This Week in Tech 1027: 20 Years in the Can

Summary

Podcast Summary: TWiT This Week in Tech 1027 – "20 Years in the Can" (April 14, 2025)

This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte, celebrates its monumental 20th anniversary in episode 1027, aptly titled "20 Years in the Can." This special episode honors the show's enduring legacy through nostalgic discussions, listener tributes, and insightful conversations on pivotal tech topics. Featuring longtime panelists Robert Balancer (the Digital Jesuit, Father Robert Baliser), Alan Malvintano, and SSD expert Sam Aboul Samet, the episode delves into the evolution of the podcast, significant industry changes, and the resilient TWiT community.

1. Celebrating Two Decades of TWiT

The episode opens with Leo Laporte expressing excitement about the milestone, highlighting the return of familiar faces like Robert Balancer, Alan Malvintano, and Sam Aboul Samet. Leo reminisces about the inaugural episode aired on April 17, 2005, commemorating two decades of discussing the most pressing tech issues in a fun, relaxed, and informative manner.

Leo Laporte (00:00):

"This is a special episode because we're celebrating our 20th anniversary. The first TWiT aired on April 17, 2005, 20 years ago."

2. Panel Introductions and Early Show Memories

Leo introduces each panelist, sharing humorous anecdotes and professional backgrounds. Father Robert Baliser, a former submariner and nuclear engineer, adds a unique perspective to the tech discussions. Alan Malvintano, back at Soledigm, brings expertise in AI and SSD technology, while Sam Aboul Samet, now VP of Research at Telemetry, offers deep insights into the automotive industry.

Father Robert Baliser (07:51):

"The first time I was on was setting up for Interop, and it was my very first episode."

Robert Balancer (09:17):

"My first ever appearance was in a barracks room on a Navy base, where I field-stripped a Drobo on the stream."

The panel reflects on the show's humble beginnings, utilizing tools like Skype and early recording equipment, emphasizing the technological advancements that have shaped modern podcasting.

3. Listener Tributes: Letters, Videos, and Stories

A heartfelt segment features messages from dedicated listeners who have been integral to TWiT's success. Leo shares videos, poems, and letters from fans worldwide, showcasing the show's profound impact on their personal and professional lives.

Scott Summons (read by Leo) (07:34):

"I can't believe it's 20 years since you first showed up on my iPod. You've remained my primary source of tech education and information ever since."

Ron (incarcerated) (15:34):

"I have been a nerd for over 40 years, and it's a blessing to have the joy of TWiT every week."

These tributes highlight the global reach and diverse audience of TWiT, reinforcing the community's loyalty and the show's role as a constant source of knowledge and companionship.

4. Tech Industry Insights: Tariffs and Global Trade

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing the fluctuating tariffs, particularly those imposed on China, and their ramifications on the tech and automotive sectors. The panel explores the uncertainty these tariffs introduce into global supply chains, impacting manufacturers like Apple and the broader economy.

Leo Laporte (14:03):

"The latest is the tariffs are off. Well, sort of off. Except for China where the tariffs are over 100%, making it prohibitive to buy anything made in China."

Sam Aboul Samet (16:51):

"Even a vehicle built in the US has at least half of its value coming from outside the country, primarily in electronics and chips."

The discussion underscores the complexities of international trade policies, the challenges of relocating manufacturing, and the broader economic implications of maintaining or altering tariff structures.

5. Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Debate

The panel delves into the contentious debate surrounding intellectual property (IP) laws in the age of artificial intelligence. Jack Dorsey's proposal to delete all IP laws on Twitter sparks a multifaceted conversation about creativity, AI training data, and the future of content creation.

Nicole Shanahan (Nicole Shanahan's quote, 35:59):

"IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations. If you want to reform it, let's talk."

Father Robert Baliser (36:02):

"Everything else is a smokescreen. They want to train their AI on absolutely everything without restrictions."

The segment explores the balance between fostering innovation and protecting creators' rights, echoing sentiments from industry experts like Cory Doctorow, who argue that current copyright systems favor publishers over individual creators.

6. Cybersecurity Concerns: Chris Krebs and Government Integrity

A critical discussion arises around the Trump administration's actions against former CISA director Chris Krebs, emphasizing the importance of maintaining cybersecurity integrity within the government. The panel expresses concerns about the potential erosion of expertise due to political retaliation and the broader implications for national security.

Father Robert Baliser (55:33):

"Once you start prosecuting experts for disagreeing with the party line, you end up with a non-functional government."

Robert Balancer (56:32):

"There's so much institutional knowledge that gets carried forward to new people, and wiping out the workforce severely hampers our defenses."

The conversation highlights the essential role of agencies like CISA in safeguarding national infrastructure and the dangers of politicizing critical security positions.

7. Evolution of Podcasting Technology and Practices

Reflecting on the podcast's technological journey, the panelists discuss the transition from rudimentary tools to sophisticated platforms. They reminisce about the early days of Skype recordings, the challenges of remote collaboration, and the advancements that have streamlined podcast production.

Leo Laporte (10:56):

"We use Restream now. It’s much easier to manage recordings and stream across multiple platforms."

Father Robert Baliser (11:09):

"We've moved from local recordings to using Zencastr for better quality and efficiency."

The evolution showcases the adaptability of the TWiT team in embracing new technologies to enhance their broadcasts, ensuring high-quality content delivery to their audience.

8. Listener Engagement and Community Building

The episode continues with more listener submissions, featuring individuals from various backgrounds who share their personal connections to TWiT. These stories emphasize the show's role in inspiring careers, facilitating education, and providing a sense of community.

Andrew (video tribute, 30:09):

"I've enjoyed the content and being a part of Club TWiT. Thank you for the great products you've recommended over the years."

Chris (video tribute, 49:31):

"TWiT has been part of my life now for so long that it's really hard to imagine it not being around."

The panel celebrates these narratives, reinforcing the mutual respect and appreciation between TWiT and its listeners.

9. Future-Proofing and Technological Optimism

Leaning into the future, the panel discusses emerging technologies and the importance of adapting to rapid changes. They explore innovations in SSD technology, advancements in automotive electronics, and the potential of AI to revolutionize various industries.

Robert Balancer (31:08):

"Solidigm's work in AI-related SSD products offset some GPU VRAM costs, which is crucial as GPUs become pricier."

Sam Aboul Samet (32:05):

"Our first market forecast report highlights the growing intersection of AI and transportation mobility, setting the stage for significant advancements."

This forward-looking dialogue underscores TWiT's commitment to staying at the forefront of technological developments, offering listeners valuable insights into the future of tech.

10. Concluding Reflections and Gratitude

As the episode nears its end, Leo expresses profound gratitude to the TWiT community, acknowledging the contributions of staff, panelists, and listeners who have been pivotal in sustaining the show's success over two decades.

Leo Laporte (84:11):

"It's been a long and crazy trip and a lot of fun, and I really thank all of the people who've been part of this. You'll see, as I said, a scroll of all the people who've ever been on TWiT as contributors."

Father Robert Baliser (85:52):

"Twit has been a constant in my life, no matter where I've gone or what I've been through. Thank you for everything."

The episode concludes with rolling credits, honoring the 389 individuals who have appeared on This Week in Tech over the years. Leo closes with a heartfelt wish for another 20 years of engaging discussions, community growth, and technological exploration.

Leo Laporte (Finale, 86:55):

"Here's to 20 years more. Thank you, everybody."

Key Takeaways

• Enduring Legacy: This Week in Tech has successfully navigated two decades of technological evolution, maintaining relevance through adaptability and a dedicated team.

• Global Community: The show's influence spans the globe, with listeners from diverse backgrounds finding value and inspiration in its content.

• Critical Issues Addressed: From international trade policies and AI ethics to cybersecurity and technological advancements, TWiT continues to tackle essential topics shaping the future.

• Innovative Practices: Embracing new technologies and platforms has allowed TWiT to enhance production quality and expand its reach, reflecting the dynamic nature of podcasting.

• Gratitude and Appreciation: The episode underscores a deep appreciation for the TWiT staff, panelists, and listeners, highlighting the collaborative spirit that has fueled the show's success.

This Week in Tech 1027: 20 Years in the Can is not just a celebration of time but a testament to the enduring power of community, innovation, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge in the ever-evolving landscape of technology.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. It's a very different twit this week. I gotta warn you ahead of time, we've got a great panel. As always, Robert Balaser, the digital Jesuit. Father Robert joins us. Alan Malvantano, he's back at Soledigm. Our SSD expert, Sam Abulcemed, my car expert. All old friends, but this is a special episode because we're celebrating today our 20th anniversary. The first twit aired on April 17, 2005, 20 years ago. And because on the thousandth episode, we brought back the old panel and we kind of reminisced, I thought it'd be fun on this 20th anniversary episode to hear from our audience, people who watch the show, how they discovered us, where they watch us, that kind of thing. So we've got a lot of videos, poems and letters from you, our listeners, and we'll be playing those throughout the show, talking about the news as well. It's going to be a very special twit. Coming up next, podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1027, recorded April 13, 2025. 20 years in the can. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show we get together for the last 20 years and talk about the week's tech news. This is our 20th anniversary episode. I'm really thrilled to have this group with me. Good friends, Padre sj, Father Robert Ballis here, the digital Jesuit visiting from the Vatican. Nice to see you, Father. You can bless this show. Yeah. So good to have you. Also with us, it's great to have Alan Malvintano, longtime friend of the show. He, of course, was longtime host of this Week in Computer Hardware. He is an AI and SSD technologist back at Soledigm. Congratulations.

[Robert Balancer]

Thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

They keep pulling you back in. Former submariner.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah. Among other things.

[Leo Laporte]

And a nuclear guy. And he's got a bunch of cars taken apart in his garage, we just learned, which is a lucky thing because guess who else is here? Sam Abul Salmon, my car guy, is here. He does the car podcast at Wheel Bearings Media. Wonderful. And is a VP Research at Telemetry. Hello, Mr. Abul Samid.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Hello, Leo and Padre. And Alan. It's great to be here now. Honor to be here, because I've been.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm thrilled to have all three of you. You've all been on many times. I had said Patrick Norton was going to come on the show, but I guess Alan, you strong armed him. You tried to get your firearm?

[Robert Balancer]

I tried. He's got, I think, something about an archeological dig and his garage.

[Leo Laporte]

Patrick is famous for having done this show in so many places, including under a car in the early days. So anyway, I would have loved to have him on, but I understand these things happen. We did on the thousandth episode have Patrick on with a bunch of other old timers, the original hosts. The only one we haven't been able to get on is Kevin Rose, who said, I will be in the air on Sunday. He's traveling like crazy. He and Alexis Ohanian are restarting Digg. Former frenemies, of course. Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit. Kevin started Digg many moons ago.

[Robert Balancer]

Didn't he lose a house?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sadly, his house burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire.

[Robert Balancer]

In the fires, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But I don't think it was his only house, so I think he's okay. Anyway, family's all right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Famous by a raccoon video, if you remember one viral years ago.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I thought that was in San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, this was a new house he had recently moved into, sadly. Oh yeah. I might even built it. I'm not sure he built a house. That's a long story. We don't have to go into it.

[Robert Balancer]

I just hope it didn't have his watch collection in it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all I. Oh my God, the watches.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this show has been through a lot. In fact, at the end of the show, we are going to roll credits for all 389 people who have ever appeared on this Week in Tech. It's worth sticking around for to see if you recognize some of the names. It's kind of fun. The other thing we're going to do during the show, I asked, and I've been asking for the last month for people to send in videos or stories about how they started watching Twitter and so forth. And so we're going to intermingle those into the show. In fact, I'll read a couple of emails that I got. Not everybody sent a video. Scott Summons, Scooter VC in a proud club Twitt member says, I can't believe it's 20 years since you first showed up on my ipod. I figured I followed you from Tech tv, my unregistered online tech class that was constantly on my TV in my dorm in the late 90s when I was getting into my MIS degree. You guys have remained my primary source of tech education and information ever since. And this I it was a great. He says, my Favorite moment that I can remember is when I heard Leo praising the USAA banking app and its innovative invention. At the time, it was innovative to deposit a check by scanning it. I work at usaa and while I wasn't part of the primary development team, I worked on some processes that enabled that functionality. To me, it was the highest compliment that Leo, whom I'd been watching for years at that point, loved something that I'd had a small part working on. I still bank with usaa. It's a great, great bank. Thank you for all you do. You're always a bright spot in my week. I hope you enjoy every second of celebrating this amazing accomplishment. I'll see you on Discord. Thank you so much, Scott. I really, really appreciate that. We got a lot of videos. We'll play play them throughout the show and some. Some surprising locations. Some of these are kind of wild. I did. I'll read one more that I got because this comes from an unusual location. I wanted to say hi, my name is Ron. I'm currently incarcerated in prison in Washington. We get to listen to podcasts on the tablet. We get to have to pass the time. I have the joy of remembering you from the screensavers. Many years ago when I worked just up the road at Hewlett Packard in Rohnert park in Santa Rosa, I would watch you and your co hosts. You've done so well with the programs and podcasts. Before I was sent to prison, I watched you on YouTube. I listened to the 1000th episode and I wish I could be part of your anniversary show, but I won't be out until 2031. Oh, man. I wanted to thank you for allowing Twit to be offered to us inmates for free. Of course. We're very happy to have you listen. As a nerd for over 40 years, it's a blessing to have the joy of twit every week. I wish we could have the other podcasts you were involved in, but I will enjoy what I get. Believe me, one twit a week is more than enough. I have watched and listened for 25 years. I enjoy the North Bay connection. Also, I live in Spokane. Again, thank you for the amazing show and keeping me updated with the tech world as I am incarcerated. I will join the chats when I'm released. Thank you, Ron. Ron, I hope we're around in 2031, but. And I wish you the best. Yeah, well, and this is the thing that's kind of amazing. These letters and videos came in from all walks of life, all over the world. It's really been a joy and a pleasure to do this show along with you guys. It's really nice to have you. What do you remember the first show you were on, Father Robert was the first time you were on?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, the first time I was on was I was in. In the Peninsula in the South Bay, setting up for Interop and I was with Brian Chi.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And what was the show that you did before Twit back in the day?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it was the tech guy. There was security now and Deborah MacArthur's inside the net.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was tech guy. And I was in the chat room and I mentioned, oh, gosh, you know, I had already done the. The listener call in show for Tech News today. And I said, oh, yeah, I'm in the area. Oh, can I come up to the studio? I'd love to watch in person. And you said, if you come up, I'll put you on the show. And so I jumped into a car with Brian Chi hauled but to Petaluma. And yeah, that was my very first episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Very first show that we did was April 17, 2005. So this is the closest date we could get to that. It was only 34 minutes. Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose and Robert Heron. You can still listen to it if.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

You want it warmed up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You want to hear just. I could play a little bit of it just to give. Oh, that kind of extreme. This is how weird it sounded. It's very different. We were on Skype. As long as we're catching up, what you up to these days, Robert? Everybody knows Robert Heron as the crazy lab rat who specialized in video and would come on the show and with his whacked out hair and tell us the latest. Patrick was out of the car. I think you're not on TV though, probably.

[Robert Balancer]

No, not these days. I am working though, for extreme tech and pcmag.com and I'd love to.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is back when it was Revenge of the Screensavers.

[Leo Laporte]

They have an incredible. This is. This is. It was the Revenge of the. Oh, we found my salad. Thank God. This was the Revenge of the Screensavers, which I only called it that briefly because I got an email, a cease and desist letter from Comcast saying we still use that name. You can't use that name. I kind of thought I might recording.

[Father Robert Balliser]

On like little zoom zoom audio recording.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, that was Skype. That was. That was. That was the only reason we. I realized we could do this. First time we did it was January of 2005 after Macworld Expo and yes, we were all sitting in a table at a. At a bar, the 21st Amendment Brew Pub. And yeah, it might have been a zoom. I don't. It was something. Oh, no, no, it was a Rantz Recorders. You knew. Yes, Sam, it was that Morantz Recorder. Solid State recorder.

[Robert Balancer]

This is like way, way pre Skyposaurus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but. But because somebody called the radio show shortly after that on Skype, I realized, oh, I could do a show with people in different locales. And so those, Those early Twits were mostly done on Skype, not with Skyposaurus. One call.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

When you start like those first shows, had you even expanded out of the attic of the cottage?

[Leo Laporte]

I was in a tiny little garret room of an old bed and breakfast that we called the Twit Cottage later, but I was in a single. The smallest room in the cottage in the attic. It was tiny. In fact, there is a system with Kevin Rose where he takes a tour. Very short tour. Yes.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No. Yeah, I watched that one too. Wasn't there a time when you would have people record locally on a little audio recorder and then you try to combine the audio files later? Because I did that. That was just one time. That was so hard.

[Leo Laporte]

We never did A lot of podcasts to this day do what they call Double Enders, where everybody records locally and then somebody assembles it. But the problem with that is it takes a long time to edit it and put it all together and to keep it synced.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

We, I mean, we sort of do that now. It's gotten easier now with services like Streamyard and and so on.

[Leo Laporte]

We use Restream. Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

You know, they record everybody locally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And upload it to the server and then I just grab them off the.

[Leo Laporte]

Server and it's much easier.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Nowadays we use Zencastr.

[Robert Balancer]

Even the Brew Pub, the Brewpub Twit episode was Episode zero.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Technically I don't consider it episode one because it was a one off.

[Robert Balancer]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But. And I didn't. It didn't intend it to be a podcaster. Well, I guess it technically was, but really we just put it on a website. Yeah. And I. And because 30,000 people downloaded it. That's when I said, geez, I wish I could do this more often. Well, the light bulb was when Skype. I realized I could do it more often with Skype because everybody, you know, Kevin was in la. Patrick, I don't remember where. I think he was in San Francisco. But you never know where Patrick's going to be. He's finally settled down a Little bit. Do you remember the first time you were on?

[Robert Balancer]

I think the first time I was on was when I was up in Petaluma. I think I came in studio and did one. The Dvorak was on was like when the Samsung 840 EVO headlight come out around then. Like this is way, way back. I remember that because Dvorak asked me like, what's your favorite ssd? And then he, he like he spot checked me with wire cutter.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's like.

[Robert Balancer]

While I was answering.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if you're right.

[Robert Balancer]

He searched it. He. Oh yeah, that's what Wirecutter says. Yeah, I get no spam. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He used to love to come up because he would stop at the Costco in Nevada on the way to Petaluma because he said that guy got a great wine buyer there. Sam, when was the first time you were on?

[Sam Aboul Samet]

The first. My first time on the network was in January 2011 at CES. Because you and I first met you in 2010.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

When you were at. At the Maker Faire in Dearborn.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, In Michigan.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And then the following January I was at that point I was working for GM and we did a segment with the GM Envy Concepts.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. Was it CES or comdex?

[Sam Aboul Samet]

It was a ces, I remember. And then I wasn't actually on Twit, I think until like 2014, by which time I was, you know, I had shifted away and it was. I was working as an analyst at that point. So I think it was.

[Leo Laporte]

You were a regular on the radio show? Of course. For many, many years. For a long time. Yeah. He was our car guy on the radio show. Well, don't worry, there will be news this week. We aren't going to appearance.

[Robert Balancer]

I think Leo was this week in computer hardware number 48. This is when you hosted this Week in Computer Hardware?

[Leo Laporte]

I used to host it back in the early days.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, A lot of times when I.

[Leo Laporte]

Launched a show, I would host it for a while just to get it off.

[Robert Balancer]

My first, first ever appearance, I was in a barracks room on a Navy base in Norfolk and I field stripped a drobo on the stream.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. So you were still in the service at the time?

[Robert Balancer]

I was still in the Navy, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Robert Balancer]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. We've had so many great people and as I said at the end, stay till the end of the show because at the end we're going to show credits for everybody who's ever been not on the whole network, just on this show on this week in tech, we probably should mention some news. This was kind of a crazy easy week with the tariffs. The latest is the tariffs are off. Well, sort of off. Except for China where the tariffs are. I don't know how high they are because I can't keep track. Well over a hundred percent enough to make it. So you really wouldn't want to buy anything made in China. And then on and off, just this weekend, the President gave all CPUs, computers and parts made in China a break. Wide ranging exemptions. That was on Friday night.

