Victoria Song (3:40)

And I feel like the industry is very much going towards. At least some part of the movie is made with technology. It's so.

Leo Laporte (3:51)

It is technology. I mean, however you make it, it's technology. We had visual effects for such a long time, right? Nobody is outraged because something shot in front of a green screen or something like that.

Harper Reed (4:00)

Where's the real art here?

Victoria Song (4:03)

Right?

Leo Laporte (4:04)

Much of the film's dialogue is in Hungarian. And apparently the. And I don't speak Hungarian, but the Hungarian that Brody and Jones speak is very accurate. It's a difficult language to pronounce and they were able to do it. It's a very. By the way, it's a three and a half almost. It's three hours and 20 minutes, very long. There is a mandatory 15 minute intermission in the middle. It's that long. Only cost $10 million to make. It was kind of a low that. For now, it. For a Hollywood film that's a low budget film.

Harper Reed (4:43)

Extremely low. Extremely low.

Leo Laporte (4:45)

It was shot on VistaVision. When they, when they. When the movie came on, I watched it at home. I didn't want to go in the theater. It said VistaVision. I thought, wow, I didn't even know that was still around. I found out though. I watched an interview with a cinematographer from Vanity Fair and He said all VistaVision is. Is 35 millimeter port. You know, film like you would use in your camera, turned on its side so it's wide and. And so the, the normally film cameras, I guess, run up and down. I didn't know this. That makes sense. They've got a spool and it goes through the sprocket like this. They run it this way. The spools are on the side and they run it across. So it's it's still 35 millimeter, but it's wide angle. Um, it's beautiful. It's a gorgeous film with an interest. Really interesting soundtrack. And I don't think that a little bit of AI to make the Hungarian sound better is. Oh, wait a minute. There was also some generative AI used for a sequence at the end of the film. But I think also just to generate a couple of buildings or something like that. Draw architectural essentially assets or so that they would use because they had drawings at the. I don't think it'll spoil it to say at the end is a retrospective of his work as an architect. And they have drawings and they were not drawn by a human, but they were generated.

Victoria Song (6:01)

I mean, I do think there is some. Some line, like the deepfakes in Hollywood are an issue. Like, okay, there's a formula One movie coming out. Brad Pitt stars in it. If we found out that the Brad Pitt we were looking at was actually just a recreation of him, that'd be creepy. Feel like we'd be like, violated as viewers. You'd be like, wait, what the heck? We would feel betrayed. So there is some line, but what you're describing, I don'. I don't think crosses it. And as far as I'm concerned, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Harper Reed (6:28)

You definitely don't wanna. I don't know, like, it's just so.

Brian Wolf (6:31)

Weird because we watch so many things and a lot of us, especially the nerds, like you ask any of us.

Leo Laporte (6:36)

Our favorite movies, we're like Star Trek.

Brian Wolf (6:38)

Star wars, like all kinds of sci fi oriented things.

Harper Reed (6:42)

Tron, even the cgi, like the movie.

Brian Wolf (6:45)

Wouldn'T happen without it.

Leo Laporte (6:46)

So you could do Tron without some sort of special effect. I don't think that's us though.

Brian Wolf (6:51)

And I. I like what Sandra said. The reason why they're mad is because they only spend 10 million and they're nominated. Everybody else's budgets was way higher.

Leo Laporte (6:58)

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

Father Robert (10:10)

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

Leo Laporte (10:20)

Yeah.

Father Robert (10:20)

And I. What was the show that you did before Twit back in the day?

Leo Laporte (10:25)

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

Father Robert (10:30)

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

Leo Laporte (10:56)

Very first show that we did was April 17, 2005. So this is the closest date we could get to that. It was only 34 minutes. Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose and Robert Heron. You can still listen to it if you warmed up. Yeah, yeah. You want to hear just. I could play a little bit of it just to give. Oh, that kind of extreme. This is how weird it sounded. It's very different. We were on Sky. As long as we're catching up, what you up to these days, Robert? Everybody knows Robert Heron as the crazy lab rat who specialized in video. Would come on the show and with his whacked out hair and tell us the latest. Patrick was under the car, I think I used to. You're not on TV though, these days probably. No, not these days. I am working though for extreme tech and pcmag.com and I'd love to.

Father Robert (11:39)

This is back when it was Revenge of the Screensaver.

Leo Laporte (11:41)

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

Father Robert (12:03)

Recording on like little zoom zoom audio recording.

Leo Laporte (12:05)

No, no, that was Skype. That was. That was. That was the only reason we. I realized we could do this. First time we did it was January of 2005 after Mac World Expo. And yes, we were all sitting in a table at a. At a bar, the 21st Amendment Brew Pub. And yeah, it might have been a Zoom. I don't. It was something. Oh, no, no, it was a Morantz Recorders. You knew. Yes, Sam, it was that Morantz Recorder. Solid State reporter. This is like way, way pre Skyposaurus. Yeah. But because somebody called the radio show shortly after that on Skype, I realized, oh, I could do a show with people in different locales. And so those early twits were mostly done on Skype, not with Skype. Source one call.

Brian Wolf (12:49)

When you start like those first shows.

Leo Laporte (12:52)

Had you even expanded out of the.

Harper Reed (12:53)

Attic of the cottage?

Leo Laporte (12:56)

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

Victoria Song (13:13)

Yes.

Jason Calacanis (13:14)

No.

Father Robert (13:14)

Yeah, I watched that one too. Wasn't there a time when you would have people record locally on a little audio recorder and then you try to combine the audio file later? Because I did that. That was just one time. That was so hard.

Leo Laporte (13:27)

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

Brian Wolf (13:39)

And I mean, we sort of do that now. It's gotten easier now with services like streamyard and.

Harper Reed (13:44)

And so on.

Leo Laporte (13:45)

We use Restream. Yeah.

Father Robert (13:47)

You know, they record everybody locally.

Leo Laporte (13:49)

Yeah.

Brian Wolf (13:49)

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

Leo Laporte (13:53)

Much easier.

Father Robert (13:53)

Nowadays we use Zencastr.

Harper Reed (13:56)

Even the Brewpub Twit episode was episode zero.

Leo Laporte (13:59)

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

Harper Reed (14:04)

Right.

Leo Laporte (14:05)

But. And I didn't. It didn't intend it to be a podcaster. Well, I guess it technically was, but really we just have a website.

Harper Reed (14:13)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (14:13)

And I. And because 30, 000 people downloaded it. That's when I said, geez, I wish I could do this more often.

Harper Reed (14:19)

Light bulb.

Leo Laporte (14:20)

Well, the light bulb was when Skype. I realized I could do it more often with Skype because everybody, you know, Kevin was in la. Patrick. I don't remember where I Think he was in San Francisco, but you never know where Patrick's going to be. He's finally settled down a little bit. Alan, do you remember the first time you had.

Harper Reed (14:37)

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

Leo Laporte (15:00)

Oh, that's so like while I was answering. Let me see if you're right.

Harper Reed (15:05)

He searched it.

Leo Laporte (15:05)

He's like, oh yeah, that's what Wirecutter says.

Harper Reed (15:07)

Yeah, I get no spam. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (15:10)

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

Harper Reed (15:23)

The first.

Brian Wolf (15:23)

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

Leo Laporte (15:32)

Yeah.

Brian Wolf (15:32)

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

Leo Laporte (15:35)

Oh, yeah. In Michigan.

Brian Wolf (15:37)

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

Leo Laporte (15:46)

Was it CES or Comdex?

Brian Wolf (15:47)

Ces, it was a ces.

Leo Laporte (15:48)

I remember.

Brian Wolf (15:49)

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

Leo Laporte (16:03)

So I think you were a regular on the radio show, of course, for many, many years. For a long time. Yeah. Now you, we were talking about anthropics, Claude, that's the, the coding engine you like to use. Harper. In fact, you. You turned me on to Claude Code, which is their command line version of that. OpenAI just launched their AI coding engine, Codex in ChatGPT. I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it or not.

Harper Reed (16:28)

I have, I have. I spent a bunch of time with it yesterday. I find it very compelling, but it works different than how I currently work. And I think this is an interesting. This is kind of bringing up one of these things about AI that I think is fascinating is we don't yet know what the user experience looks like. And so each of these companies is taking a swing at a slightly different experience. In this case, OpenAI has done this a couple times with Operator and then with now with Codex, where they have what looks like a computer that you're interfacing, not necessarily via traditional computing interface.

Leo Laporte (17:07)

It is actually. It's a computer in the cloud, I think runs in a sandbox. Virtual computer in the cloud. I love this. What are we coding today? Is the front page prompt.

