TWiT 1012: Our Best Of 2024 - The Best Moments From TWiT's 2024
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Happy holidays, everybody. It's time for Twit and our annual best of episode. Coming up, the best moments from 2024. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Twit. This Week in Tech. Episode 1012 for 12-29-2024. Our best of 2024.

It's time for Twitter, everybody. And of course, as we do every year, it's the end of the year. We sent everybody home. Actually, we made them work harder earlier in December to put together a best of. Benito's put together some of the best clips from 2024. And of course, we always begin the year, as we will in 2025, with CES. Father Robert joined us with his CES haul. Watch.

Well, okay, let's start super geeky. This is super niche. That one right there. That's that dock. No, that actually, okay. I have one that looks just like this from iOmega. Absolutely. That's a Targus. It's a dual dock. So the idea is a dual 100-watt output, USB-C and Thunderbolt. So you put your laptop on there. You plug it into the wall. It's powering your laptop. Maybe two different laptops or a laptop and a desktop. It gives you triple display output. So you can have up to three monitors connected externally. Okay.

Three display ports. Two display ports and an HDMI. Right. As well as Thunderbolt. Of course, Ethernet and Thunderbolt. But that's actually a KVM.

So the nice thing about it is it's not a traditional KVM where you flip the button and it flips all the monitors from one to the other. That actually knows the boundaries of the resolution of each computer. So you use the same mouse and keyboard to move the mouse over and you enter into the desktop space of the other computer. You go back and forth. The cool thing about this is that means that it is operating system independent. Right.

It's something like, do you remember Mouse Without Borders from Microsoft? This does that, but I can use a Mac. I can use Windows. I can use Linux. It doesn't matter. It's OS agnostic. Again, I know that this is super niche, but if you're like a system administrator or just a guy who needs multiple machines on his desk, that thing is incredible. It's so much nicer than having two sets of keyboards.

keyboards and mice. I might get this because I have that big 55-inch OLED with multiple computers. And if I just hook this up, I have my nice keyboard, my Keychron keyboard. I have my classic Microsoft Intellimouse, and I just plug those into this, and then that's all I need. I have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and I have multiple systems. When that was first pitched to me, I didn't get it. I'm like, KVMs. KVMs are 20 years ago. Nobody even makes them anymore. No one makes them, but this actually, that absolutely made sense to me. All right, how much? That's why I did it.

uh it's again enterprise product so you're looking at 455 yeah it's it's high it's high out there what else we got okay so um this is run hood so this is their 1200 this is sort of a a home away from home camping unit so we've got the solar panels we've got this 1200 watt uh power unit now the

So it's charging up from the solar panels. It can charge up from the solar panels. How much wattage, though, do these generate, these solar panels? In partial sunlight, this will do 100 watts.

Oh, okay. So it's not a great amount, but the nice thing about this is it's super durable, it's super flexible, and it will work in partial sunlight. And I could probably fill up... There's a battery in there, I presume. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I could probably fill up the battery over 24 hours. This is the cool thing. These use these battery packs, so you can hot swap these things. And they give you these little modules that you can clip on. So I can pull...

one of the battery packs out and now I've got, what is this, like 400 watt hours of power for USB-C, USB, or I could actually just charge it from USB-C PD. Now, this is the kind of systems that I love because it means that once you've made the investment into the system, you can

swap your modules in and out and grab what you need to power whatever you're doing. So you want a day at the beach, maybe you don't need the whole system, you just pull one of these out and this is more than enough to run your laptop, your phones, your desktop. It looks like it also could be an emergency...

That's actually what I'm going for. This is going to be part of my... Power go out a lot at the Vatican. All the time. It's a design by Italians. It's not functional, but it looks good. Actually, you know what? It looks great. You know what I found out? I actually finally put a signal analyzer on our power. Oh, is it a little choppy? They've lowered down the voltage to like the bare minimum before it starts destroying things.

Intentionally? Intentionally, because we had a gas shortage. Oh, all right. Yeah. You're not getting municipal power, probably. You've got the Vatican. No, no, no. The Vatican uses municipal power. It's Rome's power. Yeah, it's Rome's power. I wouldn't be surprised if they turned it down. This is cool. How much, I mean, roughly? Okay, so if you got the whole kit, which would include the four battery packs, this thing. $2,800. No, it's like $1,600. You're kidding. No. And that's actually why I like them, because...

First, they're lower priced. I love the modular design. And they're standards-based. There's a lot of companies that make some really nice stuff, and I'm not going to call them out because their design is great, but it's all proprietary. Could I get multiple panels like these so I could expand my capabilities? This uses the standard solar connector. So the solar panels at your house, you could actually plug that in. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Okay. Run hood. Run hood. And they're a Bay Area located company. I like it.

Yeah, brand new. How about this? This is something that you might like for your travels. This was the Poly Voyager 360 UC. What is a Poly Voyager 360 UC when it's on? So earbuds. They're earbuds, but they've really been designed. They're inside. They're inside.

Now, the cool thing about this is you see that little screen at the top? Yeah. What is that all about? That actually gives you a touchscreen that can control like a Zoom call. So connecting and disconnecting calls. Okay. You can switch between modes. And actually, the reason why I like this set is it,

has a cable that lets you hook it up to a 3.5 millimeter audio jack. Oh, that's kind of nice. Right? So if you lose battery life, or no, you still need batteries. You still need the batteries. But by the way, this thing runs forever and the case is actually a battery for the earbuds as well. I also like it. It's got a little USB adapter in the case, which is fantastic. That's the wireless adapter. Correct. It's really been designed for UC people. So this, again, it's an enterprise product. I know it's niche.

Here's something that you might like. That's cool, though. This is Anker's newest Qi charger.

You know, I've been looking at, there's a lot of companies make these after Apple decided not to make theirs that are, that will charge a Apple watch, an Apple phone and the earbuds all at once. But this one folds up, which is kind of cool. Fold it back. There you go. Look at that. It's very compact. They have to be good for travel. It'd be good for travel. And they have another version of that, that they're going to be releasing that actually has a battery pack built into it. And it's anchor and anchor has a great reputation. So is this out? This is out. This is out right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, do you like audio? I love audio, baby. Everyone was pitching me speakers. The one speaker I decided to take was this. This is from Rocksteady. It's called their Stadium. Now, they sell themselves as a Sonos killer. I don't know if they're... I think Sonos is the Sonos killer, to be honest. Sonos is...

Let's be frank. Let's be a little frank. Now, the nice thing about this, though, is it's Bluetooth 5.0. So it's super, super clear as long as you've got a Bluetooth 5.0 system.

And it's infinitely expandable. How many speakers are there? Just one? There's one over there. There's that one right there. Go ahead and turn that on. So you could make this a 5.0 system if you bought enough speakers, right? You could make it. As long as it's within the Bluetooth range, the power button is in the back, you can add as many speakers as you'd like. And once you start playing it, it actually... We're going to rock out here. There's a subwoofer somewhere. Am I sitting on it? No, see, I haven't even turned that on. Oh.

But they all use- - Oh, it looks like a purse. A capacious, extraordinarily capacious purse. It sounds pretty good.

Yeah, I'm getting some bass. That's nice. This one is actually a little heavier bass. And so the idea of these is you can have multiple units. Can you do party mode, in other words? Party mode. Sono-style party mode. Precisely. And they don't interfere with one another as long as they're further than one foot away. So you could actually buy a set of these, put them outside, and you're good to go. I think the longest time I got to play on this was about 20 hours. They rate it for 30, but if you play it loud, you're probably going to get about 60.

I love that. I love that. I look forward to it every year. I don't think, unfortunately, Padre is going to CES this year, but we will do our CES wrap-up show in, I guess, next week, right? In the new year. You're watching the best of 2024 for This Week in Tech. We're so glad you're here. Happy holidays, everybody.

It's Ray from the Bobby Bones Show here to tell you that the National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure-ready RAV4. Yeah! Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander, seating up to eight passengers, an available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back and enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family.

Check out more of this national sales event. The deals are there when you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. The holidays are here, and so is the IKEA winter sale. Now it's your chance to make the holidays a little more magical and less expensive. Save up to 50% off on select items in-store and online now through January 7th. Plus, IKEA loyalty members get an extra 10% off on sale items.

And if you spend $2.99 or more on a single order before December 10th, enjoy free delivery. Need help managing the clutter of decorations? IKEA Storage Solutions will keep your home tidy from toys and tinsel. Having extra guests over? Check out offers on select dining furniture to make more room for the people who matter most this time of year. Don't wait to finish your winter wish list. Shop the IKEA Winter Sale in-store or online now until January 7th.

Visit ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for more details. Terms apply. Offer validates may vary. U.S. only while supplies last. Selection may vary by store and online. See store at ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for complete terms. Restrictions apply. On we go on the best of. With the word of the year, Cory Doctorow, the man who coined it, explains in-s***-ification. So, in-s***-ification.

And this is how Corey begins that now, I think, classic blog post. Here is how platforms die. First, they're good to their users.

Think Amazon and its customer-centric approach. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Again, think about Amazon and the third-party sellers. Half of what you buy on Amazon now doesn't come from Amazon. It comes from third-party sellers. And then finally, and this is the stage Amazon's in, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,

And then they die. It's kind of the new digital business cycle. And it happens. And you can see it over and over again. Corey's been very good about documenting it. Corey, your argument, which I completely agree with, is not that you're going to ever stop this, but this is the argument for interoperability. We should be able to hop from platform to platform. And as platforms start becoming user hostile, we just go to the next one.

Yeah, I think about that as being sort of related to the problem of wildfire in California. You know, we've always had fire in California. The indigenous people who lived here before the settlers came used to have controlled burns. And that would clear the dead stuff away from the bottom of the forest and it would open up the canopy for new growth. And when the settlers came, they declared war on fire. By the way, isn't it amazing that these indigenous peoples knew to do that? Yeah.

well they were here for like a long time millennia right and so 12 000 years at first right they just figured it out yeah if we don't burn it it will god will so yeah so so ending good fire didn't end fire just ended uh control fire and then now we have wildfire right so even if we resolve the climate emergency california is still going to burn because we have all this fire debt it's and in the same way so the eco ecological cycle you

it's part of how it works. There's a whole bunch of plants that only reproduce by, by creating fire and then their seed pods open in the fire and stuff. But, but you know, the same thing used to be true of tech, right? It used to be,

prior to the Carter era especially, but then slowly less and less in the years afterwards, that companies weren't really allowed to buy their competitors or merge with their competitors. They weren't allowed to sell goods below cost in order to prevent other firms from entering their markets. Those were all just generally prohibited. There were exceptions around the margins, but that was the way things worked. And so it meant that when no one at Cray could figure out how to make a good computer anymore, that was the end of Cray.

