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

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. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit. This Week in Tech. episode 1064 for sunday december 28th 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 who listen 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 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 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 slash 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 there's a little bit there's controversy about a number of the nominees for best picture here's what's uh an interesting one the brutalist uh which starred uh i thought was quite wonderful adrian brody and felicity jones as uh hungarian refugees after world war ii who escaped the nazi death camps and managed to make it to america where he became an architect where he was an architect where he resumed his career as an architect they speak uh hungarian to each other and even though they had dialogue coaches they wanted to make the hungarian they were speaking more accurate so they used an ai tool from a ukrainian specialist called re-speecher to tweak brody and jones hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic um that has sparked outrage in among the ancients who run the hollywood uh 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 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 it is technology i mean however you make it it's technology we had visual effects for such a long time right nobody's outraged because something shot in front of a green screen or something like where's the real art here right yeah right um much of the film's dialogue is hungarian um and uh apparently the and i don't speak hungarian but the the hungarian that brody and jones uh speak is very accurate it's a difficult language to pronounce um 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 uh it's that long only cost 10 million dollars to make it was kind of a low that for now for a hollywood film that's a low budget film extremely low extremely it was shot on vista vision when they when they when the movie came on i watched it at home i didn't want to go to the theater it said vista vision 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 vista vision is is 35 millimeter port you know So 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 a 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 architectural essentially assets or so yeah because they had drawings at the i don't think i'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 i mean i do think there is some some line like the deep fakes 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 would 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 you definitely don't want to i don't know like it's just so weird because we watch so many things and a lot of us especially the nerds like you ask any of us our favorite movies we're like star trek star wars like all kinds of sci-fi oriented things tron even the cgi like the movie wouldn't happen without it so you couldn't do tron without some sort of special effect i don't think that's us though and i like what sandra said the reason why they're mad is they only spend 10 million and they're nominated everybody else's budget was with so i asked and i've been asking for the last month for people to send in videos or stories uh about how they started watching twit and so forth so we're gonna uh intermingle those into the show in fact i'll read a couple of uh emails uh that i got not everybody sent a video scott simmons scooter vc in a proud club twit member says i can't believe it's 20 years since you first showed up on my ipod i figured i followed you from tech tv my unregistered online tech class that was constantly on my tv in my dorm in the late 90s when i was getting into my mis degree you guys have remained my primary source of tech education and information ever since and this i it was a great he says my favorite moment that i can remember is when i heard leo praising the usaa banking app and its innovative invention at the time it was innovative to deposit it a check by scanning it i work at usaa and while i wasn't part of the primary development team i worked on some processes that enabled that functionality to me it was the highest compliment that leo whom i've been watching for years at that point loved something that i'd had a small part working on i still bank with usaa is 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 uh we've got a lot of videos we'll play uh 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 uh 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 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 Runner 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 1,000th episode, and I wish I could be part of your anniversary show, but I won't be out until 2031. Oh, man. I wanted to thank you for allowing twit to be offered to us inmates for free. Of course, we're very happy to have you listen as a nerd for over 40 years. It's a blessing to have the joy of twit every week. I wish we could have the other podcasts you were involved in, but I will enjoy what I get. Believe me, one twit a week is more than enough. I have watched and listened for 25 years. I enjoy the North Bay connection. Also, I live in Spokane again. Thank you for the amazing show and keeping me updated with the tech world as I am incarcerated. I will join the chats when I'm released. Thank you, Ron. Ron, I hope we're around in 2031, but, uh, and I wish you the best. Yeah. Well, and this is the thing that's kind of amazing. Uh, these letters and videos came in from all walks of life all over the world. Uh, it's really been a joy and a pleasure to do this show, uh, along with you guys. It's really, uh, nice to have you. What do you remember the first show you were on? Father Robert was the first time you were on uh yeah the first time I was on was um I was in uh in the peninsula in the South Bay setting up for interop and interrupt Brian Chi yeah and I what was the show that you did before twit back in the day well it was the tech guy there was security now and it was MacArthur's inside the net it was Tech Guy and I was in the chat room and I mentioned oh gosh you know I I 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 