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

[00:00:00] 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.

[00:00:25] 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.

[00:00:54] 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.

[00:01:19] 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 have 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.

[00:01:49] 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.

[00:02:19] 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, Adrian 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.

[00:02:48] 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 ReSpeecher to tweak Brody and Jones Hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic.

[00:03:13] That has sparked outrage among the ancients who run 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? There is.

[00:03:40] And I feel like the industry is very much going towards at least some part of the movie is made with technology. It's so... 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 is shot in front of a green screen or something like that. Where's the real art here? Right. Right. Much of the film's dialogue is in Hungarian.

[00:04:09] And apparently, and I don't speak Hungarian, but the Hungarian that Brody and Jones speak is very accurate. It's a difficult language to pronounce. And they were able to do it. It 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.

[00:04:37] It was kind of a low, for now, for a Hollywood film, that's a low budget film. Extremely low. Extremely low. It was shot on VistaVision. When the movie came on, I watched it at home. I didn't want to go to the theater. It said VistaVision. I thought, wow, I didn't even know that was still around. And I found out, though, I watched an interview with a cinematographer from Vanity Fair. And he said, all VistaVision is, is 35 millimeter film like you would use in your camera, turned on its side.

[00:05:07] 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, it's still 35 millimeter, but it's wide angle. It's beautiful. It's a gorgeous film with an interest, really interesting soundtrack. And I don't think that a little bit of AI to make the Hungarian sound better is, oh, wait a minute.

[00:05:36] 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 drawings. Essentially assets or so. Yeah, because they had drawings at the, I don't think it was spoiled 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.

[00:06:06] 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. I feel like we'd be like violated as viewers. We'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. You definitely don't want to, I don't know.

[00:06:31] Like, it's just so weird because we watch so many things and a lot of us, especially the nerds, like you guys, 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 I 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 because they only spend 10 million and they're nominated. Everybody else's budget was way higher.

[00:06:59] 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. And so we're going to intermingle those into the show. In fact, I'll read a couple of emails that I got. Not everybody sent a video. Scott Simmons, Scooter VC in a proud club member says, I can't believe it's 20 years since you first showed up on my iPod.

[00:07:25] 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 nineties when I was getting into my MIS degree. You guys have remained my primary source of tech education and information ever since. And this, 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.

[00:07:54] I work at USAA. And while I wasn't part of the primary development team, I worked on some processes that enabled that functionality. To me, it was the highest compliment that Leo, whom I've been watching for years at that point, loved something that I'd had a small part working on. I still bank with USAA. It's a great, great bank. Thank you for all you do. You're always a bright spot in my week. I hope you enjoy every second of celebrating this amazing accomplishment. I'll see you on discord. Thank you so much, Scott. I really, really appreciate that. We've got a lot of videos.

[00:08:23] 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.

[00:08:48] I have the joy of remembering you from the screensavers many years ago when I worked just up the road at Hewlett Packard and 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 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.

[00:09:16] 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.

[00:09:45] Ron, I hope we're around in 2031, and I wish you the best. Yeah. Well, and this is the thing that's kind of amazing. These letters and videos came in from all walks of life all over the world. It's really been a joy and a pleasure to do this show along with you guys. It's really nice to have you. What do you remember? The first show you were on? Father Robert, what was the first time you were on? Yeah.

[00:10:10] The first time I was on was I was in the Peninsula, in the South Bay, setting up for Interop. Interop. And that was with Brian Chi. Yeah. And what was the show that you did before Twit back in the day? Well, it was the tech guy. There was Security Now. It was tech guy. And Amber MacArthur's Inside the Net. It was tech guy. And I was in the chat room. And I mentioned, oh, gosh, you know, I had already done the listener call-in show for Tech News Today.

[00:10:40] 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 butt to Petaluma. And yeah, that was my very first episode. Very first show that we did was April 17th, 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.