[Robert Balancer]

Yesterday. Yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Even that has changed because they came out two hours ago and they said, no, no, no, no, we're not really. It's not permanent exemptions. Yeah, these are just pausing. We're pausing those tariffs.

[Leo Laporte]

We wouldn't want anybody to get comfortable with the situation.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We wouldn't want the market to settle or anything. We wouldn't want people to be able to figure out a supply chain for the next two years. So let's keep some uncertainty in there.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know what happened. I imagine Tim Cook called the President and said, dude, you're literally going to put Apple out of business because the tariff with 145% tariff on iPhones would make the iPhone unaffordable. Apple did move a lot of its manufacturing as much as it could to India, Vietnam and Brazil. But still the majority of stuff is made in China and assembled in China. They even flew a number of big cargo planes from India trying to get as many iPhones into the United States. Before the tariffs went up, Vietnam had a 49% tariff, but that's paused. But again, it's only for 90 days. None of this is enough for Apple to say, oh, we dodged a bullet. What would happen if an iPhone doubled more than doubled in price?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, that it's cheaper to fly to another country, buy an iPhone and fly back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, get a nice trip to Thailand. Yeah, same thing. It would be the same thing with laptops and more importantly for CPUs, which would affect cars, wouldn't it, Sam? I mean cars already have.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

In fact, you know, we were just as we were recording this morning, I was reviewing the truck that I was driving last week. It's a truck that was built here in the US It's a GMC canyon. And looking at the window sticker, you know, they've got some data on content and it said on there US and Canada content, even though it's assembled in Missouri, US and Canada content, 49% and it doesn't break out what the Canadian content is versus US and then another 25% from Mexico and then the other 26% from somewhere else. So even a vehicle that's built here, at a minimum, at least half of the the value of it came from outside of the United States and probably closer to about 60 to 65% of the value of parts and so on came from outside the US and electronics are a big part of that, you know, because there's a lot of chips, you know, whether you're talking, you know, older legacy designs that might have 100 electronic control units scattered around the vehicle or more modern designs like the one I was just driving the other day, that have a central computer with two Nvidia orange chips in there. That's a big chunk of the value of the vehicle is just in silicon that is imported.

[Leo Laporte]

On Friday at midnight. Exemptions were granted to computers, smartphones, monitors, flash memory, DRAM and other storage like hard drives, video cards, flat panel televisions, regardless of screen type, power supplies and other finished goods. Silicon chips no longer tariffed nor the fabrication machinery needed to make them. However, Apple watch bands are still tariffed. Leather goods, iPhone cases still tariffed. Cabling, PC cases and the raw materials to make them, aluminum, titanium and steel, all still tariffed. How does Soledyne, how does an SSD manufacture, Does Soledym manufacture its chips in the U.S.

[Robert Balancer]

Well, I mean, there are some, but there's still plenty of fabs that are overseas just like any other. Just like any other chip.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And Leo, just to follow up on what you just said, I just pulled up WhiteHouse.gov and the latest, the most recent article on here is Sunday shows President Trump's America first trade policies in action. And it's got some bullet points of what was said by people like Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, on tariffs for certain electronics, which is what you were just referring to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

These products are going to be part of the semiconductor sectoral tariffs which are coming. We need to have these things made in America. So, you know, they may be sort of on pause for now, but coming back soon at who knows what the lesson is.

[Father Robert Balliser]

In 2 months, everyone please build fabs that normally take between 6 and 10 years to spin up properly.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah, that's about right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, let's do that. Just do that.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're never going to make iPhones in the US That's a pipe dream.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right. I mean, I think it was Lutnick or maybe it was Besent who said, oh yeah, we'll have Americans will be screwing in tiny screws any day now. It's not going to happen.

[Robert Balancer]

I mean. I mean, you would. You would think the only way that they could pull it off was if everything or the majority of it was automated. But even that's not the case because all the automotive engineers are over in.

[Leo Laporte]

China, plus the robotics come from China.

[Robert Balancer]

Automation. Automation engineers.

[Leo Laporte]

What's happened, you know, whether you agree on the idea of tariffs and whether it makes sense economically, is we've been living in a world where it was essentially a free trade world for a long time, and so we've created these multinational supply chains. And you're asking to overnight stop it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't know if you can. Yeah, it's even worse if you say stop it or maybe don't stop. Wait a minute. Don't stop it. No. But. No. Oh, you're gonna. Maybe we'll stop it in three months. We might. I don't know. I don't know how. What must be going on in the boardrooms of Apple right now. I mean, or every big Dell or. Yeah, I mean, instead of.

[Robert Balancer]

I mean, instead of spending cycles on innovating, everybody's having to think about contingency plans for. What do we do?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even know how you make. How do you make plans for something like that?

[Robert Balancer]

Exactly.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, basically they'd be saying, we know that we can. We can force him to back down. We. If we complain enough and we threaten him enough with the economic consequences, he'll back down, at least temporarily. So you. You could get into the cycle where every two or three months there's a pause. They. Everyone loads up on every possible chip that they need while the tariffs are down, which will essentially mean that the Chinese companies make all the money that they were making before, so there's no effect to them and there's no reason for them to negotiate. And then it goes back to a tariff and we have a panic and the market drops out and the treasury bonds continue to rise. And then two months after that, he'll pause it again. The problem is you can backwards engineer what's happening. Ludnick is claiming that this is all part of the plan, but we know it's not. We know that there was panic, so that they stepped back, and then people started saying, oh, well, Trump is surrendering. So then he redoubled his efforts, and then he backed off, and then he redoubled.

[Leo Laporte]

It may not even matter what Trump does because China has suspended exports of rare earth minerals and magnets. China is just. They of course, have their own tariffs on inbound US Stuff, but China is just turning off the tap whether there's tariffs or not.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Well, the other interesting thing that China said the other day was, you know, after they cranked it up to 145%, you know, China was at 125%. Yeah. We're not going to bother going beyond. And we're done at 125. There's no point in us continuing this tit for tat because it's not going to have any effect. You know, it's, it's ridiculous.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They said, you know, 125% is effectively the same as 4,000%.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

At that point, it's. So why. It's, that's, it's childish. Now there is, there is a vocal group on the groups that we monitor that are saying, oh, this proves that the US Needs Greenland because Greenland has all these rare earths that we're looking at. They don't mention that it would take 20 years to set up the infrastructure and drill through our sheets.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

So, you know, you know where else we have those rare earths? Right here in the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're just not mining for here.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah, yeah, we've got, we've got a lot of these materials. Most of these materials, we just haven't.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Been huge cash in Las Vegas.

[Robert Balancer]

But that takes time to spin up. Right. That's not a thing overnight. You can just suddenly, poof. Now we have all these rare earths.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, there isn't. It's funny because. Okay, I don't know what commentary there is to make. It's obviously a problem. There's. That's that. And we're just going to. We're all in. We've got a crazy person driving the car and we're on the back seat and we have, do we have any.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I mean, I'd like to add something else to this, which is, you know, even beyond the tariffs, the whole deregulatory policy that the administration has, which is, you know, for the, for the auto industry, for example, you've got this push to pull back on, on all the emissions and fuel economy regulations, which is one of the things that was driving the move towards electrification. Okay. So we do that. You. And then you've got the tariffs, you know, so you're driving, you're pushing manufacture, automakers and suppliers to put manufacturing back in the US where it's going to be more expensive. So you've added costs there. Now you have pulled back on the, on the other regulations. And now the automakers have more incentive to invest more in old technologies, continue building engine, internal combustion engines and so on. And, but at the same time, the rest of the world is not pulling back on that. So you've got to have electrification. And so you're adding costs all over the place, stacked on top of each other, which is going to reduce the resources that these companies have for R and D and innovation. And we're already losing on innovation to China. And so what's going to end up happening if we continue down this path is the US Auto industry essentially becomes an island that with products that they can't sell anywhere else in the world, nobody wants what Trump wants them to build. And so the, the, and you know, you look outside of the US you go to Canada, you go to Mexico, you know, they're moving forward with things like electrification, South America even. And so the, with these trade policies, they're going to say, all right, byd, you want to build a factory in Windsor, Ontario, come on in. And so the US Industry is going to be completely isolated and totally non competitive in the rest of the world and they're going to end up getting crushed.

[Leo Laporte]

Not to mention the fact that Doge has fired most of the safety experts.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah, well, there's not, not a great loss there because they've been utterly ineffectual for the past decade anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay. But I think Elon has something to do with that. Right. Because they were investigating car safety. Full self driving vehicles in full self driving in their Tesla vehicles. Sam, if you could turn your mic down just a little bit. You're clipping a little bit. We're going to take this one tariff.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Thing that I think it's important to get on the record because it's so often misunderstood. John Gerard brought it up in the discord when he says, what does free trade mean? Does that mean that no country had tariffs of any amount on American goods? This is actually really important. It's a good question because I live with three economists, three economist professors, and what they have tried to explain to me is it's so difficult to actually calculate what tariffs are because it's not just outright we're taxing this percentage of whatever we you sell to us. They can count as tariffs. Do you have lax employment standards that allow people to work in substandard conditions for substandard wages? Do you have environmental laxity that allows people to pollute, which drives down their costs because they don't have to worry about being fined or having to pay for cleanup? Do you have a system of economy that charges the same amount for transportation of goods between your provinces and other countries. Now, depending on how you add those numbers up, you can get extremely high numbers or extremely low numbers. What this administration has done is they've taken all the worst case numbers because they want to show a worst case scenario. But that doesn't actually reflect what the real tariffs are. And we don't know what the real tariffs are because even the best economists can't give us definitive numbers. They can just say this country has lax environmental standards, this country has lax employment standards. This country has a easier transfer between countries. So it's a good question. It just doesn't have a simple answer.

[Leo Laporte]

We enjoyed the benefits of that though, right? The iPhones are a lot cheaper because.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, we like that. We want that. We don't want to be polluting our environment. We don't want to be running sweatshops. We just want the finished product. Well, okay, but then you can't blame us for giving you what you want, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, it's a complicated world. That's the truth of it. Let's take a little break. I'm going to play a video and then we're going to go into a spot and we'll have more. We're done with the tariffs though. More other other news. We are watching the 20th anniversary episode. I would never, if you'd asked me 20 years ago if this would be the topic, I would not have thought that I was very, I, I have been very bullish on the tech sector. Obviously I'm a little less bullish now. Here we go with a our first video. I'm going to do it in alphabetical order of your first name. This is Alexander.

[Robert Balancer]

Hello, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello the team this week in tech.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

My name is Alex.

[Robert Balancer]

I'm a software developer from Brazil, but I live in the northwest of France in a very small city called Luck.

[Leo Laporte]

Maria Kerr.

[Robert Balancer]

I've been listening to the show for over 10 years now and you guys.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Are part of my Monday morning routine. With you guys.

[Robert Balancer]

I've learned a lot of things about smart speaker cryptocurrency and now I'm learning.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot about AI.

[Robert Balancer]

Thanks for the great work.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye bye. Thank you, Alexander. We'll stop and we'll get to Andrew in just a second. Andrew, hold on. We're going to have more.

[Robert Balancer]

Whoa.

[Father Robert Balliser]

What was going on there?

[Leo Laporte]

In just a moment while I had my segue to the next video I have put it all into. Thank you vlc. We were trying all different ways of playing this Turned out VLC was the best way to do it. We're going to have more with this week at Tech in just a little bit. Our great panelists, Alan Malvantano now back at Solendeim. Congratulations, I guess, right?

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They made you an offer you couldn't refuse. I'm glad to hear it. It's great to have you making the.

[Robert Balancer]

SSDs faster, you know, the usual.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the usual end. But I see this AI. Are you doing AI too?

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah. So I went to Fison for a year and worked on a bunch of AI related SSD products and our projects and turns out that that's also one of the things solidigm was looking for. So it came in handy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good to have some skills in this day and age. Congratulations.

[Robert Balancer]

As it turns out, it's handy to offset some GPU VRAM with some SSD capacity in some cases. Because, you know, GPU VRAM is kind of pricey.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, absolutely. Also, Samit Bullsamet, who has recently changed jobs. He is now an analyst at Telemetry. Same, same beat. Basically the car.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Basically the same beat. Doing market research for the transportation mobility industry. We just published our first market forecast report last week and doing advisory work with a number of clients. So yeah, same, same kind of stuff, but no longer being cen sponsored by my employer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, talk about Guidehouse. They were in the news as a matter of fact, in just a little bit. Your former employer also. But you can, you can recuse yourself from that conversation, I'm sure.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

No, I'm happy to talk about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. All right.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And then there's all they are. My former employer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Then there's Father Robert who responds to a higher authority.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You will change to working with AI. So you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, there you go. There you go. It's great to have all three of you. Thank you for joining me on this 20th anniversary edition. Our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter. They've been with us for many a year, both as an advertiser, but also as the company we used to do hiring. You know what speed dating is, right? If you're the owner of a growing business. What if there was a speed dating like feature for hiring? In other words, you could meet several hundred interested qualified candidates at once, all at a designated time. It kind of is. It's called Zip Intro and this is brand new from ZipRecruiter. You can post your job today and start talking to qualified candidates tomorrow. Right now you can try Zip Intro for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT Zip Intro gives you the power to quickly access excellent candidates for your job. And it's kind of like speed dating. You do it via back to back video calls. Now you of course pick the candidates, you pick the time and Zip Intro does all the work of finding and scheduling qualified candidates for you. Then you can choose who you want to talk to and meet with great people as soon as tomorrow, right? It's so easy. And by the way, when you're, you know, down a person, you maybe do want to do this tomorrow. I want to hire somebody fast. That's what ZipRecruiter is all about. Enjoy the benefits of speed hiring with the new Zip Intro only from ZipRecruiter rated number one hiring site on G2. Try Zip Intro for free. The website is ziprecruiter.com TWIT again that ziprecruiter.com TWiT Zip Intro post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. Let me play one more video that we're going to get back in to the news. This is Andrew. Andrew, Happy Anniversary Twitch Gang.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I've been watching since about 2016 when.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo was still on the radio. I just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed the content and being a part of Club Twitch and also thank.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

You for the great product you've recommended over the years.

[Leo Laporte]

Happy Anniversary. Thank you. Oh and we'll get to ant in a bit. Stay tuned. Aunt. Don't go anywhere. Thank you Andrew. Really great to have you in our club and thanks to all of our club members. We started that a few years ago when ads were a little bit lean. It's worked out really well. We're really glad to have all those wonderful Club Twit members. So thank you for being a great part of the Twit famous. Back to the news. Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. This was an interesting tweet started with Jack Dorsey who said delete all IP law on Twitter. To which yeah, interesting huh? This was. This was yesterday or day before yesterday. To which Nicole Shanahan, who said I am an actual IP professional here. No, no. IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations. If you want to reform it, let's talk. To which Jack, he amplified a little bit, said creativity is what currently separates us and the current system is limiting that and putting the payments disbursements into the hands of gatekeepers who aren't paying out fairly. And actually this is something as provocative as that tweet. Is this is something even Cory Doctorow has been saying for a long time, is that copyright only favors really the publishers, not the creators. It's the publishers who wanted copyright in the first place. Can you imagine though, a world without IP protection?

[Robert Balancer]

He's kind of dipping in the patent trolls too there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Patent troll is another problem. Elon Musk, by the way, responded with two words. I agree.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, let's be serious. What they're after is the ability to feed everything into their AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's it. That's all they. Everything else is a smokescreen. They can say, oh, we want to make sure that creators are paid fairly for their creations. But no, it's. We would like to be able to train our LLMs on absolutely everything without restrictions and then we can figure out payment later if we ever get to that point.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an interesting debate though, because you're right. Without trademark and copyright protections, without patents. The whole idea of patents was to encourage inventors to invent stuff and then after a suitable period of time where they exclusively enjoy the fruits of their invention, it's put out into the public so that everybody could benefit from that patent, which has seemed like a good idea at the time.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Well, and, and it was, and it still is, except that somewhere along the way over the last several decades, we've gotten to the point where there was so much stuff that they were, that people were trying to, that people were trying to patent. And we didn't have competent patent examiners that actually knew how to evaluate these patent applications. And so they were just granting patents willy nilly on everything, especially on software that had no business being protected. You know, there were some, there were some genuine innovations that deserve protection, but the number of those was a tiny fraction of the total number of patents being granted. That's why we got into this whole mess with patent trolls.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We had an episode of Twilight where we actually brought in someone from the US Patent, the uspto, and essentially what he told us was, look, the people who really know this stuff, who can pick it up immediately and look at a patent application and say whether or not this is unique and novel, they work for the other side. We can't pay enough for, for these, these specialists to work for the government. So of course we're going to have substandard review of applications. And that hasn't changed. There's so much more money to be made on the other side of the patent troll fence.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an interesting debate. When Jeff Jarvis comes by with intelligent machines on Wednesday. I'm sure he'll have something to say about this too. He said, has said for a long time that copyright anyway, is problematic from a creator's point of view. But you're right. I think that the real reason Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk want to do it is so they can. Is. Does Dorsey have an AI play?

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I would be shocked if he's not an investor in xai.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And so actually, I think, yeah, his Twitter. His Twitter shares were rolled into xai, so.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah, so he's at least got that much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. Yes. It's all one.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

He was. He was probably also. I think he was also an investor in XAI even before that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Okay. Tomorrow, Meta's court date appears. The FTC wants to break up Meta. He wants. Wants Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to be three separate applications. And this will be a trial, an antitrust trial that begins tomorrow, which could completely change Meta's business. Or not. That's the question. Now this one is going ahead even without Lina Khan running the ftc. So Meta has made enemies in both administrations, apparently. Meta's statement says the FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17 year old in the world knows. Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese owned TikTok, Google's YouTube, X iMessage and many others. More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the commission's action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final. That's a good point. They were allowed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram. Should they be forced to divest now.

[Father Robert Balliser]

What harm is caused by the integration? So I'm playing devil's advocate here. The fact that they can combine three extremely popular services that operate in different niches, how are they leveraging that unfairly? Or is it just because it's one company and we don't like that? I mean, in order for there to be a violation, there has to be some sort of leverage that they're applying between the products in order to improve the overall position of all platforms. Do you see that happening? Is that actually happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Guys?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, it's hard. It's a very hard question. I mean, I. I like it.

[Leo Laporte]

We Also, in the US we don't have a good handle on how powerful WhatsApp is. You do in Italy though, right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, gosh, yes. It's the default here. Everyone uses it.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Outside of the United States, it is pretty much the default. Is it now the rest of the rest? Yeah. Outside the U.S. yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Africa, Asia, Europe. It's all WhatsApp, Apple messages.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah, Apple, Apple Messages is pretty much a US centric thing, or North America centric. And, you know, Signal has gained, you know, a bit of traction over the years, but it's. But WhatsApp is really the. The one because it, you know, it supported things like group chat a lot earlier and a lot better than other services.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But the question is, because I don't see it on this end, does WhatsApp then drive traffic to Instagram and.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably not Facebook.

[Robert Balancer]

Probably not.

[Leo Laporte]

Instagram drives traffic to Threads, but that's kind of de minimis. I mean, who cares?

[Father Robert Balliser]

So it'd be hard to prove the harm. Unless you're saying, oh, no, they're using the fact that. That WhatsApp operates with Facebook to hurt platforms like X and. And Blue Sky.

[Leo Laporte]

And you'd have to agree that there is plenty of competition for WhatsApp and for Instagram. Is there any competition for Facebook? No, not really.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

But who uses Facebook except old people like me. Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I've been pushing Signal. I've been telling people, if you sign up for a signal, there's a less than 0% chance that you'll get US secret military war plans.

