TWiT 1015: Smarter Than a House Cat - TikTok, Trumpcoin, Samsung Unpacked 2025
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It's time for TWIT. This week in tech, Jason Heiner is here, editor-in-chief of ZDNet. Molly White of the Web3 is going just great website. And from this week in Google, Paris Martineau, we're going to talk about, of course, the Trump coin.

And now the competing Melania coin. I kid you not. Molly will explain a little bit about the technology behind meme coins. We'll also talk about insurance spying on you. Isn't that a good way to bring down premiums? Maybe not. And what Apple's going to do with its AI-based news alerts. I'll give you a hint. Bye-bye. It's all coming up next on This Week in Tech.

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1015. Recorded Sunday, January 19th, 2025. Smarter than a house cat. It's time for TWIT. This Week in Tech. What a week. And what a week it is. If you're not interested in TikTok, this might not be the show for you. What a saga. Let me introduce our panel.

Molly White is here. So glad to have Molly White of the famous Web3 is going just great. Her newsletter citation needed. She's an expert. She's a longtime Wikipedia editor. I brought you on because we were thinking about Wikipedia, but then things happened and there's other things to talk about. Very nice to have you, Molly. It's great to see you. Thank you for being here. Good to be back. Yes. Jason Heiner is also here, editor-in-chief of ZDNet, longtime friend of the show. One time you elected me president. Yes.

and uh the internet of the internet well at the time that was really the most important thing to be president of but that's true times have changed welcome back good to see you Jason always a pleasure also from this week in Google the wonderful Paris Martineau hello so uh Leo is it you who's getting inaugurated tomorrow tomorrow I will be no my term as president of the internet ended and no one replaced me right Jason huh that makes a lot of sense actually it was unending

the term never ended you are still the president of the internet I mean you I'm surprised you haven't crowned yourself King it was a smaller time then well you know I've got some notes for you on your tenure then I take no responsibility for anything that happened after 1998. um I should have as it turns out created my own uh meme coin and I could have been rich it's true

so um we'll do the tick tock I I will get to the tick tock I'm waiting to see what happens there's something could happen in the next 10 minutes so I just want to make sure we get the latest news I've heard it's been going in and out since we got on this last night I'm uh I'm watching the football game and somebody says tick tock's down I said it's only 7 30. it's supposed to end at midnight

and of course tick tock uh they shut down early and and it's really clear at this point it was a stunt right that they wanted everybody in the world to know that it was you know the u.s government shut us down and it even said fortunately president trump says he's going to save us so stay tuned this morning i get up he's not president by the way president-elect trump saved him miraculously and it's back up

but it says in the message president trump saved us which i think is a bit telling it's just incredibly odd how heavy-handed they are being with the political theater here i mean i think anyone watching this kind of

understood intuitively that even when TikTok signaled earlier this week in messages to employees that were reported on first by the information like that, hey, we're going to go dark on Sunday, which they technically didn't have to do. Well, I'm not clear that they didn't. I mean, the law didn't require it, I guess, huh?

Well, it's judging by the fact that right now they're no longer dark. I would say that throws into question the whole thing because the law requires them to like, well,

Like, what is happening here is the law penalizes both ByteDance, TikTok, the company for remaining active in violation of this law, as well as everybody downstream and upstream of them. That's the app store like providers, as well as like hosting companies like Oracle. And I'm forgetting the other one. It starts with an A.

And those penalties range anywhere from, I think, like $500 per user per instance to like $5,000 per user per instance. And it's not just unique downloads. So that adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars of potential liabilities for these companies. And nothing has changed except for TikTok says that...

Trump essentially reached out to Oracle and the one other Internet service provider kind of working on the back end and assured them that he wouldn't come after them for those fines, which is a bit of a question mark for me because I'm not sure that Trump has the power to do that or not. So strange. So this is a law that was duly passed by Congress, signed by the president, took effect yesterday.

on the 19th today yeah as we record um they of course Tick Tock appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court nine to nothing said the first amendment does not protect you because you're a foreign entity and you're an enemy of the country and for security reasons security reasons Trump the first amendment and they voted nine nothing I mean this was a very clear

vote that no you're going to be shut down on sunday they justice kagan and we talked about this on wednesday paris with uh our friend kathy gallus who is admitted to the supreme court was at the oral hearings and she told us that uh judges justice kagan said it would be problematic if a president could just unilaterally say yeah we're not going to do that we don't want to put the president's situation where he overrides congress and the supreme court

trump's not even president but apparently can do that so it's an executive branch sort of thing like the the job of the executive branch is to carry out the law enforce it so you can say i'm not going to enforce it right right so i so i i think on a technicality that that's their their their stance but it did go i mean even apple released a statement last night you know saying a quote unquote quote apple

Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Apps developed by ByteDance Limited and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, CapCut, Lemonade, and others will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store.

starting January 19th, 2025. So it was like gone. It's worth noting that that hasn't changed despite the fact that TikTok is now available to people who already had it downloaded. That's right. The app stores still haven't blinked on this. And I'm fascinated as to what the internal conversations are like happening behind closed doors at a place like Oracle because technically they're taking on

hundreds of billions of dollars of liability. And these financial provisions, as misguided as many people believe they are, they do have provisions in them that the government told the Supreme Court last week that

it could conceivably enforce these financial penalties up to five years later. So like Oracle could be penalized under whoever the next president is. They're taking on a lot of risk. Yeah. That's a huge amount of risk. Larry Ellison, the Oracle guy is a big Trump guy too. So, you know, he may be making this into a political thing or at least very willing to listen to Trump's promises. Well, I mean, yeah, if you want to pull that thread, um,

One of the big investors in TikTok is an American and a Republican donor, Trump donor, Jess, who owns 15% and did, in fact, talk to Trump shortly before he changed his mind on TikTok. There's Jeff, yes. There's also...

uh the fact that uh the ceo of tick tock went to mar-a-lago and sat down and broke bread with president-elect trump and elon musk and then there's the invitation to sit next to musk in the inauguration inaugural dais tomorrow so there's very clear message but you know this is what america wanted right this is this is not what congress wanted not what not what trump wanted in 2020 when he first

declared that they was going to ban TikTok not what Biden wanted when he signed the law not what the nine justices of the Supreme Court wanted but 171 million Americans who use TikTok seem pretty clear I asked my son who uh

you know and i've said this before and i should probably say it again i have a conflict of interest on this because my son is a tick tock chef who has a career a very good career because of tick tock clearly because of tick tock he decided to start posting uh videos of him making sandwiches on tick tock went from a few thousand followers into two and a half million followers in a matter of months

parlayed that into a cookbook oh by the way he wasn't dumb he parlayed that into an Instagram account as well and is opening a restaurant in Manhattan in two months all because of tick-tock's algorithm I asked him today do you think that could have happened on Facebook on Instagram Facebook's Instagram he said no he said tick-tock's algorithm is what made me the algorithm is much better than anything else but he was also smart enough to move to insta he

He says he knows many, many people who were telling him, I'm going to have to go back to work. He had a friend who quit his job last week because TikTok was making him money. And he says he's going to have to go back hat in hand to get his job back. Many millions of Americans made money on TikTok. Henry never got much money from TikTok directly, but the advertising he sold on his TikTok channel made it so he never had to work, right? It's been a huge success. So TikTok is, there would have been,

a lot of creators disenfranchised by this ban. Something I think that is interesting about this, I mean, it does seem like, assuming everything plays out the way it seems poised to right now, which is kind of a silly statement because I'm sure that will change about 20 times during the recording of this show. But if Trump somehow manages to block or stop the enforcement of this from his perspective,

I'm curious as to what is going to happen, because it seems like people, there are still a number of parties out there that technically have standing to sue to challenge the lack of enforcement of this in court. Like, it's unclear exactly who that would be, but maybe like TikTok users who supported the ban or, you know, competitors of TikTok, they could ostensibly sue and say it's like...

they're having harm for the fact that the government is not following the law and enforcing this. And that could result in financial penalties for all these companies, too, as well as like a lengthy, costly legal battle. I'm just baffled that this is in this strange limbo right now. It's not in limbo. Well, I don't know if it's in limbo. There may even be a constitutional crisis created by Trump not enforcing the law.

um Tick Tock constitutional crisis welcome to 2025. isn't that funny Molly boy we've been talking about this I'm sorry you started saying something and I interrupted you what what's the what do you think

I was just going to say, I think it's really interesting that the Supreme Court sort of took the stance that this is about whether or not TikTok or China has a right to freedom of speech. And they sort of didn't address the freedom of information aspect of it where, you know,

Supreme Court decisions in the past have established that people have a right to receive information. And, you know, the idea that this needs to be blocked because it is like China who doesn't have a free speech right just seems really out there to me, especially compared to past decisions. Well, as Kathy Gellis has said, it's not the free speech of China. It's the free speech of the 170 million Americans who are on TikTok. You are shutting them down.