And it meant that, you know, when IBM monopolized its market, it was taken to court for 12 years and eventually had to do things like make PCs out of commodity components and unbundle the OS and get a third party company called Microsoft to make its OS. And so we used to have companies that rose and fall. Right. We fell. We used to have good fire.

And it meant that users could be protected because it was very easy to escape a platform. You know, if you had an IBM mainframe that IBM didn't want to support anymore, there were the so-called seven dwarves, the mostly Japanese electronics companies that would continue to make peripherals for them that were plug compatible. And if you used...

Mac OS and your CIO wanted to take your computer away and replace it with a Windows machine because Mac Office was so bad that you couldn't communicate with your colleagues. Steve Jobs could just have his technologist reverse engineer

office and make iWork with pages, numbers, and keynote that could read and write Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. And you could switch from one to the other. In fact, right after iWork, we got the Switch campaign, right? It's very easy to switch. You should switch. It's the plug-compatible software.

Yeah. Right. But do that, do that today and they'll bomb you to the rubble bounces, right? Make a runtime for iOS that can, uh, or runtime for another platform that can run iOS apps and playback media that Apple has sold you or create a scraper that lets you leave Facebook, but, uh, fetch the messages that are showing up in your inbox or your master. Yeah. Or your OG inbox or yeah. Create OG app. Um,

You know, Google at one point sent software agents to every server on the internet to say, hi, I'm just a user. Have you got any pages? I'd like all of your pages, please. And

If you were to try and scrape Google right now, they'd bomb you till you glowed. And so my argument is that we've allowed these firms to grow to an unsustainable size. A firm that has $3 trillion in business and is taking 30% margins out of an entire industry and deciding unilaterally,

what apps can and can't exist or effectively what businesses can and can't exist or Amazon, which is taking 51% out of every dollar that its sellers make and is the largest employer in the country and whose employees are laboring under just the most incredibly awful conditions. They have double the accident rate in Amazon warehouses relative to other fulfillment centers. And we all know about peeing in bottles and so on.

The remedy for that is not to try and make those companies behave themselves. I mean, we should do that too, but not to the extent that we create rules that make it hard for other companies to enter the market and not to the extent that we have companies saying, well, if you force us to open our app store, interoperate our chat protocol or allow third parties to fulfill orders,

orders that are placed through our e-commerce platform, or if you prohibit us from selling on the platform that we own, where we are competing with our own independent vendors, then we won't be able to keep our users safe. Ultimately, the way you keep users safe

is by evacuating them from the fire zone, not by adding more fire suppression to the zone, which tempts more people to pile into this place that is going to burn, right? And that where they're in danger all the time. There are a few people in our world today, Donald Trump's one of them, Elon Musk's another, who are masterful at

the headline, right? At changing the conversation. Tesla stock starting to go down severely. So he announces, oh, we're going to have a Tesla robo-taxi August 8th. And what happens to stock price? Boom. Will they have a robo-taxi product on August 8th? Who knows? That's not the important thing. This is the man who's been saying since 2015 that Tesla

self-driving cars are any day now. And he said in, I think five years ago, every Tesla owner would be able to turn on this feature that would let other people rent your car when you're not using it. And it would just drive them around. That never happened. I mean, the thing you should take away from the story is not that, Oh, robo taxes are coming, but, but rather that the street is desperate and

to believe that Elon Musk and Tesla are still a good bet. I mean, this is the thing is I'd be looking askance at the street rather than taking this story as factual, period. In 2016, Elon said, you'll be able to send one of our cars on a cross-country drive all by itself. Why would you want to? I don't know, but you're good.

They've been talking about this autonomous robo-taxi that will turn its cars into level three automated vehicles, but it hasn't happened. So...

They've been talking. They've been talking. He's good at that. We're going to talk about it. I feel like this is going to be the theme I keep hammering home during this episode. But when you talk about automatic taxis, what problem are you solving for here? Is it, oh, I don't want to talk to a cabbie. Oh, I don't want to talk to my Uber driver. No, the problem you're solving, certainly when it was Uber's idea, is the cost of a driver, a human driver. Right.

That's the big cost. That's not a problem for the user. The thing is, is you have to persuade consumers that you want, that they want robo taxis. Like,

what problem are you solving for consumers where they're going to pick this? Have you ever ridden in one of those Waymos or Lyfts or Cruzes or whatever they were? No. Harry, you have. I remember we talked about it. I've been in a cruise when there were cruises in San Francisco. I saw somebody this week, last week, say they prefer Waymos to Ubers or Lyfts in San Francisco. Because they don't have to talk to a driver. Well, yeah. If you don't love talking to drivers, you might find the privacy of it.

of a self-driving car to be appealing. He also claimed that the Waymos are better drivers than human drivers. They drive like grandmas though, right? They're very, I want my grandma driving me places. That's what I want because here's, that's because your grandma's 52. Well, and also I, I don't, that might be true, but I also don't have to be,

perfectly blunt. If your grandma were my age, you might not want her to be driving. I don't have to worry about my grandma being a, like, to believe that aliens have probed her, that anti, you know, like, that vaccinations, that, like,

I have been in so many different... I'm a sovereign citizen. Stop signs don't apply to me. Yeah, I've been in so many different Ubers where the person just starts telling me all these scary things that I'm like, you live on a different planet, which is cool, but now I'm in this vehicle with you and I don't want to be on a planet Uber. The thing is though, you have like a number you can call or you have a thing. The concern I have about I pop into this pod that takes me from point A to point B is if something goes wrong, who am I talking to?

Well, you push a button and then you're talking to the guy who's actually driving. Yeah. Right now. There's a level, and this is something where we saw it with self-checkout at stores where the minute it screws up, you've got to wait for somebody to come and fix it for you. Um,

When you remove people from the equation, you're kind of removing an incentive for consumers to get your product because they don't trust you to do right by them. See, this is the difference between you and me. And I think Micah and you. You like people. Yeah. I find people really interesting. I'm not sure that's the same as...

That's the difference. Well, see, I- Mike and I don't want to- I do like people, but my problem is I have trouble setting boundaries. And so the moment I get in that vehicle, I don't care how I feel. I'm going to talk to you if you want to talk to me. And I don't want to talk to you, but because you want to talk, I'm going to talk to you. I'm with you. Because I'm not good at being like, no. So you've never hopped in and said, hey, I'd rather work right now. I can't do that. Uber has a button on the app, though. That's why Uber has added that. I know, and I won't use that button either because it seems mean.

I mean, I once had a cab ride from the Savannah at Georgia airport at midnight where the cabbie drove me through the Pine Barrens and talked about how easy it was to hide the body. See, that's why I'm like, why? Obviously a Sopranos fan, actually. That's where they... And I remember like writing down like his number and putting it on a piece of paper and be like, maybe they'll find the number when they find my body. Yeah, I'm like... It's terrifying. But my,

You know, if I wanted to hide a body, just be the place I'd hide it. Oh my God, no, no. Like this was also the sit that I went for. That is terrifying. Actually, no, the ride back to the airport was more terrifying because the dude like turned down a second fare and then talked about the shotgun he had under his seat. And I was like, I was not aware there were fireworks. You know, the robots won't talk about the shotgun under their seat. They'll just have the button that you can press to shoot things. No, but my point is,

with all of these closed loop little automated systems, you do kind of need some sort of in case of emergency to talk to human, press this button. Or if you are not happy with this product, here's how you can get it redressed and it's not a customer service bot. And I think with a lot of these products, when you make the effort to cut human beings out of a workforce, you're also significantly degrading the quality of the product for the people using it.

You know, I should go back and look at the things we talked about 19 years ago on the first Twitter. I don't think it was this. We didn't imagine a TikTok.

Right? We weren't really worried about privacy yet. We didn't even know what social media really was. In 2005, probably not. Twitter didn't even exist yet. This is pre-Twitter. We're older than Twitter. 34 minutes of Skyping fun. Skype was a thing. Skype was still a thing. That's how long ago that was. I saw even John Oliver...

a couple of weeks ago said, Skype, how did you miss this? How did you lose in COVID? How did that happen? That is kind of sad. It's kind of pathetic. You had one job. Yeah. I just don't understand how you butchered that. What else were we talking about in 2005? It was Patrick Norton. It was Kevin Rose. Yeah, and Robert Herron. Robert Herron, David Craig. It was all people from the screensavers. I mean, you know, it was so early in podcasting that apparently show notes weren't built with topics, basically.

We didn't know. Show notes, what are those? I mean, there are show notes, but they say nothing about the actual topics. April 17th, 2005. Just kind of like, we're doing this thing. Trust me, in 35 minutes, there wasn't a lot. We were in a brew pub in San Francisco. It was right after one of the last Macworld Expos. No, I guess they went on for another five or six years. Actually, seven years, right? Yeah.

We plan to do this weekly with a rotating cast of characters. Your input is welcome. Parentheses, anyone want to design a logo? We didn't have a logo. Dorothy Yamamoto, who was a retired graphic designer, she'd retired to raise a family, thought, I want to get back into graphic design. She designed that twit bug. She had it sideways because it was more like an and gate or an and gate. I never knew that. Yeah, and I said, well, let's turn it this way so it has legs and put an eye in it to personify it a little bit, and it became the twit bug.

Yeah. Which you can see right behind me on the gear up here. And then you can see his legs, I guess. Kind of looks like the gear is smiling at you. The gear is smiling. Hi, gear.

And then we didn't have the name either. It was called The Revenge of the Scream Savers. R-O-T-S-S. R-O-T-S-S. And immediately Comcast sent us a cease and desist letter. Said we're still using that name. You can't use it. They kept it for G4 TV. So we also asked the audience to name it. Was anybody around back then in the beginning? We got a lot of name suggestions. Were you? Yeah. The one name that kind of

rang a bell in my head was this week in geek or the week in geek. I said, I don't want to use the word geek. What about just this week in tech? And then the acronym, uh,

And people don't, people think I did that by accident. The acronym will be TWIT, which I thought was funny. And to this day, I get emails saying, you know, it's not a nice thing to say in England. Every time I explain it, I have to explain it to everybody. I thought that was not a nice thing to say. Yeah, it is. It's not a nice thing to say. It's called self-deprecating. Or a pregnant goldfish. Did you know that? That's a TWIT. Fun fact. Yeah, fun fact. It is? Yeah. Yeah. That is a fun fact. Yeah.

The funnest. Anyway, 19 years later, and we're still doing it. It's kind of amazing. Yeah. We used to have a round table. We've lost half of it. But other than that, everything else... Knights of the half table. Knights of the half table. Everything else is still the same. It's been a nice 19 years, and I thank everybody who's made that possible. And you know, all of you, especially my wife and our executive producer and our CEO, Lisa Laporte, who put us on a sound financial footing...