[Leo Laporte]

Join the group.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The judge hearing this, it's a bench case. There's no jury. The judge hearing it is actually an interesting judge. He's also hearing the Venezuelan case, the Deportees to Venezuela case. Judge Boasberg. It's unclear what the Trump administration. You know, remember Mark keeps going to the White House in Mar? A Lago. He's made multiple trips. Mark Zuckerberg. It's unclear what the president himself thinks. Zuckerberg donated a million dollars to the Inaugural Committee. He has agreed to pay Trump $25 million. The president sued Facebook and Instagram for being suspended after January 6th. They settled. Facebook settled that in a clear attempt to kind of curry favor with the President.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Unfortunately.

[Leo Laporte]

But so far, the FTC is pursuing it aggressively. Sorry.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It is kind of clear in the sense that, remember, not too long ago, Trump thought TikTok was the worst thing ever.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And it was the reason why we needed to get rid of sexual.

[Leo Laporte]

It's transactional, of course.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But then he got popular on TikTok, and there were a lot of influencers on TikTok who were pushing the Trump weight.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, also, 30% of TikTok is owned by a big donor. Jeff Yassin.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Precisely. So if the same thing starts happening on Facebook. If the data starts coming out. Oh, no, they're really pro Trump on Facebook, then he'll back down because we know that's, that's his number one priority. I want to look good.

[Leo Laporte]

The new chair of the ftc, Andrew Ferguson, said his lawyers are raring to go against Meta, but he also said at that same time, I will obey off lawful orders from the President. So in a way, he's leaving the door open for President Trump to.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah. What? One thing to remember is that one of the first. One of the early executive orders of this administration was that the, the DOJ would no longer prosecute cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Which effectively is make bribery great again. Right. Yeah. I mean that in, in my prior job, you know, we had to go through regular.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Online training courses and one of the ones that we had to do at least once a year, actually. I think over the last several years we. I ended up having to do the same course like twice a year was, you know, the Foreign Corrupt Practices act because, you know, you weren't allowed to give or accept bribes in exchange for business.

[Leo Laporte]

When I worked for a premiere on the radio show. Even then Clear Channel, which was the owner at the time, would say, here's, you know, here's what they have little quizzes like Joe is trying to get his goods through the, the port of, you know, Frankfurt, and he wants to give the port director $1,000 to help things along. Is that okay? And of course you're supposed to say, no, of course not. That's bribery. Well, not anymore. Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see. I don't at this point, it's kind of breaking up Meta. Doesn't seem like a big deal. Remember, the government also is talking about breaking up Google.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But, but they can demonstrate a harm. So the connection between the browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Easier for that. Yeah, it's easier.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's easier to show that. Yeah, they're leveraging something bad here with, with Metis properties. I mean, yes, they have cross posting, but I don't see how they're hurting competition by having those three. They are incredibly popular, but they're not.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Stifling competition, at least between Facebook and Instagram. Maybe not so much with. With WhatsApp. You know, the. They do share the data that comes through those and they use that as part of their ad targeting algorithms. And so it does amplify a lot of what they're doing with the ad targeting. And at least in theory, you know, makes that more effective. It allows them to get higher prices for the ads in much the same way as what Google does, you know, across their various properties with advertising.

[Leo Laporte]

In a completely unrelated story, when you go to see the new Megan movie M3G a n you will be encouraged to interact with the evil doll via a Megan Chatbot. Meta is launching its Movie Mate technology with a screening. This is just why this is just what you want in a theater. Allowing moviegoers to second screen during the film to access exclusive content, trivia and behind the scenes info in real time.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is fantastic. Leo. I love this because I needed a really good reason to never go to a theater.

[Leo Laporte]

Never again. Unbelievable.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, if I wanted to be watching a movie with a bunch of people looking at their phones, I, I'd go to my parents house. I. I don't mean that's not what I want in a darkened theater.

[Leo Laporte]

Good answer. Good. Unbelievable. We got so many videos and I'm gonna try to play as many as I can, but this was one video that, that brought me, I would say brought me a little bit to tears from a dear, dear friend. Ant oh.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Hey there Chief Twit, Mr. Leo Laporte, Ms. Lisa Laporte, and the entire Twit family. Hope y'all doing okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I wanted to send in my video.

[Father Robert Balliser]

To say first congratulations and happy 20th for everyone there at TWIT, and also.

[Robert Balancer]

Just to say thank you for everything.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That you and the family has done for me and my family. You know, before ever becoming an employee at twit, you know, I let it be known that I was a fan and you know, yes, the economy went.

[Robert Balancer]

To craptastic and everything changed and I'm.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No longer there as an employee of twit.

[Robert Balancer]

But I am still a fan. I still watch the shows regularly each.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And every week whether I agree with the stuff that's discussed or not. It's nothing but love and nothing but respect and I appreciate everything that you all have done for me as far as the experience that I gathered there that I still find useful to this day. Far as how I used to watch twit, I remember watching it just on.

[Robert Balancer]

An old CRT computer monitor back in the days in the early 2000s and just waiting on that RSS feed to update.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Of course now that's changed to watching.

[Robert Balancer]

It via the YouTube feed on my big screen TV. And when I was thinking about watching.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Watching it back in the days, it reminded me of one of the first.

[Robert Balancer]

Times that we met. Actually it was the first time that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We met in person here in Petaluma.

[Robert Balancer]

When the whole family came Out. When we got together for meeting. Got together to meet for dinner.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Queen Pruitt says, oh, you're the white haired guy on the screen that he's.

[Leo Laporte]

Watching all the time.

[Robert Balancer]

I'll never forget that because she was just as genuine as she always is.

[Leo Laporte]

And the look on your face, you.

[Robert Balancer]

Just laughed and it was a really good time. Nothing but love for you and the whole twit family.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So, yeah, feel free to stay in touch.

[Robert Balancer]

I will continue to watch the shows like I normally do and continue to.

[Leo Laporte]

Do whatever it is that I'm doing.

[Robert Balancer]

As a full time creator. Again, happy 20th to you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Here's too many more.

[Robert Balancer]

As long as you want to, Mr. I'm going to retire.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, thank you. Aunt Pruitt and I have very fond memories of that barbecue we had with hard heads and Queen. The Queen. And it was so much fun. And I miss you, Ant. I see you. Of course, he's in the discord right now, member of our club. And we just miss him. And you know, I have fantasies someday if we raise enough money with a club to bring Ant back and, and a lot of the people we've, we've had to leave behind along the way. It's not an easy thing running a business, as you might imagine. We will have more very, very kind videos from a whole bunch of people. All right, let me do one. I gotta do one more. One more video because this one is, well, an unusual place. Watch here. Let me finish. Hi, Leo, Chris here.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Club tip member.

[Leo Laporte]

And this since, I think, late 2005.

[Father Robert Balliser]

When I got into podcasting, I listen to all episodes of Apprais Weekly and Twit everything that Mica does. And occasionally I dip into Security now.

[Leo Laporte]

And Windows Weekly, but they're a little bit geeky for me.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I'm two years older than you and retired.

[Leo Laporte]

As I was coming up to retirement.

[Father Robert Balliser]

My wife was worried that I'd just vegetate in front of a computer monitor.

[Leo Laporte]

So she suggested we started sailing.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, we'd already been sailing for a little while, but now we've been sailing continuously around the world for three years.

[Robert Balancer]

In fact, right now we're sailing past.

[Father Robert Balliser]

French Guiana, Devil's island actually, where Papillon was imprisoned for, I think 13 years. And in 40 days time, we'll be in the Caribbean and we'll have completed our circumnavigation. Anyway, I wanted to say congratulations on 20 years of podcasting and Twit and Macro Weekly. I've listened to most of the episodes.

[Leo Laporte]

And enjoy them all.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Of course, with Starlink nowadays and high speed comms. I know you like travel. You could buy a boat as well. Starlink on it and do the next 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't tempt me.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Cheers, Leo and all the team, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so great to hear from you. Andrew on his boat next to Devil's Island. Amazing. Actually, that was Chris on that. Thank you, Chris. All right, we can now do some more news. I just, I have so many, we have so many very thoughtful, very kind videos. I thought it'd be fun to do a clip show, but not clips of us. Clips from our viewers and our family, really. And it's really fun to see all of those people. As long as we're still talking Trump. I cannot resist this one. We are big fans of Christopher Krebs. Oh, no. Very smart guy. He was the head of the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency CISA during the last Trump administration. He made the mistake of saying that the 2020 election was free and fair and was in fact, he said, one of the most secure elections in American history, which caused some enmity, I think, with the president. Trump on Wednesday signed an order targeting him for investigation by his basically a pet Department of Justice at this point. No accusation of a criminal act by Chris Krebs. And he, as far as I know, I'm, you know, a very high integrity individual. This is, this is not investigate him.

[Father Robert Balliser]

For any particular action. This is, I would like you to find a crime.

[Leo Laporte]

Find a crime.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

It's harassment. That's all it is, plain and simple, harassment.

[Leo Laporte]

Kreps works with our friends Alex stamos@sentinel. One great guy and absolutely high integrity. And this is, it's more than harassment. It's really the beginning of what I fear is a kind of authoritarianism, almost a Stalinesque authoritarianism where people who disagree with the president are then prosecuted. We'll see if anything comes of this. It might just be an EO that does the. Nothing happens. Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, there's very few people who have the 10,000 foot view of security like Krebs. Krebs can do it all. And we are allowing a man whose feelings were hurt because Krebs didn't go along with the party line and he's allowing him to sacrifice expertise for loyalty. I mean, that is insidious. Once you start doing that, you end up with, with a non functional government. Because if people in the government can't disagree with the party line, you don't have a government. You have yes men.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you don't want the remaining People at cisa, and by the way, quite a few of them have already been fired. You don't want them fearing political retaliation sometime down the road for doing the right thing. Half of the full time staff at 40% of the contractors are under the gun. They haven't been fired yet, but it is imminent. Sisa. How important is SISA to our security?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Extremely. It's, it's basically the, the first, the last, the only line of defense we have for, for most of the most secret stuff that, that the United States deals with.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

If you don't have a functional cisa, you are essentially telling all of the bad state actors it's open house, go ahead and do whatever you want as long as you pay lip service to one or two people in our administration and we won't call you on it. It's such a bad precedent.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah. Half my Navy career was in cybersecurity.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Yeah, I know.

[Robert Balancer]

And I mean, this goes just beyond this for this particular case. The thing that bothers me about this is if you're an expert in the field, like, for example, I deal with SSDs day in, day out. If I need to make a statement about just a way that the thing acts, as an expert in the field, like I need to be able to just call a spade a spade, whatever the case may be.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Robert Balancer]

But in this case, this guy's getting, you know, harassed and gone after because he just called it. I mean, I guarantee you he had a whole bunch of data at his disposal to back up what he said.

[Leo Laporte]

He also revoked security clearance, which he's been doing to almost everybody in previous administrations. The irony of this is Trump had appointed Krebs as his first CISA director. He actually built the agency. NBC News quoted one CISA employee. It's really tough. It's a really tough time for all of us right now. Every day somehow feels more bizarre than the last. It's incredibly difficult to focus on our mission that's serious. They have a very. They have an important mission.

[Father Robert Balliser]

When he was asked about Krebs, Trump said he gave that line about, oh, I don't think I ever. I don't really know him. I think I met him once maybe, but I don't know. I don't know who he is. It's like, wait, what? That's the answer you give to about everyone who you've thrown under the bus?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

It's to the point where it's almost a comedic. Like, you know that that's gonna happen if it's somebody that he, it looks bad if he knows them, then he just doesn't know them. And, like, it's just. It's almost like a. Like a joke. At this point.

[Leo Laporte]

Krebs acted fairly honorably. He declined to comment on the eo. He did on Wednesday repost to X the message he published in 2020 after Trump fired him. Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend today, secure tomorrow.

[Robert Balancer]

Yep. That's called taking the high road, kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And remember when Krebs was doing this in 2020, he didn't say, oh, no, the President is lying. He didn't say, oh, there's so much propaganda. He said, from my scope and the mission that I have been given, we have seen no attacks on the US Election system. That was it. That, that's the thing that hurt Donald Trump's ego, because someone didn't even call him a liar, just said, no, no, I'm not going along with what you're saying.

[Robert Balancer]

Honestly, there's an opportunity for the investigation. Air quotes around investigation to just backfire because, okay, fine, dig into it and find all of the things that he was using to justify his statement.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right.

[Robert Balancer]

And find, you know, proof that there was, in fact, you know, no interference there or something so negligible that, you know, had no impact.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

But none of that's ever going to get published. None of that's ever going to get released.

[Leo Laporte]

That'll be suppressed.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Or there will be another EO investigating the people who were doing the investment.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yes, exactly. Investigations.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's a Russian doll of nested investigations.

[Leo Laporte]

It really is. Trump administration is currently purging CESA's workforce. Emails went out to CESA employees encouraging them to retire early or take a buyout package by tomorrow. A second email sent by the acting director, Bridget Bean, reiterated that offer. Trump has nominated a permanent director, Sean Planky, who's yet to be confirmed by the Senate.

[Robert Balancer]

So having. So having. Having done a couple of decades of government stuff myself, I can say that there's an awful lot of things in place where the way that things work. There's an awful lot of institutional knowledge that gets carried forward to, like, as you get new people in, then there's turnovers and there's very sort of structured ways to, you know, somebody doesn't just show up in a new role, and then the first day they're just doing an amazing job. Like, they have to go and learn from all their peers. They're sitting next to and figure how to do. How do all these systems work, how do all these things work? And I mean, I've never been in one of these organizations when just a whole quarter or a third or a half of them were just wiped out. But I just can't even think of the type of like damage that does as far as the institutional knowledge carrying forward works. And also how long does it take to get that back? Because a lot of that knowledge was hard fought. Like people had to make a lot of mistakes along the way to figure out, oh yeah, you can't do that that way. You have to do it this way. This is how it works correctly. And you just, it's almost like you're starting from scratch after you do something like.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And that's exactly what you're going to have is starting from scratch. Because a lot of those people, if not most of those people, even if, you know, the administration changed and somebody wanted to hire everybody back, a lot of those people are just, they're not, they've lost their trust, they've lost their faith in, in the, the, the government and in the, in the system and they're not going to want to come back, they're not going to want to be a part of this going forward.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

So just as our, our allies no longer, you know, it's going to take decades before they trust us again.

[Robert Balancer]

Right. So, so because of all that churn that you caused on the front end, on the back end, all of your best people, well, they're going to go somewhere else. Especially if they were in the government working and you forced them to go over into the civilian side and find work there that they'll get way more for. Yeah, exactly. Nine times out of ten, that's where the real money is. You know, those people that are working for the government, they were doing it kind of for the same sort of reason why I served in the military. Like, you don't serve in the military.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

You don't serve in the military to make a lot of money. You know, you do it partially because you're trying to do something for the country. Right. And even government workers generally, even though there are some pay grades that are, you know, making decent money there still don't hold a candle to what you make on, on outside of that sphere. Right. You go into cybersecurity, especially cybersecurity, you go on the outside of the government for cyber security, you're making double.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Robert Balancer]

And out of those people, when you try on going back to the back end thing, when you try to rebuild the government agency, if you do actually need a government function for that, for that Whatever that thing is, whatever that purpose is, you're no longer going to get the best people or even close to it. They're just not going to have. They're not going to bother. Right. Because why would I want to go work there when I can go work someplace that actually has their stuff together?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, at defcon every year, there's always some sort of presence from the NSA or another intelligence agency trying to recruit people who would be very good at this job. And the way that they try to recruit, recruit them is they acknowledge up front you're not going to make as much as you would as at a private firm, a commercial firm. However, if you've got a passion for defending the country, and that actually worked, that worked in many, many cases.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You can't make that pitch anymore. If you come to DEFCON this coming year and you try to make the pitch, do what's right for your country, you'll get laughed out of the auditorium.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But the good news is we're making shower heads great. Again. And I think, I think that is all that matters. Right?

[Robert Balancer]

How many times do you have to flush that toilet, Leo? How many times?

[Leo Laporte]

10, 20 times?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, it depends how many documents are in it. Yes, you need a high flow.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm talking about the executive order that Trump put out on Wednesday titled maintaining acceptable water pressure in showerheads. It's something on the campaign trail he complained about toilets, shower heads. I saw a Republican spokesperson on Fox the other day say, finally, your dishwasher is going to really wash dishes. Which I just maybe think that, you.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Know, I, I have not had a problem with my dishwasher getting the dishes clean. And, you know, actually in. Since we bought this house eight years ago, I've replaced, you know, what were almost certainly decades old toilets with modern low flow toilets. And they work so much better. Yeah, those old toilets. Yeah, those were the ones that you'd have to flush three or four times. These new ones, one flush, boom.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one flush does it all.

[Robert Balancer]

To even go down that road about dishwashers in particular is hilarious, given that anyone who's watched one or two or half a dozen Technology Connections videos about how dishwashers work, which is, by the way, if you are on YouTube and you want to go down a rat hole for a whole entire afternoon, feel free. Right. But they use just a few gallons of water.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. It's amazing.

[Robert Balancer]

They use almost. No. Yeah, it's amazing how they're able to clean, you know, so it's not, it's not Even a flow issue. So where you usually hear the, you know, the complaints from, you know, a person who probably doesn't need to complain about it, but, like, shower heads flow and feel like.

[Leo Laporte]

President Trump has never once loaded a dishwasher.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, there's no way.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

He's probably never even seen a dishwasher.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even think he.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I think it's because he doesn't realize that dishwasher is a machine. He thinks it's actually an immigrant person hired.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a guy named Jesus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just bizarre. But, you know, anyway, you can only laugh. You can only laugh. What else?

[Father Robert Balliser]

You can kind of track back the genesis of a lot of these really weird EOs. It probably. He was at Mar a Lago and a guest said, oh, the water pressure is really low in my room.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

And so he said, oh, well, I'll make an EO about it.

[Leo Laporte]

He also did an EO on LED lights saying they make him look orange.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, it's not the lights. No, no, I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's the lights.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, that's actually a really good chance for Philips, with their Hue series to send a bunch to Trump and say, hey, you can make yourself any color you want.

[Leo Laporte]

I am lit by LEDs right now. In fact, I could use a little more orange, to be honest with you. I'm a little pale. All right, let's play some more videos. This is Christopher. Christopher, go ahead. Hello, Leo and Twit family.

[Robert Balancer]

I'm Christopher.

[Leo Laporte]

I live in Buckhamshire in the uk. I grew up with you and Twit.

[Robert Balancer]

While I was in London and commuting on trains to work every day. I first discovered the network while standing on an underground platform. I had my iPhone3GS in my hand, and I wondered if what more I could do with it. And I discovered podcasts, and from there I discovered MacBreak weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

I then discovered all the other shows on your network.

[Robert Balancer]

I liked Tribe. Before you buy one of my favorite deep cuts of yours, please bring it back. But I'll forever be sad that I never got to visit the studio. That was on my bucket list whenever I go over to the West Coast.

[Leo Laporte]

But I do look forward to the.

[Robert Balancer]

Tour that you said you were going to do. So please make sure you do that and come over to the uk and I'll be the first to buy a ticket, and I'll be the first in line. Anyway, thanks for everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[Robert Balancer]

Thank you for keeping me company on my commutes. My marathon training runs, my cleaning the house, and all the things that you do while you're just consuming a podcast on a day by day basis. You give me inspiration on all of my endeavors and I'll forever be grateful for that. So take care and I look forward to the next 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Christopher. Do you remember know how that was a great show?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Mr. Before you buy, I love you.

[Leo Laporte]

And before youe Buy, you were the host of Know How. You did a great job.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, yeah, I just want to piggyback on that. You have no idea how many things I have accomplished while listening to things off the network.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the best thing about podcasts. You don't really have to listen to them. You can just have them on in the background too.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Both things that I've accomplished and things that I've learned from the various shows. I mean, there are so many things that, from listening to conversations that seemingly unrelated to what I do. Oh, that's a good idea. I can use that over here. You know, and there's so much that I've learned that I have applied in my various jobs in my career over the last 20 years. It's, it's, it's been amazing.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, which is why I, I don't listen to any of the true crime podcasts because I already know how to successfully murder someone.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't need. I don't want to learn. I don't want to learn that. Here's another one. This is Henry. Henry, go ahead.

