TWiT 1064: TWiT Best 0f 2025 - 2025's Best Moments on TWiT

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Tech (TWiT) 1064 – "TWiT Best of 2025"

Episode Overview

Date: December 28, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte with rotating TWiT panelists
Theme: A celebratory look back at TWiT’s most remarkable and impactful moments from 2025, highlighting key tech developments, listener stories, reflections on the show’s 20th anniversary, and panelist discussions on technology trends such as AI, privacy, and product launches.

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Main Segments & Key Insights

1. Celebrating 20 Years of TWiT and Listener Community

[00:00 - 11:13]

• Leo kicks off with heartfelt thanks for listeners, especially Club TWiT members whose support kept TWiT going through tough transitions, including downsizing to the Attic studio ([00:18]).
• Listeners contributed emails and stories from diverse backgrounds—including a long-time viewer working at USAA who was thrilled to hear TWiT praise their app ([08:29]), and a listener tuning in from prison, grateful for TWiT’s free access for inmates ([09:31]).
• Panelists (Dan, Harper Reed, and others) reflect on their first appearances on TWiT, reminiscing about early podcast tech and the evolution from analog recorders to cloud-based remote recording ([12:00]).

“We’ve made it 20 years, and it’s because of all of you. That’s something I’m especially grateful for.” – Leo Laporte [00:46]

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2. AI in Media, Art, and Society

A. AI in Film Production

[03:40 - 07:00]

• Discussion of Oscar-nominated film "The Brutalist," which used AI (Reespeacher) to perfect Hungarian dialogue and generative AI for visuals, sparking debate in Hollywood about the “rightful” use of AI in creative arts ([03:40]).
• General consensus: the line between technology and art is blurry, but concerns mount around deepfakes and fully synthetic performances ([06:01]).

“There is some line... If we found out that Brad Pitt we were looking at was actually just AI, that’d be creepy.” – Victoria [06:01]

B. AI and Coding: The Rise of “Vibe Coding”

[16:28 - 23:41]

• Harper Reed details hands-on experience with OpenAI’s Codex and the workflow paradigm called “Vibe Coding”—prompting AI to generate code from natural language, even bypassing traditional IDEs ([17:19] onward).
• Leo and Harper discuss the implications: anyone can now “vibe code” apps, eroding the craftsmanship of coding but massively expanding accessibility ([18:44]).

“You have someone who’s seen a computer for 15 minutes and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I just made an app...and it’s perfect.’ And you see it, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good.’... It removes the craft.” – Harper Reed [22:19]

• Both note historical parallels to industrialization (“we are all farmers, and industrial farming is coming for us”), and joke that code artisans will be relegated to the ‘farmer’s market’ of programming ([23:41]).

C. AI, Work, and Society: Job Displacement Fears

[34:18 - 47:52]

• Jason Calacanis and the panel discuss rapid job displacement due to AI, questioning whether Universal Basic Income can work, and how automation (e.g., robo-taxis, warehouse robots) shifts profit to corporations versus workers ([34:18], [39:46]).
• Concerns about the evolution of capitalism, potential for “a vast and growing underclass,” and deep skepticism about tech’s commitment to the social good ([47:52]).

“All of this really looks like it's not to make society better, but to enrich a small number of people, the executives... It's going to drive income inequality crazy.” – Leo Laporte [46:36]

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3. Privacy, Hackability, and Everyday Security

DIY Privacy: Building an Anonymous Laptop

[65:09 - 74:33]

• Brian Wolf shares the story of building a laptop with no traceable connection to himself, assisted by ChatGPT and extensive pen-testing from friends, including anonymous VPN payment and public library Wi-Fi ([65:34]).
• Emphasizes both the power and peril of AI as a tool—it aids in making such projects more feasible, but confidently “hallucinates” errors if the user lacks expertise ([73:25]).

“What amazed me is how confident GPT is. That’s the problem: it’s confidently wrong if you don’t know enough to know that it’s snowballing you.” – Brian Wolf [73:25]

Legal and Structural Limits to Privacy

• Victoria and Leo discuss the difficulty of maintaining anonymity in the face of legal process (warrants, subpoenas), underscoring the importance but imperfection of technical and legal safeguards ([76:31]).

