This Week in Tech 1016: Marc or Marx?

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Tech 1016: Marc or Marx?

Release Date: January 27, 2025

Hosts and Panelists:

• Leo Laporte (Host)
• Ed Bott (Senior Contributing Editor at ZDNet)
• Owen Thomas (Managing Editor of the San Francisco Business Times)
• Sam Aboul Samid (VP Market Research at Telemetry Insights and Podcast Host of "Wheel Bearings")

---

1. Microsoft 365 Copilot Launch: A Total Disaster

The episode opens with a critical discussion about Microsoft's recent launch of Copilot in Microsoft 365, which Ed Bott describes as “a total disaster.”

• Pricing Hike and Lack of Communication:
  • Ed Bott [05:07]: "The first thing they did was they jacked your price up 30 to 45% with no notice."
  • Leo Laporte [08:05]: "But does anybody want AI? Or am I?"

Microsoft raised the subscription price for Microsoft 365 by 30-45% to incorporate AI features without adequately informing users about the changes.

• User Backlash:
  • Ed Bott [08:55]: "I cannot find a single person who is happy about this."

Users expressed significant dissatisfaction across forums and social media, citing unexpected price increases and intrusive AI features that couldn't be easily disabled.

• Microsoft’s Response:
  • Microsoft introduced a “Microsoft 365 Classic” version at the old price, but only by attempting to cancel the current subscription.
  • Ed Bott [10:38]: "They created a Microsoft 365 Classic version which is the thing you had until yesterday at the price that you were paying until yesterday."

2. Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek R1: Innovation Under Constraints

Discussion shifts to DeepSeek R1, a Chinese AI startup that has achieved impressive results with significantly lower training costs.

• Efficient AI Development:
  • Leo Laporte [24:54]: "DeepSeek has proven there's another way to win by revamping the foundational structure of AI models and using limited resources more efficiently."

DeepSeek R1 utilizes innovative techniques like Multi Head, Latent Attention (MLA), and Mixture of Experts to reduce computational demands, requiring only a tenth of the computing power compared to Meta's Llama 3.

• Impact of US-China Tech Cold War:
  • Owen Thomas [25:48]: "Is that just forcing China's AI sector to get smarter than us?"
  • Leo Laporte [25:27]: "It might have undermined the US's policy to keep these chips out of Chinese hands."

US export controls have inadvertently pushed Chinese firms like DeepSeek to focus on software-driven optimizations rather than sheer hardware scaling, showcasing adaptability and creativity under restrictions.

3. Samsung Galaxy S25 Announcement

The panel briefly touches upon Samsung's release of the Galaxy S25, available in vibrant colors such as coral red, blue, black, and titanium jade green.

• Color Availability:
  • Sam Aboul Samid [23:34]: "There are four additional colors available in stores: navy, mint, icy blue, and silver shadow."

Despite the buzz, many color names were leaked weeks prior, diminishing the excitement around the official announcement.

4. Elon Musk, Tesla Sales, and Twitter/X

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Elon Musk's ventures, including Tesla's fluctuating sales and the financial struggles of his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter).

• Tesla Sales Decline:
  • Sam Aboul Samid [38:33]: "They were down by about 4 or 5% globally last year, but up by 6.7% in the U.S."

Tesla experienced a global sales decline but saw an increase in the US market, partly due to the introduction of the Cybertruck.

• Financial Issues at X (Twitter):
  • Leo Laporte [50:50]: "The Wall Street Journal reported that X is barely breaking even, struggling."
  • Sam Aboul Samid [52:19]: "Tesla shares have skyrocketed, and Elon's personal share of Tesla has gone up by something like $100 or $150 billion."

X is facing financial stress, with banks preparing to sell billions in loans at reduced prices. However, these loans are secured by Tesla stock, mitigating some risk.

• Trump Coin and Crypto Community Reaction:
  • Leo Laporte [81:08]: "Trump created a meme coin, which divided the crypto industry."
  • Owen Thomas [82:37]: "The majority of people who bought Trump were likely inexperienced retail investors."

Trump's launch of a meme coin garnered over $58 million in fees within a day, leading to skepticism and calls for greater regulation within the crypto community.

5. Data Centers, Meta’s AI Investments, and Energy Consumption

The panel discusses Meta’s ambitious AI project, Stargate, aiming to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with a $500 billion investment over four years.

• Innovative AI Infrastructure:
  • Leo Laporte [25:48]: "Meta is building a 2 gigawatt plus data center so large it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan."

Meta is investing heavily in data center infrastructure powered primarily by natural gas, raising environmental concerns.

• Energy Consumption and Environmental Impact:
  • Sam Aboul Samid [29:31]: "Matrix math optimized processors are way more efficient at doing the kinds of calculations you need to do to do AI with much less power consumption."

The use of advanced, energy-efficient processors is highlighted as a way to mitigate the massive power demands of AI training.

6. Cryptocurrency Regulation and Trump’s Involvement

The conversation delves deeper into the regulatory landscape of cryptocurrency, particularly focusing on the distinction between NFTs and meme coins.

• Regulatory Classification:
  • Sam Aboul Samid [87:17]: "NFTs are collectibles, while Trump meme coins are fungible and don't fit the collectible category."

The panel discusses the implications of classifying meme coins as collectibles versus securities, with potential tax ramifications.

• Executive Oversight:
  • Ed Bott [78:39]: "There's a really funny thing about that distinction though... but if you look at tax laws, the capital gains taxes in the United States, the long-term capital gains rates for collectibles are much higher than they are for securities."

This classification could influence how these assets are taxed and regulated, with significant financial implications for holders and creators.

7. TikTok’s Availability and Alternatives

Leo Laporte expresses his support for TikTok while highlighting its recent removal from major app stores, leading to a surge in demand for locked devices.

• TikTok’s App Store Ban:
  • Leo Laporte [72:57]: "You can't get the app anymore from the Google Play store or the iOS store."

Users are creating a secondary market for iPhones pre-installed with TikTok, selling for exorbitant prices on platforms like eBay.

8. San Francisco’s Historical Opposition to Arcades and Modern Tech Shifts

Owen Thomas shares a story about San Francisco's 1982 ban on arcade machines, drawing parallels to current technological resistance in communities.

• Historical Context:
  • Owen Thomas [139:06]: "When San Francisco fought Pac Man, did you know the city declared war on video games?"

This historical anecdote serves as a metaphor for contemporary resistance to emerging technologies, emphasizing the cyclical nature of innovation acceptance.

9. Eventbrite and Female Entrepreneurship

The panel highlights Julia Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite, emphasizing her role as a successful female entrepreneur in the tech industry.

• Entrepreneurial Success:
  • Owen Thomas [132:14]: "Julia Hartz took the company public and was the second youngest woman to do so at the time."

Eventbrite continues to thrive by catering to event planners and creators, maintaining its headquarters in San Francisco to leverage the local innovation ecosystem.

10. AI’s Impact on Jobs and Programming

A deep dive into the potential consequences of AI on the workforce, particularly in software development.

• AI in Coding:
  • Leo Laporte [120:32]: "I think AI is completely capable of doing that. I think an AI coding engineer is not too far off."

The panel debates whether AI can effectively take over coding tasks and the implications for human programmers, including the loss of institutional knowledge and the ability to troubleshoot complex systems.

• Economic Incentives and Job Displacement:
  • Ed Bott [121:03]: "The economic incentives that are driving most of the AI research today are about eliminating human labor cost."

They discuss Marc Andreessen’s optimistic view that AI will reduce job costs and possibly lead to universal basic income, contrasting it with concerns about job displacement and economic inequality.

11. Conclusion and Show Details

The episode wraps up with promotions for the TWiT network's various platforms and sponsorships, including a detailed advertisement for Zscaler and a VPN service. The hosts share personal anecdotes and express gratitude towards their panelists and listeners, highlighting the importance of community and adaptability in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Ed Bott [05:07]: "The first thing they did was they jacked your price up 30 to 45% with no notice."
• Leo Laporte [08:05]: "But does anybody want AI? Or am I?"
• Ed Bott [08:55]: "I cannot find a single person who is happy about this."
• Owen Thomas [12:09]: "If companies push through price increases, everyone pays more, costs go up, then they demand more wages. It feeds an inflationary cycle."
• Leo Laporte [24:54]: "DeepSeek has proven there's another way to win by revamping the foundational structure of AI models and using limited resources more efficiently."
• Ed Bott [38:33]: "They were down by about 4 or 5% globally last year, but up by 6.7% in the U.S."
• Leo Laporte [50:50]: "The Wall Street Journal reported that X is barely breaking even, struggling."
• Leo Laporte [83:38]: "Trump created a meme coin, which divided the crypto industry."
• Owen Thomas [132:14]: "Julia Hartz took the company public and was the second youngest woman to do so at the time."
• Leo Laporte [120:32]: "I think AI is completely capable of doing that. I think an AI coding engineer is not too far off."
• Ed Bott [121:03]: "The economic incentives that are driving most of the AI research today are about eliminating human labor cost."

---

This episode provides a comprehensive analysis of current technological challenges and innovations, including corporate missteps, groundbreaking AI developments, and the socio-economic impacts of emerging technologies. The panelists offer insightful perspectives on how these trends shape the future of technology and society.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Great panel for you. Sam Opulsammond. My car guy is here. From San Francisco Business Times, Owen Thomas and my dear friend ed Bott from ZDNet. We'll talk about Bill Gates fascinating interview in the Times of London in which he says, I might be autistic. I might be. We'll also talk about Trump Coin and why the crypto community is aghast. And a Chinese AI startup that did a lot more for a lot less. All of that and more coming up next on Twit podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1016, recorded Sunday, January 26, 2025. Mark or Marks Foreign. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the latest tech news. I have gathered a fine ensemble of people who don't enjoy football. Actually, that's a lie. Some of them are making sacrifices. Ed Bot is here, senior contributing editor at ZDNet. He says I'm making a sacrifice being here. Thank you, Ed.

[Ed Bott]

My pleasure, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I appreciate it. Do you want me to tell you the score? No, you pause the TiVo, as they say. He is. He is, of course, senior contributing editor at ZDNet. I know that because it says it right under his chin. And you moved out of Albuquerque?

[Ed Bott]

Oh, goodness. We've. We're in. We're in the Research Triangle park area of North Carolina now.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Everybody. Did you know that everybody's moving to North Carolina?

[Ed Bott]

You know, we met some friends the other day who their entire family, over the course of four years, moved from various parts of California to the same little town in North Carolina. So, yes, it's true.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a nice, nice place to be. And you're not having a polar vortex, I hope.

[Ed Bott]

It seems to have passed.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. The weather has warmed up. Also with us from San Francisco, where the weather is always a perfect 58 degrees. Owen Thomas, managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times.

[Owen Thomas]

I think it's more like an Arctic 52.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, chilly. It's chilly. Too bad you don't have any more anchor steam beer to warm you up.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, they're bringing it back. New owners.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, hallelujah. That was a sad day when they closed the doors.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. No, you can't. You can't stop bottling.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, be like not having a sourdough bread or something.

[Owen Thomas]

It's. It's. Something is bubbling up here all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great to See you, Owen. And my car guy, Sam Aboul Samid. New job. New job. He's VP Market Research at Telemetry Insights. That's TelemetryAgency.com. but still writing about cars, Sam?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I am still writing about cars, still doing the Wheel Bearings podcast and I've just. We started a new transportation mobility focused research and advisory practice out of. Telemetry is a company founded by my friend Craig D. Five years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So. So are you specializing a little more into.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

No, no. Still covering the same areas that I did when in my previous job. I just decided that it was time for a move away from a company where market research was a tiny little branch of about 50 or 60 people in an 18,000 person consulting firm that gets 60% of its revenue from government contracts to something that's more focused, smaller, smaller organization. So now I've gone from being a tiny minnow in a huge ocean to being a big fish in a puddle.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. I like it.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I like it so far too.

[Leo Laporte]

So, gentlemen, this was, as I informed you before the show began, kind of a slow week in tech. You got. I'm gonna give you two choices right off the top. You can either talk about the new Chinese AI R1 and its amazing $6 million training cost, which is, by the way, for those who don't know, cheap, or the new Galaxy S25 phone, which comes in coral red, blue, black or titanium jade green. That's a tough one. Maybe, Ed, we should go back to Microsoft and talk about the botched Copilot launch. You spent a little time on this on Windows Weekly. I know you wrote about this in on ZDNet. You say the Microsoft 365 copilot launch was a total disaster. What does that mean?

[Ed Bott]

Well, pretty much everything that, that could go wrong did go wrong. They, you know, Microsoft has, you know, they've been sticking AI in everything lately and they call it Copilot. So you've got Copilot in Windows and you've got Copilot in a lot of their enterprise security tools. And now you've got 360. You've got Copilot in Microsoft 365, which is the. For family and personal subscriptions, which is what used to Microsoft Office. Right, the subscription.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is not the business version. This is for people. I have.

[Ed Bott]

This is for the home people.

[Leo Laporte]

This is my eight dollar a month subscription that I have to Office.

[Ed Bott]

Oh, I'm sorry, sir. So. So yeah, the first thing they did was they, they jacked Your price up 30 to 45%. Oh, with, with no notice you're at, your next bill will be up $3 a month or 30% if you're on an annual plan.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

They did give you notice. You know, it's up until whenever your next billing period is. So it's not like they charge you notice today. We get a week or two until.

[Leo Laporte]

The end of the month.

[Ed Bott]

Okay, fair enough. But they didn't give you any notice that these features were going to be in there. So that's number one.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm getting AI, but that's good. Doesn't everybody want AI?

[Ed Bott]

I, I don't think anybody, judging by the reading that I've done in online forums and on Reddit and on social media and in my email inbox, I can't find literally, literally I cannot find one single person who is happy about this. And, and here's the worst, here's the worst part. Okay. Microsoft says that, you know, they had done a trial of this in the Southern hemisphere starting in November. So people in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and all had, they had their prices raised and they had the AI stuff in there already. And Microsoft says they listened to the feedback carefully and they were going and they're, and they're giving people an opportunity to disable this feature to, you know, turn it on or off. But it's not in there. It won't be in there until next month. If you have Word, I think Word on the Mac, you can now there's an Enable Copilot box that is already selected. You can clear that checkbox and then disable it. That's supposed to be in Windows, but I haven't seen it in any of my copies of Word for Windows. And in all the other apps they say, well, it'll be there next month. And so you're stuck with this thing with these copilot prompts that keep coming up and you can't make them and you can't make them go away.

[Leo Laporte]

But. So, I mean, I like AI and I suspect that people who are like me pay for ChatGPT or Anthropics, Claude or Perplexity AI, or in my case, all three and would prefer to use AI that way. I guess it makes sense though, if it's integrated into Word, it's a writing assistant, right? Like grammar.

[Ed Bott]

Well, in Word it's a writing assistant. In PowerPoint, I asked the co pilot in PowerPoint today to create a presentation for me on the evils of AI assistance in productivity software. It created a 30 slide presentation. It's actually pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's expert at that.

[Ed Bott]

So, so the thing, but, but the thing is, had they, I, I mean I think they, I think they just did this, it reminds me of what they did with the recall feature last year, which is they didn't think about how to roll this out. Right. So Microsoft hasn't raised the price of what used to be Office 365 and now is Microsoft 365. They haven't raised its price in 12 years.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not since I subscribed to it 12 years ago. Yeah, right. So it was a good deal.

[Ed Bott]

So what they could have done was they could have said hey folks, you know, we haven't raised the price here in over a decade. You know, the price of everything's going up. We're going to raise your price two or three dollars a month. It'll start you know, next month or the month after that with your next, next billing. And, and I think every, everyone would have probably been fine with that. They would have grumbled a little bit but they would have said, you know, inflation and everything, this, this, this seems normal. And then they could have said and we have these new AI features that we're going to offer to every subscriber and here's a box, yes or no, do I want this enabled in my software? But instead what they did is they raised the price and they said it's for the AI. And people say I don't want the AI, you know, so, so you raised my price and you gave me something that I didn't want.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah. As somebody in our Discord trust no one says copilot integration is horrible. The pricing model is ridiculous. Leave it to Microsoft to over complicate something that could be so simple. Kind of echoing what you just said, Ed.

