:58]
Molly White
I feel like there's a huge upsell opportunity where they could provide access for other people to add things to the list of things.
- [106:05]
Leo Laporte
Maybe. And by the way, a visit to Walmart would not be out of line.
- [106:10]
Molly White
Yeah, exactly.
- [106:11]
Leo Laporte
I don't know what this is. It says, stare at the new fake toys for cats and see if they capture their interest.
- [106:17]
Molly White
Did a cat write this?
- [106:21]
Paris Martineau
I do think your cat. Your cat has gotten in there.
- [106:25]
Molly White
Your cat has hacked the system.
- [106:28]
Jason Heiner
This is like an inside joke of the AIs because, so, you know, the. A. Most of the Experts say that AI is about as intelligent. Today's AIs are about as intelligent as the average house cat. And so, you know, that's the. The house cats, you know, getting their. Their revenge.
- [106:42]
Leo Laporte
I think they're a little bit better than that.
- [106:45]
Molly White
I've met some very smart cats.
- [106:48]
Jason Heiner
Exactly.
- [106:49]
Molly White
I've also met some cats, though, so I suspect the average is actually the same thing.
- [106:53]
Jason Heiner
I was gonna say I've got some cats that are way smarter than some of the AIs that I've interacted with in the past few months.
- [106:59]
Molly White
I do think there are like 10 cats just dragging that average down.
- [107:03]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, like the whole orange cat population. One brain that shares one singular brain cell among all of them. That's. That's dragging the average down. It's a spider's George situation.
- [107:15]
Molly White
You know, the Calicos have the high end for sure.
- [107:19]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [107:20]
Leo Laporte
So that. That was. I found that. That was at ces. The bee thing. There's another one I ordered as well. This is the. This is a article from Wired by Julian Chocatu. Your next AI Wearable will listen to everything all the time. So there's the bee, which I got, but I also ordered this. This is the Omi. And it. You glue it to your temple.
- [107:46]
Molly White
What?
- [107:47]
Leo Laporte
It's a little pearlescent thing you glue to your temple every day. Every day, forever, always.
- [107:56]
Molly White
I feel like you'll get a rash.
- [108:00]
Leo Laporte
By the way. Way. Was it you, Paris, who pointed out that the women in this picture who are looking at the guy with the pearl in his Tempo are.
- [108:07]
Molly White
Are laughing?
- [108:08]
Paris Martineau
I did not.
- [108:09]
Molly White
No.
- [108:09]
Paris Martineau
It looks almost either like they're making fun of him or they're like, wow, who's that?
- [108:13]
Leo Laporte
He's so cute.
- [108:14]
Paris Martineau
Something on his temple.
- [108:15]
Leo Laporte
They can't see his temple. That's why as soon as he turns his head, they're going to rear back.
- [108:19]
Paris Martineau
If I saw someone with that out in the world, I would stare clear I would be like, something's gone wrong.
- [108:26]
Leo Laporte
I think. I would think it was like a.
- [108:28]
Molly White
New medical device of some kind. Like, it looks almost like a very fancy like cochlear. Cochlear implant.
- [108:35]
Leo Laporte
Well, okay, you're not far off. Because the creator, Nikita Shevchenko, says that the OMI is trained to recognize specific brain waves when you focus on speaking to it. So instead of having to say a hot word, you just think omi. And it will. It will respond.
- [108:57]
Molly White
Wait, so you don't speak?
- [108:59]
Leo Laporte
No, you don't need to. You just think it. Wow.
- [109:02]
Paris Martineau
I think you have to speak to it, but I think to wake it, you just have to think, oh, me?
- [109:07]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [109:08]
Paris Martineau
And I do not believe that that works.
- [109:10]
Leo Laporte
Well, we're gonna find out when it comes. But I did order claude, which has been around for a while. It ties into either ChatGPT4O or to Anthropic's Claude3.5 Sonic It. Both of which are. I have to say, I know you laugh and you mock, but these are actually very good.
- [109:30]
Molly White
In fact, better than ChatGPT.
- [109:31]
Paris Martineau
No, I would say they're good. I just can't get over the fact that it's called plod. Yeah, it just feels awful coming out of your mouth.
- [109:40]
Leo Laporte
It's coming from China. So. By the way, some of the flawed.
- [109:46]
Jason Heiner
From Pyongyang, the AI is as smart as the average house cat. Was not just an average, you know. You know, person saying this was John Lecun, the head of meta's AI research. Right.
- [109:59]
Leo Laporte
A good thing that said that.
- [110:01]
Jason Heiner
He said it is dumber than the average. I was. I actually overestimated. He said it's. It's not as smart as the average house cat. So.
- [110:10]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, so he's team Cat.
- [110:12]
Jason Heiner
He's team Cat on this one. And he's the head of AI for. You know, for Meta.
- [110:17]
Leo Laporte
You know, he knows he's quite respected. In fact, I have a lot of respect. Respect for him.
- [110:21]
Jason Heiner
Same, I think. You know. And he's also not an over hyper, so I appreciate. Clearly appreciate that. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if he included the orange tabbies in that, but I'm assuming that it's implied, you know.
- [110:35]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [110:37]
Molly White
I feel like your strategy with all of these devices is just to DDoS, the data collection agencies with so much information. Information.
- [110:47]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's a one way fuzzing it. Yeah.
- [110:50]
Jason Heiner
He can't even if he's a good.
- [110:51]
Leo Laporte
Driver or a bad.
- [110:53]
Jason Heiner
Exactly. He can't create a.
- [110:57]
Paris Martineau
Video is also being recorded basically 247 at this point. So it doesn't even matter anyways. No more.
- [111:03]
Leo Laporte
That's my point. I don't have any privacy. So this is. I'm the one who should try this stuff out.
- [111:08]
Jason Heiner
And LLM could just go through all of your shows and create a, an asshole insurance profile on you that is almost going to be perfect. Right. Of what you can do. All right, here's one of the AI.
- [111:20]
Paris Martineau
I was about to say. Gizmo, are you smarter than the average AI?
- [111:24]
Molly White
Gizmo has already added a catnip toy to your shopping list.
- [111:29]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's already in route. She just hit, you know, buy.
- [111:34]
Leo Laporte
How close are we to your company hiring an AI to replace you as a PhD level programmer? Maybe closer than you think. We're taking a little break with. No. Jason says no, that's not going to happen.
- [111:47]
Molly White
House cat level program.
- [111:50]
Leo Laporte
Would you let your house cat write your code? I don't know. We're going to take a little break. When we come back, we'll have more. You're watching this week in Tech, Molly Wood, Jason Heiner, Paris Martineau and Gizmo the Wonder Cat. It's great to have all four of you. You. Our show today, brought to you by netsuite. We. You know, this is, this is why you listen to this show. You want to know what's ahead. What does the future hold? What does the future hold for business? Problem is, you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Rates will rise or fall. Inflation's going up or maybe it's going down. Could someone please invent a crystal ball? Or maybe just a little pearl I can wear on my temple? Example. Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one Cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into a single fluid platform. That's awesome. With one unified business management suite, there's a single source of truth, right? Giving you the visibility and control you need to make. Make quick decisions. It's much clearer with real time insights and forecasting. You're peering into the future with actionable data. And when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time on what's next. This is what you really need. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest opportunities. I wish I needed an ERP solution because this is the one I'd use right now. There is something you might want to download a Lot smarter than a cat. The CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. That's. It's available free. They have actually a lot of free white papers there. Netsuite.com TWIT but if you're interested in what this means to your business, this is a great place to start. Netsuite.com Twitter it's free. Along with a lot of wonderful other free stuff at NetSuite. N e t s u I t e netsuite.com twit we thank him so much for supporting behind the curtain. Coming soon. PhD level super agents. This is Axios. Mike Allen and Jim vanderhei. It's an opinion piece. So yeah, it's not exactly a news piece, but there's some interesting stuff in here. There's some juice. Sam Altman has scheduled a closed door briefing for US government officials at the end of the month.
- [114:27]
Jason Heiner
The overhyper in chief, by the way.