[00:11:10] Just getting warmed up. Yeah. Yeah. You want to hear just a little? I could play a little bit of it. Just give that kind of extreme. This is how weird it sounded. Very different. We were on Skype. As long as we're catching up, what you up to these days, Robert? Everybody knows Robert Heron as the crazy lab rat who specialized in video and would come on the show with his whacked out hair and tell us the latest thing. Patrick was under the car. You're not on TV, though, these days. No, not these days. I am working, though, for Extreme Tech and PCMag.com.

[00:11:38] This is back when it was revenge of the screensaver. They have incredible highs. This is it was the revenge of the. Oh, we found my salad. Thank God. This was the revenge of the screensavers, which I only called it that briefly because I got an 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. I asked the recording on like little Zoom. Zoom audio recording. No, no. That was Skype.

[00:12:07] 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 rant recorders. You know? Yes, Sam. It was at Morant's recorder. A solid state reporter. This is like way, way pre Skype a source. Yeah.

[00:12:35] 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 tweets were mostly done on Skype, not with Skype a source. One call. When you when you start like those first shows, had you even expanded out of the attic of the cottage? No, I was in a I was in a tiny little Garrett room of an old bed and breakfast that we called the Twit Cottage later.

[00:13:03] 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. 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 podcasts today do what they call double enders, where everybody records locally and then somebody assembles it.

[00:13:33] 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 mean, we sort of do that now. It's gotten easier now with services like StreamYard and so on. We use Restream. Yeah. Yeah. They record everybody locally and upload it to the server. And then I just grab them off the server. It's much easier nowadays. We use Zencaster. The BrewPub Twit episode was episode zero. Yeah. Technically.

[00:14:00] I don't consider it episode one because it was a one-off. Right. And it didn't intend it to be a podcast. Well, I guess it technically was, but really we just put it on a website. Yeah. And because 30,000 people downloaded it, that's when I said, geez, I wish I could do this more often. Light bulb. 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.

[00:14:29] 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 like when the Samsung 840 Evo had come out around then. This is way, way back. I remember that because Dvorak asked me, like, what's your favorite SSD?

[00:14:55] And then he spot checked me with Wirecutter. Oh, that's Dvorak. So, like, while I was answering, 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, I got a great wine buyer there. Sam, when was the first time you were on?

[00:15:23] 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, I was, at that point, I was working for GM. And we did a segment with the GM Envy Concepts at CES. Oh, I thought, was it CES or Comdex? It was at CES. I remember that.

[00:15:49] And then I wasn't actually on Twit, I think, until, like, 2014. By which time I was, you know, I had shifted away. And 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. Yeah. Now, we were talking about Anthropics Clawed. That's the coding engine you like to use, Harper.

[00:16:16] 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.

[00:16:37] 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 now with Codex, where they have what looks like a computer that you're interfacing, not necessarily via a traditional computing interface.

[00:17:06] 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. 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 my bread and butter at this moment. I love this. My Vibe Coding is all I do.

[00:17:36] I'm Vibe Coding somewhere, not at here, but at my house. The computer is Vibe Coding itself. It's doing it right now. And you don't have to touch anything. I just want one of those birds. What are they vibing? Well, the thing. It's better than an intern. It's so good, Will. 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.

[00:18:04] It was my sense that it was coding without actually typing any code. You're doing, you're passing the vibe of what you want onto the AI and the AI is generating the code. Although when Kapathi 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.

[00:18:30] And I have many friends who have Vibe Coded their way into an app and Vibe Coded their way into a bunch of bugs, Vibe Coded their way into something that they've launched. They've launched like an MVP kind of minimal viable. Yeah, a hundred percent. 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.

[00:18:56] You just type in like, I want to make a expo, which is a react native framework and 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.

[00:19:25] I mean, it's in seconds. It's got to, it's done. And I find it this liberating experience and, and I, 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. Yes. But since we last talked, Leo, we have a couple of great blog posts, by the way, on how he does this, which I recommend at Harper.blog.