Yeah, and a lot of the, but a lot of the conversation about the Supreme Court decision has been basically like, well, China doesn't have a free speech right, which seems like very, very misguided as far as, you know, the way that speech even happens online. We don't make our laws based on what China does and doesn't do. I'm sorry. Well, we apparently do.

Yeah, that's not a good basis for making or not making a law. There is the question of whether TikTok is some sort of security risk. And the Supreme Court said it overrides any First Amendment concerns that the Congress has decided that there is. The Congress and the intelligence agencies have never given us those reasons. They've just said, take it on faith. It's a Chinese company, so it's a problem.

Yeah, but I mean, there have been plenty of cases that have gone to the Supreme Court in the past that have made those arguments that have not come out in that in favor of the government. I mean, the Pentagon Papers case is a good example where they argued, you know, this is a security risk, you can't publish this. And, you know, the Supreme Court didn't shut down the New York Times. They said that, you know, people have a right to receive information. And, you know, this is

something that you can publish. And we ended up with the Pentagon Papers. And now it seems like a sort of total reversal of that stance based on sort of hand wavy national security concerns that have not been really discussed. I mean, I sort of understand that

you know, the government can't just come out and say, you know, detail every national security concern that they have. But there is a lot of just sort of like, no, trust us, China is doing something nefarious that we can't tell you about. And there's been no reporting really of what that might be. Yeah, I think perhaps the reason that the Supreme Court acted the way it did, because it was

It was a little bit of a separation of powers issue potentially because the Congress had passed this, we can debate the merits of it, and the president signed it. I think for the Supreme Court to overrule it and uphold it, it would have to be, my understanding is there would have to be overwhelming evidence that this encroached on the

this encroached on constitutional rights or very clear, very clear, you know, abrogation of laws. And I think that because there was some lack of clarity and confusion, my interpretation was the reason why the Supreme Court didn't act

was because it is so gray. And for them to overrule the votes of the Congress and the signature of the president, it would have to be something that was really clear and essentially kind of egregious for them to do it. That's how I understood it from just like a legal standpoint, let alone sort of the merits of it. 'Cause there are some real interesting,

issues you know debates at the at the heart of this that I think are worth talking about but I but I think that's why they didn't act there are constitutional issues that are raised by it though and Kathy gellis has said and somebody is pointing out we're not attorneys and we're not we're not attempting to be attorneys but Kathy gellis is admitted to in fact to uh

uh talk before the supreme court so she presumably knows of which she speaks she said that a the supreme court's decision raises some serious issues and the court has perhaps undermined that not only undermined the first amendment but also given um the president uh some powers that he didn't previously have not that that's the first time they've done that so uh it is it's just it's just a weird situation it's pretty clear tick tock

brought itself down as a stunt right last night uh knowing that would get people up in arms and get everybody's attention because they didn't stay down for very long I mean they played their cards really well for all again sort of the values of the thing aside tick-tock played this thing really well they said like look if they if they pass the band we're just shutting down like we're not gonna keep appealing and all that and I think they counted on the fact that there would be an outcry yeah they

The big losers on this are the Democrats, frankly, and Biden. Trump comes off looking like a savior and TikTok's by the way. Which is particularly crazy because he's the one that started all of this. He's the one who instigated the TikTok ban. And yet he gets the credit for stopping what he started.

I feel like the national memory is a little bit shorter than a couple of years. It's just wild. Yeah. So there are people, so what will probably happen? We don't know. Trump is going to have to issue an executive order. Honestly, I don't think this is the most important thing he'll be weighing in on on January 20th, but he says, yeah, there are a few other things. Deporting everybody in Chicago apparently is also on the agenda, but

he apparently what he's going to do is is extend the deadline which is the least legally troubling thing he can do rather than saying I'm just not this I'm this I don't like this law not going to enforce it he's going to extend the deadline and give an American company a chance to buy there are a lot of suitors uh it's not clear who's going to win in this one Larry Ellison of course is there but so is Elon Musk they've the TikTok ByteDance has denied that but uh

there have been reports that Musk is interested in buying at least a part of Tick Tock well so are many others perplexity an AI company called perplexity has put its hat in the ring and of course uh the former owner of the LA Dodgers Frank McCourt says I got 20 billion right here I'm ready to throw it at you tick China has said we're not going to let Tick Tock sell the algorithm

Something that I think is interesting, though, is if Trump wants to use the option, you can trigger this 90-day extension. In order to do that, he has to certify to Congress that TikTok has agreed to sell. And I don't know if that's entirely correct that TikTok has agreed to sell. Because I think in order to sell TikTok, you'd have to sell parts that China has said TikTok cannot sell. Right. Namely, the algorithm. Yeah.

And what's sad is, okay, to me, TikTok is the least...

danger i mean china is allowed to propagandize us on x on elon musk's own platform as is russia and and on meta and nobody's doing anything about that if if you're concerned about china propagandizing us americans are the most thoroughly propagandized people in the world i think at this point on all sides we're fed uh misinformation from all directions

So that's not a really good argument. The second argument is, oh, well, they're getting all of our data. That's a terrible argument because Congress is clearly unwilling to pass. And this was TikTok's argument for the Supreme Court. Congress, if they wanted to, could protect us by passing a comprehensive data privacy bill. They clearly don't want that. And anyway, China doesn't need TikTok to get all that information. They just can buy it on the open market.

Because Meta's collecting it and selling it on, as is everybody else. Data brokers have all that information. I mean, I don't think, I think we know that China doesn't have to buy it, that they've, for years, they've infiltrated AT&T, they've, you know, they've exfiltrated data, you know. I guess the...

I think the data argument is, it is a little bit compelling though, because the ease at which their government sensors could have access to the data is a little bit different from that standpoint. Now, supposedly it's because of data sovereignty and Oracle now, the way they store the data and that.

who knows what the reality is. I think there's not many people who do, but I think that the ease of access to data and the ability to manipulate the algorithm, I think there is something to that. There have been so many videos that talk about channels that just as an experiment, that

they went to TikTok, they created a huge following. They said one negative thing about the Chinese government and like overnight, 90%, right? Drops. There's no question about that. Of course, you can't say pixel fit on meta either. I was going to say, yeah, you can really replicate that experiment anywhere else. I mean, say cisgender on Twitter. Those are American censors, guys. That's different. Yeah. And I,

Okay, so maybe there is a threat from TikTok. It does seem weird that our government's focused on that instead of so many other things that are so threatening. And we're spending so many cycles on this subject.

It's just a social network. It's not that important. I mean, I do think it's the consequence of this increased, not to, you know, bring up a phrase from speaking Google that we use, but this phase of moral panics that we've been seeing over the last couple of years. You've been listening to Jeff Jarvis. Think of the children. Think of like there has been this huge whipping up of fear and rage over everything.

companies like TikTok, and it also is coming at a time of increased like xenophobia and fear of anything that is foreign. And it makes sense, of course, that the natural conclusion of this would be the kind of first foray into something actually happening, a ban of a foreign social media platform that spirals out of control where none of the people actually enforcing it seem like they want to be enforcing it. But we've gotten to this point anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think there's also just sort of the larger conversation about, you know, access to information and sort of the ability to, you know, disseminate and receive information that is really being is really changing in recent times, you know, where Republicans were sort of once the party of free speech. And now, you know, we're seeing these sort of unprecedented attacks on the press from Donald Trump and other allies.