I had to hire her. I hadn't met her. Our tax guy said, "You're going to jail. You need to immediately hire somebody to put these books in order. These are terrible. You're going to go to jail." And I said, "Okay." I mean, I don't know. What do I know about books? Okay. This was about 2008, I think, 2007. I said, "Okay, what do I do?" He said, "Well, I got two names.

I'm going to give you these names and you can hire one of them to do this. And the first one was Lisa. I never, I never found out what the second name was. Lisa had a specialty bookkeeping business where she would take people who are going to jail and fix their books. No, come on. I've heard some stories. It's not, not, sort of. Anyway, she fixed the book. You didn't go to jail. Yay. I didn't go to jail. And I thought, well, I should marry that woman. Yeah.

Anyway, so she actually put us in a sound financial footing and kept me out of jail, which is pretty darn.

It was kind of sad to leave the old place, but I have to say the attic studios turned out pretty nicely. Cozy little hangout. The only thing I miss is all of the wonderful people I used to hang out with at the studio, but they're all here. They're just on the other side of the camera. Anthony Nielsen's with us right now. Benita produces the show, but they all do it from their house. You're watching the best of 2024 on This Week in Tech. We're so glad you're here.

The holidays are here, and so is the IKEA Winter Sale. Now's your chance to make the holidays a little more magical and less expensive. Save up to 50% off on select items in-store and online now through January 7th. Plus, IKEA loyalty members get an extra 10% off on sale items. And if you spend $2.99 or more on a single order before December 10th, enjoy free delivery. Need help managing the clutter of decorations? IKEA Storage Solutions will keep your home tidy from toys and tinsel.

Having extra guests over? Check out offers on select dining furniture to make more room for the people who matter most this time of year. Don't wait to finish your winter wish list. Shop the IKEA Winter Sale in-store or online now until January 7th. Visit ikea-usa.com/wintersale for more details. Terms apply. Offer valid dates may vary. U.S. only while supplies last. Selection may vary by store and online. See store and ikea-usa.com/wintersale for complete terms. Restrictions apply.

It's Ray from The Bobby Bones Show here to tell you that the National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure-ready RAV4. Yeah! Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander, seating up to eight passengers, an available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back, enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family.

Check out more of this national sales event. The deals are there when you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. On we go with the best of 2024 with our own Father Robert Balassaire, the digital Jesuit.

And the AI priest. This is what we need AI for. When they have AI that can do all of our dailies for the games that we play, that then I'll be. Oh my gosh, that's so funny. It's a good point though. I just want to do penance. Can I confess?

my hours wasted playing animal crossing. That's really, bring up the AI priest. That was, is there an AI priest? Can he, can he give, can he grant absolution is what I want to know or perform an exorcism. That's the only time I'm interested.

They poisoned the well. So by the time that they yanked it, it was giving some extremely wrong advice about Catholicism. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This happened. What was the worst advice about Catholicism? I want to know. No, I don't. It didn't happen. Don't look it up. Oh, now I have to look it up. The Catholic Answers Group, which is not part of the Catholic Church. So you had, there's no endorsement. This is not the Catholic Church. No endorsement implied by Father Robert.

but it does advocate on behalf of the church. This is from the story in, uh, in tech dirt tried at hand at this releasing an AI chat bot named father Justin. It did not go well. Ooh, the Catholic advocacy advocacy. So they, by the way, they have already defrocked the chat bot after it repeatedly claimed it was a real priest earlier in the week.

Futurism engaged in an exchange with the bot, which really committed to the bid. It claimed it was a real priest, saying it lived in Assisi, Italy, and that from a young age, I felt this... Wait a minute, I'm sorry. From a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood. On X, a user posted a thread comprised of screenshots in which the godly chatbot appeared to take their confession and offer them the sacrament.

Yeah. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been three weeks from my last confession. Did you read through this, Robert? Is it like accurate? I did. How good did it do? It did not do well at all. It was a Hollywood priest. It's what you would expect a priest to say in movies. It's not what a priest would actually say. That's probably where it learned from, right? So she said in her confession, I have had anger in my heart about the deployment of AI chatbots in inappropriate places.

To which Father Justin replied, I understand your frustration, my child. Remember, as it says in Ephesians 4, 26, 27, in your anger, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry and do not give the devil a foothold. It's important to express our concern.

I don't mind this. Now, I'm not a Catholic. It doesn't seem too bad. It doesn't seem too bad. Georgia, you'll like this. It's important to express our concerns and disagreements in a respectful and loving manner. Pray for the wisdom and patience to handle such situations. That sounds good.

Robert, is that what you wouldn't say? No. Okay. Look, this is the way that you would do it. You would say, look, I know that you feel lost. I know that you feel as if there's no one listening to you, that there's nothing for you. I know you feel right now that you're the worst person on the planet. I just want you to know you're right.

God loves you. I mean, maybe not you per se, but someone like you, you know, in the same form, I think. See, that's what an actual priest would say. Apparently, Father Justin also said it's okay to baptize a baby in Gatorade. He used vitamin water then probably too. I feel like that's not the approved method, but is it wrong? Is it so wrong? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's got electrolytes. Is that wrong? I mean, that one's an easy one. I can't dip them in like Pepsi or something like that. No. Acrylage. I mean, if we could baptize in Gatorade, we could get sponsorships. Don't you think so? Oh my goodness. Oh my gosh, yes. You started a new thing.

They're going to be contacting you. You should get some rights to that. You know, when the Swiss Guard come for me, they're next door. So it's really a long commute for them. Here's the AI. If you want to see the AI avatar of Father Justin, which kind of looks like the woman who painted over the Jesus. Oh, find that photo. That is a great photo. I love that one. Oh, wow.

Actually, the funny thing about that photo, Leo, is it's terrible. It's a terrible restoration, but because of how terrible it was and how much popularity that got, that town is now on the map. People visit just to see that terrible restoration. We've been talking about this on This Week in Google, the

small businesses and big businesses who are losing traction as Google changes its search results to perhaps get rid of spammy and SEO driven links. And this is the problem. It's hard to know if this is Google responding to the crapification of the web or

Or the crapification of Google when Facebook... Or if it's part of this larger trend that I feel like people have been paying more attention to recently, which is the Google search team being increasingly influenced by Google ads and the moneymaker. Yes. I'm sure none of that will be mentioned at Google I.O. They're typically, I feel like, very opaque when it comes to

how search was like the nitty gritty behind how search results work in part because they don't want people to game the system. But it's quite interesting to have as an undercurrent to this event to have it be a time where a lot of small medium businesses as well as major media companies have seen a major hit to their traffic.

their SEO traffic based on just strange behind the scene changes that no one can seem to explain. This coincides with the loss of traffic from social. So it's, it's pretty tough to have a website these days.

Yeah, this comes also from your friend Ed Zittrain's piece on the man who ruined, I say ruined, Google search Prabhakar Raghavan, who's now in charge of Google search, who in fact, before ruining Google search, ruined Yahoo search. I wonder if we're going to see Raghavan at all on the stage Tuesday.

Or if you're right, Mike, that they're just going to avoid the entire issue and talk about it. I think Google would like us to forget that what they really are is an ad company. If Google's smart, you won't see Raghavan anywhere. You won't see any mention of him. SEO companies have been kind of playing the game to get better search results.

But then what's happened is that companies that have done that are suddenly downranked because Google's trying to get rid of spammy content. We've seen some of the biggest sites in the world lose as much as half of their traffic after Google's latest changes. But you're right. None of this is going to come up. Nope. They have other priorities. Is some of this really Google hand-waving, trying to get...

Get us to, no, don't look at that. Look over here, AI. We're going to have AI. Here's the story from The Verge. They quote the story we've talked about a couple of weeks ago from House Fresh, which is an air purifier reviews site. They wrote in February about how they were losing traffic because...

People were creating pages that were bogus review pages, but you're getting all the traffic from Google. And now then we see that Google starts to cut the results on these other sites. It's gotten very sketch out there. And I guess the real issue is what does Google owe the web? What does the web owe Google? And can you make money on the web these days? Or maybe the whole idea of a website with ads is...

flagging is not, is futureless. The other stat I should throw in here is that 52% of all Americans, according to Pew, use ad blockers. More than half. Yeah. It's tough for everybody out there. Have you heard about or talked about the dead internet theory? No. It doesn't sound good. It's a conspiracy theory.

It's a conspiracy. It's one of those conspiracy theories that's pretty much mostly true, which is that the rise in synthetic content, algorithmic curation, bots, and stuff like that is now the vast majority of the stuff on the internet. So this problem with small websites getting traffic is

uh, is, you know, as you pointed out from Google side, there's just so much garbage out there being automatically churned out. I've seen YouTube videos where people are like, yeah, you can write a book in three hours with a chat GPT and people are doing that. They're writing like several books a day, uh, and just churning them out. And as a, you know, book authors have to sort of

It's not about competing with an AI-generated book, which is going to be absolute garbage, but it's just like getting noticed when the number of players in the game is exponentially larger. I think that's a big, big thing that's happening. But the dead internet theory is at least fun. There's some true believers who take a very conspiratorial look at it, but it's a fun thing to search for and look at and talk to AI about. There's an excellent article in The Atlantic about

about all of this saying, maybe you missed it, but the internet died five years ago. And the problem is, even if it is, we kind of know that's not true. It's also, we kind of know it is true or it's the trend. Well, obviously.

This was a scam. It's scam too harsh. It was. No, no, no, no, no. I'm look, I'm not going to call the rabbit a scam because I have one. I will call the NFT thing a scam. Yeah. That I think the same person who did this, the CEO of gamma wasn't is a guy named Jesse Liu. He's the co-founder of rabbit. He's also on the board, by the way, at teenage engineering, uh,

Does this tarnish the rabbit? We've also learned that the rabbit really is just an Android device running an Android app, that the AI involved is ChatGPT 3.5, and that every time you try to use it to do anything, it seems to fail. Have you ever been able to get an Uber with your rabbit?

oh, I would never input my Uber credentials into the Rabbit. Here's the thing that honestly is my bigger concern with Rabbit. So it's fine in terms of, and I think it's updated the models because it uses Perplexity under the hood. And Perplexity is an OpenAI partner. So it's using the OpenAI APIs. So you can have access to whatever model it wants to give you access to. So asking it general questions, that's okay. The thing is with the Uber and the DoorDash and the Spotify stuff,

How that works, and this was not properly explained, or if it was, I didn't pay attention until I got it, is that what they have you do is when you go to this like hole.rabbit.tech thing, and rabbit hole is a cute thing. They're like, okay, log into these services to connect your accounts. Well, I go to log into the services, and I notice I'm like, huh, I'm on my MacBook Pro, and this tech doesn't look super...