[00:19:55] 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 the AI to do it. You mean you get a binary? No, no, it's on your computer. It's there. But like, why, why look at it? Why would you look at it? The code is so cheap to generate. So what I did with, what I did with Cloud Code, which was fun, was I had, I work in Emacs with Common Lisp. I mean, I'm working in a weird, obscure world.

[00:20:23] 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 going to, if you were going to give me a little guide to vibe coding? I want to write an app.

[00:20:49] I want to write an app that does, I don't know. It takes all my, all my thoughts that I, 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, it's such a, there's such a nuance to, to what it is and what people think about it. Because you truly can do that.

[00:21:19] 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 have no idea what's happening. That's a bad thing though, right?

[00:21:44] I think it was a bad thing when it costs 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.

[00:22:11] 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, you know, my peers, all these people I've worked with for the last 20 years in like kind of big startup tech kind of that we've conceived as tech.

[00:22:41] We really valued the craft of code. You know, 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.

[00:23:10] 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.

[00:23:39] 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, they think 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. And but if you wanted a handcrafted and by the way, I found this out.

[00:24:04] If you wanted a handcrafted Amish table, you could get one. But it's $15,000 because somebody has to make it by hand. But it still exists. We've seen this before. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Will. He dropped that. We lost Will. Oh, he was so mad he hung up. He's so upset. So should we, isn't this a little dystopian sounding though, Harper?

[00:24:31] I mean, I don't, I'm confused about this because I've, 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, 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.

[00:24:58] Every time I'm programming, I'm kind of vibe program 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, it puts it into a negative space, which, you know, whatever.

[00:25:19] But what I find fascinating about this is I spent all of my career learning things like POSEX 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. Like 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.

[00:25:43] Like 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. Now, well, that's, that's all you need to know is how to Google, right? Changed that whole idea of what is a fact. How do you hold facts as we were talking about earlier? This is the process.

[00:26:08] There's a stage where, where, you know, I hate to bring it back to, to, to journalism. Right. But, um, anybody can write a sort of, you know, re rewritten press release of X company, you know, released X graphics card. And here's, you know, the summary of what it does.

[00:26:28] Um, but to really write like Hunter S Thompson, you know, to really write, um, can it do that? I think yes. Awkwardly. Um, 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.

[00:26:51] 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 chat GPT 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, um, I think it's O3 mini or GPT 4 mini or something.

[00:27:19] It, 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, 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.

[00:27:48] And, 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. Um, 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.

[00:28:17] 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 ex-wife. Normal. Uh, code, uh, OpenAI does have a command line version of Codex CLI. They've updated, uh, that as well. You know, uh, I use, um, a note-taking app called Obsidian, which has a ridiculous number of, uh, plugins.

[00:28:42] 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.

[00:29:12] 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 or 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. Interesting.

[00:29:29] And what I find fascinating as well is that things are changing so fast that I would fully expect a product to be released where someone says, you know, describe the SAS company that you want or the SAS product you want. And it just takes care of all of the data storage. We'll make it for you. We'll just make it for you right there. Oh, you're, you know, a landlord of only pigs. Great. Oh, you're, you're, you're a farmer that only grows, you know, dandelions. Perfect.

[00:29:56] 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, uh, out systems that, uh, they did for years, did no 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.

[00:30:24] And do you think it makes it easier for startups? Cause the, 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.

[00:30:54] They're like, 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. 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.

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[00:34:09] 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?

[00:34:38] So, we just might as well accelerate into it. I think that's still, at least in the tech industry, that's still the general belief. Like, 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, you know, an outsider trying to figure out what was going on inside the room to being inside the room where they make the decisions of, you know, who to give a check to and what to bet on.

[00:35:08] And that starts the whole process of building this technology. So, what I realize is I think the job displacement this time will be different. Everybody tries to make an analogy towards the industrial revolution and stopping farming and only 1% of people work in agriculture today. But when I started doing the back of the envelope math and I started looking at how quick this displacement is happening, I've come to the conclusion that in the next 10 years, we're going to see serious job displacement.