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4. Reflections on Apple’s 2025 Product Event and the New Tech Marketing

[48:50 - 63:35]

• Panelists debate Apple’s recent event: few product surprises, a heavy focus on “design” as branding, the divisive new orange color (described as everything from “pumpkin spice” to “doo doo brown”), and shifting focus from media to influencers at launch events ([51:34]).
• Victoria describes her hands-on experience covering the event, and laments the increasing presence and priority of influencers over journalists ([61:42]).

“It was a weird event...Going in, you can assess what the thesis will be. This year, it was a little hard to figure out...when we got there...it became pretty clear the thesis was design.” – Victoria [51:41]

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5. Community, Legacy, and TWiT’s Future

[78:10 - End]

• Leo closes the episode with a round of thanks—from TWiT staff to listeners—for keeping the community vibrant after two decades. Promises to keep bringing insight and fun in the coming year, hinting at more big tech stories to come in 2026 ([78:10]).
• Memorable quip in signoff:

  “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.” – Leo Laporte [80:52]

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On AI in Film:
  “They used an AI tool from a Ukrainian specialist...to tweak Brody and Jones' Hungarian dialogue to make it sound more authentic. That has sparked outrage...” – Leo Laporte [01:46]

• The Craft of Coding under Threat:
  “We have all these details about farming, and someone’s just going to come in and replace all of us with industrial farms. We’re going to the farmer’s market.” – Harper Reed [23:41]

• On UBI and Capitalist Pressures:
  “It would be like unemployment or food stamps...the question is, will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost?” – Jason Calacanis [36:32]

• On Influencer Culture at Tech Events:
  “These events...geared towards media...to see influencers have a bigger seat at the table and get prioritized was really interesting.” – Victoria [61:42]

• On Building Untraceable Tech:
  “Now I have this laptop that technically is not traceable back to myself.” – Brian Wolf [69:59]

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Segment Timestamps

| Segment | Start | End | Notes | | --------------- |-------|-------|----------------------------------------------------------| | Intro & Community | 00:00 | 11:13 | Leo’s thanks, listener stories, 20th anniversary | | AI in Film | 03:40 | 07:00 | “The Brutalist” and creative AI debates | | Vibe Coding & AI | 16:28 | 30:02 | Demo/discussion of AI-powered coding, job impacts | | AI and Jobs | 34:18 | 47:52 | Jason Calacanis on automation, UBI, societal impact | | Apple Event | 48:50 | 63:35 | Apple 2025 event, influencer rise, product strategy | | DIY Privacy | 65:09 | 74:33 | Brian Wolf’s laptop project, privacy, AI guidance | | Legal Privacy | 76:31 | 78:10 | Legal limits of anonymity, First Amendment | | Closing Thanks | 78:10 | 80:52 | Staff, legacy, and the future of TWiT |

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Conclusion

This “Best of 2025” episode blends nostalgia, sharp commentary, and hope for the future, highlighting TWiT’s steadfast commitment to listener engagement, honest dialogue, and clear-eyed perspectives on technology’s impact. The varied reflections—from AI’s disruptive power to the changing landscape of tech journalism—underscore TWiT’s continuing value as a home for authentic, accessible tech conversation.

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For more episodes and community engagement, visit twit.tv. If you enjoyed this recap, consider joining Club TWiT to support their independence and deep dives into tech.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Well, happy holidays to all of you from all of us at the Twit crew. We're so glad you're here. This is our annual holiday best of. Stay tuned for some of the best moments of 2025.

[Harper Reed]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1064 for Sunday, December, 28, 2025. Happy Holidays from the Twit family. Hello, everybody. Leo Laporte here and it is, as always, in between the Christmas Day and New Year's Day, kind of a week off for our Twit family. So. And I hope they're enjoying it. We're doing this a little bit early, as you can see. If you are sharp eyed and looking at my clock behind me, we have a Twit episode for you this week. As usual, a best of. There were some amazing moments in 2025, but before we get to those, I just want to say a heartfelt thank you to all of you, those of you who listen, especially those of you listening to the holiday show. You're obviously the most dedicated Twit listeners. We really appreciate your Support. It's been 20 years. This is the year we celebrated our 20th anniversary and, well, I can't imagine a better 20 years more satisfying for me and I think for our team. And it's all because of you. And a special thanks to our club TWIT members who've gone the extra mile with their financial support to help keep us going. You know, this was our first full year in the Attic studio. We closed down our, our offices and studio last year in an effort to save money. We had to cancel some shows, lay off some of our most treasured employees. It was hard, but the Twit Club members came through for us. And at this point, you make all the difference to keeping these shows going. I want to keep doing them. I hope you want to keep listening to them and if you do, I hope you'll consider joining the club at TWIT tv. Club Twit. But enough of that. Let's get into some of the best moments from this week in tech 2025. Are you going to watch the Oscars tonight? We're going to get out of here because I think the show's already begun. Conan o' Brien on it. The There's a little bit, there's controversy about a number of the nominees for best picture. Here's what's an interesting one. The Brutalist, which starred, I thought was quite wonderful, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones as Hungarian refugees after World War II who escaped the Nazi death camps and managed to make it to America, where he became an architect. Well, he was an architect where he resumed his career as an architect. They speak Hungarian to each other and even though they had dialogue coaches, they wanted to make the Hungarian that they were speaking more accurate. So they used an AI tool from a Ukrainian specialist called Reespeacher to tweak Brody and Jones Hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic. That has sparked outrage among the ancients who run the Hollywood that they would dare. They would dare use AI in any form or fashion. In fact, some suggested it should disqualify it for awards consideration. There's so much fear of AI in Hollywood, isn't there? Right now among creatives in general?