butt to petaluma and yeah that was my very first episode very first show that we did was april 17 2005 so uh this is the closest date we could get uh to that it was only 34 minutes patrick norton kevin rose and robert heron you can still listen to it get warmed up yeah yeah yeah you want to hear just a i could play a little bit of it just to give that kind of extreme this is how weird it sounded it's very different we're 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 uh with his whacked out hair and and tell us the latest patrick was out of the car i think you're not on tv though these probably no not these days i am working though for extremetech and pcmag.com and i'd love this is back when it was revenge of the screensaver they have an incredible this is this is it was the revenge of oh we found my salad thank god this was the revenge of the screensavers uh 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 episode yeah i asked recording on like little zoom zoom audio recording no no that was skype uh that was that was that was the only reason we i realized we could do this first time we did it was january of 2005 after mac world expo and yes we were all sitting in a table at a at a bar the 21st amendment brew pub and yeah it might have been a zoom i don't it was something oh no no it was a rants recorders you knew yes sam it was was that morantz recorder a solid state reporter this is like way way pre skypesaurus yeah but but because somebody called the radio show shortly after that on skype i realized oh i could do a show with people in different locales and so those those early uh twits were mostly done on skype not with skypesaurus one call when you when you start like those first shows you had you even expanded out of the attic of the cottage no point i was in a i was in a tiny little garrett room of an old bed and breakfast that we called the twick cottage later but i was in a single the smallest room in the cottage in the attic it was tiny in fact there is a system with kevin rose where he takes a tour very short tour yes no yeah i watched that one too it 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 we never did a lot of pockets today stay 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 we said i mean we sort of do that now it's gotten easier now with services like stream yard and and so on we use restream yeah and you know they record everybody locally yeah and upload it to the server and then i just grab them off the server and it's much easier nowadays we use zancaster even like the brewpub the brewpub twit episode was episode zero yeah technically i don't consider it episode one because it was a one-off right but and i didn't it didn't intend it to be a podcaster well i guess it technically was but really we just put it on a website. And because 30,000 people downloaded it, that's when I said, geez, I wish I could do this more often. Well, the light bulb was when Skype, I realized I could do it more often with Skype. Because everybody, you know, Kevin was in LA, Patrick, I don't remember where, I think he was in San Francisco. But you never know where Patrick's going to be. He's finally settled down a little bit. Alan, do you remember the first time you were on? 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 it. It was when the Samsung 840 Evo had come out around then. This is way back. I remember that because Dvorak asked me, what's your favorite SSD? And then he spot-checked me with Wirecutter. Oh, that's Dvorak. While I was answering, he searched it. He's like, oh, yeah, that's what Wirecutter says. Yeah, I get no spam. Yeah. He used to love to come up because he would stop at the Costco in Novato 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? My first time on the network was in January 2011 at CES. Because you and I, I first met you in 2010 when you were at the Maker Faire in Dearborn. Oh, yeah. In Michigan. Yeah. And then the following January, at that point, I was working for GM, and we did a segment with the GM Envy Concepts at CES. Oh, was it CES or Comdex? It was at CES. I remember that. And then I wasn't actually on TWIT, I think, until like 2014, by which time I had shifted away, and I was working as an analyst at that point. And you were a regular on the radio show, of course, for many, many years, for a long time. Now, we were talking about Anthropics Clawed. That's the coding engine you like to use, Harboury. In fact, you turned me on to Clawed Code, which is their command line version of that. OpenAI just launched their AI coding engine, Codex, in chat GPT. I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it or not. 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 of times with operator and then with now with codecs, where they have what looks like a computer that you're interfacing, not necessarily via a traditional computing interface. 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. It works very well. called 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 well 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 i'm vibe coding somewhere not at here but on my house the computer's vibe coding itself doing it right now and you don't right now you don't have to touch anything i just want one of those birds like homerhead vibing well well the thing it's better than an intern it's so good will like like i think they call it vibe coding from like five different perspectives so i'll talk about the two or three that i think first of all andre kapathi was the first to use this term it was my sense that it was coding without actually typing any code you're doing using you're passing the vibe of what you want onto the ai and the ai generating the code. Although when Karpathy 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. But it turns out that you don't know what, you don't have to know what you're doing. You don't have to. 