This Week in Tech 1062: The Architects of AI

Summary

This Week in Tech 1062: The Architects of AI

Date: December 15, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Ian Thompson, Jason Heiner, Owen Thomas

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the current state and far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence (AI), probing the transformative influence it's having not just on tech, but on global economics, culture, infrastructure, and regulation. The roundtable of seasoned tech journalists discusses the “AI wildfire” sweeping the industry, the sustainability of the boom, power and regulatory struggles, and how AI is seeping into every aspect of society—from hospital wards to holiday sermons.

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Panel Introductions & Changes (00:00–08:38)

• Host: Leo Laporte

• Guests:

  • Ian Thompson: Launching SiliconLimey.com, writing a column for PC Pro, focused on interpreting U.S. tech for the UK audience.

    "Just trying to explain to the Brits what exactly is going on over here, which is doing my head in." (Ian, 01:32)

  • Owen Thomas: Managing Editor at the San Francisco Business Times.
  • Jason Heiner: Newly appointed Editor-in-Chief at The Deep View, a publication specializing in AI analysis and news, with over 600,000 subscribers.

    "The future of media is direct relationships, with more specific audiences." (Jason, 06:19)

• Discussion on the shift toward independent media platforms and news coverage, away from legacy outlets.

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Segment 1: "Time Magazine Person of the Year – The Architects of AI" (08:38–21:29)

• Topic: The selection of “The Architects of AI” as Time’s Person of the Year, reflecting AI’s dominance in 2025 headlines.
• Panel Reactions:
  • Mixed feelings about naming a collective group vs. a single person—seen by some as a “cop out.” (Owen, 10:31)
  • Historical context: Machines, not just people, have been picked before (e.g., “personal computer” in 1982).
  • Panel views on candidates:
    • Jensen Huang (Nvidia) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) considered as more impactful than familiar names playing catch-up (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg).

      "Huang really driving this ‘AI factory’ movement...it’s having a massive impact." (Jason, 15:11)

    • Anthropic’s focus on safe AI and enterprise adoption lauded as influential and profitable.
    • Fei-Fei Li and Demis Hassabis credited for fundamental research.
  • The blurred line between AI architects as visionary leaders and as business drivers.

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Segment 2: "AI Wildfire and Bubble Fears" (21:29–46:44)

• Article Discussed: Dion Lim’s “The AI Wildfire Is Coming”

• Key Points:

  • AI’s resource drain: Data center boom causing spikes in energy and RAM prices. (Framework raising RAM prices 50%.)
  • Comparison to past bubbles: Panelists compare current trends to .com and Bitcoin waves and debate whether an AI “pop” is imminent.

    "Whenever you see stuff like this going on, my instinctive reaction is, yeah, there’s going to be a market correction." (Ian, 31:10)

  • Small models as the future:
    • The boom was built on scaling large models, but a wave of small, task-specific AI is now taking off.

      “The real winners are the small models...they’re more efficient, much cheaper to run.” (Jason, 31:36)

    • Smaller models don’t need latest hardware, proven by Chinese innovation (DeepSeek).
  • Healthcare AI: Real-world examples of doctors and patients using AI (like Open Evidence for medical queries), showing immediate value.
    • AI now outperforms traditional research in diagnostic support when responsibly sourced and used by doctors.

• On Market Correction:

  • Long-term value deemed real, but expect volatility as hype subsides and efficient models scale.
  • Technology’s low cost curve: AI eventually will be “better, cheaper, faster.”

    "A forecast about technology based on current technology is always going to be wrong." (Owen, 41:25)

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Segment 3: AI, Business & Geopolitics (62:53–70:46)

• Tim Wu’s Financial Times Essay: “Could America Win the AI Race but Lose the War?”

  • U.S. vs. China: U.S. spending dwarfs China, but China applies AI more efficiently and invests in batteries, EVs, and manufacturing.
  • Collateral: AI leaders in the U.S. use the China threat for lobbying and government money, but the biggest existential risk to startups is America’s own megacorps.

    "They want the government to back them. They’re using China as the threat." (Leo, 68:31)

  • OpenAI and Anthropic started as bulwarks against big tech, but now depend on out-competing giants directly.

• Regulatory Landscape:

  • Executive orders aim to prevent a patchwork of state laws; companies want a single national framework.
  • Concerns over “regulatory capture” where early movers like Anthropic set industry-friendly standards.

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Segment 4: AI – Cultural Penetration and Social Backlash (51:05–61:49, 83:23–88:12)

• AI in Culture:

  • AI-generated Christmas content: Churches using AI for sermons and nativity scenes—drawing both shock and skepticism.

    "I do expect the vicar to put some work in at the end of the day." (Ian, 51:05)

  • Amazon’s AI-powered video/Kindle recaps: Notorious for mistakes and lack of author control; sparks debate over AI as a surrogate for real creativity.
  • Meta’s Ray Ban glasses used by border patrol, cruise lines banning smart glasses—privacy concerns grow as “surveillance wearables” become mainstream.

• Trust & Adoption:

  • Users more willing to trust Apple or Google over Meta or Amazon for privacy.
  • Anticipation around Google’s upcoming AI glasses—panelists optimistic about the hardware ecosystem for AI-driven wearables.

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Segment 5: Regulation & Societal Experimentation (103:44–111:09)

• Australia’s Social Media Ban for Under-16s:

  • Enforcement challenges: Bans on Snap, Instagram, YouTube, X for teens; reliance on platform-based age verification sees teenagers circumvent via VPNs.
  • Broader implications: Loss of online anonymity; worries about driving youth to less safe, unregulated platforms (e.g., Telegram).

    "We're losing anonymity online, and that's a really big thing to lose." (Ian, 107:16)

• Age Gating & Privacy Risks:

  • All users may face biometric verification to access platforms.
  • Discouragement across the panel that governments can meaningfully enforce these rules.

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Segment 6: U.S. Visa Waiver Scrutiny (112:02–117:48)

• New ESTA restrictions: Visitors may soon be required to provide five years of social media history, even possibly make accounts public.

• Concerns Raised:

  • Privacy and equity: “If you’re brown, you’re in trouble. If you’re white, you’re all right.” (Ian, 116:54)
  • Chilling effect on tourism and the broader message: U.S. is making entry harder for all but discourages the “wrong” people.

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Segment 7: Media Consolidation & Future of Journalism (117:48–126:48)

• Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Netflix takeovers:
  • Massive merger discussions and rumored political meddling (promises to Trump to sway regulation).
  • Consensus: Media consolidation threatens plurality, but due to fractured audiences, the real impact of mergers is softened.
  • Rise of independent journalism bolstered ("Direct relationships, niche audiences"—Jason).
  • Loss of trust in large media institutions; direct engagement and specificity seen as the future.

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Segment 8: Tech & Business Shorts (141:57–150:59)

• App Store Rulings:

  • Court upholds order against Apple’s restrictive app store cut and policies (“malicious compliance” criticized).

    “The Apple tax is dead in the U.S.—the beginning of true untaxed competition and payments worldwide on iOS.” (Tim Sweeney/Leo, 141:58)

  • Japan to ban third-party app-store blocks for Apple/Google imminently.

• Excel’s 40th Birthday:

  • Excel’s enduring dominance; anecdotes about corporate dependence on Excel even in a Google Workspace era.

• Bug Bounties:

  • Microsoft expands bug bounty programs in recognition of the vital defensive role hackers play.

    “Break our code, show us how it's done, and we'll pay you. Because we're not expecting you to do it for free.” (Ian, 152:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The real winners are the small models... they're more efficient, much cheaper to run." (Jason, 31:36)
• "Forecast about technology based on current technology is always going to be wrong." (Owen, 41:25)
• "Whenever you see stuff like this going on, my instinctive reaction is, yeah, there's going to be a market correction." (Ian, 31:10)
• "A cruise line just banned smart glasses... privacy concerns." (Jason, 87:12)
• "We're losing anonymity online, and that's a really big thing to lose." (Ian, 107:16)
• "If you're brown, you're in trouble. If you're white, you're all right. And that's fundamentally stupid." (Ian, 116:54)
• "The Apple tax is dead in the U.S.—the beginning of true untaxed competition and payments worldwide on iOS." (Tim Sweeney/Leo, 141:58)

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Other Quick Hits and Lighter Notes

• SantaCon, cold winters, and local color: Discussion about San Francisco's social fabric, cold snap, and bar crawls (73:21).
• CES Preview: Anticipation for AI hardware and XR ("extended reality") innovations (79:06).
• Right to Repair (Military): Ongoing frustration that the military can’t repair its own gear without contractor involvement (134:42).
• Game Awards: French indie title Expedition 33 sweeps awards (164:29).
• Twitter Trademark Drama: Lawyers contest whether X has abandoned the Twitter name (167:03).

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Topic | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Show & Panel Intro, Media Moves | 00:00–08:38 | | Time "Person of the Year" & AI Architects | 08:38–21:29 | | AI Wildfire: Resource, Bubble, and Social Impact | 21:29–46:44 | | AI & Data Centers: Small Models, Healthcare | 31:10–41:22 | | AI Regulation & Bubbles | 46:44–61:49 | | Geopolitics: US/China, AI Investment | 62:53–70:46 | | AI Wearables, Privacy, and Hardware | 83:23–88:12 | | Social Media Bans, Age Gating Discussions | 103:44–111:09| | U.S. Visa Waiver Scrutiny, Immigration | 112:02–117:48| | Media Consolidation, Journalism Future | 117:48–126:48| | App Store Rulings, Excel at 40, Bug Bounties | 141:57–150:59| | Game Awards & Twitter Trademark | 164:29–170:13|

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Tone & Style

The show is relaxed, spontaneous, and occasionally irreverent, with banter and sidebars. The depth and context provided are incisive and authentic, reflective of veteran journalists steeped in decades of tech history.

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Conclusion

The AI "wildfire" is burning across industries—from tech companies to hospitals, from data centers to Sunday sermons. This era is marked by real innovation, intense hype, looming corrections, and fundamental questions about regulation, business sustainability, privacy, and the future of information. Amidst all, the independent voice and direct audience relationship are now the gold standard, with the traditional monoliths facing a future as uncertain as the AI revolutions they’re chasing.

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[A]

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

[C]

We'll be launching Siliconlimey.com but I've just been building up some freelance stuff in the meantime, just so we've got something to show on the side.

[A]

Yeah, nice. So you're doing well. You got. You got a. You got a little. A little check. So you could take it easy for a while, I hope.

[C]

Oh, well, yeah, but I mean, I've. I'm starting a month column with PC Pro in the uk.

[A]

Oh, awesome.

[C]

A letter from America. Just trying to explain to the Brits what exactly is going on over here, which is doing my head in.

[A]

But you're pulling an Alistair Cook. That's great. I love it.

[C]

Well, yes, although he's originally called Alfred and he changed his name for it for radio purposes, presumably. Alf Cook sounds a little less.

[A]

Alfie's left from America. Yeah, yeah, he was. I was a big fan, of course, Masterpiece Theater host and then. But he did a thing called. I think it was called Letter From America, didn't he?

[C]

It was called Letter from America. He did it until 2004, just before he died. And I'll be recording a podcast on that as well. But the pro column will be running for those of you in the UK who want to understand what exactly is going on over here. And good luck. Exactly.

[A]

Good luck. We don't understand. We're going to try this, what this show's all about. Not just Ian, but Owen is also here. From Thompson to Thomas Owen, longtime friend of the show, managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times, only for Two years. I thought for some reason you'd be there a lot longer. And while Ian is wearing a festive floral shirt you are wearing. It looks like we're at the party is beginning. Is there a party right after the show. Look at that.

[B]

I think I did use this for last year's work holiday party but I can't repeat so I'm going to have to come up with something else.

[A]

Do you have a. Is. Is tonight's work a work holiday party?

[B]

No, it's. It's in a couple days. I just have this jacket literally at the office.

[A]

Yeah. You know, just in case. Just to do any big media hits with CBS or something.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Class in case of emergency.

[C]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

It's from a great company called Opposites. Like opposite.

[A]

Oh, I have a bunch of their stuff I love. I have a. My New Year's Eve suit is from then it's stars and stuff. Yeah.

[B]

Oh my stars and garters star.

[A]

Oh my stars and garters. Oh and it's good to see you. And now ladies and gentlemen for to complete the. What is it? What's a quad? A quadrangle.

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

To compete complete the forces square the circle. To Square the circle. Mr. Jason. Hana. Hello Jason. Wait a minute. Oh, hello. Where's all the. You'd nodded. ZD is eating that anymore?

[D]

That's. That's exactly right. Yeah. The beginning of this month I December 1st, I ended my time at ZDNet.

[A]

How long were you there?

[D]

I. So this is crazy but it actually I was with a company the company essentially for 24 years from I started Tech Republic because I started Czech Republic. And by the way when I started Tech Republic they were losing $2 million a month. So I didn't know how long it would last. I just knew I'd learn a lot and I thought well you know, I'll learn a lot and I'll have to get another job. Right. Not in a year or two. And then they got bought by cnet. CNET got bought by cbs. CBS got bought by cbs, sold our brands to. To Red Ventures. Red Ventures sold ZDNet and CNET to. To Ziff Davis. And in that whole line essentially my start date was still the beginning my first day, you know at tech public. So it lasted a lot longer than I thought. I mean I had of different jobs in that. In that time but ended up at.

[A]

The top editor in chief of ZDNet. Right.

[D]

Yeah. So ZDNet. I. I ran ZDNet for four years. Loved it. Had an amazing team, we reimagined ZDNet for the next decade. And in 2022, when I came back, we did the biggest, you know, boldest redesign in the history, changed the mission, you know, re. Reimagine the team and. Yeah, but you know, all good things come to an end and it was time I had this opportunity to. I met a founder that I really was impressed with and you know, I realized that I wanted to go. I didn't, I wasn't looking to leave. But when I talked to this founder of the Deep View, which was an amazing publication that has grown, it's only around, been around for two and a half years.

[A]

Yeah, it's new to me. I, I'm glad to learn about this.

[D]

Yeah, they, they've created a newsletter. It's over, you know, 600,000 subscribers. It really focuses on the, the AI space primarily.

[A]

Wait a minute, 600,000?

[D]

Yes, 600,000 subscribers.

[A]

Huge.

[D]

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

[A]

Yes.

[D]

With more specific audiences.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

I was working on ZDNet and this gave me a chance and also I've been working on, I've been covering AI for over a decade, since 2013. And I wanted to do two things. One, I wanted to, this was the opportunity to go much deeper on that thesis and then it was also an opportunity to go much deeper on AI because I think there are a lot of big questions about AI that we're going to have to, you know, grapple with over the next few years. And then when there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of hype, there's a lot of uncertainty and disruption and where there's all of those things, there's amazing work for us to do as journalists. Right. When, when there's a lot of confusion and disruption out there. So I, I took that on as a mission and said, you know what, I would love to spend all my time thinking about that every day and building a team to.

[A]

Nice. So how much does this cost to subscribe to free? What?

[D]

Yep, it's free to subscribe.

[B]

What?

[D]

Yeah, but it is, look, they have a, they have a really good business model. It's, it's, it's bootstrapped. It's not, it's founder, you know, funded, it's self funded essentially by the, by, by the money that the business has made, you know, it's been profitable from the very beginning. So it's. It's a. It's a great.

[A]

So it's ad supported or. Or. No, it is.

[D]

Yeah. So there. There are ads in the newsletter, but much more, I think ads that are. That are more organic and more. And less, you know, Times Square.

[A]

I'm signing up for all the newsletters, so I hope you don't mind.

[D]

Amazing.

[A]

Look at this.

[D]

Amazing. Thank you.

[A]

You even have a newsletter about AI in the movies, which is very interesting.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. To be.

[A]

All right. Signing up. Oh, is this. Is this like a week or PC week? While I have to qualify?

[D]

No, no, you do not have to qualify. Everybody that's interested in. Look at.

[A]

It's doing something. Your AI readiness score is a mere 32%.

[D]

Can help you with that for sure. I'm sure it's higher than that, Leo. Like, you probably answered some of the questions pretty quickly.

[C]

What.

[A]

I believe I'm readier than that. Anyway, congratulations, Jason. That's really good news. So we got two people who have moved to independent. I've moved to Independent 20 years ago.

[D]

Years and years. Yes.