- [114:29]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Shh. I want to tell you a secret. There is a lot of chatter about AI replacing mid level software engineers sometime soon, maybe even this year. And so Axios is speculating that maybe what Sam Altman wants to tell Congress about is I guess 401 or 402. What, what's the, what's the next one?
- [115:00]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, whatever the next one is. I mean, look, he's been saying, I mean, what was it he was saying recently? It was going to be, it was like hundreds of days until, you know, reach super intelligence. And he's the one that's been overhyping this thing from, you know, the beginning. And that's not to say that alarms are not an important breakthrough that are going to do some really interesting things, because they are, there's no doubt about that. But you know, Sam Altman, you know, also is, is grinding an ax with this too, right? He, he is, you know, moving his. At first he was at open eyes open and I open AI saying no, you know, I don't, I don't, I'm, I'm rich enough, I don't need to make any more money. You know, there's no, there's no reason for me, I'm in this for the, for the good, good of humanity. And now they've sort of changed the whole, all of the bylaws and that are in the process of, so that they can, you know, and he's raised.
- [115:59]
Leo Laporte
More money than any company in history of money raising.
- [116:03]
Jason Heiner
So yeah, I think, you know, him hyping this, it's just tough to really believe that it's not about the Race, right. That's not about winning and OpenAI, you know, gaining as much sort of power and influence as they possibly can. I don't believe that they have anything even close to a PhD. I don't think they have anything close to a house cat, you know, necessarily yet either. So I think, but with. I think we have to. It's not that OpenAI isn't doing important work and there's people there that are, but I think, you know, Sam Altman, I think we really have to, to, to question, you know, his motives. I think it's good for us to question his motives and also good for us to, to really not buy into the hype that he peddles about where OpenAI is and what it does. And the last thing I'll say about the programmer piece, I don't know about anybody else, but I know in every company I've ever worked for, you know, we can't get the programmers to get enough done fast enough for us to get all the work done we'd like them to do. So I think it's the much more likely scenario because I think this does replace some types of coding the LLMs can, but in fact, what it's likely to do is make them much more efficient, to make them have them to do less, a lot more of the sort of really boring, repetitive tasks encoding so that they become a lot more, a lot more productive and potentially get, you know, projects done faster. I think we are seeing some of that already. And so I, I actually am more bullish on it being helpful to, to programmers and not so much, you know, putting programmers that are jobs. Because it can't do it by itself, right? It can't code things by itself. It still needs to be shepherded by somebody who actually knows what they're trying to build and what they're doing. This has been sort of been said for, for decades that, you know, coders are soon going to be out of business. There was the sort of no code, low code, which is, which is a good thing. There's lots of good things that have come out of that as well. But I think that some of this is some high hype. Not for, you know, they say those things about coders that aren't true, I think because they're trying to hype up the value of what these AIs can create, which is still. There's a lot to be shown in terms of their ability to replace work that people are doing. I think that part's just not close.
- [118:37]
Leo Laporte
I do think there's some evidence that AI is scaling very rapidly. Smarter and smarter. At the start of the year last year, AI models scored 5% on the Ark AGI benchmark. September 32%. OpenAI's 03 claims and they haven't shown it yet, but they claim that it's at 88% on this AGI benchmark.
- [119:05]
Molly White
With a grain of salt though, that that could continue on sort of a linear trajectory because it's a lot better.
- [119:10]
Leo Laporte
88%. 88.
- [119:11]
Molly White
No, no, no. I know, but there's also been all these reports about how they're basically running out of data. And you know, there is, we are running out of things on which to train these AI models. And so the idea that there is just sort of this infinite improvement based on, you know, the quality of the training data at least is, is certainly not the case.
- [119:33]
Jason Heiner
And they're now they're making synthetic data, right, to help train the models, which is also a really Weir.
- [119:40]
Leo Laporte
I think this stuff is changing so fast that some of those things that we've heard and believe to be true are turning out to be not as much of a problem as we thought. For instance, there's a strong case to be made that we have enough information that we don't need a whole lot of new information. We just need maybe better LLMs or different models. Besides LLMs or more computation capability, there seems to be some real scaling happening. OpenAI's O3 is scoring 25% on a very difficult math benchmark. Expert crafted math problems designed to evaluate advanced reasoning in AI systems. Gemini and Chat GPT4 solved 2%. OpenAI's O3 is 25%.
- [120:30]
Molly White
Based on whose evaluation this is?
- [120:32]
Leo Laporte
This is a new Frontier math benchmark. It's called Frontier.
- [120:36]
Molly White
Right, but is it. Is the. Is it a third party evaluation or is that the. It is.
- [120:40]
Leo Laporte
But you're right to be a little skeptical because OpenAI has announced those scores, but they haven't released the actual information yet.
- [120:50]
Molly White
I think it's also like how much of a test do they have access to? How much of it's in the training data?
- [120:55]
Paris Martineau
Like, it's worth noting that this narrative that I feel like the AI hype cycle is promoting, which is that like every update we're seeing is exponentially better than the last and it's going to only continue that way. That narrative hasn't really been borne out so far like already in just a couple months ago, my colleagues the information reported that like OpenAI had found that the rate of improvement has like slown has gotten A lot slower for whatever current GPT they're working on. Orion versus the jumps they'd seen in previous models. And in part that's because of the data issue. But I think it's worth taking stuff like this into consideration when what we've been sold as kind of a collective is that everything about this is just going to get better and better. It's completely inevitable. So everybody should give us all of their money now because the victory in this field is just a foregone conclusion at this point.
- [121:51]
Leo Laporte
And by the way, Molly, you're right, because there is a blog post that claims OpenAI funded frontier math and had access ahead of time to the problem set. So until we, I mean this is. Until we really see, you know, this has to be done kind of in the open, instead of an announcement from.
- [122:10]
Jason Heiner
Open AI, there's an AI hype crash that's coming for sure. You know, it could be or maybe not.
- [122:17]
Leo Laporte
Isn't it possible that there. We may also be blown away? You don't think that that's possible?
- [122:21]
Jason Heiner
I think both things can be true. Like, I think that there's a hype crash coming because it's like, you know, you ask most people, even people I ask in the tech industry, what are the things you use every day that. That from the AI revolution. And a lot of them struggle to give me. They're like, at the end of, they're like, well, I've used Chat GPT to help write a cover letter. You know, they, they struggle. I'm like, well, you know, you.
- [122:46]
Leo Laporte
I've talked to a lot of coders, including our own guys, Paul Thurat and Steve Gibson, who have used it to write code. Well, Jason Snell on Mac Break Weekly says it writes perfect Apple script. He's been using, I can't remember which one, I think Sonnet to write his Apple scripts.
- [123:02]
Jason Heiner
One of the examples that does work well, like it saves people time from writing code sometimes.
- [123:09]
Molly White
I also had to untangle some of its disasters.
- [123:12]
Jason Heiner
Yes, for sure. It still needs human oversight.
- [123:15]
Leo Laporte
Do you have an AI is going just great site yet?
- [123:18]
Molly White
I do not. No, I don't.
- [123:20]
Paris Martineau
You ask her this every time she's on the show, Leo. And she said, no, I'm not opening.
- [123:25]
Molly White
That can of worms.
- [123:27]
Leo Laporte
But you did open, you did open the code for the site so somebody could make that site. I hope somebody.
- [123:33]
Molly White
It is open source. Yeah, by all means.
- [123:35]
Jason Heiner
So.
- [123:36]
Molly White
And use AI to do it and.
- [123:37]
Jason Heiner
Use AI to build it for sure. You know, so the thing is like that where AI works really well, and LLMs are starting to, to, to change this a little bit, but it's still the case case that where there is a very concrete set of data and a very clear set of parameters. AI is better than human, right? So, so some of the coding it can, it can do faster than a human because it has a very defined set of parameters. And so it is mostly computational, right? So it's still very good at those things. Where it's not good is where and where it falls down. Down is where it needs context and it has to fill in gaps where.
- [124:19]
Leo Laporte
There doesn't even understand context. Right. It doesn't know any of that. It's not, that's not how it works.
- [124:24]
Jason Heiner
That's why there's another story in there about, you know, they've been trying to get it to do history, you know, to answer history questions and it's not.
- [124:33]
Leo Laporte
So good at that.