Brian Wolf (17:19)

It works very well, and excuse me for my ignorance, is this what is called Vibe coding?

Harper Reed (17:26)

Oh, I don't know if we have even time to get into this. This is like. This is like my. This is.

Brian Wolf (17:32)

I.

Harper Reed (17:32)

This is my bread and butter at this moment. I love this. My Vibe coding is all I do. I'm Vibe coding somewhere, not here, but at my house. The computer's Vibe coding itself.

Leo Laporte (17:40)

Doing something right now. And you don't. Right now, you don't have to touch anything.

Harper Reed (17:44)

I just want one of those words like homer. What are they? Vibing. Well, the thing.

Leo Laporte (17:50)

It's better than an intern.

Harper Reed (17:51)

It's so good, Will. I think they call it vibe coding from, like five different perspectives. So I'll talk about the two or three that I think.

Leo Laporte (18:00)

First of all, Andrej Kapathy was the first to use this term. It was my sense that it was coding without actually typing any code you're doing. Use it. You're passing the vibe of what you want onto the AI and the AI is generating the code. Although there are somehow. When Karpathi was talking about it, he implied that it was a qualified, experienced coder who was doing this, not somebody who didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Harper Reed (18:27)

But it turns out that you don't know what you don't have to know.

Leo Laporte (18:29)

What you don't have to.

Harper Reed (18:30)

And I have many friends who have Vibe coded their way into an app, and Vibe coded their way into a bunch of bugs. Vibe coded their way into something that they've launched.

Leo Laporte (18:41)

They've launched. Like an MVP, kind of minimal viable.

Harper Reed (18:44)

Yeah, 100%. I am so happy about this. Basically, what you do is you just sit there in front of a computer and whether you're using codecs, for instance, is a great example. There's a little prompt, like a little box you just type in. I want to make a Expo, which is a react native framework, an Expo app that is a Instagram knockoff, and I want to call it whatever. And I have this really important feature that I think is important for it, and it will just kind of do that, where you don't necessarily. You have relinquished control of all of the individual decisions that a developer or A designer would make in making that.

Leo Laporte (19:21)

Process using watch too, because it spits out the code really fast. I mean, it's in seconds, it's done.

Harper Reed (19:29)

And I find it this liberating experience.

Leo Laporte (19:36)

But Harper, you can look at the code and know if there's problems, you can actually. You have enough experience to look at it and fix it.

Harper Reed (19:44)

Yes. But since we last talked, Leo.

Leo Laporte (19:49)

Harper has written a couple of great blog posts, by the way, on how he does this, which I recommend.

Harper Reed (19:53)

At Harper Blog, we have stopped using IDEs. We don't even look at the code anymore.

Leo Laporte (20:00)

Oh, geez.

Harper Reed (20:01)

And this is really complicated. I was talking to a friend of mine and he was like, how would you do this? Like, he gave me some problem. I was like, you just asked, where.

Leo Laporte (20:06)

Does the code go? You mean you get a binary.

Harper Reed (20:09)

No, no, it's on your computer. It's there. But like, why. Why look at it?

Leo Laporte (20:12)

Why don't you look at it? The code is what I did with generator, I did with Claude code, which was fun, was I had. I work in Emacs with common lisp. I mean, I'm working in a weird, obscure world. And I just said, here's. Here's the code. Fix it. And then I gave it a greenfield problem. I said, write me the code. It actually put it in Emacs for me, which is pretty cool.

Harper Reed (20:37)

I don't go that far. I'm not.

Leo Laporte (20:38)

I know it's crazy.

Harper Reed (20:39)

I'm much younger, so can I just log on to.

Brian Wolf (20:42)

If you were going to.

Harper Reed (20:42)

If you were going to give me.

Brian Wolf (20:43)

A little guide to Vibe coding. I want to write an app. I want to write an app that does.

Leo Laporte (20:52)

I don't know.

Brian Wolf (20:53)

It takes all my. All my thoughts that I. That I put into a voice note.

Harper Reed (20:59)

And publishes them as a blog on somewhere.

Brian Wolf (21:02)

Can I just vibe code that 100%.

Harper Reed (21:07)

Like, it's so ridiculous. This is why I think the Vibe coding has such a. There's such a nuance to. To what it is and what people think about it, because you truly can do that. It probably what I. What I like to think about is at what point are you going to. Or is it going to generate something that is past your ability to easily maintain it. And this happens quite quickly for me. And I've been programming for, you know, 30 years professionally, and what I find is that you get to this point where you're like, well, I've lost the plot. I literally.

Leo Laporte (21:42)

That's a bad thing though, right?

Harper Reed (21:44)

I think it was a bad thing when it cost money to Program computers. Because it used to be that if, you know, Devindra came to me and said, harper, we're building this app. And I said, great. And I said, my daily rate is x thousand dollars. And then I kept messing up five days in a row. I would be fired. And that's kind of what's happening here. Except instead of it being one day, it's like 10 minutes and it messes up five times in a row. But the six times it then is perfect.

Leo Laporte (22:12)

It was $2 to write all of this code, like hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was $2.

Harper Reed (22:19)

And so this is a really complicated issue because I just don't think there's going to be jobs anymore. That's my conclusion. I'm like, okay, therefore there's no more jobs. But what I think is even more complicated is all of these people like me, my peers, all these people I've worked with for the last 20 years in big startup tech that we conceive as tech, we really valued the craft of code. We have our fancy keyboards, we have all of this stuff that is about. This is the best thing that's going to generate the best code with all these tools. Exactly. These methodologies, and you kind of throw them all out and you have someone who's seen a computer for 15 minutes and there's, yeah, I just made an app and it does all this crazy stuff and it's perfect. And you see it and you're like, yeah, that's pretty good. And it's very complicated because it removes the craft. And the best analogy that I've seen for this is we are all farmers and industrial farming is coming for us, and we've built our careers being farmers and we have all these details about farming and someone's just going to come in and replace all of us with industrial farms and we're going to have to. We're going to be relegated to the farmer's market. So you're going to be like, Harper, you're a bespoke artisanal entrepreneur that uses bespoke, artisanal product managers with bespoke artisanal engineers that use their fingers to do everything. And we're going to make something that no one actually cares about.

Leo Laporte (23:41)

It's going to be like, we've seen this straight so many times. I mean, so can I use my North Carolina furniture craftsmen who were making beautiful handmade wood furniture? And now if you buy a sofa, it was made in China, stapled together out of the cheapest wood possible. But if you wanted a Handcrafted. And by the way, I found this out. If you wanted a handcrafted Amish table, you could get one, but it's $15,000 because somebody has to make it by hand. But it still exists. We've seen this before. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Will. He dropped out.

Father Robert (24:20)

He lost Will.

Leo Laporte (24:21)

Oh, he was so mad he hung up. He's so upset. So should we. Isn't this a little dystopian sounding though, Harper?

Harper Reed (24:31)

I mean, I'm confused about this because I've spent the last two weeks, somebody.

Leo Laporte (24:37)

In our Discord chat said that's the most non inspirational speech I've ever heard.

Harper Reed (24:42)

I've been talking to a lot of young people about this. Young engineering grads and young, young undergrads, specifically helping them wrap their head around Vibe coding and kind of how to code with AI. And for what it's worth, I don't ever call it vibe coding because in my perspective, I love programming. Every time I'm programming, I'm kind of Vibe program coding or whatever. I just love it like flow that you get. Like, I love that. I look forward to that. So I don't think it's necessarily. I don't. I think Vibe coding is a way to make something that is very interesting, kind of, it puts it into a negative space, which, you know, whatever. But what I find fascinating about this is I spent all of my career learning things like POS X Unix or qmail or these things that I love that I don't need in my brain. Or as one of my friends said, like, I wish I didn't have to know all of Python. I just don't. I wish I didn't have to have all of it in my brain or one of my favorite tech books, right? The JavaScript, the good parts, like, it's like, that's kind of what this brings us is rather than having to know all of the inactive, the intricacies of Ubuntu or of Red Hat packaging or whatever thing is in your brain, you now just need to know the good parts now.

Leo Laporte (25:58)

Well, that's all you need to know is how to Google, right? Change that whole idea of what is a fact. How do you hold facts? As we were talking about earlier. But this is the process where, where.

Brian Wolf (26:10)

You know, I hate to bring it back to journalism, right? But anybody can write a sort of, you know, re. Rewritten press release of X Company, you know, released X graphics card and here's, you know, the summary of what it does. But to really write like Hunter S. Thompson you know, to really write. Can it do that?