There's been sort of bipartisan attacks on speech coming with TikTok, with other proposed bills around moral panics with kids online safety and those types of bills, age verification, access to content that's deemed obscene or otherwise inappropriate for minors. And so it does feel like it's a part of sort of a broader pattern of

cracking down on access to information that is really concerning. I think, um, especially going into this new administration where it seems like those types of things are going to heat up even more. It's we, we don't mind social media as long as we control, uh, its use. In other words, um, as in who, who's the, we in that scenario, the, like as a society, no,

people in power people okay I think we call them the oligarchs I'm gonna call them the oligarchs the oligarchs um it was also interesting the reaction of Tick Tock users the number one app all week was a little red book uh or actually they called it what they call a red notebook but it's but it's uh Xiao Hongshu is Little Red Book

uh the ceo says that's because i went to stanford but i think it's maybe more than a nod to chairman mao's little red book anyway little red book was suddenly even though it was mostly chinese suddenly the number one download on apple's store

And it was interesting seeing, I mean, on various, I didn't download it myself, but I saw a variety of like posts from users who tried it out on various social networks. And the thing that struck me is many people were saying, I came to this new platform because I'm

On TikTok, I really found a place for the LGBTQ community and to find fellow people in my community and express my sexual identity. And you cannot do that on Red Note or Red Book, whatever it's called. And you can't probably do it on TikTok, can you? Maybe you can on TikTok. No, you can on TikTok, but you literally cannot use...

most hashtags in uh that are like yeah they're uh very stringent about that and so I saw a bunch of people from these communities that I'm in posting oh well you know on Redbook you've got to do hashtag le instead of lesbian because you can't put lesbian because they need to take it down I'm like how is this better how how are you it's not it's a gesture it's a gesture they know it's not better it's a gesture it's saying go ahead and stop us

you know what are you going to do you're going to stop everything what are you going to do and I think that that's a strong signal really the the the biggest losers here are the Democrats who uh who fell for the fell for Trump's faint he did a head faint he said we're gonna ban Tick Tock right and they all fell for it and then I mean I would argue

I think it's less, I think positioning it as Trump playing some 4D chess here is probably a little mal-informed in the sense that I don't know we can say for certain that Trump had any idea that this was going to play out the way it did when he made that first executive order. I think that everybody was just reacting in terms of this situation.

I don't know, wave of moral panic we've seen rise and no one really thought about the consequences and it ends up being the Democrats are left holding the bag in this. - Yeah, I mean, look, they made some real enemies among millennials and what's younger than millennial? Gen alphas? - Gen Z. - Z? What's the youngest?

I don't know. I never liked those labels. Then beta. Is it like, that's like the ones that are just being born now. You all just jealous of us baby boomers. Cause we have a legit designation and you all just trying to get, you know, your own, but no, uh,

there's no other one they're all piggybacking off the gen x yeah but that gen x wanted to be baby boomers that's all they just didn't like it that we had it yeah everyone wants to be babies everybody wants to be baby boomers you know that all right all right we're gonna take a break and uh when we come back why there's just i don't all right we're gonna do we're gonna talk about uh i want to find out molly's gonna explain what solana is

right and then and then we're going to find out this is your cross to bear Molly you have sorry you're the crypto expert here you're watching this week in tech Molly White is here web 3 is going just great and of course citation needed which is an excellent newsletter you should all subscribe to find it all at mollywhite.net and and or mollyfx000 right did I get that right zero x f f f f f yeah

My hex is so bad. 0xFFF, which is hex for white. White. Clever. Thank you for being here, Molly. Jason Heiner from ZDNet. He is the man in charge, editor-in-chief at ZDNet. You've risen to the top, my friend. I mean, of a sorts. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't get better than that.

congrats it's good thank you yeah always good to be here you deserve i know no one who deserves it more than you you're fantastic that's good and of course the wonderful paris martineau who works for the information who had the we you you mentioned it but let's let's emphasize this the scoop that tick tock was gonna yeah not me but my colleagues i've been all over it all weekend i've been watching i mean they're working right now i uh it's a changing story

yeah it's truly so impressive i mean and it's times like these that i'm happy to be in a newsroom that has a great china team as well so it was actually oracle that started shutting down the servers which is interesting

Yeah, I mean, that's part of the reason why TikTok went offline last night. And part of the reason that it's so interesting that it came back today because it seems to be as a result of these backroom negotiations between Trump giving these assurances and companies like Oracle. And again, I'm forgetting the name of the other one. It's like a commie or something. Yeah. Wild. Wild. Wild story. Probably Akamai.

Akamai. Hey, that's it. Akamai. Akamai. Yep. They probably weren't hosting it, but they were providing CDN, I'm sure. Yeah. Cloud services. Our show today brought to you by Delete Me. Boy, you know, we're talking, I mean, there is no national data privacy law. There doesn't, it's not, seems not likely that there ever will be one. So it's up to you. It's up to all of us to protect our privacy online. Have you ever searched for your name online? It's depressing how much is right there in a search.

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so um this is kind of unprecedented I don't even know what to say thank goodness Molly White is here um and it's right at the top of web 3 is going uh just great President Trump President-elect Trump the day before his inauguration created a meme coin Trump it's called you call it an S coin I'll call it a meme coin

dollar sign Trump if you go to get trumpmemes.com you can buy it and I'm not hiding it because so many people have done so it is now worth what is it 32 billion dollars well there's actually some sort of breaking news that changes that which is that Melania Trump just launched her meme coin what no

And the Trump meme coin has crashed like 65%. Wait a minute. People sold Trump to buy Melania? Yeah, something like that. No, come on. You're teasing us. Trump down, Melania up. I am not joking. What is the name of Melania's coin? Melania. Boy, that's a little weird. Like an hour ago. Yeah. I mean, that sounds like there's trouble in paradise. What? No. Between them?

Camelot man! Here's the post from the new, soon to be new president. My new official Trump meme is here. It's time to celebrate everything we stand for winning. Get your dollar sign Trump now. Go to Trumpmemes.com. Have fun. Oh boy. Let me just see what it costs. Do I have to give him money? Oh, you can buy it with a debit card or crypto.

And it's based on Solana. Is that right, Molly? That's correct, yes. What is Solana? That has been...

So Solana is another blockchain, sort of like there's the Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum, and then there's Solana. It was very popular around the Sam Bankman Freed era. He was very into Solana. And then it sort of had a nosedive around the time those things fell apart. But it's been back. And a lot of the recent meme coin trend has taken place on Solana. Was Hawk to a coin on Solana?

I believe it was, yes. So what that means is I could create a dollar sign Leo coin, but I wouldn't have to actually do any math. There's no math involved, right? I don't have to come up with miners or anything. This is all handled with Solana, does it? Yeah.

Yeah, and there have been sort of these recent platforms developed to make it very easy for anyone to create a meme coin on Solana without necessarily having to have a ton of technical expertise. You've always been able to create your own meme.

you know token on an ethereum or solana or anything like that but um some of these new platforms to really try that really try to make it easier have caused this sort of explosion in interest in meme coins so one hour before we went on the air melania released melania it has grown 4 487 since in the first hour oh it's down a little now are people you think selling trump to buy melania

Uh, potentially, I mean, or people are getting out of Trump for other reasons and they think that, you know, this is all, uh, you know, a bad sign for the Trump campaign.

financial world I don't know you know they're worried that the the Trump meme coin is about to crash or something like that uh Trump is right now worth 45.47 but you're right it did drop it was uh started the day it's almost 70 dollars so it is down 34 percent that's got to be the set price right because 45 47

his president numbers oh everybody's aiming at 47. I think that's actually coincidence but that's crazy yeah that's funny so the the concern on this I mean my son I'm talking to Henry about Tick Tock and he said by the way is that legal

Is now. So, and that was one of the things, and one of the reasons the crypto industry was all in on Trump because he said, we're going to fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC, that's been saying that cryptocurrencies should be regulated like securities, which, I mean, that seems sensible to me. So, but it's very clear that under this new administration, they will not be regulated like securities, if at all, which means that,

and and I guess uh the president-elect is is basically announcing this by creating his own coin as is Melania here is the bank of Trump and if you decide you want to contribute to the new administration without you know all these rules and and and things you just buy Trump coin and uh presumably uh the president-elect has a big stake we do we know how much

um I think 80 percent of the token is currently when the price goes up control his his money his value its value goes up and he he kind of it's paper money but so is Tesla stock I mean it's paper money um but it it's a way of kind of indirectly giving money to uh our our leader

I would say rather directly, actually. Yeah. Well, I mean, the only thing more directly is if you just write him a check, but that there's all sorts of stickiness around that. So. Right. Yeah. That's a regulated. This is not. This is not regulated. Yeah. I mean, and it's not that much of a, you know, the newest Trump meme coin is really not that much of a departure from his previous actions where he had a meme coin. Yeah.