- [124:34]
Jason Heiner
It's about 46 on average, which is really about the same as anybody just guessing, you know, it is not good, good at those things. Anything that, that demands, you know, those sort of higher levels of understanding. And so I think those are the things that there are promises in the AI ecosystem today that, you know, it's, it's reach, you know, or its reach exceeds its grasp, right? It can't, it can't and it won't quite get there. So I think that, that's why I say that there is a, there's a AI hype crash coming and yet there are also still amazing things that LLMs can do and that are going to continue to, to drive advances. But like any of these hype cycles, right, there's, there's going to be all of the people that are going to, that are, that are just in it for the quick buck, right, are going to flee and the people who really understand it and really are sort of true believers will stick around. But you know, it could be this year, it could be next year, it could be next month. But, but I do think there's a crash coming.
- [125:35]
Leo Laporte
Mean Alex Lindsay, who is one of the hosts of Mac Break Weekly, also is in our IRC or actually in our discord right now, says he uses Sonnet and ChatGPT to write and compile Swift and Xcode. That's something that was recently added to Apple's Xcode. He uses it to create fully functioning apps. Not smooth enough to release, but usable for me. And I have seen startup founders say, yeah, we're starting to use AI to write our MVPs because it's fast, quick to market. And we can do that, you know, without hiring somebody to do it.
- [126:12]
Molly White
One thing I think that is kind of remarkable about the Axios piece that you linked is the example that they give is imagine telling your agent, build me new payment software. The agent could design, test and deliver a functioning product. Product. And like that example is about not do that. Some of the most high risk, highly regulated, like portions of software. That's like saying like fly an airplane for me. You know, like they're using like one of the riskiest examples in that article. Whereas like most software engineers will say, like, if you were to use AI, like it can do boilerplate, well, it can maybe do a prototype, but I would not just like ship it out the door. And certainly not with payments involved.
- [126:57]
Leo Laporte
Well, I think that underscores what, what we're talking about here really underscores that AI is appropriate for some uses, not all. Maybe don't use it as a historian or to write your cash app, but there are certainly uses for it. And I think maybe we've also gotten a little kind of taking it for granted. We're getting a little jaundiced here. You know, this is pretty amazing. What it's able to do right now is remarkable with not something I would have predicted three years ago.
- [127:25]
Paris Martineau
I, I understand that like feeling and that impetus to kind of be defensive around it, but I also don't think that, I think that AI is getting its laurels. You know, nobody, nobody, I would say could correctly argue that AI isn't being appropriately hyped or hyped enough. It has gotten way more hyped then I'd say it deserves, given the current reality of the product. I mean, I totally agree as someone who I'd say is a bit of a skeptic in this field, like, yeah, AI is. And the AI tools and chatbots we have access to currently are incredibly useful in certain limited capacities and for specific tasks like what you're just talking about. I, when you mentioned that coding thing, I realized like, oh, I've been trying to figure out how to get an animated cursor on my site and doing a thing. Why don't I ask ChatGPT? It, you know, gave me some answers that I'll look into later that could be, you know, quite useful. But I don't think that that means that we should extend the entire AI industry enough grace to allow them to do whatever they want and procure as much money they want as they want without any scrutiny. I think that because this is the biggest industry right now and receiving an outsized amount of attention and frankly money from investors. It is, it deserves scrutiny.
- [128:51]
Molly White
And I also think there's like reasonable questions to be asked about, you know, is a tool that can like generate code to help you animate your cursor. Like, does that justify the cost in terms of the, you know, energy end of things, the environmental end of things? Totally agree. You know, does the, the end justify the means? Is a worthwhile question as well.
- [129:13]
Paris Martineau
For instance, I just asked Chat DBT that and frankly, all of the answers it gave me I'd already seen from searching through Reddit and like stack overflow and stuff like that or other things like that. It was nothing new, but yet how much environmental damage did I do? Probably shouldn't think about that, but also we probably should.
- [129:33]
Molly White
Well, it's okay now because your Google searches also use a lot of.
- [129:38]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, everything is bad of the good place.
- [129:41]
Molly White
They've incorporated AI into Google so now everything is wasting that much electricity.
- [129:46]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, we write about AI every day on ZDNet. It's our most popular topic. It has been since almost the month that Chat GPT was was released. So. And we write about the good things, we write about the bad things. We ask the questions, we talk about, you know, where the rubber hits the road, the way companies are using it, the way individuals are using it. So there's a lot happening, I do think, and I think it is fair to question some of the overhype and that's why I, I really think that the, the rubber doesn't meet the road where some of the hype is around it. And I think that that's why there's, there's a lot of money, there's a lot of energy, there's a lot being poured into it that I think is, it's gotten over its skis. And so that's, and that's because, you know, we read stories about it every day. We read the problems people are having with it, we read the things that are going great, the things that are amazing as not going anywhere. It's not going to disappear, but kind of like the dot com bust, right when the dot com bust happened, then a lot of the real work got done afterwards when the people hung around and really invested in it. And it wasn't just sort of a hype cycle, but that's how hype cycles go, right? There's the, there's sort of the hype cycle goes way up. Then there's sort of the trough of disillusionment and then there's the like, you know, real work getting done from there. And we have to expect any hype cycle that's as high as what this one is right now. Like it's going to have. It's going to hit a bumpy moment, you know, inevitably.
- [131:17]
Molly White
I would point out that after the 2022 crash in crypto, now we have Trump meme coins. So.
- [131:24]
Jason Heiner
Yes.
- [131:25]
Paris Martineau
Something I hadn't thought about is when comparing this to the dot com bubble, at least the dot com bubble, we got like a wacky little sock puppet guy to kind of associate with it. We need to have a weird little mascot for some of the AI companies.
- [131:38]
Jason Heiner
Sock puppet. Yeah.
- [131:39]
Leo Laporte
We actually got more than that. We got dark fibers underneath most of the continent, in fact, much of the world. And this is one of the things that does happen with those boom bus cycles. The same thing happened with the transcontinental railway. Those railroads went bankrupt, but we had railways as a result. We got into infrastructure as a result.
- [131:57]
Jason Heiner
And data centers. We're going to get a bunch of data centers.
- [132:00]
Leo Laporte
We're going to have a lot of data centers. We're going to have nuclear power.
- [132:03]
Paris Martineau
A lot of data centers in places like Arizona that are already totally running out of water. But the data centers get the water contracts on the right side.
- [132:11]
Molly White
They are converting some of the bitcoin mining rigs into. So that's like. Oh, hey, that's something.
- [132:17]
Leo Laporte
I'm trying to find a graph I saw and I don't remember where I saw it.
- [132:20]
Paris Martineau
The crypto blockchain.
- [132:23]
Leo Laporte
Blockchain. Yeah, I'm trying to find the graph. I can't, but I saw a graph that actually showed in perspective to a lot of the other energy uses. And actually AI is not the question to a chatgpt is not as bad as it. The truth is we use energy for everything. Google searches, everything. We're going crazy. Credit card purchases. We are using a ton of energy. Yeah, podcast.
- [132:52]
Paris Martineau
Yes, I agree. We use electricity and energy for everything. But it is notable the amount of energy that these AI tools use in the fact that AI is now being woven into absolutely everything with no. In many cases, there's no way to say no. I don't want AI to be suddenly part of this other thing that I use every single day and thus amplifying the environmental impacts of my actions. It's just all getting a bit worse.
- [133:21]
Molly White
And I also think that it is notable that it was AI that caused so many of these companies to completely go back on any environmental commitments. That was not something that the credit card Transactions required of them, apparently.
- [133:36]
Leo Laporte
Right. Here's the Wall Street Journal article. Thank you, Jason, for putting that in. Yann Lacun thinks AI is dumber than a cat. I gotta point out that was October. Things have changed. Okay?
- [133:47]
Jason Heiner
We've come a long way.
- [133:48]
Leo Laporte
We've come a long way. That was months ago. It is the case. And I think that that's something that Steve Gibson pointed out on security now that this is moving faster than anything we've ever seen before. And anything that you think is true today may well not be true tomorrow. And I think it's open. It's important to keep an open mind to what is happening while at the same time acknowledging, yeah, we're in a hype cycle. That's for sure. True. That's. That's not the case. But I think that there's something going. There's something happening here. I don't know.