[Ed Bott]

Oh and, and I'll add one more thing. So they did understand that this is that people were going to be unhappy about this. And so they, they created a Microsoft 365 Classic version which is the thing you had until yesterday at the price that you were paying until yesterday. But the only way that you can get that is to try to cancel your current subscription. At which point they say wait, don't go away. Would you like the classic version for the old price for a limited time offer.

[Owen Thomas]

The discussion about inflation and using that as an excuse to push through price increases. It's a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If companies push through price increases, everyone pays more, costs go up, then they demand more in wages. It feeds an inflationary cycle. This is the Opposite of the role that technology played in the economy in the 1990s. Alan Greenspan, who was, I believe, head of the Federal Reserve back then, observed that there was a strange phenomenon where productivity was going up, but inflation was really low, which in turn let them keep interest rates relatively low. Where is that tech driven productivity gain that we're supposed to be getting? And if we're gaining productivity, shouldn't tech companies be able to hold prices stable?

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Owen Thomas]

That's what makes me a little suspicious of that reflexive, oh, let's just raise prices. Why are tech companies not able to capture themselves the gains of technology? And part of it is that AI right now is kind of in this early investment stage where it is really expensive and maybe not as good as it needs to be and maybe we'll get there on the curve. But yeah, I'm suspicious when companies kind of push through price increases. Whatever. The rationale is, I like AI and.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm surprised to hear, Ed, you say that nobody wants AI. Don't people, don't people want AI? Or am I?

[Ed Bott]

Again, again, I will say, I will say I have read, I mean literally, literally thousands of comments, including in forums that are for AI, for, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

For copilot, AI focused forums.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, yeah. And, and I, I cannot find a single person saying, I like this. It's worth the extra $3 a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, go ahead, Sam.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

No, no, Sam, I was saying to your comments on, about, you know, technology improving productivity with AI, you know, what we end up having to do most of the time is double check everything that the AI is doing. So we have to do it anyway in addition to using the AI. And so we're not actually getting, at least for right now and probably for the foreseeable future. We're not actually for most people, I would say, not necessarily for everybody. I think for, for, for programmers, for developers, there's probably a lot of benefits to AI and is, you know, certainly Leo, you've talked about it a lot out of it, your list GPT thing. But I think for most average people that just need to write documents, write emails, do spreadsheets, there's not actually any real productivity benefit to AI yet and there probably won't be for quite some time as long as we can't actually trust it to do the right thing.

[Leo Laporte]

GitHub Copilot is very popular, right?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, but that's one example. Like I said, for developers there's definitely some benefits there, but even there it's a starting point. But for the average person, that's using tools like Microsoft Office. I don't think that there actually is any benefit.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want it and they don't want the price. If they had done this without a price increase, would it have been more palatable?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Probably.

[Ed Bott]

If they had offered it. If they had offered it as an option. If they had popped up a dialog box that said, here's a new feature. It's included with your suite. Yes or no. You know, and the idea, though, that they rolled it out and put this thing there, and it is very much in your face. If you're typing in a Word document, that little. There's a little Copilot icon that marches down the page at every line.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like another clippy, in other words.

[Ed Bott]

And people have made that comparison. But if you scroll to the end of my article, you'll see that I asked Copilot if it could explain the benefit of this.

[Leo Laporte]

This one, this year?

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It says, if you asked If I have 84 million subscribers who pay me $10 a month and I increase their monthly fee by 3 miles, how much extra revenue? Well, let's do the math. So you're saying it's another $252 million a month, is that right? Okay.

[Ed Bott]

Yes, yes. Yeah. So to go to the bottom, those last two lines there.

[Leo Laporte]

So would you make an additional 3 billion a year from this feeding fee increase? What are you planning to do with all this extra revenue? Well, actually, we know, because this stuff is really expensive. I don't know if this is even a net profit for Microsoft. Is it?

[Ed Bott]

This is. Oh, no, it's. Oh, no, it's extremely. I think I recall reading 50 or 60 billion dollars in capex for this year, almost all of it related to AI type stuff. And, and this is only. Now, the thing is, though, that $3 billion is from a relatively small business unit in Microsoft. The consumer version of Microsoft 365 is not where the money is. Right, but they've got. But, but the other thing that I.

[Leo Laporte]

Asked Copilot, OpenAI charges 200 bucks a. A month for OpenAI Pro. And they say we're still not making money on that because so many people are using it so extensively.

[Ed Bott]

Right. And Microsoft charges $30 per seat right on top of. Yeah, for the business. Yeah, for the business version. And. But the other, you know, the other question that I asked Copilot at the end there was, so what happens If I. If 10% of my subscribers cancel as a result of this? And it said, you know what? You're still going to make $1.7 billion in extra revenue. So how do you feel about that?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me ask you this and all three of you can respond. Microsoft has, I mean, you mentioned recall, but it's a long history of Microsoft fumbling these PR opportunities. They're clearly not good at this. The very fact that everything's got the same name is clearly pointing to a lack of imagination. All of their Outlook is the name of all of their many different Outlook email products. Copilot is the name of their many different, very different AI things. They botched, Recall. They botched. I mean, you can go back to Clippy. They bought, they've. But they're tech. But that's just the PR marketing side. Their technology is pretty good. Yes or no?

[Owen Thomas]

Do you remember when Microsoft added. Net to every product name?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, this is like that. It's two different divisions and one is competent, one's incompetent.

[Owen Thomas]

I think it is just like a cultural problem at Microsoft where they are bad at, bad at product names in particular. Like, yeah, they're not terrible at marketing overall. Like clearly, you know, I think that's.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Actually at all big companies. The bigger a company gets, the worse it gets at stuff like that. Apple is.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at Google.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, Google is terrible at that. Automakers are also terrible at it. Yeah, every big company is terrible at product naming.

[Ed Bott]

There is one. There is one reason for reusing all those names, however, which is, I don't know if you remember, you know, 10, 12 years ago when Microsoft had their, when they released their first cloud storage system and they called it SkyDrive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. They got in trouble, they got sued.

[Ed Bott]

They got sued and they had to change the name because of Rupert Murdoch's Sky Media in the uk. So they lost that one. And so in a lot of cases, the impetus to go with a name and use it across many things is because you're not going to have any legal problems. And when you're as big as Microsoft or you're as big as Google or Apple, you are a target for your target for lawsuits. And so there is some, you know, there's some justification for that. But I found an article when I was doing some research for this one, I found an article that I wrote in 2010 and everything was called Live. Then it was Windows Live. And so they stuck Live on the end of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Trademark lawsuits. We own the name. Let's just call everything the same name.

[Ed Bott]

You know, law, when, when the lawyers and yeah, the lawyers.

[Leo Laporte]

There is still a good. I mean, is the technology Good. I mean, okay, patch Tuesday last week, what was that? 169 flaws patched more than ever since 2017. 30 days. Maybe they aren't even that good technologically. They're.

[Ed Bott]

They're a big target.

[Leo Laporte]

They're a big target.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I asked Steve Gibson this on security now. I said, is the problem that there is a billion and a half Windows users? So they're, you know, there's going to be, they're going to find more flaws and fix more flaws than smaller operating systems. So, Ed, you cover Microsoft. Is Microsoft. What do you think?

[Ed Bott]

I think they've done. Their technology has improved dramatically in the last decade. They've gotten, yeah, they've gotten their processes together. In some cases it's boring, but boring is good. You don't want to have bad headlines. And so I think Windows is actually a pretty good product these days. It looks good, it works well.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the most popular operating system after Android.

[Ed Bott]

It's reliable. And the Office stuff, if you can make the copilot stuff, you know, reach its proper place, is, is actually also, is also quite good. You know, I don't hear, I don't hear a lot of complaints about that that aren't sort of either edge cases or just sort of the normal. You know, when you have a small percentage of a very large number, it might seem like it's a, you know, it's a lot of problems. But I know one way a billion.

[Leo Laporte]

And a half people, I know we're in place that 3/extra 3 billion might be going. This week, the President, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison of Oracle, a bunch of. Sam Altman of OpenAI announced a new half trillion dollar over four years project called Stargate to create an AGI. Elon subtweeted this, by the way, saying I know for a fact they don't have the money. To which Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said, well, I know I'm good for the 80 billion. Okay. I think he's referring to the 80 billion in Azure credits that they've given OpenAI, I would guess. But hey, credits count. I'm good for my 80 billion. I love that. All right. Well, I started to have to lead with such a fascinating subject. You can see it was that of the colors of the S25. So I think we've, I think we've, we've bested that. Anyway, I checked.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

There actually are four additional colors and ones you mentioned.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what colors?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

There's three. There's three that are online only.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Which is the blue black, the coral red, and the pink gold that you mentioned. But there's four others that you can get in stores which are navy, which is a darker blue, mint, which is a light green.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are boring.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Icy blue. There's icy blue.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's boring.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And silver shadow. So I mean, there's seven colors, and they're arguably more vibrant colors than those you can get on an iPhone Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Vibrant? Is that vibrant? Those are those vibrant colors you're looking at.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, have you checked out iPhone Pro lately?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's true. They're not exactly so. All right. Coral red, blue, black, titanium, jade green. All right. Anyway, it's fine. It's fine. That's the big story is this S25 announcement. The problem was everybody already knew even the color names weeks ago because every. For some reason Samsung managed to get everything.

[Ed Bott]

And they did spend a lot of time talking about Galaxy AI in that event. Oh yeah, this week. But most of that is integration with Google Gemini, as far as I can tell.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ed Bott]

So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

The AI world is pretty incestuous, which is why this Deep Seek R1 was so interesting, because this is an AI that came out of China they claim was developed for very little money and is doing reasoning that seems to be as good as O1, the Premier AI from OpenAI. So that's why that was the other story we could.

[Owen Thomas]

It does make me wonder, you know, the Biden administration has been. Had been really tightening the screws on China's AI sector by limiting its access to Nvidia chips and other chip technology. Is that just forcing China's AI sector to get smarter than us?

[Leo Laporte]

Essentially, that's exactly the point from Wired's article about this from J. Yang, who says, let's see, Deep seeks success points to an unintended outcome of the tech cold war between the US and China. US export controls, as you pointed out, have severely curtailed the ability of Chinese tech firms to compete on AI in the Western way, I.e. by infinitely scaling up, buying more chips, training for a longer period of time. As a result, most Chinese companies have focused on downstream applications rather than building their own models. Deepseek apparently uses Meta's Llama model, which is a, I'm going to put this in air quotes, open model. It's not open source, it's just other people can use it, which is kind of what that means. Even though they're calling it open source. Deepseek has proven there's another way to win by revamping the foundational structure of AI models and using limited resources more efficiently. They did buy 10,000 Nvidia chips to do this. It's funded by a hedge fund billionaire. He made a lot of money and decided that he wanted to start Deep Seek. It started as something called Fireflyer, a deep learning research branch of High Flyer, which is the hedge fund I mentioned. I think it's an interesting story and people who've used Deep Seq say it's great unless you ask it about Tiananmen Square because it is Chinese. It just shows that there is a lot of creativity, I think, in the AI sphere and that there is no one way to solve this problem. It's very interesting. Liang, the founder, told a Chinese tech publication the decision was driven by scientific curiosity rather than desire to turn a profit. I wouldn't be able to find a commercial reason for Deep Seq, even if you ask me to. It's not worth it commercially. Must be nice to have so much money. You could say, you know what we should do? We should spend it on Nvidia cards. Basic science research has very low return on investment ratio. Liang said when even when OpenAI early investors gave it money, they sure weren't thinking about how much return they would get. Rather it was that they really wanted to do this thing. It's actually very cool that they've succeeded. Although it does put into doubt the US's policy to keep these chips out of Chinese hands.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, even if you were able to keep the Chinese from buying Nvidia processors, one thing that we're increasingly starting to see is use of other types of processors. The Nvidia processors are good, great at essentially brute forcing the problem. Right. But they're not, they're not actually that highly optimized for doing the very specific types of calculations. They do have, like the Blackwell processor and others. The previous generations have tensor cores in them that are very optimized for this. But increasingly, as you get into these LLMs, what you need is something even more highly optimized for doing matrix math. And if you can get to that, and that's, you know, we're seeing increasing development of these matrix optimized. Matrix math optimized processors are way more efficient at doing the kinds of calculations you need to do to do AI with much less power consumption.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, though, when he sees this, because he's the one who's raised all this money, he's the one, one of the people spearheading Stargate looking to spend half a trillion dollars. These guys don't have anywhere near the resources and they don't have access to the hardware. Wired writes. Deepseek has also made significant progress on something called Multi Head, Latent Attention, MLA and Mixture of Experts, two technical designs that make deep seat models more cost effective, requiring fewer computing resources to train. In fact, according to the research institution EPIC AI, DeepSeek's latest model required one tenth the computing power of Meta's comparable Llama 31 to train. So there, you know, sometimes it's true, isn't it? In the world when you have constraints, you, you get, you're forced to get creative and maybe even do a better job. It's very interesting. Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I mean, that's, I thought that was where all the best engineering comes from, is having, having constraints.

[Ed Bott]

I thought that was an interesting and odd remark, that quote that you read about the guy saying basic research doesn't have a return on investment. That might literally be true because by definition basic research isn't designed to turn into a product. But I think some of the most important products of our lifetime and the last couple generations have been sort of have come out of accidental discoveries from basic research. Sure, right. You know, you bet, you know, semiconductors and such. So, you know, there's a, there's a strong case to be made for funding basic research, you know, both at the government level and by private capital, because you know, that, that you're, you know, that somebody's going to get lucky and find something amazing that, that nobody thought of.

[Leo Laporte]

We. And of course you can go ahead.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Sam, if you can, then, if you can let somebody else do that funding of the basic research and then when they find something, then take that and create the applications, which is what it looks like Deep Seq is doing here to commercialize it. You know, if you can continue to rely on somebody else to do that basic research and, and give you those, those, those foundational layers that you can then build on to build technology applications, why wouldn't you do it? Especially, you know, at this point in time, you know, and then, you know, as you grow and, and start actually start to generate some revenue and some profits, then maybe you start doing some of your own basic research.

[Leo Laporte]

But also, excuse me if I'm a little cynical, but I mean, this is a guy operating out of communist China and it is definitely in the Chinese government's interest to show that it can still compete even with the sanctions placed on it by the United States. So I imagine even if he's not getting any concrete remuneration for his research.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Efforts, there's probably support.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a little bit of support and encouragement and even maybe a medal in it for him. Who knows? I don't know. This is. But it's also good if again, we have to somewhat put some faith in what they're saying and they could be making this. We don't know really. And as always with AI, you don't really know what's going on. So there's a certain amount of trust here, but. Wired quotes a professor of university at the University of Technology, Sydney, Marina Zhang, who studies Chinese innovations. She says unlike many Chinese AI firms that rely heavily on access to advanced hardware, Deepseek is focused on maximizing software driven resource optimization. They've embraced open source methods, pooling collective expertise and fostering collaborative innovation. This approach not only mitigates resource constraints but accelerates the development of cutting edge technologies. So bravo. I mean, right. We should all be in favor of that. That's a good thing. By the way, they are releasing this model and giving it away for free. So they are putting their mouth where their money is. That doesn't make a lot of sense. You know what I'm saying? They're giving it away where their mouth is. You know that's. Yeah, but they didn't. Yeah, well, they're putting their robot where the AI. I don't know. We'll have to come up with something for this era, this, the AI era.

[Owen Thomas]

We'll ask ChatGPT to work on.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you. Yeah, that's good. See, this is exactly the kind of thing I think chatgpt be very good at. We're gonna take a little break. We have lots more to talk about, I think. AI we got some more AI stuff we should talk about Stargate a little bit. Owen's got brought some San Francisco news along from the San Francisco Business Times. Good, good, good, Anya. Including an interview with Julia hartz, a Web 2.0 legend. Still around. We got more to come. You stay right here. You're watching this Week in Tech with my buddy Ed Bott, who I've known since what, COMDEX days, I think long time.