- There were Trump themed meme coins, but I don't know if any of those were ever definitively connected to him. - This is the first official. - There was actually a lot of speculation. - What was the coin that Baron did with him? - Baron has a coin? - No, Baron was the czar of a coin or something like that. He was the crypto officer.

Yeah, so there's a couple different things. There was a Trump-themed meme coin that was believed to have been backed by, or like, that Barron Trump was speculated to be involved with, but that was all going off of claims by like Martin Shkreli. Oh, well, there's a reliable source. Yeah, and so he was never really definitively linked to that. But there is a project called World Liberty Financial, which is a crypto project that

Trump is basically a beneficiary of, but he's not technically an officer of the company, even though he clearly has a strong say in the control of and direction of the project. But he makes like 70, I think 75% of protocol revenues off of that. And so people were already basically funneling money to Trump through that project.

What are protocol revenues? What is that? Is that like gas fees? What is that? Yeah. So the thing with World Liberty Financial is that theoretically it's supposed to become a DeFi protocol where you could actually like use the app to do crypto trading. And if you were to do so, that would generate revenue for the protocol. And then a percentage of that goes to Trump. So they break off a little bit.

Yeah, but in its current form, there is no functionality. So basically, it doesn't really do anything. This is more direct, the Trump coin. This seems to be very direct, yes. And, you know, there is really no business behind it in the way that World Liberty Financial at least claims that there will be some sort of app or something that you could use eventually, maybe. Yeah.

Of course, immediately on X, there are pseudo accounts created. Yes. Like Trump meme coin. When I first saw the tweet about the Trump meme coin, I thought that Donald Trump's Twitter account had been hacked. Like, that's what I assumed. Because on Twitter, this happens all the time where celebrities' accounts are compromised and then they pretend to launch a meme coin and the hacker makes off with whatever revenue there is. And then eventually the person...

regains control of their Twitter account. And it turns out it wasn't their meme coin. It was just some person. And I assumed that was what was happening with the Trump coin, which I don't know why I didn't think it was likely that he would pull a stunt like this, which, you know, in hindsight seems very character for him, but. So there, so there's only a 10% public allocation of this meme coin. 80% of it is the president elects money.

10% is going to somebody else. I don't know. Maybe that's Solana or gets a cut or something. 10% goes to the public. The idea is that over time, the 80% allocation would be released to the public, I believe. But at the moment, that is the case. Yes. So if you listened to or read the interview that the New York Times Rastutat did with Marc Andreessen,

Mark's company, as you know, Mark Andreessen created Netscape, Mozilla before that. Made a lot of money when Netscape went public and has become a venture capitalist. Many of their investments at Andreessen Horowitz are crypto companies, Web3, they were a big Web3 proponent.

uh and andreessen says this is why he's become radicalized he was a democrat his whole life but he but he realized the democrats wanted to kill crypto he's the one who talked about debanking of crypto companies on joe rogan uh the democrats wanted to kill crypto and so he's become a a real supporter of the republicans and especially of donald trump because donald trump's pro-crypto

but you can see the problem with crypto right here that it is un because it's unregulated it's a really easy way to scam people like crazy not to mention it's facilitated ransomware I mean the ransomware explosion is is primarily because they can get their ransomware in Bitcoin

right um a lot of people made a lot of money I'm not saying they haven't but I imagine there's also a lot of people who lost money you know it's a zero-sum game yeah for people to make a lot of money a lot of people have to lose a lot of money I mean I know there's more Bitcoin being created all the time so that's not it's not exactly zero that's true that's true but um it's pretty close to it um how does how does this trump coin work is there more trump coin being mined or is there a a set pool of trump coin

Uh, there's a set pool of it. And like I said, there's that initial allocation to the team. And I think the idea is that the team will sort of distribute more of it over time, but it's really, why would they do that for all? Why should they do that to make more money? Oh yeah. Cause if they do that, then maybe more people will buy it.

Yeah, I think there's, I mean, I think, I think there's probably not much of a long-term plan with this. There doesn't tend to be with meme coins. There's sort of like a, you know, Can you still buy Hawk Tua? I don't think you can. You can? Yeah. Why would you? They're all basically tradable forever, but it's just the question of, does anyone actually trade them? Do people understand this when they're, I think certainly the people who are buying Trump coin are not looking at this allocation table anymore.

and saying oh yeah okay well there's a total groups the total admission duration is 36 months circulating supply at TGE 200 million the maximum card supply is 1 billion I'm gonna make money on this I think this is good what is the emission schedule what the hell does that mean is that when they release their 80 percent yeah that's about new tokens being released oh okay not mind

Right?

to validate blocks instead of mine blocks. And it's more eco-friendly and all that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, and the basic idea is you have a decentralized ledger that everybody can see of who owns what. And it's validated somehow magically, whether through mining or validation or proof of work or proof of stake or whatever it is. But it's interesting. You can just wave your hand and say, yeah, I'm going to create a billion Trump coins. Yep.

And they magically appear. Yeah. I mean, in fairness, you've been able to do this for a long time. You know, the Ethereum network has been doing this for a long time and people have been launching new tokens on, you know, all sorts of different blockchains. Do you have to back it up? Do you have to like buy some Solana to back it up?

Not necessarily, but in practice, most people will set up what's called a liquidity pool so that if someone wants to buy some Trump tokens, there is someone on the other end of the trade. But as time goes on, other people will sort of join into those activities and become liquidity providers. Oh, that's what the other 10% is, by the way, is liquidity. Yeah. So it's 80% Trump, 80% liquidity, 10% public distribution.

i don't understand what any of this means by the way and i'm gonna bet that 99 of the people who are buying it don't and therein lies the problem

Yeah, I mean, meme coins are really just based on vibes. You know, there is no business or anything behind it. There is no sort of project underlying it, even in the way that a lot of crypto projects like, I don't know, a year ago, they at least claim to be doing something. And most of them didn't, but they claim to be. And now there's meme coins, which is just like, maybe number go up.

And that's sort of the whole philosophy behind them. And people are just trying to get in quickly enough and pick the right meme coins so that they're the ones buying low and selling high and not the part of like 99% of people doing the opposite. But just to make you feel better, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the page at gettrumpmemes.com, which I'm going to bet is mostly hand-waving

but it makes it feel like this is somehow regulated. Trump memes are intended to function as an expression of support for and engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol dollar sign Trump and the associated artwork and not intended to be or to be the subject of an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.

GetTrumpMemes.com is not political, has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or government agency, because then the FEC would rule in. CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the Trump cards.

and are subject to a three-year unlocking schedule cic digital llc and celebration cards llc the owners of fight fight fight llc will receive trading revenue derived from trading activities of trump meme cards those are those fees you were talking about molly see terms and conditions here okay i'm gonna click terms and conditions sometimes i just i see something like this and i want to go like

find a way to print this out and send just a screenshot of that back in time a decade and one shot kill me. You know, like imagine reading this like a decade ago, no context. I don't think I would survive. I think my brain would explode trying to comprehend it.

But you see these disclaimers on basically every crypto project website because they sort of think they've found a get-out-of-jail-free card where, like, if you put this at the bottom of the website, then the Securities Exchange Commission can't come after us. And in this case, I guess it's probably true because of the, you know, Trump administration changes to the SEC. But it is just sort of this, like, it's like when...

financial influencers are like, not financial advice. And then they proceed to give you like financial advice. Yeah. Please be aware. This is in the TNC. Please be aware. The price of Trump memes may be extremely volatile. Well, we just found that out when Melania released hers.

and you may experience substantial losses in connection with a sale or other disposition of Trump memes, we make absolutely no promise or guarantee that the Trump memes will increase in value or maintain the same value as the amount you paid to purchase same. There remains your sole and exclusive responsibility.

I was going to say, I believe there's also a clause about class action litigation against the project, which is sort of a legally controversial clause where, you know, you're only allowed to, I forget what the terms are, but it's something like, you know, you have three weeks to file a lawsuit and then you basically automatically waive all class complaints. Yeah.