[A]

Yeah. And I'm a big believer in what you're doing and what. What we're doing. I think it's really. It's the future of media, isn't it? These big media.

[D]

You inspired me and other people that I've been on this podcast with, you know, Ian, you know, inspiring. Inspiring me to think differently.

[A]

Well, increasingly, our guests on the show are independents. More and more. You know, when we started, it was all people working for PC magazine and stuff like that, Tech Republic. And now it's more and more just people who have a newsletter or have their own thing. All right, let's talk about the news. And since you're an AI expert, Jason, I expect you to weigh in. Time magazine's Person of the Year. By the way, a lot of people on the. On the betting markets said that AI would be the Person of the Year. You could go to those, you know, Poly Market and the other, you know, what do they call those? The. The.

[D]

Yeah, Prediction markets.

[A]

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

[D]

Yep.

[A]

Polymarket saying, no, it's not AI, it's the AI architects.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, so if I can jump in as someone who has actually worked on the Person of the Year during my stint at Time magazine.

[A]

Ah, well, you know how this works then.

[C]

Total.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, how. How is that an editorial? How is that an editorial decision? How is that an editorial?

[A]

Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of amd. Was it Lisa Su. Is that her name? Elon Musk.

[D]

That's right, yeah.

[A]

Jensen Huang. Sam Altman. That's a. Demis Hasibas. Demis Hasibas, yep. Who is the. Who are these last two? I don't know if I.

[B]

Looks like Dario.

[A]

Yeah, Dario of Anthropic.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And who's the last woman? I don't know who she is. She's barely got on the COVID She's fallen off the girder.

[D]

Fei Fei Li. Who's the.

[A]

Oh, Fei Fei Li, of course.

[D]

Stanford. Yeah.

[A]

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

[C]

I think she's down right on that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

World models are the thing, she says.

[A]

Well, I would, I would say no one would deny that AI was the. For us anyway, the big story of the year. We even took one of our flagship shows this week in Google and made it an AI show in February. The intelligent machines. Because it's clearly the. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but the most important and exciting thing that's happened in technology since the PC.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, but what this reminds me of is in 1982, Time magazine was all set to make Steve Jobs Person of the Year, man of the Year at the time. And instead they made the personal computer machine of the year. Right again, total cop out.

[A]

Pissed people off a little bit, I remember.

[B]

Yeah. I think frankly, they thought that Steve Jobs character was a little too flawed to get the.

[C]

Which is kind of ironic considering that Time magazine made Adolf Hitler their personal Year in the.

[B]

I was about to say.

[C]

I was about to say.

[A]

It doesn't mean the best person of the year, it just means most influential.

[B]

And that's important. It is not an honor. It is not an award. That's something people inside Time talk about a lot and try to explain to the outside world. But it's kind of a hard thing to grasp because you're on the COVID you're Person of the Year. It feels like an honor, but. But it is fundamentally not, or it's not intended as such.

[A]

First. It started almost 100 years ago in 1927 with Charles Lindbergh was the first. Yeah.

[B]

Hardly a. Hardly an upstanding.

[A]

Yeah. As it turned out. Yeah. Once we learned. Yeah. Trump has been Person of the Year last year and in 2016, twice. Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton. President's, you know, pretty often get in there.

[C]

Stalin. The Russians. Yeah.

[A]

Stalin, Hitler, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Andropov.

[C]

Did Mao Zedong make it in there?

[A]

But Deng Xiaoping did, but not Mao Zedong.

[B]

And Steve Jobs actually never got Person of the Year.

[A]

I think that's unfortunate.

[C]

God, that's got to have rankled with him so badly.

[A]

Yeah. Queen Elizabeth in 1952, Winston Churchill in 1940, and that was it. It's over now.

[D]

So on this. Sorry, go ahead.

[B]

No, well, yeah, I'll throw it out to the panel, though. Who would you have picked among these?

[D]

Yeah, I think it should have been either Jensen Huang or Dario Amadi, a lot of the others, because they were the ones that were driving a lot of this forward in different ways. One Jensen really driving a lot of this, like, AI factories movement, you know, forward, which is where. Which is depending on who you talk to. Right. Like the thing that's going to power, you know, the next generation. Or it's like this massive pyramid scheme that's going to collapse and destroy a lot of value. But you can't argue. Yeah, you can't argue that it's having a massive impact even in certain industries. There are airports that can't get built fast enough because all the construction workers are building. So many construction workers are building, you know, AI factories.

[A]

Yeah. That's one of the stories this week, is that all the people who really know what they're doing are building factories.

[D]

Yes, yes.

[A]

And not infrastructure.

[D]

Could be a fool's errand. And we can talk. I would love for us to dig into that.

[A]

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

[D]

A lot of them are backwards, though. Lisa. So Lisa, Sue's trying to keep up with Jensen, you know, largely and is taking the, the leftover demand that's falling off of Nvidia. It's a great business taking over leftover demand that Nvidia can't sell. But, you know, Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, even, they're, you know, they've spent a lot of the year playing from behind. Right. Like, the GPT5 for OpenAI was really brutal. You know, they, they had been used to. Every time they came out with a new model, it pushed the industry forward. This one really didn't. It was mostly about them in one sense or another, saving money. Also, it showed that they lost their two leading tech, you know, leaders, which were Mira Moradi and Ilya Sutskever. And it showed when they released that model, like it was not up to snuff. And then you saw Google come along and do Gemini 3. And there we got. It was like they switched fortunes. Right. Like, usually when Google released a model in the past, we go, oh, sorry, it's just not so good.

[A]

Elmer Glue. Elmer's Glue on pizza. Really. Google.

[D]

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

[A]

He's one of the actual architects in this.

[D]

This is true.

[C]

Yeah, exactly.

[D]

Actually, architects, you know, things. But so I think if you're, if you're going to make a really going to make a decision and say, hey, we've got to pick a person. You know, I think you have to think, well, I didn't, I didn't mention Dario. But, you know, the thing about Dario and what Anthropic has done is like they have had this strategy that I'm surprised it worked, but it's worked where they're saying, well, we're going to be, we're going to do two things. We're going to be the safe model and we're going to put out standards on the ways that our things are built. And when we put them out, you know, others are going to follow and they'll have to do it and I don't know, I was skeptical of that, I'll be honest. Like, will they really? But it did come to pass, like when they put out like they're essentially constitutional AI thing, all the others quickly were like, oh yeah, the same week or whatever they came out, they're like, yeah, we're doing, we've done the same that, we've checked that box too. So I think that's been influential. And then the other thing is, you know, he's not doing sort of the crazy data center build out strategy. Instead they are making huge investments in the enterprise and are selling to companies and because of that they keep 10xing their business every year. They went from two years ago, they went from 100,000 to 100, sorry, 100 million to a billion. This year they're going to go from, you know, a billion to 10 billion. It's pretty, it's pretty nuts to be able to reach that scale and to keep 10x scene. But they're, but they're doing it and it's, they are going to be profitable within a couple of years. Whereas, you know, OpenAI is sort of playing the Amazon game. We're just going to scale to infinity and we're going to put profitability off for a decade or something. You know, that's what Amazon did and they did it very successfully. But they're one of the only companies in history that's ever, you know, really done that successfully. So we'll see. But I think you have to, if you're going to pick, I would say to Owen's question, I would say you have to. Jensen, Dario, maybe Demis. But I think it's still pretty late in the year that they came and showed that they are ready for, ready to compete with the others.

[A]

Faye Fei Li, also an architect, both Demis and fundamental actual work in the field. The rest of them are either leaders or money raisers. They're business people for the most part. It's weird. The picture of Mark Zuckerberg is the most animated I've ever seen him. So he's like smiling.

[C]

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

[A]

But this is not the Mark Zuckerberg I know. I just gotta say, and I don't know what Elon's doing. It looks like he's holding Lisa sue from falling off the girder. Of all of them, the only one who has a computer. Is Sam Altman trying to raise money for other projects? Probably Demise is on the phone. It's a very strange. This is a painting. It's a very strange painting. It's, of course, a takeoff on a very famous picture of a construction worker sitting on a girder over New York City with their lunch boxes. Okay. I think you're right, Owen. I think the. Have you, have you actually been in the room during the conversations for these?

[B]

I, you know, I was a very junior editor, to be clear. But yes, I was in conversations.

[A]

Would always mock these lists because he was in the room often with PC magazine and other places. And he said it's all, it's all, it's all marketing. It's all, it's all to sell copies of magazines has nothing to do with news and any real way. And I think you'd probably agree with that on.

[B]

Well, yeah, except that, that, you know, new sense sales. Except maybe at airports aren't really.

[A]

I guess you're right. It doesn't matter anymore.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, here we are talking about it. So.

[B]

Absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, the COVID of a print publication in this day and age is a, is a, well, it's a conversation starter. It's a. Like, it can, it can make a statement about a story in a way that, you know, just a headline and a URL can't. And I think it's, you know. Yeah, I think it's clever. I mean, you know, certainly, certainly time knows that Person of the Year is always going to get talked about.

[A]

Maybe next year it'll be the AI crash will be the Person of the Year. Let's take a break and let's talk about that. This is a piece from Dion Lim, CEO, Dinner Insights. The air wildfire is coming. It's going to be very painful and incredibly healthy. This is. I've seen a lot of takes saying it's just a bubble and it's going to burst and the stock market's going to crash and it's going to be a mess. I've also seen a lot of takes saying AI uses obscene amounts of water and energy, some of which is not as strictly accurate. I've also seen, as you just mentioned, Jason, people saying, you know, this AI network center boom, data center boom is, is going to kill us in other ways. And certainly power costs have gone up. I can't believe my electricity bill. Not that I blame AI for it. I blame Pacific Gas and Electric for it.

[C]

Don't we all, mate? Don't we All.

[A]

And then there's the issue of nuclear power plants coming online. Energy and ram. So there are all these consequences. RAM Prices Framework just announced they're going to raise their ram prices 50%. There's a local computer store in San Francisco, Central Computer, which I used to hang out at all the time. I did a video for them 30 days ago. I love them a lot on how to build a PC. Great place. They have a sign in the window saying from now on RAM is Prices change daily. It's market price. Like on a menu for lobster. It's market price. We don't know what it's going to be.

[D]

Can you imagine like gas just have like a thing instead of ram, you know?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean ironically, the last time that happened at Central Computer, among. Among others. But that I was at the Chronicle and that was the place we went to for, you know, the.

[A]

Yeah, it's just the local. Ms. Angle.

[B]

It was bitcoin mining.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

It was still GPUs, it was still Nvidia before the AI boom. So these kind of trend driven shortages, we've definitely seen them before. But this is definitely at an extreme global level where it's becoming geostrategic and inflaming relations between countries.

[A]

Well, let's talk about it in just a bit. We're going to take a little break with Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. Jason Heiner from his brand new publication, the Deep View. Editor in chief. I'm gonna. Do you have an R? You have RSS fees? I'm gonna add it to my Daily News beat check. There's some great stuff on here. I'm thrilled. Very good. They need you, Jason. They need somebody with your gravitas. And soon to be part of his letter. It's a letter to America from. From Ian Thompson, soon to be the Silicon Light.

[C]

Well, someone's got to explain the rebellious colonials to the rest of the empire. So.

[A]

Yes. Have you watched. I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary on the revolution. Have you been watching. I haven't.

[C]

Very good though.

[A]

Oh yeah, it's really good. It's really good.

[C]

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

[A]

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

[C]

It's a very lovely place. I've been here 15 years, so, you know, it kind of grows on you.

[A]

It's history that they didn't teach you in the history books, that's for sure.

[D]

He was in parliament and argued for the Americans in parliament before, you know, becoming the general that was sent to smite the Americans.

[A]

It's wild stories. Yeah. All right, we're take a break. We'll come back with more on this week in tech. We're so glad you're here in the holiday season celebrating our holiday spirit. I haven't really decorated the place. I did shrink my Mac, though. It's a little smaller than it used to be. Actually, Burke has. Has taken it because I. I had a. I have the original Mac back here, as you may remember. And it started smoking.

[D]

Oh, dear.

[A]

And I decided maybe I should unplug this and give it to Burke and see what he can do with it. So I have a little mini Mac in its place. But maybe Burke's not making any promises. Maybe he can fix it. And while you're at it, Burke, would you put another 128 kilobytes of ram in there? That would be great. Our show today, brought to you by Shopify. I have an actual soft spot for Shopify. I'll tell you about that in a second. Imagine you're lying in bed late at night. You're scrolling through, I don't know, a new site you found or social network, and you found something you really want. And you hit the add to cart button on that item you've been looking for. And you're in bed. You're ready to check out, but you're in bed. You're in your jammies, and you remember your wallet's in the living room downstairs, and you don't want to get up and go get your credit card. Just as you're ready to abandon your cart. Bam, bam, boom. You see it. The purple shop button. Don't need the wallet. If you've shopped online, chances are you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. And that purple shop pay button you see at checkout makes buying so incredibly easy. There's a reason so many businesses sell with it, because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. Oh, I hear that sound already. We made another sale. The story, of course, is that my son Salt Hank, TikTok superstar famous for his sandwiches. He's got a sandwich shop in New York City. He's got an Instagram and TikTok with millions of followers. He when he first started he wanted to start a start selling salts named Salt Hank. What did he do? He went to Shopify. Shopify created the site. He's still using Shopify for his e commerce. It's my daughter, same thing. She's selling T shirts and jerseys and books and it's through Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform not just behind my kids but behind 10% of all the e commerce in the United States. Household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started like Salt Hank. Shopify gives you that leg up from day dot with hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates to express your brand style and forget about the code. Tackle all those important tasks in one place from inventory to payments to analytics and more. Spread your brand's word with built in marketing and email tools to find and keep new customers. And did I mention that iconic shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world? It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. Your customers already know it, they already love it. So if you want to see fewer carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today. Shopify.com TWIT Go to shopify.com shopify.com twitch we love them. Thank you Shopify on behalf of my family and dad not having to open his wallet whether I'm in bed or at any other time. Thank you Shopify. So this is the premise and I'm hearing this more and more. I think even Jeff Bezos said this AI won't crash. It will burn like every tech cycle. The fire will clear the brush, redistribute talent and leave infrastructure to power. What comes next? I think that's a fair assessment. There's for. You know when I keep hearing about this, oh, it's a bubble, it's going to crash. I keep reminding myself, I keep saying in fact out loud. But there's such value in it and we've seen the value. And I use AI every single day all the time for all sorts of things. Now Ian, sounds like you're an AI gloomer, not doomer necessarily. Are you a gloomer? Oh, you're muted gloomer. You're talking and nothing's coming out.

[C]

There we go. Sorry, new Microphone.

[A]

I know, it sounds good though. People already picked up on that in the chat room, said, oh, he's got a new microphone. Microphone.

[C]

They pay close attention. Yeah, no, exactly. I've had carefully hidden the brand name, but you can probably guess.

[A]

We saw it.

[C]

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

[A]

Yeah. Jason, what do you think?

[D]

So the interesting thing, so I did a story on the Deep View, literally my first story, it was an exclusive with a CEO of Neurometric AI and they released this leaderboard of thinking models. Thinking models are, you know, the models sort of on top of the thinking algorithms, I should say. So it's down there in the startups area. Yeah, the first one on the left.

[A]

Oh.

[D]

So these are mostly open source models in this, in this algorithm. But what the real winners are in this, and this gets to this question, the real winners are the small models. So it's not so much that there's this thesis that's been powering the AI boom and that's been powering this data center, you know, build out, which is that these big models needed to kind of solve everything and they're very power hungry and they need to, you know, we need to build capacity because if we keep scaling the way we are now with more people using these things, because what happens is it's not only, only like 10 to 15% of people have even have started using AI on the planet. Right. So you can, you can guess like these other booms, like phones and the Internet, it's going to really grow over the coming years. But also as people use them, they use them more. So all of this, this Boom is built on this idea that we need to run everything on these big models and the big models require the latest hardware. Well, that. In the last half of 2025, that argument has started to fall apart. What's happening now is when companies use smaller models, they can. They are more efficient, meaning they're faster and they're a lot cheaper to run when they're. Yeah. Move smaller models that are more specific for running, you know, specific workloads that you have. If your company needs AI to do, you know, X. Right. To run a data. A data model, if they need people to help create, you know, CRM applications or those kinds of things. So what that means is that a lot of the workloads for that we're going to be growing over the coming years are going to run on these smaller models. In these smaller models, they don't need the latest hardware. Like you can run it on a generation of hardware.