Harper Reed (26:40)

I think, yes. Awkwardly. I don't think, here's my example is I don't think you're going to generate Hunter S. Thompson or a beautiful novel or, or any of these things. But my, my kind of test is always, can I get. Can I make it? Can I make it write a joke that I laugh at? And the answer to that is very much yes. But that does not mean that I would say ChatGPT is a great humorist or a great comedian. That doesn't mean that it can't make a joke that I laugh at. For instance, in the background, we have a whole bunch of sensors they're piped through. I think it's O3 mini or GPT4O mini or something. It takes all the sensor data and then it puts it through a prompt where it basically talks about what's happening in my office. I find this to be hilarious. Most of the time it is very sarcastic. And for instance, one time we came in, it took a picture of us, passed that picture through ChatGPT or, you know, and it said, two balding men are approaching the office. And we're just like, come on, man, what are you, what are you? Come on. Like, leave me alone. So it's like bald here.

Leo Laporte (27:43)

What are you talking about?

Harper Reed (27:43)

Exactly, Exactly. It's a hairstyle, but that kind of. That's the type of thing that's happening. And we laughed. Like, we laughed. But I would never claim in all of whatever that it has a good sense of humor. And I think that the complicated thing here is that, and this is why I'm not in linguistics, the complicated thing is like, I don't think it's thinking necessarily, but it certainly is outputting things that make it seem like it's simulating thought. And humans are fallible and will fall in love with anything. As a friend of mine said, there are people online who have fallen in love with Miss Piggy. Why do we think they wouldn't fall.

Leo Laporte (28:18)

In love with Japan who have married their pillows?

Harper Reed (28:21)

Right?

Leo Laporte (28:21)

It's just human. Ask me. OpenAI does have a command line version of codecs CLI. They've updated that as well. You know, I use a note taking app called Obsidian, which has a ridiculous number of plugins. And one of the things I've thought might be really useful for me, I can't write a Obsidian plugin. It's kind of JavaScript plus, you know, it's a little. It's beyond my ken, but I could certainly vibe code plugins. For myself.

Harper Reed (28:56)

Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (28:57)

And I'm starting to think really how useful that would be writing bash scripts, you know, for your cron jobs. There are a lot of little jobs that you could do that you could easily. You know, they're not going to blow the world up if you use them.

Harper Reed (29:12)

I think this is the thing that is the most interesting for me. A friend of mine just tweeted, you know, I've been vibe coding replacements for various SaaS products that I pay for. I'm up to build equivalent of three for three attempts.

Leo Laporte (29:26)

Wow.

Harper Reed (29:27)

And I think that's kind of where we're faced.

Leo Laporte (29:29)

Interesting.

Harper Reed (29:29)

And what I find fascinating as well is that things are changing so fast that I would fully expect a product to be released where someone says describe the SaaS company that you want or the SaaS product you want. And it just takes care of all of the data storage. We'll just make it for you right there. Oh, you're a landlord of only pigs. Great. You're a farmer that only grows dandelions. Perfect. Here's the product for you. Because you just need the constraints that that problem has and then the AI will generate it for you.

Leo Laporte (30:02)

We have a sponsor, outsystems that did for years, did low code. Right. And now they've added AI assistance so that you can basically instead of their whole pitch is used to be you decide build or buy. Now you just, you know, you buy our system and you build whatever you want. You don't have to buy anything ever again.

Brian Wolf (30:24)

And do you think it makes it easier for startups? Because the paradigm of startups was always you had, you know, one guy with the idea, one guy who had the business insight and then you needed a technical co founder.

Father Robert (30:37)

Right.

Leo Laporte (30:38)

The guy that actually build the thing.

Brian Wolf (30:39)

That you had the insight for. Do you think it replaces the technical co founder?

Harper Reed (30:46)

I think this is now the time of the business guy. They have been waiting on the wings of all the mba.

Leo Laporte (30:53)

My reaction exactly.

Harper Reed (30:55)

They're like sitting back there in every business school. They have their little thing. You're in the little thing they filled out that said looking for a tech co founder and they're just ripping it up and being like, finally it's our.

Leo Laporte (31:07)

Time, don't need it to go through their sweater vests. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I hate to interrupt, especially Harper Reed. He is fascinating but we have an ad for our special year end episode and we're very grateful to Zscaler. We've been talking to you about Zscaler for the whole year. Our sponsor for the Holiday episode of this Week in Tech. You know one of the things that Zscaler does that's so brilliant is it solves a problem businesses have with AI. The potential rewards of AI are fantastic, right? Every business has to look at whether they can use AI to improve efficiencies, to streamline production, to write code. But there's also risks, the loss of sensitive data. And of course bad guys are using AI against us, creating amazing phishing emails that are indistinguishable from the real thing and attacks malware attacks at scale at a speed that nobody's seen before. Generative AI is, is helping bad guys as much as it's helping businesses these days. So there are some real AI threats, but Zscaler can solve that problem. You know there are 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications by users inadvertently. ChatGPT and Microsoft Co Pilot this year saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. It's easy to do by accident, but there is a solution, a modern approach. It's Zscaler's Zero Trust plus AI. It does really a whole lot of things of course, because Zscaler is a zero trust security solution. It removes your attacks surface, it secures your data. But it also works with AI to safeguard your use of public and private AI. It protects you against those crazy AI powered phishing attacks. It protects you against ransomware. Nothing does better than Zero trust against ransomware. You don't have to trust me. Ask Siva. He's the director of security and infrastructure at zwora. He uses zscaler and he has this to say about it.

Brian Wolf (33:11)

AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security.

Leo Laporte (33:18)

The benefit of zscalet with ZIA rolled out for a US right now is.

Brian Wolf (33:22)

Giving us the insights of how our.

Leo Laporte (33:24)

Employees are using various gen AI tools.

Brian Wolf (33:27)

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.

Leo Laporte (33:40)

With Zero Trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition, you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more@Zscaler.com Security that's Zscaler.com Security now back to the show. One of our biggest topics of this year in AI, of course there are a lot, but one of the real concerns people have is job loss. And of course we had a real expert on the show to talk about this. Jason Calacanis and our Twit panel talking about AI watch.

Jason Calacanis (34:20)

For much of my career, you know, in, in as an adult, the last 35 years or so in tech we had. I was kind of indoctrinated into the tech's going to happen, so we might as well build it and society will figure out a way. It's this inevitability of tech. Right. So we just might as well accelerate into it and everybody's going to benefit.

Leo Laporte (34:42)

At least in the tech industry. That's still the general belief, like I would say that you could try to stop it. But why it's going to happen whether you want to or not.

Harper Reed (34:51)

Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (34:51)

And I was at a conference this week and I've been, you know, since I'm on the inside now as an investor. I started as a journalist, entrepreneur and then became an investor. So I went from, you know, an outsider trying to figure out what was going on inside the room to being inside the room where they make the decisions of, you know, who to give a check to and what to bet on. And that starts the whole process of building this technology. So what I realize is I think the job displacement this time will be different. Everybody tries to make an analogy towards the Industrial Revolution and stopping farming and only 1% of people work in agriculture today. But when I started doing the back of the envelope math and I started looking at how quick this displacement is happening, I've come to the conclusion that in the next 10 years we're going to see serious job displacement. And we were talking about this prior to ChatGPT being lost. And you might remember Sam Altman doing when he was at Y Combinator, a study on universal basic income that he funded. And everybody talked about it constantly, very publicly. And the last year that's kind of.

Leo Laporte (35:49)

Been the antidote to job losses. Oh, well, don't worry because there's going to be so much surplus thanks to technology that we'll be able to pay everybody a universal basic income.

Harper Reed (35:59)

Yes.

Jason Calacanis (35:59)

There's really like two or three different solutions to the job destruction problem. We can get into that.

Leo Laporte (36:05)

It always, it always seemed to me kind of a little hand wavy because where's all that money going to come from?

Father Robert (36:11)

Yeah, it's extremely hand wavy.

Leo Laporte (36:13)

Who's paying for this? Ubi Is it the federal government?

Jason Calacanis (36:16)

I mean, we have a, we have UBI today in the form of a lot of different programs we have.

Leo Laporte (36:22)

So yeah, yeah.

Jason Calacanis (36:23)

If you took all the entitlements together and you just throw people a check and there's people who have, you Know, theorized, just doing this.

Leo Laporte (36:30)

But how big a check would it be?

Jason Calacanis (36:32)

You know, we actually could do the math. I think it'd probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom of the economy.

Leo Laporte (36:38)

So you can't even pay rent in Petaluma.

Brian Wolf (36:42)

It would be like, let alone eating.

Jason Calacanis (36:43)

It would be like unemployment or food stamps and these kind of.

Leo Laporte (36:46)

Yeah, it would be subsistence.