So, I mean, I feel bad because obviously the people who buy this, well, there's two categories of people who are going to buy this. There are people who love Trump or Trump supporters, like my in-laws, who have his flag flying over their house.

um and they they just they say you know we're in this is great we're going to give them and they're on a fixed income they don't have a lot of money um they're going to give them give them some money just to show their support right there's a second category which are foreign actors Nationals uh people who want influence with the government who will

When you buy this, it's public, right? It's not hidden. They know you just bought some, right? It's public in the sense that people can see your blockchain address, but you would have to connect the blockchain wallet address with the actual person or entity behind it. So if you bought it with crypto, there wouldn't be...

be but they do allow you to buy it with a debit card so you yeah there is the added portion of this which is not a feature of most meme coins which is that you could buy it with a credit card or a debit card or whatever it is and i assume that goes through some sort of you know they've got a partnership with i don't know coinbase or something who is doing who's facilitating that but

That is probably not as public because of the traditional financial end of things. By the way, it's your sole and exclusive responsibility to assure the purchase and sale of Trump memes and the use of cryptocurrencies complies with laws and regulations in your jurisdiction. That's your problem, buddy. Not my problem. It turns out, though, that it is actually very much their problem. I don't think you can just disclaim that away. I don't think it's any accident that this was...

introduced the day before inaugural it was also introduced on the day of the crypto ball in DC which was a black tie event put on by the crypto industry twenty five hundred dollar tickets dinner will not be served reporters are strictly forbidden and incidentally was headlined by Snoop yeah apparently he's a Trump guy now who was uh even as

recently is the day of the election very anti-Trump there is now a cancel Snoop movement I might add because he has been into crypto for a long time so that wasn't too much of a surprise but so that's what that's really what you're what you're seeing here is um the crypto community is extraordinarily happy if well I'm not saying it is if it were a pyramid scheme

And you had put a lot of money into it. You would very much like more suckers to come along.

and buy out your share, wouldn't you? I mean, that's how schemes work for sure. Yes. I mean, more like a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi. Well, there's some of both, I think. Well, that's true. You're right. You're right. It is both. Yeah. I mean, crypto, any of these things, just like meme stocks, just like penny stocks, you know, a lot of it's like finding someone, whoever can, you know, we're finding the demand to buy the next one, right? Like that's what it's always about. Yeah.

And so this thing is short-lived. I think it's interesting in that it's likely to create a bunch of blather around crypto for the next few months. But at the same time, when people...

put some money in and they see something that they put you know even 500 in and then it's worth you know 25 cents two months later like they tend to you know say well i'm never doing that again that's what sort of typically happens in these meme coin you know rises and falls and so so do you think it's a shrinking pool of people who will

put money into this stuff i mean there's a lot of people that have gotten a lot of the sort of the average folks that every have gotten burned by crypto and that sort of 2021 you know um uh rise and fall 22 and so i i think that yeah there it's like a new pool of of people who maybe are now giving it a try but what tends to happen with meme coins is what happens every time is like

Again, people put in 100 bucks and then they find out how is what I what was 100 bucks, you know, two weeks ago now worth 75 cents. And and then people are like, well, I'm never doing that again. Sort of phenomenon. Well, that's the rational response. And in

And in most cases, that does happen. But I think as we've seen from the whole original meme stock craze and everything that's currently going on with GameStock stockholders and former Bed Bath & Beyond stockholders who believe they still have stock, there is a small but mighty percentage of people that this just sends them into a whirlwind of conspiratorial thinking. It's true, Chris.

And I'm interested to see how that plays out when you combine something as volatile as politics and these sort of communities. Because something, I mean...

I've been looking at, I guess, just with idle fascination, but interested in this phenomenon within the GameStop, Bed Bath & Beyond people, because it reminds me of the conspiratorial thinking you see with QAnon. But if you have the Venn diagram of people who believe in QAnon and who also are potentially prone to that, it becomes a strange circle. And I'm morbidly curious to see how that turns out.

I would also say there is sort of a third demographic here, which is people who are prone to gambling addiction, who see a big loss on something like a Trump meme coin and they aren't like, "Oh, God, that was a bad idea. I should never do that again." Their reaction is, "I picked the wrong one. I should pick the right one next time. Yeah, and I'll make it back next time." It wasn't fast enough.

Right. And there is so much of that in the crypto world where there is like, there is this tendency for people to really like blame themselves in a way that is very unusual where it's like,

oh, I shouldn't have done this and my wallet was hacked and that was all my fault. Or, oh, I just picked the wrong token. I made the wrong trade. But it's never, you know, they don't sort of see the flaws in the system. They often just attribute it to their own personal failings and then believe that if they just trade better or if they just behave in a different way, you know, that they can suddenly become the Lamborghini driving people that they follow on Twitter. Should this be regulated?

Well, I think there's reasonable arguments to be made in sort of both directions. You know, there is this enormous market such that it is that is a wild west. And so, you know, it would be nice if there wasn't this blatant fraud happening. And I would point out that you can

handle fraud without bespoke regulations, like stealing is still illegal, even if you do it with crypto. But there is sort of this argument, which I am sympathetic to, which is that the more you regulate it, the more you legitimize it, and the more you sort of make it look like a sound investment,

But I also wonder if maybe that ship has sailed a little bit. You know, we already have Bitcoin ETFs, for example. And so we've already legitimized it to some extent. And maybe that's a better... That's something that worries me a little bit because ETFs make it very easy for you to put Bitcoin in your...

IRA in your retirement funds. 401k. Yeah, it's easy to invest. Maybe not 401k, but yeah, certainly an IRA. They are getting to that point though where 401k managers are considering adding Bitcoin ETF options. Yeah.

I do think something that's worth keeping in mind here is like, I think there's this tendency and I certainly fell prey to it, like when we're talking about meme coins and this whole kind of wild west of an industry to view the victims and losers of this as people who had it coming or just made a poor choice. But as these products get more and more popular, and they're extraordinarily popular right now,

oftentimes the average victim of these financial scams are everyday well-meaning Americans who suffer huge financial losses that are devastating to them and people who support them. And I think when we're thinking about regulation, part of the reason to do something like that is to protect the average consumer from harms that they may not realize they're getting themselves into.

Yeah. I mean, Americans love a get rich quick scheme, right? Like it's, I mean, since 1850, it's been like a long string of them. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little different when it's in the white house. Yeah. Uh,

Um, your point is really well made because I, I hear that a lot as someone who covers crypto scams, I get a lot of people saying like, oh, they had it coming. They shouldn't have been so dumb. Like anyone who puts money into a meme coin deserves everything they get and so on. Um, but like watching the crypto world for the past couple of years and seeing the victims of these scams, it really, people really do not understand the types of people that we're talking about. Um,

And the types of things that people believe to be inherently true about anything that is available for them to buy. This is particularly the case with Americans where people believe that because they can buy it, it is regulated. It must be okay. Yeah, and there is someone making sure that it's not a scam. Yeah.

And so when companies like Celsius and Voyager collapsed, for example, in 2022, those were two large crypto companies based in the United States.

there were all of these people who believed that they had like FDIC protection on their Celsius accounts because Celsius kept saying that it was safer than a bank and so people just assumed that they had protection from those types of losses people believed that if it was a scam they wouldn't be allowed to be registered in the United States um and so they I mean people do not expect like

CEOs to just lie to their faces, even though they do it very frequently. And so, you know, I think there is this misunderstanding that like everyone who's involved in crypto and loses money is like,

some 20 year old guy who has money to burn, who is very technologically savvy, who understands what he's getting into and understands the risk that's involved. And therefore, you know, you shouldn't feel bad for him when he loses everything. But if you actually look at it, I mean, there are retirees who are told that this is the only way that they're going to be able to retire comfortably. There are people who are trying to, you know, pay medical debts. There are like very, uh,

compelling stories of people who are in a bad situation and trying to get out of it, who believe that this is kind of the only way that they can get out of it, and often really don't understand what they're getting involved in. Are there any regulations at all? Is this regulated in any way?

well like I said stealing from people is illegal so yeah you you know there are I don't I haven't seen one a single well I guess Samuel Bankman freed yeah and Celsius you know there's the there is but that's usually unfortunately that usually happens after the fraud happens it's too late it's not it's like running a pump and dump for a mean coin is that yeah it and well there is

some debate over who is in charge of that regulation, but pumping and dumping is also illegal, although people I think sometimes forget that in the crypto world. And so the SEC has brought cases about pump and dumps, but because they're so frequent,

frequent and prevalent, they really only bring them against like high profile cases where they feel like they can send a message. So for example, they went after Kim Kardashian. They've gone after, you know, a couple of other celebrities for getting involved in these pump and dumps or for undisclosed promotion of these tokens. Oh yeah, that's right. I remember they, they went after the celebrities that fortune favors the brave, you know,

All of those ads we saw in the Super Bowl. But nothing ever happened. Matt Damon's not in jail. Well, I think those were class action and not coming from the SEC. They were regulation. Yeah. So they do do those types of lawsuits. But I think they've unfortunately just sent the message that if you're not a celebrity, no one's going to come after you. And so there's all of this meme corn activity anyway. Also, when the president-elect does it,

It is a very strong signal. Right. You know, come on in guys, the water's great. I'm looking, there are 66 political coins

on coin ranking right now at coinranking.com number one of course the official Trump coin that came out yesterday but there is a mega coin actually there's quite a few there's a coin there's a Dolan Trump coin a geo-bottom coin there's a Pepe coin there's the Trump token there's Trump AI Trump Mega fight for Trump baby Trump tooker Carlson mega Trump huge

MAGA VP, baby Trump, son of Trump. Not only can you buy these, they have a market cap. JD Vance, there's a Vance coin. Doesn't mean Vance did it, right? Just somebody else just named it that. There's a Kamala Harris coin. Make America great. There are quite a few MAGA coins. Are these scammers trying to take advantage of... I mean, there's a real Donald Trump coin, but I don't think it's really Donald Trump. Nobody says you can't do that.