[Victoria]

There is, 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]

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]

Where's the real art here?

[Victoria]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Much of the film's dialogue is in Hungarian and apparently 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 was. 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, for a Hollywood film that's a low budget film.

[Harper Reed]

Extremely low. Extremely low.

[Leo Laporte]

It was shot on VistaVision. When they. When they. When the movie came on, I watched it at home. I didn't 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 the 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 so 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 still 35 millimeter, but it's wide angle. It's beautiful. It's a gorgeous film with an 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]

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 AI 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't think crosses it. And as far as I'm concerned, yeah, yeah, you're right.

[Harper Reed]

You definitely don't want to. I don't know. Like, it's just so weird because we.

[Brian Wolf]

Watch so many things and a lot of us, especially the nerds, like you.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask any of us, our favorite movies.

[Harper Reed]

We'Re like Star Trek, Star wars, like.

[Brian Wolf]

All kinds of sci fi oriented things.

[Harper Reed]

Tron, even the cgi, like the movie.

[Brian Wolf]

Wouldn'T happen without it.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

The reason why they're mad is because.

[Brian Wolf]

They only spend 10 million and they're nominated. Everybody else's budget was way higher.

[Leo Laporte]

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 Twitter and so forth. So we're gonna 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'd been watching for years at that point, loved something that I'd had a small part working on. I still bank with usaa. It's a great, great bank. Thank you for all you do. You're always a bright spot in my week. I hope you enjoy every second of celebrating this amazing accomplishment. I'll see you on Discord. Thank you so much, Scott. I really, really appreciate that. We got a lot of videos. We'll play play them throughout the show and some. Some surprising locations. Some of these are kind of wild. I did. I'll read one more that I got because this comes from an unusual location. I want 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. 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?

[Dan]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Dan]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Dan]

It was tech guy. And I was in the chat room and I mentioned, oh gosh, you know, I, 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 nice, but to Petaluma. And yeah, that was my very first episode.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Dan]

Get warmed up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You want to hear just. I could play a little bit of it just to give. Oh, that kind of extreme. This is how weird it sounded. It's very different. We were on Skype. As long as we're catching up, what you up to these days, Robert? Everybody knows Robert Heron as the, as the crazy lab rat who specialized in video and would come on the show and with his whacked out hair and tell us the language. Patrick was out of the car, I think. I guess 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.

[Dan]

This is back when it was Revenge of the Screensaver.

[Leo Laporte]

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.

[Dan]

Recording on like little zoom zoom audio recording.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, that was Skype. That was, that was, that was the only reason we, I realized we could do this first Time we did it was January of 2005, after 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.

[Dan]

It was something.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no, it was a Rantz recorder.

[Harper Reed]

You knew.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, Sam, it was that Morantz recorder. Solid state recorder.

[Harper Reed]

This is like way, way pre Skyphosaurus. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

When you start like those first shows.

[Leo Laporte]

Had you even expanded out of the.

[Harper Reed]

Attic of the cottage?

[Leo Laporte]

I was in a tiny little Garrett 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.

[Harper Reed]

Yes.

[Dan]

No, yeah, I've 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]

We never did. A lot of podcasts today 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.

[Harper Reed]

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

[Brian Wolf]

Streamyard and so on.

[Leo Laporte]

We use Restream. Yeah.