- [134:20]
Jason Heiner
Both things can be true, right? Like we have an overhyped cycle and we have interesting and powerful things happening. Right?
- [134:26]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. All right, let's take a little break. You're watching this week in tech and I'm sure something else happened, but we'll find it when we come back. Actually, there was ces. Did you go to ces, Jeff?
- [134:39]
Jason Heiner
Jason, I had a injury the week before you sent people. I did. I sent. Focus on my team.
- [134:48]
Leo Laporte
All right, well, if there's anything besides the AI wristlet and the. And the temple pearl, you let me know.
- [134:55]
Jason Heiner
There are a couple things.
- [134:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Although I'm looking forward to coming on twig. We're renaming Twig Intelligent Machines, by the way, next month because we want to cover this more. And I'm looking forward to coming on as the boy with the pearl temple piece. You know, I think that'll be. That'll be my trademark. I'll be like a board.
- [135:12]
Paris Martineau
That'll go over really well with me and Jeff and will not result in any ridicule.
- [135:17]
Leo Laporte
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- [140:09]
Jason Heiner
I mean, yes, probably. Like the, the, the. It's got the new chip from Qualcomm that they announced, you know, last fall. I, I mean, you know, they're going to talk AI. Speaking of AI, they're going to talk a lot about AI.
- [140:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [140:25]
Jason Heiner
You know, Samsung's not a software company. It's never gone really well for them. From a, from a software standpoint, there is Bixby.
- [140:32]
Leo Laporte
Just say the words Bixby, Bixby. Every time I have a Bixby button on my TV remote and I own always, it makes me so mad when I hit it by accident.
- [140:42]
Jason Heiner
There used to be a Bixby button on the phone too. Yeah. Yeah. So the most interesting thing is, will there be a tease from this event? Remember, if you remember last year they teased that the ring was coming. They didn't really show it. Right. So there's the ring out.
- [141:02]
Leo Laporte
The ring is out now, right?
- [141:03]
Jason Heiner
The ring is out, out. Okay. Yeah. And it's not bad. I mean the most interesting thing is that they were the first of the big tech companies to really release a smart ring.
- [141:13]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [141:13]
Jason Heiner
This has been mostly been done by kind of smaller companies, mostly startups led by Aura, of course. So the most interesting thing is will Samsung tease something? And there's kind of four possibilities of what they could tease one and this would be very Samsung, you know, Apple of course is, is rumored to be releasing a slim, the iPhone slim this year. And so it would be by the.
- [141:40]
Leo Laporte
Way, Slim is 2 millimeters thinner. It's not, that's not really noticeable.
- [141:46]
Jason Heiner
That's sort of as much as the phone two years ago. I think it was because they've been getting thicker. Right. So. Right. Anyway, so Apple is rumored to be doing a slim version of the iPhone this year. So it would be just like Samsung to tease, sort of. Oh, and we're also going to do a Galaxy S25 slim, you know, potentially this year. We'll see. That wouldn't be that interesting to be honest. There's the Galaxy Ring 2, maybe they tease that again. Wouldn't be super interesting. But now it starts to get more interesting. They, they announced this XR headset. Not great timing, right? XR headsets are not having the moment that they were a year ago for sure. So. But they did announce Project Mohan and you know, maybe they tell us more about when that's coming.
- [142:34]
Leo Laporte
Would they use their own software? Would they license Meta's software?
- [142:39]
Jason Heiner
Would it be Android, Android xr, which would be what?
- [142:43]
Leo Laporte
They actually even Meta is using Android now, aren't they?
- [142:45]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, well they've always, theirs has always been based on a version of Android, a proprietary version version, a basically modded version of Android. So the most interesting thing of the scenarios if they were to tease something would be their competitor to ray ban the Ray ban Meta smart glasses. The crazy thing is these glasses, they mostly are just audio, but they were probably one of the hottest selling products last year in terms of stuff that was sold out out. And so now we know because last fall the Qualcomm CEO teased that that Qualcomm, Metta and Google were working on a pair of smart glasses. So this has already been teased that it's out there and it's coming and I think that people are much more interested in smart glasses. Than they are in VR headsets. For sure.
- [143:44]
Leo Laporte
I think you're right. Yeah.
- [143:45]
Jason Heiner
And you know, the interesting thing, we did a little bit of reporting on this and what we found last year when these things were, when the Ray fan metas were sold out so much, you know, we went into some of the, like sunglass huts and lens crafters where they sell these things. And the interesting thing was a lot of times they had these kiosks in there, right? And a lot of times when these tech companies put these kiosks in places like this, the people on the show floor, the, on the floor like selling them, they know nothing about them, right? They. Or if they tell you information about them, it's often wrong or so this was interesting. The, the people that we talked to, they knew these products very well and they're like, oh, yeah, we don't have one of those you can look at. But the guy down at the, at the, that sells the jewelry at the jewelry store, go down there, he has a pair and he loves them and he'll tell you about them. And by the way, like, yeah, I bought a pair for my girlfriend and she loves them. She wears them to the beach and we take photos when we go on vacations. And so it was really interesting. We found that the, the sort of average, the interest from that sort of average person on these was pretty high. And that was when most of them were sold out in the first quarter last year. And then of course, since then they've been selling much better. So, you know, they don't do a lot, but even having a little bit of a camera, this is like a camera that's only as good as like the iPhone 12 or 13. But, but that's, but that's fine, right? For most people being able to, to, to use your glass, your sunglasses to take a photo instead of. Yeah, there you go, you got them. Is it means you don't have to take your, your camera out of your pocket on vacation. People like that. They also are good for like, listening to podcasts and listening to, you know, audiobooks and things like that, taking a phone call. So people seem to like this far more and are showing far more interest in this than they are in any VR headsets.
- [145:36]
Paris Martineau
I'm interested in what you've, I guess, heard from people just generally about their reasons for liking the meta glasses. I mean, I know this is, this is totally anecdotal.
- [145:43]
Jason Heiner
Yes.
- [145:44]
Paris Martineau
Everyone I've talked to who's a big meta, like Ray Ban glasses fan, I've asked them about what they use it for. And they don't use any of the AR features. It is always. They're like, I like being able to listen to or podcasts without having it in my ear here. That's every single time. I know, but I think it's interesting that they're popular. Like, maybe this is just a one off of all the people I talk to, but if that is a larger trend, I think it's interesting that their popularity is being seen as a sign that AR products are something that folks want when it could just be people want headphones options that aren't. No little pods in your ear.
- [146:23]
Molly White
Don't they make like bone conducting headphones though, like, too?
- [146:26]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, we had an advertiser that made I don't know.
- [146:28]
Paris Martineau
And I've asked people.
- [146:30]
Jason Heiner
Better than the bones.
- [146:30]
Paris Martineau
They're better.
- [146:31]
Molly White
Are they? I never use them, so I don't know.
- [146:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And you can say, hey, Meta, what am I looking at right now?
- [146:39]
Paris Martineau
How often do you do that?
- [146:40]
Leo Laporte
Never. I just got these out. I wasn't even sure if they were charged.
- [146:44]
Jason Heiner
Like when I tried your glasses though, Leo, it was really the audio quality.
- [146:47]
Leo Laporte
The audio is amazing.
- [146:48]
Jason Heiner
That's the thing that really surprised me, that it sounded good. So I think that's enough. That's really enough to sell those things.
- [146:53]
Leo Laporte
Whether it's research glasses or the brilliant labs glasses or the wrist or the. Even the temple piece, people are intrigued by what's going to be next and they just want a little taste of it. They know this isn't going to, this isn't going to change their lives. In fact, it's good that they got some use out of it. It's. It's a decent headphones. But honestly, I think people want to, want to be part of the. They want to kind of see into the future, don't they?
- [147:19]
Jason Heiner
What's next?
- [147:20]
Leo Laporte
Or is that just me?