Jason Calacanis (36:48)

So, you know, the question is, will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost? Right. So the typing pool went away, the mail room went away, photocopy room went away. You know, we've watched all these jobs go away over time. This time, I just think we have to be little more thoughtful about it because, you know, today, Tesla launched their Austin self driving. I got to drive last week in one of those prototypes.

Leo Laporte (37:11)

Oh, wow. Yeah. And immediately, by the way, the state of Texas passed a law saying you got to have a permit to do that. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (37:18)

So people are.

Leo Laporte (37:18)

Yeah. But obviously aimed at Elon. I mean. I mean, Elon does have a safety driver still, which lets him off the hook for a while. But.

Jason Calacanis (37:25)

Yeah, I think they have a safety operator. Interesting. It's in the passenger side, but.

Leo Laporte (37:29)

Oh, he's not in front of the wheel.

Jason Calacanis (37:30)

Not in front of the wheel.

Leo Laporte (37:31)

But this is stop encouraging. It's.

Jason Calacanis (37:34)

It's kind of like right in between what Waymo did, there's a big stop button and a pullover button on the dashboard. So if something happens and they're going only low speed in a small area. And then I was talking to Zipline.

Leo Laporte (37:46)

Which is before you. Before you move on. How was that ride? Was it. I know you're friends with Elon. Yeah. Are you still buddies? Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (37:53)

Oh, yeah. Still best friends.

Leo Laporte (37:54)

Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (37:55)

I have the latest hardware for Tesla Juniper model. Yeah. And I put a couple hundred miles on it doing self driving. I think the. The cyber cabs, the robo taxis, have a little bit of a better version of that. It feels a little more aggressive and confident, I still think. Well, yeah, and I.

Leo Laporte (38:15)

It was. It was doing rolling stops, was doing California stops for a while. And somebody said, well, that's because Elon trained it and that's how he drives.

Jason Calacanis (38:22)

Well, it is a neural net. That's how it drives. So it's studying humans. I. I do think that this technology is here and it works. It should just be very regulated and you should have to have a safety driver for the first 10,000 miles or 10,000 rides, maybe a million some.

Leo Laporte (38:39)

So GM gave up on cruise and basically Dissolved the division. Google's going ahead with Waymo big time. There's. You can't go around San Francisco without seeing a thousand Waymos, Waymo, every other car.

Jason Calacanis (38:50)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (38:52)

Elon wants to get into this business, but he's not alone. This is the, the, one of the hot businesses right now is robo tax.

Jason Calacanis (38:59)

There'll be many winners. Volkswagen has a very competitive product. There's coming to pony AI, there's we ride.

Leo Laporte (39:05)

So Amazon has Zoox.

Jason Calacanis (39:07)

Zoox, yeah. There are in the United States.

Leo Laporte (39:13)

Oh well, we'll never know what we'll have in the United States. Jason, one of the things when you.

Father Robert (39:20)

Work outside these technologies are taking the low hanging fruits of the gig economy, which is one of the future. It's sad and I know people have alluded this before, but essentially the key to driving this with capitalism is that it's replacing the most expensive and least efficient part of the capitalist system, which is the people, which sounds great. And it will increase your profits short term until there's no one who can afford to buy your goods and services.

Leo Laporte (39:46)

Yeah, the people are now out of work. I think that I remember reading an estimate, there was something, I think 14 million truck drivers in the United States. And of course trucks are one of the very first things that will go autonomous.

Father Robert (39:58)

Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (40:01)

So in his article we'll get back to it when Jason comes back. But he talks about three solutions. The UBI new job creation, which is often the response to industrial disruption or technological disruption. It was in the industrial era, people stopped making buggy whips but found. Oh, it says his laptop overheated in the sun.

Father Robert (40:25)

Welcome to Los Angeles.

Leo Laporte (40:30)

And then his third solution, he says his favorite is AI vacation, which surprises me coming from Jason. I will have to ask him about this. He's also talking about Andy Jassy at Amazon saying get ready because we're going to replace a lot of executives.

Father Robert (40:48)

Okay, so a couple of trends that I've seen at these conferences that I've been doing. First, everyone loves to talk about AI, but almost everyone doesn't think that their job can be done by AI, which.

Leo Laporte (40:59)

Is you couldn't have an AI podcaster, could you? Right.

Father Robert (41:02)

You know, and it's always like, no.

Leo Laporte (41:05)

I think Google already does. Yeah, yeah.

Father Robert (41:08)

But, but one of the other issues has also been that it, they, they're thinking of this as an overlay on top of the existing system. We can fix it with X, Y and Z, universal basic income, et cetera, et cetera. Social services increase. But what we're going to have with the coming of AI, as it gets perfected, it's not just the changing of the economic structure of the society, it's going to change society itself. We could actually see the reversal of what we saw starting with the industrial revolution where population centers rushed to the cities. If we're all on UBI and if most of those repetitive jobs are now being done by AI, there's no reason to stay in expensive city centers. So what happens when your population disperses? Well, it changes the way that people relate to one another. It changes the way that communities are built, it changes the way that demographics are handled. You start seeing balkanization of communities because why not live with the people that you like if you no longer have to live in big cities? So these are all the concerns that are being brought up right now in the Vatican just a couple of yards away. There are high level discussions about who do we bring in to have these conversations. Not just, just universal basic income, not just economists, but you have to bring in sociologists, you have to bring in psychologists, you have to bring in experts in AI. It's basically going to touch every part of every human society across the planet.

Victoria Song (42:31)

I just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past. You could say that Amazon and Amazon Warehouses have created as many jobs as Amazon took away, but I don't think that people working in Amazon fulfillment centers is a sustainable job and.

Leo Laporte (42:59)

Well good, let the robots have that one. In fact, Amazon's moving rapidly in that direction.

Victoria Song (43:03)

I mean, yeah, I mean, but I mean I just, I think, I mean even like as in Jason's article, it says for 24 hours a day these $10,000 robots will get the done without bathroom breaks or threatening a union drive. They cost less than $1 an hour. And like yeah, that's like this is what the tech companies want because you can abuse robots in a way that you can't get away with abusing humans.

Jason Calacanis (43:28)

Yeah, humans have. Sorry about that. My laptop over.

Leo Laporte (43:33)

He's in the shade now.

Jason Calacanis (43:34)

I'm in the sun in the shade. You know you're. If everybody's going to have to have radical self reliance. Amanda, you. This idea that like the corporation is there for you and you're going to be corporate person for X number of years, that's gone and you know, moving.

Leo Laporte (43:50)

In that direction for a while.

Jason Calacanis (43:51)

And that's where we started. Right. Like you, you. There was no concept that the corporation would be with you for your entire.

Leo Laporte (43:56)

Well there was feudalism I guess. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (43:58)

And, but now, you know, self reliance is going to be what it's all about and these are going to be complicated issues. Andy Jassy wrote a piece this week and when a CEO writes a manifesto and publishes it to everybody, you know, in the company and then publishes it publicly before it gets leaked to Amanda and TechCrunch, you know, it's important. And he goes through this and there's about two dozen examples of AI and what they're working on. And in that story, he, he, he mentions towards the end that there will be a different footprint of the company. And you know, in my piece that I wrote on my substack, I, I explained and I haven't written a piece in a long time, years. But I felt like I needed to bring this up because to your point, Amanda, the tech industry, we just build the most efficient companies with the highest profits that lower the prices for consumers. That's called capitalism. And you know, it's the, the best system in the world for creating abundance, but it's the most imperfect one. It's just the best one we figured out so far. And you know, when he writes a story like that on the Amazon website, I think this is a way of him preparing investors for higher profits and employees for less jobs. And if this is a high and low situation, Leo, you know, you are seeing it in white collar jobs, doing chores. So if you were at a company and your job consisted of chores, which is anything other than the core product. So on a podcast there's somebody who's, you know, the host and they edit it, that's like the core product, but everybody around it, you know, if there's an accountant, a lawyer, an operations person, most of those jobs which are, would be defined as chores, things necessary to produce the main thing, those are all going away and so, and they're going to go away.

Leo Laporte (45:47)

Radical independence or self sufficiency doesn't answer the question of, but how am I going to pay the rent and make a living. I agree. You know, a lot of people do jobs they hate, they don't like that are demeaning. There, there isn't a lot of dignity and a lot of jobs, but at the same time, people need to eat.

Jason Calacanis (46:10)

Yeah, this is my big concern. I think we, there's a number of people in the tech industry who have hit peak employment. In other words, their job at Google or Amazon that they had for $300,000 a year or something amazing. Like they may not be able to find that job as a middle manager and if you look at companies like Uber, Google, Microsoft, they have less employees now than they did three or four years ago and they're making twice as much money.