[Ed Bott]

It's been more years than either one of us wants to used to come.

[Leo Laporte]

On with me and Dvorak on Dvorak on computers back in the Saturday mornings, right?

[Ed Bott]

Sunday mornings.

[Leo Laporte]

Sunday mornings, yeah.

[Ed Bott]

Sunday mornings, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of fun. I've known Owen Thomas for some time too, come to think of it. Managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times. It's always great to see you, Owen.

[Owen Thomas]

I have one COMDEX flashback. It involves Bill Gates and Third Eye blind. And I remember that the memories are blurry. Beyond that, you might, you might have been at that exact party.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I was. I remember the, the white man's overbite, or as we now call it, the Bite D Bill is. I think I danced like five feet away from Bill Gates for a while at Comdex, one of Dvorak's famous parties. It's great to have you, Owen. And of course my buddy the car guy, Sam applesamid [e-mail] hire them and also his great podcast, Wheelbearingstot Media. We were talking about Robbie on Wednesday because I asked, why does San Francisco, why does Sonoma county, why is my town, my little town, have so many cover bands? And Bonito reminded me that Robbie has like seven cover.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, Robbie's in half of them. I think he's got, he's got a Daft Punk band, a Talking Heads band, a Depot band. Yeah. A back cover band. I can't remember the others. Now there's at least Beastie Boys band.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yes, I think he does a Beastie Boys one. Yeah. Wow. So, all right.

[Leo Laporte]

And we also. I want to talk cars with you, Sam, because there's a lot of lot going on, including maybe a little trouble in paradise with Adolf Hitler, as they call him. We're gonna take it, but that's not. It's nothing funny about that. And we're gonna take a break and talk about it in just a bit. You're watching this Week in Tech. Our show today brought to you by, I'm very happy to say, Oracle. Even if you think AI might be a little bit overhyped, it really is suddenly everywhere. From self driving cars to molecular medicine, and yes to business efficiency. In fact, if it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed, a lot of computing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Oracle OCI OCI is a blazing, fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. But here's the great thing. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. So you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, Sunoai. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new U.S. customers with minimum financial commitment. The offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer. Oracle.com TWIT that's Oracle.com TWIT you support us when you use that address, so please do. Oracle.com TWIT are Tesla sales falling off, Sam?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, they were. Let's see. Overall, globally, I think they were down by about 4 or 5% last year, and they were up by about 6.7% in the U.S. despite adding sales of the cybertruck. So even with the cybertruck, which only sold about 35,000 units last year, half.

[Leo Laporte]

Of them to Petaluma, I see them all over our little town. Yeah, it's wild. My neighbors just bought one.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Oh, sounds like it's time to move.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not the most attractive vehicles.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Not at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is it because of Elon's association with the new administration or.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

That is a big part of it. I know I personally know a number of people that have sold their Teslas in the last year, year and a half.

[Leo Laporte]

Political.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, particularly, particularly since, since he bought Twitter, but especially in the last year. You know, people don't want to be associated with them. And even people that are keeping their cars because, you know, they can't necessarily afford to get rid of them. You know, they may have a car loan that they're paying off.

[Leo Laporte]

They get the bumper sticker that says, I bought sticker.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, no Elon, or. Yeah, I bought this before I knew Elon was a jerk or, you know, or other other words. And so, you know, there's a lot of people that are kind of stuck with them for now. And, you know, I mean, that's, that's fair. I, I, you know, I, I know, you know, if I was $10,000 underwater on a loan, on a car loan, I probably wouldn't be selling it to buy something else right now either. Yeah. So it's, you know, it, it's a challenge, you know, and there's a lot of people who like the idea of electric cars, and, you know, there, there's, there are good reasons to, you know, to have a Tesla if you want an EV because of the charging infrastructure, but they do not want to be associated with this guy because of what he is doing outside of, of the company, and they don't want to be financially supporting him.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know for a fact that it's because of the politics. It could very well be that there are just many more competing vehicles.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, yeah, and that's, that's why I say, you know, the, the politics is just Just is one part of it. But there, you know, there's also the fact that, you know, their lineup, their products are getting older. They haven't really fundamentally changed.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say it's a testament to the original design though, that they don't look out of date, they don't look old fashioned.

[Owen Thomas]

True.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

But even, even with that, you know, it's pretty rare that, you know, that, that automakers don't make more regular changes. You know, people don't want to necessarily be, especially those that are buying new cars, don't necessarily want to be driving the same thing that they bought five years ago. Yeah, 10 years ago. You know, so even, even cars that, you know, have a very evolutionary design process, like say the Porsche 911, you know, a Porsche 911, you look at one today, you look in the 1960s.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

You know, it's a very different car, but you can see the DNA there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And you know, mustache. That's not necessarily, you know, with, in the case of Tesla's, you know, it's much more, there's much less change that's visible. There's actually a lot of, strangely enough, there's actually a lot of change under the skin.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

That people are not aware of.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think people maybe who buy Teslas are more aware of that. There's, he's. Tesla's still have a technological lead, don't they, in efficiency?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Not necessarily, no. I think like in terms of you looking at efficiency, lucid is absolutely the best efficiency. And you know, a lot of other automakers, you know, are in the same ballpark as Tesla in terms of efficiency, in terms of charging speeds. So. And, and you know, that's the other thing. There's a lot more competition now. There's a lot more EVs in the marketplace today than there were five, seven years ago. And you know, I, I was just going, if you wanted through the sales numbers this week, and you know, except for the Volkswagen ID4 and some Mercedes EV models, pretty much every other EV model on the market in the US Their sales have gone up. Last year, Tesla went down. VW and Mercedes went down. Everybody else was up.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And Tesla's share of the EV market in the US has dropped steadily over the last five years. In 2020, there were about 80% of all EV sales. In 2023 they were at 55%. Last year they were down to 47% of EV sales.

[Owen Thomas]

And for years, Tesla made a lot of money selling kind of a sort of tax credit to other car companies because they, you know, Tesla basically had more credits than it knew what to do with and these other companies weren't selling enough EVs and it kind of made for a nice trade for well.

[Leo Laporte]

And good on Elon. I mean you could say that he jump started the EV market and of.

[Owen Thomas]

Course now what he wants to do is have, you know, have his buddy Trump take away.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is puzzling to me.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, no, it makes perfect sense if you think about it. He's still got 47% of the market. Take away the subsidies for all the other smaller players which by the way Tesla no longer qualifies for because it's gotten too big. So.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

No, they do.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, they still qualify.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I think when they did the Inflation reduction Act in 2022 and revamped the tax credit scheme, Tesla was again, well believed. The vehicles that have us built batteries.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And are. Yeah. Were qualified again.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. There was a period when Tesla kind of maxed out on the credits. But simply because of its scale, Tesla is going to benefit. If you take away subsidies, Tesla is probably going to be in a better financial position car by car than, than anyone who's manufacturing at smaller scale.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that, I mean it does seem that only who has the President's ear must have argued against removing the EV subsidies or. No.

[Ed Bott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

That doesn't appear to be the case. Yeah, it doesn't appear that he is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why not? Doesn't that hurt him?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I think he feels like he's going to continue selling Teslas anyway with or without the subsidies that customers are going to continue buying them.

[Leo Laporte]

So Owen's essential point is that it hurts other people more than it hurts Tesla.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, because Tesla, because they build so many EVs, they do have the economies of scale on the EV side and the way that they've designed their cars, they've, they've managed to take a lot of cost out of them. And so it seem, it appears that they can make, they could, they can sell their EVs profitably whereas others can't. And without the, the tax credits then, then others would. Other manufacturers, they have a harder time selling their EVs and would then potentially have to go to Tesla to buy those ZEV credits. Those are emission vehicle credits. But the, the, the other part of this is that what Trump also wants to do is he wants to roll back the emissions and fuel economy standards which are part of the, and eliminate California's waiver to set their own standards.

[Leo Laporte]

He calls it the elimination of unfair subsidies and other ill conceived government imposed market distortions that favor EVs.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Right. And then if he, if they do that, if they succeed in doing that, then other manufacturers won't be. Won't have to sell as many EVs to meet the. Meet the requirements that they want to roll it back to. And then they wouldn't have to buy credits from Tesla. So Tesla still gets hurt. So it doesn't make sense why Musk would want to roll back those standards.

[Leo Laporte]

Or maybe he doesn't have as much clout as we assumed.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

That's certainly a possibility.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, it looks like Doge, which was initially the Department of Governmental Efficiency with the MEME name, was going to be slashing federal bureaucracies and now it looks like it's been absorbed. It's actually, they took the US Digital Services, which our friend Matt Cutts had started, or it was part of, and have renamed it Doge. So now what was going to be something a little bit more drastic is really boiled down to, well, it's going to help improve digital infrastructure in the U.S. government. That sounds like a demotion. Vivek Rajaswamy has left to run for governor of Ohio. It's.

[Ed Bott]

Well, has left is an interesting way to put it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was he fired?

[Ed Bott]

Well, it certainly sounds like he was pushed out.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, he didn't get what he. He didn't. He didn't like the direction Doge was going.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, Elon. Elon never likes to have anybody that's on the same level as him.

[Leo Laporte]

I was shocked that, that they, that they created a co chairmanship. Yeah. It was inevitable that Elon department had.

[Ed Bott]

A government deficiency department.

[Leo Laporte]

It's already a problem.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

It was pretty much inevitable that Elon Musk was going to find one of them was going to go, just as if he. Just as he has with anybody else that threatened his position at any of his companies.

[Leo Laporte]

But Doge does seem to be somewhat reduced. So I'm. I'm just wondering, maybe Elon just doesn't have the, the cloud he thought he had.

[Ed Bott]

I mean, he's busy gaming.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, that's the number one. What? I forget which game it was number one.

[Leo Laporte]

He's admitted essentially that he, he farmed all of his equipment and gear and that when he plays, the real players are going, he's an idiot. He just walked by. It's a very important drop and ignored it.

[Owen Thomas]

Wasn't Grimes tweeting about how the father of her children was.

[Leo Laporte]

He did a little hostage tweet. Yeah. It had very much that hostage flair to it. You want me to read It. It was actually pretty funny. I can find it. Then we will talk a little bit about Twitter, because Twitter also in the news. You know, come to think of it, maybe a few things did happen. Grimes. Elon tweet. It had a very. Let's see.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, she's been embroiled in. In a custody thing with Elon for a while now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Over at least a couple of the. The three kids that they had together.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Only one of which she actually gave birth to. The other two are with surrogates.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, really?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, she. Apparently she had some major medical issues during birth of the first one.

[Leo Laporte]

You must be reading People magazine. I didn't. I missed that one.

[Owen Thomas]

And, you know, and apparently the. The kid who has a long, unpronounceable name but goes by X has been at Elon's side, like in. In. In Mar A Lago. You know, it just strikes me like he's got, what, 11 plus kids?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

There's at least 12 that we know of.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, probably more like, is there a website? How many kids does Elon Musk have?

[Leo Laporte]

No, but that's a good idea for a site. Maybe you want to.

[Owen Thomas]

Or should I just ask ChatGPT? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Grimes tweeted, just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first American druid in Diablo to clear abattoir of Zir and ended that season as the best in the usa. He was also ranking in Polytopia and beat Felix himself at the game. This is the hostage statement. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who could verify this. That is all. Now, please give me custody of my children. No, I left that. I added that at the end.

[Owen Thomas]

Wait, Leo, you don't actually follow Grimes. I'm disappointed.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. You're right. You caught me out. I do not follow Grimes. Come on. I follow Elon. So Elon is denying now that he said this, but it was. I did see it in the Wall Street Journal that X is. He sent out an email to employees. And you can deny it all you want, but it's kind of hard once you send out an email. The Wall Street Journal reported that X is barely breaking even, struggling. To which a number of banks have responded by saying, yeah, we're going to try to get out of as much of this. They're preparing to sell billions of dollars of their loans at. They're hoping 90 to 95 cents on the dollar, which actually, if they get out at that price, they did pretty.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, I think especially considering the interest rates. They issued those loans right before rates started soaring. So great timing for Elon, but terrible for the banks. I don't know the exact math, but I would be surprised if they got 90 cents on the dollar just based on the differential in prevailing rates right now.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, they, but those loans are all. Those are personally guaranteed, aren't they?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, they're guaranteed with. He put up his Tesla stock.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Ed Bott]

So those are very, very safe investments. If you, you know, whatever price you can get for those, you're, you know, you're going to get your money.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. That's a good point. 13 billion of the 44 billion Elon.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, but you could just buy T bills is my point, and get a bank.

[Leo Laporte]

Banks have to diversify. Right. The lenders include Mitsubishi, bnp, Societe Generale. There are a few sovereign wealth funds, I believe, involved in all of this. The email said over the past few months we've witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes, which I would argue makes X pretty valuable. Right. We're also seeing other platforms beginning to adopt our commitment to. And I'm going to put this in air quotes, free speech and unbiased truth. Okay. He apparently is referring to meta rolling back. It's fact checking. So even if you lose money. Yeah. A, you've got that spoolie pulpit that's hugely valuable to Elon personally anyway. B, the banks aren't going to really. They've got it. It's backed by, I mean, what happens if Tesla stock tanks, Sam, is that, that means that their collateral is worth a lot less.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there any chance of that happening.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Right now, given who's in power in Washington right now? Probably not.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably not.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

But you know, if he, by the.

[Leo Laporte]

Way, Elon denies this email, which is bizarre.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I don't know, if Trump had lost, you know, it would probably be a different situation. But yeah, the, the, you know, if Tesla shares were to drop, you know, because he, he used the shares as collateral, you know, then he would potentially. They could call in the loans, he would potentially have to liquidate and for that could, could have forced a downward spiral of Tesla shares, but didn't happen. What has happened is since the election, the value of Tesla has skyrocketed and Elon's personal share of Tesla has gone up by something like 100 or $150 billion since, since did he get his.

[Leo Laporte]

$56 billion in annual pay?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

No, the, the, the, the, the judge in Delaware declared that that vote was still invalid. He still does not get that money.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah. The shareholders. Oh. The judge ruled he couldn't have it. Shareholders at the shareholders meeting said, no, no, he deserves it. So the judge came back and said, no, he doesn't. It's.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That those chancery judges are tough.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that's. That's why. That's why he reincorporated the company in Texas.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, Much better place.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon responded to the Wall Street Journal with this tweet, and this is why Twitter is valuable to him or X is valuable to him. The report is false. I sent no such email. Wall Street Journal is lying. And then, of course, immediately his fans say, why do these legacy media keep lying? I was excited about the fact that. That X is breaking even. Huh? Huh?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Why would you care if you're not a shareholder? Why would you care if it's breaking even?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. By the way, I've been informed, I did not know this, that the dance Elon's doing here is the X. He's making the X of X. I thought he was just kind of a. A nerd.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, those two are not mutually exclusive.

[Ed Bott]

Not mutually exclusive.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the obsession with X? It's so weird.

[Owen Thomas]

He owned the domain for a long, long time, and single letter domains were very rare.

[Leo Laporte]

He bought it in the PayPal era, I believe.

[Owen Thomas]

No, no. Free payback.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Prepaid now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

X.com is. Was his company that merged with the other company.

[Owen Thomas]

I have an X.com debit card in my. In my archive of.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Owen Thomas]

Of fintech paraphernalia.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Nice.

[Owen Thomas]

So sometime in the 2010s, I think, 2015 or so, he actually bought the X.com domain back from PayPal.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Owen Thomas]

Which had. Which had owned it since the. Since the merger.

[Ed Bott]

And he wanted. And he wanted to turn PayPal into the everything. The everything. Yeah, the Everything site and give it the name X. And so, you know, so he just. Now he has Twitter and, you know, I haven't heard much about his plans to turn Twitter into a bank and everything, but, you know, every. Ultimately every Silicon Valley company wants to become a bank.