- [147:21]
Jason Heiner
So I think so. One, one. The research that we had is very similar to what you said, Paris. Like, mostly they use them to take phone calls and listen to podcasts and not have to have, you know, things in their ears. The one asterisk to that was a few people who work in, in jobs where like their hands might be full, right? And they. Or so like somebody IT professionals working in a server room and they're like, you know, they're trying to remember, oh, what was that? What's the name of this product versus that one? And they'll do the sort of, hey, Meta thing or even just, you know, you can hold down the button to, to do it and ask the question and they'll ask the question, you know, when they've got other stuff in their hands and you know, essentially doing like a Google search from their. Their glasses, you know, audibly without having to pull out their phone. So people did like doing. Just being able to do some searches. It doesn't always work. It was like maybe, maybe people have said 50% of the time it works but. But they like the idea that there are some cases where they can do it hands free if they're working with their hands on something. So that's the only thing we found that people were using it for a lot. But these things credit and I don't really trust Metta, I'll be honest. Like with much data but, but to their credit they have actually added features throughout the year. There really wasn't a lot you could do with them before. Right. Except essentially do that, that audio search. But they now do have that thing of like what's this the name of this monument or painting that I'm looking at or things like that. Yeah, you know, searches, some visual searches, Google Lens kind of searches and some other things like some where you can make a note essentially and those sort of deals. But I think they are still very early in this. But I, but I think the usability of it does seem to be attracting people a little bit more.
- [149:15]
Leo Laporte
We're going to get there. I don't think Samsung's got anything any different than what matters doing and I think people probably buy matters just because it's matter. Right.
- [149:24]
Jason Heiner
Well they are working with Google though, so. Right. So. So I think you know that this is supposedly a partnership. What the Qualcomm CEO talked about in September was that Meta, Google and Qualcomm, sorry Samsung Meta, Samsung, Google and Qualcomm, sorry, not Meta were working on this project. That's not so Project Mohan is the, is the XR headset.
- [149:51]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's the a. Okay.
- [149:52]
Jason Heiner
That's right. This is something different.
- [149:54]
Leo Laporte
This is something else.
- [149:55]
Molly White
And this Samsung have the, the brand name glasses too. Like how Meta went with Ray Ban.
- [150:01]
Jason Heiner
Or their just like I know we don't.
- [150:03]
Leo Laporte
We don't look like Ray Bans.
- [150:05]
Molly White
Found another one yet.
- [150:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you found something we want to know.
- [150:09]
Jason Heiner
That picture is. Is. Is of Meta Ray Bans. That's right. What the Samsung, you know, okay. Who knows.
- [150:15]
Molly White
But then again I thought that they managed to get a partnership with Ray Ban too and the Ray Ban was just like playing the field.
- [150:22]
Jason Heiner
No, that said like there's plenty of other glasses providers they could, you know, they could partner with.
- [150:29]
Paris Martineau
Well, I mean Ray Ban is part of luxottica, which is like every glasses.
- [150:32]
Jason Heiner
All the brands. All the brands. It's true.
- [150:36]
Leo Laporte
Okay, well I'll be back Wednesday maybe at 10am, maybe at 11. I don't know yet.
- [150:41]
Jason Heiner
They might have glasses. That's true. With the new glasses. They might wait for Mobile World Congress to reach to do that. That's probably the only, you know, maybe asterisks there.
- [150:52]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think you should find a way to wear all the glasses at once and compare them them live simultaneously.
- [151:00]
Leo Laporte
Well, I do want. I think I will do all the wristbands at once and the temple p just like all I really do. I know it's crazy and I know it's a huge invasion of privacy and everything, but I think there's something there to listening to everything I do throughout the day and giving me summaries, action items. I feel like that's useful. And I mean how else would I.
- [151:22]
Paris Martineau
Know know that you have strong opinions about bleach in laundry if not for. That's something they went over on and I do.
- [151:31]
Leo Laporte
I do. It does make some hysterical mistakes. In fact, Apple is now finally admitting that, yeah, maybe the AI summaries. The Apple and AI summaries.
- [151:40]
Paris Martineau
Summaries are so bad they're wrong.
- [151:42]
Jason Heiner
Like, I think they're funny.
- [151:45]
Paris Martineau
Okay, they're funny, but they're just bad. They're at what they're supposed to be doing something. I've realized where they are true because I've turned them off on almost all the apps but still have a few on in the hopes that they're okay or just as a data gathering thing. And for instance, when it comes to summarizing notifications from Twitter or Blue sky, it's just wrong every time. It will say Leo commented on your post. Leo did not. Leo didn't even like my post. Where is that coming from? I don't know, but it's wrong every time. And I'm just like, how are you so bad at the thing you're supposed to do? Like, you just have three data points. Points. How are you struggling to summarize those into one sentence?
- [152:27]
Leo Laporte
Well, Apple has announced that they're going to a. They're going to. They're not going to. They're going to turn off the, I think the news summaries, but they're also going to italicize them. That's the fix, by the way. So they're now going to be italicized so you'll know that It. I don't know what you'll know. It's italicized. Yeah.
- [152:45]
Molly White
Didn't they get into some hot water?
- [152:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, BBC is pissed.
- [152:49]
Molly White
Yeah, exactly. They attributed some stuff to the news outlets that was just absolutely wrong.
- [152:56]
Leo Laporte
So the AI summaries and by the way, this is from a beta of iOS. It's not. Apple hasn't announced anything but if you babybc did a little victory lap. Apple suspends error strewn AI generated news alerts. But we don't know know what's going to really happen. This is just in a one example.
- [153:18]
Paris Martineau
Of how it's getting this wrong. Right now I have an AI summary for New York Times notifications that say says Trump promised to repeal executive actions. Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners. The first point of that. Completely wrong. The thing it's trying to summon says Donald Trump promised to sign executive orders.
- [153:36]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [153:36]
Paris Martineau
Not repeal them.
- [153:37]
Leo Laporte
Completely wrong. Yeah, I have them turned on just because they're hysterical. I think, I mean look, you shouldn't look at those and say, oh my God. You should look at them and go, I wonder what that really, what they're really saying.
- [153:51]
Paris Martineau
I just think, I mean I'm not saying from a. Yeah, I just think it's very interesting that Apple used to be known as a company that wouldn't release a product that was completely or an update that was completely terrible and bad at doing what it stated it was supposed to do. And now it is because AI 2024.
- [154:12]
Jason Heiner
Was a rough year for them. They should not have released the Vision Pro the way they did. We, we wrote about this in January.
- [154:18]
Leo Laporte
This is the one year anniversary by the way of the release of the Vision Pro.
- [154:21]
Paris Martineau
The announcement, it's changed everything, guys. I mean we're all talking from, we're all podcasting with our legless. Have you, have you been on a call with somebody using the Vision Pro thing?
- [154:33]
Jason Heiner
It's brutal. It is brutal though.
- [154:36]
Paris Martineau
It's genuinely terrifying. It looks terrifying. It's the most uncanny valley thing you've ever seen.
- [154:44]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, it's brutal. So we wrote about this in January. You know, we sort of gave it a, we said look, technologically they've accomplished something really interesting, but we cannot recommend it for one single person other than if you are a developer wanting to develop for this maybe longer term for AI on the bet that you want to get ahead but even then like, you know, it's, we just can't recommend it and they've, they've marketed it to the wrong people like they want it to as this like movie device. To watch movies and in airplanes. You know, why would you want to do that and not just use your iPad like it's, you know, it's, it's crazy. And so now we took a lot of flack for that. We also recommended everybody that bought it. We, we sort of said you have, if you buy it, you've got, we publicized the return policy very clear, you know that this is, this is the return policy. Know it be ready because you're very likely going to want to return it. And we saw that probably, you know, the most returned product ever. And that doesn't mean that it wasn't a technological breakthrough because in many ways it was. But it was not marketed well. It was a developer kit that they, they somehow decided they wanted to turn it into a movie watching device and it just can't compete with an iPad pad. Then you have AI. You know, they released AI really too early as, as Paris was saying, you know, when they really were not those, those products were not ready yet. And so 2024 I think is going to go down as one of the most challenging years when, when you know, Apple really departed from some of its core values in, in the ways that it brings product to market and releases them. And they've got, they've got a lot of work to do this year. Year to, to. To sort of fix some of the. Yeah. Missteps from last year.