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. they've launched like an MVP kind of minimal viable yeah 100 and I am so happy about this so basically what you do is you just sit there in front of a computer and like whether you're using codex for instance is a great example there's a little prompt like a little box you just type in like 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. It's cool to watch too, because it spits out the code really fast. I mean, it's in seconds. It's done. And I find it this liberating experience. And I- But you, Harper, you're going to look at the code and know if there's problems, you can actually, you have enough experience to look at it and fix it. Yes. But since we last talked, Leo, we have... Harper's written a couple of great blog posts, by the way, on how he does this, which I recommend at Harper.blog. We have stopped using IDEs. We don't even look at the code anymore. Oh geez 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 and i was like you just asked where the code go you mean you get a binary no no it on your computer it there but like why why look at it look at it the code is so what i did with what 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 i don't go that far i'm not i know it's crazy i'm much younger so can i just log on to if you were gonna if you were gonna give me a little um guide to vibe coding um i want to write an app i want to write an app that does um i don't know it takes all my thoughts that I put into a voice note and publishes them as a blog on somewhere. Can I just vibe code that? A hundred percent. Like it's so ridiculous. This is why I think the vibe coding has such a nuance to what it is and what people think about it because you truly can do that. It probably, 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 have no idea what's happening. That's a bad thing though, right? I think it was a bad thing when it cost money to program computers, because it used to be that if, you know, Davindra 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. And so then you're like- It cost me $2 to write all of this code, like hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was $2. 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've conceived as tech, we really valued the craft of code. We have our fancy keyboards. We have all of this stuff that is about like, you know, like this is the best thing that's going to generate the best code. We have 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 they're like, 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 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 it's going to be like this we've seen this story so many times i mean so can i use my analogy of all the 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 uh and but if you wanted a handcrafted and by the way i found this out if you wanted a handcrafted uh amish table you could get one but it's fifteen thousand dollars because somebody has to make it by hand uh but it still exists we've seen this before go ahead i'm sorry will uh-oh he dropped that we lost will oh he was so mad he hung up he's so so should we isn't this a little dystopian sounding though harper I mean, I'm confused about this because I've spent the last two weeks. Somebody in our Discord chat said that's the most non-inspirational speech I've ever heard. I've been talking to a lot of young people about this, young engineering grads and 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 coding or whatever. I just love it. Like the flow that you get, like I love that. I look forward to that. So I don't think it's necessarily, I don't, I think vibe coding is a way to make something that is very interesting. Kind of it puts it into a negative space, which, you know, whatever. But what I find fascinating about this is I spent all of my career learning things like POSIX Unix or Qmail or these things that I love that I don't need in my brain. Or as one of my friends said, 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. It's like, that's kind of what this brings us is rather than having to know all of 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. 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? This is the process. Where, you know, I hate to bring it back to journalism, right? But anybody can write a sort of, you know, rewritten press release of X company, you know, released X graphics card. and here's the summary of what it does. But to really write like Hunter S. Thompson, to really write, can it do that? I think yes, awkwardly. Here's my example. I don't think you're going to generate Hunter S. Thompson or a beautiful novel or any of these things. But my kind of test is always, 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 03 mini or GPT-40 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, it passed that picture through chat GPT or, you know, and it said, uh, two balding men are approaching the office. And we're just like, come on, man. What are you, what are you, come on, leave me alone. So it's like, nobody's bald here. What are you talking about? Exactly. Exactly. It's a hairstyle, but, um, 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. No, 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 in love with Chester? There are people in Japan who have married their pillows. Right. It's just human. Awesome. That's my life. OpenAI does have a command line version of Codex CLI. They've updated that as well. you know uh 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 a javascript plus uh you know it's a little it's uh 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, uh, writing bash scripts, you know, for your cron jobs, all these are, 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. I think this is the thing that is, um, the most interesting for me, a friend of mine just tweeted, um, you know, I've been vibe coding, uh, replacements are various SAS products that I pay for. I'm up to build equivalent of three for three attempts. Wow. And I think that's kind of where we're faced. 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, you know, 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, you know, a landlord of only pigs. Great. Oh, you're a farmer that only grows, you know, dandelions. Perfect. Here's the product for you, because you just need the constraints that that that problem has. And then the AI will generate it for you. 