[Dan]

They record everybody locally and upload it.

[Harper Reed]

To the server, and then I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Grab them off the server and it's much easier.

[Dan]

Nowadays we use Zencastr.

[Harper Reed]

The Brewpub Twit episode was Episode zero.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

Light bulb.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

I think the first time I was on was when I was up in Petaluma. I think I came in studio and did one. 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]

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

[Harper Reed]

He searched it.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I get no spam. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

The first.

[Leo Laporte]

My first time on the Network was.

[Brian Wolf]

In January 2011 at CES.

[Harper Reed]

Because you and I. I first met you in 2010. Yeah. When you were at. At the Maker Faire in Dearborn.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, In Michigan.

[Brian Wolf]

And then the following January, I was.

[Harper Reed]

At that point I was working for.

[Brian Wolf]

GM and we did a segment with the GM Envy Concepts.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it CES or Comdex?

[Harper Reed]

Ces, it was a ces.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember.

[Brian Wolf]

And then I wasn't actually on Twit, I think, until like 2014.

[Harper Reed]

By which.

[Leo Laporte]

Time I was, you know, I had.

[Harper Reed]

Shifted away and it was.

[Brian Wolf]

I was working as an analyst at that point.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

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]

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.

[Harper Reed]

It works very well, and excuse me for my ignorance. Is this what is called Vibe coding? Oh, I don't know if we have even time to get into this. This is like. This is like my. This is. I. 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]

Doing something right now. And you don't.

[Harper Reed]

Right now.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to touch anything.

[Harper Reed]

I just want one of those words like homer.

[Leo Laporte]

What are they vibing?

[Harper Reed]

Well, the thing, it's better than an intern. 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]

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]

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

[Leo Laporte]

What you don't have to.

[Harper Reed]

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]

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

[Harper Reed]

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 process.

[Leo Laporte]

Using Watch too, because it spits out the code really fast. I mean, it's in seconds. It's done.

[Harper Reed]

And I find it this liberating experience.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

Yes. But since we last talked, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, geez.

[Harper Reed]

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]

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

[Harper Reed]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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]

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

[Leo Laporte]

I know, it's crazy.

[Harper Reed]

I'm much younger, so can I just log on to. If you were going to. If you were going to give me.

[Leo Laporte]

A little guide to Vibe coding.

[Harper Reed]

I want to write an app. I want to write an app that does.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, it takes all my. All my thoughts that I.

[Brian Wolf]

That I put into a voice note.

[Harper Reed]

And publishes them as a blog on somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I just vibe code that 100%.

[Harper Reed]

Like, it's so ridiculous. This is why I think the Vibe coding has. There's such a nuance 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]

That's a bad thing though, right?

[Harper Reed]

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]

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

[Harper Reed]

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]

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 drop that?

[Dan]

We lost Will.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

To.

[Harper Reed]

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]

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, you know, I hate to bring it back to journalism, right? But anybody can write a sort of, you know, re.

[Harper Reed]

Rewritten press release of X Company, you.

[Brian Wolf]

Know, released X graphics card. And here's, you know, the summary of what it does. But to really write like Hunter S.

[Leo Laporte]

Thompson, you know, to really write.

[Harper Reed]

Can it do that? 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]

What are you talking about?

[Harper Reed]

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]

In love with Japan who have married their pillows?

[Harper Reed]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's just human.

[Harper Reed]

Ask me.

[Leo Laporte]

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. Oh yeah, 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]

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]

Wow.

[Harper Reed]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Harper Reed]

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]

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.

[Harper Reed]

And do you think it makes it easier for startups? Because the paradigm of startups was always.

[Leo Laporte]

You had, you know, one guy with.

[Brian Wolf]

The idea, one guy who had the business insight and then you needed a technical co founder.

[Dan]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The guy that actually build the thing.

[Brian Wolf]

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

[Harper Reed]

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

[Leo Laporte]

My reaction exactly.

[Harper Reed]

They're like sitting back there in every business school they have their little thing you're in. There's a 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 time.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't need their sweater vests.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

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 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. Chat, GPT and Microsoft copilot 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 attack 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 Escaler and he has this to say about it.

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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 [e-mail] 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.

[Jason Calacanis]

Watch for much of my career, you know, 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.

[Harper Reed]

Figure out a way.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's this inevitability of tech. Right. So we just might as well accelerate into it and everybody's going to benefit.

[Leo Laporte]

At least in the tech industry. That's still the general belief.