[A]

Don't you need it to train it? No, first, not even that.

[D]

This is just inference, not training. So inference is just when somebody does a search or uses generative AI to do something, to do a task, like.

[A]

Perplexity or Kagi Assistant, all of these orchestrators, which actually aren't AI models, they're doing searches and then apply AI to the results.

[D]

That's inference. Right, That's. That's using you, me, all of us using AI to do something. That's sort of. The, the sort of. The search and inference training is when you use. To train the better models for the models to get better and smarter over time. That's what. Only essentially, that's what really. The models. Yeah, that's what they're doing. The frontier model companies. So the frontier model companies need that latest hardware. They need the latest in video stuff. The other models don't. They can run on hardware that's four or five generations behind, potentially.

[A]

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

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

There's also. We've talked to a number of people on intelligent Machines who are creating small models, little models for as you say, purpose built, specific, specific stuff. There's a company that is doing it, they call it Chat GPT for doctors. It's called Open Evidence. They are one of the latest unicorns. They just went to a 12 billion dollar valuation. Why? Because they're making money. Part of the way they make money though is they sell ads to pharma companies, pharmaceutical companies. Yeah, yeah, but, but doc. But what, what? The point is that doctors are using this and I think my doctor, I think many doctors have been using AI for a while. There's a sign in my doctor's examining room that says, just so you know, I'm using AI to transcribe our conversation so I can pay attention to you instead of sitting at the keyboard typing. But don't worry, we throw it away as soon as it's transcribed it, we don't keep the recording.

[C]

Okay, I imagine you would statements on that part.

[A]

I imagine a lot of doctors are doing what a lot of us do. If I have a health concern or problem, I immediately do an AI search. And I've often got a lot of. Now you have to be careful obviously because as we know, AI isn't always right, but it's often very useful and especially in that inference vein where it's, it's combining inform real information from the web into a synthesis that's of real use.

[D]

I have two friends this year that both were diagnosed with that they had, they had essentially a growth, right? Yeah, potentially tumorous growth.

[A]

They're worried about cancer.

[D]

Yeah, they were, they were worried about it. They went in, they got the test done, they sort of could see their test results unreadable by a human being. Right. But then they had appointments that were like three or four weeks later and.

[A]

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

[D]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

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

[A]

I've talked. A good friend is a physician who's very bullish on AI and he said, you know, the hardest thing being a doctor is the diagnostic part because there's you a lot to remember. Right. And you're afraid of missing something. He said, the most important part of what I do as a doctor is relating to the patient, explaining to the patient, hearing what the patient has to say and that. And AI does not do well. I do that. But the AI can be very helpful in the diagnostic arena because it has. So this company, Open Evidence is, they say, accurate. It's not aimed at consumers, it's only aimed at doctors because it's based on medical journals. They licensed the New England Journal of Medicine and many others. So it's basically synthesizing peer reviewed studies to answer medical questions. That's what a doctor would try to do. A doctor go home with a stack of JAMA and AMA and so forth and try to read all this stuff. But AI does it better, faster and more accurately than the doctor's memory. I think that makes sense. Sense. You don't want to replace the doctor, but in partnership with a physician, I think this is a very good idea.

[D]

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

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

So how do we solve this? Because we do. Maybe the solution is, as you said, Jason, is small models that are less expensive and more purpose built.

[D]

Well, and they're going to soak up a lot. So go ahead.

[B]

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

[C]

Right.

[B]

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

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

Better, cheaper, fast. But you know, we're not just as, like, we're not all working as switchboard operators. I don't think we're, you know, I don't think this forecast of, you know, we're, we're going to burn the planet down with our, with our data centers is, you know, it's not just Alarmist. It's ignorant of the way technology works.

[C]

Also on the power front, I have to say this has given a welcome fillip to nuclear power because for decades it sat on the sidelines.

[A]

Welcome for some. I'm not sure it's universally agreed that we want to, we want to go go nuclear.

[C]

Well no, small mod small modular reactors are looking very good at the moment. There's some very interesting fission ideas coming through and the fact is the U. S Power grid can't handle this. Chinese one probably can but the US can't at the moment because they've got a whole lot decades of under investment.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And by the way streaming still uses more data center capacity.

[A]

Exactly. Than what we're doing right now is worse than AI.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But you know like no one, no one complains about that because we all, we all take it for granted.

[A]

Absorbed that we need our Netflix. Right.

[D]

Right.

[A]

Right.

[C]

We are planetary traitors.

[A]

Right? Yeah right. Yeah I, I think yeah.

[D]

So there's probably not a bubble with a capital B but there are bubbles I think you know when they're. The thing that, the thing that makes me less concerned about a bubble with a capital B is that when people are running around saying that there's a bubble there's usually not a bubble. Bubbles usually sneak up on you where it's just like everything's up into the right. Right. Like during the there while there were a few doom sayers during the dot com bust mostly people were like this is the future and it's happening and we need it and it's going to keep going up and up and up. Same thing with the mortgage thing is like giving everybody the ability to, to afford get affordable housing is an amazing thing and it's just all up and to the right. We're just going to everybody we're going to get more and more people into houses and we sort of ignored some of the underlying. Most people ignored the underlying unhealthy parts of it. So I, well I think that there are some bubbles we sort of are generate. The past few generations have been burned by these things and so we're really conscious of the fact that when things start really cooking that it could be a bubble. I think that some of the valuations do look bubbly but some of them aren't even close to where we were during some of the dot com like insane valuation. So yeah there is a lot of.

[A]

You know, go ahead on.

[B]

Oh there is a lot of financial engineering happening. Like look at the Disney open AI deal like so open a is going to pay Disney for, to license its characters for Sora. Yeah, but Disney is investing a billion dollars in OpenAI. So OpenAI can pay, you know, can pay Disney, you know, and there's a.

[A]

Lot of those circular deals. Nvidia, Microsoft, Jensen Huang giving money to somebody to buy chips from Jensen Huang and so forth.

[C]

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

[B]

That's what, that's what killed a lot of, you know, that was a big contributor to the 99.com bubble and the subsequent 2000 shorts. Well, the shorts gave up because the shorts, the shorts had their shorts handed to them.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, and like, it's a good.

[C]

Phrase, I'm stealing that.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

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

[A]

You know, but that's a financial crisis as opposed to a real problem underlying the.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, technology. You know, the thing is if, if the infrastructure, like if these companies get washed out financially, the infrastructure still exists, someone can come along and take advantage.

[A]

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

[C]

I was gonna say you almost said a law there and I'm sorry, he's not King yet, Yo.

[A]

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

[C]

Oh, Gavin got the memo based on this one, you know.

[A]

Yeah, we got the memo. But California, Illinois.

[C]

Well, and this came in just before Texas was about to. Texas do its own specific law on this as well. And I think the states are really angry about. It's just like, hang on, states rights. You've been banging the states rights drums for the last 20 years, and now it's just like Daddy knows Best.

[A]

Even Steve Bannon says this is terrible and says David Sacks is completely misleading Trump. He's got his ear. He's whispering in his ear.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

But, you know, it's getting pretty vicious too, because anthropic as the safe AI, the pro regulation API, they want regulation. Yeah. They're getting beaten up by Sachs, among others, as seeking, quote, unquote, regulatory capture. That's where a company gets essentially a regulatory regime that's friendly to the way they do business or maybe pulls the.

[A]

Ladder up behind him, in effect.

[B]

Yeah, but that's exactly what David sacks did at PayPal.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So he knows this playbook very well. That's ironic to me.

[A]

Here's one of the interesting ways AI is entering our culture. This is from Axios. It's beginning to look a lot Like AI Christmas, churches across the US and abroad are experimenting with AI generated Christmas content. AI generated nativity visuals, kids lessons, sermons. AI tools are becoming more and more a part of using.

[C]

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

[A]

But it's every week, Ian. Every week, week in, week out. How many times can you say be nice? So I've actually talked to do a lot. Yeah, no, I agree. This is exactly the antithesis of what you want AI to do. Let's give you a sermon on a Sunday. Here's an article, 5 Ways to Use AI for Christmas at your church. This is from the Church Communications Group. The most wonderful time of the year is fast approaching and churches all around the world are gearing up to celebrate the birth of our Savior. Well, come along to 5 Creative Ways to Use AI for Christmas at your church.

[C]

I'm sorry, but why not personalized Christmas greetings? They're not personalized if you're using a computer to write them. You know, personalized is. Thank you so much for seeing me at such and such a point. I really like you. Blah, blah, blah, just like feed it into an AI engine. That's not personal enough. AI gets my goat about this.

[A]

How about AI powered nativity storytelling? Well, virtual Christmas concerts. Why write music? Why even hire a band when Suno can do it so well? And they even have links to all the different AIs to try.

[C]

Hi, this is Benito. At least it didn't make sense to problems that don't exist.

[A]

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

[C]

I was gonna bring that up because yes, that's absolutely insulting.

[A]

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

[C]

But I mean, the Kindle thing really got my goat because they're basically saying, well, you can ask you questions about the book, no spoilers, but do the authors have any say in this whatsoever?

[A]

In fact, Amazon has told the authors, you cannot turn this off.

[C]

Yeah. Which is, quite frankly, for the person that's creating all this content, massively insulting and also potentially damaging to their own personal. Quite frankly, ridiculous.

[A]

I don't know. I like it. I mean, you know.

[C]

Yeah, but then having someone else explain it to them in using hallucinations or, sorry, what we used to call mistakes, you know.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

These things do. You know, you find the hallucinations pretty, pretty quickly in many cases, or the worst part is if you're unaware of the hallucin hallucinations. But the thing that's interesting right now is you start to, you know, the more you use these things, the more you start to realize what kinds of prompts are. Are very open to hallucination and what things you can. The ways you can prompt it to make sure it sort of sticks to its knitting a little better. I think that's likely to improve over time. But we still, we still are in a world where, you know, these. Gemini 3 is really good. For example, Gemini 3 is super, super good. I have a prompt that I use every time there's a new model that gets almost every one of them to hallucinate. And Gemini 3, as good as it was on the first day, it was closer, but I still was able. It hallucinated completely made up something completely ridiculous in this one. Leo will appreciate this one, because in a book that I wrote 10 years ago, before a lot of this was not all online, you know, It's. I featured 10 people. This was. It's called Follow the Geeks. It was really anticipating the influencer revolution because it was showing people that went independent and were incredibly successful doing it. Leo was one of them. And the thing is, is on the Internet, you. The book is not no longer in print and it was self published. Thank you, Leo. And and so because of that, it's a great way that I can test the LLMs. I can say, tell me, give me a summary of all 10 people who were in the book. Because it's not out there very readily on the Internet.

[A]

But, you know, this was absorbed, right? You think this was absorbed by the AI or.

[D]

No, you would think it was, but somewhere between. They usually get 7 to 9 of the people, right? And they'll hallucinate, they'll bring in other people that kind of were related to people. Leo is almost always in there and usually the first one, because we've talked about it on the show, like it's been mentioned by many people. But a lot of the other ones get left off every time it brings in people who weren't in the book but were kind of like similar to some of the people who were. And in The Gemini example, Gemini 3 example, it completely made up the name of somebody and made a bio for them and talked about the fact that I, you know, was, you know, enjoyed talking to them very regularly. Made up a whole Persona for this person that does not exist, was not in the book, and as far as I can tell, is not a real person. So you sort of start to learn. I think one of those things that is going to be interesting as we get back, get used to using these things more, you know, we start to learn the questions that are good to ask and the parameters we can give to it and then the things that, you know, it's likely to. To hallucinate around.

[A]

Yeah, that's. Boy, that's. You've got an interest now. You know that the. I got the mail from the lawyers in the Anthropic settlement. Anthropics agreed to pay 1.5.

[C]

Oh, you're making money on this?

[A]

Well, I'm conflicted. Anthropics agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors. Might end up being as much as $3,000 a book whose books were ingested by a pirate book database. Very large one that was by the way, used for training by pretty much everyone as far as we could see. Certainly Meta used it. Anthropic got caught. They had used a variety of other sources though, and the judge was Interesting. We talked about this when it happened. The judge ruled that when they bought the book, even though they bought the book from a used bookstore, that that was fair use for them to ingest that with the AI. But ingesting the pirated books was not. So authors with books in that database are owed compensation from this $1.5 billion fund. So I got the mail this week. I haven't. I'm not. I don't want to be tempted. I haven't actually looked it up. I'm sure I have 13 books. I'm sure more than a few of them are in there. Gosh, $3,000 times 13. That adds up. I could buy a nice lunch with that. I think the lawyers get a good chunk of that. Plus I'd have to pay my co authors and my publisher and probably wouldn't end up being much. But I feel in a way I'm conflicted. I don't want to take the money because I feel like, well, no, I'm happy to. For instance, all of our shows, hundreds of thousands of hours of content are freely available for AI to ingest their Creative Commons. I don't care. I want them to. I want AI to be better. Yeah. So I'm conflicted about taking the money. Everybody's saying take the money. Jeff Jarvis said, give it to charity if you feel so bad, but take the money. It's going somewhere. I'll donate it to Creative. Comments. You're right.

[C]

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

[A]

Let's take a little break. We'll have more in just a little bit. You're watching this week in Tech. So glad you're here along with Ian Thompson, Owen Thomas. That's confusing the the Thompsons and the Thomases and of course, Jason Heiner. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. There's a name you ought to know. Every business these days is asking the same question. How do we make AI work for us? Right. The possibilities are endless. Guessing is, I think, too risky. But sitting on the sidelines, well, that's not really an option. Because one thing is almost certain, your competitors are already making their movement. Well, no more waiting. With NetSuite by Oracle, you could put AI to work. Today, NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It's a unified suite that brings it all together in one place. Your financials, your inventory, your commerce, hr, CRM. And because it's all in one place, it's a single source of truth. And that connected data is then what makes your AI smarter. Your NetSuite AI smarter. So it doesn't just guess, it knows. Intelligently automates routine tasks, delivers actionable insights, helps you cut costs and make fast AI powered decisions with confidence. This isn't another bolted on tool. It's AI built into the system that runs your business. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com TWiT the guide is free to you at netsuite.com TWIT netsuite.com TWiIT we thank him so much for supporting this Week in tech. Actually, you know, I'm thinking almost all of our ads now are for AI companies of some kind. So if it is a, a, if it is a bubble, I'm in trouble. That's probably true for all of you, right? I mean, AI is, is driving our economy these days.

[C]

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

[A]

Jason's new publications.

[C]

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

[A]

Well, I, I for one am on the AI side. Now here's a piece from Tim Wu, the weekly weekend essay in the Financial Times this weekend. Could America win the AI race but lose the war? As we've just been saying, the US has gone all in on artificial intelligence. But the idea of an end of times battle with China over tomorrow's key technology is part delusion, part lobbying tool for Silicon Valley. You know what, this is from time immemorial. We've had the other Being the threat, right. And we gotta put all our money into something because of the other, whether it's a space race or computers or now AI. US companies, Wu says, over the past year have spent $350 billion on AI infrastructure with projections of over 400 billion for next year. Four times what China is spending. These are estimates, but still.

[C]

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

[A]

Interesting is that AI leaders in the US are using China as a straw man to get more investment, to get more government support. He says China is somewhat less committed to AI than it's portrayed to be. While it is a strategic priority, the state and its major companies are spending much more money to secure dominance in other domains. Electric vehicles. China's clearly number one in EVs technology wise. Right? And it's one of the reasons you can't buy one in the US because our car companies are terrified of them. Batteries, robotics, solar panels, wind turbines, advanced manufacturing. Wu says these sectors may be less glamorous, but their returns are far less speculative than AI. China is very happy to spend.