[Robert Balancer]

Hey, Leo and gang, this is Henry from Abbottsford, British Columbia, Canada. Also known by some man as the 51st state. Though some of us up here think of that little country down there as the 11th province.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that idea.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Thought I would give you a quick.

[Robert Balancer]

History of my discovery of twit tv. Oh, before we start. No, that's not a shrine.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So it was the middle of the.

[Robert Balancer]

Night In November of 2007, I think it was, and I couldn't sleep.

[Leo Laporte]

So I got up, turned on a.

[Robert Balancer]

Tv, and here was this program called the Lab with Leo Laporte.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was filmed in Vancouver and hosted by a Canadian.

[Robert Balancer]

Well, so I thought, you feel full?

[Leo Laporte]

Nearly.

[Robert Balancer]

Good. Anyway, I was hearing things I'd never heard before on a TV computer show. You know, usually it's like, well, here's the latest HP color printer. And yes, it prints in color. But on this particular program, you were talking about all kinds of things that were really interesting I'd never heard before.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, I think that was the.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Episode that you had the creator of Ruby on Rails.

[Robert Balancer]

So I quickly became addicted to that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And then shortly thereafter, it went off the air.

[Robert Balancer]

So I lost track of Leo for.

[Father Robert Balliser]

A few years and then discovered him.

[Robert Balancer]

At this place called the Twit Cottage. And he was doing podcasts. Well, you were doing podcasts, so I.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Have been an avid listener ever since.

[Robert Balancer]

Followed you to the Brick House and.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Then to these side studios. And where this comes in, these guys.

[Robert Balancer]

Is I drove down to the studios.

[Leo Laporte]

For what turned out to be the.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Last ever live recording of Twit. And I have to tell you that.

[Robert Balancer]

Not only was that a great experience, but this is a time where you'd.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Already had to cut back, let some hosts go. Two of them were there that day, Jason and Anthony. And as a testament to the quality of people you are, even though they've been let go, they both showed up.

[Robert Balancer]

Jason was on the panel and Ant.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Was in the background taking pictures, hugging.

[Robert Balancer]

People, just having a great time. And that was such a great experience.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, and for dinner.

[Robert Balancer]

And it really is a family there. I'm very impressed with what you have.

[Leo Laporte]

Built and continue to.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And I just hope. Hope it goes on for years and years.

[Leo Laporte]

You're getting my little contribution every month. Thank you.

[Robert Balancer]

In the Club Twit. And I really hope that. Well, is it going to be a.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Competition between you and Steve to see who continues the longest?

[Robert Balancer]

Let's not make it a competition.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes. And then I met those.

[Robert Balancer]

Where is this? I met these two guys who signed the pictures and had a good conversation with them. You're a great bunch.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is an excellent thing you're doing.

[Robert Balancer]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

So thank you. Thanks. Thank you. And that is not a shrine. I just want to make it clear. Hey, Leo. It's just. It's just a. It's just a shelf with a bunch of twitch stuff on it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's memorabilia. It's just memorabilia.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, we'll have more with our great panel. I'm sorry, guys, you have to put up with all these videos, but I really wanted to honor the listeners, the community around the show, because honestly, it's meaningless for us to sit around John, if we don't have all these wonderful people listening. And we do our shows live for that very reason. You know that, Robert. We. We love having a chat room going on and people talking back to us. It's. It's really a lot of fun.

[Robert Balancer]

So. So, speaking of old. Speaking of old, twit related stuff, I don't know if this is actually a connection I can make here, but I Was. So I submitted a video. Kind of quasi as a fan, but I've been on a few shows. But, like, I submitted a video for one of the anniversary things, and I wasn't sure.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't remember that. Alan.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

I was like, in my garage. There was like a cylinder head behind me and stuff. This was, you know, four houses ago. So I was.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Robert Balancer]

It wasn't the 10th anniversary show, but I was skimming through the 10th anniversary show just now, and there was a segment where you went, like, years before the 10th anniversary show, and you're in your attic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

You know, and you're like, somebody's showing you a mixer.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that was Kevin Rose. I think that was the system.

[Robert Balancer]

It might have been Kevin. Now, I don't know if that mixer direct, like that actual mixer, ended up with Ryan at PC Per or not. Maybe it might have. And in case.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you have it. Is it a. Is it. I just thought I would. It is a Mackie.

[Robert Balancer]

I'll show you your old mixer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the original mixer.

[Robert Balancer]

It was in my garage from when we cleaned out the studio.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. You have the. You have more than I do. That's the original. And there's. I hope you all have fezzes we'll make you wear.

[Robert Balancer]

Pretty sure I got some of your light panels in the basement.

[Leo Laporte]

You might.

[Robert Balancer]

You might, you know, just random stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

They've been scattered to the wind. So that mixer, the Mackie mixer I had, I guess because of radio. I can't remember why I had it, but that's how we were able to start the podcast. And each of the different people had pots and all that stuff. And when it broke, Colleen Henry, who was. Or Colleen Kelly, who was our engineer. The story. Colleen's story is amazing. She came by one day, the cottage. She was studying sociology at San Jose State, and she wanted a job as an intern. She. Even though she was a sociology major, but after I talked to her for a while, said, I'm not going to give you an internship. I'm going to hire you. Would you work for us? And she became our first studio engineer. And when that board broke, she took it down to a little place down in San Francisco where a guy named Burke McQuinn was working. And Burke fixed it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Do you remember this her fault?

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And Burke did such a good job. Colleen came back and said, you know, this guy Burke, he'd be good to have around because he can fix stuff. And Burke is still with us. In fact, he was over here. We invited him over For Easter, which, as most of you know, is next week. But he showed up today, so I. We got to visit with Burke a little bit. He says, yes, I gave that Mackie Onyx mixer to Ryan. So that is one.

[Robert Balancer]

So this is it.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke has validated it. You have it now.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

So we have the provenance confirmed.

[Robert Balancer]

Yes, the lineage.

[Leo Laporte]

Save this video. So if anybody asks, you could say where it came from. That's awesome.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, my goodness. And you know what? I didn't even know. It wasn't until I was skimming the video from the 10th anniversary, and I was like, that's in my garage.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. I can't believe it.

[Robert Balancer]

Just. I just ran out there.

[Leo Laporte]

You had that all this time? I can't believe.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There are two things from the brick house that I really missed. The first is the. The Mame cabinet, that really nice arcade cabinet that we used to have.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that name cabinet.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And the other one was the pinball machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the pinball machine was a gift from. Oh, I forgotten her name. Jerry. Jerry.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, Jerry Ellsworth.

[Leo Laporte]

Ellsworth. That's it. Jerry Ellsworth was who, among other things, repaired pinball machines. She gave us that. Somebody took that when we moved out of the brick house. And somebody also took the Mame cabinet, which was a gift from a listener.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I know who has the main cabinet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and Jerry Ellsworth made that. The commodity.

[Robert Balancer]

She worked on this. Yeah, she worked on the Commodore 64 built in.

[Leo Laporte]

Told you that there's a back door in there. You can get a whole Commodore basic out of that. Did you know that?

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah. Well, it's got. If you open it up, it has, like, solder pads for all the other peripherals. She did that.

[Leo Laporte]

She said I was. I wasn't going to build that without putting a whole comet of Ramen there. Let's take a little break. We will have a lot more, more, More reminiscences. It's a clip show. We should be sitting on a couch. But anyway, and more visits from our great listeners. In fact, Joe Esposito is coming up in just a minute. This episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by a great, relatively new sponsor, but a really good one. They're all good. Love them all. Threat Locker. Threat Locker, though, I love. Because it is a very affordable way to do Endpoint security. In particular, zero Trust Endpoint security, which is the gold standard for protecting your business. Ransomware is running rampant. Just watch security now. Phishing emails, infected downloads, malicious websites, RDP exploits. Don't Be the next victim. There's a, we were showing on security. Now there's a website where you can see day by day ransomware text. There's usually a dozen companies on there. Sometimes companies you know well that are getting bit. You don't want to be on that wall of shame. Fortunately, ThreatLocker Zero Trust Platform takes a proactive and this is the key deny by default approach. That's zero trust. It blocks every unauthorized action protecting you from both known and completely unknown zero day out of nowhere threats trusted by global enterprises like JetBlue. And you know, places that are vital to the supply chain like port. The Port of Vancouver, good example. They use Threat Locker because they cannot afford to be down. And how often do we hear about ports being attacked by ransomware gangs? Port of Vancouver doesn't worry about it. Threat Locker shields them from zero day exploits from supply chain attacks. And I love this provides complete audit trails for compliance. So it's a great choice for compliance as well. ThreatLocker's innovative ring fencing technology isolates critical applications from weaponization. It stops ransomware and it limits lateral movement within your network. You don't want people just using apps willy nilly. It works across all industries, supports Mac environments. You'll love that as well as PCs and they have 24. 7 US based support. You get complete comprehensive visibility and control. Here's a testimonial from Mark Tolson. He's the IT director for the city of Champaign, Illinois. Another critical supplier. A city, right. They're under attack all the time. Schools, cities, ports. Mark says quote Threat Locker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do. If bad actors got in and tried to execute something, I can take comfort in knowing Threat Locker will stop that. That's what you want. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with ThreatLocker. Visit threatlocker.com twit to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. Threatlocker.com twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. And you support us when you go to that address. That way they know you saw it here. Threatlocker.com TWIT One of my favorite people in our club, Twit and I know you've seen his illustrations, his, his very, his very cool pictures is Joe Esposito. He is a graphic designer and he sent us this video. Joe, hey Leo and everybody who works at TWiT. This is the video about how I found Twit and what Twit has meant to me, kind of per your request. And like a lot of people, I think that the first experience I had of Twit wasn't really twit. It was Tech tv. I came to Tech TV wasn't from the very beginning. I found it right around the time that the new set was in place. I remember the new set was kind of a big deal, so I don't know what year that would have been. But I know Patrick was the co host and I know there that the new set had just come into place. And it was a really neat channel because there wasn't a lot, not like that that I remember on television at all. Something where, you know, it was a.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Lot of the kind of geek interests.

[Leo Laporte]

That of course now you can find it everywhere.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But at the time it was something.

[Leo Laporte]

Special and it's all channel. I remember there was just lots of.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Really neat stuff on that channel.

[Leo Laporte]

And it almost felt like a custom tailored television channel for me. And so I became a fan then. And I remember in probably it was 04 now.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was in 2004. I had come come out to see my. Who eventually would become my wife. And one of the priorities I had was I want to see a taping of the screensaver. So I got to actually go to the. I think it was at that point G4 had already acquired it. So it was whatever the studios were called. But I went to the show and got to meet you and Patrick. And I remember the show was one of the segments was about slide rulers.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Which I thought was kind of funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Came to a show that's basically about cutting edge tech. And the episode I got to see was about. About slide ruler. Still a great show, but it was just kind of one of those irony things where it's like, oh, okay, cutting edge computers and slide rulers. All right, this is what the episode's going to be. And then at the time, you hadn't announced that you were leaving the network, but it was not too long afterwards that you had said you were departing. And so I think like a lot of people, I thought, well, that's it. I mean, I don't know when I'm going to hear his voice again, when I'm going to see this type of content again. Maybe he never will. And then of course, Revenge of the Screensavers, which then became Twit, started up. I got to go to one of the early live reunion things. I don't know if it was an official episode or not, I want to say it was in the back of an Apple Store. I remember Patrick Norton was there because I helped him clean up cables and I talked to him about kind of being from the east coast a little bit, but it was. I remember there were a lot of people, I think when I say Dvorak was there and a number of others. And like I said, I think it was in an Apple Store. And then I remember trying Twitch started up and started getting going. And one of the things that you kept saying was that podcasting was something that everybody could have a voice in. And that really struck a chord with me. And so a year after the first couple episodes of Twin, I started my own show and I'm still doing it. Next year will be the 20th anniversary of our show. Not anywhere near as good as anything that's on Twitter and probably never will be. But honestly, Twit has been part of my life now for so long that it's really hard to imagine it not being around. So I'm really happy that the. The club has. Has been able to kind of keep the network from going off air. I actually got to go. Not only the original Brick House, I had a brick in the Brick House. I got to go to the east side studio. Got to go to the second to last show, which was kind of a sad thing. But I think it's worked out very well. I think that the move to all online, that's the new studio Seamless. I mean, there's been no impact on anything. The quality is still just as good.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's just in a different set.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, anybody who is watching this.

[Father Robert Balliser]

If you're not part of the club, you should be.

[Leo Laporte]

Because just like so many things. Thank you. Creators can only exist with your support. And you know, you've seen what's going on with everything. The only way to really keep something.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Around if you care about it, is to support it.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm really happy that there's a way for me to support Twit directly. I want to thank you for all.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The years and everybody be in front behind the camera. It's the personalities, but it's also the.

[Leo Laporte]

People who put the shows together. It's just been, again, such a foundational part of my life. I'm thrilled that everybody's still around. I'm thrilled that Twitch still going strong, and I hope it only gets better with age. Just like.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, I don't drink wine, but that's what I hear.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a fine wine. So thank you for everything. And I'm looking forward to many more years of everything I've enjoyed so far. Thank you, Joe, and thanks for all the great illustrations. I gotta play one more. You saw the video Guy on a Boat. I have heard from people a number of times that they watch while they're driving combine harvesters. This one is Johannes from Austria. Hello, Tweet crew. This is Hannes from Austria. This is how I have been listening to a lot of Twitch podcasts over the year. He's driving a. A combine harvester or something. I don't know.

[Robert Balancer]

Club member and listener since 2000.

[Leo Laporte]

He's driving a tractor. Anyway, 14. Bye. Bye, Hannes. Thank you. It's so great to know you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That was a Kabuto. A Kabuto tractor. It's definitely not a John Deere.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it was. Yeah, it was a Kabuto or something like. Yeah, it was really cute. And he had behind it, he was towing some sort of wheat thresher. I don't know what he was doing. Maybe he was cutting the wheat or something. Maybe he's just mowing the lawn. I don't know. Anyway, it's really nice to have all of these wonderful people watching the show, and it's great to have you guys on the show. You probably didn't realize when you came here that it was going to be such a. Kind of a different episode, but I appreciate patience. It's fun to see.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I started as a fan from back in the tech TV days. I went to an episode, a taping with you and Patrick Norton, when Patrick was showing us how to make a cantana out of a Pringles can.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. That's right. That's right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And it was. It was new for me because, remember, before that there really wasn't intelligent tech stuff. It was always a segment on another show. And so you had this, this. This network dedicated to technology and. And science and stories that I actually cared about. I. Yeah, it changed my life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I feel very fortunate. By the way, SC Homestead in our YouTube chat, says that is a disc arrow. He's plowing the fields for the next crop. And by the way, it looked like he wasn't driving the wheel. Was.

[Robert Balancer]

A lot of.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

A lot of modern tractors have automated driving capabilities now. Yeah. Primarily using gps because it's. You're. It's. It's part of what they call precision agriculture. Right. So they can more precisely know. Know exactly where they're planting, how much, how many seeds they're planting, and get just the right density of plants in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they use AI?

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I mean, they're starting to, you know, some of the, the early ones, you know, didn't really use that, but yeah, they're, they're starting to incorporate that. Certainly, you know, Deere has been a leader in this space. They've, they've done a lot of interesting work with, with automation in agricultural equipment.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I could find it. Somebody some years ago sent me a video of him in his combine and it was like a living room. The whole thing was completely automated and it was a house sized farming thing. And he says, I don't really have much to do as we ride up and down in this thing. So thank you for the podcasts. It's pretty amazing what they do.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

At least the last, last two or three years. Deere has had a huge booth in the west hall at ces and you know, they have these giant tractors in there. Most of them are, you know, have automated driving capabilities and, and I said all this precision agriculture capability both for plowing and, and, and seeding and harvesting and they, there's. I'm not sure if Deere has this, but there are companies that have developed stuff where, you know, as they go through the field, as the vehicle drives through the field, they're using AI and vision systems to look for weeds and then using lasers to zap the weeds.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

So that way they can dramatically reduce the amount of, of pesticides that they need to use because they're, they're literally just zapping the weeds as they go.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Here is, this is the deer booth at ces.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Here's the giant harvester that we were talking about. And the operator really is there just to kind of.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Padre. You have the one with the, the big triangular tracks on it.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, Padre.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there you go. Look at that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

See?

[Leo Laporte]

Trying.

[Robert Balancer]

Wow.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I think I've got it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, this was my favorite. I love this big.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Oh yeah, the big dump truck. The Caterpillar mining truck. This was actually one of the first commercial applications of automated driving technology that came out of the DARPA Grand Challenge program. So after the DARPA Grand Challenge concluded in 2007, a couple of the leaders of that program, Chris Urmson and Brian Selesky. Chris was the overall team leader from Carnegie Mellon that won the DARPA Urban Challenge in 07. And Brian led the software effort on that. They went to work with, with Caterpillar and worked on deploying automated driving systems for these giant mine trucks because it's, they're so difficult to Drive and it's, it's very dangerous. And Chris stayed there I think about a year, year and a half and then moved over to join Google to start the Google self driving car project which is now Waymo. And Brian said it familiar.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Brian stayed another year or so to complete the project at Caterpillar. These were first deployed commercially in 2013. There are about 550 of these trucks these autumn. These autonomous mining trucks in service now on three continents around the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember in the early days of the DARPA Grand Challenge the cars would go six feet and go right off the. We used to watch it and laugh and say oh you're never going to get these things to work. And that's. I always remember that when people say oh we'll never have full. You've said it yourself, we'll never have full self driving. We'll never have artificial super intelligence. You know things. I never thought we'd have a, you know, four terabyte hard drive things. Technology has a way of surprising you sometimes. Sam has famously said though they'll never be a level 5 full self driving.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Vehicle and I still, I still stand by that. I think it's very unlikely that we will get to a system that can operate fully unsupervised in all conditions.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I, I think Alan, it was right around the year 2000 where I said by the year 2020 we won't have spinning hard drives anymore. We'll have memory cubes with. I mean hard drives have survived and thrived much farther than we ever thought they would and they're much denser than we ever thought they. What are the largest hard drives now? Spinning drives.

[Robert Balancer]

24 now I think Rob.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and petabytes are on the way. How about SSDs? Are they competitive?

[Robert Balancer]

Solidyne makes 122 terabyte SSD.

[Leo Laporte]

122 terabyte. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

[Robert Balancer]

It's a two and a half inch form factor. It's like this, it's like this size.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's one of my pet peeves about science fiction shows, TV TV shows and movies that they set the future date that someone traveling back in time from.

[Leo Laporte]

Way too soon, it never makes sense to 2049.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Wait, you're telling me they invented time travel by 2049 or 2001? No, come on, go further out. A couple thousand years.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you might need one of those petabyte drives if you use Microsoft recall to keep track of everything you do on the computer. Recall is finally coming out with A release preview. They announced this when? Ages ago.

[Robert Balancer]

That first announcement didn't go too well.

[Leo Laporte]

They announced it in, I think it was almost a year ago. People said, what? You're what? That's a security nightmare. They backpedaled and then, you know, they said, well, we're going to delay it. They restated the security goals. Some have said that they. I think Paul Thurat has said this is what they had originally said, but they weren't so unclear about it that people thought it was really a security nightmare. Well, finally they had planned to launch in October. That got pushed back. Now they're going to put it out for the insiders in the release preview channel, according to a blog post on Thursday. How do you feel about Recall?

[Robert Balancer]

I like the idea of it if it's local.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but see, to me, if it's. It's most useful if it's not local, if it's on every device you have. Right. Who cares if this one computer knows what you did? That's why I carry this thing around.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The little AI device I've showed it many times, called a bee that is recording all the time and then makes summaries and notes for me at the end of the day, ideally an AI should have every bit of information.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm talking like, you know, by local, I mean private to, you know, within your own sphere of devices, not just Microsoft has all.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

You want it on multiple. I mean we all use multiple devices and you want it. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Recall, as it stands is only on that one computer. Right. It does not cross device lines. And I think that it's safe to say it is private, although security experts worry that it is, you know, a treasure trove for hackers if they could get in.