- [156:32]
Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. Final break before we. I can't believe how fast two hours went by before we wrap things up. You're watching this week in tech, Jason Heiner. Love you. It's great to see you. Editor in chief, ZDNet. He has a little fez behind him. Look at that, right beneath your Mac plus or Mac Pro right there, Right there. There's the fez. Molly White. Would you like a fez, Molly? Because we can get you one.
- [156:57]
Molly White
I want to have a fez.
- [156:59]
Leo Laporte
You want a fez? All right, fezzes for all. Mollywhite.net Yay. And of course Paris Martineau who is the host of the last few episodes. Actually one more episode of this week in Google. And then on your birthday, February 5th, the brand new show intelligent Machines where I go crazy about how wonderful AI is and you and Jeff shoot me down. It's gonna be a great show. Show.
- [157:22]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it'll be great. Will I be there? We rebrand. Will I be eating a multi course meal somewhere in Brooklyn?
- [157:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you think you might not be there for the show?
- [157:30]
Paris Martineau
It depends. I need to check my resign notifications Honestly, it depends on when I am able to obtain.
- [157:37]
Leo Laporte
You're trying to get a reservation?
- [157:39]
Paris Martineau
Well, you know, we'll find.
- [157:42]
Leo Laporte
What if I say I can get you a reservation for Salt Hanks sandwich restaurant in the West Village?
- [157:47]
Paris Martineau
I'd hope so. I'd hope I'm able to go to Salt Hank St. Louis Restaurant in the former home of slutty vegan.
- [157:55]
Leo Laporte
That's right. Right next to John's Pizza on Bleecker Street. But it won't be, unfortunately, in time for your birthday. It won't be probably till, well, you know how it is with restaurants. He's already. It's so funny. He's already bitching about regulations.
- [158:07]
Paris Martineau
I was about to say the permitting process for opening that baby is gonna take forever.
- [158:11]
Leo Laporte
It's already.
- [158:12]
Molly White
They turn. Turn Republican.
- [158:13]
Leo Laporte
I know. He says, oh man, this Eric Adams, he's killing me here. It's pretty funny.
- [158:21]
Paris Martineau
You gotta be like, son, pay a visit to zero Bond. Slip a couple twenties over on that table and your problems will be taken care of.
- [158:29]
Leo Laporte
I just told him that this is what happens. You know, in fact, I think John Dvorak used to quote. Oh, who was it? Was it Thoreau? Says if you're not a liberal in your youth, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative in your old age, you have no brains. Or you don't have a sandwich restaurant in New York City. But either way, yeah, it's probably the latter.
- [158:52]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, sounds like Thoreau.
- [158:56]
Leo Laporte
He says, dad, what's going on? What's going on? I said, son, it's society protecting itself against you. Corrupt mogul. So there someday, maybe he will be a mogul. I hope to be the son of a. The father of an oligarch.
- [159:13]
Molly White
Sandwich mogul.
- [159:14]
Leo Laporte
Sandwich mogul.
- [159:15]
Jason Heiner
Our show, good name for a restaurant actually.
- [159:17]
Leo Laporte
Sandwich sandwich mogul. Yeah, I'll suggest it. He was going to call it Salt Hank because that's, you know, his name and all that, but I just bought.
- [159:26]
Jason Heiner
The domain Sandwich mogul dot com.
- [159:28]
Molly White
Yeah, well, I just trademarked it, so.
- [159:30]
Jason Heiner
Oh, man, he's gonna have to happen fast.
- [159:33]
Leo Laporte
Now he is a sandwich mogul. It's Twoo. It's Twoo. Our show today, brought to you by. Actually, there's no accident, there are no coincidences. Shopify. How did Henry become a sandwich mogul? Thank you, Shopify. If you go to his website, salhank.com and you buy some of his delicious salts soon, by the way, pickles, pickled cucumbers, pickled peppers, pickled onions, you'll be using Shopify. It's 2025. A new year means new opportunities. Maybe for a lot of you out there, you've been thinking about one thing over the holidays, starting your own business, looking at people like Saul Hank. You know, Saul Hank asked me, my son asked me, he said, you know, how do I do this? How do I come up with a brand? How do I sell stuff to people? What? And he said, what, dad? What am I even going to sell? I said, son, sell salt. The profit margins are high and it never goes bad. And he's doing really well. He actually, he answered his own questions. Shopify fixed it for him. The best time to start your new business right now. Shopify. By the way, my daughter also uses Shopify to sell her custom T shirts. Come to think of it, the whole family uses Shopify. Shopify. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open your business and get your first sale. Get your store up and running easily with thousands of customizable templates. There's no coding or design skills required. All you need to do, just drag and drop. Their powerful social media tools let you connect all your channels and create shoppable posts and help you sell everywhere people scroll. Shopify makes it easy to manage your growing business. They help with the details like shipping. Shipping like taxes, payments from one single dashboard, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if somebody beats you to your brilliant idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything. Ladies and gentlemen, with Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think. Established in 2025. That is a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com TWIT go to shopify.com TWIT start selling with Shopify today. It's all lowercase. Shopify.com TWIT Shopify. And if you. If you look at your Salt Salt Hank site, powered by Shopify, you know, as much as we said that TikTok was empowering for him, I think he'll agree Shopify made it possible for him to start a business. And ultimately that's kind of the dream of the whole thing. The salt lovers club. There it is. Home to the best pickles and seasoning in the effing world. Let me see.
- [162:36]
Paris Martineau
Oh, look at the salt Hank night for. For you.
- [162:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. There's the pickles. There's the pickles. Coming soon. Get the cookbook. It's out now. There he is. And somewhere in here it says powered by Shopify. It's pretty. It's pretty cool. It's pretty darn cool. Thank you. Shopify makes it easy for me. Don't have to support him anymore. Let's see what else? Is there anything else in our US Finalizes rule banning smart smart cars with Russia and Chinese tech. See, while they're banning or unbanning and banning and unbanning. Tick tock. They're going and actually banning Chinese cars. I wonder why. Is there anybody in the United States who sells smart vehicles?
- [163:30]
Paris Martineau
No, couldn't be.
- [163:31]
Leo Laporte
No, actually Biden did this, which is hysterical. I wonder actually what, what the Trump administration is going to do about AI. They, I mean, the Silicon Valley thinks they're very favorable to AI. Marc Andreessen said that's the whole reason he became a Trump supporter, because the Biden administration wanted AI to be controlled by a handful of big companies. I don't know if that's true.
- [163:51]
Paris Martineau
Who's the guy, who's the new isar? Is that David Sachs?
- [163:54]
Leo Laporte
David Sachs, yeah. Another South African.
- [163:57]
Molly White
AI and crypto.
- [163:58]
Leo Laporte
And crypto.
- [163:59]
Paris Martineau
Oh yeah.
- [163:59]
Leo Laporte
Together. Even though he does not have a dog in either hunt, which actually is probably good. It's just unusual. Usual.
- [164:07]
Jason Heiner
Probably has a dog at a lot of hunts, actually.
- [164:09]
Molly White
Yeah. I would not be so confident on that statement.
- [164:11]
Leo Laporte
Never. Let's put it this way. He's never run a crypto or AI company. How about that?
- [164:16]
Paris Martineau
The bar is in hell. If that's the bar.
- [164:19]
Jason Heiner
Yeah. I think he's on the boards of lots.
- [164:21]
Leo Laporte
Oh, probably. Yes.
- [164:23]
Jason Heiner
Yeah.
- [164:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Good. Because you don't really want.
- [164:26]
Jason Heiner
You can obfuscate your involvement that way. Yeah. Sorry. It's so cynical. Cynical. So cynical you are. But I don't think that. I don't think that. Boy, the, the, the. It's like talk about DDoS. Like DDOSing conflicts of interest have been DDoS so badly already before this thing has even started that it's like, where do you even.
- [164:50]
Leo Laporte
There's no such thing.
- [164:51]
Jason Heiner
You know, where do you even. It's like just set up your arms and say, you know how there is.
- [164:55]
Paris Martineau
Absolutely such a thing as.
- [164:57]
Molly White
I think they're actually each trying to hit high score.
- [165:00]
Leo Laporte
That's the max.
- [165:03]
Jason Heiner
Hit the high score.
- [165:03]
Leo Laporte
Who gets the maximum interest?