[Leo Laporte]

That's funny, because Goldman Sachs, which got the coveted Apple card, is desperate to get at a consumer because they've lost billions of dollars on it. So maybe you shouldn't want to be a bank. Maybe it's not such a good thing.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, they lost billions because they did a bad deal with Apple. And yeah, I want to.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple, how do you lose a billion dollars on a credit card? I mean, I know how I would, but how does the bank do that? Isn't it just a license to make money? Normally, yeah, I guess printing all those titanium cards cost a lot of money.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, also Goldman, you know, Goldman made a lot of rookie mistakes. You heard about incidents where, you know, say someone would get a card and then their spouse would be denied an Apple card, which, you know, just speaks to like questionable underwriting.

[Leo Laporte]

Alexis Ohanian, wasn't it? Alexis? Who was it that said I could get the car but my wife couldn't? Yeah, yeah. So, okay, we're take a break. When we come back, here's a riddle for you. It's almost as big as Manhattan and Mark Zuckerberg is building it right now. Whatever could it be? Is it his new yacht? Stay tuned. You're watching this Week in Tech. Owen Thomas is here, San Francisco Business Times. Great to have you. My old friend Ed Bott, also here many a magazine. He's now senior contributing editor at ZDNet. Does that mean you just kind of file whenever you feel like it? Is that what that means?

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, that's probably a pretty accurate job description.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I got an idea. I'm going to take the week off. How about that? Also Samo Samid, my car guy. Telemetryagency.com Our show this week, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. I know we've all heard a lot about the word zero trust. Well, Zscaler's a remarkable way to implement it. Enterprises have spent so much time, so much money, building perimeter defenses, firewalls, and then of course, VPNs so that employees can still get to the assets they need to access. Has that protected us?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Breaches continue to rise like crazy. There was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks last year and a record $75 million payout. This is crazy. Traditional security tools like firewalls expand your attack service with public facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors. And now the bad guys are using AI to create new exploits faster and easier than ever. It's really bad out there. Plus then of course, you're using a vpn, but you struggle to inspect the outbound encrypted traffic at scale. So once the bad guys get in, they can exfiltrate your data with impunity. Well, there's one more thing. This perimeter defense solution with the VPN to get in enables its lateral movement. It connects users to the entire network. Once they're inside the network just assumes, oh, they're legit. So they can. The bad guy can go anywhere, can exfiltrate all that data via encrypted traffic that you can't even see. Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructure using AI to outpace your defenses. Now it's time to rethink your security. We cannot let the bad actors win. They're innovating and exploiting your defenses faster than you are. Unless you use Zscaler Zero Trust+AI. It stops attackers by hiding your attack surface, which makes your apps and IPs invisible to the bad guys. That's a great start. But then it also eliminates lateral movement. Just because a user's in the network doesn't mean they get access to everything. Zscaler connects users only to specific apps, not the entire network. And it continuously verifies every request based on identity and context, simplifying security management with AI powered automation. You got to do it. Because Zscaler is analyzing over half a trillion daily transactions, half a trillion every day. Use an AI to find that needle in that giant haystack that tells you this is a threat. This is a threat. This is how they're getting in. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust and AI. Learn more at Zscaler.com Security Zscaler.com Security we thank him so much for supporting this week in text zscaler.com security so what is this giant thing? Here's a picture of it superimposed over the island of Manhattan. That, my friends, is a data center. The Richland Parish Data Center. Mark put this picture up on on Facebook saying this will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than a billion people. Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model and will build this is the scary one and a. We will build an AI engineer and we will build an AI engineer. We have the technology that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to an R and D efforts. To power this, Meta is building a 2 gigawatt plus data center so large it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan. We'll bring online a gigawatt of compute in 2025 and end the year with more.

[Owen Thomas]

Has anyone told Mark that you can build buildings higher? Like you have multiple stories?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Where is this? Richland Park. Where is this?

[Ed Bott]

Well, there's a Richland in eastern Washington.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that makes sense. That's where you'd want it because you.

[Ed Bott]

Get lots of hydro, lots of Hydropower.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He says we're going to end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs.

[Owen Thomas]

This one's in Louisiana, which makes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's in Parish, of course. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Planning to invest 60 to 65 billion in capex this year, while also growing our AI team. What happened to the Metaverse? Hold on, Mark.

[Ed Bott]

You know, it didn't have legs, Leo.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Oh, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, I like it. It didn't.

[Owen Thomas]

You haven't heard about the plan to rename. Rename Meta. Facebook with an I F, A I Facebook. I got that one from ChatGPT. That's no good. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell him to. Tell him to go back, tweak my prompts, work a little harder.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Of course, you know, all these data centers is probably part of the reason why, you know, Trump has this executive order to open up drilling everywhere, you know, to, to drill for more oil and gas, because they, they, you know, he, he wants it to power all these data centers because these things are consuming huge amounts of power. Notice in, in this, in this post, he, he doesn't talk about how much it can actually compute. He talks about gigawatts. This is the amount of power it's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

That's power. It's 4 million square feet. Yeah. It doesn't say what kind of computing.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Capability over 2 gigawatts of power. Well, he's got 1.3 million GPUs, but 2 gigawatts of power is an enormous amount of power because, you know, if it wasn't for these, these AI data centers, we actually don't need to do any more oil and gas drilling or coal drilling. We already produce way more oil and gas than we need. You know, the US Is now the number one, the world's number one exporter of oil and gas. We, we export more than Saudi Arabia does.

[Leo Laporte]

That was under Biden, by the way, that that happened.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And, you know, so we don't need to be producing more. And in fact, if, if we did produce more, it actually would go down. Well, but. Except it wouldn't. Because the thing is, because we're not consuming it right now, people are not consuming the oil and gas if the price does go down. Right now, oil is about 75, $80 a barrel, and almost all of the oil and gas we produce now comes from fracking. And the cost of producing oil and gas from fracking is in somewhere in the 60 to 65 dollars a barrel range. So, so if oil prices actually dropped below that range, what happens is they just stop producing, they stop drilling more. That's what happened back in the mid 2010s when we had oil prices that were over a hundred dollars a barrel. We started doing all this fracking and all of a sudden oil because it was economical to do to $40 a barrel and all that fracking, all those fracking operations came to a grinding halt.

[Leo Laporte]

Something analogous is happening in California are our local utility says that because we're conserving so much, the price of electricity has to go up.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they've had six rate increases in the last year. Not because we're using more power, but because we're using less.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah. They need to recover their investment in the infrastructure, in the power plants and the infrastructure. So if we produce more, what's going to end up happening is if it doesn't get consumed somewhere then they'll, you know, will you just reach that equilibrium point where if the price drops they just stop producing more. So you're not actually going to be. There's no net seeing any reduction in price for consumers.

[Leo Laporte]

So to support this meta data center Enter G which is probably a chat GPT created name, the the Louisiana energy company Enter G has been around for a long time. Yeah. Will produce three combined cycle combustion turbines each with a combined capacity or no total combined capacity of 2.2 megawatts, 2.2 thousand megawatts, two of which in Richland, Paris they're going to build two new substations, six customer substations, install 100 miles of 500 kilovolt transmission lines, eight new 230 kilovolt transmission lines. This is I mean yes. To power a gigawatt data center. I'm surprised they're not building a pocket nuke.

[Owen Thomas]

By the way, combined cycle turbines are natural gas field. They're a more efficient way of extracting energy from natural gas.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's fairly clean. Right.

[Owen Thomas]

Nancy Pelosi infamously once characterized natural gas as green energy. It's still carbon and it escapes in the atmosphere.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, well and it still generates CO2.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Although. Although the CO2 has, is less greenhouse intensive than methane. So if you're fracking problem, if you're fracking and releasing methane into the atmosphere, that's about 10 to 20 times more intensive than than CO2. So between these new burn it are.

[Leo Laporte]

30 hydrogen which is absolutely better. Right. And they want to transition to 100 hydrogen.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well again except that you know, most of that hydrogen is being created by by cracking natural gas.

[Leo Laporte]

Fossil fuels. Okay.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

So unless. Unless they're using solar.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Or wind to, to produce the hydrogen from water from.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they are putting in 1500 megawatts of solar resources. I mean, it's got to do a lot to get 3 gigawatts.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, it's, it's. You know what's amazing is Texas, for example, I believe I saw a pie chart. It's getting nearly a third of its energy needs from wind and solar, which Trump has said he wants to abandon. You know, it just makes no sense, except that, I guess some, you know, Trump felt that some wind turbines in Scotland were, you know, were messing up the views from his golf course.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so this is what I don't understand. You're basically. He's basically implementing policies that are going to hurt the oil industry in the long run. Is that right, Sam? Is that what you're kind of saying?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, I don't, I don't think he actually understands.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I understand, but they understand. And why aren't they standing up and saying, hey, Mr. President, this is not what you want to do?

[Owen Thomas]

So, Leo, climate change is a hoax and we need to annex Greenland at the same time?

[Leo Laporte]

I understand all that. So I just, I, I feel like it's there.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

It's not that. It's actually not going to benefit the oil and gas industry.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they still make money.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah. Because, you know, if they produce more, you know, they'll, they'll find markets for it. And AI data centers are a prime market for burning that oil and gas to, to power data centers. That's a market for them. What I was saying is, is that consumers are not going to benefit from lower pump. Lower gas prices at the pump. We will never see lower gas prices than about three bucks a gallon.

[Leo Laporte]

So, Ed, when you talk about Microsoft making an extra 3 billion on copilot, that's a drop in the. Drop in the bucket.

[Ed Bott]

Like I said, that's a tiny little division there. They need, they need to. They need to get an order, an order or two of magnitude more.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, they have to force everybody to use Copilot for everything they do.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Otherwise they lose.

[Leo Laporte]

So the. All Tesla owners are not the only people a little mad at Elon. There are at least a hundred subreddits that are considering banning all links to X on the subreddits. And I don't know if you use Reddit, but if you use Reddit, it's all over Reddit. No more links to X. Not that many of them have had links. Some of this because it was questionable gesture at the president's inaugural rally.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I don't think there's any question about what that gesture was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, one way or the other, the subreddit seem to think so. This New Jersey subreddit, London, Ontario, the 49ers. I know my team subreddit. It's not run by the 49ers. Run by individuals. Rchristianity banned Twitter links with a gif in which musk salute was put side by side with neo Nazis R NFL hockey, baseball and NBA all considering a ban. Comic book movies. Oh, no. Made me smile. It's interesting. It's funny how. I'm just saying, where's the backlash on some of this stuff? And I guess that's maybe on Reddit. Maybe that's where the backlash is. What's going to happen to TikTok?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Does anybody. Do any of us care?

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I'm gonna. I'm in favor. I'm in favor of Tick tock. I'm a tick Tock guy. I like TikTok. My son made his career out of on TikTok. He's managed to move on. Thank God TikTok's still around. But you can't get. You can't get the app anymore from the Google Play store or the iOS store, which, by the way, has created a fairly brisk, I think, market for iPhones with TikTok still installed on eBay. Here's a $2,000 or best offer. $1,800. $3,000. Here's one. I don't know if this is going to sell for 12,481 with TikTok installed because you can't, you know, if you bought a new iPhone today, you wouldn't have TikTok on it. You couldn't install it. 10,000, 40,000, that iPhone.

[Ed Bott]

And it's an iPhone 12 too, so it's a classic.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, this is worth more because it has TikTok and cap cut. I somehow think that this is just a publicity stunt because nobody obviously is going to pay 40,000 for it.

[Ed Bott]

But, you know, there was. There was apparently.

[E]

Check this old listing.

[Ed Bott]

Oh, apparently this. This apparently happened 15 years ago or so with Flappy Bird. Was it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. When he pulled Flappy Bird back.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How do I make this? Sold only.

[E]

Oh, it's on the left somewhere.

[Ed Bott]

It's one of those checkbox on the left.

[Leo Laporte]

Box here. Sold. Lock status, price.

[Ed Bott]

Sold and completed items only.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Ed Bott]

On the lower left.

[Leo Laporte]

Show only.

[E]

Yeah, There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you. I'm an old Man, And I don't understand how the Internet works. Here's one that sold for $67. $800. Okay, okay, 120. Yeah, they're not going for 40,000, but they're. They're going 500 bucks for a 14 with TikTok, 560 for 15 Pro Max with TikTok.

[E]

But that's about what that phone should cost anyway.

[Ed Bott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So whether it has TikTok.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, this is basically an easy way to, you know, I wanted to sell this phone anyway. Now I can, I can sell it quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hysterical. It ended 685 bucks. He got it. Well, I have a phone, a few phones with TikTok installed.

[Ed Bott]

Make yourself rich.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Spare a few of those.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, I've read that. I've read that the most likely outcome for this is that that Oracle is going to wind up, you know, managing the business in the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

But they already were kind of hosting the data with Project Texas. But I guess maybe that gives them an inside track.

[Ed Bott]

And, and, and, you know, this was, this was a dumb move from, from day one and, you know, and a terrible precedent to set. And the fact that it got this far and then that the courts upheld it and said this doesn't have anything to do with the First Amendment is kind of crazy. And the best thing that could probably happen is for some sort of kabuki theater to happen where ByteDance is pulling the strings from halfway across the world. But there are American overseers who can, who can reassure the members of Congress who voted for this that everything is okay now, and then they can just stop thinking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Which is really what they would like to do at this point. Somebody in our chat room is suggesting maybe Microsoft just renamed teams to Microsoft TikTok with Copilot Plus Copilot. Thank you. Surge strip. That's a good one.

[Owen Thomas]

I mean, Meta is already weaving AI into Facebook such that I think pretty soon it's going to be suggesting what.

[Leo Laporte]

To post and writing your posts for you.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. Which just.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, they already have bots that are posting stuff.

[Owen Thomas]

They have, which they said, oh, that was a mistake. That was an accident, an early test. We've gotten rid of those.

[Leo Laporte]

That is Meta's MO, isn't it? Just do stuff when you get caught, say, oh, that was a mistake, and then move on. Is that called moving fast and breaking things? I think it is. David Sachs, who is our new AI and crypto czar. He is, of course, one of the PayPal mafia friend of Elon's, a South African like Elon, who is now a fairly important, I think, fairly important role. I guess a czar is important in the government. Yes.

[Owen Thomas]

I think that's Roloff. Both you're, you're thinking of. Who's a South African.

[Ed Bott]

No.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

So is Sachs.

[Leo Laporte]

Sachs is South African too. Yeah. Yeah, they all are.

[Ed Bott]

Africa.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little weird.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Was not born in South Africa, but he grew up there. His parents.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, his dad is so weird.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Was running a uranium mine in what is now Namibia when he was five years old.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, whether he's South African or not, he has decided that NFTs and meme coins are not securities. This is of course one of the reasons the crypto industry supported a new administration. They didn't like this idea that Gensler had of calling them securities. They're collectibles. Actually, that's true until they do a rug pull. Yeah, but they are. I mean, that's the idea. They're collectibles. Now, I don't know. His, his word has no force of law, but he does presumably advise the President. So maybe we'll see an executive order saying they're just collecting.

[Ed Bott]

You know, there's a really funny, there's a really funny thing about that distinction though. Obviously they don't want them to be called securities because they don't want them to be regulated by the SEC and other organizations. But if you look at tax laws and the capital gains taxes in the United States, the long term capital gains rates for collectibles are much higher than they are for securities. If you sell. Oh, yeah, it's really bad. So this is, you know, he is arguing to get rid of this frying pan and replace it, which is huge. This huge gigawatt fueled furnace.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa. The capital gains tax on collectibles is higher than it is for say, a stock.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh. Well, we have to fix that. I'm going to keep my board h. Just a little bit longer. I had no idea. Actually. This is the funny thing. You know, of course the crypto industry really supported not only the Trump election, but also the election of 100, I think it was 135 new members of Congress who are pro crypto and celebrated a real victory. In fact, they had the crypto inaugural ball that Snoop Dogg performed at. They've really felt like this is good. And in many ways, you know, Trump's announcement that they want to, that the US Is probably going to have a Fort Knox of Bitcoin, which is great for anybody who's passing password.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Just don't Lose the accounting.