[D]

Reality. The reality is that, you know, the US and China are making each other better in AI. Like it is not a zero sum game where one wins and one loses. One of the really interesting thing is things is in the sort of 2015-2018, 2020 era when deep learning and you know, the sort of the proto generative AI stuff was happening. China was graduating something like 8 to 10 engineers focused on this stuff to the U.S. right? And, and there was this narrative and granted it was in the sort of the high tech space and not sort of part of the larger narrative that it is that AI is now. But the narrative was like this is going to be next and China is gonna, is gonna crush us because they are, is gonna crush the US because they are graduating so many more engineers, so many more scientists, and they are way ahead. And what happened was all of the, the generative AI, the technology that is driving it, was mostly invented in the US in Silicon Valley and to almost everybody's surprise, including China's. Now, now, now that that's happened, you know, China is getting really efficient with the models, you know, Deep Seq and Quinn, like they are able to train them on a lot less compute. They're on much cheaper technology, much cheaper hardware and that's causing all of these other US companies to really again put a, you know, put a pin in this idea that oh, it's the larger models trained on the latest hardware that's going to all of the innovation and everything else downstream is not where a lot of the great stuff is going to happen. When in fact like that's what I said the second half of 2025 we started that, that started to fall apart. We started to see that these smaller models on more specifically trained for certain tasks are actually much cheaper and much lower power and much more performant. So you know, that's only because in one sense in the first half of the year especially Deep Seq made this, this big breakthrough. So I think they only competition is always good. They make each other better, they have different strengths and ultimately that's going to make the, that what Owen talked about. Like we have to get to a more efficient, you know, more cost effective version of the great things that these models are doing. But competition is what's going to, what's going to drive that and right now it is driving it, you know, between the competition, between the two of them. And look, look, others want a piece of it too. Surprisingly, the EU just passed some legislation to, to allow AI to develop in a, in a less regulated way for AI data centers to, to, to be able to spin up in Europe in ways that weren't really practical before. And you know, Europe has a very, very educated populace. There are a lot of scientists, there's a lot of innovators. You know, they're going to have a piece of this. They're way behind right now. But, but we've seen in other parts of this, the European group of countries find some really unique ways to be part of the conversation as well. And I'm sure it's gonna happen again.

[A]

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

[C]

I do worry that, you know, when. If the bubble bur. If. Or when the bubble bursts, the threat of China is going to be used to encourage a government bailout of AI companies.

[A]

Absolutely.

[C]

And I think that would be incredibly damaging because you've got to let the free market sort this out. You know, there's no use propping up companies who are spending way too much with way too little returns. Let the market sort it out.

[A]

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

[B]

I mean, here in San Francisco, there's obviously a lot of bullishness about the AI boom. And it's.

[A]

Yeah, you're an AI city.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, coming back. Well, it was a ghost town for a while there.

[B]

Yeah, it was. I was, I was, I was rattling around downtown for a while in 2021 and 2022.

[A]

Yeah, it was scary. It was very sad to me because I love San Francisco.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

We shut down our office, and when. When lockdown came, I went back three months later just to pick up some old kit. And you're right, it was. You know, the specials came to mind. It really was a ghost town. It's just. But it's come back, it's bounced back, and I think AI is largely to help with that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Not to. Not to, you know, not to change the topic to that, but Union Square actually saw a better Black Friday this year than in 2019.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah. You know, I think you do need. You know, I don't think. I don't think inflation has been that extreme over. Over six years. You know, it's not. You know, yes, it's been a little hot, but it's not been. You know, it hasn't even been double digits, as best I can track the.

[A]

Number, but add tariffs to that, and it does.

[D]

Look at this.

[A]

Look at this. I mean, I don't think the RAM thing is just AI. I think it's also tariffs.

[B]

But, you know, I. You know, I also think that people. There's a bit of a. There's a bit of a backlash. There's a bit of nostalgia. People are maybe a bit burnt out on.

[A]

Yeah, we want to be happy, don't we?

[D]

We. Yeah.

[B]

You know, just go, go, go, go out, have a little fun.

[D]

I feel.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Explain Santa. It's not as good as it sounds.

[B]

SantaCon is basically a big, you know, unorganized, anarchic bar crawl by people, men typically wearing Santa hats and Speedos and hopefully socks, especially given the weather and, you know, other others wearing, you know.

[A]

Basically a bunch of drunken Santas.

[B]

It is a bunch of drunken Santas.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

God bless them all.

[C]

My favorite Santa Con story came in 2014, where during the Santa Con celebrations, a guy in. In the costume robbed A bank, and then basically grabbed the money, ran out into the crowd, merged into it. And he's never been.

[A]

Good luck finding him.

[C]

I was just. I mean, I know this is. This is a criminal that should be in a.

[A]

That's great. I love it.

[C]

But, yeah, it's. If you're a bartender, it's the worst night of the year, but a lot of people have fun with it.

[A]

Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I. I seem to think my son might have participated in one or two of those.

[C]

If he did, he probably didn't tell.

[A]

Dad the whole story, but apparently his generation. He's 32. Has come up with all sorts of novel ways to get drunk. And he also. But in the. In the. Like the Tuesday before Thanksgiving or the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, there's a thing where they all come back home and then they all go out to the bars that night and get wasted the day before Thanksgiving. There's a name for that, too. They're very creative, that generation, looking for ways to celebrate. Anyway, santacon. Did you. Owen, you look like you might have gotten a Santa outfit.

[B]

I will confess, I have done SantaCon in the past, not yesterday. This is the coldest December in a century.

[A]

Okay, thank you. Because I keep saying how cold it is, and my wife says it's just because you lost weight. It's not that cold. It's cold.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

That's real, too. Because, like, you lose, you lose.

[A]

You don't have the blanket I used to have.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Adipose blanket.

[A]

Maybe I should dress up like Santa for the rest of the month.

[C]

Oh, you California wusses. By British standards, this is positively balmy. Thus the church, you know?

[A]

So this is the coldest winter we've had in century For San Francisco.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

It broke the record.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. It feels that way. I just thought it was me.

[D]

Even colder than August, worse than August, Coldest December now.

[A]

Hard to believe. Hard to believe.

[B]

Google.

[C]

I do love summer over here. When you see tourists wandering around with hastily bought hoodies who came over in June and it was just like, this is California. It was supposed to be hot. And they just.

[A]

Driving across Golden Gate Bridge to watch the tourists in July in their shorts. Freezing.

[D]

Yeah, the oh, crap shirts. They sell a lot of those. Yeah, the oh, crap hoodies. I should say.

[A]

That's what they're called. Oh, crap.

[D]

Yeah. Like you get here. Yeah, I didn't pack for this, you know, especially in August.

[A]

I didn't know about that.

[D]

A Mark Twain thing of, like, the coldest winter I ever Spent was a summer in San Francisco.

[A]

You know, that's cold. So Google, by the way, it's funny because you nailed it. They went from being an also ran in all of this, kind of almost the laughingstock to dominant. Gemini's fantastic. People are raving about their new anti gravity code editor. And all of a sudden after saying, yeah, we're not really interested in glasses. Earlier this year, they got all these partners making XR glasses. First glasses with Gemini will arrive in 2026. Xreal is one of their partners. So of course is Samsung with a Galaxy XR headset. Warby Parker, the glasses manufacturer. Gentle Monster. I don't know who that is. Is that Lady Gaga's fan club? I don't know who that is.

[D]

It's a luxury brand of glasses frames. That's why.

[A]

Yeah, it is.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. I'm sure Lexotica is in on it as well. They make the Ray Ban.

[D]

Well, they're not. They have an exclusive with Meta.

[A]

They can't.

[D]

Yeah, they've also invested in Meta and vice versa. Or, you know.

[A]

No.

[D]

And Meta invested in them.

[A]

Sorry, I'm a fan.

[C]

And they also control so much of the market, but. Yes. Which for a couple of pieces of plastic is a fantastically lucrative operation.

[D]

Oh my gosh.

[A]

Glasses. I sell something in yours. They're so expensive. Expensive. I got.

[C]

No, I bought these from the pharmacy for 30 bucks. I'm fine.

[A]

But you know, well, I. These cost a little bit more. These are the Meta Ray Bans, not the new model. I'm. I'm waiting because I don't. I think we're not quite there yet. But I'm very interested what Google is planning, given how good their AI is these days. They're also, by the way, going to appear next year on Apple iPhones. They're the new series Gemini. That's the rumor.

[D]

Probably white boxed, you know.

[A]

Yeah. I won't say Gemini.

[D]

That's right.

[A]

Yeah. But you'll notice. Smarter than Siri much.

[C]

Well, yeah, I'm seriously considering going to CES this year for the first time in over a decade. Because on the XR front, it's looking really interesting. I was a judge at the MIT XR competitions last year. Or sorry, earlier this year.

[A]

That stands for some of the. What does that stand for? It's not ar, it's not VR. It's exactly reality.

[C]

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

[A]

I'm excited. I, this is what I've wanted for a long time. I want, you know, I wore for a while all of those AI pins. The most recent one, I'm so sorry. I know. B computer, the first one, I was really excited. This is from CES last year. There was a bunch of these got announced last January and I bought the B computer. Then they got sold to Amazon. So then I got the Limitless pin.

[C]

I think I gave you some hard time about that as well.

[A]

Yes, my wife especially. I stopped wearing them because she said you're recording all the time. Time. Yeah, but that's, but just for me, it's just for me it's so I have, I, I know I have a record. I don't know why. So Limitless got bought. Just got bought by Meta. Yeah. So that's out of the window. The problem is maybe do we trust Google? Is that going to be. I, I, we've talked about Apple being the trustworthy company, but they don't seem to be moving very quickly in any.

[B]

They are, they've been quietly shaking up their AI leadership. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has.

[A]

Yeah. They got rid of John J. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

They've had a massive change of management on that front. I mean an awful lot of people have, have come and gone in the last month.

[A]

It's, it's looking like Zuckerberg is writing big checks to everybody and saying, you know, work over there, you want to work over here. Alan Dye, their head of ui, just left for Meta.

[B]

The, the most incredible thing. I, I don't think I realized this when the deal was done. Did you know that Meta, in order to get Alexander Wang, the CEO of.

[A]

Scale AI, 26 year old CEO of.

[B]

Scale AI, they bought who's now running all of AI at Meta. They bought 49% of the company. They took non voting shares. So they have absolutely no say over their investment.

[A]

That's ironic considering how good Mark Zuckerberg has been in maintaining his, his shares.

[C]

Being the emperor with his masculine energy.

[B]

I, I guess it's, you know, is, it is a game recognized game or maybe that's it.

[A]

He says, andrew, I'm gonna make you the next Mark. Yeah, but he's a kid. I don't know if they're gonna get what I feel like sometimes. I've seen this before with companies that got big venture investments. Having a lot of money is not necessarily a good thing. It means you can write big checks, but. But doesn't mean you're strategically spending the money wisely. I'm not convinced.

[D]

It's sort of like a writer who gets really big and then they don't. Nobody edits them anymore. Yeah, everybody.

[C]

Neal Stephenson, case in point. Yeah.

[A]

Google just told me there was a big earthquake 11 miles away. I haven't felt it. There, right there.

[D]

It's coming.

[A]

If shaking intensifies, drop cover. Hold on, hold on.

[C]

Well, considering my house is half a mile away from the Haywood fault, that's really not encouraging news to hear. So if I disappear from the screen, this one.

[A]

This one's up our way. This one's up by Santa Rosa, right where we are.

[C]

Santa Rosa's been getting a lot the last few weeks. And of course, Geezerville, sorry, Geyserville, whatever you call it over here is.

[A]

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

[D]

I do think that trust is big on these AI tools. Ultimately, it's been shown time and again that people don't have a lot of trust for meta. Meta has. Has sort of gone back on its word, broken its own rules, you know, sort of thumbed its nose at the government and said, look, well, we'll sort of break the rules with people's data and, you know, yeah, we'll take the fines. And so, you know, I know a bunch of people who've tested in the tech industry and, and that, that follow tech and that have meta ray bans because they, they want to try this out, they want to see how it's going. But it's amazing how many of them will say, as soon as Google comes out with a product, I'm. That's, that's. That's the one I want. Right. And it just comes down to they trust Google a little bit more than they trust.

[A]

Is that misguided?

[D]

So, right. They are in essentially the two companies that people trust.

[A]

Google's a big ad company because they.

[D]

They make all their money off of. Of people. Right.

[C]

I'm just remembering the glass holes. So. Yes, yes, yes.

[A]

But, but I agree with you. Just, there's something in our, in my psyche that says, what? Well, Apple or Google. Yes, but that was ironic that those two pins were Sold to the two companies I least trust, Amazon and Meta.

[D]

Amazon and Meta, Yeah. So you know, the, the pin thing, I, I am convinced too that OpenAI what they were working, what Jony I've was working on was very much a pin. And then they saw how badly the pins were. Humane pin, the humane pin and all that. And then they started to change it. Like we're, we're what? We're not saying what we. But it, but it's not a, it's not glasses.

[A]

It's not really.

[D]

And so, and you know they say things like you're going to be amazed at how simple it is. Well, it all sounds like a pin, right? Like ultimately. But I think they want a little bit of distance from the sort of the failures that we had in 2025 with those products. And then I think they're going to come to market now they're saying they're going to have multiple products. Right. So we'll, we'll see. I think they're probably going to learn. Jony, I've obviously knows it but he is a designer, not a, you know, manufacturer. They're going to learn how hard it to do hardware well, especially profitably.

[A]

No kidding.

[D]

So you know, I don't have a whole lot of confidence in that. But it is interesting that they are, they're doing something and we'll see. I think that Apple will do glasses, you know, Zuckerberg, not Zuckerberg, Mark, the other Mark, you know, from Bloomberg said that German that, that the, you know, they are working on it. They, they shifted, shifted the people who are working on Vision Pro, the next version of Vision Pro over to glasses because you know, they see that this form factor taking off and I think they saw it as a longer term thing and they've made it potentially a shorter term thing. People do trust, I think the closed nature of Apple, Apple, once they realized that they weren't very good at data, they decided to make that a strength and not a liability. They're like we're the company that's going to be about privacy. See. So I think because of that, you know, they have a chance to, to really succeed in the glasses space. And it is interesting, I mean Met has done some interesting things with the product and shown us that there's, there's more to it than I think we, we thought there would be, especially by this point.

[A]

And we're going to see a lot of complaints about privacy. Right. I was, you know, I heard from a lot of people who said don't wear that pin around me. And I, you know, Alex Lindsay said, if you sit down at the dinner with me at a restaurant wearing these meta ray bans, I must say take them off, put them away. 404 Media just had a report that a border patrol agent was caught recording a raid. Look at that. He's wearing meta ray bans. The lights on. He's recording. Wow. I mean, this is inevitable, right?

[D]

One of the cruise lines just banned smart glasses because really privacy concerns. Yep. Just this week.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Get a lot of pictures of drunken.

[C]

People falling in the pool, all throwing up from nanovirus. But yes.

[A]

You know, I mean, or norovirus. Yeah, that's right.

[D]

But yeah, I mean that they were only. The cruise line said such technology. Technology is only permitted in cabins ashore and other non public spaces.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, Snapchat is, Snapchat is coming out with a new version of its spectacles next year. So they're, they're still at it.

[A]

I've had a couple of versions of those. Yeah. I like the metas. I mean, the sound is very good on them.

[B]

I just, I never understood why Google.

[A]

You know, abandoned it.

[B]

Well, the form factor was dorky, right? It was, it was like inherently unbalanced. So you're always going to look like, you know, look a little robot. Yeah, yeah. Like a off kilter robot. Worse. But you know, it's like when, when you get the form factor down to like this basically looks like a chunky para of sunglasses, it makes sense. It's a lot more tolerable to a mainstream consumer.

[A]

Yeah. And these Google glasses are for sure chunky. Victoria Song, who was very excited about them from the Verge and was talking about them on the show a couple of weeks ago, she has pictures of her in them and they're very chonky.

[D]

The displays, the Meta Ray Ban displays. The new ones with the displays.

[A]

Yeah, and the Google ones too.

[C]

Look.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the new, the, the regular, the regular ones, the regular Oakley and Meta Ray bands. Oakland Oakley Metas and Meta ray bands. Those look, to Owen's point, you know, pretty normal. The Meta Ray Bans display and I I also demoed these, you know, at their, at their event in the fall when I was at ZDNet. And yeah, they, they look much more like you're wearing in, you know, piece of technology. They're, they're a lot bigger and thicker. They're, they're also a lot heavier too. They're, they're like 79 grams versus 49 grams.

[A]

Yeah, but we'll get used to it.

[D]

Or like 35 grams.

[A]

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

[C]

I haven't decided yet. See if I can make it pay, to be honest. But when I joined the Register 15 years ago, I did so on the understanding that I would never have to go to another bloody CES again because I loathe A, I loathe Las Vegas. And B, it's a sales conference. It's not really a technology conference. But on the other hand, it's fun things to see.