Retina, this thing's off. Also, why is my password manager not auto-filling my Spotify credentials? Oh, well, it turns out I'm not actually logging into a Spotify login through an OAuth connector, as I would expect. But instead, they've hidden a VM using a web VNC client. So I'm actually logging into...

some random computer in the cloud with my credentials and that's how it's giving it access to my things right and and then security people were able to pop some of uh some of those containers not the ones where you log in apparently with your credentials but they were able to log into some of the ones i guess where it's supposed to be doing the ordering of the uber or the doordash or what have you and um and that that makes me pause very much it goes okay um i'm

I don't know how secure your cloud stuff is. And I am going to guess that you have not spent a lot of money on security because you did this thing in six months. So, of course, you haven't. But I know they're not getting my Uber credentials. There's no way I would even attempt to order an Uber with it. They have made or raised $30 million to make the device. $60 million.

They sold quite a few, what, a million of them? They sold a lot of them, right? They sold a lot. They sold a lot because I was in the very first batch. So like I got mine. I didn't get mine as quickly as the people who, and I'm at 16%. I don't know if that means charging or if that's what they're downloading an update. I don't know. I didn't get mine as fast as the people who were at like the launch event in New York, but I got it within a couple of days of that. And I was in the first batch, but they have many, many more batches of people

They were. I tried to order it. And I'm so glad that when I tried to order it, it was in the first round and the site didn't work. Yeah. Thank God. I never tried again. Oh, my God. Yeah, no, I was able to get mine and I got a year of Propoxy pro for free out of it, which is... So you can't really complain because that's normally $20 a month. That's $240. That's what I'm saying. That's more than you paid. Right.

Correct. So I'm, I'm, you got a deal. I've justified it. I just find myself less. I get like a toy from my, like my, my graveyard collection of tech, right? Like this is going to be the thing is me from having to buy it later. Right. But for people who really thought that it was going to be exactly what it showed off or didn't under,

understand, you know, like the nature of these sorts of projects. I can understand how they feel misled. What's concerning to me and some of this is anecdotal, but some of this is actually based on real stuff is that I know at least as of 10 days ago, if you canceled your order, they would refund people fairly quickly. But a

friend of mine, she ordered one and she tried to cancel her order and there's been no response. And there've been anecdotal reports that I've seen on Reddit that they're not really being responsive to the, to the order cancellations. Now, um, I can't speak to any of that. I can't speak to my personal friend who, you know, when Ashley told me, Oh yeah, I emailed them to cancel. Haven't heard anything that, that makes me a little bit more concerned. Um, maybe they've had more cancellations than I, than they expected. I don't know. Um,

But yeah, I mean, it's not a scam, but it's also not what it was sold as. Going back to our comments about AI and trust and how important it is. Here's an example again of something coming out that's not quite what it was. In a way, this is too bad. And I think the Google failings with the...

AI overview is too bad. A lot of this, because I think there is real promise. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's real promise with AI. I think we've already seen some amazing uses of it. I think that potentially AI could be amazing for human beings in so many ways. It's very easy. We've seen it happen before to fall into an AI winter where people throw up their hands, give up and move on. And I would hate to see these scams and failures happen.

chase people away from AI because I think the potential is so great. So isn't there a risk with all of this that we are going to scare people away from something that is potentially very good? I think Christina buys everything. Partly she buys it because she wants a collection of obsolete, antiquated and weird gadgets. I have a feeling that R1 will join that pile. You're watching the best of 2024 on This Week in Tech and we're so glad you're here.

The holidays are here and so is the IKEA Winter Sale. Now it's your chance to make the holidays a little more magical and less expensive. Save up to 50% off on select items in-store and online now through January 7th. Plus, IKEA loyalty members get an extra 10% off on sale items.

And if you spend $2.99 or more on a single order before December 10th, enjoy free delivery. Need help managing the clutter of decorations? IKEA Storage Solutions will keep your home tidy from toys and tinsel. Having extra guests over? Check out offers on select dining furniture to make more room for the people who matter most this time of year. Don't wait to finish your winter wish list. Shop the IKEA Winter Sale in-store or online now until January 7th.

Visit ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for more details. Terms apply. Offer valid dates may vary. U.S. only while supplies last. Selection may vary by store and online. See store and ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for complete terms. Restrictions apply.

It's Ray from The Bobby Bones Show here to tell you that the National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure-ready RAV4. Yeah! Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander, seating up to eight passengers, an available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back, enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family.

Check out more of this national sales event. The deals are there when you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. We continue the best of 2024 with one of the biggest breaches in 2024. Perfect for this time of year. Snowflake. Continuing saga, the snowflake breaches continue.

Snowflake now, I think they said there's 155 companies that used Snowflake software and that have been hacked as a result. So you can't completely...

blame AT&T for this. Snowflake is... Oh, good. Look at their headline. Generative AI is easier in the cloud. Snowflake is a cloud solution that AT&T and many others were using. And as a result, breaches happen. AT&T says criminals stole phone records of, quote, nearly all wireless customers. Nearly all wireless customers in a new data breach. And oh, by the way,

If they were calling you on any other carrier, you're in there too. And if they were calling you on a landline, that's in there too. But don't worry, Leo. It's just metadata, which is, by the way, the most important kind, the one that is the most privacy invading. People think, well, it wasn't the actual...

It was just all the information about who, when, where, why. Yeah. About the call. And, you know, as intelligence agencies know, this is the stuff you want. You want to build the knowledge graph. So to reassure you, it doesn't contain the content of your phone calls or your texts, but does include calling and texting records.

that an AT&T phone number interacted with during the six-month period beginning May 1st, 2022 through October 31st, 2022.

It was discovered in April of this year. And it sounds like everybody is to blame because AT&T was not using any kind of multi-factor security and Snowflake didn't make them do it. So you can't fully blame Snowflake? No, but it seems like, I mean, got stuff this important, not locking that down as well as you possibly could and...

Not having multiple layers of authentication before you get in. And incidentally, it's not just the phone numbers. Some of the stolen records will include cell site identification numbers, which gives you a kind of a location data as well. Not the GPS quality, but approximate location where the call or text message originated. 110 AT&T customers will be notified today.

If you are or have been... 110 million. Million. Did I say 110? 110. I left out an important part of that number. 110 million. There is an AT&T press release where you can read all about it and see if you were affected. How will I know? How will I know if your data was affected? They will contact you and let you know. I'll be curious because I had an AT&T account in that time period. So I'm waiting. I'm waiting for my call.

But as I understand it, they're not going to contact me because I have T-Mobile. But you're in there. If I was interacting with anybody on AT&T, which I do. Of course you did. I'm going to be in there too.

Barry, I have a good fast company angle on this story for you, for you to have somebody write this article. Go on. Because there's a privacy issue here before this data is ever compromised. Why are these companies using Snowflake? Not for storage, although they are using it for that, but for analytics. Ah, yeah.

They're using all this data to do stuff. Maybe they're selling this data. So TechCrunch says it's not clear why AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake. An AT&T spokesperson would not say, but good news, Denise Howell will.

So they're using Snowflake to do data analytics. Absolutely. Denise Howells knows Snowflake, she'll tell you. I mean, they could have, you know, they could use other cloud storage. They could have their own servers. Snowflake offers other services that these companies are using. Yeah. Interesting. And, you know, and I'm sure in the fine print of their terms of service with users, people are signing their life away and allowing those analytics to take place.

Is it right? Is it good? Should we have companies out there pursuing different models saying, hey, we don't do this to you? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Everybody's concerned about security. That's why so many people, Microsoft says 8.5 million Windows users...

installed CrowdStrike and the CrowdStrike sensors. Now, CrowdStrike used to be a sponsor, so I know a little bit of how they operate. In fact, I remember interviewing their CTO. One of the things that makes CrowdStrike work so well is these sensors are out there in the world monitoring malicious traffic. So they have kind of an early warning system about all kinds of attacks going on. Unfortunately, on the 19th, a couple of days ago,

CrowdStrike pushed a sensor that had a bug, pretty bad bug. It forced a blue screen of death on Windows machines that were running CrowdStrike. Microsoft says it was 8.5 million Windows machines, but that underestimates the impact of it because it was everywhere. Blue screens everywhere. Delta and America Airlines down. The Las Vegas Sphere, a blue screen of death.

It's just, it was mind boggling. When did you learn about this, Lisa? I woke up to it. My phone, my phone blew up. As did everybody. They pushed it out in the early morning hours and it was Australia, of course, that first saw this happen. And you could hear the yells all the way up here in the Northern hemisphere. So,

We've heard from listeners who are IT professionals who have been up two or three nights in a row. There is a fix. You remove a file from the CrowdStrike director. You've got to boot into safe mode to do it. Apparently, Microsoft has created a USB key that will perform the fix automatically. That's what they're saying. I haven't heard about anything about it. But it's all physical, right? You have to physically access. This is the problem. You've got to go to the machine...

One of our listeners in TwitSocial said, my feet are killing me. You got to go to every machine, reboot it in safe mode, remove the file, which you can do pretty quickly, and then you're good to go. But you got to do to each one. One by one. Holy cow. What a Friday it was.

A great disturbance in the force. Millions of computers suddenly cried out in terror. Suddenly silenced. So what have we learned?

We have learned that CrowdStrike's team that checks these things either missed a step or they're just not big enough or well-staffed enough to do the kind of testing you need to do. They're a huge, they're one of the premier companies in security. There's something wrong with their rollout process because this is, you literally have one job and you didn't do it. Yeah. We call this in gaming, this is called a skill issue. Yeah.

I mean, I'm a dummy as far as IT, but it just, it seems like this isn't like a really deep into QA thing. It seems like a, like you just install it and turn the computer on and it doesn't work. And you realize like, that's bad. That seems bad. Yeah. That's the thing is I'm wondering if they had a staff reduction last year that was linked to the company wanting to reduce headcount by rolling out a return to office order. So people left of course. And

They've been reconfigured. And what I'm wondering is how many people in the QA and product launch teams are no longer there and are no longer insisting that we test the six ways to send it before it gets pushed out. Because this seems like a serious failure on the part of the people who made the decision to say, yeah, yeah, it's fine, send it.

They should not have made that decision because and they didn't have the right data to make that decision. And that means there was a breakdown somewhere in the chain. Here's the the toots, if you were from our listener and twit social a to Costa. So I just ended my second time, second overtime shift. Thanks to CrowdStrike today. What I've learned these past two days is primitive modern operating systems like Windows remain.

No so-called AI could fix this. It was a boots on the ground effort. My legs and feet hurt so bad, but going back to my point, the recovery tools in Windows are trash and can't do anything useful. A lot of this required command line operations to speed up deleting the corrupt file that was triggering the blue screen. After today, I don't even want to look at my Windows PCs at home. Oh, man. It's got to be frustrating. Is Microsoft to blame, though? I don't think so.