[Leo Laporte]

Bitcoin, right? Yeah. Just don't lose the password. I know from personal experience, but the other thing that the crypto industry is a little bit shaken by is the day before he got inaugurated, Trump created a meme coin. So did Melania. And the New York Times says Trump's crypto venture divides the industry. He aims to support some.

[Ed Bott]

Well, that's shock.

[Leo Laporte]

There they are coming into the crypto ball. They look like crypto bros, don't they look like they got the crypto money. Make bitcoin great again. Baseball caps worthy. And Snoop Dogg offered a rendition of journeys. Don't stop Believing. And whatever you do, keep buying the bitcoin. It was during the party that he announced that he was going to launch Trump meme coin and crypto executives said, just where we were getting credibility, right? And we're trying to, you know, enter the mainstream. His venture, they said, created a brief. This is the New York Times. A brief and highly publicized bubble that partly deflated within a few days, even as Trump's family and its business partners collected millions of dollars from fees on the purchases and sales of the coin. Nick Carter, who is a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump, runs the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures, says it makes it all look corrupt and self interested. Really? Oh, no.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Welcome to the perpetual grift.

[Leo Laporte]

An analysis by the crypto forensics company Chainalysis showed the majority of people who bought Trump were likely inexperienced retail investors, possibly even dabbling in crypto for the first time. I think some of them are members of my family, actually, not my immediate family. Thinker. These traders, according to the analysis, roughly broke even. More than 100,000 of them lost money. Meanwhile, the launch of Trump generated $58 million in fees for the Trump family in less than a day. $58 million. Oh, and let's not forget they own on paper, 23 billion billion worth of Trump at its $29 price, which is already a 60% drop from the peak.

[Ed Bott]

Now, I mean, this is, this is the Franklin Mint, but without all that messy physical stuff that has to be done.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

You don't actually have to stamp out coins.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to do anything, just announce it. If they rug pulled, if they started to sell it, that's a rug pull and the price would go down. But if they did it quickly, talk to a girl, reap billions and billions of dollars. Asked about the coin's launch on Tuesday at the White House, Mr. Trump said, I don't know much about it.

[Owen Thomas]

It is amazing how much Trump has changed his tune about cryptocurrency. He was very specific.

[Leo Laporte]

He said, it's not money last time. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

But this time, crypto wealth helped get him elected.

[Leo Laporte]

Turns out it is money.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who knew?

[Owen Thomas]

You know, it is interesting to. To kind of think, like, if you were to wind back the clock, if Biden were to, you know, were to have told Gary Gensler, like, maybe ease up, like 10% on the crypto industry, and if Biden had, say, invited. Invited Elon Musk to, you know, an event about electric vehicles at the White House, you know, might things have turned out differently.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't know. You know, I think you really, honestly don't. You have. If you're going to make Bitcoin be what it wants to be, don't you have to regulate it like a security? Otherwise it's just a speculative.

[Owen Thomas]

I think even under Gensler, Bitcoin was going to kind of come out. Come out clean or, you know, be regulated as a commodity rather than security.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you want that, right?

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. But most other cryptocurrencies tend to be associated with an entity or a small group. And Gensler SEC was moving to regulate, like, securities. I suspect under Trump, the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission is going to end up with most oversight.

[Leo Laporte]

So there will be some oversight, you think?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

Which. That was the crypto industry's kind of preferred regulator.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They want to be somewhat respectable. That's why they don't like these.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Or at least to appear respectable.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Owen Thomas]

They just don't want SEC regulation.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

They'd rather. They'd rather this other, smaller agency.

[Leo Laporte]

Eric Trump, when asked about the Trump tokens, he dismissed criticism. He says the Trump Trading Card and World Liberty Financial are two of the most successful products in crypto history. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? How can you say it was a conflict of interest?

[E]

So I'm kind of still stuck on the NFD crypto as collectibles because they're fungible. So, like, you don't collect them. You're trying to collect all the Bitcoin. No one's trying to collect.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. He's not saying crypto. He's saying NFTs are collectibles. Right.

[Ed Bott]

And meme coins.

[E]

But mean claims.

[Leo Laporte]

No, mean coins.

[Owen Thomas]

What is the definition?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They're not. You can't say, I've got. Unless you get a nice piece of paper with gold borders on it or something like.

[E]

That's the whole point of crypto is that it's fungible.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fungible that it's all. One is the same as the other. It's not collectible. An nft, you could say, well, I've got this bored ape. I've got bored ape 304.

[Ed Bott]

But is a meme coin, is a trump meme coin fungible? I mean, there are places you can go, there are banks and retail outlets. Dell will take your bitcoin, you can pay them in Bitcoin. There's places where bitcoin is fungible. But a trump meme coin, if you were to take your phone in and show someone the, you know, the, the, the bits that say, oh, this is a Trump meme coin, I would like that car.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, I think, I don't think you're.

[Ed Bott]

Going to get very far.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, I think it's different. It, you know, it's, it's more that, you know, is it. I think your question really is that it's exchangeable for some goods or services.

[Leo Laporte]

That's different. Fungible. Fungible means they're all the same. Like one is the same as another. Right. One trump coin is the same as another trump coin.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Right. Where. Whereas, you know, two NFTs, you know, two, two. Each is unique. Dumb, dumb monkeys are different, slightly different from each other. And so, you know, they're, they're not directly exchangeable, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

You know, whether you can exchange a trump coin, you know, for some good or service, you know, that's, that's, that's not fungible, I think. I'm not sure what the, you know, I mean, exchangeable or, or legal tender, I guess, you know, would be the. Probably.

[Ed Bott]

Well, there's a. But there's also, there's also the concept of scarcity. Right. And I mean, so baseball cards, right. There's, there's more than one copy of the Mickey Mantle rookie card, you know, so, you know, and, and, and one is just like the other, except that it's not because one's worn and one has a crease in the, in the edge and, and everything. And I don't think you get the exact same variation with meme coins, but you do, at least in theory, have scarcity. If you say, you know, this is a, this is a limited run, right? And just like the, and just like the Franklin Mint or just like anyone that does limited edition prints or something, you can say it's the scarcity that makes this thing valuable and that will allow.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no scarcity of trump. I mean, well, there is, there's, but there's just millions of them of the Dollar sign, Trump.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

If only there was scarcity.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you're just gonna. I'm just gonna get more email. Now, you see, look, we're only talking about it from a point of view of a technology point of view. And this is. These are technology, technological innovations. I honestly, I looking at trying to find a silver line. I feel like the saying, let's not over regulate AI is a good thing. Right. Rolling back some of those AI, you know, Biden's AI executive order and so forth. That's not. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we want to stimulate this, this AI economy to see what happens. Now, if you think AI is bs, you disagree. And I don't know if AI is BS or not. I don't know if we're going to get super intelligence or we're going to get something super valuable. I think it's worth a try.

[Owen Thomas]

The problem is that the states are not going to stay still. California already has some AI regulations on the book, which passed in the most recent legislative session, some of which kicked in January 1st. And I think you'll see more probably from New York, I would guess would be one. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know who is not going to stand still for sure is China. We've already seen that. So I think we need to move forward. We can't get too finicky here on AI unless it truly is an existential threat to the humanity. But I don't think it is.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. I mean, and China, by the way, has been very, you know, China has cracked down on lots of tech sectors. And I think that you will see the AI that comes out of China, it's already regulated.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

We talked about how you can't ask Chinese chatbots about Tiananmen Square. So China is going to have AI with Chinese characteristics. And I think it behooves us to have AI with American characteristics.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Owen Thomas]

And think about what.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree, but I don't think, in fact, Governor Newsom vetoed that AI regulation in California because he felt like it would hold AI development back, that it was too aggressive.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, the specific one that kind of required safety testing, a kill switch and things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Biden executive order required safety testing for companies of a certain size, but the California law actually required a kill switch, which I think might have been going a bridge too far. At least it was for Governor Newsom, or Governor News scum, as the President calls him, in a very mature fashion. All right, I want to take another break here. You're watching a bunch of libtards Talk about, talk about cryptocurrency. Clearly you thought you had Twitter, but you had MSNBC all along. We'll move on from that in just a little bit. Maybe not right away. Samuel Samit is here. Owen Thomas, great to have all three of you. Ed Bot, so nice to see you. You're watching this Week in Tech, brought to you this week by my personal choice for VPNs. People are always asking me, a, you know, should I have a vpn and then B, which VPN should I get? Yes, you should have a vpn. Maybe don't use it always, but there are times when you need it. I'll be honest. 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ExpressVPN has apps for your iPhone, your Android device, your laptop, windows. It even has they even. And they sell them. They're very good server. It'll run on servers on your routers so you can protect your whole house. And the thing is, it's not a free. I'll be honest, it's not a free vpn, it's not expensive, it's less than seven bucks a month. I think even less than that. But that money is important because it supports them in doing everything they need to do to keep you safe, including rotating the IP addresses, creating those server technologies you just heard about, and providing enough bandwidth to each server so you can put it on your whole house. And nobody's going to say, hey, what happened to the Internet? It slowed down. It's fast, it supports HD video, which is another nice reason to have it. ExpressVPN is easy to use. You tap one button to turn it on and you're protected. Put it on your router, the whole family be protected. We used, I'm telling you, we use it anytime we want to get online and not be seen. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com twitt the only VPN I use and recommend. Expresvpn.com Twitter. I've had an account with them for a decade now. I think you'll get an extra four months free when you buy a two year package at expressvpn.com twitt that brings the price down to well below seven bucks a month. I think that's a look. Don't use a free VPN because if you're not paying for it, well then you are paying for it in a weird way. You're. They're, they're selling your information off. Not ExpressVPN. The best ExpressVPN.com twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. You support us too when you go to expressvpn.com twit Sir Paul McCartney says don't let AI steal all records. He he is worried about proposed changes in the United Kingdom copyright law that would allow tech companies to freely train their models on online content unless the copyright holders expressly opt out. Sir Paul says no, we're the people. You're the government. You're supposed to protect Paul. You're sounding like a hippie. You're supposed to protect us. That's your job. So if you're putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists. This is a warning or you're not going to have them. Now he's not against A.I. remember, he used A.I. to create what he called the last Beatles record to clean up a John Lennon demo and make a real song out of it. So he knows AI and he, and he uses it. But he says you get young guys and girls coming up, they write beautiful songs and they don't own it. They don't have anything to do with it. And anybody wants to can just rip it off. That money's going somewhere. Said he said it should go to the artist, not just some tech giant somewhere. I was the one who's just arguing that you shouldn't have any restrictions on AI but if Sir Paul says you should, I think having it be opt out is probably not the right way to go. Or is it?

[Owen Thomas]

Can we run Leah's voice through an AI that does a Paul McCartney accent?

[Leo Laporte]

I'll talk like this the whole time. I don't mind. That's a bad Paul McCartney I was reluctant to invoke because I like Sir Paul. He has a point saying this for a while, right?

[Ed Bott]

Yeah. And one of the things I've seen or read about lately, I haven't actually seen them myself is a lot of AI slop songs on Spotify in particular, where people would go, yeah, yeah, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, if you ask for an ambient Playlist, you know, I want a dinner party, bossa nova. Three quarters of the songs were not created by artists.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, they're just AI. They're just AI slop. And, and, and that's a place, that's a place that sort of discovery mechanism is where artists get the chance to go from unknown to cult favorite to mainstream.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ed Bott]

And, and if those discovery playlists are filled with generated crap, that is, that is, you know, built from, you know, make me something that sounds like Elvis Costello. Make me something that sounds like David Sanborn. You know, know, you're, you're never going to get, you're, you know, you're just not going to get, you're not going to have space for new artists to come up there. And I think that's exactly the same point he was making.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and frankly, Spotify, even if you are an artist, pays the least of any of the music services. So, you know, already they're kind of an AI.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

They don't pay anything and they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Have to pay anything because it can't be copyrighted. Right. There's a new study from Duetti, a new economics reports analyzing the artist's payouts for various music streaming services. Who would you think pays the most? I was surprised to see this. Per thousand streams, Amazon pays the most. Amazon Music pays $8.80 per thousand streams. Apple is second with $6.20, then Google's YouTube $4.80, then Spotify $3, almost a third less, two thirds less than Amazon. And Apple pays double what Spotify plays.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, it's interesting how Amazon music really started as this kind of defensive move to protect the CD business that they had back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Is that why they did it? Wow. Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

No, I mean, same reason for, for the Kindle. Amazon sold a lot of books. You know, they saw ebooks coming and didn't want to, didn't want to lose out. I, you know, I do wonder, you know, I do wonder if Amazon's payouts are higher because they're subscale in, in digital music. You know, do they need to go out and buy say a Sirius xm, which owns Pandora, to kind of compete with Apple and Spotify.

[E]

Yeah, I think this is a, a market share question. Like anybody who's, who has a top market share, I think is going to pay less.

[Leo Laporte]

If you look at this, it probably is exact reverse order of market share, isn't it? By the way, Spotify denies it, says those numbers are wrong. None of these companies reveal what they pay. So Spotify says we don't even pay per stream. So this. These claims are ridiculous and unfounded. No streaming service pays per stream because that would incentivize streaming services to minimize streams or use AI to generate songs. He didn't say that out loud. It would mean low engagement, fewer artist connections, and lower overall payouts. Instead, we take the opposite approach. They don't really explain it. We want users to engage more so they pay more by sticking around and choosing premium. We're proud to be the leader in total payouts. Oh, we make it up in volume. Of course they're the leader in total payouts. They're the leader by far in total plays.

[Owen Thomas]

I have a good friend who's a musician, and he says that he gets these quarterly or what have you statements, and it's all Spotify, nothing else, really. Kind of needle.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm surprised Apple doesn't. But Apple was so slow to go to streaming, right? They really wanted you to. They thought buying music. They thought people wanted to own the music, even though you don't really own the music when you buy it.

[Ed Bott]

Oh, Steve Jobs famously. Steve Jobs famously said people want to own their music, right? And so he wanted to sell tracks rather than stream them.

[Leo Laporte]

They were very slow to go to streaming.

[Owen Thomas]

I was so happy when the other day when I was craving the Wicked soundtrack after seeing the movie and discovered, oh, yeah, I bought that back in the itunes music store days and it's still on my Apple music app, but.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean the original Broadway show?

[Owen Thomas]

The original Broadway show.

[Leo Laporte]

Much better. Probably. I don't know. I tried to watch it.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, you know, the fandom debates it.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Do they. They think Ariana and Cynthia are better? No. You know, Dina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth.

[Owen Thomas]

Excuse me, That's Adele. Dazeem to you, sir.

[Leo Laporte]

Adele Dazeem to all of us. I. You know, you loved that movie. Are you holding space for defying gravity?

[Owen Thomas]

You know, I just saw this real where Ariana Grande is talking about being in that interview where Cynthia Erivo is asked about how fans are holding space for divine gravity. And Cynthia Erivo has no idea what the interviewer means. And I think that's because the interviewer had no idea what she meant by holding space. And to this day, none of us know what holding space means when used in any context about anything. It is just.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad. I wanted to ask my gay friends what does that mean? Because I thought maybe I'm just too.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, don't put.

[Ed Bott]

Don't.

[Owen Thomas]

Don't put this on us gays. We are not holding space for holding space.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not holding space either. Well, who the hell is then? Did you love Wicked? Not the play, the movie.

[Owen Thomas]

I did, I did love it. I did love Wicked.

[Leo Laporte]

I have not been able to get through it. I'm partly because I'm a type 2 diabetic and too much sugar will kill me and my. I could feel it.

[Ed Bott]

Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you this, Judy and I saw wicked, you know, 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ed Bott]

Many, many, many, many years ago on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth and amazing. And, and, and, and, and really, really enjoyed it. And then we saw the movie and we really, really enjoyed that. And because they are two completely.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not related things. Yes.