[00:35:36] 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 few years- 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 that.

[00:36:05] It always seemed to me kind of a little hand wavy because where's all that money going to come from? Yeah. It's extremely hand wavy. Who's paying for this UBI? Is it the federal government? I mean, we have UBI today in the form of a lot of different programs we have. Entitlements, yeah. If you took all the entitlements together and you just wrote people a check, and there's people who have theorized just doing this. But how big a check would it be? You know, actually, you could do the math.

[00:36:34] I think it'd probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom of the income ladder. You can't even pay rent in Petaluma for low thousands a month. No. It would be like- Let alone eating. It would be like unemployment or food stamps and these kind 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 mailroom went away. Photocopy room went away. Well, you know, we've watched all these jobs go away over time.

[00:37:01] And 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, Elon does have a safety driver still, which lets him off the hook for a while. Yeah. I think they have a safety operator. It's interesting. It's in the passenger side. Oh, he's not in front of the wheel?

[00:37:30] Not in front of the wheel, but there's a stop and a pullover button. 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- By the way, 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.

[00:37:54] 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. That's Elon. Well, yeah. 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 Elon drives. Well, it is a neural net.

[00:38:24] That's how it drives. So, it's studying humans. 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 basically dissolved the division. And Google's going ahead with Waymo big time. You can't go around San Francisco without seeing a thousand Waymos. Waymo every other car. Yeah.

[00:38:52] Elon wants to get into this business, but he's not alone. This is one of the hot businesses right now is robo taxis. There'll be many winners. Volkswagen has a very competitive product. There's a company Pony AI. There's WeRide. 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 disappeared. You know, one of the things that happens when you work outside.

[00:39:21] These technologies are taking the low-hanging fruits of the gig economy, which is one of the few things. Yes. It's sad. And I know people have alluded to 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 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.

[00:39:50] There were 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. 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.

[00:40:17] People stopped making buggy whips, but found, oh, is this his laptop overheated in the sun? Welcome to Los Angeles. 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.

[00:40:47] 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. You know, and it's also like, no, I think Google already does. Yeah. 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.

[00:41:15] 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 rush to the cities. If we're all on UBI, and if most of those repetitive jobs are now being done by AI, there's

[00:41:45] 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.

[00:42:09] 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.

[00:42:31] I just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past. 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.

[00:43:01] 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.

[00:43:31] My laptop. 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, yeah, there was no concept that the corporation would be with you for your entire Well, there was feudalism, I guess. Yeah.

[00:43:58] And but now, you know, self-reliance is going to be what it's all about. And these are going to be complicated issues. Andy Jassy wrote a piece this week. And when a CEO writes a manifesto and publishes it to everybody, you know, in the company and then publishes it publicly before it gets leaked to Amanda and TechCrunch, you know, it's important. And he goes through this and there's about two dozen examples of AI and what they're working on.

[00:44:27] And in that story, 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 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.

[00:44:56] 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 this is a high and low situation, Leo. You know, you are seeing it in white collar jobs doing chores.

[00:45:22] 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.

[00:45:47] 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 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.

[00:46:11] 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. Well, that's the other side of this.

[00:46:37] 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 society to be run. It's not.

[00:47:04] Every time we've seen that in the past, there's been a guillotine involved. 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

[00:47:32] 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. Half. Half.

[00:47:58] This Apple event on Tuesday, or I guess it was Wednesday. We, well, 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. Um, you know, there, there were certainly a number of things that were either leaked wrong

[00:48:27] and none of the, 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. Um, what 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 it's announced. Like they'll change their mind on it. That's true. And also sometimes, for instance, infrared cameras supposedly might be in the AirPods.