Leo Laporte (46:35)

That's the other side of this. And I think the issue might end up being all of this really looks like it's not to make society better, but to enrich a small number of people, the executives, the CEOs, the investors. And it's just going to drive incoming inequality crazy. And I don't think that that's a sustainable way for a society. It's not to be run.

Father Robert (47:03)

It's not.

Leo Laporte (47:04)

Every time we've seen that in the past there's been a guillotine involved.

Father Robert (47:09)

Well, the thing is when you hear tech execs talking about radical self reliance and I understand that, I understand that need, the problem is they think that only applies to the people. If we move into what looks to be the final destination of AI, corporations will need radical self reliance in the sense that they will no longer be able to judge the profitability quarter to quarter on as the success metric for their companies. If you no longer have the same massive pool of consumers to consume your products and goods, it no longer becomes whether or not you're providing services that people want. It's do you provide services for the good of that society? It changes the rules entirely and they're not looking at that part.

Leo Laporte (47:52)

I think they should also be worried about a vast and growing underclass that is not happy.

Jason Calacanis (47:57)

Precisely.

Victoria Song (47:59)

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Victoria Song (48:08)

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Leo Laporte (48:57)

This Apple event on Tuesday, or I guess it was Wednesday. We well no, it was Tuesday.

Harper Reed (49:03)

It was Tuesday.

Leo Laporte (49:04)

Had nothing of surprise, right? I mean everything that they announced had already been leaked, which is kind of unusual for Apple. There Was no one more thing, no surprises or were there not everything?

Harper Reed (49:13)

I mean there were a lot of rumors that were wrong too.

Leo Laporte (49:16)

Right.

Harper Reed (49:17)

A lot of stuff about the AirPods, stuff about AirPods that weren't leaked. You know, there were certainly a number of things that were either leaked wrong and none of that, you know, you're never going to see Bloomberg's, you know, go on and say, by the way, we were wrong about seven out of the 28 things that we had here. You know, they're never going to do that.

Leo Laporte (49:35)

Well, Mark Gurman always says, and I think it's, some of it's actually legit is these are pre announced products and Apple often will pull a product before it it's announced. Like they'll change their mind on it.

Harper Reed (49:47)

That's true.

Leo Laporte (49:48)

And also sometimes, for instance, infrared cameras supposedly might be in the AirPods. Obviously you're not going to pull that because you have to be. They've been making them for months. So whatever features are in the AirPods, the new AirPod Pros are obviously were kind of locked in months ago.

Harper Reed (50:06)

The reason to have the event though, we hear lots of rumors, but the rumors don't put it in context for why are they doing it? What's the purpose that they think these features could have? And so it's like having a collection of parts of this to make a computer, but it doesn't run anything, right. It doesn't do anything until you actually put it together. You know, the event is where they put it together and they tell us like this is why we're doing it. This is who we're aiming this for. This is why we think it'll make a difference.

Leo Laporte (50:36)

There's another word for that that's called spin.

Harper Reed (50:40)

Well, it's all that storytelling too.

Leo Laporte (50:42)

Yeah, Storytelling, marketing, it's all roughly the same idea, which is here's a set of features, here's a set of facts.

Harper Reed (50:48)

Facts.

Leo Laporte (50:48)

Let us tell you, let us shape what that means. And to some degree that that's what the briefings are too is to, to kind of give you an idea of where Apple, what Apple's thinking is about all this. Go ahead, Dan.

Brian Wolf (51:00)

Oh, I, I think it's exactly that. And Jason, hit the keyword. It is context. And saying who this product is intended for and that storytelling element is, is pretty important. And you know, earned media is even for Apple, they need earned media.

Leo Laporte (51:15)

What we're doing right now earns them media.

Brian Wolf (51:17)

Every review, every shut out their competition and earn them millions of dollars of media.

Leo Laporte (51:25)

All right? They otherwise would have to buy. So I know that Victoria is. I know you're somewhat restrained, but you can talk about the event, right? And you can. In fact, you live blogged it on. On the Verge.

Victoria Song (51:39)

I did. I did do. I did have feelings. And I blogged while it was happening.

Leo Laporte (51:45)

It was you and Allison Johnson and Jacob Castronakis were. Were there.

Victoria Song (51:50)

Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird event, I'll say. Just because, you know, I think going in, you can suss what the thesis of the event will be. And this year it was a little hard to figure out what that was. And then when we got there and we were sitting down in the theater, it became pretty clear that the thesis was design.

Leo Laporte (52:10)

Design. They even showed a video at the beginning celebrating, you know, the click wheel and Apple's, you know, heritage of design.

Harper Reed (52:17)

This.

Leo Laporte (52:17)

What is it, six years since Jony. I have left the company. Company. They're back on design.

Victoria Song (52:22)

I. I think at one point in the Live blog, I. I couldn't, you know, promote alcoholism, but I kind of wanted to say drink if. Drink if you hear the word design again because it was just brought up so often. You know, you saw it when they were talking about the iPhone, air, just everything that went into it and you know, the floofy, you know, interstitial movie stuff. And then, you know, they talked about liquid glass. And I'm of the opinion it's liquid ass. I'm not a liquid glass fan.

Leo Laporte (52:56)

I haven't. Believe it or not, I haven't heard that yet. Wow, that's somebody who hates just.

Victoria Song (53:04)

It just makes. It's fine. Except in certain situations. You know, I've been using the beta for the last couple of months. There. There are just situations where it becomes illegible because of how.

Leo Laporte (53:16)

Right.

Victoria Song (53:17)

How the transparency is. I find it strains my eyes over a long period of use. Other people are like, oh, maybe you should get your eyes checked. Listen, I've been very upfront that I have garbage eyeballs and that, you know, I can't use dark mode because that strains my eyes over a long period of time. I'm stuck with light mode, even though dark mode is much cooler looking. I'm sure that a lot of people find the transparency effect really cool. I have a harder time reading and I get annoyed. So I'm.

Leo Laporte (53:48)

There's absolutely no question it reduces accessibility. And the good news is there is a switch. You can turn it off. I agree with you. I don't think I have garbage eyeballs, but I agree with you. It does not enhance legibility. Let's put it that way. It's sizzle. More sizzle than steak.

Victoria Song (54:06)

Yeah, yeah. And it feels like a lot of the whole thing was like orange.

Harper Reed (54:09)

Orange.

Victoria Song (54:10)

It's orange. So, you know, we're talking about design that way.

Leo Laporte (54:13)

I like your strawberry sweater, but it's orange.

Victoria Song (54:17)

Yes. So I'm not an orange lover, but every once in a while there'll be something that's orange that I will accept. And you know, with the leaks for the iPhone, Pro Max or the pro series, I was looking at the orange and the leaks and I was like, oh, no, it's looking like a doo doo brown kind of orange.

Leo Laporte (54:35)

Yeah, yeah. We didn't know what the orange was. People were saying, oh, no, that's going to be copper. It's going to be more muted. Because Apple's not traditionally a bright color. Certainly not in the pro devices.

Victoria Song (54:44)

It's very not.

Leo Laporte (54:46)

It's very orange.

Victoria Song (54:47)

It's extremely orange. It's a pumpkin spice orange. It's not a strabe orange.

Leo Laporte (54:51)

Oh, please don't say it's pumpkin spice. Oh, no. By the way, I ordered orange. I even have an orange case. I am ready. I am going all orange. I can't wait.

Victoria Song (55:00)

Autumnal orange. So like a very nice deep orange.

Leo Laporte (55:04)

It's pretty.

Victoria Song (55:05)

It's not like biohazard.

Leo Laporte (55:06)

Not pumpkin spice. Just pumpkin. Pumpkin.

Victoria Song (55:08)

It's. It's pumpkin orange. It's not biohazard orange. It's not gonna like burn your eyeballs out. But it seemed pretty divisive online.

Harper Reed (55:17)

Orange.

Victoria Song (55:19)

Sure.

Leo Laporte (55:21)

Sorry, sorry, sorry. You have an orange chair. You must like orange.

Harper Reed (55:25)

The orange sweater, like we've got all.

Leo Laporte (55:27)

Kinds of like, where's your orange? Yeah.

Harper Reed (55:29)

Dan's on your embargo too. You know that's a hint.

Leo Laporte (55:33)

You know that's right.

Harper Reed (55:34)

Chair is a hint.

Leo Laporte (55:34)

Easter egg legs. So go ahead.

Harper Reed (55:37)

Sorry.

Leo Laporte (55:38)

The event, usually we don't see what happens at the Apple campus. There was outside by the Rainbow stage. Or was it inside?

Victoria Song (55:48)

It was inside the space.