[Robert Balancer]

Correct. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The better.

[Robert Balancer]

The AI makes things for you to find your own stuff more easily and index all of your own things. They're also better if somebody gets in. It's not supposed to be in. They could just easily find all your stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Robert, are you slathering at the chops? I am not.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We are currently planning our Windows migration strategy because we've got a large chunk of the organization that does not want to go to 11. So when.

[Leo Laporte]

So what are you going to migrate to?

[Father Robert Balliser]

So we've already started switching off some of the most critical infrastructure to Linux. We do not want to go to Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There's a couple of services that are stubborn. We don't have good analogs yet, but. And it's not about recall. Actually, I. I find the feature. Interesting. It is an interesting set of functionalities that get added to Windows. But we've been so put off by the Windows 11 experience, especially at the enterprise level, that we just, we don't see ourselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Come October, Microsoft says Windows 10 users will no longer get support. You've got to go to Windows 11.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They'll expand, they'll extend that. They will absolutely extend that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they have in the past.

[Robert Balancer]

I think it's still greater than 80% of everything it's increased.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Windows 10 has increased from the last metric. So people are getting really upset with a lot. And part of it is just they don't want to be force fed a lot of changes that they didn't ask for. And it seems like with every release, 11 adds something. You're like, why'd you do that? Or why did you take that away? This functionality, that's just silly. So recal would actually be one of the reasons I would stay, just to see how it works. It is an interesting idea. I'm with Alan. I've got a lot of privacy concerns, especially with you centralizing my data and allowing an AI to prioritize what is important.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But I mean, it's for me, operating systems are now like TVs. I'm so done with smart TVs. Give me something that's solid, that works, that is stable, that is secure, and I'll be happy with that OS for the next 20 years. Yeah, but then how are they going.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

To make money off you? In perpetuity.

[Robert Balancer]

Right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what Microsoft says in the release notes. To use recall, you'll need to opt in. That's good. Originally it was opt out. You'll need to opt in to saving snapshots, which are images of your activity, the AIs. And they use various AIs to analyze those snapshots to extract the information from them. You'll also have to enroll in Windows hello to confirm your presence. And that's for security so that only you can access those snapshots. Microsoft says you're always in control of what snapshots are saved and can pause saving snapshots at any time as you use your Copilot plus PC throughout the day, working on documents or presentations, taking video calls and contexts, switching across activities. Recall will take regular snapshots and help you find things faster and easier. There was concern about it taking snapshots of your credit cards. I don't, you know, in theory, I think they say, oh, we're not going to do that. But how will they know without Looking at it, they're going to take a picture of.

[Robert Balancer]

Just seems, it just seems wasteful to me generally because they're talking about saving a bunch of screenshots. But that's the most like low tech way to do it. Like, I mean you have. If you want to know where you want on your browser, you can. Chrome has. Chrome browser has history of all the URLs you want to. It's all just. You can distill what would be, you know, potentially terabytes worth of screenshots into just like a few kilobytes worth of just metadata.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the theory. I don't. Do they preserve the screenshot? I don't know. Or after they analyze it? I think that.

[Robert Balancer]

I don't know. I would hope that it, you know, ingests the screenshot and then just takes what it needs from it and then it just goes away because otherwise it's just going to be a space hog.

[Leo Laporte]

I do remember them talking about the storage used and it wasn't vast, but I can't remember the exact details. You do have to have a Copilot Plus PC, which is the new standard for PCs. At least 40 tops in the Neural Processing Unit, 16 gigs of RAM, 8 logical processors. To use recall, you'll need at least 50 gigs of storage space free.

[Robert Balancer]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Saving snapshots automatically pauses once the device has less than 25 gigs left. You have to use BitLocker or device encryption, obviously to protect yourself. And you have to enroll in Windows. Hello. As I mentioned, to verify your identity. It's interesting. Well, I'm very curious. We shall see.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, one of the things that was drilled into me from the time that I started was having good archiving processes. So over the last 30 years I have a set of descriptors that I put on every file and project that I ever created.

[Leo Laporte]

Smart.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It makes it possible.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very.

[Father Robert Balliser]

To go back by data topic. Yeah, it's disciplined. So basically Recall says no, don't do that, I'll do that for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So if, if you haven't done what I've done, then Recall could be very.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the same thing here. In fact, even though AI is yet to be useful enough so that the stuff captured by this BE is super useful to me. It is capturing and saving all the time. And I'm hoping as years go by I will now have a kind of a database of things that I've said and done and agreed to and other people have told me and so forth. It's recording my piano lessons. It's recording shows, it's recording everything. I'm hoping that that will become more and more useful down the road. It's kind of an investment in the future.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Is that. Is it saving all of that to BE's servers or.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, exfiltrating this. Okay, so we, I interviewed his most intimate conversations on our show machines. So what it does is this is a really just a microphone which sends to the iPhone, which does send it to an unnamed. He said the founder said it's some commercial AIs and some of our own, so he wouldn't say which AIs they use. And I think it's probably moving around quite a bit. Sends it out to them, deletes the recording though. Okay, so the recording is deleted after it's analyzed.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, so it just transcribes and saves.

[Leo Laporte]

Transcribes and then extracts. So I do have transcriptions of the most recent conversations that I can identify. Speakers, but not of the past.

[Robert Balancer]

I don't think the thing that I'm kind of waiting for, like I'm a digital pack rat, much like Padre, is I've tried to be as good as I can within reason and within like, you know, not to go too crazy to where it's diminishing returns, but I try to somewhat organize things, but I'm kind of holding out for the local AI, for the models you can run on your own hardware to get good enough to where you basically have, you know, the movie her available locally.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I want.

[Robert Balancer]

Right. And you can just, hey, go through all my stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Robert Balancer]

I need you to organize all these things, figure out, you know, index everything so that if I just want to ask, hey, where's that picture? When I was, you know, in the Twitch studio that I had. Show me all those pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we've been doing that today. People have been pulling up, you know, old images. I would like to say where was I on December 20, 2012? I'd love to be able to ask that. It's almost like a diary of your. It also keeps track of your agreements. So I have a to do list. It generates a proposed to do list, which you can then say, yeah, yeah, keep that one. No, no, I'm not gonna do that. And, and so it's really nice to keep track of your agreements. I like the idea anyway. I think recall is a good idea. I understand the security concerns.

[Robert Balancer]

This is the problem. I mean, I've been doing, you know, somewhat low tech version of the AI thing, just out of necessity, you know, even though it's not actually AI but, you know, I try to make sure all the pictures or the file names are actually like the date and time of the picture, for example. And things might be sort of sorted into folders loosely. But I mean, there are some tools you don't necessarily have to have AI to have really good ability to find all your stuff. Like there's a. There's a tool called Void Tools is the company that are not company, but the guy has a thing called Void Tools. There's things just called search everything. Right, Right. And it's just a program. It indexes all your stuff, even if it's on a remote like network.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a long storage dream of technology. You've got all this stuff digitally. You should be able to do that.

[Robert Balancer]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Where I would use it is if you had something that was smart enough to go through the literally tens of thousands of hours of footage I have. And there you go. Meta descriptors of conversations and scenes. That's. That's where I actually could use help.

[Leo Laporte]

I could beat you on that. You want to hear some Twitch stats that have been compiled.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

By our esteemed team. There have been 10, 30 episodes. Obviously the first episode where any video exists is number 24. The longest episode, which was from 2018, episode 699. It was a best of those. This doesn't count. Almost 4 hours. Hours, 3 hours, 56 minutes. The longest non best of was from 2022, was called the Whole Internet Burrito and it was 3 hours 36 minutes. We might beat that today. I don't know. The shortest episode. Introducing IPAC. Is that the Compaq IPAC. It was 2006. It was before the iPhone.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, my God.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

That sounds about the right. That sounds about the right time frame.

[Leo Laporte]

IPAQ. It was 24 minutes long. Average episode length. It's been getting longer, but if you include the older ones, two hours, three minutes. If you wanted to listen to every episode of Twit, it would take you 88 days, 9 hours, 31 minutes and 59 seconds. With no sleep, with no sleep, constantly listen. Not here or here. Not listen. Whatever.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I spell a challenge.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to process it. So anyway, it's been a long and a crazy trip and a lot of fun, and I really thank all of the people who've been part of this. You'll see, as I said, a scroll of all the people who've ever been on Twitter as contributors. I couldn't. I wish I could I tried. We don't have a record of everybody who's ever been on the staff. There's so many people that I would love to thank. People like, as I mentioned, Colleen Kelly, our first studio manager, John Slanina, our last studio manager, Burke McQuinn has been with us almost since the beginning. Of course, my wife Lisa, who's been the CEO and our executive producer since 2015. There's so much. I don't want to leave people out. There's so many great people, so many editors. Of course, our current team is wonderful. There is a crawl at the end of the show where you can see the current people. I just couldn't get all the names of the people who have worked at twit, but there have been so many. And I thank you, each and every one of you. You want to see another? Let's do one more video. I know I'm really slowing the show down. I apologize. But people were nice.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I love these.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a guy in a fez. Hi, Leo and all the Twit family. Congratulations on 20 years. That's how long I've been listening. I started on a Palm Treo and I went to the Nokia N95. You brought every one of them in between.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

There was a whole bunch of others, of course. Your Nexus one with the Rolly Ball.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. That first Android phone, Pixel 1.

[Robert Balancer]

Lots of others in between, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

And now I listen on an LG V40 because it has a really good DAC and. Yeah, anyway, so 20 years. Good one. Thanks. Thank you for wearing a fez.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I love that he was. He wanted a phone with a good dac. You don't hear that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

No. And that LG has like a really excellent high res DAC in it. So I understand why listens. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that. That was a great video.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, Leo, that reminds me of those days we would have at the Brick House where a box of Leo's stuff would just show up. Just old gadgets.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo's garage sale, we called him. And I would just put them in the conference room and I would just say have at it. And people. I was always afraid there'd be knifings, but. But no, it always worked out. Towards the end we had people put colored stickers on it and then, you know, we figured out a way to allocate it because as. As we got closer to leaving the studio, the, the goods that were put on that table appreciated considerably in value. A lot of computers and things.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It helped that we had such a diversity of people in the brick house that we all wanted different stuff. Like some of us were just interested in historical tech items. Other people wanted tech items they could actually use.

[Leo Laporte]

Well. And let's not forget the no hole. Oh, I love that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I miss that place so much.

[Leo Laporte]

So in the old brick house, it was huge. It was 10,000 square feet on the main floor where the studio was. But there was also a 10,000 square foot basement which we didn't even have to pay rent for because the ceiling was so low that you would hit your head on the sprinkler pipes. So they couldn't, they couldn't rent it to us, but we had it and we filled it up and it was the home for many years of something I knew nothing about. I found out after the fact that you and others had built. What was the no hole?

[Father Robert Balliser]

The no hole was a space that we had hidden behind racks and the cage so you couldn't really see it. And it had workstations that had a fridge with alcohol and non alcohol alcohol.

[Leo Laporte]

You had a bar down there.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We had a bar down there. We had all the quadcopters. We had a nice, very nice beanbag, the arcade machine. So it was a place for us to retreat between shows. It was quite nice.

[Leo Laporte]

But you kept it a secret.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean it was an open secret. We never tried to hide it. We just didn't talk about it unless we were in the know.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew, knew nothing about it. And that was. That was you. But it was also your. Your two.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Brian.

[Leo Laporte]

Brian and Burke. Yeah, Brian and Burke. Brian and his brother both worked for us. They were wonderful. I just saw Brian the other day. He's working somewhere good. Facebook. I can't remember.

[Father Robert Balliser]

He was at Google for a while, then Facebook for a while and now he is moved on. He just told me. I can't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he mentioned it. Jammer B is in our chat. Our longtime studio engineer, Jammer B. You knew about that no hole, right? Okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Chamber being. Knew about everything going on in that.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke says he threw sharp things at you down there, padre.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Burke did not. At first. At first Burke did not like us down there because we were intruding on his space. That was his domain.

[Leo Laporte]

His space.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Because that's where all the wiring was from the cameras to the Tricast.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, and the server room was there. We. We actually built it in, you know, a room around where all the servers were. Because the way the studio is set up, all the sets were around the perimeter and there was a desk in the middle with all the switches and turret, the boards. And this is John's idea, was brilliant. It rotated so it could aim at whatever set. So the technical director was sitting in his turret and was looking at the show. So it could rotate around 360. Well, it couldn't do. You couldn't rotate it twice. It would stop.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It would start snapping cables if you went twice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because all of the. The devices in that turret went down through a hole in the middle of the floor to the server room. So there were big cables going down, and all the work was being done in the basement.

[Robert Balancer]

In the server room, in the overhead of the basement, there were just bundles of network cables everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, beautifully done, too.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, and by the way, we got a big upgrade to the know hole when pixel core moved out, because we took their cage. We took the entire pixel core. You took the cage that became our place. And we got a couch down there. We got carpeting down there. It was fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

So. So it was such a big area. We rented some of it to Alex Lindsay and his pixel core. In fact, we rented a bunch of the studio as well to him. And he put up fencing. He put up cyclone fencing around it to protect it because there was valuables in there. So when they left, you just. You broke in and you took that space as well, huh?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Are you kidding? Do you understand we used to have quadcopter races underneath the studio? Wow, that was. That's how big the thing was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was huge. I used to race my bicycle around under there.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Before we built it out, when we first moved in. All right, one more video. This is Nathaniel. Let me click the link. Hello, Leo Laporte. My name is Nate Abbott and I live in Gilmanton Ironworks, New Hampshire. And I discovered you in 2005. I thought I'd share a funny story from way back then, and I don't know if you remember this, but I believe I was researching what twit was, and I went searching and found a post from you looking for your twit broadcasters that week. And apparently people weren't getting back to you, and you thought you would just go to the beach. And I was probably desperate. It sounded like a bad day for you. I think ultimately you got that episode together, and people. People came together and twit carried on, but that's how sketchy it was back then. And it's amazing to me what you were able to do. I think it's hard for me to express actually what it's meant to be moved up here in 1998, started an MSP business. Back then it was just a reseller business and tech services. And really 90% of the time in the car when I'm driving, I am listening to Twit. It's just been invaluable to me. Also security now in particular. Yet Steve Gibson has meant a lot. I remember being ahead of the Blaster worm. I didn't have any servers working as firewalls, which, if you remember back in those days, there were a lot of windows, small business servers that were sitting on their rear end, so to speak.

[Robert Balancer]

Hanging out on the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

And Blaster just, just went wild with those. I used to listen to buzz out loud. And I remember, I can recall how Cena couldn't seem to sell an ad on that show while you were selling ads every single week on Twit and all and you were building your portfolio of video and audio shows. I've been absolutely devoted to Twit that whole entire time since then till now. I just want to give thanks, thanks to, first of all to you, because it's meant a lot to me to have you there every week essentially ringleading a tech talk that I can't have with anybody here where I live, except one or two people in particular, Mike Elgin, who I just want to mention taking over in the place of the great Tom Merritt. When he left, Mike was in a tough spot and he handled it like he was born for it. And I still love to listen to Mike Elgin and I'm kind of dying to go on one of his trips. Renee Richie, Ian Thompson Abrar Heidi, Amy Webb, Jason Calacanis, Stacy Higginbotham, Paris Martineau, Aunt Pruitt, Jason Howell, and the great John C. Dvorak, who I recall from those early days. Kevin Rose obviously become a legend at this point. It's quite a circle you created there. And I. I really have to salute you for the work that you've done and the unique and unmatchable thing that you've created there for us. And I appreciate it just more than I can say. So congratulations on 20 years of twit. Who would have thunk? Oh, and one last thing. Congratulations to you for highlighting women who are excellent in the tech industry and getting them on your show just about every week. I really think you've made a difference for a lot of people who might have thought, yeah, I'm not sure it or tech or computers are for me because I'm a woman and it seems like a pretty male place. And I have actually a. Someone I've met recently who is struggling with that very thing. So you're doing great things in the world and thank you again for 20 years. Thank you. Take care, Leo. Thank you. Thank you, Nate. I appreciate it. Yeah, we've been all about diversity, equity and inclusion since before it was trendy. And now that it's no longer trendy, we're still all about diversity, equity and inclusion because it's a big tent. Tent. It's a big tent and we love getting as many people as possible into the tent. So that's very kind of you. Thank you, Nate. I appreciate it. We're gonna take a break, come back with more. Yes. There's some more tech news before you do, Leo.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I knew I need to get out of here in a couple.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, you told me you're gonna have to leave. So let's say goodbye to Sam. It's great that you could be here for the first half of this 14 hour show and if you're still going.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

When I get back, will jump back in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we might be, who knows? I'm only halfway through the videos. Thank you, Sam. It's great to see you, Sam. Abouble Sam. His podcast, Wheel Bearings is at Wheel Bearings Media. Great show. If you're a car nut, you gotta, you gotta listen and watch. And of course he is now an analyst. We didn't get to the guidehouse story. We'll save that for next time.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah, we'll do that another time. But, but yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for, you know, bringing me in as part of the, the expanded, the extended twit family. It's been great to interact with you and the rest of the team and all the other participants on this show and all, all the shows over the last, you know, decade or more, you know that I've been actively participating in it and, and appreciate it. Like I said, I've learned so much about this, you know, about, about so many things, uh, from the different shows. So, yeah, just thanks and, and keep it going as long as you can.

[Leo Laporte]

I will.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as my brain doesn't give out, my voice doesn't give out and we still have somebody to listen.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I'll be here.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to honor all these great listeners and viewers. Thank you, Sam Able.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

All right, thanks everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Take care.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Take care, Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

There was that day when we actually had a studio, a big giant movie pic studio in, in the Marin. I think Alex Lindsay arranged it for us and nobody showed up.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's, that's always, that's a nightmare scenario that you throw a party and no one goes.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's the only time that I can remember that we didn't do a show because I mean, if nobody showed up, I really couldn't do it. I think there was one time where we ended up doing the show with our audience, with our listeners. That was fun. But I don't think, I think we've only missed one show because nobody showed up. By the way, Benito was working for Buzz Out Loud. When he was listening to Buzz Out Loud, we stole pretty much everybody. Tom Merritt, Molly Wood, Veronica Belmont Bonito, Jason Howell, all worked at Buzz Outlet, all end up working for us at one point. I as actor at one point or another.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, that's actually what connected me to twit because back when I was working and living in Washington D.C. buzz out loud had a call in show and I sent a video, a correction to Molly Wood and so she read that. And then years later when Jason was working at twit, I submitted a video for the listener call in and he remembered me from Buzz Out Loud. So he's like, yeah, let's play this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Buzz Out Loud is a great show. And, and I was actually sad that seen it ended it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But it was a daily, it was pretty hard to do a daily show.

[Leo Laporte]

Hard to do five days a week.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, Yeah, I can imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

We used to do the Giz Whiz, the Dick T. Bartolo show five days a week. And that was murder. But you know, I was thinking about that the other day. Dick who still does the Giz Whiz, he does it with Chad. Now another former employee, Chad Johnson, who started the OMG Craft show on, on our network and eventually said I want to go independent. I want to do it on YouTube. We said yes. He and Chad still do the Giz Whiz. And I was always amazed Dick could come up with a new crappy gadget every day of the week. It was kind of of mind boggling.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I think that no shortage of crap talking.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently there's plenty.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Still going strong. And actually somebody in our YouTube chat is sir one sir is saying wasn't the longest show the New Year's show. That's a good point. We did two 24 hour shows. This is true New Year's Eve two successive years. And then Lisa said, never again. You're killing the staff. I said, but I like it. They say, yeah, but you aren't doing all the work.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I I was one of the the stops because I was in Hawaii when that happened. So I had, I had three hours back.

[Leo Laporte]

That started because Lisa and I were watching, we're visiting, we were staying at a friend's house in New Year's Eve and we watched, you know, the ball drop at 9pm because we're in California. 9pm is midnight east coast time. And then it was over. We said, wait a minute, it's only.