[A]

See, it'll be the AI conference this year for sure. Right.

[D]

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

[A]

Eight days. Oh, no, no, no.

[D]

Eight days in Vegas is like a.

[A]

Month, you know, It's a year in any other place. Oh, my God.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Three days.

[C]

Eight days in Vegas keep me away from sharp implements, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's a horrible town, it's a horrible conference. But at the other hand, it's where, you know, the world goes. The tech world goes dancing. Also, Vegas in January.

[A]

Yikes. Yeah. It's cold, it's damp.

[C]

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

[A]

Yikes. All right, let's take a little break. We'll come back. I want to, I feel like I want to go to CES this year. Now you kind of gave me because it is.

[C]

Will Padre be there?

[A]

Padre is going to cover it for us. In fact, he's going to be on the show the week after to report and he's going to be doing video content for us. So, yeah, we'll have our own coverage of it. But there is something about going and seeing this stuff. Stuff and, you know, weird robots and, you know, there's just gonna be stuff. You look at it, you go, this is not a good idea. This is a bad idea.

[B]

The CNET still do the best stuff.

[D]

Is the bad ideas. The bad ideas are the best things.

[C]

I know.

[A]

Like the toilet paper robot they had a few years ago, right. That would. From Kohler or somebody else.

[C]

Do you remember the 3D TV demo that Sony gave where that was. You remember when CES, I think this is about what, 10 years ago, CES was all about 3D TV. This is gonna revolution TV.

[A]

And I was a skeptic even then.

[C]

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

[A]

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

[C]

Oh, joy.

[A]

And again, another one of those things you cannot turn off. Off. There's no way to not get it. Let's take a break. We'll come back with more in just a little bit. Tommy on trip in our Discord chat says IFA was taken over in Berlin by Chinese companies this year. There'll, of course be a lot of Chinese companies in the ces. I would imagine. Should be. Should be very interesting. It's probably too late to go, so I don't have to think about it.

[D]

It's not too late. You. It's not too late.

[A]

You're bad, Jason. Well, you got a room for.

[D]

I just want to. I just want to, you know, meet you for coffee and say, hey.

[A]

Oh, would that be fun? That's really the reason to go to those shows.

[D]

It is, that's why I'm, I'm for the in person meeting. Everybody is there, like the PR people, the people you work with and collaborate with talk. That's, that's.

[A]

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

[C]

No, no, I mean, I can see.

[A]

The back of your head.

[C]

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

[A]

Yep. Our show today, brought to you by Vention. Yes, it's another AI. Another AI company. This is a great company. Vention's been around for a long time. They are engineers first and foremost. In fact, 20 plus years of global engineering expertise. And one thing they've seen in this AI era is that while companies adopt AI to make things easier for the developers, for most teams, it's making the job harder. That's where Vention's expertise comes in. They build AI enabled engineering teams to make software development faster, but also cleaner and calmer. Clients typically see at least a 15% boost in efficiency. And we're not talking AI hype here. This is real engineering discipline. That's what Vention does. The other thing that I wanted to tell you about that Vention does, besides coming in as a partner in your development, they also have, and I would highly recommend this, AI workshops. This is a great way if you are kind of on the precipice of doing something with AI, of learning about it. And they're very interactive, these workshops. So you work with the Vention team to kind of plan it, to think about it, to help your team focus, find practical and safe ways to use AI across the entire enterprise. It's a really great way to start with Vention to test their expertise. Whether you're a CTO or a tech lead or a product owner. This saves you so much time. You don't have to spend weeks kind of figuring out what tools do we use. There's an infinite number now, right? What architectures. Even choosing which models to use is crazy. But Venture knows all about it. They can help assess your AI readiness. And they do this interactively with you, clarify your goals and then outline the Steps to get you there without the headaches. And if you need help on the engineering front, their teams are ready to jump in. As your development partner or your consulting partner, whatever level that works for you. This is a great next step to take after you do a proof of concept. Let's say you've built a prototype on lovable. All right? And it's running. You got it running. It runs well in tests. But now what do you do? What's next? You can't ship it yet. Do you open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving? We got a team. We gotta build a team. We gotta build a team. Or maybe instead of running around like that, you bring in a partner. Someone who's done this before many times across many industries. Someone who can take your idea and expand it into a full scale product but without disruption, without disrupting your systems, without getting in the way of your team. That's what Vention does. 20 plus years of global engineering expertise, that makes a big difference. They're not newbies here. This is, these are the pros, Vention. Real people with real expertise and real results. Learn [e-mail] see how your team can build smarter, faster and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today. Eventionteams.com twit that's v e n t I o n teams.com twit twit benjanteams.com twit we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. I want to also thank. We are in the holiday season right now and I, I really want to take some time to thank our club members who have made this year possible on Twit. I don't, I don't, you know, share the details of our financial situation except to say that 25% of our operating costs now are paid by the club. That's, that's a huge deal. Without your contribution, without your support, we would have to cut back, we'd have to cut shows, cut personnel and we've already cut back a lot. Right. We closed down the studio. We had to cancel some shows, get rid of some people a few years ago and, and I don't want to do that again.

[C]

And if you delightfully salty co's on there as well. I do like the chat, you know. They are very love that. It's a serious sn.

[A]

Sometimes I call it the Club Twit Disco because it's just a party in there. So that's one of the benefits. Here's the deal. $10 a month, $120 a year. Although there is a coupon for 10% off the annual plan and it's only going to be there for 11 more days through Christmas. So this would be a good time to get it for as a gift for a geek in your life or for yourself. Go to Twit TV club Twit. You get 10 bucks a month or less than that. I guess that's nine bucks a month. If you use the coupon, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You do get access to the Discord, which is. I mean, we've always had chat, but this is. It's very fun chat. It's very, it's very graphical.

[C]

Trunk nerds. Free cover.

[A]

Yes. Come on in. Come on into the disco. The club Twitter disco. We also, it's not just during the shows we taught. We have, of course, forums for all the shows, but we also talk about AI. We have a great AI user group. We have 3D printing group. There's, there's, let's play where we play Minecraft. We have a couple of Minecraft servers. We also will talk about. Well, for instance, we're all. And just finished the advent of code. We have a lot of coders in there working on that coding challenge. We have the book club. We have so many events too. That's another thing that is a lot of fun in Club Twit. We're going to do a home theater geek recording tomorrow with the chat room. You get to ask your questions. Mike is crafting course corner. It's coming up on Wednesday where Micah chills. You can chill with him. He's doing Lego, but you can do needlework, knitting, cooking, programming, whatever it is you do. We're gonna have a special interview. I'm a big chess buff and as you might know, AI and computer chess has changed the game. We're gonna have British grandmaster David Howell and the CEO. Wow. Yeah, really great guy. CEO of Take Take Take Mats Andre Christensen on Thursday at 9am that's an early morning pre record for intelligent machines. But I wanted to let you know about that. I got an email from a guy named Mark Malkoff, who's a New York City comic and just wrote a book called Love Johnny Carson. Which is funny because I do love Johnny Carson. And I had just bought the book and he said, I know you cover tech. He's a listener. I know you cover tech, but do you think you'd ever want. I said, yes, I love Johnny Carson. So I'm going to interview him just for fun. January 2nd, the day after New Year's Day. That'll be a lot of fun. Our AR users group is back that day as well. Just so many great things. The book club. We got to schedule a book club reading a really interesting book called Underneath Hollow London. It's really interesting. Interesting. All of this is fun and wonderful, but the most important thing that Club Twit does is it, it supports us. So it's kind of a way of voting for our programming, our style of programming for independent tech journalism. Twit TV clubtoit. I just want to encourage you to consider joining the club. I'm stalling a little bit because I got a message from Owen saying he's got to walk the dog. Dog. Fitz. Fitz is getting antsy. So Owen, I think is out walking the dog right now.

[C]

Well, it's either that. So you get a mess on the floor. So.

[A]

Yeah. Now you're a cat though, right? You're not.

[C]

Well, Stumpy has already made an appearance on this. On today's show. You may have seen the tail going backwards and forward.

[A]

Oh, I missed it.

[C]

Oh, well, it could be worse. The last time I was on, she took an enormous dump in the litter tray just before the end of the show. Just like hold it together. Hold it together.

[A]

You did. I had no idea.

[C]

Through the mouth, not through your nose.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Right.

[C]

And the murdering basket bastards that did it. Sorry, I'm not sure I should say that, but could only get hold of very low level guns. So there was a shotgun, I think, and a single rifle, but still 12, 14, 16 dead. We just don't know yet.

[A]

Yeah, I think it's 15 now. Yes. Horrific. Yeah, I mean it's a Hanukkah celebration on the beach. It's just, you can't imagine anything worse.

[C]

Yeah, no.

[A]

So anyway, our condolences to our dear friends in Australia, but also condolences to people under 16 in Australia, Australia, who have no idea that that's happened because they have no social media.

[C]

Oh, please. They do, they just don't.

[D]

You know, it's.

[C]

This ban is completely unenforceable. I mean, New Zealand is now talking about it, Britain is now talking about it, Denmark. Are you going to enforce this? So, you know, are you going to go to everyone's phones and automatically remove it? You're going to force them to sign on.

[A]

This is the interesting thing. It's neither the parents nor kids are liable. It's not up to the them, it's up to the platforms. And of course the platforms can do something.

[C]

They can't do anything about it.

[A]

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

[C]

Verification. Or is it button saying I promise I'm over 16, swear to God, it's.

[A]

Pinky finger pose for a picture or, you know, we're going to take a video of you and guess how old you are.

[C]

Oh, for goodness sake. Yeah, I mean, you can look at.

[A]

Me and guess that I'm over 16, but I think if you're 17 it might not be that obvious. Right.

[C]

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

[A]

Oh no, it's terrible. And of course one solution will be, and I imagine I haven't seen sales figures, but Sales figures for VPNs in Australia must be through the roof.

[C]

No, they are in the UK as well. Some trying to ban their. But they use.

[A]

Well, and that's the scary thing, thing is that's the obvious next step because this is only enforceable if people can't pretend to be in another country. Yeah, so you got to ban VPNs but you can't ban VPNs because, well, people use them to go to work.

[D]

And for legitimate reasons to protect, you know, themselves for security from security, you know, vulnerability.

[A]

So technology companies aren't particularly Happy about this. But most of them have said they'll comply. Snap said disconnecting teens from their friends and family doesn't make them safer. It may push them to be. To less safe, less private messaging apps. I think that's a legitimate point. Well, yeah.

[C]

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

[A]

Right. Well, they can't, can they can. And then of course, there's this issue of, you know, even adults will have to use age verification because. Right. Everybody will have to. You can't just say, well, are you under 16? Okay, you better verify that. Yeah, everybody will. And that means there will be a massive risk of privacy. You know, you saw The Discord lost 70,000 user accounts that had been. Because they had been age gated. That's a drop in the bucket.

[C]

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

[A]

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

[B]

I think the question, Leo, is the Internet bad for dark dogs?

[A]

No, it's good for dogs. Look at that little puppy. Hello.

[B]

You're a good boy, aren't you?

[A]

You're a good boy. Yeah, he just needed his walk.

[B]

He just needed walksies.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. I stalled for you. So we're talking. We're talking about the social media ban which went in effect three days ago in Australia. I haven't heard howls of pain yet.

[C]

No, I mean, I've got relatives over there and no one's particularly complaining about it because no one's complying with it that much. I mean, there is a great argument to be said for ban smartphones in schools, for example.

[A]

There is some evidence that does improve test scores. That improves a lot.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So you hand it in in the morning you get it back at the end of the day. I'm all for that.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But, you know, I just don't see this as enforceable. As much as the rules come in, then somebody will find a tech way to get around them. Yeah, I mean, look at archive is, you know.

[A]

Right. Yeah.

[B]

I mean our, you know, although he's.

[A]

Being sued, you know. I mean.

[C]

Yeah, no, he is. Every service is doing it as well.

[B]

Is every teenager going to, you know, going to get a vpn?

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Look how that worked out. Oh, no, that worked out pretty well. Never mind.

[C]

That worked out really well. Thank you.

[B]

Okay, calm down. Peter Thiel.

[C]

Oh, yeah, he doesn't.

[A]

He actually said it's. Didn't he say that. That women shouldn't have the right to vote?

[C]

Yeah, well, he.

[B]

What he said was. He said that basically capitalist democracy had no, had no chance of success after women got them.

[C]

It.

[A]

Oh, my God. Is he a weirdo? That is just.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Bizarre.

[C]

Well, you heard about his Antichrist lectures recently where it's like the Antichrist is here on Earth and you're in San.

[A]

Francisco, a series of lectures.

[C]

Yeah, the Commonwealth Club. And I didn't actually managed to get a ticket, but it was just like.

[A]

Yeah, it sold out right away.

[C]

I'm not sure I want somebody with these kind of opinions having that much of a hold over the levers of power.

[A]

I think he said that Greta Thune Lundberg was the Antichrist, which is.

[C]

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

[A]

Wooden box, go down to Hyde Park. Little megaphone.

[C]

Yes. Speaker's corner. One of the great British traditions is this.

[A]

Do they still do that at Speaker's Corner?

[C]

Oh, no, no, they still do it, you know, but it's for all the British police's penchant for cutting down on social. On social media and arresting people for that. Speaker's Corner is still a thing. And good on it because, you know. Yeah, you need to have somewhere to go out and rant and for other people to watch you and take the piss occasionally.

[A]

Now, did you get your citizenship? Did you. Were you able to do that whole process?

[C]

It's in processing. So I for one, would like to praise our Maximum leader, Donald Trump. And I will say nothing at all.

[A]

One of those countries either. You're a nice white boy, so it's okay.

[C]

Yeah, for the moment. But as you just put it on the screen, that the times, they are changing.

[A]

Well, and this is what I was curious about, US is considering with the ESTA Visa waiver program, by the way, countries, not just the S. Hole countries, but Australia, France and Japan.

[C]

Well, all of Europe and the U.K. you know, it's pretty.

[A]

What, Considering before allowing entry as a tourist, five years of social media history.

[C]

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

[A]

But it's optional.

[C]

But it's. It's Vol. Yeah, it's optional. Plus, my mother's 86. It's not as though she's been. Apart from Facebook. There's nothing else she's been doing. Get off talking about.

[A]

Because you're leaving a paper trail.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, now she's. Now they're talking about making it mandatory. They're talking about the US on your friends and family and even possibly DNA swabs.

[A]

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

[C]

If you look at the list on it, it's hilarious. They ask for MySpace profiles and you're like, really? You know, it's 2025, for goodness sake.

[A]

If any information is admitted.

[B]

I thought all the MySpace profiles were accidentally deleted. Was that just the photo?

[A]

I hope not. I want my MySpace profile. I hope not.

[C]

Said no one ever. But.

[A]

If any information is omitted, it could lead to the denial of current and future visas. Sorry, you can't come here. Now remember, Donald Trump just got the fake Nobel Prize from FIFA. We are the host of the World cup this summer.

[C]

Please, it was a participation prize.

[A]

The fake Nobel Prize prize. So I. Is this. Now, Trump did say, if you buy a ticket to the World Cup. Oh, that's fine. Just come on in. So there's a little hint to terrorists. Just a little, you know, little, little hint. But this is gonna be a lot of people from Europe and around the world coming to America, coming to Los Angeles in the, in the summer.

[C]

Well, Los Angeles, yes. Not San Francisco, because we've got the really bad games of the World Cup. But, you know, I don't think we're lining up to watch the Kateri football team going in.

[A]

But I don't want to watch.

[C]

This is basically going to kill tourism in the U.S. i mean, it's already some of the key.

[A]

Sorry, it's already on the decline from.

[D]

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

[A]

The dirty little secret of illegal immigration, that most of the illegal immigration is people overstaying their visas. Yeah. It's not coming in over the border.

[D]

It is by design. I think the challenge with the rhetoric around immigration is it really has lost the narrative. The narrative has gotten so out of control and so outside of reality. And if we really. Yeah. If we really looked at the numbers, if we really dealt with the reality, and if we could really have a conversation about the fact that immigration adds so much. The only difference between the US economy and the economies in Europe and Japan are immigration. Right. That's the only reason that we're growing and shrinking. But the problem is we also don't have an honest conversation about the fact that immigration creates challenges, it puts strains on systems. It, it creates, you know, pockets of population that need extra support, that need the ability to, to, to integrate in ways that are often challenging for communities. And because we can't really have a sane conversation, it's like many things in the US today, we can't have a sane conversation about, about the things and about the honest trade offs and about how it goes. And it just becomes Very bifurcated into like the four or against camps. Then, then all of a sudden, you know, we, we end up in where we are, which is that we just don't have intelligent dialogue around really difficult issues. And so the, the can gets kicked down the, you know, the road longer and longer.