- [165:05]
Jason Heiner
I mean, and it's the same in like, you know, money and politics. It's like, what, what happened? Like it was less than a generation ago where the number one issue, political issue was like campaign finance. Reform. And now it's just like again just throwing up the arms on conflict of interest and money in politics. It's like remove all the caps, remove all of the restraints, remove everything. People spend as much money as they want, waste as much money as they want essentially on political campaigns. And is it a waste?
- [165:36]
Leo Laporte
Is it really a waste? You know, we all laughed when elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter. I think you guys money worth.
- [165:45]
Jason Heiner
How so?
- [165:46]
Molly White
I mean the crypto guys that spent like they raised like $200 million and they already made it back in terms of just like bitcoin gains and stock price.
- [165:55]
Leo Laporte
They have hundreds of members of Congress. They've got a very pro crypto White House. Yeah, I think the money pays off. I think you could argue that Elon's X has become a very powerful source of information and ultimately of.
- [166:12]
Molly White
I thought you were talking about Grimes for a second.
- [166:15]
Leo Laporte
I also thought you were Grimes as well as Grimes. I think.
- [166:21]
Paris Martineau
Everybody'S wondering what crimes is talking.
- [166:24]
Molly White
She's so powerful.
- [166:25]
Leo Laporte
She is moving into the compound. I thought she was the only holdout, but she, she's moving into the Musk baby compound.
- [166:35]
Jason Heiner
I just never thought these are the kind of things we talk about on Twitt, you know.
- [166:39]
Leo Laporte
All right, let's talk about this. Bill Gates.
- [166:42]
Jason Heiner
I'm only kidding.
- [166:43]
Leo Laporte
Bill Gates. There's a name you might remember from the blast from the past. Past has been promoting these new nuclear power plants that use salt instead of water. They're called natrium plants. Got the permit to start building in Wyoming. They still do not have permits from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But how long before that will happen? There's Bill. I wonder if he, he knows how to drive one of those bulldozers. The Wyoming Industrial Siting Council is granted a construction permit permit to Terra power for its natrium nuclear power plant. These are, I don't know, can you call them pocket power plants. It's safer, they say because they're not using water for cooling. The unique natrium design enables the company to start non nuclear construction. Ah, so that's it. They are able to build every bit but the nuclear part until they get the NRC approval. Ah, I get it, I get it. There are lots of people think we need nuclear power. That, that's, that's the most proximate way to get out of burning fossil fuels.
- [167:51]
Jason Heiner
It's true. You know, I think the thing, you know, we haven't built nuclear plants in like 40 years in the US very.
- [167:58]
Leo Laporte
Very expensive, very expensive.
- [168:01]
Jason Heiner
But there are we know a lot more as a sort of world community we know a lot more of about building safe efficient you know better nuclear plants than we did 40 years ago when sort of the, the scare the worst you know scares of of what can happen when you don't do it well sort of stopped everybody from from building them. So I so I think it certainly deserves a look right? I I think there are. We've had. We've run up against challenges with when it comes to energy and technology like we've run up in challenges of of efficiency of storage of being able to transfer you know solar, wind, hydro.
- [168:47]
Leo Laporte
We can.
- [168:48]
Jason Heiner
We can harness those things really well. But one of our challenges is the power grid. Right. We don't. We don't export. We can't move power around very well which is why we still are as dependent on oil real as we are. And so you know we have. There's a number of problems that have to be solved. And so I think that that Bill Gates and others are are showing this interest because we we are we've hit some challenges of power with the. The other clean power methods that we were what I was just talking about. But you know it certainly should be part of the conversation. I I think and and that's why why people are starting to sort of make the the case that it could be part of a clean energy future. But of this century I think still power is going to be the number one concern. It powers everything. And the more that we get into AI and crypto and other things the more it creates urgency around solving the challenges.
- [169:47]
Leo Laporte
We need the power. We need the power. These are littler plants. They run they're cooled with liquid sodium plant will generate 345 megawatts of power capable ramping up to 500 megawatts for short periods of time. To compare the Three Mile an Island plant that Microsoft is bringing back online does well over 800 megawatts of power. So these are about the half the size of 3 mile of the single of there were 3 mile island had multiple plants of the single 3 mile an island plant that's coming back but they plan to to put you know if it goes well dozens of natrium plants across the globe including several more in Wyoming and certainly Bill Gates has the money to do it. First Steps First Steps Cash App Find $175 million for its According to the CFPB it's woefully incomplete response to fraud I love how the Biden administration in the in the waning hours of the administration has just done all of this stuff. Knowing that, you know, already Musk has said and Doge have said that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau should be deleted, I think is the word they used. So they're trying to do as much as they can before they are deleted. They find Cash app because it implied it failed to address fraud in the mobile payment network. It created the conditions for fraud to proliferate. When things went wrong. Cash App flouted its responsibilities, even burdened local banks with problems the company caused. Cash, you may remember, is run by Block, which is Jack Dorsey's company. It was a Jack Dorsey startup after, I think he was still at Twitter when he started it. He was running it and Twitter for quite some time. As I remember he renamed it to.
- [171:42]
Jason Heiner
Block during the blockchain craze, the 2021 blockchain. Now he's kind of like, oh well, I guess we don't want to go back.
- [171:48]
Molly White
You know, at least it's kind of vague though, like you can get away with that.
- [171:52]
Leo Laporte
It's blockish. It's not blockchain, it's just blockish.
- [171:56]
Molly White
One thing that's sort of tangential to this is the CFPB also recently published. I think it's, it's at this point it's like in the comment stage. But they are looking to basically interpret that same. I think it's that same rule to apply to both crypto holdings and also digital game. Some digital game assets that are sort of cash like yes, because they should.
- [172:25]
Leo Laporte
Be, they're treated, you can trade them in for dollars. They're, they should be regulated. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
- [172:32]
Molly White
Yeah, so the idea is like basically the same law that makes it so that if you like, you know, if you like leave your debit card in an ATM and someone withdraws $200 and you call your bank within like a pretty short period of time, your bank will give you that money back. They basically want to have that same type of thing apply to crypto assets. And like if someone steals all your Robux or whatever, which is I think really interesting but also you know, given the political end of things, I not super confident that that is going to go anywhere.
- [173:05]
Leo Laporte
I'm hoping that RFK Jr gets behind this. Now smokers may not be like this much, but the FDA has proposed reducing nicotine in cigarettes from 14% to less than 1% to a literally non addictive level. Which means you'd basically be buying some herbs that you could burn that didn't Deliver. They were not a nicotine delivery site system. This is not going to be a rule until there's a long comment period. I think it's eight or nine months. But a very. I think a very. They're proposing to cap the nicotine level at 0.7 milligrams of per tobacco. I'm sorry, Per gram of tobacco.
- [173:48]
Molly White
And what about like vapes and stuff like that? Are they still allowed to have nicotine?
- [173:52]
Leo Laporte
It would apply to cigarette. Cigarette tobacco, roll your own tobacco. Most cigars and pipe tobacco, but not e cigarettes. Nicotine pouches, heated tobacco products for the vape industry. Hookahs. It's gonna be, it's. There's gonna be an explosion of hookah, hookah bars, smokeless tobacco products or premium cigars. Yeah. I think it just creates a black market for nicotine delivery systems.
- [174:20]
Jason Heiner
Yeah.
- [174:21]
Molly White
Yeah. They legalized meat and they criminalized nicotine.
- [174:24]
Leo Laporte
That's right. What a world. What a world. All right, I think we can stop right here and say we have done our job of bringing light to the world, explaining what's happening in the world around us. Molly. I'm so, always so glad to have Molly white with us. Mollywhite.net subscribe to Citation Needed. It's her newsletter. Of course. Web3 is going just great. Is Citation Needed your big thing? But you do a lot of podcasts too. I know.
- [174:56]
Molly White
Yeah. I am a professional podcast guest.
- [174:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And the best. That's why you're so good. You can read her work@mollywhite.net thank you so much for being here. I really. I knew as soon as I saw the Trump coin come out yesterday. I said I'm so glad we got Molly. Thank you, Molly.
- [175:18]
Molly White
Happy to be here. Thanks.