[Father Robert Balliser]

All I remember about that New Year's is that when I left for Hawaii, you didn't have a tattoo on your ass. And when I came back, you had a tattoo.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what's weird about tattoos? I still have it. They don't go, ever goes away. Keep waiting for it to fade out. So I said, you know, we should do a New Year's Eve show that doesn't end at 9pm East coast time. In fact, we should do a New Year's Eve show that, that starts when the New year starts in the Solomon Islands or wherever it is and continues all the way through till the New Year is, is gone all across the globe. That's why it was 24 hours.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That was educational because that's the year I realized there aren't 24 time zones in the world because there are some weird offsets, 30 minute offsets.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So we were, there was one, we were doing it 15 minutes apart. Jammer B. Well, I want, I, I, this is why Lisa won't let me do it anymore. I said, I want to pop a champagne bottle every time it's New Year's Eve somewhere and I want a balloon drop every time. So we would have, because I wanted to have it's Happy New Year 24 times actually turned out like 27 times. So we got the cheapest champagne we could get. There were magnums, but they were awful. But they, but you know, you could pop them and, and Jammer B, the first time he attached a bunch of balloons to a rope. The balloons came down, picked the rope back up and it was pretty pathetic.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They were just kind of flopped different. It was different.

[Leo Laporte]

So the second time, poor Jammer B, he went up in the ceiling and he wired each balloon had its own little fishing line, hundreds of them across the ceiling so that he could let them fall. And they did. It was beautiful. And then ratchet them back up for the next balloon drop so we could do them all. And the saddest thing. Oh, you did two at a time. Jammer B's in our chat room. The saddest thing is when we left the brick house, Jammer B said, yeah, we only Used that once.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah. Oh, I. I missed that. We did so much experimentation, so much fun. Brick house. It was a lot. That was also. That was the same year that you broke the twit desk doing the Harlem shake, I believe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Right. And I could roll that in right now because it lives on. On YouTube. And I'm just hoping that Benito does not roll it in.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We'll get a copy of that. Strike.

[Robert Balancer]

There's that, and then there's the two times that you had exercise balls burst twice under you.

[Leo Laporte]

One. Only one was on camera, one was on the radio show. And all you heard was at the cottage.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was at the cottage, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you heard was boom. And then it was over. So there's audio of that, but there is video of me because the second time it happened. See, the problem was. I can't remember, was it you, John? Somebody said, you know those exercise balls, the ultra burst or anti burst, ultra fit stability balls you buy? Because I used to sit on a stability ball for years. Most of the time. The trainer told me once sit on a stability ball. So I did. He said, you can get those cheaper from China. So we bought a bunch of them cheaper. Was Colleen okay? I don't want to incriminate you, Jammer B. So Colleen bought a bunch of knockoff stability balls, which. Both. They popped. We never. After the second. The second time, I knew it had popped because I started to sink.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

And then what I didn't realize is there's a period of time when you are just going sink. And then after a certain point, it goes boom and you're on your.

[Robert Balancer]

Yes. You just. This was. That was at the cottage. I think for a moment, you're like, I'm melting.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I'm melting. And then something. Whoa. Where's Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I don't want to take the time to go find those, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna let you roll both of those in. Benito, put them in the post. Okay, we'll put them in post. It's great to have Father Robert Ballister. You could stick around, right? I know it's late at night. What is it?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, it's getting close to 2:00am I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm so sorry. Well, we're going to keep you up a little later, Alan Malvantano. It's not quite so late. Where. Where are you located? I forgot.

[Robert Balancer]

I'm on the East Coast. I'm in Kentucky.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's dinner time in Kentucky. Yeah. Maybe go out and get some KFC while we take this Little break. Okay. Do they eat KFC in Kentucky?

[Robert Balancer]

Not really.

[Leo Laporte]

Popeyes, the.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The original maker of KFC in Kentucky, he has a different. He has a restaurant that people tell me you actually have to go to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Because he got upset with what KFC did with his recipe. So he has a restaurant where he actually makes his original recipe.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he a Kentucky Colonel? Well, originally, yeah, I think Dvorak was a Kentucky Colonel. So what? Somebody on the Twitter panel. You can buy them, I believe. All right, we're going to take a little break. This show brought to you by netsuite. You know, we talk a lot about the present on this show, but we also talk about the future. And that is a lot harder to know. What does the future hold for business? You ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Especially now. Rates are going up. Rates are going down. Inflation. It's going up. No, it's going down. Can somebody please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their operations with NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform. You know, it's great with one, a single unified business management suite. There's just a single source of truth, right? So you have the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions because all that information is at your fingertips. With real time insights and forecasting. You're. It's kind of like a crystal ball. You're peering into the future with real, actionable data. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's coming next. If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. This is the solution for any enterprise. Whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seizes your biggest opportunity. Speaking of opportunity, you might want to check out the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. This is free right [e-mail] twit and this is something everybody needs to know. The CFO's guide to AI and Machine Learning. What does this mean for your business? The guide is free. Netsuite.com twit n e t s u I t e netsuite.com twitt we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Another video. I think we might have a podcaster in this one. He's got a pretty good looking setup. This is Patrick. Patrick.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Hi, Leo.

[Robert Balancer]

And congratulations. For more than 20 years, you and the Twit Network have been a direct influence on my life in more ways than one.

[Leo Laporte]

Whether it's entertaining me or giving me.

[Robert Balancer]

Advice in my everyday job, to helping me with my career success, to giving.

[Leo Laporte]

Me the passion to explore new hobbies, it's been absolutely invaluable, to even the.

[Robert Balancer]

Occasional chagrin of my wife. You've literally become the voice of a third person in our house.

[Leo Laporte]

I've installed speakers everywhere, including in the.

[Robert Balancer]

Shower and in 20 other locations with.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole home speaker system, just to be able to listen to twit wherever.

[Robert Balancer]

I am and whatever I'm doing. I can honestly say that in these.

[Leo Laporte]

20 years, I've listened to every single episode.

[Robert Balancer]

And thank you again so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's to 20 years more.

[Robert Balancer]

And hopefully that's not all.

[Leo Laporte]

20 years powered by AI Leo bots. Thank you. That's Patrick Foxhaven. He must have a YouTube channel, right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

He's got three basketballs. The Enterprise NCC 1701.

[Leo Laporte]

I see that. Yes.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And what looks like a Game Boy. And then up top, that's like some sort of scrolling disc optimization screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this guy's. This Guy's got a YouTube channel or a podcast, something. Right. Although I'll be honest with you, Alan, I kind of prefer your set. I like the funky set with a lot of.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, I do a lot of stuff going on. It's a real set.

[Robert Balancer]

You got all sorts of chotch keys back there.

[Leo Laporte]

Tchotchkes. That's it.

[Robert Balancer]

I mean, this is like an Optane wafer.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Whatever happened to Optane? Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

I'm still waiting for the Harvard Business Study to come out on all the ways that this was simultaneously too early and too late of a technology to exist.

[Leo Laporte]

And Intel's layer cake memory. Right. That was kind of the idea. It was stacked or something. Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

Cross point. It was cross point.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. It was three dimensional. Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

Yep, yep, yep. It was three. Three dimensional and phase, basically. They would never admit to it, but we were so excited.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, we were so excited by that tech. I remember wanted to see it.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And then it didn't really do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

How about dire wolves? How do you feel about. Are you excited about dire wolves coming back? Absolutely.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We don't have to worry about endangered species anymore, Leo, because we can always.

[Leo Laporte]

Bring them back, make them again. But scientists, scientists were so focused on what they could do, they didn't think whether they should do it. No, this is scientific Americans saying, sorry, yeah, tell Us what? It's not really a direwolf, Alan.

[Robert Balancer]

They only kind of sort of did it. They took some of the DNA and they grafted it into a close. Well, they said it was a close relative, but even that's up for debate.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the same company. What is it? That's a terrible name. Colossal Bioscience. Doesn't that sound like if you were an evil mad scientist, you would call it Colossal Bioscience? They're the ones who did the woolly mouse. Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is the genetic equivalent of taking the body of a Humvee, putting it on the chassis of a Suburban and saying, you can now buy a military vehicle. It looks like it, but it's not.

[Robert Balancer]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a gray wolf whose genome has been edited to give it some direwolf like traits.

[Robert Balancer]

I mean, listen, there's, there's plenty of novel, like there have been advancements that they have done like without a doubt to, to do, to accomplish what they have so far. It's just that their, their PR is spinning it a little too. They're just spinning it a little too far. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually interviewed George Church, who some say is the father of genomics, and he has been working and he made a good case for it on bringing back the woolly mammoth. It's not like to create a Jurassic park, it's to actually preserve the permafrost in the, in the Arctic. So his point was that the permafrost holds a lot of carbon dioxide. It's, it's frozen in there and as it melts, of course it's released into the air and causes greenhouse, It's a greenhouse gas, causes greenhouse effects. He says that it's been trapped there to some degree because they had giant mammals thousands and thousands of years ago that would stomp it down. But with the extinction of these giant mammals, it's not getting, you know, compressed and combined with climate change is going to pose a real problem. And there's this, a triangulation. You can go back and look at it. Church is working with a company to kind of try to recreate this woolly mouse. I think was, I don't know if it was a first step, but to try to recreate the woolly mammoth. Not because it would be cool, although it would be cool, but because they want to repopulate that Arctic area to protect it, to protect permafrost.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We don't need woolly mammoths to pound down that ice. Just send me and the population of Springfield, Missouri, just do a quick run. It's all good.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Anyway, I mean, there's been a lot of mocking of this, you know, dire wolf and even. I've even seen people mocking the woolly mammoth.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I. I don't want to mock it, though, because it is. It is interesting genetics.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's a point also, to be honest.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's in the PR that it gets ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

I mean, they had to make genetic. Like when you're trying to change DNA, usually you have to go in very precisely and you can only tweak like, a couple of chrome, you know, a couple of things. Right. But. Or, you know, well, then they're doing it, like, in. In batches. They're able to do, like, for every time you unwind the chromosome and pass it through this thing, you can actually make multiple changes per pass now, which is like a pretty cool thing. It's like you're able to do multiple edits for one operation, which lets you, you know, change more. And that's. That's all. I mean, there's benefits that you can. That can come from this, that extend well beyond just making, you know, a pseudo, you know, pet or whatever you want to call it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if they had baby. If they had, like, miniature willy mammoths, that'd be cute running around the house.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, no, Leo, come on. I don't want, like a woolly mammoth in some woman's purse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's like baby Yoda. It'd be kind of cute. Cute. Speaking of science, apparently the new budget the administration is proposing has some fairly significant cuts to NASA's budget. Not the budget to go to Mars, but to the agency science budget. Five billion out of the 25 billion. About 20%. And most of them are concentrated within the agency science Mission directorate. Probably because that's one of the people, one of the groups that are saying, we're going to have climate change, it's going to be a problem. They oversee planetary science, earth science, astrophysics research and more. The science programs are going to get in this new budget a 50% cut in funding, which is significant.

[Robert Balancer]

I would like to point out that, I don't know numbers off the top of my head, but the NASA budget is already infinitesimally small compared to extremely small.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it should be larger. Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is what happens when you put an industrialist in charge of an organization that does research.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Research is always looking at something that might be useful. 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a cost center. It's not a Process. Yeah, exactly.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We reap the benefits for that in future generations. The industrialist is always saying that's wasted money that could be used to do something that we don't do now. So you know, Musk is all about let's make rockets. Now we know how to make rockets. Now we know how to get me to Mars. So I can say I'm the man who landed a man on Mars. But that does nothing for space exploration 10, 20, 30 years down the line. And I want NASA to focus on those 10, 20, 30 years down the line.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so does, so does the nominee for NASA director Jared Isaac Man. During his confirmation this week, he said, I strongly supported NASA's science programs. But, but you know, traditionally the NASA directors spent a lot of energy fighting for more money and not getting it. So we'll see. But that's a little, a little concerning. But we still have the dire wolf, so that's okay.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, I mean a lot of, a lot of those tech, I mean talking about like benefiting industrialists, it's almost like a short term versus a long term play. If you want to just do the thing right now versus the things that get developed through NASA programs, since it's a government and public funded thing, it ends up going to the public. Well, what happens? You end up with a bunch of other related industrialists that can take advantage.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and then you also get pork barrel programs like the SLS that are really non functional but exist only because every member of Congress could send a tiny bit of that budget to their state, to their industries. I mean I think the SLS is literally made, has parts made in every state of the union because of that.

[Robert Balancer]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just nuts.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And then they wonder why it's so over cost. Right. Because you did it in the most inefficient way possible.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But and this is not, this is not a partisan problem. And this happened in the Obama administration, it happened in the Biden administration, happened the Trump administration. This is, this is Congress just not wanting to spend money on this kind of stuff.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, it's also the way that we look at public service when we're electing someone for office, especially for national office, for federal office. We want to know what they're going to bring to us.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And so we, they have to, it's like a quarterly report at a company, they have to do.

[Leo Laporte]

For me, I got this bill, I.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Got this money, I got this check, this stipend, whatever it might be coming into my state. Well, that's great. If you only care about the next election cycle.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you want to ever go to Mars, do you think that that's really in the cards?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I think we will. And then everyone will say, okay, we went there. There's no reason to go back. Mars is a horrible target for space exploration.

[Leo Laporte]

It's toxic.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's the worst place to go. It has. It has no magnetosphere, which means that any terraforming, which some people keep saying, oh, we'll just terraform it with nuke, it goes away, right? There's no. There's no shielding from radiation. It gets less than 40% of the sunlight that you get on Earth. It has less than 1% of the atmosphere. It has toxic poisonous perchlorates built into the regolith. It is a horrible target for terraforming. I mean, much better is the moon. The moon would be a fantastic place for us to go, but it's not sexy like Mars.

[Robert Balancer]

Padre, didn't you watch Total Recall?

[Leo Laporte]

Get your ass tomorrow.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Get your ass tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

Dr. Quaid, please. I'm gonna read a poem. This is. This is a poem written. Let me see here if I can find it. I really liked it. Dan Sheppard in Paducah, Kentucky, just down the road from you a piece.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, yeah?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't know if he's a colonel. Maybe he is. I don't know. Dan wrote this. 20 years of twit. It mostly rhymes. Back in the day, I was tech elite with an ipod so big it doubled as a seat. FireWire blazed at 400 pace or so I thought I was young, Give me grace. An emac chugged at 800 MHz downloading twit while making it hurt on 56k. It took all night. One episode. It was a long fight. John C. Dvorak, always contrarian. Kevin rose, a.com barbarian. Hodgman cracked jokes. Woz was a sage. Jason yelling about funding his next stage through dial up screeches and wi fi waves Leo and crew still fill my days from iPods to AirPods. Look how we've grown. Yet somehow Leo's inbox is still overblown. Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. So happy 20th twit, you techie delight. Still keeping me up way too late at night. And if my modem dials up once again, just know I'm trying to download the tech guy. Amen. Thanks for 20 years. Thanks for a great poem that's really fun. And here's a. Let me pull this one up. A video from Paul. Go ahead, Paul. Hey, Leo.

[Robert Balancer]

I'm Paul Smith and.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And I have been with you guys.

[Robert Balancer]

Since the very beginning, since the original name. That copyright prevents us from saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Revenge of the screen Saver.

[Robert Balancer]

That you guys have made it 20 years. In fact, it's your show that inspired me to go into teaching IT work in high schools and computer science. I currently am a computer science teacher for middle and high school and is small town in Illinois, not too far from Mr. Norton. And I teach computer maintenance to high schools as well. I just want to say congratulations and let's hear for many, many more.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are always the. The people I love hearing most from are people who were inspired by the work we did on tech TV or here on Twitter to get into teaching, to get into technology. And I hear from those people all the time. That's really been a blessing. I'm really kind of most proud of that. More news to come in. Just a bit. Alan Malvantano and Father Robert have stuck around. You are troopers, I guess. Well, well done. We only have. Let me see. We only have five more videos to go. That's all. Just all. And two more ads. We're good. We're good. And one more news story.

[Robert Balancer]

You're lucky. We got Padre and it's. Isn't it Palm Sunday?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, it's Monday.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You have to work Monday.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, yeah, over there.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I worked all day.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Oh, Robert, take a nap during this next ad, please. Be my guest.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I rested last week.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a great picture from you, Roberto, of. With your. Holding your palm. I guess it looked like the church he goes to. They have a photo op when you get your palm. Do churches do that?

[Father Robert Balliser]

There are actually quite a few. In fact. The Church of San Ignacio, which is ours, they have a mirror that you. You go up to, and you. You put in a euro coin and it turns on the lights so you can see.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my gosh, there is Roberto.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

With his palm cross.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, the two days that get the highest attendance are Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday. The two days that we give stuff out for some reason that's.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to smudge on your forehead. Come on down. We're giving them out for free. Do you have to everybody as they go by you? Wow.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot of work.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, actually folds up your fronds canonically. Could I just, like, sprinkle. Just throw it into people's faces?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Don't make me be sacrilegious. You just. You're just egging me on here. What are you doing for Easter? What's Your Easter going to be, like, busy.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's going to be right here. The Easter week, Holy Week in the Vatican is just gorgeous. Pretty much any hour of the day. There is ethereal music that just comes from St. Peter's and it washes over the top of our house. So I hear it in my office. It's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

This Monday is. It begins. Yes.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, it started yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or yesterday it began. Yeah. We were traveling and I remember being in Spain during Holy Week and they have these parades through the streets. Each church has its own float, usually showing Jesus in the cross and, you know, his. What are they? The agony. What do they call it?

[Father Robert Balliser]

The Stations of the Cross.

[Leo Laporte]

Stations of the Cross. It's funny because in Spain, Jesus is very well dressed and the women around him, Mary Magdalene and his mother, beautifully dressed in Spanish regalia. It was quite something. And these floats are very big, very heavy and carried. Carried by people in medieval robes, basically. It's quite an amazing sight. I was fascinated.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Just don't go to the Philippines. Oh, I was about to ask you, Padre, I was about to ask if you've done the Philippines, because I used to go traumatic. I used to go to San Fernando Panga every. Every Holy Week.

[Leo Laporte]

And what happens if you actually want.

[Father Robert Balliser]

To see someone really, not virtually and not fake get crucified? Go to the Philippines for Holy Week. Traumatizing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Do they. I don't.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's a thing. It's a thing. They actually. They actually walk down the streets, self flagellating. Some of them are carrying a cross, wearing crowns of thorns.

[Leo Laporte]

So they do the Stations of the Cross parades.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's parades of them.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

It's wild.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's.

[Robert Balancer]

If.

[Father Robert Balliser]

If you're into gore and vore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That would be a good Holy Week for you. That was not my thing.

[Robert Balancer]

Not my thing.

[Leo Laporte]

No. I'm just seeing if I can find some pictures of these.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Don't get pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not of the crucifixions. No, no. Of the parades. They were. They were quite beautiful.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I have. I know I have some. Some here. Wait a minute. Let me. It was. We didn't plan the trip for Holy Week, but. But once I realized it was Holy Week, I thought, oh, this is going to be fun. We're going to get to see some beautiful things.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We are starting to see what the Jubilee year will do to tourist traffic here because we're now in tourist season and it's significant. It's a big bump.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Yeah. Well, I. I won't.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And also, they're coming after tourists. So if you come to Italy, they're coming for you, the inspectors, because they know that tourists make mistakes. Well, because if you get onto a bus, you buy a ticket, you actually have to validate your ticket in the machine in the bus. People don't know that all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I remember that. No, I didn't know that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yes, that's a €50 on the spot fine. If you cannot pay it on the spot, it becomes an €80 fine. If you try to leave the country when you get to the airport, it's a €400 fine. So don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. When you get on the bus, validate your ticket.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

And another thing that I didn't know until I got to Italy, you order, you pay for your cornetto and espresso first at the cashier and then you go to the counter and you show them receipt and you get your cornetto and espresso. It's two separate transactions.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It depends. If it's like my coffee place down here, they know me. So we just order and then we pay at the end.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

But not normal places. Yeah, you pay up. You pay up front.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we went to the.

[Father Robert Balliser]

When you come, I will take you to my place downtown. It has the best coffee and the best pastries.