[Jason Calacanis]

I would say that you could try.

[Leo Laporte]

To stop it, but why it's going to happen whether you want to or not.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I was at a conference this week and I've been 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 an outsider trying to figure out what was going on inside the room to being inside the room where they make the decisions of 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 us 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]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Dan]

Yeah, it's extremely hand wavy.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

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]

But how big a check would it be?

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, actually you could do the math. I think it'd probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom of the so you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Even pay rent in Petaluma.

[Brian Wolf]

It would be like, let alone eating.

[Jason Calacanis]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it would be subsistence.

[Jason Calacanis]

So, you know, the question is, will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost?

[Harper Reed]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

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]

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.

[Victoria]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

So people are.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

Not in front of the wheel, but there's a stopover.

[Leo Laporte]

But encouraging.

[Harper Reed]

It's.

[Jason Calacanis]

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]

Which is doing delivery 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]

Oh, yeah. Still best friends. Yeah. 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 was.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

Well, it is a neural net. That's how it's driving. 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 number.

[Leo Laporte]

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 yeah, 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]

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

[Leo Laporte]

So Amazon has Zoox, Zooks.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, there, there are in the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Dan]

Taking the, the low hanging fruits of, of the gig economy, which is one of the few things.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is sad.

[Harper Reed]

It's sad.

[Dan]

But, 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.

[Leo Laporte]

Which sounds great.

[Dan]

And it will increase your profits short term until there's no one who can afford to buy your goods and services.

[Leo Laporte]

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.

[Dan]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

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.

[Dan]

Welcome to Los Angeles.

[Leo Laporte]

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. Okay.

[Dan]

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 I always have to dissuade.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't have an AI podcaster, could you? Right. You know, and it's always, I think Google already does.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, but, but one of the other issues has also been that it. 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, etc. Etc. 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 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]

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]

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

[Victoria]

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]

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

[Leo Laporte]

He's in the shade now.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 a corpor corporate person for X number of years, that's gone and you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, moving in that direction for a while.

[Jason Calacanis]

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]

Well there was feudalism, I guess. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

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 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]

Radical independence or self sufficiency doesn't answer the question of, well, 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 in a lot of jobs. But at the same time, people need to eat.

[Jason Calacanis]

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]

That's the other side of this. And I think the real 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. It's not. Every time we've seen that in the past there's been a guillotine involved.

[Dan]

Well, the thing is when you hear, when you hear tech execs talking about radical self reliance and I understand that, I understand that need that the problem is they think that only applies to the people. If we move into what is 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? Yeah, it changes the rules entirely and they're not looking at that part.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Victoria]

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[Harper Reed]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Victoria]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Victoria]

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[Harper Reed]

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[Victoria]

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[Harper Reed]

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[Victoria]

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[Harper Reed]

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[Leo Laporte]

Savor responsibly. This Apple event on Tuesday, or I guess it was Wednesday, we. Well no, it was Tuesday.

[Harper Reed]

It was Tuesday.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

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

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.

[Harper Reed]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

The reason to have the event though, you like. We hear lots of rumors, but the rumors don't put it in context for like 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 to make a computer, but it doesn't run anything, right. It doesn't do anything until you actually put it together. 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]

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

[Harper Reed]

Well, it's also storytelling too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, storytelling, marketing, it's all roughly the same idea, which is here's a set of features, here's a set of facts. Let us tell you, let us shape what that means. And to some degree that's what the briefings are too is to kind of give you an idea of where Apple, what Apple's thinking is about all this. Go ahead, Dan.

[Brian Wolf]

Oh, I think it's exactly that. And Jason, hit the keyword.

[Harper Reed]

It is context.

[Leo Laporte]

And saying who this product is intended for. And that storytelling element is pretty important. And you know, earned media is even.

[Brian Wolf]

For Apple, they need earned media.

[Leo Laporte]

What we're doing right now earns them media. Every review, every, every post, it will shut out their competition and earn them millions of dollars of media. 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 take your Live blog. Did on. On the Verge.

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

You and Allison Johnson and Jacob Castronakis were. Were there.

[Victoria]

Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was a weird event, I'll say. Just because, you know, I think going in, you can assess 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]

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]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Victoria]

I think at one point in the Live blog, I couldn't promote alcoholism, but I kind of wanted to say drink if you hear the word design again, because it was just brought up so often. You saw it when they were talking about the iPhone, air, just everything that went into it, and the floofy 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]

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

[Victoria]

It just. 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]

Right.