[Ed Bott]

It's a different, it's a different, you know, they're just different experiences. Yes. And they both. And, and you know, we're, and we're both fans of the story and the artists and all.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the play was over in three hours. The movie, it's not gonna be over till next year. So. Yeah, there is a difference there.

[Ed Bott]

I'm waiting, I'm waiting for the, the, for, for AI to take. When they finally come out and merge them into one, two and a half hour, two hour, 45 minute film. That'll be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What you won't be able to do is put them on your Blu Ray DVD because Sony has ended production of recordable Blu Rays with no successor planned. It's the end of the line for recordable Blu Rays. Oh, they're also going to stop manufacturing minidiscs. Did you know they were still making.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Anybody still using either of those?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean. Well, I could say I could see recordable DVDs. Blu rays. Yeah. Because for, even for data backup and stuff. Right. Apparently nobody's buying them or they wouldn't stop making them. I mean they're gonna stop recording.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Is anybody still back, you know, doing the backup to recordable discs?

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

As opposed to just doing cloud backup?

[Leo Laporte]

My grandfather must, you know, it's sad and Ed, you probably kind of sympathize with this. Used to be able to make fun of older people and their lack of knowledge about technology. Now I am one and I. Yeah. So I can't any longer, you know, say, well, you old folks stop backing up to recordable media.

[Ed Bott]

I, you know, I, I'm gonna say I for the, and for my entire career, that's a thing that I have tried to avoid is those stereot.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't say your mom would understand how this works, that your mom would.

[Ed Bott]

Grant you, you know, or your, your grandfather, you know, your less technically sophisticated relatives, regardless of what age they are.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Ed Bott]

Is, is the thing. But I do. One of my favorite lines was a friend of mine back in the 90s who was, she was 50 something and had worked at a very large company doing very important technology work and she had some very young person come into the company who was trying to, you know, trying, trying to impress her with his level of knowledge and she just looked at him and said, you know, kid, I have email addresses that are older than you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably true.

[Ed Bott]

Probably so. And, and I think, and I think that's probably true for our generation.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Ed Bott]

You know, you and me now, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Think frankly it's the case that we older folks, because we had to work it all out on our own, maybe understand technology a little bit better than a generation that just kind of had it handed to them on a slab of glass. Right.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah. My kids are, you know, 33 and 29 and they grew up using this technology their entire lives. You know, they, I mean they learned to use a mouse, you know, when they were like our, my younger kid, you know, start using a mouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Too.

[Leo Laporte]

It's nothing special for them.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And, but you know, if you ask them how any of this stuff works. No idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask them if they've ever, have you ever removed the ball of your mouse to clean it?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I mean, both of them actually have assembled their own PCs. Oh, well, both of them wanted to do that. Yeah. But I mean, I don't think that, you know, they know how to plug the pieces together and basically what the, what each of those components does, but they don't really understand. They've never done any coding and they.

[E]

Don'T think a PC these days is like Legos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's not, it's not what it used to be. I remember putting chips, I'm sure Ed, you remember putting chips, maybe SAM 2 into the sockets. Right. The memory, adding RAM chips.

[Owen Thomas]

And you could put it in the.

[E]

Wrong way and screw the whole thing up.

[Leo Laporte]

You could. Or bend the pin or. Yeah, there's all sorts of things you could do wrong. Sony, by the way, we should point out these are recordable Blu Rays. You're still going to be UHD and Blu Ray discs for commercial movies. That's not going to change it. And apparently Verbatim and others are going to continue to make recordable Blu Rays. So this does not mean they're gone. It's Just Sony's going to stop. And it is their technology. They did invent it. They're going to kill mini discs, MD data and mini DV cassettes as well. It's funny because the, all of this, all of the tech TV shows are recorded on mini DV cassettes somewhere.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I'm amazed they were still making those.

[Leo Laporte]

I know so well, the cameras are out there, right?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I mean, I've got one in the closet here across from me and box of mini DV tapes. But, you know, I transferred those to. I digitized those 10, 15 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

I have not yet transferred them. I probably should. Oh yeah, yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I've got, I've got all those home movies we shot when the kids were little on, on my Plex server.

[Ed Bott]

Now.

[Owen Thomas]

I do worry in terms of, you know, understanding technology developments like Meta's AI engineer. Is Meta going to have staff who understand how their algorithms work? You know, if it's all offloaded to an AI engineer that's developing the AI and we don't really know already how these large language models work kind of on a deep level, we just see the inputs and the outputs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we actually glossed over that and I thought that was a fairly interesting thing that Mark Zuckerberg said that they would have an AI engineer designing software for Meta, presumably for Facebook and Instagram and whatnot.

[Owen Thomas]

It's like, how are junior software engineers going to learn how to code and, and develop and progress and, you know, get to the skills that they need to, you know, perfect AI? I mean, I guess we just offload it all to AI and hope that AI perfects itself.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

You know, in the early part of my engineering career in the 90s and, you know, and then into the mid 2000s, you know, I was doing software, automotive software, and part of our process was doing code reviews, you know, doing, doing reviews at various stages of development, you know, reviewing the documentation, reviewing the, the code, doing peer reviews and, you know, so we actually had to go through line by line. And obviously I don't think they, I don't think it's possible to do that anymore just because of the huge size of some of these applications. But that was, you know, that was part of how I learned how to do this stuff was from reading and reviewing the code that other people wrote.

[Ed Bott]

And there's another related issue there. I know at Microsoft and at other large companies, there's big code bases and there's a real reluctance to touch that code unless you know exactly what you're doing. And in fact, I can remember a Couple times when a problem came up and somebody had to be called in who had been at the company, who had retired five years earlier, 10 years earlier, but had been responsible for that code for 10 years. And they brought that person back in, paid them a huge consulting fee to help them understand what the issue was and how to fix it. And if you have an AI engineer, I'm going to use your air quotes there, Leo. An AI engineer writing this code. How are you ever going to have someone who can explain to you what it does, or more importantly, explain why this one part of it is the way it is? Because a bad thing happened 10 years ago and it wasn't obvious. But we never touched that block of code because bad things happen. And you won't have that. You won't have that instant. You, you don't get institutional knowledge because there won't be an institution.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you are sounding like an old timer, Ed, because honestly, the same. So the COBOL engineers who were brought in to fix Y2K, we got another one, by the way, coming up in 2038. It's the Unix epoch problem. The UNIX time is going to run out of bits in 2038. It'll be very much like Y2K. I am convinced that by then the fixes will be automatically applied by AI. No human will have to look at it. No COBOL expert will have to come in and fix it. If you've ever taken looked at a regular expression that was very intractable and obscure, the easiest way to fix it, to figure out what it's doing is to give it to an AI. It's brilliant at that stuff. It can look at the code that no one else could figure out. Why does this work and why did we do it 20 years ago? I think AI is completely capable of doing that. I think an AI coding engineer is not too far off. Now, I'm not an expert in this domain, but we are going to. We have a new show launching. We're going to rename this week in Google, a week from Wednesday, we're going to rename it Intelligent Machines. We're booking Ray Kurzweil to come on. And I think if anybody would understand and be able to tell us whether this is going to happen to be Ray. He's been saying the singularity is just around the corner for decades, but we are going to get people on who can talk with some expertise around this. But it is my sense it's possible Mark is a hype monster, that Sam Altman's a hype monster. That these guys are just raising money and you know, that they're misrepresenting what's going to happen. But it's honestly, I don't think they're wrong. I think it is my sense that within the next few years it'll be very credible to have an AI generate working code. And at that point there is a scary singularity because once AI can start writing itself, start creating new AI itself, that starts to happen very, very quickly. So I know you guys are skeptical, but I think it's just around the corner, literally a few years off it.

[Owen Thomas]

Or at the, I guess I'm not skeptical about the idea that, that there is a lot of scut work in programming, a lot of repetitive kind of not high value work that has to be done because the process of coding is still not sufficiently instrumented and automated. I definitely see a role for AI in kind of reducing that scut work. But yeah, I guess I question, you know, I, I question the higher level applications of AI. And if we as a society want to offload this higher level parts of the process.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, sorry, I think replaced the weavers when we came up with automated looms. I mean, this is what happens in the world.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, but the thing is we, we had people that knew how the looms worked and how to fix the looms and how to keep them running.

[Owen Thomas]

And we also birthed, you know, fashion industries in, in Milan, London, Paris, New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, maybe, you know, maybe you didn't need to weave these things by hand to create works of art.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I found a to.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

To what Owen was saying, you know, if, if we, you know, if we just hand off all of this coating to machines, you know, we don't have the equivalent of the people that, that repaired and built and understood how those looms work. You know, if, if we, if we rely on them for all the coding, who's going to go back when, you know, when something inevitably does go wrong? And it will, you know, it, you know, you, you cannot build a perfect system. And so things are going to go wrong and who's going to go back and be able to figure out how to fix those things or even diagnose what might have gone wrong if we hand off everything to machines?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think we're going to find out. It'll be, you know, it's going to be interesting. I don't think code is that special. It's not the Pieta, it's not the Mona Lisa, it's not the Sistine Ceiling.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

It's not. But it. But I think we do need to understand it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think a machine is very capable of understanding it.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

But if we don't understand the machine, that's, that's what I'm getting.

[Leo Laporte]

But we already are there, right? We already know these AIs.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, that, that's the problem. We. We don't understand the machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a very huge. We need to understand the machine way of. Of thinking of things.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, we don't even understand our own brain. What can I say?

[Leo Laporte]

But we don't understand our brains work. Doesn't mean we trust them less.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, I don't know. I mean, looking back at the last few years, I'm not, you know, I don't know that we should be trusting our brains.

[E]

That's why you should actually. That's actually why you should be more skeptical of gener.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Of.

[E]

Of an AGI, because we don't even know what our consciousness is. How are we going to know what an artificial one is?

[Leo Laporte]

We'll find out when we get there. We won't know.

[E]

It's a philosophical question more than a second.

[Leo Laporte]

This is evolution, right? Isn't this evolution? Isn't this how things are supposed to work? We get better and better, and maybe.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

We are getting better.

[Leo Laporte]

A new species.

[E]

Well, I mean, this is the philosophical part of it. What is better, right? Like what constitutes better?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is no better. Right. It's all what can survive difference. It's whatever will survive.

[Ed Bott]

And, and let's talk about the economic incentives, because the economic incentives that are. Are driving most of the AI research today are about eliminating human labor cost.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah. And, and I mean, I think there was something that I read that Marc Andreessen said that just. Well, there's a lot of things that Mark Andreessen has said that make me roll my eyes. But, but this one, that, but it basically said that, you know, he said something like, you know, that AI will eliminate 70 or 80% of the jobs, but it'll drive the cost of everything down so low that people will still have a better quality of life, which was.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about his famous techno optimist manifesto. Yeah, yeah. In which. And this is the problem with all these guys, they eventually come to. Well, there'll be universal basic income, because you're absolutely right. There won't be any more jobs. So how are humans going to survive? Who's going to be the market for this AI? Well, stuff will be so cheap you won't need any money.

[E]

Okay, then don't charge me for anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the plan.

[Owen Thomas]

I think at some point we need to go to the Andreessen Horowitz homepage and see what this purported all their investments.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, no, no, the new logo, you've got to see it. You've got.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a. What is that? Is it a bitcoin? What is that? What is that?

[Owen Thomas]

It is, it's kind of, it's. It's an Ayn Rand art deco fever dream. It is like. Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Bott]

Is that the city that they're building in Fairfield?

[Leo Laporte]

So for people who are listening, it's a golden three dimensional coin with some sort of goddess who seems to have an abacus built into her chest, holding a heart shaped orb, emanating light over a futuristic city.

[Owen Thomas]

Leo, you know what this reminds me of?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Owen Thomas]

When I was a high school student, I went on an exchange program to Volgograd in what was then the fading Soviet Union. And they had a giant statue commemorating the victory over the Nazis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Owen Thomas]

And this reminds me of that statue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. There's one in Budapest. It's very similar heroic art. Yeah. They never take these down because they were built with concrete. You can never take it down. I've hiked up to see, that's exactly what that is. That's a Soviet era.

[Ed Bott]

I'm just wait. Yeah, I'm just waiting for Andreessen Horowitz to begin publishing their five year plans because then, you know, I'm sure that everything will, will make perfect sense once we have a five year plan.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what we need, a five year plan for the agricultural harvest.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, I'm sorry, the people who haven't studied 20th century history might not understand, understand that reference, but it's worth looking up.

[Leo Laporte]

Chinese famine and you'll Soviet.

[Ed Bott]

The Soviet. That was Sue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ed Bott]

Stalin. Yeah. Stalin did a pretty good job of, of. And there's actually a tech angle, there's actually a tech angle to those famines because there was a, there was a, a scientist who believed that there were, you know, certain seeds or something that, you know, these were going to be completely weather resistant and you could just grow them reliably. And, and there were other scientists who said, no, this, this, this is, these are magic beans here, they're not going to work. But, but he had the ear of the Politburo. And so those were the seeds that were planted. And nothing grew. And people starved.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, millions. In the 30s, about 5 to 8 million Soviet citizens starved because a centralized plant economy did not, did not provide them with food. In the 60s, same thing happened in China. They say as many as 55 million people starved during the great Chinese famine. Three years of famine.

[Owen Thomas]

I'm reading a bunch of Vladimir Lenin quotes on Marxists.org oh, God bless you. And I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking half of these, you could put them out, you could post on X and attribute them to Marc Andresen and probably most people would believe that Marc Andreessen said them.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it funny? Because of course, Elon's biggest insult is that you're a Marxist, when in fact a lot of what this test creel kind of utopianism is very Marxist in its thinking.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh yeah, it is. Let's see. This is a really good one. If you. You'll forgive me. Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old. Lennon or Andresen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you should do.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, you should do a whole. You could do a, you know, who said it thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, who said it? That's a good. Yeah, Mark Andreessen or.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, I mean that sounds like it's smart Techno optimist manifesto.

[Leo Laporte]

I want you to write a website. You know, ChatGPT will do it for you instantly. Mark or marks with a series of quotes.

[Owen Thomas]

Mark or marks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and you could just. You could just put them side by side and then grade people at the end, give them their marks. We're going to take a little break. You're watching this Week in tech with three. Now we know Marxists. Oh, no, wait a minute. We're anti Marxists. Ah, see, all this time we've been anti Marxists.

[Ed Bott]

You're going to the re Education camp, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

That's trouble. Whatever. By the way, I do think I have a new way of raising funds. These are sealed in the box. Mini DVS cassettes. Anybody wants to buy these? I just found a whole. A whole bunch of bucks a piece.

[E]

That one was a dash.

[Ed Bott]

Do they have TikTok on?

[Leo Laporte]

They're still making debts.

[Owen Thomas]

You beat me back.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good. You recognize the debt for some reason. I have three of them. Say, the screensavers from March 2003, they're all the same. I don't know why I have many of them. They're all the same, but. All right. I just found my entire collection of mini cassettes.

[E]

Those are probably off sites, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. You know, it's funny. The DAT is exactly the same size Is it the same technology? No. Mechanism? No. Yeah. This is MiniDV, which is what Sony's discontinuing. Then some of these are dvc. I don't know. I think they're all from tech TV is what I think. Actually, one of these intrigues me. It says Leo Laporte, our number one. I wonder if it's an old air check. Be kind of fun if it is. Where do you get the. Who can. Who can convert these for me?

[E]

I'm sure there's a place in Petaluma somewhere. Or just buy a little machine on.

[Leo Laporte]

Get a dad, get a DAT machine. All right. Wow.

[Ed Bott]

There's a science project for you.