Yeah, no, I mean, these tokens have been around for a long time. You know, even before Trump was launching meme coins, people just will launch a meme coin about anything and everything they can think of. And there have been a bunch of them that are politically, you know, involved with some political thing. But people, you know, anything that happens, like if there's some big news, there'll be a meme coin about it immediately. It's just sort of a free for all. That's what I mean by it's not any practical way regulated. Yeah.

Correct. I would agree with that. And especially with the way things are looking like they'll be going, I would not expect that to change much. When they say the market cap of Trump coin is 9.25 billion. That's the current market cap. Does that mean there's actually nine point, not that many people bought it or does that just some made up number? Yeah. So I,

I actually wrote a piece about this on my blog a long time ago about cryptocurrency market caps, which people like to say big numbers. And so they'll say things like there's a $15 billion market cap or something like that.

And the way that those market caps are calculated is very naive. So it basically means what they're doing is they're taking the current price of the token and they're multiplying it by the number of tokens in circulation. In some cases, I actually saw the New York Times do this recently, which was really kind of horrifying, but they actually were...

multiplying the current price by the what's called the fully diluted valuation which is like if every token in existence were to be created multiply that by the current price and you get these huge numbers like almost trillions of dollars in this case but it's nowhere connected to reality like you could not in any reasonable world actually cash out something close to that um

I like to give the example of basically like if I were to create a Molly coin and I were to sell one Molly coin to somebody else for a dollar, and then I had a million Molly coins that existed,

They would be saying that the Molly coin market cap was a million dollars, even though $1 went into that ecosystem. Yeah. So it's really... You would have to find a million people to actually buy it for a dollar, right? Right, exactly. And it's too bad they use market cap because that's a well-known...

phrase in the stock market and equities and it means something in an equity now they also also use trading volume and i think this is real the the value of all trades of trump coin in the last 24 hours is 18.9 billion dollars so i would put an asterisk around that too because really that's not real trading in crypto markets is unbelievably endemic like it is just a normal

activity practically like you can hire people to wash trade. What are they doing? They're selling it to themselves and then back again? Yeah, pretty much. They're faking volume for that exact reason because it makes it look like the token is more liquid than it is. Like there's a deeper market for it than there is. So it's fake. Yeah. Or could be fake. We don't know. It often is fake, I would say. We don't know. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I just, it's a little sketch to be doing this, to be honest. A little. But it does send a signal that this is going to be a great four years for crypto. Well, I would actually point out, you mentioned this earlier, you made a comment about how, you know, crypto is very excited about this, but I've actually seen a surprising amount of sort of shock and horror from the crypto world about the Trump meme coin. I think the crypto world has really, you

come to expect something very different than what they're going to get with the Trump administration. And they are kind of horrified to see what looks like a total grifty cash grab. It's obviously not great for the reputation of crypto when Trump is out there doing these types of things. People... A real leopard's eating faces, Mel. It is very much that, yes. But I think that, you know, I'm actually really interested in watching over the next couple of years how the crypto world's like...

you know, the normal everyday people who are buying and selling crypto react to the sort of political reality that they are, that they sort of signed up for in a way where they were like, okay, I guess we'll back, you know, we'll, we'll get behind this political project and we'll support these crypto executives who are,

you know, getting in bed with Trump with the idea that those crypto executives, the like billionaire executives and venture capitalists will do what is good for the little guy in crypto, even though history has shown repeatedly that billionaires don't usually care about the little guy very much.

Um, and I think there is going to be kind of a reckoning where maybe the people who are like Coinbase executives don't actually have, uh, the interests of, you know, everyday people in mind and they actually are more interested in protecting their bottom line or, uh,

padding their wallets a little bit. And I think that this is kind of an early preview of that to some extent. Yeah, there are still true believers in crypto and blockchain who truly believe that

that this is a vehicle that will democratize finance remember cryptocurrency came out of the financial collapse in 20 of the banks in 2010 2011 and the whole uh idea was to create this principles-based decentralized monetization monetary system that is separate from

sort of an oligarch controlled monetary system where the people in power are not accountable for mistakes that they make. And then the little person pays for their mistakes instead of them having to be accountable for them. And so there are people in the crypto ecosystem that still firmly believe in this

those ideals and in that idea, and that there is a way that cryptocurrency can democratize finance in ways that especially apply to places outside of the US and places where there are a lot of unbanked people who are still at the mercy of sometimes very corrupt money lenders and banks. So I think

For that crowd, seeing crypto get a bunch of publicity around meme coins is probably one of the worst possible scenarios, right? Because it's going to take crypto and turn it into essentially just people thinking it's just a Ponzi scheme. It's always going to be a sort of a cheap meme scam.

Ponzi scheme sort of place when there are people who really believe in this and have put their, you know, they could be working on AI, they could be working on other things, but they're invested in the crypto ecosystem because they are essentially true believers in the original ideals of, you know, 2010 and the post-

you know, and post Lehman Brothers and other bank collapses. And so I think that's one of the risks here for that crowd. This could be a rough, you know, this could be a rough year for them and maybe even a rough sort of couple years.

Yeah, and that crowd, I think, was looking at things like Bitcoin ETFs. I mean, the idea of BlackRock offering a Bitcoin ETF is like completely antithetical to so much of the Bitcoin ethos, which is like no big finance people getting involved in this. And then so I think there were there have been a lot of people who have seen the direction of crypto in the last decade.

you know, five or 10 years and are sort of like, oh God, this is not what we wanted at all. But I also think that a lot of those people have either left or perhaps maybe abandoned those ideals. And maybe it was a little naive. Some of them are AI startups for sure. AI is the new crypto. All right. We're going to take a break. Great panel. It's great to have you. I'm so glad you could be here, Molly White. This is the, this is your time. It's your time.

Molly White is at mollywhite.net. Paris Martineau at theinformation.com and editor-in-chief of ZDNet. So great to have you, Jason Miner. Just going for the ride. Yeah, well, what a ride though, huh? What a ride. What a ride. The show this week brought to you by ZipRecruiter.com.

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they're flattered right they go wow they want me and you're much more likely to get that employee it kind of moves you to the top of the line right there it really works it's a it's amazing so lisa posts a job and within an hour she said we got a great kitchen by the way she's worried what am i going to do if we can't hire we got a great can we got another great can in fact we got i think three or four great candidates before lunch here's to a new year of hiring made easier

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and we hired Viva and we were very happy very happy um that had a nice happy ending so boy I can just go on and on about great stuff Molly you're not in the LA area are you no Jason LA area and I know you're not you're in Brooklyn Paris so our our again is still burning in LA and our thoughts and love go out to all of our friends in LA many many of our listeners and many of our contributors Kevin Rose lost his house

It's just, it's been devastating out there. So stay safe, I guess. That's all I have to say about that. Let's see, what should we talk about? I didn't put these in order, so I'm just gonna go through them kind of randomly. Texas is suing Allstate. Actually, this is one of a number of suits over driver data. State of Texas accuses Arity, an Allstate subsidiary, of collecting data about people's driving behavior

through mobile apps leading to increases in drivers insurance rates well isn't that how it's kind of supposed to work yeah i think you're supposed to know about it though oh okay without their knowledge or consent from the cashmere hill article i can't recall if it could have been three years ago it could have been six months ago where she found essentially that um

A number of insurers were using data from their customers' cars in order to adjust. Not just their cars. Their cars, their phones, a million other different things. And their apps. Apps. If you have Life 360 to keep track of your family members, you're right. She wrote this in June, and that's where this came from.