[A]

But we're all immigrants, unless we're Native Americans, and even Native Americans came over the Bering Strait some millions of years ago. I mean, we're all immigrants.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, well, I'm sorry, I mean, if you, if you take the strictest definition of the law, then Melania came over here as an illegal immigrant. So ask. Right.

[A]

You know, a student visa when he wasn't.

[C]

He was on a student visa when he came into town. But, you know, and then has benefited enormously from government benefits. But, you know, I mean, America is built on immigration. Now, having had to jump through 10 years of legal hoops to go for my American citizenship, I would say by all means, give people a legal path to immigration. If someone's just overstaying their visa and you know, doing bugger all for the, for the economy, that then fine, I've got no problems with that. What worries me in particular about this is that it's. How can I put this politely? If you're brown, you're in trouble. If you're white, you're all right. And that's fundamentally stupid. If you look at the leaders of tech companies, a lot of them are immigrants, A lot of them were founded by immigrants. We need to acknowledge that and sort out the system once and for all. Rule.

[A]

So Reddit, even though I don't. Well, I guess because it's in Australia, they weren't one of the, one of the social networks that was mentioned, but Reddit is already proactively going ahead with, quote, new experiences and policies designed to confirm age responsibly and securely. So. And if you are under 18 anywhere in the world, world, you will get a version of Reddit with more safety features built in, stricter chat settings, no ads, personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content. So they, I mean, I think that a lot of companies, Reddit's, of course, owned by Conde Nast, and I think they're just trying to get ahead of this, right?

[B]

They, no, they, they were actually spun out in an ipo, so.

[A]

Oh, they're not Conde anymore. Okay, okay. All right. I think they still have that kind of mainstream mentality though, these days. Steve Hoffman's doing very well.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think being answerable to Wall street is probably more of a more mainstream influence. Yeah, even more investors and advertisers tend to do that to companies.

[A]

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

[B]

Two words are complicating this revocable trust. So Larry Ellison is of course the father of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, and he is fronting a lot of the money.

[A]

For the as is sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Dubai.

[B]

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

[A]

The trust and say, Larry, not the dad could say, no, the dad wants this, this. He, I mean, he wants to call. So he's already got Warner Discovery. I mean, he's already got a Paramount, which means he has CBS and he wants cnn, which is Warner Discovery. He's apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, promised President Trump that if, if, if you would just let us buy cnn.

[B]

I'm not sure. I'm not sure anyone really wants cnn.

[A]

No. In fact, probably would be spun off, wouldn't it? It would be, but they're using his leverage. David Ellison, according to the Journal, told the Trump administration if he bought Warner, he'd make sweeping changes at cnn.

[C]

Barry Wise, I could see.

[B]

And that is the thing. Now I say that having enormous respect for CNN as a journalistic institution and as an incredibly important American and global institution, but right now it's a political hot potato. All these deals require some level of government sign off, you know, especially, you know, especially.

[A]

Well, this would be such a Huge media consolidation. I would. I would expect the government to say no. Right. They. They just doubt it.

[D]

Paramount, because, you know, the audiences have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk for all of these. Like, it's so much of the audience, you know, has. Has moved away from these vehicles now. They still have huge audiences. Like, there's no doubt. But it's not like, you know, it was not even close to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years, 30 years ago. Like, it's become so small in comparison. Right. It's like 20% of what it was a couple decades ago. So. So I think there's a. There is an argument. To me, I don't know how hard they would make the argument or not, you know, the current fcc, but I think that they would look at it and say, like, how much of a public harm is it, really? Because it's so small. It's so small.

[A]

And in fact, that's the argument that Ellison is. David Ellison has been putting forth, saying, you know, we're Paramount by itself, is too small to compete against Netflix and Disney. We need more content in Amazon. We need more content. We need to be a bigger company to compete.

[B]

And by the way, which would be.

[A]

The argument against Netflix winning this deal.

[B]

But that's the argument Netflix is making. But Netflix is saying we're too small compared to YouTube, which is actually bigger on, you know, in the living room than Netflix.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And, you know, and then there's the mobile universe, where arguably TikTok is competition for Netflix as well as HBO. Max.

[C]

Well, the article is. Now, wasn't TikTok.

[A]

Wasn't this supposed to be the TikTok thing? Supposed to be over months? What's going on with that?

[C]

It's been kicked down the road. I mean, Oracle has taken still, you know, standing to try and get a stake in TikTok as well, which, you know.

[A]

But I know Trump keeps extending every 90 days, but I haven't heard a word about it. A month or two ago, he met with President Xi and that was supposed to seal the deal, and it was over, and now we haven't heard anything.

[C]

Yeah, it's kind of like an Elon Musk deadline. They just carry on down the road and down the road and down the road.

[A]

Very strange times.

[C]

I don't know. I just can't help feeling that more media consolidation is a bad thing.

[A]

I agree.

[C]

Need more independent voices out there. You need more fresh voices out there.

[A]

I'm proud of both of you guys for going independent. That's why I'm proud to be doing what we do. The more voices, the better. The less that they are beholden to government or Wall street. Better.

[C]

The more competition. Yeah, yeah.

[D]

Audiences are. Audiences continue to splinter. Right. Like it's. And the fact of it is, and sorry to do this philosophically, but, you know, is that it's harder and harder to trust large entities. Right. And the trust over larger media entities has, you know, continued to drop and drop and drop. And part of that is, rightly so, you know, necessary and somewhat, and somewhat natural because it's, it's, you don't know who, who it is or who they are or who controls it or what their biases are. And so it becomes natural to trust them less. Right. It's, you know, like I said, I started this. Like, my bet is that longer term, you know, the future of media is deeper engagement with more specific audiences. And I think that that can be a niche topically, but it can also be locally or even hyper locally. Right. And so because when you know and understand like who is giving you the news, it's much easier to trust it. You know, we, we've lost a lot of trust in mass media that we used to have. And this is, I think you're only going to see more of these kinds of things. I'm not as, I'm not as worried about them because I think audiences are already moving away from a lot of these, these platforms. We do lose something, right? We do lose a bit of a shared experience where we, we aren't watching the same thing. And so we have a different, you know, understanding and take on it. And. But I think part of that is some of the creation of communities around, around topics, around issues, around conversations. And some of that is also finding new ways to expand, express itself right. In the, in the age that we're in. But I, I don't think that Paramount Buy, if Paramount were to own Warner Brothers, that I don't know that it does that much harm. I think a lot of the harm's already been done.

[A]

Yeah, well, and everybody's watching YouTube. YouTube TV rather. YouTube just rolled out a TV lean back experience. Improved experience because they realized that so many people now watching their big screen screen TVs for sure. So they've changed the interface from.

[D]

And the app experience is not great on TV. On most TVs.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So they're very aware of that and they're updating it.

[D]

On a recent vacation with my family, we logged into YouTube on the TV. Never logged into any Other streaming services. We only watched you and that was like the first time that I can remember that happening. But we were all kind of perfectly happy. Happy doing that. I thought that.

[A]

Have you ever watched Whatnot? You know what whatnot is? I think Owen might know whatnot. This is from information Weekend Whatnot. Schlock empire shows digital live shopping can thrive in America. This is suddenly hot, hot, hot live. It's basically home shopping on your phone.

[D]

QVC?

[A]

Yeah, QVC on your phone. Whatnot has an 11 and a half billion dol. I've never even heard of it. It's a reseller market. Sellers auction off items like sports cards, last year's suede sneakers and off brand cologne through video live streams. It's ebay crossed with TikTok. This is from the information. Oh, and there are, there are. And as. As with any good kind of niche media, there are little code words. So if you hear sudden death. Yes. That means there's a time limit on how long buyers can submit bids in the auction. If a seller says lots of big rips here, they're talking about sealed packs of trading cards which they are literally ripping open. A shoplifting special is a deal so good. It's. Well, you get the picture. Writes the information.

[C]

On the list. I popped my head around and took a look at it.

[A]

Did you watch it?

[C]

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

[A]

It's authentic. Yeah, it's worth eleven and a half billion. Is it an app or is it a website?

[C]

I went on, yeah, you don't need.

[A]

An app, I guess. Oh, now I'm firing.

[D]

This article reads like when people, you know, five years ago when you had like 40 year olds writing about TikTok, it sort of.

[A]

It's so amazing what the kids are doing to these days. Wow. But I keep seeing these stories in more than one outlet about live shopping now. All right, well, you know, whatnot.

[C]

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

[D]

Cost you in London. How much does the same meal cost you in London?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Not 30 fish and chips in London. You can get it for a tenner. You know that. So that's what, 12 bucks? And it's good fish and chips, not artisan fish and chips.

[A]

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

[C]

Really? What is a French dip sandwich?

[A]

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

[C]

I'm just. I'm just looking up what a French dip sandwich is, because I'm.

[A]

Okay. All right, now you. Now you did it. I'm gonna have to shoot show you.

[C]

Yeah, let's have a look.

[A]

I will show you. It's. It's called Salt Hanks, and it's on Bleecker Street. I'm. Everybody's watching the show.

[D]

Friendship sandwich. Like roast beef that you dip in, like prime rib.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[A]

Yeah. But he.

[C]

Oh, my God. No wonder America's life expectancy is going down. I mean, it looks delicious, but. And as a Brit, I'm the last person to criticize other people's food. Foods go to. I have to say, dipping a beef sandwich in.

[A]

Okay, New York Times. This is. This is Hank's sandwich featured in the New York Times. Oh, damn.

[C]

That does actually look rather good.

[A]

It's. This is super good. Very expensive prime rib with a garlic aioli and caramelized mustard. Onions have been cooking all day. And the French.

[C]

Is that a meal for two? Because that.

[A]

Yeah, you. That's why you could. You could. You could actually. You could actually just go in there and split it, because it's. It's a lot.

[C]

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

[A]

Well, this.

[C]

So she'll be there. No, no, no. I'M fine, Mum. We have doggy bags over here. They're there for a reason.

[A]

There's my son right there.

[D]

He's.

[A]

There's salt. Hank himself. This is a New York Times documentary they did on him.

[D]

Wow.

[A]

It is really good. Yeah, yeah. There he is. Look at. That's the caramelized onions. They cook them all day, the way.

[C]

Caramelized onions should be done.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's good.

[C]

By the way, did I see Bourdain in there?

[A]

Yeah, but Bourdain's no longer with us.

[C]

But yes, true.

[A]

Every. Every celebrity in New York has come into the show, shop down to eat this.

[C]

Excellent.

[A]

How do we get started? Oh, yeah, live shopping. I was going to whatnot.

[B]

I was gonna say, didn't ebay buy Skype? Because live shopping was the future.

[A]

Oh, is that why? I never understood.

[B]

Yeah, Meg Whitman went to China, and apparently folks were using Skype to, you know, to sell stuff. And.

[C]

A good friend of mine from ZDNet actually got his comments on the BBC, see, expunged about the ebay buy. Because they asked him onto the show and it's like, so why do you think Meg. Meg Whitman did this? And he went, well, we've all got drunk and bought something on ebay. And that line was very carefully cut out.

[A]

Yes. All right. They say, now what am I shopping for? Electronics? Trading card games? Pokemon cards? Beauty. Beauty's going to be the most thoughts. Beauty's going to be the most fun. All right, let's go, let's go. Oh, I got to give him a phone number. No, no, I'm not going to give you a phone number. They want a phone number. I'm never going to.

[C]

This is what we need.

[A]

I'm going to regret this. I am going to regret this, aren't I?

[C]

You need a Google voice number just for stuff like this, Leo. Yeah, that's right.

[A]

We had a sponsor actually have fake phone numbers from one of our sponsors, my son, Pseudo.

[D]

Is that a burner number that you put in?

[A]

Yeah, it's like a burner, actually. It's really cool. They're not a sponsor anymore, but I'll give them a free plug because you can have a different number for every service. And then you can say what happens to phone calls and text messages. And it's all in this app. It's really a sweet way of getting around things like that. Yeah, things like that. Military almost got the right to repair, and then Congress said, no, no, this.

[C]

This grips my muffin. It really does.

[A]

I mean, the worst come on, you.

[C]

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

[A]

McDonald's, McFlurry machines. Right. So the, the. This is part of the National Defense Authorization act, which was finally marked up on sun last. Last Sunday. The House version of the bill. Repair advocates worried could have implemented a data as a service relationship with defense contractors would have forced the military to pay for subscription repair services. So that was taken out. But also the provision that said, you know what? The military employees can fix machines. It's okay. It's a blow to the right to repair movement, of course. And it's just amazing.

[C]

Yeah, you should have Cory doctor on this to talk about this because he goes incandescent about it and for good reason.

[A]

Right.

[C]

You know, they can repair themselves. I mean, the whole Marine Corps engineering department is built on repairing stuff that no one else wants. They can do this stuff.

[A]

Let's take a little break. You're watching this week in tech. Oh, we lost Jason Heiner. He's disappeared. Walking his dog now. Okay, everybody's walking their dogs. Oh, there he is. We're gonna take a little bit. Sorry, you can go. We're gonna take a little break.

[C]

I have a cat on the lap, so.

[A]

Oh, hello, Stumpy. Ian Thompson with this kitty cat, Stumpy. And Owen Thomas with his really sweet little dog Fitz. Fitzy. You call him Fitzy.

[B]

Fitzy is mad about doggy bags because he says it's false advertising.

[A]

He doesn't ever get that.

[B]

Yeah, humans always eat it.

[A]

The humans keep eating my bag. Yeah, just not right.

[B]

That's his steak.

[A]

Burke. And our. Who does all of our right to repair stuff does all our fixing. He's fixing the Mac right now. Says. Well then what do you have a tech tank mechanic for if you can't fix it?

[C]

Yeah, I don't know.

[A]

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

[C]

What are they going to do in the wartime situation? Oh, excuse me. I'm just going to call, you know, Locky. Oh, we gotta Get a to send someone over.

[A]

Yeah, we gotta get a contractor out here. What? The subscription is not paid. Paid up. Military invoice.

[C]

Back to you in 90 days.

[A]

I need to get lobbyists. Well, no, it's the episode.

[B]

It's the military industrial complex.

[C]

They're the ones getting the money to fix the things.

[A]

So they're the ones who are benefiting things and they're the ones who donate to Congress. Got to get money out of politics. I think that's a problem. I really do.

[C]

Absolutely. But come on, it's America. You've legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. I mean, it's just. This is the way it is.

[A]

We do have something very cool though, here in America. It's a thing called advertising that makes it possible to do this podcast. So I want to thank America for letting us do this. This episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. So it's so interesting when you hear us talking about this. There are both benefits and downsides to AI. The potential rewards are huge. Every business has to consider consider it. But there's also risks, whether using public or private AI. The risk of losing sensitive data. Well, as an example, there were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked through legit SaaS. AI applications, chat, GPT. And Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations last year. Generative AI also means the bad guys guys can use it to make themselves more effective and more efficient. They're using AI to create phishing emails that are just indistinguishable from the real thing. To rely right malware, even to automate data extraction so they can, they can get the data out of your system fast once they've broken in. There are upsides and downsides to AI, but there is a way way to mitigate a modern approach. Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. Zscaler Zero Trust eliminates your attack surface because you don't need big firewalls and VPNs to get through. It secures your data everywhere. It safeguards your use of public and private AI in the company so you don't start exfiltrating that vital information. Protects against ransomware, protects against AI powered phishing. It's a. We got a great video. Siva, who is the director of security and infrastructure at Swara, says this about using Zscaler Watch.

[D]

AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security. The benefit of zscaler with Zia rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various gen AI tools. So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to you know, companies data classification does not get fed into the public LLM models, et cetera.

[A]

With zero trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era, you can stay ahead of the competition and you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] Secure Security that's Zscaler.com Security we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. You support us when you use that address by the way, so make sure you use it so they know you saw it here. Zscaler.com Security Scathing, scathing. You're laughing. You already know where I'm going.