[00:48:55] Obviously you're not going to pull that because, uh, you have to be, they've been making them for months. So whatever features are in the AirPods, uh, the new AirPods pros are obviously we're 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, you know, put it in context for like, why are they doing it? What's the purpose that they think, you know, these features could have.

[00:49:20] And, and so you, you, it's like having a collection of parts, uh, of, of that's 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 the, here's a set of features. Here's a set of facts.

[00:49:50] Let us tell you, let us shape what that means. And to some degree that that's what the briefings are too, is to, to kind of give you an idea of where Apple, what Apple's thinking is about all this. Go ahead, Dan. 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, is pretty important. And, you know, earned media is even for Apple, they need earned media.

[00:50:16] 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 in media. All right. 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 check your live blogged it on, on the verge. I did. I did do, I did have feelings and I blogged while it was happening.

[00:50:46] It was. You and Alison Johnson and Jacob Kastronakis were there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was a weird event. I'll say just because, um, 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. Design.

[00:51:12] 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 Ive left the company. They're back on design. 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

[00:51:40] 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. That's somebody who hates it.

[00:52:04] 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. They're, they're just situations where it becomes illegible because of how, 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

[00:52:32] 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, I have a harder time reading and I get annoyed. So 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.

[00:53:01] 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. So, you know, we're talking about design that way. So I like your strawberry sweater, but it's orange. 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.

[00:53:25] 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. 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 pumpkin spice orange. It's not a sorbet orange. Oh, please don't say it's pumpkin spice. Oh no.

[00:53:55] By the way, I ordered orange. I even have an orange case. I am ready. I am going all orange. I can't wait. It's an autumnal orange. So like a very nice, deep orange. It's pretty. It's not like biohazard. It's pumpkin. It's pumpkin spice. It's just pumpkin. It's pumpkin orange. It's not biohazard orange. It's not going to like burn your eyeballs out. But it seemed pretty divisive online. Sure. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

[00:54:23] You have an orange chair. You must like orange. The orange sweater. Like all kinds of like. Where's your orange? Yeah. Dan's under embargo too. You know. Jason. That's a hint. That's right. Chair is a hint. Easter eggs. So. Go ahead. Sorry. The event. Usually. We don't see what happens at the Apple campus. There was outside by the rainbow stage. Or was it inside? It was inside the space. Were you there too, Jason? I was. Yeah. Okay.

[00:54:54] Yeah. Dan, were you there? No. 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 inside the Steve Jobs Theater. Yes. Oh, okay. That's nice. Yeah. And then Tim Cook. They didn't let us too close to the campus. It's before you go in, right? They don't let us too close to the circle. Right. A little bit.

[00:55:23] Well, did you get the golf cart treatment? Because Victoria got the golf cart. I did get the golf cart. Okay. 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 neat. And I think there are speakers around the actual spaceship. There are speakers. Like Disneyland.

[00:55:53] 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. I have some of your pictures, Victoria. You're sitting in the beautiful Steve Jobs Theater with, 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.

[00:56:20] 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 awe-dropping was. Cause I was like, why not just call it jaw-dropping? Under-awe. Yeah. Marketing definitely came up with that one.

[00:56:48] It was like, this is like the proper title would have 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. 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 more. Or is it two years? Next year. Well, there's going to be, we think a folding phone and we'll get to the slim phone. Cause I think the air is kind of a preak. It's like the John the Baptist to the Jesus phone.

[00:57:16] And then, excuse me, excuse the, I apologize, the heresy. And then, um, and then, uh, the year after will be even more odd-dropping cause that'll be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. And so. Yeah. Completely invisible. Like you won't even see it. Like it'll float. It'll literally float. This one didn't float. That's it. You just give Apple a thousand dollars. So Victoria, there were a lot of influencers at the event. Yes.