And the important thing is, unlike there are programs that these insurers have where you sign on to do this legitimately, that's not what she's talking about here or what her investigation found. It was this whole collection of different sources that...

Users and drivers had no idea were sending information about stuff like what time you're driving at night or are you breaking slightly quickly when you come to a stop sign. And that was being used to increase someone's insurance score or insurance payment significantly.

Just because they've gone out a couple like their, you know, Life 360 app or something else would tell their insurer covertly, hey, this person's often driving after 11 p.m. And the insurer is like, maybe that's risky. They're going to have to pay more for their insurance.

And it's really dirty. It's really, it's different from the, like you said, there are programs where the insurance company is like, Hey, we'll give you $15 off your policy. If you download this app that sends us your data, which like is still kind of gross surveillance, but is at least, you know, you opt in. Yeah. Yeah. And,

One of the cases I recall from this article that I thought was the most skeevy was she had an example of a customer who I guess when they were buying whatever car they were buying, they had said, no, I don't want to sign up for the program where all of my car's data is automatically sent to the insurance companies.

And the car dealership employees signed them up anyway. And that was their internal policy is no matter what the customers say, everyone's getting signed up for this data auto sharing program. - I'm sure they were getting a draw on it. They were getting every person they signed up, they got, you know, a hundred bucks or something, you know, whatever. - Yeah, like a commission fee. - Yeah. - What's hysterical is some of the apps that you sign up for, I mentioned,

Life 360, there's also MyRadar, a weather forecast app, and GasBuddy, which helps you save on fuel costs, have opt-in driving analysis features, ostensibly for that app. Like, how's your teenager driving? We'll let you know. But what's also happening is that data is being sent on to the insurance companies without your knowledge. Now, I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here.

But the job of an insurance company is to give you a premium that will correctly reflect the risk that you're going to make a claim, right? And insurance companies, you know, maybe they get rapacious and they charge you too much. But the idea is we're going to charge you a fee commensurate with the risk. That's why teenage drivers pay more for their car insurance.

And to the degree that they don't do that, we all pay. So if I'm a really safe driver, and this is why I sign up for those plans, the insurer knows that, that's going to bring my cost down. Shouldn't I also think it's a good thing for the insurance companies to know who's a terrible driver?

because I don't want to subsidize their insurance they should pay an insurance premium commensurate with their risk yes but they but doing it in underhanded ways where they're going and you know essentially doing some very you might have to who's gonna who's gonna let the insurance company know they're a crappy driver terrible driver I feel like well we also

Leo, we also have laws around data privacy and security that say you've got to get people's consent. I know, I know. It's really shocking. You have the right to not let the insurance company know you are a really terrible driver. Or at least that should be listed somewhere in the terms of service. Hey, we're squealing on all your data to the insurance company. But it's not. Or it might be and you're signing up for those. I think one of my takeaways is like

really be more careful than ever about the apps that you download and the things that you, and delete stuff off your phone that you're not using because, you know, we've seen a number of apps also abuse, you know, the data that they're collecting. And like, we just, you know, consumers have to be more careful. Arity's response to this is,

is that, well, you did agree. You know that phrase, we may collect third-party data and reports that's in the fine print in your user agreement? Yeah, they'll say that it comes. That's what that means. We're going to sell your data. Yeah, and I bet you if you look at your EULA, it says it. Wait, does it say they're going to collect it or they're going to sell it? Yeah, it often says we will share it with...

uh third parties to improve their experience and our partners here's one example from a new york times article uh gas buddy for instance is i guess an app you can download to help like save on fuel costs i assume it tells you where certain fuel costs are uh or where the various uh cheaper gas you can find and

the new york times says for instance when you're signing up for this you can turn on a feature that rates the fuel efficiency of their drives a feature quote powered by arietti and when you do that says the company you agree to the privacy statement before they opt into this function however in this agreement is a small

in small gray font under a big red button labeled join drives, there's a tiny disclosure that says by clicking join drives, you will share quote certain information with Arrietty and agree to Arrietty's privacy statement. And this is not the Arrietty app. This is the GaspBuddy thing. And the language doesn't explain what Arrietty is or what it does. - They disclosed it. Well notice they call it Arrietty, not Allstate. I understand 'cause you would know who Allstate is.

yeah but still there are also requirements about how prominent you are allowed to make various disclosures and like tiny like we're going to fix all that starting tomorrow don't you don't you worry about that we're getting rid of that consumer financial protection board that's ridiculous

This is what also from cashes article the bigger appeal of telematics it could more accurately predict risk for individual drivers and be a fairer way to set rates most insurers will charge a 24 year old man who lives in a busy city more than a 50 year old woman who lives in the suburbs and as that 50 year old woman I think that's a good thing. Everybody eventually will have a driving score says one consultant and

you might prefer it don't judge me this is Alan Demers founder of insure tech consulting guess what they do don't judge me based on everyone else judge me based on me that seems fair but all right so then they should disclose it and and you should be very clear that they are collecting that data and it should impact your insurance although if you're a terrible driver

You're not going to like that. I think it's also an example that sticks with me is from, I think, Cashmere Hill's original article about this in March 2024. This was the example with how automakers are sharing this data. She gives the example of this guy, Ken Dahl, a 65-year-old man who was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21%. Like nothing had really changed about his life. He ends up requesting data, gets back.

a 260-page consumer disclosure report from data broker Nexus that included over 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven their Chevy Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, start and end times, distance driven. He had never gotten in an accident once over this entire time, but

because he had things like he was really hard he had two hard breaks on an early morning in june and that's why his uh payment went up 20 and i think that's a little ridiculous yeah i put a a link in the um in the show notes here that about the skyrocketing car insurance premiums and you can see this chart it is

It is unbelievable. So they're doing all of this data. And the thing is, is I don't even know how much they're using it other than to just try to increase everybody's car insurance premiums to just insane levels. That's another issue, isn't it? For the past five years. You know, are they...

doing what they should do, which is reducing the cost for safe drivers while increasing it for unsafe drivers. No, they're just using it as an excuse to raise everybody's rates. Exactly. But I also feel like the sort of like, if you're not doing anything wrong, you know, you shouldn't have a problem with this type of thing doesn't really work because like, if you were to think like,

try to think of like an analogous situation where, you know, like health insurance, for example, like you could make the argument that health insurers should put a camera in everybody's house to see like how much they're sitting on the couch versus going for a run. Well, yeah, that might be a little intrusive. Okay. Yeah, exactly.

- Exactly, but I would argue-- - Although they have done that, that's called a smart TV. - Right, but like I would argue that someone just like taking the data about where I drive and when I drive is just as intrusive as someone putting a camera in my house. - But I will give you the other side of that. So California, a couple of decades ago had an initiative

which passed limiting home insurance premiums. They actually cut them by about 20%. As a result, insurers were not able to send a signal to homeowners that were building in fire zones by raising their insurance. They couldn't. They were statutorily limited to how much they could charge them for insurance.

You could make the argument that as a result in those 20 years, many people have built in areas where there were real risks of wildfire, but they weren't given the signal from the insurance company. In other words, their insurance wasn't raised. And as a result, this has happened up here in Sonoma County a couple of years ago, just happened in LA. Many of these people have lost their homes and now insurers are leaving the state because the state won't let them charge the proper amount for the risk.

I'll put on my devil horns a little bit and do some advocacy. Couldn't have those insurers at some point just said, we're not going to insure people who build in these areas we think are risky? Well, they are now. I mean, they are now. The insurance company is warning people about fire zones. Like, I feel like that is something that could happen outside of the insurance industry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I just, I think that the amount you pay for your insurance is a direct... Home insurance industry is the group that we should be feeling bad for. Well, but the amount you pay for your insurance is a direct reflection of, or should be, I think, a direct reflection of the risk. And when it's statutorily prohibited from that, I think that's when you get the problems that we're having right now.