[Victoria]

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]

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.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Victoria]

Yeah. And it feels like a lot of the whole thing was like, orange. It's orange. So, you know, we're talking about design that way.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Victoria]

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]

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 on the pro devices.

[Victoria]

Certainly not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very orange.

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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]

Autumnal orange. So, like a very nice, deep orange.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty.

[Victoria]

It's not like biohazard.

[Leo Laporte]

Not pumpkin spice. Just pumpkin.

[Victoria]

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

[Dan]

Orange.

[Victoria]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

The orange sweater, like, we've got all.

[Leo Laporte]

Kinds of, like, where's your orange?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, Embargo, too. You know, that's a hint.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that's right.

[Harper Reed]

Chair is an Easter egg. Thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

So go ahead.

[Harper Reed]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

It was inside the spaceship.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you there too, Jason?

[Harper Reed]

I was, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Victoria]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Dan, were you there?

[Dan]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

No. I mean, I write for Jason every two months, but I haven't been a journalist for a minute. I've never been a journalist. So there you go. So it was out inside the Steve Job Theater?

[Victoria]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. That's nice.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. Tim cooks to the campus.

[Leo Laporte]

Before you go in. Right.

[Harper Reed]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

A little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Harper Reed]

I. I did get the golf cart.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Music on your golf cart?

[Harper Reed]

No, I didn't have any music on.

[Victoria]

And I only had music in the golf cart. At Dub Dub, I didn't have any music. This. I feel like Dub Dub gets the fancier golf 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, oh, this is.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

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

[Leo Laporte]

There's speakers in the bushes.

[Harper Reed]

There are speakers in the bushes. For sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Hysterical.

[Victoria]

For sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

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, I see it. I don't really know what the odd dropping was because why not just call dropping under odd?

[Harper Reed]

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

[Jason Calacanis]

It would have been like a little.

[Harper Reed]

Bit more than incremental, you know, would have been probably. But they're never going to upgrade. They're never going to use that. That's why they don't hire me to do their marketing.

[Leo Laporte]

But next year is supposed to be the little bit more. More than just. Or is it in two years next year? Well, there's gonna be, we think a folding phone and we'll get to the slim phone because I think the air is kind of a prick. 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.

[Harper Reed]

And so, yeah, completely invisible. Like you won't even see it. It'll float.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll literally float. This one didn't float. That's. You just give Apple $1,000. 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]

Oh, yes, there was. So there's the annual walk down 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.

[Leo Laporte]

This thing and you know your report 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]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Good on you. Good on you.

[Victoria]

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]

Are the seats reserved or.

[Victoria]

No, it's a free call.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like Southwest Airlines. You have to.

[Victoria]

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]

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

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Quick.

[Victoria]

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]

And I'm here in a themed up theater.

[Victoria]

Yeah. 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]

Let me just said there was somebody dancing.

[Victoria]

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]

She's gonna edit or whatnot.

[Victoria]

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 wifi 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 get that 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]

The Jimmy Fallon change.

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

This is terrible.

[Victoria]

I feel like I'm in an episode of WandaVision and just 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, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I would argue that was maybe not for. That was produced by people who did not think about who this is for. It was for nobody. Yeah, yeah. And you know, somebody different.

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

So rug emoji. 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]

Yeah, but like Apple. I see Jimmy Fallon.

[Leo Laporte]

No, yeah, right. I think mistake.

[Brian Wolf]

I said this during the pre show.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'll just repeat it here for the larger audience, but Vic's reporting guided me through and Jason's as well, but guided me through, especially the IoT portions of this event, in large part because her reporting is authentic and it's honest 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 I saw were just reading off a press release. 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, who are these products for, what story is being told? And 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.

[Brian Wolf]

Very good for you, but not like.

[Leo Laporte]

Jaw dropping, awd dropping, as somebody in our chat room said it was gnaw dropping. Hey, don't let me interrupt. I know we're having a blast here reliving 2024, 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, 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]

Do you have, like, five minutes? Okay. 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]

You gotta give him headphones or something, though.

[Victoria]

He's just gonna sit down. I'll sit next to him here.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you hear what's going on?

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Brian Wolf]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Big fan.

[Jason Calacanis]

Big fan.

[Brian Wolf]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Victoria]

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 variation, but you built something that circumvents everything.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Brian Wolf]

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 version of it. I took it upon myself to figure out if I could get her the European version. 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]

Oh, interesting.