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 pitches, used to be, yeah, 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. And do you think it makes it easier for startups? Because the paradigm of startups was always you had, you know, one guy with the idea, one guy who had the business insight, and then you needed a technical co-founder, right? The guy that can actually build the thing that you had the insight for. Do you think it replaces the technical co-founder? I think this is now the time of the business guy. They have been waiting in the wings of all the ideas. My reaction exactly. They're like sitting back there in every business school. They have their little thing. You're in. Their 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. Don't need a co-founder. Zipping up their sweater vests. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I hate to interrupt, especially Harper Reid. 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. 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So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information, according to companies' data classification, does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc. with zero trust plus ai you can thrive in the ai era you can stay ahead of the competition you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve learn more at zscaler.com slash security that's zscaler.com slash security now back to the show one of our biggest topics of this year in AI, of course, there are a lot, but one of the real concerns people have is job loss. And of course, we had a real expert on the show to talk about this, Jason Calacanis, and our Twit panel talking about AI. Watch. 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 figure out a way it's this inevitability of tech, right? So we just might as well accelerate into it. At least in the tech industry, that's still the general belief. Like I would say that you could try to stop it, but why it's going to happen whether you want to or not. Yeah. And I was at a conference this week and I've been, you know, since I'm on the inside now as an investor. I started as a journalist entrepreneur and then became an investor. So I went from 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 realized is I think the job displacement this time will be different. Everybody tries to make an analogy towards the industrial revolution and stopping farming and only 1% of people work in agriculture today. But when I started doing the back of the envelope math and I started looking at how quick this displacement is happening, I've come to the conclusion that in the next 10 years, we're going to see serious job displacement. And we were talking about this prior to ChatGPT being lost. And you might remember Sam Altman doing when he was at Y Combinator, a study on universal basic income that he funded. And everybody talked about it constantly, very publicly. And the last that's kind of 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. Yes, there's really like two or three different solutions to the job destruction problem. We can get into it. Always it always seemed to me kind of a little hand wavy because where's all that money going to come from? It's extremely hand wavy. Who's paying for this UBI? Is it the federal government? i mean we have a we have ubi today in the form of a lot of different programs we have so 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 um but how big a check would it be you know uh we actually could do the math i think it'd probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom so you can't even pay rent in petaluma you would you would be like let alone eating it It would be like unemployment or food stamps and these kinds of things. Yeah, it would be subsistence. So, you know, the question is, will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost, right? So the typing pool went away. The mail room went away. Photocopy room went away. Oh, you know, we've watched all these jobs go away over time. This time, I just think we have to be a 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. Oh, wow. Yeah. And immediately, by the way, the state of Texas passed a law saying you got to have a permit to do that. Yeah. So people are 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 yeah, I think they have a safety operator. It's interesting. It's in the passenger side. But he's not in front of the wheel. Not in front of the wheel. But there's a stop. Oh, that's not encouraging. 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, which is doing delivery. Before you move on, how was that ride? Was it? I know you're friends with Elon. Yeah, I'm good friends. Are you still buddies? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Still best friends. Yeah. I have the latest hardware for Tesla Juniper Model Y. And I've put a couple hundred miles on it doing self-driving. I think the cyber cabs, the robo taxis have a little bit of a better version of that. it feels a little more aggressive and confident um i still think well yeah and i it was it was doing rolling stops it was doing california stops for a while and somebody said well that's because elon trained it and that's how he drives well it is a neural net that's how it drives so it's studying humans i i do think that this technology is here and it works it should just be very regulated and you should have to have a safety driver for the first 10 000 miles or 10 000 rides maybe a million some number so gm gave up on cruise and and basically dissolved the division google's going ahead with waymo uh big time there's but you can't go around san francisco without seeing a thousand waymos every waymo every other car yeah uh 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 taxis there'll be many winners uh volkswagen has a very competitive product there's coming to pony ai there's we ride so Amazon has Zoox. Zoox, yeah. There are, in the United States... Oh, well, we'll never know what we'll have in the United States. Jason just disappears. You know, one of the things... When you work outside. These technologies are taking the low-hanging fruits of the gig economy, which is one of the few things... Which is sad. Yes. It's sad, but... And I know people have alluded to this before, but essentially the the key to driving this with capitalism is that it's replacing the most expensive and least efficient part of the capitalist system which are the people which sounds great and it will increase your profits short term until there's no one who can afford to buy your goods and services 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 absolutely uh So in his article we get back to it when Jason comes back but he talks about three solutions the UBI new job creation which is you know often the response to industrial disruption or technological disruption It was in the industrial era. People, you know, stopped making buggy whips, but found, oh, is this his laptop overheated in the sun? Welcome to Los Angeles. 