[00:57:42] This was, uh, Apple's gotten more and more focused on influencers over, over, uh, reporters. I would guess. Oh yes. There was, um, so there's the annual walk down the spiral staircase. Um, you know, reporters generally get there early. There's a little white snacks around because you were going to be running around to get a hands-on right after this thing. And you know, you're a reporter cause you pull out that little spiral bound reporter's notebook, right? And you, and a pen or pencil behind your ear and you'll. Yeah.

[00:58:12] I'm, I'm pretty, uh, analog. So I do have those things. I do have like a big A5 notebook. 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 as 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 Southwest airlines. You have to. Yeah. That's right. Okay. First come first serve.

[00:58:42] So, you know, you have some reporters who are just like hawks. They know they have like a sixth sense of 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 signal? 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 it same.

[00:59:07] See, just like Southwest, you, you want to sit up close to the exit so you can be off the plane. Yeah. Quick. Got it. 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 theme job theater. Yeah. Yeah. Cause everyone's going to 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

[00:59:33] as you go painstakingly slow down this spiral staircase. And you're just like, oh my God, let me just, 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 cause she had her phone and she was just going like. Oh, and she's dancing to this like invisible music that I know she's going to edit. She's going to add it.

[01:00:00] 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 wife 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, um, content. But it's interesting to see these events that were pretty much geared towards media to start

[01:00:23] 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. The Jimmy Fallon. Yeah. I was at that event as well in the front row.

[01:00:53] And I was just like, what is happening? This is terrible. I feel like I'm in an episode of WandaVision 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 was different. 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.

[01:01:22] And I, you know, somebody different, you know, I said this. Some Google people and it was for someone different. And I went who, and they went just different. So rug emoji. They're, they're trying to reach the normies and they don't want to say normies because that's insulting, but that's what they're trying to do is reach normies. But like Apple, I think. No. Yeah. Right. I think. Mistake. Uh, I said this during the pre-show and I'll just repeat it here for the larger audience,

[01:01:49] but I Vicks 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.

[01:02:14] 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, um, uh, 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,

[01:02:42] but, 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.

[01:03:12] We respect your privacy, but we also would like to know a little bit about you to the degree you're willing to help us out. Just some basic information that helps us go to advertisers and say things like, well, 80% of our audience is IT decision makers, that kind of thing. That's why we do this annual survey should only take a few minutes of your time. As I said, it is one of the ways you can contribute to keeping twit on the air.

[01:03:36] 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 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. Do you have like five minutes?

[01:04:07] Okay. Can you please come onto 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. 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. I don't know. I'm a big fan, big fan. This is a kind of, I'm a little excited. Oh, that's great.

[01:04:35] Well, we got two questions for you, but first of all, you, you just built a computer. 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 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.

[01:05:05] So we kept, so we'd paid for all the logist 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 set up, 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, but solvable.

[01:05:33] 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, I would use it as kind of a planner and whatnot. And I learned that ChatGPT makes many, many mistakes very confidently. Yes.

[01:06:03] 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 a- So if you're using Windows, you got to use a Microsoft account, which immediately identifies you. It turns out you don't. Right. There are ways around that. 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- Maybe he's coaching you. Well, she's right.

[01:06:33] 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 pay cash.

[01:07:03] 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. And you have to buy it with cash. No pictures. No, no, no pictures. And you go in and you get your Molvad VPN- And you pay cash for it? Of course. Okay. Otherwise the credit card's attached to it. No, no credit cards. And then once you have the VPN access through the credit card, now you have to somehow get this laptop online. By the way, Joe says you can also send Molvad cash in an envelope.

[01:07:31] You can, but then you have to provide an address to send it back to you. I thought about that. So one of the tricks is you now have this Molvad 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 Molvad and then go silent? And that was a bit of a puzzle. And it turns out public libraries. Ah.

[01:08:00] 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, you know, extra security. But anyway, I managed to finally get online, finally get into Molvad with a totally private, untraceable back to myself account. And then once Molvad was installed, now you're masked behind their VPN.

[01:08:25] 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. Right. And all the whatnot. So that's actually been sort of auto-figured out by a lot of people before me.