Leo Laporte (55:50)

Were you there too, Jason?

Harper Reed (55:51)

I was, yeah.

Leo Laporte (55:52)

Okay.

Victoria Song (55:52)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (55:53)

Dan, were you there? No, no, I'm. I mean, I write for Jason every.

Brian Wolf (55:57)

Two months, but I haven't been a.

Leo Laporte (55:58)

Journalist for a minute. I've never been a journalist. So there you go. So it was out inside the Steve Job theater.

Victoria Song (56:08)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (56:08)

Oh, okay. That's nice.

Jason Calacanis (56:10)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (56:12)

Tim Cook.

Harper Reed (56:12)

To the campus.

Leo Laporte (56:14)

It's before you go in. Right.

Harper Reed (56:16)

They don't let us too close to the. To the circle. Right.

Jason Calacanis (56:20)

Little bit.

Leo Laporte (56:22)

Well, did you get the golf cart treatment? Cuz Victoria got the golf Cart.

Harper Reed (56:25)

I. I did get the golf cart.

Leo Laporte (56:27)

Do you have music on your golf cart?

Harper Reed (56:29)

No, I didn't have any music on.

Victoria Song (56:30)

And I only had music in the golf cart at Dub Dub. I didn't have any music this time. I feel like Dub Dub gets the fancier golf cart carts. This could just be my memory playing tricks. But I'm pretty sure when we were on the golf carts at Dub Dub, I was like, ooh, this is.

Harper Reed (56:44)

Yeah. And I think there are speakers around the. Around the actual spaceship. There are speakers like Disneyland.

Leo Laporte (56:52)

There's speakers in the bushes.

Harper Reed (56:54)

There are speakers in the bushes. For sure.

Leo Laporte (56:56)

Hysterical.

Victoria Song (56:56)

For sure.

Harper Reed (56:57)

Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (56:58)

So okay, you're sitting here's. I have some of your pictures. Victoria, you're sitting in the beautiful Steve Jobs theater with. I've got to say this, the odd dropping logo of the apple looked like it was pretty hot, which is not what you want in a phone. But I guess they wanted to tout the vapor cooling. I don't know why they did that.

Victoria Song (57:19)

Honestly, I didn't know what was awe dropping about the event because usually, you know, the fans go and they think about what does the tagline of the event mean? And sometimes it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes like the time flies event spring forward, you can kind of go, ah, see it. I don't really know what the odd dropping was because I was like, why not just.

Leo Laporte (57:41)

I was under odd.

Harper Reed (57:45)

Yeah, marketing definitely came up with that one. It was like this is like the. The proper title would been.

Jason Calacanis (57:50)

It would have been like a little.

Harper Reed (57:52)

Bit more than incremental. You know, would have been probably.

Jason Calacanis (57:56)

But.

Harper Reed (57:58)

They'Re never going to use that. That's why they don't hire me to do their marketing.

Leo Laporte (58:01)

But next year is supposed to be the little bit more. More than just.

Brian Wolf (58:05)

Or is it in two years next year?

Leo Laporte (58:06)

Well, there's going to be, we think a folding phone and we'll get to the slim phone because I think the air is kind of a pre. It's like the John the Baptist to the Jesus phone. And then. Excuse me, excuse the. I apologize the heresy. And then. And then the year after will be even more odd dropping because that'll be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. And so, yeah, completely invisible.

Harper Reed (58:30)

Like you won't even see it. Like you just flip.

Victoria Song (58:32)

Float.

Leo Laporte (58:32)

It'll literally float. This one didn't float. That's.

Brian Wolf (58:35)

You just give Apple a thousand dollars.

Leo Laporte (58:37)

So, Victoria, there were a lot of influencers at the event. Yes, this was. Apple's gotten more and more focused on influencers over reporters. I would guess.

Victoria Song (58:47)

Oh, yes, there was. So there's the annual walk down the. The spiral staircase. You know, the reporters generally get there early. There's a little light snacks around because you were going to be running around to get a hands on right after this thing.

Leo Laporte (59:02)

And you know, because you pull out that little spiral bound reporter's notebook. Right. And you. And a pen or pencil behind your ear and you lift them up.

Victoria Song (59:10)

Yeah, I'm pretty analog. So I do have those thing. I do have like.

Leo Laporte (59:15)

Good on you, good on you.

Victoria Song (59:18)

But you know, usually when I first started going to these events maybe four or five years ago, I don't remember, they all blur together. But you know, you'd go down, it was pretty brisk because everyone's like, I need to get my seat. I need to be well positioned for the live blog. I need to get the perfect angle for the photo.

Leo Laporte (59:33)

Are the seats reserved or.

Victoria Song (59:35)

No, it's a free call.

Leo Laporte (59:36)

It's like Southwest Airlines. You have to.

Victoria Song (59:38)

Yeah, that's right. First come, first serve. So, you know, you have some reporters who are just like hawks. They know they have like a sixth sense of like when the descent is going to begin. And so they kind of hang around the staircases.

Leo Laporte (59:51)

Oh, so there's. The door is open. Are there velvet ropes? How do they just.

Victoria Song (59:57)

I'm never at the front because my priority is getting to the hands on. So I sit at the back on purpose. I'm not trying to get smart.

Leo Laporte (60:05)

You want to get it same. See, just like Southwest, you. You want to sit up close to the exit so you can be off the plane.

Victoria Song (60:12)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (60:12)

Quick.

Victoria Song (60:12)

Got it. But you know, with each subsequent year that I've been going, there's more and more selfie sticks being held up.

Leo Laporte (60:20)

And I'm here in a steam job theater. Yeah.

Victoria Song (60:24)

Because everyone's gonna be like, come with me while I go to the iPhone launch event. Here we are walking down the thing and you can see them doing the. Making the content as you go painstakingly slow down this spiral staircase and you're just like, oh my God.

Leo Laporte (60:39)

Let me just said there was somebody dancing.

Victoria Song (60:42)

There was an influencer. She, you know, was just kind of doing a thing where she had her. I was just watching her fascinated because she had her phone and she was just going like. And she's dancing to this like invisible music that I know she's gonna edit.

Leo Laporte (60:57)

She's gonna edit or whatnot.

Victoria Song (60:59)

And she just did a whole thing getting the shot. I was watching her and I was like, oh, I'm just here trying to get my wi fi on my laptop. You're doing a whole production over there. And then in the hands on. She was doing the same kind of thing. And I'm sure that's just for her audience and to. To make that sort of content. But it's interesting to see these events that were pretty much geared towards media to start discourse in the history of tech journalism, as far as I've had a career kind of getting get co opted. Adam. I don't know if co opted is the right word, but just to see influencers have a bigger seat at the table and in many cases get prioritized was really interesting. I think the Made by Google event about a month ago was like a really. That was a really interesting.

Leo Laporte (61:47)

The Jimmy Fallon change.

Victoria Song (61:48)

The Jimmy. Yeah, I was at that event as well, in the front row and I was just like, what is happening?

Leo Laporte (61:54)

This is terrible.

Victoria Song (61:54)

I feel like I'm in an episode of WandaVision and I just bought like, something is uncanny and something is wrong. And it's because that event was not for me. It was not for the nerds. It was not for the pixel gadget lovers. It was for an audience that was different.

Brian Wolf (62:11)

Yeah, I would argue that was maybe not for. That was produced by people who did not think about who this is for.

Leo Laporte (62:18)

It was for nobody.

Brian Wolf (62:19)

Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (62:20)

And you know, somebody different.

Victoria Song (62:22)

You know, I said this some Google people and it was. Was for someone different. And I went, who? And they went just different.

Brian Wolf (62:29)

So rug emoji.

Leo Laporte (62:31)

They're trying to reach the normies. They don't want to say normies because that's insulting, but that's what they're trying to do is reach normies.

Victoria Song (62:37)

Yeah, but like Apple, I think Jimmy Fallon.

Leo Laporte (62:40)

No, yeah, right. I think mistake.

Brian Wolf (62:45)

I said this during the pre show and I'll just repeat it here for.

Leo Laporte (62:47)

The larger audience, but Vic's reporting guided.

Brian Wolf (62:50)

Me through and Jason's as well, but guided me through especially the IoT portions of this event, in large part because.

Leo Laporte (62:57)

Her reporting is authentic and it's honest.

Brian Wolf (63:00)

And YouTube was loaded with those ridiculous influencers. Some are fantastic. Some are just reading the press release. In fact, the vast majority of YouTubers.

Leo Laporte (63:11)

I saw were just reading off a press release.

Brian Wolf (63:13)

It was very difficult to tell the. To have insights into the event and the products and to say, you know, what Jason said a few moments ago, the context, to put this into context.