[E]

Yeah, that's what I did with my old DV tapes. I just bought an old camera from ebay.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, take a break. We're going to come back. More to come on this week in tech, our show today brought to you by Melissa. I spent a nice afternoon talking to some of the new data scientists at Melissa. Well, some of the stuff they're doing is really amazing. They've been around since 1985, your data quality experts. And of course, it started with addresses. But data quality is really more than just addresses. Your company's data is the most important thing you've got, right? Customer lists, supplier lists, but it's decaying. People move, addresses change, typos arise in phone numbers and emails. Now Melissa has so many apps that they've actually created a marketplace that you can go to and search for the app that'll do what you want. They just debuted in the Stripe App Marketplace. So if you're a stripe customer, look for Melissa because you now have access to the same data quality services that large global enterprises use every day. From Melissa, integrated right into Stripe, including, by the way, address validation, which is great because at the point of entry where you or your customer service rep or your customer is entering, the data is the first place data goes wrong. The Melissa app and Stripe validates global addresses both at the customer and the invoice level, and does it all within Stripe. They provide auto completion, which of course everybody loves because it reduces the number of keystrokes. You start typing and it finishes it and. And it's pulling from Val, the address database. So it's always valid addresses that enter your database. It's very easy to configure, very user friendly. You can configure the app with a few steps. Automatically provides support for customer account invoice level validation. The app offers smooth management of API keys and subscriptions, facilitating Transitions from free to paid services and comprehensive support by the way, of course from Melissa users will have direct access to Melissa experts. So you know, there's never a question, never a mystery. You always get high quality service and support Melissa. Enhancing operational efficiency, boosting customer satisfaction, maintaining overall financial health. These are the strategic goals any forward thinking business should have. And if you rely on Stripe, you're no exception. Now you have an ever expanding tool set at the ready with Melissa. And don't worry about compliance. Melissa services understand compliance better than anyone. With Melissa you get a secure encryption for every file transfer and an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies, they're SOC2 compliant. I can go on and on and on. Melissa protects the data like it's the gold that it really is. Get started today with 1000 records clean for free. Melissa.com/twit M E L I S S A.comtwit really smart people. Really, really, really smart people doing a very good job. It's a great company. Melissa.comTwit we thank him so much for supporting our little efforts here at this Week in Tech. Ah, startups are built on dreams, writes Owen Thomas. Did you write this one?

[Owen Thomas]

I edited it. This was by my colleague Will Hicks and it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't see it because it's behind the paywall, but this is a company in Redwood City. There he is, William Hicks, that wants to turn your dreams into big business. Tell me all about it.

[Owen Thomas]

It's really interesting. This entrepreneur has been kind of obsessed with lucid dreaming and basically wants to turn it into kind of something that we can harness for controlling our environment. Driving autonomous cars.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not completely bogus, is it?

[Owen Thomas]

Seems pretty sizable.

[Leo Laporte]

The company's name is. There's REM space for rapid eye movement.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yes.

[Owen Thomas]

And that's the vital part of our sleep.

[Leo Laporte]

That's when we're dreaming.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. And when our mind kind of regenerates and comes up with a lot of things. In some ways it's the anti AI, right? It's harnessing something quintessentially human that is, to Sam's point, poorly understood.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember reading about them because there was a story that they had two people who were able to talk to one another in their dreams. Is that right? Is my memory correct?

[Owen Thomas]

Yes, yes, that's the same company.

[Leo Laporte]

So a word was transmitted into earbuds worn by somebody who was sleeping. The sensors were able to pick up a response which was then sent to a second sleeping Person who then when he woke up, said rosebud or whatever it was, and it worked.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, it does seem a little, you know, it does seem a little out there. But you know what I like? What I like about the story more than anything is the kind of meta aspect of it. That, yes, AI companies are getting the lion's share of new venture capital these days, but there's other stuff going on, there's other kind of progress, there's other kind of crazy experiments out there.

[Leo Laporte]

And, I mean, when I was a young man, I was fascinated by the idea of lucid dreaming. And I read all the books and did all the tapes and tried to. So lucid dreaming is what happens when you actually wake up within your dream and you're able to somewhat control it. Right. And you remember and you're there. Right.

[Owen Thomas]

It is a kind of metaverse, if you think about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But people claim they can go visit other people, they can do stuff, they can fly and so forth. And unlike a dream where you don't have any control of the experience, they can control the experience. I always wanted to do that, never could. Is this their plan?

[Owen Thomas]

I think the founder wants to kind of open up, exploit or amplify the power of lucid dreaming. I don't know if the idea is, is to, you know, if you're not capable of lucid dreaming, to like, introduce that capability. But maybe, maybe you can.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the point. They have volunteers. They wear a special sleep mask that monitors their brain waves and eye movements so they know whether they're lucid or not. They say dreamers were able to control a remote controlled car by twitching muscles during sleep to steer and move the car forward. They are about to launch a smaller sensor device that can be sent to up to 100 people for the next round of remote experiments. I should say that this guy, this founder who's from Kazakhstan, Michael Raduga, while he was waiting for his green card, his H1B visa to come to the United States, had a hole drilled through his skull so he could, I don't know what, stick a wire in there.

[Owen Thomas]

And he did it overseas because he knew, like, you know, if he were in the US or France or wherever.

[Leo Laporte]

They would not allow such a thing. But in Kazakhstan, no problem. We implant electrodes into brains all the time.

[Owen Thomas]

It is wild. And they are planning to introduce a sleep mask that supposedly will help you lucid achieve lucid dreams.

[Leo Laporte]

The electrodes that he implanted have since been removed by a licensed neurosurgeon.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I wonder if RFK Jr will make this all legal now.

[Leo Laporte]

I want it to be true.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Didn't Micah Sargent, he used to do.

[Leo Laporte]

A podcast on, on sleep and so forth. I don't know if he was able to lucid dream. Were you able to lucid dream, Micah? I don't know. I've always wanted to, but always failed for me. But you know, part of the problem, I don't think I'll ever be able to because I don't even, I don't even see. I can't, I'm, I'm a, what is it? Aphasic. I can't see images when I close my eyes. My dreams are, are just conceptual, not fist people say, do you dream of color? I don't even dream in things. I just dream in concepts.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I don't know about you guys, but I, you know, I almost never remember dreams almost very, very well.

[Leo Laporte]

That you could fix. You keep a dream journal. Eventually you will remember your dreams.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

How do you keep a dream journal if you wake up and you can't remember?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you, it's bit by bit. So you wake up, you write down what you can remember, and then you go back to sleep.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

And then, but if you don't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

A period of days, months and years, you will eventually remember your dream. You get better and better at it. I notice Ed is wisely recusing himself from this entire conversation.

[Ed Bott]

You, I, I have, I, I, I am not a lucid dreamer, but I do have very vivid dreams and I often remember them when I wake up. But what's interesting and the dream journal, the thing about the dream journal technique, that, that does work is because those don't go to the portions of your brain that store memory. And, and so five minutes later you're going, wow, that dream was really intense. And I can't remember exactly what happened. Don't you know that feeling when you wake, you know, when you wake up? You know, when you wake up, you can remember everything.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know, I'll sometimes write it down right away.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or record it. Yeah, yeah. I'm going through your stories now, Owen. That was the first. Should we do when San Francisco. Actually this is a Chronicle story. When San Francisco fought Pac man, did you know the city declared war on video games? When was this, in the 80s?

[Owen Thomas]

82. Yes. Kind of in the height of the Pac man fever.

[Leo Laporte]

We know it's a long time ago because all the pictures in this story are in black and white.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, I mean, what, you know, the kind of through line between San Francisco of 1982 and San Francisco of 2025 is that someone proposed something new and neighbors all opposed it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's called nimby. Yeah, it's as old as the hills.

[Owen Thomas]

Would that be Nintendo in my backyard?

[Leo Laporte]

Nintendo in my backyard. Clement street fought off Space Invaders yesterday, wrote Chronicle reporter Harry Jupiter. By the way, best name ever and lots of other coin devouring video games. More than 50 neighborhood residents and merchants went to a police permit hearing to oppose the 30 machine arcade that was intended on 831 Clement street as the Chronicle points out, an arcade today on Clement street would be welcomed, even celebrated. We have downtown in Petaluma, there's a store that specializes in antique video games and arcade games. And they've got two Ms. Pac man games.

[Ed Bott]

You could do a great remake of the Music man, set it in the 80s. We've got trouble right here in River City.

[Leo Laporte]

Mayor with a capital P that stands for Pac Man. Stands for Pac Man. Dianne Feinstein led the charge anti arcade laws made it harder to launch a video game out poorest than it was to open a liquor store. See, this is that moral panic that Jeff Jarvis is always saying. Oh, you know, you're worried about social media. In 82 it was PAC Man. Right. Didn't I think we survived?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Did we?

[Owen Thomas]

Did, yes. Except now we have, you know, a video game player at the, you know, basically in the halls of power of the White House.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but is he, is he really a video game? Is he any good? We don't. No.

[Owen Thomas]

We only have Grimes say so and.

[Leo Laporte]

Grimes says he is so I believe it.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Well, I mean, you know, we walk around with dozens of video games in our pocket all the time, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, that's a good point. The arcade has come to our pocket.

[Owen Thomas]

It's literally called Apple Arcade.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't, you can't get away from it. That's a very good point. Not my backyard, not my back pocket. But it is. And that's. And that's a good thing. So tell me about this is the story you wrote. Julia Hart's Eventbrite is still around.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, I was kind of looking through companies that had publicly traded companies that we had not written about recently. And Eventbrite actually had a pretty successful IPO a few years back. And Julia Hartz, the co founder, took the company public. She was the second youngest woman to take a company public at the time, I believe 2018, not that long ago. So kind of surprising that a, you know, so few female founders have rung the bell at the New York Stock Exchange or press the button or you know, whatever they do at nasdaq.

[Leo Laporte]

Not, not since Elizabeth Holmes actually.

[Owen Thomas]

Oh, bad example, bad example we have. You know, but you know, there are actually, you know, more, I think more positive examples of women very, you know, very successfully running tech companies. Not a founder, but Fiji Simo at Instacart. She, you know, that company has been on an absolute tear. And you know, for Eventbrite, really it's more of a kind of a, you know, a story of a company that has, you know, held on and really found, you know, found a connection particularly with like event planners. They call them creators, you know, people, people who organize meetups, events, sell tickets. And Eventbrite has really kind of figured out how to cater to them. And you know, Julia told me that what they, what they think about is kind of life phases. So especially right now, what's really important is, you know, people come to a city like San Francisco, they don't really know where to go, what to do, how to meet people. And you know, she sees Eventbrite as kind of helping them do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you know, Eventbrite, it's funny, it seems like there were so many open source alternatives to Eventbrite, but it's, but Eventbrite has triumph, has survived and it's. And it's, and it's better. It's. This is it the biggest one. Still.

[Owen Thomas]

I don't, you know, actually I, I should know. Mark. There is a, there is an upstart competitor called Party Full.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Owen Thomas]

That is very popular because it's, it's kind of very oriented around text messages.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we used Party Full in the last tech TV reunion.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. And yeah, it's really more.

[Leo Laporte]

Was more like messaging. That's exactly right. It was more like. And the pictures were posted there and so forth.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, I mean a lot of the conferences and stuff that I attend, you know, I end up getting tickets issued to me through Eventbrite. So I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I know it gets used by a lot of businesses and you know, larger event planners.

[Owen Thomas]

It's, it's found that sweet spot in kind of, you know, that, that next, that next level up from just like a party with friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. Yeah. We. The particle was actually very cool. I thought it was a pretty neat, neat app.

[Owen Thomas]

Another part of the conversation that I really enjoyed with Julia was talking about why stick with San Francisco? Eventbrite is still headquartered in San Francisco after all these years. They're obviously global, they've got a distributed workforce. But Julia said San Francisco is part of the Company's DNA, the creativity, the AI boom that's happening around them right now. By being in San Francisco, they can tap into that in a way that if they had move to Austin or, you know, or. Or Charlotte or wherever.

[Leo Laporte]

Or North Carolina.

[Owen Thomas]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, and they do have an office in Nashville, by the way. But being in San Francisco lets them, you know, lets them kind of tap into that. That wave of innovation.

[Leo Laporte]

People were abandoning San Francisco and the downtown and the commercial district felt like a ghost town. Has that turned around at all, Owen?

[Owen Thomas]

You know, I've got to say, anecdotally, I. I look out on Battery street, which is kind of the. The funnel to the Bay Bridge. Yeah. Traffic is routinely backed up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the worst. You never want to be there at rush hour.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah. But, you know, the only reason why it's backed up is because there are people who obviously drove in to work, you know, work all day in San Francisco, and now they're. Now they're headed home. So, you know, they're returning to office.

[E]

Let's be honest, though, Battery street doesn't take a lot to back up Battery Street.

[Owen Thomas]

Well, that's. That's fair. But, you know, we. We also did a survey of kind of some of the top tech employers, and, you know, it seems like they are, you know, the most common pattern is they're retaining some kind of hybrid work, but they're tightening down and they really want you in the office three to four days a week is typical. So I go into the office on Fridays just because I don't like working from home, and I live pretty close, so, you know, might as well walk my dog and, you know, and get a change of pace. Definitely. Fridays are still pretty quiet, and that's a struggle for downtown businesses because they have to, you know, they have to staff for five days a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

But, you know, it's really interesting to.

[Leo Laporte]

See our federal government demand that government employees return to work. But. And I think there are people like Elon Musk who are very much in favor of making people come to the.

[Owen Thomas]

Office, which is amazing because Elon Musk is never, by definition, he can possibly.

[Leo Laporte]

Be every day for the rules for thee, not me.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, I mean, like, Xai has a big office in San Francisco, even though he's moved X Corp, you know, the former Twitter out. His AI company is in San Francisco because that's where all the hot AI companies are. You know, they're building a data center in Memphis.

[Leo Laporte]

There's something to be said for having an area where there are a lot of companies, a lot of people, and there's this kind of intermingling, cross pollinization of ideas or even just this energy around. And San Francisco really used to have that.

[Owen Thomas]

And you know, we just had the J.P. morgan Healthcare Conference. Different sector, biotech and healthcare, really busy. You know, you could, you could just see it in kind of the number of suits on, on the street. Yeah, you usually don't see that many, many people in suits and ties. Except for J.P. morgan week.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You're actually one of the few people who ever comes on this show who has an office. Right. Sam, your work from home?

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah, I haven't worked in an office for over a decade and most, almost.

[Leo Laporte]

All the people who come on our shows are coming to us from their house. Houses.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

But, but they don't. What you said, Leo, about you know, that, that intermingling, you know, I'm based in the Detroit area and I have not worked out of an office in a decade, but I regularly meet with people in person.

[Leo Laporte]

You do need to be where you are. Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

You know, because the industry that I cover, the auto industry, you know, it's not just the Detroit automakers, you know, which is only three companies, but a lot of suppliers, a lot of companies, you know, a lot of Japanese and Korean companies and, and, and other, other, other, and European companies have offices here and you know, they have tech centers in this area. And so I regularly, and, and, and also, you know, other, other reporters and analysts, you know, that I go to events to and I talk to people. And so I, you know, I do interact with these, a lot of these people in person on a regular basis. Some, you know, often several times a week. And so there, there is a value to that intermingling, as you said, but it doesn't necessarily have to be in an office.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I am not a big return to work guy. We're a completely remote company now. More, more for economic reasons than because we want to be. I like the social environment of a workplace, but it works, it works.

[Ed Bott]

I've been at CD net for 19, it'll be 19 years in a couple weeks. And, and during that time I've had two basically managing managing editors who I've friendly with. We've, you know, we work in a super collegial fashion. They're great people. One of them I've never met and the other one I just met for the first time, you know, a couple months ago because she happens to live in North Carolina. But, but there's, you know, there's a whole bunch of, you know, there's dozens of people that I work with who I've never met in, in, in person. And it's, it used to be strange, it's, it's now normal. But, but I miss, I miss aspect of it. I mean just the, the accidental, the accidental contact that you get with people where, you know, you have a, you just have a conversation, then you. And you talk about stuff and it's not task related, it's just because you're hanging out waiting for something to happen and you're just shooting the breeze and, and you learn things about people and that fosters a better relationship in many ways.