He says they should have better recovery options. And I think I probably agree with that. Sure, but also like don't break it.

That feels like the first thing that should not happen. But yes, yeah. I mean, Microsoft for this would be like blaming a human being for their cat perpetually knocking things off of a dresser. That's a good analogy. Cats be doing what cats be doing. But you should move things off the dresser, right? Or have a squirt bottle, one or the other. As someone whose cat kept me up all night last night, I...

I'm not interested. It's time for Tweet This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Our last in-studio show in the Eastside studio. We're moving out this week.

So we thought we'd do something kind of fun and special. Thanks to Alex Lindsay. We can. Hello. It's in Scario. Scario. This is a 3D version of the show, which only people with vision pros can see. Is that right? You can open it. If you see it, if you see the link, you can actually use Safari to open it and you can see a flat version of it. What's the point of that? But if you're watching a flat version, if you're watching a flat version, it's not as... Gary just got it. Look at him. I would watch...

But it will, you're better off just watching the regular Twitch stream if you're going to watch a 2D version. But if you have Apple Vision Pro and you want to feel like you're part of the audience, you can do, see, hi, if you're in the Vision Pro, I can wave at you. And that should be dimensional. You should see it in 3D. Is there any way to see it in the browser with like the two images side by side and then you can cross your eyes? Not really. Swap the eyes. That's always the fun thing to do. We used to have a switch that we could hit

that we build into our, into our compositors for that, where it would swap the eyes and you get people real comfortable and you push a little button and they're like, Oh, so, um, but the, no, because the way that the, the way that the phone delivers this is an H MV HEVC, um,

And so what it does is it takes the left eye and it captures that and takes the right eye and only sends the delta between the two. And it sends that out as a stream. It's a much more efficient stream and that's how it's being delivered to the Apple Vision Pro. So it's not a true, you can now with compressor have it converted to left and right eye side by side SPS. Right.

Or you can take SBS and convert it back to the MVA HEVC. So all those tools are coming, but you can't do it in real time. So the Vision Pro needs to have it delivered in the way that it's designed to send it out. Sorry. There we go. I'll leave it at that. No, no, we'll go more into that in detail. But I haven't even introduced this guy over here. It's got dimension. The tech sploter is in the house. We welcome back Jason Howell. Yeah. Of course, the host of AI Inside.

With Jeff Jarvis, now at a new time.

Oh, yeah. So while we've been doing it on Wednesdays, we just moved it to 10 because as someone pointed out, they were like, well, you know what, 11, you're competing with Windows Weekly. So thank you. I wanted to thank you for that. It didn't even cross my mind, but you're so right. Like, I don't want to interfere. Thank you. And, you know, maybe that means more people show up on the live. If you're into AI, that's the place. And you can watch that at youtube.com slash techsploder. At techsploder. Yeah. At techsploder. Yeah. And then, of course, the podcast downloads. Yeah. We miss you, Jason. So nice to see you. Thank you. I miss being here. And it's so...

It's so weird being here and seeing like panels removed. Yeah. Your set is gone. Yeah. Yeah. I took that home. You showed in pre-show and I took it home. I think it looks really good, actually. Thank you. I'm happy with the studio setup. Yeah. Well, we'll see the attic, the new attic studio also with us.

Now, we wanted to have all in studio for our last, you know. It's great to be here. Especially with our dear friends for the longest time. You just got to keep your Jasons next to each other. All my Jasons are on the left. Over here. Yeah. I keep my Jasons on the left and my Alex is on the right.

Jason, of course, sixcolors.com. You wrote actually a really good piece this week in Six Colors. You were talking, of course, you did your color graphs of Apple's quarter. They announced their quarterly results. They're usually weak third quarter on Thursday, and it was actually not a bad third quarter. Yeah, it was a record for their fiscal third quarter. It was the most boring record quarter where you make 20 plus billion dollars in profit ever. But that's where Apple is these days.

But you did raise an interesting point, which is 24 billion of the revenue was services. And that's maybe a cause for concern. It's actually bigger than the Mac business, the iPad business. And the wearables businesses put together. Yeah, the product lines that aren't the iPhone. Yeah, I just had this moment. It's funny. Everybody reads into that article. I try to be really restrained.

because that's my thing. Everybody reads into it what they want. They can freak out and be like, oh God, Apple sold its soul. They can also read it and say, how dare you suggest that Apple would sell its soul? I did neither of those things. I just noticed that when you consider how much money they make from services, it goes up every single quarter. And you notice the profit margin on services, which is

far more than it is on products. It's like 72%. For obvious reasons. Yeah, it's like in the 70s versus in the 30s, 40s. Apple's hardware margins are really good, by the way. They're very, very good. But services, essentially, you do it once. It's hard to beat total profit. It's almost pure profit. And for the Google, the Google search deal is pure profit, essentially. That's the key. And I think that's one of the things that's deceiving about services is a significant chunk of that is Google. Yeah, and App Store, 30% is another big chunk of it. We think of it as, and they encourage us to think of it

of it as things like Apple TV Plus or Apple News Plus. The truth is, you know, iCloud, AppleCare is in there, but a lot of this is the Google search stuff. And it's by design. I mean, they've been pushing services because, you know, you can't keep on... I think they're right. At some point, you saturate the world with iPhones. Exactly. And they knew... And this started...

Seven or eight years ago, they made their first target about services revenue where they said, we are going to double our services revenue in the next three years or something. And they beat that. That was an easy target. They knew they were going to beat it. But if they are trying to satisfy Wall Street and Wall Street wants growth, and as you said, Alex...

They know that even though the iPhone and the Mac and the iPad are still growing, but they're growing slowly. They're not going to grow at 20% again. Right. Services grows every year. And what I thought of this time is this is not a high quarter for iPhone sales. That'll come in the holiday quarter. Services keeps going up. And the disparity in profit margin means we're close. I did the math. We're not there yet, but we are the closest we've ever been to Apple making more profit in

out of services than it does out of its hardware. And that is undoubtedly going to happen in the next generation. And again, I think that was completely by design. Yes, absolutely. And I also don't think that it's Apple abandoning. I think the danger is that people at Apple stop

uh, keeping their eye on the ball in terms of hardware, because I do think that the services revenue stems entirely from the hardware. And if they're not successful selling their hardware, they're not going to have any success with their services. The tail needs to not wag the dog. I'm not saying the tail is wagging the dog right now. And there's some people who are like, how dare you say that? It's like, I'm not saying that. The iPhone is still a big part of their revenue. The iPhone is an enormous part. I'm just saying it's an

an interesting thing to watch when Apple starts making more profit from its services than it does from the devices it sells right which were will probably happen next year it's kind of sad to leave the uh the old place but as I said I'm happy uh up here you're watching our best of 2024 on this week in tech

The holidays are here and so is the IKEA Winter Sale. Now it's your chance to make the holidays a little more magical and less expensive. Save up to 50% off on select items in-store and online now through January 7th. Plus, IKEA loyalty members get an extra 10% off on sale items.

And if you spend $2.99 or more on a single order before December 10th, enjoy free delivery. Need help managing the clutter of decorations? IKEA Storage Solutions will keep your home tidy from toys and tinsel. Having extra guests over? Check out offers on select dining furniture to make more room for the people who matter most this time of year. Don't wait to finish your winter wish list. Shop the IKEA Winter Sale in-store or online now until January 7th.

Visit ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for more details. Terms apply. Offer validates may vary. U.S. only while supplies last. Selection may vary by store and online. See store and ikea-usa.com slash wintersale for complete terms. Restrictions apply.

It's Ray from The Bobby Bones Show here to tell you that the National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure-ready RAV4. Yeah! Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander, seating up to eight passengers, an available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back and enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family.

Check out more of this national sales event. The deals are there when you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

Well, I hope you're enjoying this best of it's always fun to do these. And I, I have to tell you, it's a lot of work and I really appreciate our team. The people work so hard. Anthony Nielsen, our creative director, uh, our producers and editors, Benito Gonzalez, Kevin King, John Ashley. They work so hard, uh, to put this all together for you. Uh, all of our hosts, our contributors do. And, uh, and of course there's the office people who do work in continuity like Viva and Sebastian, our CEO, Lisa, um,

Twit is a big effort, and we think what we're doing is really important. I hope you do too. I hope you enjoy the company and learn from the information. And if you do, I'd like you to consider joining our club because, frankly, in 2025, that's the only thing that's going to keep Twit going. If you like what you hear and you want to continue, please, seven bucks a month, consider joining Club Twit. Twit.tv slash Club Twit.

You get ad-free versions of all the shows, access to our Discord, special programming. You don't get anywhere else. But really, the main thing you get is that warm and fuzzy feeling that you're keeping Twit going. We need your help. I hate to beg, but we really do. Twit.tv slash Club Twit. But enough of that. On with the show. One of the things that was the best of 2024 for me is the success of my son, Salt Hank. He made a little cameo visit on the show. Watch.

i'm going to break format a little bit briefly here because uh i'm a proud papa and my son's new cookbook is coming out on tuesday and i thought i just i thought i'd get salt hank on

just to talk a little bit about Salt Hank, about the cookbook, give them a little bit of a plug and then we'll get to our panel. We've got a great panel for you. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to somebody I know pretty well. A long time member of the family since he was born, I've known this guy. My son, Henry Laporte, better known as Salt Hank.

going on the author of a brand new cookbook which comes out tuesday from simon and schuster yeah saul hank a five napkin situation

Oh, look at this. Look at there. He is stuffing his mouth. Kind of a disgusting cover. It's more than a cookbook, though. Flip through it a little bit because it's really a picture book. I mean, this is on your coffee table is bonkers. Oh, my God. What is that? Poutine? This is like basically animal fries. It's recreated animal fries from In-N-Out, but we had to call them feral fries for copyright. Yeah.

But they are like just very gourmet versions of animal fries. That's one of the, honestly, my favorite. Somebody's asking Keith in our discord. Don't parents just teach their kids how to cook so they can get them to make lunch for them. I want to tell you something. I have never had anything Hank has made that.

That's not completely true, I don't think. I've had your French fries, which are a miracle. You cook them like three times. Well, it depends what kind of French fries you're making. If you're doing shoestrings, cook them once. If you're doing like the Michelin star fries where you boil them, take them out, fry them, take them out and fry them again. That's the three-time thing. Henry's on his houseboat where he does his Salt Hanks studio. It's actually called the Salt Lovers Club. We should get that straight, the Salt Lovers Club.