Leo Laporte (63:25)

Who are these products for?

Brian Wolf (63:26)

What story is being told? Is this something that is amazing or is this like Victoria in your reporting? Is this within the context of IoT or health or something that is maybe very good for you but not like.

Leo Laporte (63:43)

Jaw dropping, awe dropping. As somebody in our chat room said it was gnaw dropping, gnaw dropping.

Victoria Song (63:52)

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Leo Laporte (64:15)

So good, so good, so good.

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Harper Reed (64:28)

How did I not know Rack has Adidas?

Leo Laporte (64:30)

There's always something new.

Victoria Song (64:31)

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Leo Laporte (65:14)

Hey, don't let me interrupt. I know we're having a blast here reliving 2025, but I thought this would be a good time to mention something we do every year around this time that's very important to us and to our ad sales. It's our Twit Survey. We do it because we don't really and no podcast does know anything about you. That's, I think, a good thing. We respect your privacy, but we also would like to know a little bit about you to the degree you're willing to help us out. Just some basic information that helps us go to advertisers and say things like, well, 80% of our audience is it decision makers, that kind of thing. That's why we do this annual survey should only take a few minutes of your time. As I said, it is one of the ways you can contribute to keeping Twit on the air. If you would like to before too long in the next couple of weeks, do it now while you're watching, go to TWiT TV Survey 26. It's our annual 2026 TWiT listener and viewer survey. It's very important to us, and I thank you. I really appreciate it. And, of course, if you don't want to do it or there's questions you don't want to answer, that's fine, too. But anyway, you can help us out. We appreciate it. All right, now back to the show.

Victoria Song (66:27)

Do you have, like, five minutes?

Jason Calacanis (66:30)

Okay.

Victoria Song (66:31)

Can you please come on to the show and tell Leo about the computer that you built from scratch and just. It's. It'll be worth it, I promise. Come here. Just.

Leo Laporte (66:38)

You gotta give him headphones or something, though.

Victoria Song (66:40)

No, he's just gonna sit down. I'll sit next to him here.

Leo Laporte (66:42)

Can you hear what's going on?

Victoria Song (66:43)

Yeah, yeah. Just start from the explain, like, the Tour de France thing, and then.

Leo Laporte (66:48)

Hey, Brian. First of all, great to meet you finally after all this time.

Brian Wolf (66:53)

No, no. Big fan.

Jason Calacanis (66:55)

Big fan.

Brian Wolf (66:55)

This is a kind of. I'm a little excited.

Leo Laporte (66:57)

Oh, that's great. Well, we got two questions for you. But first of all, you just built a computer.

Victoria Song (67:03)

We're talking about privacy, and we're talking about privacy and how lots of regulations are on the books trying to ban kids from, like, age, but you built something that circumvents everything.

Leo Laporte (67:15)

And also relevant to the point you have a teenage daughter, so you are also parents.

Brian Wolf (67:20)

What happened was Amy wanted to watch the Tour de France, and she didn't like the American commentators, so we kept. So we had paid for all the legal access to it and everything else, but you got the American version of it. And so I took it upon myself to figure out if I could get her the European version. And so, relatively straightforward setup. Put in a vpn, figured it out, got ourselves an account over in England, and then proceeded to get it to Stream, which was a small technical problem, but solvable. But that got me thinking. Could I make a laptop that was completely disassociated to myself?

Leo Laporte (68:05)

Oh, interesting.

Brian Wolf (68:07)

So could I create a laptop that had no back connection to me? And that started a process. Actually, this was my experiment of using ChatGPT to see, you know, I would use it as kind of a planner and whatnot. I learned that ChatGPT makes many, many mistakes, very confidently.

Harper Reed (68:26)

Yes.

Brian Wolf (68:27)

And so there was a lot of debugging that. But basically, I figured out how to set up a laptop from scratch. Now, I didn't want to go into.

Leo Laporte (68:36)

So if you're using Windows, you gotta use a Microsoft account, which immediately identifies you.

Brian Wolf (68:41)

It turns out you don't.

Leo Laporte (68:42)

You can't. There are ways around that.

Brian Wolf (68:44)

A trial account so anyway, through a long process of back and forth and I wasn't going for nation state security.

Victoria Song (68:49)

The insane things that you did, though, because that's.

Leo Laporte (68:52)

So one of the problems is Amy's coaching you.

Brian Wolf (68:55)

Well, she's right, because one of the problems is getting the VPN set up. You have to buy access to the vpn. So how do you do that?

Leo Laporte (69:03)

Right. It turns out there are some that take crypto.

Brian Wolf (69:06)

I think some take crypto. I wasn't ready to tackle the crypto beast. That's not something I'm familiar with. And I didn't want to take it on.

Leo Laporte (69:12)

Right.

Brian Wolf (69:13)

But it turns out a company called Mulvad will allow you to buy prepaid Mulvad cards anonymously through. I got mine through Best Buy and you just walk in.

Leo Laporte (69:26)

So you go to Best Buy, you buy a card and you don't want to. You have to buy a cash. You go looking down, no pictures.

Brian Wolf (69:33)

No, no, no pictures. And you go in and you get your Mulvad VPN and you pay cash for it because.

Leo Laporte (69:39)

Okay, otherwise credit cards attached to it.

Brian Wolf (69:42)

No, no credit cards. And then once you have the VPN access through the credit card, now you have to somehow get this laptop online.

Leo Laporte (69:51)

By the way, Joe says you can also send Mullvad cash in an envelope.

Brian Wolf (69:54)

You can, but then you have to provide an address to send it to. I thought about that. So one of the tricks is you now have this Mullvad VPN access so you're able to mask your computer. But how do you set it up for the first time? How do you get this laptop online? Just enough to get it to log into Mullvad and then go search for silent. And that was a bit of a puzzle. And it turns out public libraries. Ah. So I spent some time and I drove around to several public libraries before I could figure out because I kept getting locked out for various reasons of extra security. But anyway, I managed to finally get online, finally get into Mulvad with a totally private, untraceable back to my cell account. And then once Mulvad was installed, now you're masked behind their VPN and they have a very aggressive VPN structure with multi hop and various other things that hide you quite well. So once you were then cloaked behind the vpn, then the next step was setting up everything else. And so you had to get a Windows version that was stripped down and all the bloatware was removed. You had to get up Firefox extension with all the phone home stuff shut down. And all the whatnot. So that's actually been sort of auto figured out by a lot of people before me. And I was just following their task. But the hard part was trying to figure out how to get that initial contact. So now I have this laptop that technically is not traceable back to myself.

Leo Laporte (71:28)

Well, wait a minute.

Victoria Song (71:29)

He had. So Leo, Brian's little keybase group, you guys had your geek friends over?

Brian Wolf (71:34)

Oh yeah, I didn't want to.

Victoria Song (71:35)

They're, well, some of them listeners.

Brian Wolf (71:36)

Shout out, shout out to them. They were amazing. They came over and all it took was some barbecue and they were willing to penetration testing and they, they set it up and did a pen. So they.

Leo Laporte (71:46)

Oh, they actually tried to attack you. Try to try to de. Anonymize you.

Brian Wolf (71:49)

Yeah, so they set up a ghost WI FI account that was on one of their sniffers things. And I'm probably using some of these words out of alignment, but you get the general idea. And so I connected to this ghost account that they were sniffing and it turned out, turns out Mulvad is really, really good at blocking everything. So even on a reboot in a fresh startup, it would never expose the IP or anything addressed.

Leo Laporte (72:12)

No leak, no leaking. IP leaking. No.

Brian Wolf (72:14)

Well, I also found out modern laptops don't let you do IP Mac address changing. No, they're built in to prevent it. So I use a USB plugin, one that is capable of doing Mac address hiding because apparently that's what it's basically built for. So every time.

Leo Laporte (72:35)

So that was a WI FI adapter. A USB WiFi adapter.

Brian Wolf (72:37)

Yeah, Wi FI adapter that did allow.

Leo Laporte (72:39)

You to rotate Mac addresses.

Brian Wolf (72:40)

So now I've got a stealth Mac address hooked up to a stealth laptop. And then I got a little crazy. I set up a cell phone modem so that theoretically it could only get tracked to a cell site. You couldn't get it close enough to the house. But again, again, if you get into the nation state level security, you've got to basically build the laptop, use it once and then shred it.

Leo Laporte (73:02)

Shred it immediately.

Brian Wolf (73:04)

If you're trying to just add a.

Leo Laporte (73:05)

Curiosity, first of all, Brian, what's your last name? So we can give you a lower third when we edit this.

Victoria Song (73:11)

Wolf.