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. 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. You couldn't have an AI podcaster, could you? Right. I think Google already does. Yeah, yeah. But one of the other issues has also been that they're thinking of this as an overlay on top of the existing system. We can fix it with X, Y, and Z, universal basic income, et cetera, et cetera. Social services increase. But what we're going to have with the coming of AI as it gets perfected, it's not just the changing of the economic structure of the society. It's going to change society itself. We could actually see the reversal of what we saw starting with the Industrial Revolution, where population centers rushed to the cities. If we're all on UBI and if most of those repetitive jobs are now being done by AI, there's no reason to stay in expensive city centers. So what happens when your population disperses? Well, it changes the way that people relate to one another. It changes the way that communities are built. It changes the way that demographics are handled. You start seeing balkanization of communities because why not live with the people that you like if you no longer have to live in big cities? So these are all the concerns that are being brought up right now in the Vatican. Just a couple of yards away, there are high-level discussions about who do we bring in to have these conversations. Not just 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. I just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past. Like 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 let the robots have that one. In fact, Amazon's moving rapidly in that direction. 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 ten thousand dollar robots will get the job done without bathroom breaks or threatening a union drive. They cost less than one dollar 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. Yeah, humans have. Sorry about that. My laptop. over here in the sun. He's in the shade now. Now I'm 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 corporate person for X number of years, that's gone. And, you know, that's moving in that direction for a while. And that's where we started, right? Like you, there was no concept that the corporation would be with you for your entire life. Well, there was feudalism, I guess. Yeah. And, but now, 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 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 mentions towards the end that there will be a different footprint of the company. And in my piece that I wrote on my Substack, 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 best system in the world for creating abundance, but it's the most imperfect one. It's just the best one we've 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 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 radical um independence or self-sufficiency doesn't answer the question of but how am i going to pay the rent and make a living i agree you know a lot of people do jobs they hate they don't like that are demeaning there there isn't a lot of dignity and a lot of jobs but at the same time people need to eat. Yeah. This is my big concern. I think 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, 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. Well, 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 right. It's not. Every time we've seen that in the past, there's been a guillotine involved. The thing is, when you hear tech execs talking about radical self-reliance, and I understand that, I understand that need, the problem is they think that only applies to the people. If we move into what looks to be the final destination of AI, corporations will need radical self-reliance in the sense that they will no longer be able to judge their profitability quarter to quarter as the success metric for their companies. If you no longer have the same massive pool of consumers to consume your products and goods, it no longer becomes whether or not you're providing services that people want. It's do you provide services for the good of that society? It changes the rules entirely. And they're not looking at that part. I think they should also be worried about a vast and growing underclass that is not half. This Apple event on Tuesday, or I guess it was Wednesday. No, it was Tuesday. It was Tuesday. 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. 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. There were certainly a number of things that were either leaked wrong and none of that, you're never going to see Bloomberg go on and say, by the way, we were wrong about seven out the 28 things that we had here you know they're never going to do that um what mark german always says and i think it's some of it's actually legit is these are pre-announced products and apple often will pull a product before it it's announced like they'll change their mind on it that's true infrared cameras supposedly might be in the air pods 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. The reason to have the event though, you're 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 you know the event is where they put it together and they tell us like this is why we're doing it this is who we're aiming this for this is why i think it'll make a difference there's another word for that that's called smart well it's also storytelling too yeah i mean 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 what Apple's thinking is about all this. Go ahead, Dan. Oh, I think it's exactly that. And Jason hit the keyword, it is context and saying who this product is intended for. And that storytelling element is pretty important. And earned media is, even for Apple, they need earned media. What we're doing right now earns them media. every review 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 uh i know you're somewhat restrained but you can talk about the event right and you can yeah it's like you live blogged it on on the verge i did i did do i did have feelings and i blogged while it was happening. You and Allison Johnson and Jacob Kastronakis were there. Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird event, I'll say, just because 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. design they even showed a video at the beginning celebrating you know the click wheel and apple's you know heritage of design this what is it six years since johnny i've left the company they're back on design i i think at one point in the live blog i i couldn't you know promote alcoholism but i kind of wanted to say drink if uh drink if you hear the word design again because it was just brought up so often you know you saw it when they were talking about the iphone air just everything that went into it and you know the floofy you know interstitial movie stuff and then you know they talked about liquid glass and i'm of the opinion it's liquid ass i'm not a liquid glass fan i haven't believe it or not i haven't heard that yet wow uh that's somebody who hates it It just makes it's fine, except in certain situations. You know, I've been using the beta for the last couple of months. They're just situations where it becomes illegible because of 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. 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 more it's sizzle more sizzle than steak yeah yeah and it feels like a lot of the whole thing was like orange it's orange uh so you know we're talking about design that way so i like your strawberry sweater but it's orange yes um 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 uh pro max or the pro series i was looking at the orange in the leaks and i was like oh no it's looking like a doo-doo brown kind of orange 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 it's certainly not it's very orange it's extremely orange it's a it's a pumpkin spice orange it's not a sorbet orange please don't say 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 tumnal orange so like a very nice deep orange it's pretty it's not like biohazard not pumpkin spice just pumpkin it's it's pumpkin orange it's not biohazard orange it's not gonna like burn your eyeballs out uh but it seemed pretty divisive online i sure sorry sorry sorry you have an orange chair you must like the orange sweater like yeah all kinds of like where's your orange yeah where's your embargo too you know that's a hint you know that's right chair is a hint easter eggs so um go ahead sorry the event uh usually we don't see uh what happens at the apple campus there was outside by the rainbow uh stage or was it inside it was inside the space were you there too jason i was yeah okay yeah dan were you there no no i'm i mean i 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 inside the Steve Jobs Theater. Yes. Oh, OK. That's nice. Yeah. And then Tim Cook to the campus. It's before you go in, right? They don't let us too close to the circle. Right. A little bit. Well, did you get the golf cart treatment? Because Victoria got the golf cart. I did get the golf cart. Yeah. Mine didn't have music on your golf cart. No, I didn't have any music on. And I only had music in the golf cart at Dub Dub. I didn't have any music this time. I feel like Dub Dub gets the fancier golf carts. This could just be my memory playing tricks, but I'm pretty sure when we were on the golf carts at Dub Dub, I was like, ooh, this is sweet. Yeah, and I think there are speakers around the actual spaceship. There are speakers. Like Disneyland. There's speakers in the bushes. There are speakers in the bushes. for sure. That's hysterical. For sure. Yeah, yeah. 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, I've got to say this, the awe-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. Honestly, I didn't know what was awe-dropping about the event, Cause usually, you know, um, 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. Cause I was like, why not just call it jaw dropping? Under odd. Yeah. Marketing definitely came up with that one. It was like, this is like the, the, the proper title would been, it would have been like a little bit more than incremental you know would have been probably but they're never going to use that that's why they don't hire me to do their marketing but next year is supposed to be the little bit more than just a little bit two years next year well there's gonna be if we think a folding phone and we'll get to the slim phone because i think the air is kind of a preak it's like the john the baptist to the jesus phone and then excuse me excuse the i apologize the heresy And then the year after will be even more odd-dropping because that'll be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. And so. Yeah, completely invisible. Like you won't even see it. It'll float. It'll literally float. This one didn't float. 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. Oh, yes. There was, so there's the annual walk down the spiral staircase. You know, reporters generally get there early. There's a little white snacks around because you're going to be running around to get a hands-on right after this thing. And you know you're a reporter because you pull out that little spiral-bound reporter's notebook, right? And a pen or pencil behind your ear and you lift them up. Yeah, I'm pretty analog, so I do have those things. I do have like a big A5 notebook. Good on you. Good on you. um 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's 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 are the seats reserved or no it's a free-for-all it's like it's like southwest airlines you have to yeah that's right okay 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 when the descent is going to begin and so they kind of hang around the staircases oh so there's the the door is open are there velvet ropes what how do they just i i i'm never at the at the front because my my priority is getting to the hands-on so i sit at the back on purpose i'm not trying to get smart you want to get same see just like southwest you you want to sit up close to the exit