[Leo Laporte]

We went to the famous Tazo d'oro which is the original home of espresso they say. And. Yeah, and then you stand there at your, at the counter and it's wonderful. Love that.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That has spoiled me every time I come home. The coffee, the coffee tastes like water now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, this is a great snob. How about let's take a trip to Tasmania. Are you ready? This is Richard, he's, he's down under. Watch.

[Robert Balancer]

Hey, Leon.

[Father Robert Balliser]

The team at TWiT. Richard from Tasmania, Australia here. Congratulations on 20 years. Such an amazing achievement. I've been following TWiT for 19 of those 20 years when I was living abroad and bought my very first ipod and got me through lots of commutes and work days. And since then it's got me through many more and workouts and chores.

[Robert Balancer]

So thank you for everything and here's to another 20 more.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. And you wanna, you want, if you wanna go to Tasmania, you know how you're gonna go? You're gonna go in an airplane, maybe with the stork. Hey, Leo and the twit team. I just wanted to say congratulations on your anniversary.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You all have have been a constant.

[Leo Laporte]

Source of entertainment and consistency throughout the last some 20,000 flight hours of mine. I'VE been watching and listening since the tech TV days and then now into the podcast era. Love everything that you do and thanks for everything. Isn't that great? What is that plane? Do you know, Alan? Can you tell it's not a jet? It looks like it's a turboprop. Maybe.

[Robert Balancer]

Don't ask me. I can identify a submarine.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I'm trying to. I don't know. The airport does not look familiar.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't look familiar. It looks like a regional. It could be like a commercial.

[Father Robert Balliser]

He might be at the commercial terminal. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, maybe. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, and he calls himself the Stork.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah. That's not a seven six, seven seven.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

That's not a big one.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's not a Boeing.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not a jet. It looks like a turbo. Proper regional. I wonder if he delivers babies if he calls himself the Stork. Maybe that's the baby plane.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, care. Flights for babies, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break. I do have some more news, but I have lots of other things to do first. Next, let's talk about our great friends at ExpressVPN, our sponsors for this segment of the 20th anniversary twit. I've been using ExpressVPN as my VPN, not for 20 years, but for quite some time. Let me give you an example why you'd want to use it. Have you ever browsed an incognito mode? Sometimes they call it private browsing mode. It probably is not as incognito as you think. In fact, Google just last year settled a $5 billion lawsuit because they were accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. Google's defense. Oh, incognito doesn't mean invisible. And in fact, they know exactly what you're doing. All of your online activity still 100% visible to third parties. The best way to protect your privacy? Use ExpressVPN, the only VPN I use and trust when I go online. We went down to Tucson for the gem show and I arrived at the airport, you know, and it says free SFO wifi. And every time I look at that go, I don't think I should use the free airport wifi. Then I remember. But wait, I've got ExpressVPN on my phone, on my tablet, on my computer. Fire it up. Whenever I'm traveling, in airports, coffee shops in other countries, ExpressVPN is my go to. And there's a good reason for it. Everyone needs ExpressVPN. Without ExpressVPN, third parties can still see every website you visit, even if you're in incognito mode. That means your ISP or your mobile network provider, the admin of your wifi network, the free airport wifi, and in many cases everybody else on that network can also see you. And if there's a bad guy out there with a wifi pineapple or a similar device, he can even attempt to hack you. Not with ExpressVPN running. Why is ExpressVPN the best? ExpressVPN is the best VPN because it hides your IP address routes. 100% of your traffic through secure encrypted servers is very easy to use. I just, I was on my iPad. I just went to ExpressVPN. There's a big red button that says start it. I fired up the app. You just click one button and now, boom. You are completely private, completely secure, completely deployed to protect it. Even on the free Airport WI fi. It works on all devices. I use it on my phones, on my laptops, my tablets. You can use it on your routers if you want. Stay private no matter where you are. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. It's the only one I use. It's the only one I recommend. Protect your online privacy today. Visit expressvpn.com twit that's EX P R E SS V- an extra four months free when you buy a two year package. That's a great deal. Expressvpn.com Twitter we thank them so much for their support.

[Robert Balancer]

I think I've been using them for about five years now.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you? Yeah. I'm not kidding about the free SFO WI fi. Every time I'm at an airport, I want to use that WI fi. Right. But I'm always, it's always nerve wracking.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's amazing how many I get to fall for this. When I do flights out of the United States, I will create an AP with the name of the free AP from the airport.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what really worries me.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would you do that, Robert?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I just want to see how many devices auto connect. It's always about a dozen in the plane. It's like you don't you. You honestly think that 10,000ft in the air, away from the airport, you're still getting that WI fi signal? Signal.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you mean you're on the plane and you say free white, free airport WI fi?

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, everybody has their phone. It'll be like the automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it may. Yeah. Maybe set to automatically join it. Yeah.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, precisely.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's another thing. Forget those networks.

[Robert Balancer]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So all I do is I have my laptop that's connected to the plane, WI Fi, and I run a little cane enable, and I'm basically the man in the middle it. So it's. And it works every single time.

[Leo Laporte]

Sigh.

[Robert Balancer]

He's a white hat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's a white hat. That's the good news. He. He never does anything bad with your information. You see that priest? And. And row 17. He's hacking you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Row 17. I'm. I'm in, like, 35, 36.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, come on. You don't get to sit up front, huh?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Not anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm glad to see, Alan, that you're working in AI for a solar dime. That's very good. I prefer to work in A1 myself. Here we go. Yes, she's a McMahon. She's the, you know, wife of. What is it? Vince McMahon.

[Robert Balancer]

The Vince McMahon.

[Leo Laporte]

Vince McMahon. WWE and very nicely, the Secretary of Education in the United States. She was speaking at a Arizona State summit for educators, speaking to teachers. She's the new Secretary of Education. She said she was talking about a school system that's going to start making sure that first graders or even pre Ks have A1 teaching in every year. Now, even if she was saying AI. Should first graders or kindergartners be taught about AI at that age? I don't think so.

[Robert Balancer]

Listen, Leo, I can't even think about what you just said, because as soon as she said A one, I, for one, welcome our steak sauce overlord.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Then she said that maybe she was, you know, it was a slip. Right? It was a slip. A1. No, she said it again. Kids are sponges. She said they just absorb everything. It wasn't that long ago that it was, we're going to have Internet in our schools now. Let's see. A1 and how that can be helpful.

[Robert Balancer]

And there. If you watch the video, there were two other adults sitting across from this woman, and neither one of them corrected her.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, because you don't correct people in the Trump administration.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I don't think. Yeah, I don't think they knew, honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they did what you were talking about.

[Robert Balancer]

A one Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Heinz knew what she was talking about. They immediately posted on Instagram.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It's the best.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, agreed.

[Leo Laporte]

Best to start them early.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

With a picture of A1 steak sauce next to them.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, if. If they had any marketing budget, they would spin up a division of Heinz that does AI, but they call it A1A1. A1 in artificial intelligence systems. I mean free. Free press.

[Leo Laporte]

Free press. Do you think she actually thought it was a. That was a slip, right?

[Robert Balancer]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Or she's reading a prop multiple times.

[Father Robert Balliser]

She did it multiple times. It means she doesn't understand what it is and she just read.

[Leo Laporte]

She's saying kids should be taught it.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, she just read about it and she thought that it was a one in print. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the Secretary of Education.

[Robert Balancer]

Well, listen, merit based, Leo. It's all merit based these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, right, right. Be careful with your Chrome. Researchers have uncovered dozens of sketchy Chrome extensions. The sad thing is they have 4 million installs. Yep. And many of these extensions were featured on the Chrome Store. The extension store.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I have removed all extensions. All extensions stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't. I've removed of Chrome was the first thing I did.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I still use Chromium. I use Edge.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, use Edge, but you can't use a, an ad blocker on Edge. Right. Because event manifest.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You can, you can. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't use Ublock origin. You can use a. Somewhat stripped.

[Robert Balancer]

You can use other ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I what I moved to and I like it. I would recommend it. The Zen browser, which is a Firefox.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Fork I tried after the last time I was on and actually it's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very nice. It's early beta.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah. Well, it reminds me of what Chrome was like before it started getting bloaty.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I wonder if that's just the life cycle of a browser. They always start out fast and sleek and slick and then it's called and.

[Leo Laporte]

Dare I say it to a priest, inshittification.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yes. Cory Doctorow was right.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what's happened to the Chrome browser. That's when a company, it's a stage in the company's life, usually the end stage in a company's life as Corey defines it. You know, when a company starts like Amazon start, they want to build customers, right. So they, they keep prices low. They, they say we're, we're all about the customer. Then, then they get enough customers and then it's going to be all about the businesses. Same thing happened at Amazon. They brought in all the third party sellers. Now by the way, this is going to bite them in the butt because many of these sellers are in China. And basically what's going to happen to Temu Shein Alibaba, anybody selling on Amazon from China with the tariffs, you can't, you just, you're out of business. And that's at least half of, I think, Amazon's business. But the third stage is when you stop extracting. You stop caring about your customers, you stop caring about your businesses, and you just extract as much value as you can. And it's clear Amazon's in that stage. Google is in that stage. It's kind of sad. By the way, you want one more insidification story? I don't know if this is true.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Hit me.

[Leo Laporte]

It's from Carl Bod's writing about this in Tector. You know that Vizio was bought by Walmart. Walmart has been trying to ins, I mean, leverage standby mode. They, they call it scenic mode. And Vizio says Walmart says it's supposed to display relaxing, ambient content when your TV is idle for a period of time, which Vizio claims adds to the environment of your home or office. Well, I don't know if you saw this on Reddit, but one Vizio owner was annoyed to leave his room and come back to a loop of Kristi Noem saying if you're an immigrant, get out.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh my goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

Over and over again. Apparently Vizio is selling this time as ads.

[Robert Balancer]

That's not very soothing content for my television. No, like flowers and rivers and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

This was on Reddit. I left the TV idle while I went to the other room to play with my dog. After about half an hour, I started hearing Kristi Noem praising Trump and telling immigrants to get out of America over and over. I went in to check and caught this video video looping three more times before it went back to the nature clips. That's very 1984.

[Robert Balancer]

Now what's funny is where did those televisions come from? China.

[Leo Laporte]

It's circular.

[Robert Balancer]

So there's going to be less of those televisions?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there'll be far fewer. Oh yeah, far fewer.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, can you get a dumb TV now? Is there any manufacturer that sells a dumb tv?

[Leo Laporte]

You can buy a computer monitor.

[Robert Balancer]

You can buy, yeah, computer monitor.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's going to be more expensive, right, for the square.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Expensive, Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I was blown away. I, I went to Costco the other day and they're selling 85 inch TVs for 800 bucks.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Of course. Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But the reason they can do that is because those TVs spy on you. They show you ads, plus they tell advertisers what you're watching, what you're doing. They all have cameras built in so that you can zoom from the TV as one does.

[Robert Balancer]

I have all of the Samsung endpoints for the TV related things. Blocked at my router.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the way to do it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I've got a pie hole that kills all their DNS queries.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I actually don't care whether I can run you block origin anymore. Because I block it all upstream.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Upstream.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah. And we don't use any of that. Smart TV stuff is only a backup. It's. You know, I've got SHIELD Pros on all the sets.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the problem is I have. Unfortunately, I have a bunch of Samsung TVs, and even if you're running an Apple TV, it's very hard to. You have to go through the Samsung interface to get to the Apple tv. Right. You can't just have it come up. Unless you figure that out. I would like to have it come up on the. I don't want to see any of the Samsung crap. I don't think you can. And I definitely now don't want to see any of the Vizio crap app. Wow.

[Father Robert Balliser]

There's a. I. I had to set up the TV for my father because he's mostly bedbound now, and I wanted to make sure he could access everything but the tv. And I wanted to use a fire stick and I wanted to use an Apple tv. But because those functions are also built into the TV itself, he keeps choosing the wrong services.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Finally, I just had to give up and just set it up on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Let him use the tv.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Even though it's horrible. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's slow. The apps aren't up to date, but it's easy to use. My. Same with my mom, who's got Alzheimer's. You know, she's got. I bought her a TCL with Roku built in.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's exactly what my dad has.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot easier for her to use. She doesn't have a separate thing. She doesn't have to switch HDMI ports or any of that stuff.

[Father Robert Balliser]

And I went up and down the aisle at Costco just looking for any TV that didn't have any smart features. And not a single one.

[Leo Laporte]

None. This is inification made real.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Sigh. All right, let me play. I got a great video for you. Can I do one more? I got two more. I'll do. I'll do one more. This one. I think you're gonna enjoy this video.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Hey, Uncle Leo. It's Tom Britton from Freak show and Tell and the Dangerous Circus. I'm in my little Chicago rehearsal space.

[Leo Laporte]

Tonight, so you get to see a.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Little behind the scenes with non theatrical Lighting. I don't remember how I first found The Twit Podcast 2005. You only had a handful of episodes and there weren't a lot of podcasts. So I think I listened to all the podcasts on Earth, yours included. Since then, I've. I'm a member of Club Twit, and I enjoy a lot of the content of the Twit family of programming. So I want to tell you a very heartfelt happy anniversary from all the Twit fans on Earth. So you. You make a wish. Me, I'm going to blow out the candle for you. Happy anniversary, Leo. Doing the Twit, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at this. Fire eater. Fire Tom from Freak show and tell. That is unbelievable. Isn't that great? You know, that's the other thing that's amazing about this is the. Not only all over the world, but all walks of life, all kinds of people. It's just such a privilege to be able to do this and to have done this for 20 years. I really appreciate, Appreciate it. One more ad, one more story.

[Robert Balancer]

You were calling them Netcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that was so. On the very second Podcast Expo, this must have been 2007, I got up on stage, did the keynote. I said, why are we calling them podcasts? Why? That's because they run on an ipod. They won't always run on an ipod. Someday there'll be other ways to listen to podcasts. Yes. Besides ipods. Plus, Apple owns the trademark. Do you think that's a good idea? Can we call them something else? What about this?

[Father Robert Balliser]

They're.

[Leo Laporte]

They're. They're broadcasts over the Internet. How about we call them Netcasts? And, oh, it has this wonderful connotation of your casting a net to bring in people and nobody. Everybody hated. I called for years. It was a good.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I. I still love hearing that netcast you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, come on. Only on the old shows, because Jerry Wagley, who was our chief of marketing, I was at a podcast expo about four years ago. I guess they've changed it to the Podcast Movement, which is a terrible name. But anyway, and we were at the Podcast Movement and Jerry said, can we please. Can we please call them podcasts? And what was amazing is, I guess in that session where we recorded Netcasts yous love love, we also had them say podcasts you love. So we were able to edit it, and we've been a podcast network ever since.

[Robert Balancer]

Guess what?

[Father Robert Balliser]

We're there today, Leo. There's no more ipods, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Balancer]

That's True.

[Leo Laporte]

So what is a podcast?

[Robert Balancer]

Listen, it's the same reason that when you save something in Word, it's a little floppy disk. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess it is. You know, there's some people who made a retronym. It stands for play on demand or something like that, but I know.

[Robert Balancer]

Just trying to make it work.

[Leo Laporte]

But I gave up because people, they call it a podcast. They understand what a podcast is. They don't understand what a netcast is. So I gave up. I was right, though. I'm just.

[Robert Balancer]

Listen, Leo, there's an alternate timeline somewhere where everybody's calling them Netcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you call it when it's on YouTube? Do you call it a podcast? YouTube does. That makes no sense.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, I know.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, now everything's shorts. Shorts.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all shorts.

[Robert Balancer]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're going to see Padre in his shorts in just a moment. But first. No, we're not. No, I'm just kidding. That's a tease. But first, a word from our sponsor and a company I am very proud to be representing Bitwarden, the trusted leader in passwords, but also pass keys. Yes. I manage all my passkeys in Bitwarden and I'm loving it. And they even manage secrets. So it's a great way to send documents encrypted, to keep track of your API keys and your secrets without uploading them to GitHub by accident. How many times that happened? Right? No, you gotta have Bitwarden. With more than 10 million users across 180 countries, over 50,000 businesses as well use Bitwarden. You know, I don't always think of it as a. I think. I know it's great for individuals because it's open source, it's free for life, but it's great for businesses, too. In fact, it's consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2. Recognizes a leader in software reviews data quadrant bit warden continues to protect 50,000 businesses worldwide. Now, we're getting close to tax time. I think it's Wednesday. Right? Have you sent your provider all your tax information? Have they sent back your returns? Did they do it with email? Tell me they didn't. Not when you can use Bitwarden. Send it securely sends documents encrypted, end to end encrypted. So all of that stuff, whatever you're sending, remains protected. Here's the best part. You don't have to train your accountant because recipients don't need an account to access them. So it's a great way to avoid risky email attachments to share confidential documents. You get password protection. You also get expiration dates. You get view limits. You have full control over who accesses your sensitive information. This is just one of of many reasons why I'm a fan of Bitwarden. Open source means they move fast, constantly adding great new features. They just did a survey, they've new findings from Bit Warden highlight. Get this, 65% of all enterprises, more than half still rely solely on passwords. They're not using single sign on, they're not using pass keys. That's not good with a password. You know people are writing them on a post it not know put them on their monitor. Password management is cited in the same survey as the top IAM challenge for 35% of organizations. Only 21% implement passwordless authentication. We can fix that. Enterprises face ongoing credential security risks. I don't want to call Bitwarden a password manager because it's so much more. It supports sso, it supports passkeys, it supports passwordless. Bit Warden offers enterprises essential tools with end to end encryption, multi factor authentication, secure password sharing. It addresses both current and future authentication needs. They just announced their ISO 270012022 certification. That's very good news. That's an international standard that recognizes and assures that enterprises, developers and security teams are meeting stringent security and compliance requirements. If you're going to be ISO 27001, there's a lot you have to do on the back end to make sure it's safe. Bitwarden does it that complements their existing compliance with SoC2 Type 2, GDPR compliant, HIPAA, CCPA, the California Privacy act, all Bitwarden compliant. With all those standards, Bitwarden truly is the trusted security partner for enterprises. And yes, it prioritizes simplicity. It sounds complicated, right? But no, because no security solution that's complicated is going to be stand up to users, right? They're just going to bypass it. It's easy to use Bitwarden. Their setup only takes a few minutes. They're now native on all their apps and I love the new apps. They support importing for most password management solutions. So moving to Bitwarden is painless. And again I want to emphasize this. I've always said this. You should never use any encryption tool that is not open source. Bit Warden is fully open, sour, GPL licensed. The code can be inspected by anyone. Furthermore, they have regular third party security audits and they publish the results in full. So you can really be sure that Bit Warden does exactly what it Says it does get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. And as always for individuals, it's open source, free forever. Unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, pass keys too. You can even use a hardware key like a Yubikey for free forever. Although I pay 10 bucks a year. A year to support them as a premium user. But you don't even need to do that. It is a great deal. Bitwarden.com TWIT find out for your business, Find out for yourself. And I know all of you use a password manager, but I know you also have friends and family who are still using the same password on every site. You know how horrific that is? Bitwarden.com TWIT get him to move. Did you see, by the way, that Troy Hunt got pwned? Did you see that story? Bitwarden.com Twitter all right, we're done with the ad. Troy Hunt, who does Have I been pwned right before?

[Robert Balancer]

Before you move to that. So bit warden, one thing I like to commend them on is built into their official client is also if you are self hosting your own service, if.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re an individual, you can self host it. That's right, yes.

[Robert Balancer]

Which I'm self hosting across all my devices.

[Leo Laporte]

There's excellent third party servers. There's a Rust server. Do you use that one or do you use the Bitwarden?

[Robert Balancer]

It's just a Docker container. It's just vault warp. It's easy like back end.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I got a container on my Synology nas.