Father Robert (73:12)

W O.

Brian Wolf (73:12)

You best woof. Brian.

Leo Laporte (73:15)

Wolf. Woo. L F. Yeah, woof twice. Okay, and what do you want in your lower third? Ophthalmologist? Privacy advocate? Etiquette?

Victoria Song (73:26)

Random geek?

Leo Laporte (73:27)

Crazy geek.

Brian Wolf (73:28)

Yeah, how about just, you know, Amy's crazy husband?

Leo Laporte (73:32)

Amy's crazy husband. Okay. Wow. That. So I Mean, it does beg the question, what the hell do you need that for?

Jason Calacanis (73:40)

Nothing.

Brian Wolf (73:40)

It serves no general purpose at all.

Leo Laporte (73:42)

This is an exercise.

Brian Wolf (73:43)

Well, it was just a fun game of trying to separate out.

Victoria Song (73:46)

But the yes and the. You are not an engineer now. So the fact that he was able to build this, I mean, he can buy all the skincare products in California that he wants as a 11.

Leo Laporte (73:58)

You can have retin a up your wazoo if you wanted to.

Victoria Song (74:02)

But he, he was able to do this. You know, he's got a lot of background, but like, he was able to do this on his own.

Leo Laporte (74:10)

It's interesting. Thanks to AI.

Brian Wolf (74:12)

No, legitimately, it was my experiment with ChatGPT. I wanted to learn how to, like, I know some people are. What's it called? Assistant programming.

Leo Laporte (74:19)

There's a term for it, vibe coding.

Brian Wolf (74:22)

And so I'm not a programmer, but I was like using it as a tool to see this is really an.

Leo Laporte (74:29)

Interesting area now because people are doing things that they couldn't do before. You know, earlier we're going to talk about RAM prices and I was curious what percentage of the market Micron had. And I just asked Gemini. It's on my Google voice, my Google devices. And it told me, oh, yes, 20%. I mean, it's really. Facts are at your fingertips in a way that we never.

Brian Wolf (74:54)

What really amazed me is how confident gpg that's the problem. It's confidently wrong if you don't know enough to know that it's snowballing you. For example, it gave me, I was trying to set up a stealth profile under Firefox and there was someone who's already figured this out. And you run a script and that script then strips out all the bad stuff. And anyway, so I said, okay, here's the website to go get this script. And I click on it and it's all in Thai, the language of Thailand.

Leo Laporte (75:24)

And one night in Bangkok. You know people in Thailand, my friend.

Brian Wolf (75:28)

All right, well done, well done.

Leo Laporte (75:30)

But just ask Marie Head, he can tell you.

Brian Wolf (75:33)

I go back to ChatGPT and I'm like, this is all in the language of Thai. Are you sure this is right? And of course it goes like, oh, no good cat. You know, that site's been compromised, but multiple times, if you didn't have a good background structure of what you wanted it to do, it was very easy to be led astray. And that was really interesting to me, kind of proving what AI can do. And again, it was a tool I could never have done this without. But at the Same time, if I didn't have the base knowledge to play with it, I think that would have left me. So it just kind of showed me a little bit about what AI is capable of and what it is not capable of. Very interesting.

Leo Laporte (76:08)

I think it's one of the reasons I like to use AI orchestrators like Perplexity or Kagi Assistant because they are much more focused on actual resources and they always give you links to the information and so forth. And I find it a lot easier to vet the information I get from them than just raw chatgpt or. Although Gemini has become awfully good, I have to say thanks to Google's back end of search. All right, hang on because I do have another question for you. Okay. And I'm unfortunately launching this at you without any preparation, prior preparation. But I saw a story in Fast Company, in fact, when I put it in because I thought, oh, I wonder if we can get Brian to talk about this. There's a new FDA approved glasses by Essalor, of course to slow nearsightedness in kids. And I'm just curious.

Brian Wolf (77:00)

Oh, that is so funny. Tomorrow I actually have a meeting with Essilor set up to discuss that very product.

Leo Laporte (77:07)

Ah.

Brian Wolf (77:08)

So I can give you the basic background of how the concept works. I don't know how this particular paragraph.

Father Robert (77:13)

Yeah, good.

Leo Laporte (77:14)

Let's hang on because we're going to take a break. But I would like to talk about that. Just give me a minute to do an ad. Brian Wolf is our guest along with Amy Webb and Kathy Gellis. And it's great to have all three of you on the show. And yes, I think Father Robert. You know what? We maybe should get Brian and Father Robert together. Our favorite hacker is actually a Vatican priest who is an expert in fuzzing his identity online. He actually intentionally creates multiple identities to fuzz information gathering about him. He's become quite adept at it. I think maybe we should get you two together and do a little special.

Brian Wolf (77:53)

I could definitely use a lot of tips.

Leo Laporte (77:55)

I think it'd.

Harper Reed (77:55)

Be.

Leo Laporte (77:55)

Well, I think it'd be interesting to talk about. We will get on that job before.

Victoria Song (78:00)

We switch topics is to make sure that legal process can't undo what you're trying to do to.

Leo Laporte (78:06)

Can they subpoena you? Right.

Victoria Song (78:09)

And anybody. Again, Amy talked about the links on the chain. Any of those links on the chain are in theory targets that somebody will try to use legal process to find whatever footprint you have left and then they'll go up the stream to see if they can put together an identity. So to, to frustrate that technically is great, but not be enough. And my job is to make sure that the First Amendment acts to protect things because anonymous speech is lawful and only undo. Yeah, it's protected by the first Amendment. And there's not enough case law that has fully cemented that protection from the practical incursions of legal process. Search warrants, subpoenas, grand jury subpoenas, all sorts of different things. And, and this is an issue that needs more attention to.

Leo Laporte (78:57)

I agree, I agree. I think Brian's done everything he can to be non subpoena able if there's.

Victoria Song (79:04)

No information about your identity show and admitted it but.

Leo Laporte (79:09)

Well, that's true. I mean you've ruined the whole thing. Brian, we now know your name, your address, your phone number, so don't try anything. Okay?

Victoria Song (79:17)

But yes, if we're I trying to make sure that the law works in this regard is really tricky. Even as a practitioner and even where the law should work, it doesn't always work well. So if you can make it that none of these links in the chain have something useful to disclose, great. You're much better off than somebody who just has to hope that it won't get disclosed.

Leo Laporte (79:39)

Right. Well, that's it for the best of 2025. But you know who really is the best of 2025? Our amazing twit team. Anthony Nielsen sitting next to me right now overseeing this. He is our VP for creative content. Benito Gonzalez, who produces TWiT, technical directs it, often edits. It will probably be editing this. Of course. Kevin King also often edits twit. John Ashley, who is of course on MacBreak weekly but does a lot of a lot of the work around the studio. One of our great editors, I can't forget Burke, who keeps the studio running and brings his dog Lily by once in a while for a little breath of fresh air. Lisa, my beautiful wife and our CEO and she runs a great team. Ty, our marketing director, Sebastian, Viva and Debbie in our continuity department. It's a small family, it's a tight knit family, but they work very hard behind the scenes to give you what you see on every episode on our network. And of course, course, really deep thanks to all of our hosts. So many wonderful people who take time on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening or sometimes in the middle of the night on a Monday to do this week in tech and all of our other shows too for that matter. We really appreciate all of them. But you know who I'm most grateful to? It's you, 20 years we've been doing this and it wouldn't be two decades of this show without your kind forbearance. If you didn't listen, there'd be really no point. And I really appreciate you letting us do this show and bring this to you every week. I hope you like what you hear. I guess you must if you're even listening to the holiday show. Thank you. We couldn't do it without you. Your support and of course a deep thanks to our Club Twitt members who give us the financial support as well as their moral support. That financial support makes a very big difference to our bottom line and we really, really appreciate you too. I, I'm very grateful to be able to sit in this seat every week and do this show. It is an absolute honor and a privilege. I want to thank you for that and I look forward to many, many more years of doing it. With your support, we'll be back in 2026 for a great year. There's going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening in Texas and I can promise you we will talk about it, we will cover it, we will bring you insight, we'll bring you a little fun as well every Sunday on this Week in Tech. Thank you all of you. I hope you're having a great holiday. Wish you all the best for a peaceful and prosperous 2026. We'll see you in the new year. And now, as I have said for 20 years and I have to say it again, happily so, another twit is in the can. Happy New Year everybody.

Brian Wolf (82:30)

This is amazing.

Victoria Song (82:42)

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Brian Wolf (83:11)

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Leo Laporte (83:24)

Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

Victoria Song (83:28)

So that means a half day. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (83:31)

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Victoria Song (83:35)

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