so you can be off the plane yeah quick um but you know with each subsequent year that i've been going there's more and more selfie sticks being held up and i'm here in a theater 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 let me just you said there was somebody dancing there was an influencer uh 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 going to edit and she just did a whole thing getting the shot i was watching her and i was like oh i just here trying to get my wi on my laptop you doing a whole production over there and And then in the hands she was doing the same kind of thing And I sure that just for her audience and to make that sort of um 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 co-opted. I don't, 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 uh about a month ago was like a really that was a really interesting um the Jimmy Fallon change the Jimmy yeah I was at that event as well in the front row and I was just like what is happening this is terrible I feel like I'm in an episode of WandaVision and And I 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, 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, you know, I said there's some Google people and it was for someone different. and I went, who? And they went, just different. 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. Yeah, but like... Apple, I think... Or Jimmy Fallon? No. Yeah, right. I think... Mistake. I said this during the pre-show 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 uh 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 very good for you, but not like jaw dropping, odd dropping? And somebody in our chat room said it was not dropping. Not dropping. Hey, don't let me interrupt. I know we're having a blast here reliving 2025, but I thought this would be a good time to mention something we do every year around this time that's very important to us and to our ad sales. It's our Twit survey. We do it because we don't really, and no podcast does, know anything about you. That's, I think, a good thing. We respect your privacy. But we also would like to know a little bit about you to the degree you're willing to help us out. just some basic information that helps us go to advertisers and say things like, well, 80% of our audience is IT decision makers, that kind of thing. That's why we do this annual survey. It should only take a few minutes of your time. As I said, it is one of the ways you can contribute to keeping TWIT on the air. If you would like to before too long in the next couple of weeks, do it now while you're watching. Go to twit.tv slash survey26. it's our annual 2026 uh twit listener and viewer survey it's very important to us and i thank you i really appreciate 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 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 You got to give him headphones or something, though. Now he's just going to sit down. I'll sit next to him here. Can you hear what's going on? Yeah. Yeah. Just start from the explain like the Tour de France thing. And then Brian, first of all, great to meet you finally after all this time. No, no, I'm a big fan, big fan. This is a kind of a little excited. Oh, that's great. Well, we got two questions for you. But first of all, you just built a computer. We're talking about privacy and we're talking about privacy and how lots of regulations around the books trying to ban kids from like age verification, but you built something that circumvents everything. And also relevant to the point, you have a teenage daughter. So you're also parents. What happened was Amy wanted to watch the Tour de France and she didn't like the American commentators. And so we kept, so we'd paid for all the legal access to it and everything else, but you got the American version of it. And so I took it upon myself to figure out if I could get her the European version. And so relatively straightforward setup, put in a VPN, figured it out, got ourselves an account over in England and then proceeded to get it to stream, which was a small technical problem, but solvable. But that got me thinking, could I make a laptop that was completely disassociated to myself? Oh, interesting. So could I create a laptop that had no back connection to me? And that started a process. Actually, this was my experiment of using ChatGPT to see, you know, so I would use it as kind of a planner and whatnot. I learned that ChatGPT makes many, many mistakes very confidently. Yes. 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. So if you're using Windows, you got to use a Microsoft account, which immediately identifies you. It turns out you don't. You can actually get a trial account. So anyway, through a long process of back and forth. And I wasn't going for nation state security. The insane things that you did, though, because that's. So one of the problems is. Amy's coaching you. 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? Right. So it turns out- There are some that take crypto, I think. Some that take crypto. I wasn't ready to tackle the crypto beast. That's not something I'm familiar with and I didn't want to take it on. Right. But it turns out a company called Molvad will allow you to buy prepaid Molvad cards anonymously through, I got mine through Best Buy. And you just walk in and take cash. So you go to Best Buy, you buy a card, but you don't want to associate, you have to buy cash. And you have to buy it with cash. no pictures no no no pictures and you go in and you get your mulved vpn and you pay cash for it because okay otherwise the credit card's attached to it no no credit cards and then once you have the the vpn access through the credit card now you have to somehow get this laptop online by the way joe says you can also sell it send mulved cash in an envelope you can but then you have to provide an address to say that's right i thought about that so one of the tricks is you now have this mulvad 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 mulvad and then go silent And that was a bit of a puzzle. And it turns out, public libraries. 