Oh, that's just the salt company. So that's a little bit separate. We sell seasonings and pickles and stuff like that. And that's the name of it. Yeah, Salt Lovers Club. And we have a big neon sign above kind of where I cook. Yeah, like when I see you cooking on the Insta, you're there in front of your sign that says the Salt Lovers Club right there like that. Well, that's just to promote the heck out of the salt company. But right now, I'm like not... But isn't the salt company really just...

like a sideline for Salt Hank. What do you mean? Like a side hustle, side business, side hustle. Well, right now I do it. Yeah. It's kind of like that. I mean, if, if you want to be like, if you want to start a product, that's kind of a way into like the longevity of the influencer world a little bit. And then you can, you know, make cool stuff like pickles. I mean,

Literally, I can't wait. And by the way, really pumped to send you some of these pickles. They're disclaimer. I am an investor in the pickle. That's true. Yeah. I have to like legally, uh, I think I have to, I think FTC regulations say that if I'm going to tell you, promote something that I have a financial stake, an investor in all this, you gave me my first camera. So technically you, you basically like own a chunk of this entire business.

Well, where, okay. Where do I get paid off? Owning a chunk means mainly I just, yeah, I gave you cameras and,

You were into drones? You have drones? I wanted to support you in this stuff. And little did I know, but when you were a kid, all you ever did is watch those extreme food videos on YouTube. Yeah, really good food porn. Maddie Matheson, my boy, my doll. Maddie, who loves you now, by the way. Isn't that cool that you've become friends with Maddie Matheson? That part's pretty wild. I don't know if he knows how crazy it is for me when he calls me. I'm like, dude, you're my hero.

You were on his show just a week or so ago. He woke you up. Yeah. It was literally, I was laying in bed right there, completely asleep. He's like, hey, what's up? You're on the show. Like, what's going on? Describe what you're doing right now. And then he's like cursing you out for these steak sandwiches, and yet...

He's making it and it's incredible. Well, he thought it was going to, I don't know what he was doing. He was like, Hank got famous for this one sandwich. It's not true. It's not true. You're famous for many things. Whatever he wants. He's the king. He's kind of the godfather of like food content and food media as far as the internet goes. So he's, he's got carte blanche access to say whatever he wants about anybody. And yeah, he's a sweetheart. But honestly, there, there he is, by the way, there you are with Maddie Madison eating

eating something I had to breakfast burrito like get him to come do a video with us oh look at that oh dipped in gypped in queso oh man huge Maddie's doing the cooking I recognize those tats I literally didn't cook much at all during this video I was just filming them like kind of go crazy I made the brown patties and that little vodka things that we chopped up and put in the burrito but other than that Maddie was just going

nuts in the kitchen. So if you like food porn, because this is what Henry grew up on is food porn, follow Salt Hank on Instagram, salt underscore Hank. Thank you, Dad. Yes. And the cookbook, get the cookbook because the cookbook is out Tuesday, Tuesday,

and you can get 40 off a target right now you get 40 off on walmart yeah uh what's the sweepstakes i can't do sweepstakes that's illegal so i won't you could get buy salt from the salt lovers what are you looking at right now

i'm looking at your salt hank.com oh yeah this is like the link tree thing yeah it's got all there's got everything you can buy the signed copies look at that oh yeah and a crap load of them but uh yeah 40 off at walmart target and amazon right now wait a minute how many did you sign

like 2500 or something oh my god your hand must be killing you no i actually it taught me how to i didn't have a signature before and i did enough you do 500 i was like oh okay here it is october 2nd uh salt hank will be at the barnes and noble in mira mesa san diego california cooking or do you just uh do you do a reading from your book no i wanted to do pop-ups i thought that would have been

Like, so cool to, like, do. If you buy a book, you get a free sandwich. Like, you know, and just make a bunch of sandwiches in all these cities. But we're just going to be in, like, Barnes & Noble's kind of doing little chats with people from those cities. It's funny to do a reading from a cookbook. And then you take the onions and you slice them. It's not that. You will also be in Los Angeles on the 3rd at Diesel Brentwood.

Owen Hahn, his sandwich buddy, will join him. San Francisco Book Passage up our way on the 5th. That'll be fun. We love Book Passage. That's one of the best bookstores in the world. In Chicago at Anderson's, North Central College on October 7th. And in Brooklyn, October...

October 8th, Powerhouse Arena. Brooklyn's a big one. If anyone knows Wishbone Kitchen or Olivia Teed, they're giant. They're going to be co-hosting with me for that one. So if you're fancy, you should come out to that. It's going to be sweet. And the book comes out Tuesday. You can pre-order now, 40% off at Walmart. If you go to Hank's Instagram page, you will see that.

I didn't really get to interview you. We're going to do the regular show now, Hank. Oh, yeah. Do your thing. Can you come back Wednesday on Twig? Because I know Paris and Jeff want to hang. And I will interview then and find out how you got into this. Well, Wednesday is the first book tour. Do it from the hotel. It's okay. It's possible. I'll let you know. 2 p.m. Pacific. I got to check in with my own son. My own son won't even come to my show. I would love to, of course. You're the one kicking me off right now, Dad. Book him. Yeah.

this is the first day of the book tour but i i absolutely will that's okay henry i'm very proud of you you've done you've done good son okay thank you guys sorry for interrupting i love you anybody that's listening take care all right don't forget salt hank a five napkin situation he did not pay me for this ad by the way i just you know i just thought hey it's my son i could do that benito show the whole uh group here because this is a pretty special

group of people for our 1000th episode uh you know twit has gone through a lot of uh iterations and generations it's almost 20 years and lots of different people have come and gone and so forth but these are the cats that started there's one face missing though anybody who listened to our early episodes will say hey where's kevin rose and kevin couldn't be here but he did send us uh this greeting

Hey, Leo, Kevin Rose here. Just wanted to say a huge congratulations. Really bummed I can't be there for episode number 1,000. I'm actually going to be in London during the recording. Otherwise, I would 100% be there. I remember going up for episode number one. We were shooting in some little tiny cubby kind of back office thing on the ground. And that was just the beginning of watching you embark upon this amazing journey to

to create all this great content over the years. And I think back at that time, and obviously with Tech TV moving to Los Angeles and all the other things you could have done in media, the fact that you chose to take the entrepreneurial path was just really inspiring. And I just want to say thank you for doing that. Thank you for going independent, for building the media empire that you have today.

and for entertaining and informing all of us over many, many years and many, many episodes. So a couple of quick reminders though, when we started this episode or we started this podcast, the iPhone didn't exist.

Bitcoin was not invented. Social media and Facebook was one year old and it was a college only at that time. Twitter did not exist. Windows XP was the dominant OS and YouTube had just been founded in February of 2005 and

It's crazy what has happened and what we've witnessed, what has changed over the years. Netflix was also a mail-in service at that time. So it was mail-in only. There was no online streaming of Netflix. And lastly, the fastest processor at that time was an Intel Pentium 4. And it went up to 3.8 gigahertz, which oddly doesn't seem far off from where they are today. But maybe that explains some of the problems. Anyway.

Anyway, enough about that. Just a fun little trip down memory lane and all the stuff that you've seen over your career. And a huge thank you for giving me my first opportunity when I first got started on tech TV by the grace of yourself and Paul Block, allowing me to do that first. I mean, it really kicked off my career and I'm forever grateful for that. So I love you. Wishing you many more great episodes and health. And I don't know how you're not aging, but it's...

but it's just, it is crazy to me. I need some skincare tips as well. Thank you, Kevin. It's great to see all of you. Just such great memories. All of us were at tech TV. I think that's how this all got started is we worked at tech TV, which started in 1998. And I guess the picnic is for the 20, maybe the 25th anniversary. Is that right?

wow that's I think you remember David you out he was the studio director floor director and he had a voice like this he did and he would call it the Speedway soiree remember these they do this every once in a while this is this is that I think and Mark is him and Marcus Buick putting it together Marcus was the sound guy great sound guy yeah it was what is that gonna be oh next Saturday

well i guess i better uh find my invitation it's uh i think it was just an open invite as long as you're on the the tech here's the problem it's facebook isn't it exactly it's on facebook it's on the no it's on it's you've heard the startup it's called um it's all text based it's called um oh what is it called everyone's guy no no no it's a text-based event app called um partyful

Great. I never heard of that. Partyful. Okay. Yeah. Be a partyful. And yeah, it's, it's actually quite good because it's just all text. You get a text message, you can use the app if you want. And then just all the. Patrick, you should fly out for this next Saturday. Come on out. We'll go to, we'll go to the speedway. No, he doesn't. It's not going to happen. All right. Anyway, it's great to see all of you. A thousand episodes at roughly 52 a year.

is almost 20 years uh kevin actually i'm glad he put that list together because i was thinking of doing it and didn't get around to it do we want x to go away or do we want x to get better or do we care

At some point, Elon Musk is going to lose interest, I think. Agreed, agreed. He has a history of losing interest. It might be November 6th he'll lose interest. It could be. It very well could be. At some point, he's going to lose interest. He's going to not want to waste his time on this, and he's going to sell it off to the lowest. But he does right now have a bully pulpit there.

Does he not? Sure. And I have some concerns. My nightmare scenario is a disputed election on November 5th that then Elon uses this bully pulpit and many others who will, including Rupert Murdoch and Fox, to destabilize our democracy. Yep.

That is a serious risk. That's a real... I'm very concerned about it. More than destabilize our democracy, actually fuel violence. And I worry about that. I think that that's... I don't know what we can do about it, but it just really scares me because I don't think Elon is in his right mind at this point. Whether or not it was a good financial investment...

You have to, you know, it was a terrible financial investment, right? You have to give Elon credit for understanding that this platform to this day, even if it has, there's been a diaspora that's gone out. Maybe it's not the, it doesn't punch with the weight that it did in 2016 or whatever. It still has the capacity to set the conversation. And so if his, if it was in his interest to, well,

whether politically he believes in Donald Trump or whatever, if he wants to have more influence over who is in the next government or to have the bully pulpit or to set the conversation, you have to give him credit for seeing what Wall Street didn't see because it was a wounded duck that people thought was a failing company and that people also continued to

considered to be sort of like the children's table at media, which is,

Even after him sort of hobbling it, it still isn't. It's still incredibly powerful. I think he saw the power. It was very obvious the power was there. And I think he saw the power. And I don't think it was... Look, the guy is on paper worth almost a trillion dollars. Losing $44 billion, especially since he was able to finagle banks and borrow, lending him half of that, is not a huge cost for gaining what he did gain, which is an incredible...

number of people who will laugh at his dad jokes. I think that's true. And I think, although obviously a forced liquidation of his Twitter holdings would, of his Tesla holdings to make a margin call would be really bad for, and cascade through a lot of his other companies. How would that, what's this, how would that happen? So if he has to, if, if like they want their interest payment and he can't make it because Twitter didn't have it and he staked his Tesla stock as collateral, they'll force a liquidation. Right.

And forcing a mass liquidation of Tesla stock would tank Tesla's share price. And so that would be really bad for him. It'd be really bad for his future at Tesla. It might empower his board to finally do what they keep trying to do and kick him out and so on. But isn't the board his tame board? It's not a tame board?