[Brian Wolf]

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 I would use it as kind of a planner and whatnot. I learned that ChatGPT makes many, many mistakes very confidently.

[Harper Reed]

Yes.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

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

[Brian Wolf]

It turns out you don't.

[Jason Calacanis]

You can't.

[Leo Laporte]

There are ways around that.

[Brian Wolf]

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

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

So one of the problems is coaching.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

Right.

[Brian Wolf]

Oh, it turns out there are some.

[Leo Laporte]

That take crypto, I think some that take crypto.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

Right.

[Brian Wolf]

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.

[Leo Laporte]

You just walk in and get in. So you go to Best Buy, you buy a card and you don't want to. You have to buy cash.

[Brian Wolf]

You go into a looking down.

[Leo Laporte]

No pictures, no, no, no pictures.

[Brian Wolf]

And you go in and you get your Mulvad VPN and you pay cash for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Otherwise the credit cards attached to it.

[Brian Wolf]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Brian Wolf]

You can, but then you have to provide an address to send it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Brian Wolf]

I thought about that. So one of the tricks is you now have this Mullvad VPN access, so you're able to master 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 silent. And that was a bit of a puzzle and it turns out public libraries.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Brian Wolf]

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 myself 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 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 tasks. 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.

[Victoria]

Well, wait a minute, he had. So Leo, Brian's little keybase group. You guys had your geek friends over?

[Brian Wolf]

Oh yeah, I didn't want to.

[Victoria]

They're. Well, some of them listen, shout out.

[Brian Wolf]

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.

[Jason Calacanis]

So they.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Brian Wolf]

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 turns out out Mullvad is really, really good at blocking everything. So even on a reboot in a fresh startup it would never expose the IP or anything.

[Leo Laporte]

No leak, no leaking. IP leaking. No.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

So that was a wifi adapter. A USB wifi adapter, yeah, WI fi adapter that did allow you to rotate.

[Brian Wolf]

Mac addresses, but 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]

Shred it immediately.

[Brian Wolf]

If you're trying to just add a.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Victoria]

Wolf.

[Dan]

W O.

[Brian Wolf]

You best W O O L F Brian Wolf.

[Leo Laporte]

W O O L F. Yeah. Woof. Twice. Good. Okay. And what do you want in your lower third? Ophthalmologist? Privacy Advocate Kit?

[Victoria]

Random Geek.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy geek.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Brian Wolf]

How about just, you know, Amy's crazy husband.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Brian Wolf]

Nothing. It serves no general purpose at all.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an exercise.

[Brian Wolf]

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

[Victoria]

But the yes and the. You are not an engineer.

[Harper Reed]

No.

[Victoria]

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 year old you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Have retin a up your wazoo if you wanted to.

[Victoria]

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]

It's interesting. Thanks to AI.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

There's a term for it, vibe coding.

[Brian Wolf]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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 now. And it told me, oh yes, 20%. I mean it's really. Facts are at your fingertips in a way that we never, you have to.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

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

[Brian Wolf]

All right, well done, well done.

[Leo Laporte]

But just ask Marie Head, he can tell you.

[Brian Wolf]

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, oh, no, good catch. 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's true.

[Jason Calacanis]

Left me.

[Brian Wolf]

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]

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. All right, hang on because I do have another question for you. Okay. And unfortunately I'm 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 Essilor, of course to slow nearsightedness in kids. And I'm just curious.

[Brian Wolf]

Oh, that is so funny. Tomorrow I actually have a meeting with Essilor set up to discuss that very product so I can give you the basic background of how the concept works. I don't know how this particular paragraph works.

[Leo Laporte]

Good, 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. Is 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]

I could definitely use a lot of tips.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Victoria]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Trying to do to can they subpoena you? Right.

[Victoria]

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 frustrate that technically is great, but that may 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]

I agree, I agree. I think Brian's done everything he can to be non subpoenable if there's no.

[Victoria]

Information about your identity admitted it.

[Harper Reed]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

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]

But yes, if we're I it 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. 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]

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. We'll 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 you course. A 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 twin 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'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'll 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]

This is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating meeting. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Brian Wolf]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Leo Laporte]

Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail].

[Harper Reed]

Liberty.

[Leo Laporte]

Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings.

[Brian Wolf]

Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.

[Leo Laporte]

Excludes Massachusetts.