[Leo Laporte]

We are social animals. I think we need to be in a society of some kind. And for many of us it was for years our workplace. I have the fondest memories of tech TV and everybody working in the same place. It was really great. And of course to do a TV show, you kind of do have to be in the same place not to do a podcast, as it turns out. I've been doing those for about 20 years now. I don't know. I have mixed feelings. I think it's a big mistake for companies to force employees back to work. I think your best employees are going to say, yeah, I don't think so. And you're going to, you're going to have a brain drain as a result. Bonito, do you miss working in, in the studio? No. No.

[E]

I mean, I, the only thing I really miss is like having a studio that's, it's nice having a studio, you know, like to do stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't miss the camaraderie you don't miss?

[E]

Yeah, I miss hanging out. You know, that's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Sing happy birthday while we eat better bad cake.

[E]

Yeah, that's the, that's the kind of stuff you miss is just like the hanging out and the, that, the stuff that's more fun to do when you're all together.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and are you mostly in office?

[Owen Thomas]

I, I'm mostly in office. Our, you know, our, our policy, for what it's worth, is three days a week.

[Leo Laporte]

That's maybe a good compromise and. But are all your writers there? No, probably not.

[Owen Thomas]

They are. You know, what we've worked out is, it's, it's, it's a little odd in that the sales side is here, I believe Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. The newsroom is here Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the idea. Keep the sales people away from the.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah, we kind of. We, we kind of.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

I'll Come in on.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, I sleep with our sales manager. So it's not a good, it's not a good thing.

[Owen Thomas]

I'll come in on a Wednesday and it's like just me and, you know, maybe one other reporter who had like, you know, has a meeting downtown and then, you know, on this side of the office and then on the other side of the office, it's, you know, it's a hoot.

[Leo Laporte]

And Annie, I mean, general, I think people should be able to be flexible and do what works best for them and their business. I'm not. I think making a rule like you got to be in the office is pretty industrial era. And we're not in the industrial era anymore. We're in the information age. We got to take a break. Final story. Bill Gates says if I were born today, I'd probably been diagnosed autistic. We'll talk about that in just a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, ZipRecruiter. Oh, man. When it comes time to hire, you'll be so glad to have ZipRecruiter on your side. Brand new year, right? As a business owner, I know there are always a few new roles you'd like to hire for. If you need to hire for your business. I cannot recommend ZipRecruiter more highly. It's the easiest way to find qualified candidates. Go to ZipRecruiter. You could try it right now for free. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT it's the hiring site employers prefer the Most. According to G2. It's the one we use because, well, there are a number of reasons. One, you know, it's always a challenge when somebody leaves to give you two weeks notice. And now you've got to fill a role. If you don't fill that role in a small business like ours, it means more work for everybody. We got to fill it somehow. So it's, you know, it's kind of important that you fill that role. But you don't want to just put anybody in that slot. Your business really depends on hiring the best people. And nowadays the best people can choose the job. They go wherever they want. When we post on ZipRecruiter, it really works because first of all, you're post, you're casting the broadest net. You're posting to 100 plus job boards, social networks everywhere. So you're, you're, you're making sure that your posting is seen by the most possible people, which very much improves your odds of getting the best person, right? But then ZipRecruiter does something very cool. They have more than a million resumes on file all the time. Because people come to ZipRecruiter looking for work. So what they'll do is take your requirements and match them with the resumes they've got and give you a list of people who fulfill your requirements. You can go through them very quickly. It's all in the ZipRecruiter interface. Rank them and pick some that really match your needs and ask them to apply. Now that is incredible, because when somebody gets invited like that, that moves you right to the top of the list. The best people go, oh, who do I want to work for? A company that I've got to persuade to hire me or a company that wants me? You're going to go to the company that wants you. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology works fast to find top talent so you don't waste time or money. And when you invite the top candidates to apply for your job, they do. They do it faster. They do it. They're ready. They come ready to work. It is. It's been such a boon for us. Here's to a new year of making hiring easier with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. For us, often it's before lunch, we'll post in the morning and it's boom. Lisa goes, wow, look, this is a great. I mean, it's really. It's cool. You should see for yourself. Go to our exclusive web address. You can try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter.com again, that's ZipRecruiter.com twit. ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. Interesting interview in the London Times. Alice Thompson got a gotta.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

That is the Times of London.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, the Times. Just the Times. That's all you have to say, The Times. There's only one. But if I say the Times here, people think New York Times. So the Times of London. Thank you for the correction, Sam. Bill Gates trump musk and how my neurodiversity made me. I didn't know Gates was not a successful student. I thought he was. Actually. He got to Harvard. Can't have been. He couldn't have failed too badly. He says he failed frequently at school. He was a weirdo. He said, if I had been born today, I'd probably been diagnosed as autistic. He would not be alone. I think there are definitely many People on the spectrum in the tech business and it kind of makes sense because it might be easier to relate to a computer than another human being in some cases. Right, great. Here's Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg sitting in a recreation of Zuck's Harvard dorm room. Somehow they've gotten gigantic Harvard boys, both of them dropouts. Right. The author says we are wandering around Gates old high school Lakeside in his hometown of Seattle. It used to baffle me it was nowhere near a lake, says the hyper factual Gates. He showed her where he had his first cigarette, where he got drunk for the first time, where he had his first joint. We end up, she writes, at what his youngest daughter calls the shrine. A room with an ancient terminal attached to an early computer and the desk where Gates spent hours writing code with his buddies Kent and an older pupil named Paul Allen. I remember I was in a boarding school at a similar time. I wasn't boarding, but it was a boarding school and the moms had gotten together just as they did at Lakeside School with a cake sale and so forth to buy a terminal connected to a big time sharing computer. And I remember going by that room thinking, that's pretty cool. They got a computer. I never went in. Damn it. Bill Gates went in and learned to code.

[Ed Bott]

You just weren't a weirdo.

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't weird. Maybe I just wasn't weird enough.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

You did all right for yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

I did okay, but. And honestly I, I was into chess at that time. Had computing been as accessible as these personal computers behind me, I might been much more likely to do it. But that teletype, you know, and all of that, I, I just, Maybe it was just.

[Ed Bott]

And punch cards. Punch cards and paper tape was my, was my era.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're older than you look.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah, I think I am.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I had to fill in the bubbles. On cards.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

With pencil. We didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, this cards we like. Like I said, we had a teletype so you didn't have to use punch cards, but it had, you know, the tractor feed and you would type and it would. What's weird is, I found out later is when you type the letter, it would then go to the mainframe which would then go back to the teletype and put it on the paper. So there was always a little latency when you were typing on it. He says, I don't like to look back much, but it's fun. He has written an autobiography called Source Code, which is why he's doing interviews. Gates turns 70 this year. Microsoft turns 50 the Gates foundation is 25. But this is the most candid interview you've, you've interviewed Bill, I'm sure Ed. Right.

[Ed Bott]

No, I never have. I've interviewed several other high level executives, you know, Ballmer and, and others. But I've, you know, I've met, I've met Bill once or twice.

[Leo Laporte]

I danced with him. The, the, the one time I was offered an interview with Bill Gates, they wanted to see my question and approve them in advance and I said no. So that's why I've never interviewed him. I didn't. My experience has been interviewing people like that is never very productive because they're so coached and polished. They're very unlikely to say anything interesting.

[Ed Bott]

Especially at Microsoft. You're going to get, they have been trained. You're going to get three. We have three key messages and they're just going to repeat, repeat them over and over again. And the, and the good ones will not say 1, 2, 3, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can hear it. It's implied.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I've been fortunate enough to interview some, some interesting people.

[Leo Laporte]

I interviewed Alan Mulally at Ford. He was great.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Yeah. I mean, he was Bob Lutz, you know. He mean, he was always good for some interesting quotes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean there's people who are on point and yet gracious and kind of. They'll drop a few little tidbits so you don't feel like it was a complete waste of time.

[Ed Bott]

Nolan Bushnell was like, he was always good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because he was nuts.

[Ed Bott]

But he did amazing things.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. He invented the pet rock, took that money and invented Atari. Created Atari, founded Atari. He was an amazing fellow. Brilliant guy.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Gates told the Times that he was a challenging child who would have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum if you were growing up today. He said, my parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others. That is kind of textbook, isn't it? Isn't it? He still rocks back and forth like a metronome as he talks. But he's learned to embrace being different. She writes, quote, this might help those raising a kid who doesn't fit the norm. He agrees. I always suspected that Bill might have been on the spectrum. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And able to work in the workplace. Certainly me.

[Ed Bott]

And he had a balm. And he had Bulmer there and too.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah. But, but Balmer was the one.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul was also on the spectrum. I Think. Come to think of it.

[Ed Bott]

Yes, exactly. They were both. They were both, Cody. You know, they were, they were. They were focused on code and results. And Ballmer had people skills.

[Leo Laporte]

He was a human.

[Ed Bott]

He was a. He was a marketing, Marketing and sales guy. And he was very, very good about listening and, you know, answering directly. Even if he wasn't going to. Even if he wasn't going to completely answer the question, he would at least give you the. The impression that he was. And, you know, he. But he was. He was good with people. And I've talked to many, many people at Microsoft who say, you know, their worst memories are Bill meetings.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ed Bott]

You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, it could be painful. Same as Steve Jobs, right?

[Ed Bott]

Yeah. The thing that people heard was, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And he had to be tough.

[Leo Laporte]

So many stories. I remember some I can't remember. Well, of course, Mary Joseph always talked about interviewing Ballmer and he remembered people's shoes. That was a salesman's salesperson's trick that he used. He always looked at people's shoes and remembered what brand of shoes they were wearing, which I thought was very odd. Bill did not. Was it Mary Jo? Somebody told me the story of getting in the elevator with Bill Gates. His mom was with him. This is when Bill Gates is the richest man in the world in his 40s, and his mom grabbed his glasses off his face, cleaned them and put them back on his face. The interview, he says, my mother was the real driving force, clearly an early Tiger Mum prototype. My mom is the central person for me. My dad, who was a lawyer, left really early and came home at dinner. He set us an example of always being on top of things and giving back and working really hard. But the idea of getting dressed properly, having good manners, I'm embarrassed if you don't do well, was all my mom. Her expectations were very high. All their watches ran on mum time eight minutes early. And she had an intercom installed in the kitchen so she could call them when meals were ready and remind them to make their beds. But Gates room was always messy. He often refused to put his coat on. Got B's and C's in junior high school and became the class clown. This I did not know. There was even a discussion. He might be retarded. He explains. There were moments when they said, hold this kid back. I had nervous energy. I was fidgeting, I was disorganized. Somebody in the Discord is saying, yeah, nowadays he would have been medicated, which may have kept him from Ever achieving his potential. Here's a picture. Wait.

[E]

If it was a poor student in high school, how did he get into Harvard?

[Leo Laporte]

He must have gotten better later. Here's a picture of him sitting at that terminal. Look at him. And there he is with his mom, probably taking her to prom, it looks like. That is. That was at his sister's wedding with his maternal grandmother. Never mind. I'm sorry. In 1977. Anyway, I look forward to reading the biography. There's Bill Gates with his sisters and his mother and father. There he is in the bow tie, looking every bit the nerd. This actually makes him. I know it's probably the intent of the article and his book, Much more human. In the 70s, no one understood about neurodiversity. If they ever invent a pill where they could say, okay, your social skills would be normal, says Gates, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal. I wouldn't take the pill. Maybe I'm forgetting how painful it was. But I needed my neurodiversity to write that software. I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration. I wrote my first code as a young teenager on a hike in the snow when I was tired and wet. And I used it later for Microsoft. Wow. On that note, you neurodiversity bunch, it's great to have you. We are really. The twit family is a neurodiverse family. And I love it. I celebrate it. We need that. That's where the artists, the geniuses, the mavericks come from. God bless him. Live long and prosper, Mr. Ed Bot. Editor, Senior Contributing Editor at ZDNet. Great to have you. Appreciate it. Appreciate you. Have a great evening. Go watch some football now. No more seconds.

[Ed Bott]

Yeah. I'm going to get the second half of that Bills game. Don't anyone tell me the score.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Shh. Don't know what happened.

[E]

All I know is all the ads now.

[Leo Laporte]

Shh. No. You want to watch the ads? The ads are the best part. There is an Apple ad for the M4 that is mind blowing. That's all I'm going to say. Thank you. Also to you, Owen Thomas. You're probably just going to go home and have a nice meal, but whatever you do this evening, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for being here. He's managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. Thank you for all you do. You look great, by the way. You look fantastic.

[Owen Thomas]

It's a love of a good dog. I'm going to walk.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that it? It. It's the Dog.

[Owen Thomas]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is your. So you're lifting, right? That's the thing.

[Owen Thomas]

I am. I am. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Owen Thomas]

That's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want to take off your shirt and show us.

[Owen Thomas]

You know, speaking of wicked. Supposedly there is a. Supposedly there's a deleted scene with Jonathan Bailey shirtless. Just going to. Just going to put that out there.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm holding space for Jonathan Bailey. That's what I'm doing. There you go.

[Owen Thomas]

So are Jonathan bellies. Pants. Let me tell you. I'm talking about the legs. I'm talking about legs.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the legs. Shorts. Thank you also to Mr. Sam Abel Samit, who's wondering what the hell he's doing here. He's a podcaster. Wheelbearings mediatelemetryagency.com Always a pleasure, Sam. I really appreciate it.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

I'm glad to be here again. Always fun to be with you in the game here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We didn't have any stories today, but we managed to make it to almost three hours. So there.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

Lisa said stories to have a good conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Lisa said don't start the show saying there's nothing to talk about. Okay. We want people to listen. I said, okay, dear.

[Sam Aboul Samid]

It's inevitable that you find something to chat for a few hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Turns out there was quite a bit to talk about. We do twit Sunday afternoons, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. I tell you that because you can watch us do it live if you want want. We're on the the Internets on Discord for the Club Twit members. I'll tell you what Club Twit is in a second. We are also on Twitch. YouTube. Yes. TikTok. Right. We're on TikTok. Yay. We're on Kik. We're on LinkedIn. We're on Facebook. And I'm sure I've left something out, but we're on eight different streams, which is great. You can watch us as you wish, but that was never the intent. You're watching us as we produce a show, but it's really, you can watch it anytime because it's a podcast, you watch it at your convenience or listen at your convenience. Get copies of the show at TWiT TV, our website, or go to the YouTube channel dedicated to TWiT or probably the best thing to do, subscribe and your favorite podcast player. Then you'll get every episode the minute it's done and you can have it first thing in the morning on Monday. If you are a member of the club, you can get the ad free Versions of the show premiere. Seven bucks a month. That's for all of our shows. You also get special programming that we don't put out in public. You get access to the Club TWIP Discord. But most importantly, the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're helping us keep this show on the air. We are ad supported, but ads don't cover all of our costs. The club makes a huge difference to our bottom line. Think of it as voting for your favorite content. If you like what you see, vote. Go to TWIT TV Club Twit. One other way you can vote. I think the survey is still up for a few more days. That's very helpful to us because it takes you 10 minutes. Go to Twitter TV survey. We use it for a couple of things, of course, to get to know you better. Not as an individual, but as a group. We don't, we cannot track you and do not want to track you. And advertisers like to know a little bit about the audience in aggregate. And so it helps us sell advertising as well. It's very helpful to us. TWiT TV survey. If you haven't taken the survey yet, a couple more days to do that. Thanks to our esteemed technical director and producer, Benito Gonzalez. Benito, are you editing tonight or you get to watch the game?

[E]

Kevin's doing it tonight.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate it. Kevin King, another one of our great, talented team. You know, they've been ever since we closed the studio in August, they've been work from home. And it's been, I miss you guys, but it's been, it's worked just fine. It's been great. Thanks to all of you for being here. We will see you next time. And as I have I said, this is our 20th anniversary year in April. The 20th anniversary anniversary of our very first twit. So as I've been saying for 20 years, thank you for being here. We'll see you next week. And another twit is in the can. Bye.

[Owen Thomas]

Amazing.