[C]

Oh yeah, no, I've been looking forward to this one.

[A]

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers back in April said that Apple was in willful violation of her 2021 injunction to open the iOS app store. Apple appealed. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now upheld it. The ruling signed by a panel three appellate court judges affirmed that Apple's attempts to charge it. So remember, Apple was charged charging 30%. They said, oh, okay, your honor, we'll charge a 27% to developers using outside payment operations. The panel said it had a prohibitive effect. It was a violation of the injunction. Similarly, Apple's restrictions on how outside links in apps had to be designed were overly broad. They said Apple acted in bad faith. Judge Rogers was right by refusing to comply with the injunction. Injunction. This is bad.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Tim Sweeney of Epic, who brought the lawsuit, says, you know, victory. The ninth Circuit court has confirmed the Apple tax is dead in the US the beginning of true untaxed competition and payments worldwide. In iOS, it's not just the U.S. of course, EU and all over the world people are saying, Apple, you know, this is, this is unfair.

[C]

In fact, Japan, the EU is very strong on this as well.

[A]

Japan.

[C]

But Apple has basically thrown up an awful lot of sort of we call barriers.

[A]

Malicious compliance is the.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

I like exactly. They go, oh yeah, we'll pay that fine in pennies.

[B]

And one, I saw a recent decision where essentially, you know, Epic and other app makers could use an external payment mechanism, but they'd have to pay some kind of commission.

[A]

Yeah, 27% instead of 30. It's like, whoa, thank you Apple, you're so generous.

[C]

So Japan, bless you, kind master. For you, I will tug my furlong.

[A]

Starting December 18th in Japan, Apple and Google will be prohibited prohibited from blocking third party app stores on iPhone and Android devices. Yeah, that's going in effect in four days in Japan.

[C]

From a security perspective that's not entirely great but at the same time that's what Apple says.

[A]

I'm not sure I buy that. Is the, is the Apple store so very secure?

[C]

Oh no, there's always, there's always malware that gets into both stores. Admittedly more for Google than for Apple.

[A]

Right.

[C]

I just at the end of the day it's that traffic trade off between do you allow a good market to develop or do you just allow Apple to skim 30% off the top of everyone?

[A]

Right. Well there's competition a coming.

[B]

I'll go back to what I've said before which is there's probably a right number here and it's probably not 0% and it's probably not 30%. There's some value.

[A]

In fact, I'm surprised Apple doesn't bring this up. They based on what Microsoft and Sony change charge in their game stores, Steam charge. I mean this 30% is kind of was the going rate.

[B]

Yeah but that was to essentially subsidize.

[A]

Hardware, you know and they don't have a monopoly in the same way that Apple does. Well, I guess they do.

[C]

Yeah. If Apple allowed sideloading properly then you know, you could possibly make a case for that.

[A]

That's what surprises me is that they haven't done that or, or just say you could have do better support for browser apps or something. Seems like Apple there'd be ways to app for Apple to make this more open. But they just, they've decided we were going to scrape every penny we can out of this.

[C]

It's not really Apple's business model though to be that open, you know. I mean.

[A]

Yes, thank you.

[C]

And we were talking about their privacy policy earlier. Privacy policy is great if you're in a western nation of the United States. Try that argument in China. Slightly different.

[A]

So I don't know now do we go to the Supreme Court with this or have we already been there? I think we've already been there. And the Supreme Court sent it back down to the 9th Circuit which then sounds like this is a done deal.

[C]

Yeah, it's kept a lot of lawyers in very nice summer houses.

[A]

Anyway, we'll see what that does. Maybe it won't make a difference. I don't know. Happy birthday. Excel, 40 years old this week. The spreadsheet remains stubbornly unlike unkillable, says Bloomberg.

[D]

Why we can't the Bean counters still love it. They're still like, yeah, we can't do it. I remember in the last couple, in several companies that I had where we were on Google, you know, workspace.

[C]

All.

[D]

The finance department, all still had Excel.

[A]

They rebelled. Isn't that funny?

[D]

Formulas?

[A]

Yeah, because we use Google sheets for almost everything. You know, our rundown today is in a Google sheet. But I bet you. I bet you our finance people are all using Excel.

[C]

Yeah, but we're still having, you know, we're having Excel competitions at the moment. You know, Brit was terribly excited because he made it to the finals of his Excel competition.

[A]

That's right.

[C]

Which I think you covered earlier.

[A]

It's going to Vegas, I think, isn't it? Where is it?

[C]

Grief. I'm sorry. Vegas has. You know, Vegas is all about high rollers and funsters. You don't get Excel. People coming down as the high rollers in Vegas, I mean, they're highly skilled people. I'm sure they're wonderful. But at the same time, yeah, it's. It's kind of like to come back to ces. I was. I was talking to a lady of negotiable affection there, and she's like, yeah, we jack up our prices 3. 3, you know, 30% during CES because the geeks are in town.

[A]

Yeah, well, yeah, during Comtex, no one. They would. They would put tarpaulins over the blackjack tables because the geeks didn't gamble.

[C]

Oh, no. One of my favorite things, I was at DEFCON. What about it was in 1920, 17, and we got into a conversation with a bartender, and there was a bunch of people from the crypto panel with. Were just getting drinks, and he goes. The bartender's like, you know, we hate you people because you don't gamble. And a guy whose name I won't mention, but he's very big in the crypto field, just said, yeah, we studied math at high school. You know, they do not like geeks there.

[A]

It was last week, we missed the. The finals in Las Vegas, but I'm sure there's video on YouTube we could all watch and. And enjoy. They treat it like esports sports.

[C]

Yeah. It's not quite Formula one, but I have to say, for a certain audience, it's. It's pretty damn good.

[D]

Microsoft Excel World Championship. That's amazing. According to the cab drivers and Uber drivers in. In Las Vegas, like, everything has gotten too expensive in Las Vegas. And, yeah, their tourism is down by, like, 30%. And so a bunch of them are ready to leave. That's the one thing that I'm gonna miss when, you know, eventually they automate all of the, you know, the Ubers and cab drivers.

[A]

Drivers.

[D]

I get all my best intelligence. I love like talking to Uber drivers and cab drivers, sort of asking them about. About things and how things are going and their perspective on things. Like some of my favorite conversations, you know, week in and week out or with. Or with Lyft and Uber drivers. And so I'm gonna.

[C]

I couldn't agree with you more. I mean these people are absolute goldmines for information about what's actually going on on the ground. The ground.

[D]

100.

[C]

You know, I mean, 100. They see it, you know, up front and yeah, when Waymo and Uber and Z all come in and put them out of. Out of. Out of a job, then yeah, it's go. We're going to lose a valuable source of information.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

You think Apple. Well, somebody's suggesting. Larry's in our discord. Suggesting Apple should buy the rights to the Excel Esports World Championship just like they did.

[B]

Oh God.

[A]

Formula 1 1. They can make it interesting. Was it. Wasn't that final something, Ian?

[C]

It, it really was. And I, I do feel for Kimmy Antonelli because when he was coming in he just realized that the mistake he'd made the previous Grand Prix had just basically handed the World Championship.

[A]

Some people might not have watched. So we won't say who the World Champion.

[C]

Oh, come on.

[A]

Right. Yeah.

[D]

This is a spoiler free show.

[A]

That's. I wasn't.

[C]

Yeah, true, true. That's just say. Let's just say that, you know, three people could have won the World Championship on the last race. The winner of the race, the worthy winner and the winner of the World Championship was a worthy winner.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Very excited. Yeah.

[A]

I now everything changes because not only are the rules all changed and the cars are going to be completely different, but Apple's taking over in the United States. The broadcasts.

[C]

Yes. I'm not pleased about that. Are you going to raise my bills?

[A]

Well, wait a minute. I was paying for F1TV. I was paying 150 bucks a year. I think Apple.

[C]

Yeah, you're paying for the, for the absolute top level service. Those of us who pay. So you're actually looking at a cost saving. Those of us who are paying for the mid level service, we are facing a cost hike and I'm sorry, Apple's not going to screw the consumer too much, but it is go. The prices are going to go up year on year on year. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

I don't know Jason and Owen.

[A]

Are you.

[C]

Do you watch F1 or.

[D]

I don't.

[A]

Every time you and I, that would be conversation. We turn people off.

[B]

That would be a sports ball, right?

[A]

Yes. It's a form of sports.

[C]

Yeah, It's. It's basically. Yeah. It's a car race where they turn right occasionally. So, you know, that's what I like about it.

[A]

It's not an oval track. It's a. It's a. A much more interesting track. Yeah.

[C]

Although, I mean, you've been to Vegas to watch it.

[A]

I went once. I've been to F1 race once. It was in years ago. Yeah.

[B]

Wasn't Sam Altman fired when he was in Vegas for.

[A]

He was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He was there at the same time I was. I didn't know this at the time. And he had to rush.

[C]

Oh, that was when it broke.

[A]

Yeah. Okay. Because I'm sitting there and the story's breaking that Sam's been fired. I'm going, whoa. But what I. Little did I know, he was in the hotel right behind me. He had to rush home.

[C]

Missed.

[D]

Wow.

[A]

Missed it by that much. I was looking at the cards. Go. Let. Microsoft is promising more bug payouts with or without a bounty program. You put this in, Ian?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. It's.

[A]

They're not getting rid of their bounty program.

[C]

No, no, not at all. I mean, a blackout this year. I chatted with the head of their bounty program, and, you know, you know, MSRC is now. Microsoft fought against bug bounties tooth and nail for years.

[A]

So did Apple.

[C]

Yeah. And it took Casey Mazouris to actually join Microsoft and convince them that bug bounties were a good idea. And now they've embraced them with both hands and they're paying out. I think it was, what, 31 million last year? Because they've worked out, you know, the logical solution is that people that do this for the love of it actually expect to pay out at the end of it, considering the amount of savings they take. And getting that volunteer support in is huge. And this is a really interesting case of basically companies saying, yeah, break our code, show us how it's done, and we'll pay you. Because we're not expecting you to do it for free. And far too many companies still are.

[A]

There's a larger risk, of course. Course. Because if Microsoft doesn't pay these guys, there are other companies that would gladly pay them even more because. Especially for iPhone exploits, because then you can sell them to a nation state and it's really lucrative. So you've I think as a company you've got to step up and offer at least something because if you don't, you're really risking it being sold to the bad guys.

[D]

Yeah, the Dark Web will pay it 100%.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[C]

I mean, well, not even the Dark Web. I mean, companies like Zero Diem will pay a million for a zero click iOS exploit. It was really interesting that, you know, the Pawn to own competition in Dublin this year, that's, that's run kind of by Trend micro. They were offering a million dollar Payout for a zero click way to subvert WhatsApp and that's below what the competition is paying. But enough people don't want to deal with shady brokers and would rather go through a legitimate competition. And that's what savings at the moment because, you know, these things are hugely, hugely profitable for the companies that can sell them. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's scary times out there. And the only reason that we haven't actually had worse problems is that fundamentally most hackers are good people, in my opinion at least.

[A]

No, I think you're right. I think they, they want to do the right thing. But you've got gotta, you've gotta, you've got to incentivize.

[C]

You can't say, oh, we'll give you a T shirt if you think and someone else is going to give you a million bucks, who are you going to go to, realistically?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's take one last break. We have a few other stories to talk about. You're watching this Week in Tech. Great to have Owen and Fitz on the show. Owen Thomas and his little. Is he a wiener dog? What is he?

[B]

He's a, A Min pin Chihuahua.

[A]

A min pin Chihuahua.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Three different, three good flavors in one.

[B]

I call him a dainty Doberman.

[A]

He's really cute. He's got beautiful, soulful eyes. It's great to have you. As do you, Owen Thomas. And a somewhat less soulful jacket, managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times. Actually, I want to ask you, there's some good articles from the Times that I want to ask you about in just a second. Yeah, don't go anywhere. We also have the wonderful Jason Heiner, who is now editor in chief of the Deep View at the deep view.com and no paywall. I love that.

[D]

No paywall. You know, eventually if we add value, you know, we, we could do it. But I also, I forgot to say at the top that I haven't announced it publicly. It's getting announced publicly. There's a press release going out tomorrow morning. So here on Sunday, December 14th.

[A]

What?

[D]

This exclusive that I've mentioned publicly, anyway. Oh, my God, I've gone. I've only mentioned that I left ZDNet earlier this month and so wonderful. I've done it for first here on Twitter.

[A]

Thank you for the exclusive because I love Leo and it's. It's really a great resource, it looks like, for AI stories of all kinds. I'm going to make this a regular, regular part of my beat check.

[D]

I love it.

[A]

Thank you. What? You couldn't pick a more interesting topic?

[D]

We're really focused on AI for, you know, aimed at how it's, you know, changing work and how it's changing the world, and yet really focused on, especially professionals, people who are working in AI and are dealing with AI at work and are expecting to deal with it at work. So, you know, that's what I've spent most of my career doing. You know, writing for. Writing for professionals are out.

[A]

Thank you, Jason. Great to have you. And the wonderful Ian Thompson and Stumpy.

[C]

Oh, Stumpy. Okay.

[B]

Sorry.

[A]

You don't have to fetch poor Stumpy. Aw. How many legs does Stumpy have?

[C]

She has four, but the front two are foreshortened. She's missing a joint in the two front legs. She's still.

[A]

Was it an injury or was it. Was she born that way?

[C]

I don't know. She was a feral that we rescued, so. But still a massive hunter. I mean, she still goes after the birds outside.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

She doesn't really get them these days because she's 18, but, you know, it's. It's nice to see her try 18. Well, that's what we think, judging from what the vet said.

[A]

But, yeah, we have a new rescue cat who's a year and a couple of weeks older.

[C]

Oh, great. So you're getting woken up in the middle of the night.

[A]

Yes, she's very. She's very. Yes. And I don't. I've never seen this before, but she likes. She doesn't bite me, but she likes to nibble on Lace's fingers, which I think is a way of saying, pet me more.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, Stumpy tried licking my eyeball once to wake me up after I stopped screaming. She never did that again.

[A]

Sandpaper tongue on my eyeball. Not good.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Wonderful to have you, Ian. And, you know, you, you, you've mentioned, but it's not official. The Silicon Limey launch is in a couple.

[C]

Yeah. January, because no one's going to read it. On in December and I've spent honestly the last couple of months building up a portfolio of writing. So. Yeah.

[A]

Is it all you?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's.

[C]

Yes, it's.

[A]

It's Silicon Limey. Blogspot.com. is that it?

[C]

That's. Oh, God.

[A]

You found old. That's your old.

[C]

That's my old blog. Yes. In fact, if you look at the very first post, that was me watching Lewis Hamilton win the World Championship in 2008.

[A]

How fun.

[C]

So here's a long run. I really. I really should delete that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but there will be confusion. So what will the address for the new silicon.

[C]

It'll be Siliconlimey.com I've got the domain booked. The website is being set up at the moment.

[A]

It's actually a great.

[C]

I'm just writing a couple of newsletters and recording some podcasts to go on there.

[A]

So you've been. You've had that name for some time.

[C]

I was surprised that I haven't had the domain for some time and I was surprised that it was actually a. Available.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay. The Instagram post needs. Posting needs some work. But I hate Instagram with the passion. Yeah, it's.

[A]

You know what? It's about time you launched out on your own. I cannot wait to see that. This is going to be great.

[C]

It's going to be fun.

[A]

I think a letter from America or a letter to America, I don't know. All of us were here. Our show today, brought to you by my mattress. And I think that you should know about this mattress because you need a good night's sleep. Helix Sleep is our sponsor for this section of this Week in Tech. And how do I know that? Because everybody needs a good night's sleep. And your mattress is so important for that, especially around this time of year. Nights are long, it's cold, you're busy shopping, shopping, hosting parties. Sleep is essential. So don't forget, when you're out shopping for everybody in your family this season, maybe you should give yourself a little gift. The gift of a great night's sleep with a brand new Helix mattress. I realized almost a year ago now that we had had our mattress for eight years. The advice is between six and 10 years, you should get a. Swap your mattress out because they wear out. I mean, who knew that? But they do. They sag.

[C]

They.