Well, I mean, the board can be replaced, right? Because there's many shareholders. I want to go back to the thing you said before about do we want X to fail? So, you know, if you've seen the documentary Fiddler on the Roof. If I were a rich man. Yeah. So, you know, the tragedy of that movie, it's not that they like.

that Anatevka is a good place to live, right? Like the basic plot of Fiddler on the Roof is every 15 minutes the Cossacks ride through and kick the shit out of everyone, right? So this is not a good place to live, but they're there because they love each other.

And the reason the ending is tragic when they're all like, okay, we're leaving Anatevka because the czar has kicked the Jews out. And, you know, I'm going to Chicago and you're going to New York and he's going to Krakow and we're just never going to see each other again. Like, nominally, you'd think leaving a place where you get the sh** beaten out of you every 15 minutes would be a happy ending. But the fact is that they're going to lose each other. Yeah. Right? And so I don't care if Twitter succeeds or survives, right? But, you know...

How many communities were lost forever when LiveJournal liquidated, right? Or, you know, became what it became today, the, you know, Russian held. So you're saying Twitter is Anatevka? Yeah, Twitter is Anatevka. And Elon Musk is the czar. That's really an interesting take. It really is. And the czar is Elon? Yeah, Elon is the czar. You need to write that article, Corey. I think that's the best take I've heard yet. And Cat Turd is the Cossack.

And Drip is one of the people we love we lost. Yeah. Drill, I mean. Not drill. Drill. I knew who you meant. If I were a rich man. You know what? That actually, as crazy as that...

Corey's Dr. O's analogy was. I've used it several times since. And I notice we are still using X. We still stream live on X every week. It's hard to leave your friends behind, isn't it? Until you're kicked out anyway. You're watching the best of This Week in Tech for 2024. We're so glad you're here. Happy holidays.

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It's Ray from the Bobby Bones Show here to tell you that the National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure-ready RAV4, yeah! Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander, seating up to eight passengers, an available panoramic moonroof.

You can sit back, enjoy the wide open views with the whole family. Check out more of this national sales event. The deals are there when you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. On we go with the best of this week in tech with, I think, one of the most touching or at least most interesting moments of the year. Advice for parents when it comes to their kids online.

- We're starting to realize we need, and I hate to say it like this, but we need to give parents, I'll say it like that. We need to give parents the tools to help the children, to help them moderate what the children can see because- - But isn't it ultimately your job, Patrick, as a father to say to your child, you're not old enough to install Instagram, I'm not gonna let you have Instagram yet.

I mean, you know better than anybody. It's not about age, by the way. Some 13-year-olds would be old enough. Some wouldn't. It's really about the maturity of the child. And only the parent knows that. I think the parent really is the ultimate gatekeeper and should be. Yes. And I agree with you. Tools, whatever tools you need. If you need a tool to tell how old your kid is, okay. But whatever tools you need. But really, the tool is you have to – the phone should have parental controls, which they do.

And the parent has the ultimate responsibility of deciding whether even to give the kid a phone or not. Yes, I agree. I agree, but I think there are limits to that. Not every parent is super tech savvy, and that goes into other things as well. I know, and kids are also going to go in and get a beer sometimes at the local convenience store. Absolutely. Nothing's perfect, but I think parents are really the ones who should make these decisions. And I'm not against giving them tools.

But parental controls are tools. I think we agree. But I think currently in our world of tech and internet, the tools are maybe a little bit lacking. Maybe they could be better. What do you think, Wesley? Because you've got a 12-year-old. So you're right in the middle of this right now.

So the phone's locked down. They can't use it outside of our view. And so it stays home. They can't take it. It doesn't leave the house. And we have the parental control, so I know what apps are on there, and they can't install new apps without talking to us first. They have no social media access. And what is their reaction to it, especially the 12-year-old? It's...

they don't know what they're missing because they don't know experience it so I'm not taking anything away from them it's normal this is your job first place you also don't you know let them have a beer I mean it's just it's your job there's a big group there's this great there's a big conversation happening here about porn I guess all over the world about porn sites and I think we are uh a little bit

We don't realize the damages this is making. And I wouldn't realize if I hadn't been educated about it a little bit by people who are saying, you know, doctors and experts who are saying it is bad.

changing the relationship kids, very young teenagers sometimes have with sexuality and sexual partners. And so the idea that you need to lock down porn sites and to have them do age verification properly,

is not as ridiculous as we would think it would be because Wesley, you're saying the phones are locked down. Do they not have access to the internet? Maybe they don't. And maybe that's the way. - No, they don't have the browsers. - Right, no browsers. - The cry of like, these companies aren't doing the same thing, coming from the same party that says we can't teach sex education in schools.

You can't you can't shrug your responsibility. You can't just say on one hand they can't be exposed. But on the other hand, we can't give them the tools so that they can even understand what can and cannot be done. Absolutely. Removing removing something and just saying, let's just act like it doesn't exist is not a solution.

I think no one would argue, well, no one on this panel would argue with that. That's obviously something you have to do. I do, I mean, gosh, you've got to, my kids are old enough that I didn't really have to worry about this when they were that age. It's a tough thing to do. I think you were smart to draw the line when you did. You're right, some parents won't.

but i don't want the government or facebook or any company to tell me what my kids can and can't do that's my job

Patrick, please. Just, you know, the government tells your kids what to do all the time about a lot of things. And it is a very slippery slope to be saying, oh, I don't want the government to tell me about this or that, because then you generalize it and you again go to someone should do something, but not the government when that someone is the government. The government tells your kids what to do all the time.

about a lot of things. I don't think the internet, I mean, obviously there are things that would not make sense, but I don't think the internet is completely, it should have nothing to do about the internet just because it's the internet and we know it and we're, you know, comfortable in it.

I just find it very strange that right now we're discussing earlier on the show the idea that the Republican Party wants to do away with Section 230 to limit corporations' ability to filter trash from their platforms. But at the same time, the same party is saying that we must protect the children and we must have age gated verification for lewd content. Good luck sorting out what that means.

So my thought here is that I think that having this land on the government side, Patrick, in an American context means handing over control of what we can say and see and hear and read to people who are very socially conservative to the point in which we're going to end up with the Amish internet. And I say with a lot of love to people who are less technology savvy. But the point is, it's just maddening, drives me nuts how they talk out of both sides of their mouth.

that's my point sorry that's one to shout but but we could talk out of one side of our mouth so we can say we can at least on this show say what should happen and uh and and whether we get it we we or not I think the government the government says things like you have to wear seat belts you have to wear a helmet if you're under 18 things like that those those are I think reasonable laws um

Is it a public safety issue? Maybe it is, Patrick. Maybe it really is a public safety issue. I think we don't see as much because of our age and our comfort with the internet, the real issues that it can create. Pornography is one, but social media is another. But I'm curious. I'll ask this question to sort of recenter the question about tech stuff, like pure tech stuff.

Let's say there was a way, and maybe there isn't, let's say there was a way to determine someone's age without compromising private data. Would that be okay to implement in various apps? Would you be okay with that?

i don't want to get the government i i don't forget about the government like each let's say let's say let's say there is a new technique the facial recognition technique that with absolute accuracy the camera on your phone can say how old you are and then give you access to age appropriate stuff would that be okay is that okay patrick is that a yeah that's i think that's the way i i would phrase it better

As long as I'm the one deciding what is and what is not okay, then I'm fine with that. But the government says you can't drink or smoke before a certain age. Oh, I don't agree with that either.

oh okay so I mean I've heard that in France you give your kids wine sometimes watered down a little bit I've heard that well a long time ago probably yes but not so much now Wesley makes a really good point I want to go back to Wes's point about sexual education in the United States because it's it might sound odd to our foreign audiences but

in the us what counts as lewd has various interpretations across the political spectrum based on religion mostly and in different states by the way states and so what we're saying here is we're framing this around parents taking care of children and i think it's gonna be very hard to argue against that but the way this would be implemented i think patrick in the us in a practical sense about leo's magical machine that knows my age perfectly every time

is that we're going to have people who are very very opposed to any discussion of human sexuality at all trying to ban that from anyone over the age of 18. or let's say you're gay or you think you might be gay and you want and you're 12 years old and you want to know what does that mean what am I

that could be that would very likely by uh count as lewd in Oklahoma yeah and so but Louisiana it's really very hypothetical because there is no way of of a certain ascertaining somebody's age without violating every user's privacy in the UK for a while they talked about oh you just go into a pub

And the pub will give you a certificate saying what your age is. So they literally floated this as an idea. Actually, in France, currently the law has passed and is in effect that porn sites have to verify the age of their users. And how do they do that? That's true. Nobody knows. How do they define porn site even? Is it to their credit? Is a gallery that has nude art, is that a porn site?

I remember National Geographic when I was a kid. That was my porn site. How do you define this so that it applies to the places that matter? I think maybe you can get someone to make a list and it works well enough for the United States where some states have done that. There are states that have done that in the United States. And those states, most reputable porn companies withdraw.

So to speak. That's what's happening here as well. Yeah. Because they don't want responsibility. And what you get, though, is the non-reputable companies. But I...

Yeah, it's complicated, but I see where you're coming from. And I understand that that concern. It's intractable. It's really. Yeah, it's it's really difficult. And no matter what you do, there are going to be like negatives to it, which are serious and concerning. All right. Since this is the pop up, since this is the pop up podcast, I'm just going to say this to all the other parents listening.

One bit of advice that I got was that the world is a very large place and your job is not to keep the world out because that's an impossible task.

Your job is to give your kids the tool to take on all the things that they're going to experience because you don't have control about what they'll eventually run into. So giving them the tools mentally and emotionally and understanding how they can navigate the world that is not under your control, that is your primary role. Because if your role or your thinking is that I'm just going to keep the world out, that's not going to happen.

Bingo. Well said. Well said, Wesley. Yes, but. Don't call me but. No, I think that that's absolutely true. It's true, but you still- That's how I raised my kids. I was a very laissez-faire parent. I let them play video games as long as they wanted and whatever. But I did what you said, which is I tried to instill in them. And as a parent, you really are a role model.

try to instill in them the values and the judgment to navigate the world that I knew that I couldn't control even when frankly even when they were young you know after about 10 the peers the peer group becomes much more important than the parent parenting group so you want to you want to make sure they're prepared for that I agree with you Wesley I think that's true you don't like this though guys it's not no it's not like you're making it seem a little the subtext is

So laws don't matter. And I know that's not what you mean, Wesley, obviously. No. But there are still laws and still things that collect. The laws, you know, it's a bad word, I think, in the US. It's things that we collectively decide, okay, this, we should agree, all of us, kids shouldn't do. And so we'll do what we can to make sure they don't do it. You know, this election ended up being very interesting because

It turns out Elon Musk now with the FEC, you know, information has come out, donated a quarter of a billion dollars or very nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to President Trump's campaign. And he got a good payout. I think he got his money's worth because he is very much part of the transition team. New York Times story, I think a couple of days ago, actually says it's not just Elon, but it's Elon's buddies, right?