[01:08:54] And I was just following their task. But the hard part was trying to figure out how to get that initial contact. So now I have this laptop that technically is not traceable back to myself. Well, wait a minute. He had, so Leo, Brian's little key base group. You guys had your geek friends over. Oh, yeah. I didn't want to. Well, some of them. 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 set it up and did a pen.

[01:09:22] Oh, they actually tried to attack you, tried to de-anonymize you. 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 Mulvet is really, really good at blocking everything. So even on a reboot and a fresh startup, it would never expose the IP or anything. No leak, no leaking, IP leaking, no DNS leaking.

[01:09:52] Well, I also found out modern laptops don't let you do IP MAC address changing. No. They're built in to prevent it. So I use a USB plug-in one that is capable of doing MAC address hiding because apparently that's what it's basically built for. So that was a USB Wi-Fi adapter that did allow you to rotate MAC addresses. But now I've got a stealth MAC address hooked up to a stealth laptop.

[01:10:21] 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 edit this? Wolf.

[01:10:49] W-O-O-L-F. Brian Wolf. W-O-O-L-F. Yeah, two words. Twice as good. Okay. And what do you want in your lower third? Ophthalmologist? Privacy advocate? Random geek. Crazy geek? Yeah. How about just, you know, Amy's crazy husband? Amy's crazy husband. Okay. Wow. So, I mean, it does beg the question, what the hell do you need that for? Nothing.

[01:11:17] It serves no general purpose at all. It was just an exercise. It was just a fun game of trying to separate out. But, yes, and 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. You can have retin-A up your wazoo if you wanted to. But 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.

[01:11:47] Thanks to AI. 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? There's a term for it. Vibe coding. Vibe programming. Yeah. And 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.

[01:12:12] 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, yeah, it's 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 ChatGPT is wrong. That's the problem. It's confidently wrong. So, if you don't know enough to know that it's snowballing you.

[01:12:41] 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. But one night in Bangkok, you know people in Thailand, my friend. All right, well done, well done. Just ask Murray Head. He can tell you.

[01:13:10] I go back to ChatGPT, and I'm like, this is all in the language of Thai. Are you sure this is right? And, of course, it goes like, oh, no good 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, it would have left me.

[01:13:39] 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 ChatGPT. Although Gemini has become awfully good, I have to say, thanks to Google's backend search. All right.

[01:14:09] Hang on, because I do have another question for you. Okay. And I'm unfortunately launching this at you without any preparation, prior preparation. But I saw a story in Fast Company. In fact, when I put it in, because I thought, oh, I wonder if we can get Brian to talk about this. There's a new FDA-approved glasses by Essilor, of course, to slow nearsightedness in kids. And I'm just curious. Oh, that is so funny.

[01:14:39] 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. 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, 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.

[01:15:10] 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.

[01:15:36] 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? Can they, 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.

[01:16:05] 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 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.

[01:16:35] I agree. I think Brian's done everything he can to be non-subpoenable. Well, if 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? But yes, like if we're...

[01:16:57] Trying to make sure that the law works in this regard is really tricky, even as a practitioner and even where the law should work, it doesn't always work well. So if you can make it that none of these links in the chain have something useful to disclose, great. You're much better off than somebody who just has to hope that it won't get disclosed. Right. Well, that's it for the best of 2025. But you know who really is the best of 2025? Our amazing Twit team.

[01:17:26] 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 the work around the studio. One of our great editors.

[01:17:52] 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.

[01:18:21] 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 shows. 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.

[01:18:51] 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 2 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.

[01:19:21] 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. 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.

[01:19:51] 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 tweet is in the can. Happy New Year, everybody. This is amazing. With Mastercard Business Bonus,

[01:20:20] sichern Sie sich attraktive Rabatte auf Tools und Services für Ihr Unternehmen. Alle Angebote unter mastercard.com slash business bonus.