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 Molved 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 a 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 their task. But the hard part was trying to figure out how to get that initial contact. So now I have this laptop that technically is not traceable back to myself. Well, wait a minute. He had. So Leo, Brian's little key base group. You guys had your geek friends. Oh, yeah, I didn't want to. They're well, some of them. Listen, shout out, shout out to them. They were amazing. They came over and all it took was some barbecue. and they were willing to penetration testing and they, they set it up and did a pen. So they, they actually tried to attack you, try to try to de-anonymize you. Yeah. So they set up a ghost, a wifi 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 Moved is really, really good at blocking everything. So even on a reboot and a fresh startup, it would never, um nice expose the ip or anything address no no leak no leaking ip leaking no i also found out modern laptops don't let you do uh ip mac address changing no um they're built in to prevent it so i use a uh usb plug-in one that is capable of doing mac address hiding because um apparently that's what it's basically built for so every time that was a wi-fi adapt a blue uh usb wi-fi that did allow you to rotate 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, if you get into the nation state level security, you've got to basically build the laptop, use it once and then shred it. Shred it immediately. If you're trying to- Just out of curiosity, first of all, Brian, what's your last name so we can give you a lower third when we when we edit this wolf w-o-o-l-f brian wolf w-o-o-l-f yeah okay okay and what do you want in your lower third uh ophthalmologist uh privacy advocate uh crazy crazy geek yeah how about just you know amy's crazy husband amy's creamy says but okay uh wow that so i mean it does beg the question what the hell do you need that for got nothing it serves no general purpose it was just an exercise it was just a fun game of trying to separate out but the yes and the you are not an engineer no 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. You can have retina A up your wazoo if you wanted to, 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. It's interesting. Thanks to AI. No, legitimately it was my experiment with chat GPT. I wanted to learn how to like, I know some people are, uh, what's it called? Assistant programming. There's a term for it. Vibe coding programming. And, uh, so I'm not a programmer, but I was like, using it as a tool to see. This is really an 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, all 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 have before. What really amazed me is how confident ChatGP is wrong. That's the problem. It's confidently wrong. So 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 it 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. and but one night in bangkok you know people in thailand my friend all right well done well done but just ask murray head he can tell you i go back to chat gpt and i'm like um this is all in the language of thai uh are you sure this is right and of course it goes like oh no good catch you know that kind of sites 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, it would have left me. So it just kind of showed me a little bit about what AI is capable of and what it is not capable of. Very interesting. 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 chat GPT or although Gemini has become awfully good. I have to say thanks to Google's backend of search. All right, hang on. Cause I do have another question for you. Okay. And you're, I'm giving, I'm unfortunately launching this at you without any preparation, prior preparation, but there I saw story and 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 essalore of course uh to slow nearsightedness in kids and i'm just curious oh that is so funny tomorrow i actually have a meeting with essalore set up to discuss that very product ah so i can give you the basic background of how the concept works i don't know how this particular paragraph 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 uh brian wolf is our guest along with amy webb and kathy gellis it's great to have all three of you on the show and yes i think father robert you know what we maybe should get brian and father robert together our we 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. I could definitely use a lot of tips. I think it'd be, well, I think it'd be interesting to talk about. We will get on that. My job before we switch topics is to make sure that legal process can't undo what you're trying to do. Can they subpoena you? Right. And anybody, Again, Amy talked about the links on the chain. Any of those links on the chain are, in theory, targets that somebody will try to use legal process to find whatever footprint you have left, and then they'll go up the stream to see if they can put together an identity. So to to frustrate that technically is great, but 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 undue. Yeah, it's it's 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 this is an issue that needs more attention to. I agree. I agree. I think Brian's done everything he can to be non-subpoenaable. Well, he's just come on a big show and admitted it, but... 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? Yes. That's just what I'm saying. If we're 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 no 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. 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 Of course, I'm MacBreak Weekly, but does 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, 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 your support. and of course a deep thanks to our club to it members who give us the financial support as well as their moral support that financial support makes a very big difference to our bottom line and we really really appreciate you too i i'm very grateful to be able to sit in this seat every week and do this show it is an absolute honor and a privilege i want to thank you for that and i look forward to uh many many more years of doing it with your support and we'll be back in 2026 for a great year. There's going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening in tech, 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 this is amazing