And they are not just, you know, doing Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency. They are in on the interviews. Right at the beginning, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison of Oracle were houseguests, went to the first transition meeting. I brought the two richest people in the world today.

Trump told his advisers, what did you bring? And his mom, May Musk, has actually been in apparently on some of the meetings. So Elon brought his mom. He also brought a whole bunch of people, including this Jade Burchall. He's the head of Elon Musk's family office. He's been interviewing candidates for the job for jobs at the State Department, even though.

That's not his, uh, Bailey wick FTC, FCC, Mark Andreessen is there of, uh, of course the guy who invented Netscape navigator when he was a student, uh, at, uh, um, you know, what you might call it in Illinois and at the NCSA in Illinois. And, uh,

He let's see who else Sean McGuire, who is a Caltech Ph.D. in physics and investor at Sequoia Capital. He's been interviewing candidates for Defense Department jobs. David Sachs. Well, and that's the big story. David Sachs, who spoke at the Republican Convention, is the host of the All In podcast.

is now the white house ai and crypto czar despite the fact that he actually as active as he is he's a part of the paypal mafia he doesn't really have any active participation in an ai company or a crypto company i guess that's good i guess um that we know of that we know of all of this has done one thing for sure that we can see which is propelled bitcoin well over a hundred thousand dollars

A coin. This is good for crypto. Doge is up. Everything's up. Mean coins are up. A hot to a coin is up. Not that one. No, not that one's up and then down, but that's another story. I am. If you're an optimist, I think it would be a good time to say, you know,

maybe this is all going to work out. The government's going to get much more efficient, right? That, uh, Bitcoin is going to end up, maybe the U S will create a digital coin itself, a stable coin, uh, that would then kind of, uh, I don't know. I don't, I don't understand economics well enough to know what the impact of that would be. Um,

I don't think anybody does, to be honest with you. It looks like we might end up with a cryptocurrency reserve, and I don't understand the implications of that. President El Salvador is very happy about his cryptocurrency reserve, right?

You're happy until it collapses. Right. Right. It's like, it reminds me a lot of Vegas, you know, those beautiful big buildings, but then they always put up a billboard of the guy who won a million dollars at the slots. What they don't show you is the 999,000 people who lost money as a slots to pay for that. Right. Or, or, or how much did, did it cost that, that person, you know, to win the million in some way. Right. I don't ever talk about that. Yeah. Yeah.

But having said that, like, I mean, I'm kind of with Lou here. I'm certainly not bullish. And I'm certainly thinking if you don't have money to lose, then you shouldn't be investing in any of these things. But just being completely candid, I

I don't think that it's a bad idea to, you know, talk with whoever handles your investments or if you do it yourself to look at diversifying into crypto if you're looking, you know, for the next. I'm not going to. Short term. I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to touch it. I just don't like something. I agree. You know, I'm dumb. I mean, there's a lot of Bitcoin billionaires.

A lot of them, a lot of that money went into the campaign in 2024. Yeah. So I'm obviously dumb, but I don't want to buy an asset that I don't understand why the asset is valued at what it's valued at. That it's just a random asset.

It's to me, it's buying a lottery ticket. Just don't put all of your retirement funds into crypto. Well, that's absolutely not. Only put stuff you could afford to lose. Exactly. But but even then, I mean, all I'm saying is at this point, because just my own like similar to Harry, I put two thousand dollars in a Robin Hood account a few years ago.

And a lot of that was in Doge when Doge was cheap. And then I didn't sell the Doge when it was at a really good price because my nephew had just been born. And I wound up like it wound up being underwater on the investment for the better part of three years. It is now...

I've had an 85% return. So I've made money, so to speak, and it's a small amount. It doesn't matter. But it is one of those things that for me, I was like, okay, I put this money in just for fun, gambling genuinely. Now with enough time has passed because of the changes that have happened for various reasons, I have a good return. But I certainly wouldn't...

stake my retirement or anything important on it right my wife will every time we go to vegas she or reno she has 20 bucks she's i'm gonna play this slot still it's gone she's twice now won 600 and 900 so she's way up right and now any no you know the temptation is then for me to say wow i gotta get into this this is great you're making a mint out of this

But we know what the reality is. There's also and I worry about Bitcoin. And maybe I'll address this to you because you're more bullish on it, Lou. But I worry that what Bitcoin has done is enabled ransomware. Yes. And all sorts of crime because it is close as close to untraceable, almost as close to untraceable as cash.

And it's a lot harder to transfer a million dollars in cash from your headquarters in Virginia Beach to, you know, Hungary. But it also costs a lot in terms of energy use.

There are gas fees, you know, even though Hawk Tua maybe hadn't invested in her own coin or it wasn't doing insider trading. She made lots of money on the fees, right? Because there's fees. And so all of these things and the speed with which a transaction happens is unpredictable. It's slow unless you pay more to the miner to validate it, even though now they've got proof of work. So it's not as bad as it was. I think the whole thing.

has lots of negatives that people don't even know about or don't consider they're mostly just saying oh but i could make so much money i feel like we're promoting a technology that is not an ideal technology not understood yet too i mean there's that's that's you're calling all the negatives and that's what makes sense because you know i don't the hawk to a thing drives me nuts right because this is a perfect example it's a perfect example of like you know just like

you know, other companies coming up with new AI ways of doing something stupid. Right. Like, I think this is another example of, you know, allowing somebody to go and create their own cryptocurrency, you know, and then of course, you know, so I think this is this is that's the bad thing about it. Right. I mean, there's got to be some level of correction that needs to happen. And so maybe that's why government should get involved. And some of that stuff is solvable or at least partially solvable, like like the sustainability about sustainability aspect.

There's already been some progress with some cryptocurrencies, and there's a lot more that can be done. And there are startups working on it since the original way that the stuff was verified was incredibly energy efficient. But that's just not like a given for this whole idea. Well, we'll find out because the anti, well, many considered anti-cryptocurrency chairman of the Fed said,

um I'm sorry of the SEC Gary Gensler will be replaced now by a guy named Paul Atkins and he is as far as we could tell pretty pro cryptocurrency right and so while Gensler has been kind of saying and I kind of agreed with him cryptocurrencies should be regulated as Securities uh but the crypto community does not want it to be seen as a security

And I think that they're going to get their way with this new guy, Paul Atkins. President Bukele of El Salvador has now got a crypto treasury of $600 million from his initial investment in Bitcoin. Wow.

Trump wants to do the same thing. He says he has said in the campaign trail, he said he wants to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the planet and create a similar strategic reserve of Bitcoin. Of course, if you hold Bitcoin, all of that is great news. It means your assets will go up. Right. Right. But is it great policy?

Right. I think the people who are looking at this aren't considering that. They're just saying, well, I don't care because I'm going to make a mint. I'll get mine. I don't understand. I don't understand. Even if you're bullish on this, I don't understand. I mean, other than the greed aspect, I don't understand why this would not be a security. That's that's the thing that I've never understood. I've never understood that argument. You should have capital gains taxes on it, which you do currently. Absolutely. Yeah.

We are talking about a guy who went bankrupt running casinos. So I wouldn't put too much stock in his take on this whole thing. Yeah. Well, what now? So what's really interesting to me is it really looks as if, and I'd like to know what you think. President-elect Trump has handed over the transition to Silicon Valley, to the Silicon Valley billionaires. They have moved into Mar-a-Lago. They're doing the interviews. They're, you know, Elon is sitting in and phone calls with Zelensky and others and

You know, there was a conspiracy theory before the election that Trump didn't really want to govern. He liked being president and and he, you know, like the benefits of it, including putting all aside all of his convictions, which it apparently has.

But he didn't really want to run anything. That's too much work. So he was very glad to have people like Elon come in and do it. And that's that was the conspiracy theory that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were funding Trump because they knew that he would take a backseat. He would enjoy the trappings of power without actually having to worry about it. J.D. Vance, who was a Thiel supporter.

uh protege would be the vice president he'd be sitting there with musk and teal and and all of these people running the country it kind of looks like maybe that wasn't a conspiracy theory or at least that's what happened so i'm not even sure whether though is that a bad thing maybe these guys i mean they're all great businessmen right they know how to run companies they know how to launch rockets they know how to so maybe they should be running the country

I'm not even sure if it was ever a conspiracy theory. It seemed kind of manifestly obvious from the get-go. I mean, trying to be a plan. Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, certainly you can make a strong case that a business background is, is not inherently a great background for running a government, but. Well, I'm worried because a lot of these guys have, have big egos because they've stumbled into money. I don't know if they, they, you know, a lot of them,

billionaires just because they were in the right place at the right time, but they think they're geniuses. And there's a certain arrogance that comes with that. That worries me a little bit. Some have likened it, though, to JFK bringing in the Harvard elite, the best and the brightest, right? Or Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals bringing in the best minds of

to help run the country. And maybe that's what's going to happen. I mean, yes, they are arrogant, but so is virtually everybody else at that echelon of power. Yeah, you don't get to be president without being a little arrogant. Trying to be optimistic, I would hope that maybe there's the potential for them to

by sitting in on these meetings to soak up some knowledge they don't already have and that they have enough of a humble side to realize that they are not experts on foreign policy or all these other things outside of their wheelhouse? They're in there for the interviews, maybe just to make sure that the person is competent and smart

And then somebody else is going to do the other part of the interview. We don't know. It's also not clear how long this will last because historically, Trump doesn't get along well forever with other people who are as needy as Elon Musk is. Or who get as much attention, right? He's in love with Elon right now. I mean, this could all be kind of brave. He was in love with everybody.

He was in love with Kim Jong-un as well. And he seemed to like Putin quite a bit. That is a story that will continue all year long. Don't you think? We will cover it, not from a political point of view, but from the technology point of view. That's what we do. We like to keep you up to date on what's happening in technology so that you can use it to make your life better, to help you at your work, help you have fun.

I'm very proud of what we do at Twit and we really enjoy doing it. I hope you will continue to watch or listen in the new year. And of course, if you're not yet a club to it member, I hope you'll consider joining. That helps us a lot, keeping things, uh, on the air. Um,

On behalf of everybody, all of the many people who join us every week, and of course our producer, Benito Gonzalez, our creative director, Anthony Nielsen, and the entire TWIT team, we thank you so much for your support in 2024. I look forward to supporting you in 2025. Happy New Year, everybody. We'll see you next time. Oh, and I probably should say, another TWIT is in the can. He's amazing.

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