[Leo Laporte]

You both use it and you both host your own vaults.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's trust no one bit Ward.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Yeah. Troy Hunt was just getting off a plane. He was on a long flight, he was a little jet lagged when he got an email that purported to be from Intuit mailchimp saying, oh, we had to pause your newsletter because of all the spam. If that was an error, click this button and fix it. And Troy said, I was jet lagged. I wasn't paying attention. I clicked the button. And then here's the interesting thing. He said, I wasn't worried. I had two factor. He used the two factor. But here's the thing. Of course it was a phishing site. It wasn't mailchimp. Yep. And nowadays, because they automate these phishing attacks, they could reuse his credentials. And the two factor, within 30 seconds, they stole his mailing list. Now, to his credit, Troy, because he runs have I been pwned? Said I've been pwned. I apologize. My mailing list got out. This is how it happened. But it just shows you if it can happen to the guy, I mean he's a security guru. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody.

[Robert Balancer]

Never click the button.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't click the button.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Authentication redirects are relatively rare though. So that was extremely.

[Leo Laporte]

Was a good attack. But it was probably a spear phishing attack. Right. They knew where they were going with that and they knew Troy would probably have two FA and sad.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Not bad. Okay.

[Robert Balancer]

That does happen though.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Now I gotta try that.

[Leo Laporte]

Son of a. Do you still have the Flipper Zero I gave you?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I do, I do. That thing has become extremely useful.

[Robert Balancer]

I need to pick one of those up.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Ever increasingly digitized area of rock.

[Leo Laporte]

They call it the multi tool device for geeks. Ostensibly. I mean you can go through customs with it because it's got a little game. I don't know, it's like a snake game or something on there.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Not anymore. They know to look for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yep. So when I, when I travel with that I have to pack it into. Into checked luggage.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Oh. Because they'll. They'll say oh you got to flip it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They'll take it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, your cyber buddy, they just announced a new product.

[Robert Balancer]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

What is it? I gotta find. Where is it not on their site.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, it's one of a new hat.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. It's not for the Flipper Zero. It's. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah. It's an interesting new product but what is it? But they have an infrared transceiver. They have Bluetooth, they have everything on this thing.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, there's all sorts of little add ons for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I didn't want to. I did not want to own one to be honest. I thought this is dangerous.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I may have been on a Royal Caribbean cruise not too long ago. And with an add on I was able to clone the RFID on the cups that give.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, I may have.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Not saying I did that. I may have.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you hand? It's hard.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It was actually really hard.

[Robert Balancer]

It was just.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They use a non standard RFID tag on their cups.

[Leo Laporte]

It was really hard. Yeah. Flipper Zero now makes the busy bar. This is not a security product. It's a little expensive at 250 bucks. It's a little thing you tap, you can have it say on air. See, I was thinking of getting it for that. You can have it say you're busy. The idea is you put it on your desk. This is if you're still if you did a return to office. Right. And let me see. I think it's a Kickstarter.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know what, it sounds kind of of silly but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, you need this.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's your. I would actually get one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's. No, that's not it. Let me see if I can find it. I hate it when they have a story about something and they don't put a link.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Now what I would really want to do is create a project, of course using my 3D printer and a couple of Arduinos to. When I engage the busy function, if someone stays in front of my desk for more than three seconds, it directs a spray of compressed air at them. That. That, that is a busy bar.

[Leo Laporte]

It has a pomodoro timer in it. It has an API so you can have it say or do anything, but the ostensible reason to have it is so that you can have it on your desk and it can shoo people away and it can say come back. It'll actually say come back in 20 minutes or something like that. 250 bucks. A little much. How much? But the Flipper Zero was cheaper than that, right?

[Father Robert Balliser]

Yeah, well, I mean it was when it came out, but then it became so popular that the. I mean they were. There was a secondary market for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you love. That's a little timer.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Cool.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a. It's. But it. But it can be programmed to say on air, if they call it a process.

[Robert Balancer]

That's a decent sized device though. It's got.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. For 250 bucks. That's actually not a bad price.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I could probably.

[Robert Balancer]

It's high but you know. Yeah, I get it. It makes a little more sense seeing the size of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, somebody's walking up to him and he's busy. So he hits the timer, go away on air. That's a good one. On a call, you can actually have it using the API. Integrate it with the software so that when you're on a zoom call, you can have a little sign that says I'm on a call right now.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Now you know who would love. Who would have loved this?

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Burke.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Because he was always trying to. To flip on that little light that he had set up to say shut up. Shut up. When we were being too loud.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember that in the old. In the brick house. Yep, I see the whole thing. I don't think he really got it. My idea was to have an open studio so there would be a commotion. So there Be a live place. So I didn't mind that people were talking. That was the idea.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Always on streaming, that was quite.

[Leo Laporte]

But broadcast. People like Burke said, no, no, there shouldn't be any noise. I remember we first. When we first went on the air from the brick house, I got a irate email. You know, the living room set. We had the camera in a corner facing us, and behind us was the whole studio, including the. The windows out to the street and stuff. So you would see everything going on. That was my intent. I wanted to feel like a lively. Like a makerspace, like what you're going to build. And somebody sent me an irate email saying, I just saw somebody walk by behind you as you're doing iPad today with a spoon, like, they're going to lunch. How dare you. I said they were.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I mean, I did an episode of before you buy where some guy walked past the window without a shirt in his underwear.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody would do that, would they? I have a bad hat.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Bonito can find that episode.

[Robert Balancer]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't.

[Father Robert Balliser]

What.

[Leo Laporte]

Was I drunk? What was that?

[Father Robert Balliser]

I don't remember. I just remember looking at the monitor going, is that. Is that. Oh, my God. What's happening right now?

[Robert Balancer]

I do miss the vibe of the cottage, though, where it was. It was sort of like. What's that radio show with the dude with the hair?

[Leo Laporte]

Howard Stern?

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, it had a kind of a Howard Stern vibe early on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

Because you were at the desk, and then you'd have. People would come into the studio, but they'd be sitting at the couch and the camera up in the corner. Yeah, yeah. No, but it was. It worked, right? It was. It was cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now I can't. I can't have anybody in the studio. It's too small. It doesn't have any room for anybody, which is sad to me. We set it up. You know, I set it up so I'd have multiple cameras and all that.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, but. But, I mean, that's not.

[Leo Laporte]

I was gonna put people in that chair, but there's a teddy bear there now, and you can't.

[Robert Balancer]

You can. You can squeeze, like, one or two people in there, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, that's why we got three cameras. There's no need for three cameras. Yeah, I don't know. I've. I'm still. It's a work in progress. All right. One last video and then one last story, and then we will be out of here. You guys have been very patient. This is from Tony. I was doing an alphabetical order by last by first name. Tony, give us your story.

[Robert Balancer]

Hello, Leo and Team twit.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations on 20 years.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

That is quite a miraculous milestone in podcasting. There are many things I'd love to.

[Leo Laporte]

Say to you, Leo, but I'm going to keep this short.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

First of all, congratulations. Happy birthday.

[Leo Laporte]

Made it to 20 years.

[Robert Balancer]

You are really the reason I am.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing what I do.

[Robert Balancer]

There's a couple things I do.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I have a website, I have a blog, I have a book, I have.

[Leo Laporte]

All kinds of things.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

And it really all started back at.

[Leo Laporte]

Tech TV days and I was sitting.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

In my living room watching you on Call for Help show, showing all these great applications and things that you could do on a Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

And it really convinced me to go out and buy a Mac. I can't even remember, but I bought.

[Robert Balancer]

A program that you demonstrated on how.

[Leo Laporte]

To create a website.

[Robert Balancer]

And I went out and created a.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Website for my passion, which was Disney, disneybrothernumbers.com and then watching you podcast and.

[Leo Laporte]

I went out and created a podcast.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

So I have to credit you with the things that I do as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Because without tech tv, without Call for.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Help and all the great shows there.

[Robert Balancer]

With Kevin Rose and Amber Mack and.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody back in the day, I probably.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Wouldn'T be doing these fun things that I do today. So thank you very much for your.

[Leo Laporte]

Time, your effort, your everything that you put into this.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

I know it's time consuming. I know it doesn't just macrolessly appear on an RSS feed.

[Robert Balancer]

So thank you for everything that you.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Do and congratulations on 20 years and.

[Robert Balancer]

I hope you do it for another 20 more.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Disney. By the Numbers, a very successful Disney podcast. We've had people, I've had people on the show who did the voice of Porky Pig, and I had a Disney illustrator do this some years ago. This was Mickey. There's a lot of Disney geeks. It's an interesting overlap between Disney and twit. I don't know. I don't know what that is. I guess everybody loves Disney and a small portion of the Venn diagram also loves Twit. Maybe that's what it really is. Anyway, thank you, Tony. Thanks to everybody who sent letters and videos and I think I've got everybody in. I hope I did. Thanks to all the people who've made twit. You know what it is after all, all these 20 years and father Robert, it's been a pleasure knowing you. Somebody asked in the discord, does Robert ever age? Because you don't. You don't.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I'm not allowed to I'm contractually obligated.

[Robert Balancer]

Not to like fine wine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It feels like.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Well, we've. We've perfected tir therapy here in the Vatican.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that might be it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Things.

[Leo Laporte]

Roberto found the video of me on my ball. Listen to that. This is.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, yeah, this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear. I punched a hole in my ball.

[Robert Balancer]

I think you changed the c. Did you change the camera?

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible.

[Robert Balancer]

Change the camera. There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible. That's it. I thought I was going to sink slowly. I'm sinking. But as it turns out, it doesn't. It was a slow leak.

[Robert Balancer]

It's the best I watched. I watched that live, and I almost fell out of my chair.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what happens when you buy cheap Chinese balls. Well, good news. Those balls aren't cheap anymore, ladies and gentlemen.

[Father Robert Balliser]

They had a whole rack of them at the. At the Brick House.

[Leo Laporte]

We did. Remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I stick with these. Ultra fitz. Anti. Burst. That's the key. Stability ball. I recommend it. Anti Burke. Stability ball. Somebody also found. I might as well play it. The. The video of the Harlem Shuffle where. This is in the Brick House where I. Do you remember this fad? It was a very brief fad where people would be in an office or whatever, and then they would. They would just burst into song and dance and they would often wear. Wear like horse heads and different animals.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then. So I thought, well, we should. We should do the Harlem Shuffle here in the studio. But what I didn't know. Oh, gosh, you know what? There's so many great posts in here, I'm having trouble finding it. What I didn't know was that I couldn't really safely stand on that table. So here we are.

[Father Robert Balliser]

This is not a weight bearing table.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Dvorak on the far left. Rafe Needleman to my right. Jason Snell is there. Somebody's on the Avatar. This is in the Brick House. We thought we'll do our version of the Harlem Shade. And there's a kid in the robot head. That was from the OMG craft show. And then. And then we all get up and do the thing with a horse's head and. But I made the mistake of stepping on the table, and I am not exactly lightweight and I broke it. Burke did fix it. Burke did fix it. He put. It was. Anyway, we. We. That was a long time ago.

[Robert Balancer]

It was a whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a whole thing.

[Robert Balancer]

The audio version of the ball burst. The first ball burst.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Robert Balancer]

I think that was when you had. It was one of the better grade Ones, let's just say. And so it was. So even though you had the Heil mic and it was audio only, that's the one where you can actually. You heard it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You can hear it.

[Leo Laporte]

It went boom. It was.

[Robert Balancer]

Yes, there was just like a.

[Leo Laporte]

That was in the cottage upstairs. That was in the old, old place. From Justin. I've been listening since the Revenge of the Screensavers. That was the very first Twit Twit. One that was on a desktop PC at my mom's house when I was in high school. Pretty soon, I'm sure I was using the Windows version of itunes back then. I don't know. I don't think so. One of my highlights was getting to meet Leo at the east side studios. My wife planned a trip to Petaluma into our California road trip. I even remember smashing my elbow into the side of the set, which made a stronger memory.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Proud to be a club Twit member. Big thank you to Leo, all of the hosts and all of the behind the scenes staff from Justin. Thank you, Justin. Bill wrote, I watched Leo on the screensavers on Tech TV and was heartbroken when it ended. But I kept up with Leo and was excited when the podcast was announced. I remember downloading the first episode and loading it into my old Panasonic MP3 player. That you plugged into your computer. Yep. And dragged songs onto like a thumb drive. I'm sure that Leo would agree that none of us could have known back then where this journey would take us. I do. It's been a mind blower. I've enjoyed the Twit Network from before it was a network through the present day. The hosts have informed, inspired, and entertained me for the last 20 years. The shows come into my life multiple times every week and I still look forward to each one. Just like that impromptu first episode. Since I first started listening and watching, my daughters have been born and grown to adulthood. I've changed jobs and houses in towns at your shows have been one constant in my life. No matter where I've gone or what I've been through, Twit has been in my life. Happy birthday, Twit. You've been a wonderful gift to me. Here's hoping for another 20 years. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Bill. That's really great. Oh, here's one more from the Farm.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Hi and welcome to the Farm.

[Robert Balancer]

My name is Michael Smith. I'm an IT professional here in South.

[Leo Laporte]

Carolina and an avid TWiT TV fan. My favorite shows are Twit, Mac, Break Weekly, Security Now. And my all time favorite, Windows Weekly.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

Richard, my liver and my wallet both.

[Leo Laporte]

Hate you, but my palette doesn't you. And this, this is where I listen to my Twit podcast. Who would have thought we'd have two tractor videos? Now that's a deer, right? And that looks like. In fact, that's how he knew it was a harrow. He's also driving a harrow. Honey and eggs. Wait a minute. What are you up to?

[Robert Balancer]

But seriously, Leo, congratulations on 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

20 years. That is amazing. And I'll see you on your next podcast. Come join me on YouTube, Messi Homestead.

[Robert Balancer]

See you there.

[Leo Laporte]

We're almost as old as his tractor. I love it. Thank you so much. That is awesome. That is awesome. So that's a 60 year old tractor that he restored. A John Deere Number 5 Sickle Bar Mower.

[Father Robert Balliser]

We can use. I think we can use AI to make that pull out turn into the Twit logo in the grass. I bet you we can make that happen.

[Leo Laporte]

If you can do that would be hysterical. Anthony. Get on it. Get on it, Anthony. Yeah, he gives us permission. Jammer B has been posting memories in our Discord. That's the place to be if you want to keep the party going. Our club, Twit Discord, is available to everybody who's a member of the club for $7 a month. And we've brought back, I'm very pleased to say, the annual plan by popular demand, mostly by demand from my wonderful wife and our executive producer, Lisa. So she demanded it and we brought it back. So if you want to join the club, seven bucks a month or $84 a year, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord. You wish you were there right now because it's really kind of a party going on in there with all of the folks showing pictures and so forth. Please join the club. Twit TV Club Twit. Father Robert Ballisaire, the Digital Jesuit. Thank you for staying up late with us on Holy Week. You're going to be. This is a tough week for you. I completely forgot. I am so grateful to you.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No, I mean, I wouldn't have missed this. I mean, Twit's a big part of my life, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm so.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Any chance I get, I'll come back.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're a darn big part of our life and I love your new plan, which we won't say anything about in public, but I love it.

[Father Robert Balliser]

It may take a few years to materialize because I have to get permission to leave Rome first.

[Leo Laporte]

But he responds to a higher authority.

[Father Robert Balliser]

I do, I do. But once it's built, I mean, there's definitely going to be a studio there among the makerspace, so I hope so.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope so. I really look forward to that. Thank you, Robert, for being here. Thanks to Sam Aboul Sammit, who is also with us but had to depart a little bit early. And of course, Alan Malvantano. You tried like the dickens to get Patrick Norton to make it. He couldn't. I tried.

[Robert Balancer]

He was, he was half in, like, for the first. When I first asked him, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I could probably do that. And then, like a few days went by and he was like, oh, no, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it.

[Robert Balancer]

He tried.

[Leo Laporte]

He tries, and I love him for that. I also asked Kevin Rose. He couldn't make it. But you know what? I'm glad I had you guys on. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. And really, this show, our 20th anniversary show, was really all about honoring the fabulous audience members of our community forever. The Twit army forever. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. Thanks to all of you for joining us. Next it'll. Next time it'll be Easter Sunday. I don't know if we're going to be able to get anybody to show up for that. For that. We'll see. It'll be interesting.

[Robert Balancer]

I think there were some names on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there some names on there?

[Father Robert Balliser]

So we're going to roll the credits. You've got, you've got a full schedule?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. We get a full, full, full.

[Robert Balancer]

You got at least a couple in there.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Next week, we hope you'll be here Sundays, 2 to 5pm as we. We always have been on Sunday. For some reason, I guess it just made sense. 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8pm Eastern time. It's the middle of the gosh darn night. Vatican time, 2100 UTC. We invite you to watch live if you'd like. We are on seven, eight different platforms. If you include Discord for our club members, there's Also TWIT, Twitch TV, YouTube.comx.com TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick 8 different live streams. And if you're chatting with us in the live streams, I see all the different chats. So we love having you, but you don't have to join us live. We, we absolutely have room for you. Anytime that you want to watch, just download a copy of the show from the website Twit TV. There's also a YouTube channel. You can go there at any time and watch the YouTube videos. YouTube.comTWIT all of our shows have a dedicated YouTube channel. And of course, after the fact, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and listen whenever you gosh darn want to, audio or video. I'm going to roll a list of the 389 people who have appeared on this show and say, great having you all. It's been a wonderful 20 years. And as a number of the videos said, yeah, let's go for another 20 more. Why not? We're still having fun, right? Thanks for joining us. As I've said for the last 20 years, another twit is in the can. And now all the people who've made this show possible. Thank you, everybody. Have a great night. Here's to 20 more.

[Sam Aboul Samet]

More.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, everybody. What a pleasure. This was worked out better than I actually thought it would work. It was really fun. Yeah, really was fun because, you know, it was nice. We had a great variety. Some really. There was a lot of different interesting stuff. It worked out very well.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Natalie.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Remember Natalie? Yeah, she. She went off and ran off with Clayton Luria. Remember Callie Lewis? There's so many names on here, right? So many wonderful people. I think this is in the order. Kara Swisher. In the order of the number of times they appeared on the show.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

I think what we got here.

[Father Robert Balliser]

So now if you could find. When we get down to one, like one. The. The one off. Guess.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you when one happens because it'll be up. Adam's five.

[Father Robert Balliser]

That's five, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Emily's five. Lexi, maybe? No, no.

[Robert Balancer]

Are these. These in, like, quasi chronological.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they're in order of the number of appearances. So now we're at one, I believe.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Oh, okay. Sherilyn has only been on once.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think we're on one.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, I didn't see.

[Leo Laporte]

All these people have appeared on one show, and it's a long list.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Has only done one.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, I think you. I think you guys missed me because I've been in three or four.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't see your name.

[Robert Balancer]

Oh, was I. Was I on there?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, You're. You're in here. Okay.

[Father Robert Balliser]

You know, you were on the third episode of TWI.

[Leo Laporte]

Computers Never Make Mistakes was on the.

[Robert Balancer]

Third episode of TWi.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Huh? On the third episode of TWIET.

[Robert Balancer]

Padre Man. You. You. I. I had to, like. I felt like I was not filling large enough shoes every time I was on twat. Because you would just shower me with just way too much phrase.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't. Isn't Padre fantastic?

[Robert Balancer]

It's just like I. I felt like I was like the. The king of freaking everything after.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we have to sell you up. I mean, you are a submariner, a nuclear. A nuclear engineer and an intelligence you used to contract to the nsa. You have some pretty hot damn credentials there, boy.

[Robert Balancer]

I've had. I've had a few careers.

[Leo Laporte]

You've done a few things. You're my S.S. leo.

[Father Robert Balliser]

Leo's thing. He used to tell me that you need to make your guests shine. You have to make them comfortable.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the whole point. Yeah.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to kiss their ass, but you come pretty darn close.

[Father Robert Balliser]

No asking his kissing involved. It was all about letting them express their expertise.

[Robert Balancer]

That was the exact thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Robert Balancer]

I don't want to bring it up there on the show, but, you know, a good thing to reminisce on is the old famous Leo spit take when he learned that I worked at the nsa.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. That was a bit of a shock.

[Robert Balancer]

Yeah, I dropped that on him sitting next to him on Twit. It was just like, what amazing.