- [175:19]
Leo Laporte
Always great to have you. You want same for you. Jason Heiner. He is the EIC at zd.net and just a good guy all around. It's always great to have you on. I appreciate it. I didn't get to ask you about cnet. Was there anything you got excited about besides all of those great AI bracelets?
- [175:39]
Jason Heiner
There was some interesting stuff this year. I will say the mo. The sort of most interesting and a little bit strange thing was there was these set of headphones over the ear headphones. They looked like they were over the ear headphones. And when you put them on, what they are is they're actually ear cleaners. And they.
- [175:56]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no.
- [175:57]
Jason Heiner
Water into your ears.
- [175:59]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [175:59]
Jason Heiner
And they have cameras that show it. Washing what your ears look like being washed by this thing. So this is like One of the most CES products ever.
- [176:09]
Paris Martineau
Oh, you weren't there like that at the end of 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy is like, oh, I've got it. It's dishwashers. But the front is clear so you can see what's going on inside. It's just.
- [176:19]
Jason Heiner
It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Exactly.
- [176:22]
Molly White
I think it's an ear bidet.
- [176:24]
Jason Heiner
Yeah, it's like an ear bidet that is the perfect.
- [176:27]
Molly White
But with a camera.
- [176:28]
Jason Heiner
With a camera to watch your ear.
- [176:31]
Paris Martineau
Leo's already purchased this.
- [176:33]
Leo Laporte
I'm looking where I can buy this. Is it a real product or it was just a perspective?
- [176:37]
Jason Heiner
No, I believe it is a actual real product that is for sale.
- [176:42]
Leo Laporte
And here it is.
- [176:43]
Jason Heiner
Yeah.
- [176:43]
Leo Laporte
These ear cleaning headphones I saw at CES make so much sense. Written by Jada Jones on ZDNet.
- [176:51]
Jason Heiner
Ear sight flow is this can't become mainstream.
- [176:55]
Paris Martineau
How much someone cost. Uses Q tips way more than I should. I can't. There can't be another level of this for me to mess my ears up.
- [177:03]
Leo Laporte
$199 moment, Molly. They're sold out.
- [177:07]
Molly White
Less than I expected.
- [177:09]
Leo Laporte
Inventory is on the way. I'm ordering it right now. I'll wear them with my brilliant glasses.
- [177:14]
Jason Heiner
There you go.
- [177:15]
Leo Laporte
And I'll be a chick man.
- [177:16]
Jason Heiner
This is a Leo product. You know, Leo, I have to say, like, how much I love that you are the techno optimist of always, always. And I, I always appreciate that about you. And at the end of the day, you know, I mean, I, I know. I, I was also. So we were, we were poo pooing a lot of things on here and it's part of our job. But, you know, I do think it is true that, you know, the optimists do own the future and it's. I love it. Served you well. And you've always been such a. Had such an amazing perspective on the tech industry.
- [177:51]
Leo Laporte
And it's why I'm not a Robert Scoble. Let's not go crazy. I'm not like, everything is the best thing ever, but I hope that we can come up with some things that are going to make our lives a little bit better. And I'm also completely willing, when it doesn't, to admit that I was very skeptical about the Vision pros.
- [178:11]
Jason Heiner
For instance, you were, you were not.
- [178:13]
Paris Martineau
To rain on this great optimism parade and all the wonderful. If you scroll down on the Earsight flow, it has a photo of what you could see inside your ear and it's the most, most upsetting thing I'VE seen in a while.
- [178:26]
Leo Laporte
It's not good. I don't know. I think I want this. I. I think this.
- [178:32]
Paris Martineau
No, the one that was like the yellow hole.
- [178:34]
Molly White
I've never.
- [178:35]
Paris Martineau
Yellow, fleshy hole.
- [178:37]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [178:38]
Molly White
I've never seen the inside of my ear. And I think I'm happy to leave it that way.
- [178:43]
Paris Martineau
There's some things that we just shouldn't know.
- [178:47]
Leo Laporte
I'm just sad. I can't buy it right now. No. That's all.
- [178:51]
Jason Heiner
Yeah. Your ears are going to be really clean this year.
- [178:54]
Leo Laporte
I need it, Leo.
- [178:55]
Jason Heiner
I have a feeling I, I need it.
- [178:57]
Leo Laporte
I do. B Bird. B Bird sells a lot of other stuff.
- [179:01]
Paris Martineau
That's the sign of a great product.
- [179:04]
Leo Laporte
The, the they. They started.
- [179:07]
Paris Martineau
If you go, if you go to their homepage, it's something that just says love resonates in every ear care moment.
- [179:14]
Leo Laporte
Apparently mostly what they do is ear stuff.
- [179:17]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [179:17]
Leo Laporte
There's specialized.
- [179:18]
Molly White
They have a niece. God.
- [179:22]
Jason Heiner
Wow.
- [179:23]
Leo Laporte
I don't know what that was and I can't unsee it. I'm so sorry to do that to you. I hope you were watching the video. Paris Martino will be back on Wednesday. Right. For this week in Google and every weekend on the information dot com. So great to have you, Paris. I appreciate we, we wanted to have you on our year end show. You couldn't make it but I've had.
- [179:46]
Paris Martineau
A, you know, a series of unfortunate events that have kept me from Twitter the last couple weeks. So I'm glad. I'm fine.
- [179:53]
Leo Laporte
We're so glad we could get you on. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining us. We do TWIT every Sunday afternoon, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you would like. We stream it used to be eight platforms. We can't get back on TikTok for some reason. Reason it won't let us on. I don't. I think there's maybe a. It's coming I guess but. So we weren't on TikTok this week. We. If we can get back on TikTok we certainly will. Discord, YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. And maybe next time on TikTok. That's so you can watch live but you don't have to watch live. I didn't mention Discord. That is actually an exclusive behind the Velvet Rope experience. Exclusive to our Club Twit members. Now if you're not a member of Club Twit, I want to invite you to join. It's one of the ways that we keep ourselves on the air. It's, it's, it's really been a great experience all around. We've met some wonderful people, about 12,000 people in our club. Seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of the shows. You get access to the club Twit Discord so you can meet the other club members. There are special shows just for you, like Stacy's Book Club, the photo show, and the coffee show and all that. So for more information, Twit tv Club Twit. I also want to remind you, you have a couple weeks maybe left to do our survey. I think we'll finish it at the end of the month. That is how we get to know you. We only do this once a year, as you know, as a podcast, we're an RSS feed. This ain't Spotify, kids. We don't know anything about you. So in order to get to know you a little better, we do this survey thing. Takes you about 10 minutes. Minutes. We do it once a year just to get an idea of who's out there, who's listening. It's helpful for us in determining programming. It's also really helpful for us in selling advertising. We don't sit tell them anything about you individually, but it's nice for us to be able to say, well, 75% of our audience are it decision makers. That's something advertisers want to know. And so if you would Twit TV survey member of the club or not, that's another way you can help us out. Any help you can give us, we really appreciate, after the fact, on demand versions of all of our shows available at the Web website TWiT TV. When you get there, there's also a link to the YouTube channel for twit. Great way to share little clips if you want to do that. Let's see what else. Oh, best way to get it is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically at the minute Benito finishes polishing it up. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, our producer. Are you editing tonight or is it Kevin editing it tonight?
- [182:30]
Jason Heiner
Kevin tonight, Kevin.
- [182:31]
Leo Laporte
All right, well, thanks to Kevin King then, for taking out all those cuss words. And that part where I lit my hair on fire and all that stuff. You won't see that thanks to Kevin. And you'll be able to get that if you subscribe audio or video in just a few hours after the show ends. Thank you everybody for joining us. This is our 20th anniversary year. We've been doing this for I know it's amazing for a long time and I, I am very grateful to all the people who make this show possible, including you three. It's fantastic. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next week. And as I have said for 20 years, another twit is in the can. This is amazing. If you love your phone but not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile. You can keep your phone, keep your number and we'll help pay it off up to $800 per line. You can also use our savings calculator to compare our plans and streaming benefits against Verizon and AT&T. So switch and keep your phone, keep your number and keep more of your moolah@t mobile.com up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days with device into eligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months.