[A]

They don't do as good a job. And I thought, well, maybe it's time for us to get a new mattress. So I started doing a little research and I am so glad I found Helix Sleep. Some of this was from the the reviews, man. Helix Sweep has won every possible award. Wired tested 100 plus bed in a box mattresses. They said the best mattress, the best bed you can buy online. The Helix Midnight luxe hybrid, that's the one we bought, was very affirming. Forbes. They tested 90 beds so far this year. The best mattress for every sleeper. Their top pick, the Helix Midnight Lux. Helix is beautifully made. Not, you know, a lot of these mattresses that you buy are made overseas with low quality, maybe questionable material. And then they put them in a box, put them on a. On a cargo. Cargo ship, a container ship, and it spends a month going across the sea. By the time you get it open the box, it smells like container ship. You don't want that. Every Helix mattress is made to order. You put in your order and they will assemble it, package it, and ship it. Not from China, but from Arizona. American made with the best possible materials. That's why the Helix mattress feels so good. No more night sweats, no back pack pain, no motion transfer. You won't even feel earthquakes. You will love your Helix sleep mattress. I know we do. We took the Helix sleep quiz and it asks you what your preferences are. You like soft, you like firm, but it also asks you how you sleep. Either a stomach sleeper, back sleeper, side sleeper. We put those in and it recommended which mattress we got. And I'm really glad we got that Midnight Lux. You know, I do the sleep tracking with my Oura ring every night and my anecdotal experiences. It's been a huge improvement in my overall sleep and in my most important kind of sleep, deep sleep. Significant. Well, turns out there's some science behind that. In a Wesper sleep study, Helix measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. They found 82% of the participants saw, just as I did, an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's the most important sleep, the one that really cleans the brain. Most important for your health. In fact, participants on average achieve 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. You know, normally you might get half an hour, 45 minutes to an hour of deep sleep. It's not all night, so an additional 25 minutes is a significant improvement. That's kind of what I got. But you also sleep better. Participants on average sleep 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Less tossing and turning, less back pain, less night sweats. You just feel good. Helix sleep time and time again, the most awarded mattress. And right now, go to helixsleep.com TWIT for 25% off site wide during the weekend flash sale. That's helixsleep.com TWIT For 25% off for the weekend flash sale. This offer ends today, December 14th. Make sure you enter our show name into the post purchase survey so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale sale ends still check them [e-mail] TWiT Weekend Flash Sale Quick. It's like what? Not quick. Get there. Buy that mattress. It's a great Mattress. Congratulations to Expedition 33, the game of the year. We kind of thought it might be game awards were last night and this French kind of oddball French indie game beat all the big names. Have you played Clair obscure? Expedition 33 it swept the game awards best independent game beating Hades 2 and Hollow Knight. Silksong already the favorite to win the grand prize but they won the first prize and then they just kept on winning. Nine awards in total. Game of the year, the most decorated game in awards history. Anybody. Has any of you played it? I've played it. I'm just wondering if you.

[C]

I haven't played it but I've got to say it's really nice to see an independent studio winning like this French studio. Nothing wrong. Okay. Traditionally we hate the French in Britain but at the same time they produce some great stuff.

[A]

Yeah. Oh sn.

[C]

Well, it's just I, you know, I speak to people at Electronic Arts and various other gaming companies and they're possibly the most depressed people on the planet because they are getting. How can I say this politely? Shafted left, right and center by management. And it's nice to see an independent company coming through creating something that people want and it's very good for the vibrancy of the gaming community.

[A]

It was a. It's a fun game. It has a very interesting unusual storyline line. It's turn based so it's a little different than the first person shooter, you know, boom, boom, boom stuff. It's beautiful and it has definitely a continental kind of ethos to it.

[C]

Are we talking breasts here or.

[A]

I did not get to the breast part. There may be. I got killed pretty quick. So you know. Anyway, congratulations. It was funny. We were talking about this game six months ago and actually that's why I played it because every.

[C]

Oh God, the berets.

[A]

Look at the berets.

[C]

I'm sorry. Way to play up to the national style.

[A]

Nicolas Maxon Francombe and Francois Maurice.

[C]

What's this?

[A]

The Mime Awards accepting the award, huh?

[B]

The Mime Awards.

[A]

Mime Awards. They are wearing mime striped mime shirts as well as red berets. They are very French. No good for them. It's a small indie. Com company. Nintendo had a few awards for some Switch to exclusives. Donkey Kong Bonanza, best family game. Mario Kart World, best sport racing game. Grand Theft Auto 6, which isn't out yet. Second year in a row, won most anticipated game award.

[C]

Still waiting for the new Half Life.

[A]

But go on for a while. Yeah. Duke Nukem Forever. Wuthering Waves, a Chinese game with a huge mop. Got the players voice award. That was the only one that's determined by public online votes. You know, I'm glad to see a little indie game company get such success. Congratulations. This is actually. Is this your story, Owen? I can't get in here because I'm using an ad blocker. Could a Twitter former lawyer is trying to get the trademark for Twitter?

[B]

Yeah, it's our story by my colleague Will Hicks. It's fascinating, really. Basically, a former Twitter lawyer arguing that X Corp, by changing the name and really wiping out almost any reference to Twitter from its website, has abandoned the trademark and therefore it's up for grabs.

[C]

Interesting.

[A]

Call me. I'd like to go in on that one.

[B]

Yeah, so, I mean, we'll see if that flies. You know, twitter.com is still very much in use by. By x.com you know, it just redirects.

[A]

To x.com I don't think it does anymore. I think that's what precipitated this because they told people. Let me see if it does.

[B]

Yeah. So still redirects.

[A]

Yeah. They told people with two factor authentication that they would have to reset it because twitter.com would no longer work. It would, I guess you could have a redirect. So that's a good argument that maybe he is still keeping the trademark.

[C]

Yeah, it's, you know, it's got a solid read. All right.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, and, and I remember actually x.com made a. Made a big deal about how they had like actually moved all the infrastructure off of twitter.com which is, you know, it's a lot of little fiddly code. Ch. Code changes that you have to make. So, you know, it is, it is a fair question of, like, can you maintain a trademark on, you know, on a former name? I don't know the ins and outs of trademark laws, but this, it seems like this case would be a good one to test that and explore exactly what US trademark law has to say.

[D]

Yeah. You have also may be in trouble with this one. So I was just going to say because I, I've known over, over because having had to deal with this in trademarks, you know, when I was at Z Net when we were, we used to have ZDNet in a lot of different countries as well as using certain versions of the mark and things like that. And you really do. One of the things that the, you know, lawyers over time reinforced over and over again with us is like you have to be using the mark regularly or else you're going to have a hard time defending it, you know, in, in court if you're not using it. If you're not, if it's not like you're using the logo, you're using the, the usage of it in, in various places and you can show. So it's true like that. I don't know that the domain name is enough like. Because they really don't make use of Twitter that I, that I've seen very often anymore. Now the public still does, but I don't think that'll count because. Because, because yeah, they, they don't specifically use it on, on almost anything that I've seen. That's interesting.

[B]

Yeah, but, but it seems like the, you know, the, the precedent is three plus years of non use. So I don't think X has made that, you know, hit that threshold.

[A]

He just wants to get in line now.

[B]

But the, you know, the, the other thing is, is intent and you know, Musk has made his int.

[A]

Intent very clear here to drop Twitter. Yes. Now X, the Everything app. Yeah.

[C]

I'm just so glad he took that enormous illuminated X off the top of the building because that pissed off a lot of people.

[A]

It wasn't there very long. Did you see it? Was it really bright?

[C]

Yeah, I did see it and I felt for the people that bought very expensive apartments across from the building who are now getting drowned out by the light from that bloody thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So it was great when they took it down.

[A]

Didn't last long. I think that he heard from a few people, including the City of San Francisco kids. Yeah, we're, we're. I think we've done enough damage to the news ecosystem for this week. Thank you, Ian, for being here. I appreciate it. Good luck with the Silicon Limey. That's great. If I don't see you before Christmas, have a happy holiday. Do you celebrate Boxing Day and all of those silly things?

[C]

I tell you the first year I came over because to explain to us Americans basically in the UK from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day, everyone takes that time off.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Apart from a few unfortunate souls who volunteer to man the office. And I can remember the first year I came over here, I was sitting on bar going into work on Boxing Day, thinking, this is just bollocks. I hate this so much. You know. You know you're heading into work slightly hungover, no one's going to be announcing anything, no one's going to be doing anything. So, yes, I. Unfortunately, however, I'm on American Times, so. So I have a piece for. I can't say who, but a large cloud and online soup provider to write up by December 31st. So I'll be spending the week on that and online soup providers, so uk.

[A]

Oh.

[C]

So, yes. And also cooking a goose for Christmas because after Thanksgiving, I'm sick of. Good.

[A]

Do you do the British tradition of poppers at the. At the Christmas dinner?

[C]

We do do Christmas crackers when we can find them, but I'm sorry, the American ones are absolute rubbish.

[A]

We have a store in town that has a wide variety of crackers. They may be rubbish, I don't know, but if you pick some up, it's.

[C]

Traditional to have a bad joke in the cracker. But some of the toys they put in there are really quite. Yes. So no, I mean, we'll just be having anchor Jack.

[A]

Company probably. Yeah.

[C]

We'll just be having a few friends and family over and you don't get much more meat on a goose, so it'll be fairly limited. But what are you up to?

[A]

Well, we're gonna have our. We are. We are doing the thing you just recommended, which is we are taking actually the first couple of days before Christmas, Christmas Eve, through a New Year's Eve off. We'll have best of shows. Our Christmas show is next Sunday. Paris Martineau, Micah Sargent, Steve Gibson and I will do our annual kind of holiday extravaganza.

[C]

Always good seeing Micah on the show. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. So I hope you'll tune in next Sunday for that. And then it's a best of on the 28th. Intelligent machines. We have some of our best interviews, including Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Wolfram. Yeah, it's gonna be a. It's gonna be a really good episode, I think, of the kind of the best interviews from the year. We're doing that across. Across the board. Everybody's going to take some time off. Off. I hope that'll be nice. How about you, Jason? You don't have a company Christmas party to go to this year?

[D]

That's right. That's right. No, probably. So working on, you know, our primary thing at the. At the Deep View is our newsletter. So we're working on some, you know, look back and look ahead stuff that we'll publish over the, you know, the last few weeks because they're pretty quiet, you know, people are not too focused.

[A]

Not a lot of news.

[D]

There's not a lot of tech news or AI news or any.

[A]

This is always a hard time time of year for our shows because there's not a lot that going on. Actually there was a lot this week, weirdly enough. But yeah, often there's not a lot going on, which is why we do the best steps. Well, have a wonderful holiday with your family. Do you have a tree?

[D]

No. So I, so I am. I'm Baha'. I. You know, I'm not Christian, but I have family who is. I'm going to visit in Indiana. Some family and yeah, we'll celebrate with them.

[A]

Is there a.

[C]

Good Lord. Rapid wool?

[A]

Yeah. Indiana.

[D]

Yeah, it's. It's like literally under zero up there, you know, right now.

[A]

Yeah, they're having a polar vortex. So what, is there a. Is there a. You know, usually there is some sort of winter solstice holiday in most faiths. Is there a Baha' I holiday around this time? So.

[D]

So there's not. But in the spring, like right before. So the, the month before the last month of the year, the spring solstice is the first day of the year in Baha' I calendar. And in the.

[A]

Oh, that's a better time to have it than January 1st, actually. That makes sense.

[D]

And, and so, so yeah, so then the last month of the year is a month of fasting, and then the. Right before the fasting is sort of the big. The big holiday to. Before to.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Prepare for the, the fasting season.

[A]

So when I was in high school, my girlfriend was Baha', I, so I.

[D]

Remember you telling me that.

[A]

Yeah, I really, I really, really appreciate it. The faith. It's a beautiful faith. So good. Well, nice. Have a. Have a lovely winter solstice then, I guess.

[D]

Yes. Yes. No, look, it's in the US It's. It's clearly, you know, very cultural too. There's lots of.

[A]

Oh, yeah, you can't get away from it. Absolutely. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah, that's it.

[A]

How about you, Owen? What is your plan besides wearing that crazy jacket to the. All the parties?

[B]

You know, we. We are actually sticking in San Francisco for the holiday and I've got the. The week between Christmas and New Year's. Off and we're gonna kind of do a little staycation, check out SFMoma.

[C]

Oh, nice.

[A]

Is there a special show that you want to see there?

[B]

No, just. We got. We got a membership this year and, you know, I haven't made enough use of it. And there's also, like, you know, every time we go out of town, I look at the calendar, there's like 50 things happening, you know.

[A]

Yeah. You know, San Francisco's really fun. There's. Yeah, there's a lot of cultural stuff. The Museum of Modern Art is great. We often will go up to see shows or go down, I guess, to see shows at sfmoma, you know, and there's. There's the palace of the Legion of Honor and there's Golden Gate park and so many wonderful things, even in the. And of course, we went to the Legion of Decorations. Right, the Legion of Honor.

[C]

Yeah, we went to the Legion of Honor to see the Mane Morisot exhibition and that was absolutely fantastic. Fantastic.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

I had no idea they were so close. But there's so many good museums here, apart from, I have to say, the Science and Technology Museum.

[A]

You don't like Exploratorium?

[C]

No, the Exploratorium is fine. But the Science Museum opposite the de Young.

[A]

I didn't even.

[C]

They're now charging 50 bucks a ticket. Oh, Claude. The albino alligator has just died.

[A]

Just passed. So you didn't even get the alligator.

[C]

So. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's. They do do a very nice thing on Thursday evenings, occasional where they have adult nights where, we know, with bars and that sort of thing. You can go up to the roof and they'll show you Saturn and Jupiter, but for standard visitors, way too expensive.

[A]

Yeah, Yeah. I didn't realize for museum. That's crazy. I know.

[C]

Wow. That's free in the uk, you know.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And then we check your social media profiles to come in.

[A]

So the difference is the government probably subsidizes them in the uk.

[B]

Uk.

[A]

I have a feeling. Not. Yeah, we're not that big on education. That's.

[C]

That's communism.

[B]

Yeah, we. We figured out that the basic membership at SFMOMA is get. You know, is basically same cost as, like going there two or three times in a year.

[A]

That's the idea.

[C]

And that's why we got our membership as well.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Plus your support is supporting a good institution.

[A]

Right, Exactly.

[C]

Well, and they've got a decent cafe as well, so.

[D]

You know.

[A]

They do, do. They do. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, Owen.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

Great to have all three of you and I hope you have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you in the new year. Okay.

[C]

Always. Yep.

[A]

All right, thanks everyone joining us. We really appreciate your support all year long again. Our holiday episode is next week and I'm looking forward to that. There's a lot of special events going on this week too in the club. Find out more by joining the club at Twit TV Club Twit. We do this Week in Tech every Sunday at 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8 in the evening. On the East Coast. It is 2200 UTC, so you can figure out what that is in your time zone. We stream live. That's the only reason I mentioned the live times, because we do stream it as we're doing it right now. We're on live in the discord for our club members. We're also live on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. All right, but you don't have to watch live. That's just, you know, that's if you like participating in the chats and stuff like that after the fact. You can get a copy of the show from our website, Twit TV twit. There's video and audio there. There's a video channel on YouTube dedicated to TWiT. In fact, if you go to YouTube.com TWiT you can see all the shows and all the channels all lined up there and even little tidbits and best of and things like that. And of course you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. In fact, we hope you will. That way you'll get TWIT the minute it's finished so you can have it for your Monday morning commute. Thank you everybody for joining us. I really appreciate it. It's great to see you. We'll see you again next week for our holiday special. Meanwhile, it's my sad and solemn duty to say another Twit is in the can. Amazing. This episode is brought to you by Coda. AI tools are everywhere, but many of them create more work, taking up even more of your time. Most of them don't really give you what you need. Superhuman is the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers everywhere you work. With the intelligence of Grammarly, mail and Coda built in, you can get things done faster and collaborate seamlessly. Finally, AI that works where you work, however you you work. Superhuman gets what you really need. AI that gets you from day one. No learning curve, just simple and easy to use. Superhuman ensures you stand out. No need to repeat what you need, sharing the same context over and over again. It works alongside you, automatically understanding where you're at and proactively offering suggestions. Superhuman cohesively helps you deliver quality work. Superhuman has specialized agents for writing meetings, presentations, and more agents that work together with collaboration in mind. It proactively helps you with every aspect of your workflow and task list. Get AI that works works where you work. Unlock your Superhuman potential. Learn [e-mail] podcast that's superhuman.com podcast.

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