I don't know if the problem, I mean, the wildfires are not because of insurance premiums. No, no, no, no, absolutely not. I mean, I think we can look at what's going on with homeowners insurance in Florida to see an example of what would happen in a totally unregulated area or part like version of this industry where they don't have caps there. And as a result,

many people in these areas just have been unable to get home insurance. I'm getting this argument. I should give him credit from Nolan Gray, who is the senior director of legislation and research at California's Yimby Institute and the author of a book called Arbitrary Lines, How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. He wrote a piece in The Atlantic, How Well-Intentioned Policies Fueled LA's Fires, in which he refers to specifically

this 1988 California voters passed Prop 103, reducing rates by 20%, subjecting future rate increases to public oversight. And of course, I understand why they did that, but as a result...

He says the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state's most dangerous areas, and they reduced the incentive from homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire resistant roof and siding materials. Were insurance companies required to provide insurance? Well, what's happened? That's a good question. No, they could have. I guess they could have left. I don't know. I think maybe they were required to. Maybe they could have left. I don't know.

What has happened is California has created its own public insurer of last resort. And unfortunately... The state is the public insurer of last resort? The Fair Plan, yeah, F-A-I-R. Oh, interesting. They unfortunately covered, in 2023, $284 billion in home value, much of that in Los Angeles. Within the next few years, Nolan writes, California taxpayers could be on the hook for more than a trillion dollars.

The state insurance commissioner is scrambling to bring insurers back, but it may be too late. So insurers have left, for sure. We don't actually live in a fire zone anymore, but our homeowners insurance has announced they're canceling us in June.

Probably because we're in California. Probably because of the camera they put in your house. Or the camera they put in our house. That's true. That smart TV. They found out I'm a fire eater. You've been chewing on all the wires in there. They've been slurping the data from those 200 connected devices in your home. And they're like, no, no, no. Okay, they probably are.

Okay, so admittedly, we don't really trust insurance companies. They're like, this guy's a podcaster. We can't. Yeah, they found out I'm podcasting from the house. Oh, boy. See all those wires. But in the perfect world with perfect information and insurers that were honorable, wouldn't that be the best way to do it?

I think the last point, honorable is a hard word to apply to mega corporations in capitalism. I would also argue that in a perfect world, insurance companies would not have my information. Yeah. So I would pay the same as you would. I mean, so I drive like a grandma. I mean, I am like...

I am a very careful driver. I am a grandma, so there you go. I'm in the same demographic as you are. I don't even, I rarely drive at night. I rarely drive at all, actually. And I still don't sign up for the policy where they take however much off of my insurance because for me, the privacy aspect of it is enough to, so like, I think there is, I think there are plenty of safe drivers who don't want to be spied on. And I think the same thing goes for other forms of insurance and data collection as well. Do you,

So you don't mind that you're paying, maybe paying the same as some hot rod and 20 year old, you know, who, no, you don't care. I mean, they, they obviously go off my driving record and all the sort of, you know, the historic ways that they go off, you know, that insurance. Is that okay?

yeah i think so i i think that's okay i mean if i get into an accident i think it's okay that people know about that right but you know i don't think they need date like very deep how often you break yeah yeah but where i go and when i go there and how i break and all that kind of thing yeah because like if i pay fifty dollars a month more then that's fine with our producer benito weighing in yes but i feel like they're just trying to moneyball it right like that's what they're doing they're trying to call but all but that's what insurance is benito

That's why there's people called actuaries who figure out what your likelihood of having an accident or dying or having your house burned down is. And then in theory, the premiums reflect that so that they can make a little bit of money on top of the risk. And it works in aggregate.

But the data they're collecting is arbitrary. And it's also like they're the ones deciding what makes a quote unquote safe driver or not. So like, what if I work a night shift, but what if my regular circadian rhythm is fine, but I work a night shift and like, so my insurance is gonna be more expensive now just because of that? - Yeah, 'cause you're more likely to have an accident. - Why?

Because you are. What if I had no history of accidents at all? Based on stats. Well, look, I mean, I pay if I had life insurance, which I don't anymore because I'm too old. But that makes sense, right? I shouldn't have life insurance if I'm close to death. Now, you might say, well, that's no fair. You're the one who needs it. You're about to die. No, that's just how it works. Life insurance is cheaper when you're younger and healthier because you're less likely to need it.

That's the insurance market. That's how it works. But there are also limits to how much information we give to health insurers, right? Where health insurers are not sitting on our shoulders every day checking if we're getting the large fries at McDonald's. They will be soon, though, don't you think? Well, actually, they are trying to be, especially when you look at Fitbits and those types of devices. Yeah.

I would love for that not to continue in that direction. And I worry about the extent to which people are sort of, you know, the boiled frog thing where we're now just becoming okay with that data being shipped everywhere. I mean, yeah, I think this is why it's important if you care about

privacy to resist all attempts to encroach upon your data privacy. Whenever I go to the airport, now they want to do the face scan thing. Every time I'm like, I want to opt out, do the other thing. And the TSA agent inevitably is like, well, you know, we've already got scans of your face. I'm like, I know. It's just the principle of it. No more, please. Yeah.

I would just like to reduce the amount and it's, you know, 30 seconds. I think also like the more we allow this data to be collected and the more normalized it is, like the more we have to grapple with the fact that data breaches happen all the time and this kind of data, the more and more granular it is. It's not going to be kept private. It's not going to just be your health insurance that knows exactly what you're doing and where you're going and how quickly you're breaking. What if it were done by an AI? Yeah.

And if we put it on the blockchain, then I would be fine with it. But what if we were done? Done by an AI, put on the blockchain. What if we were done in such a way that was guaranteed to be fair, no human was ever going to see that information. Wait, we're talking about AI? Well, all right. Maybe. You.

you really tried there for a good few I believe in AI I'll have to you'll have to excuse me Molly but I I am an AI he's having his AI resurgent he was uh you know he was down in the reality with us for the last couple of months don't make me wear my AI glasses okay Leo do you want to tell the audience when you ordered those glasses and when they were supposed to arrive and I ordered these glasses before cashmere Hill wrote that article more than a year ago more

a year ago they were supposed to arrive last april he got them this week and they don't work they don't do much why do they don't do anything and he's like but i got them ai is the future they look like joke nerd glasses like if you wanted to be a nerd in like a broadway play you know what they're not actually joke nerd glasses they're just nerd glasses do they have your prescription in them at

No, they couldn't do that. That's what took so long. They gave me a discount for some clip-ons with my prescription so I can clip that on, but I'm wearing contacts now so I can see. So just in case you didn't look nerdy enough. Do you also have sunglass clip-ons that can add like a third level? You flip them up and you flip them down. Yeah. What's wrong with that?

Those are the brilliant labs ones, right? How did you know? You see, he knows. Jason? He's been waiting. This is one of like five AI hype products Leo ordered last year that hasn't arrived yet. I've ordered more, by the way, since I've talked to you last. Something's wrong with you. The best thing is, the way you charge it is it has this orange thing that you stick on the nose. What? It has a clown nose? Yes, it does. It does. It does.

This is real. That's amazing. Why did they have to make it orange? It's a Humpty Hump nose. So you won't lose it. Yeah, yeah. No. AI is the future. These are the open sourced ones, though, interestingly. Well, that's why I'm intrigued by it. It doesn't do anything much, but it potentially could because it's open. It doesn't do anything, but it potentially could. I've been hearing about that about blockchains for a long time. Yeah.

- You have like this thing you have to, you like with a command line, like you can command line. - Yeah, so really what you're buying is this hardware. - NFTs aren't doing anything right now, but eventually they're gonna do something really big. - It's a hardware platform that needs software. Right now it's just got this little prism that's pointing down at a screen underneath here. So it's heads up display.

it's basically google glass built into the lens is all it really is and then you know right now in theory if i tap it the ai comes alive and i can ask it a question then tap it again and i could read the answer but it doesn't it's i don't know it's not really doing anything but it doesn't do that it doesn't work do what it's supposed to do

I also bought and I showed this to Paris the wristband that records everything but Paris I found a better one a friend of mine has one I didn't buy it for the longest time because it was advertised incessantly on TikTok and I thought well this is not going to be good that plaud p-l-a-u-d but then did you get an ad for it on Instagram like that's no a friend of mine has it friend of mine has it and he showed me makes a mind map of your conversations and all this stuff

This thing that Leo is talking about, the wrist thing that is not plot. He showed it to us on this week. It is a little weird wrist bracelet that just records all of your conversations. Everything's going to then gives you little like bits.

butt-kicking summaries of your day in conversation like leo was uh really cerebral while watching the football game he made fantastic points as he was discussing plays with his big beautiful mind you want me to read you i'll read you uh yesterday's you can see it you can see it right here let's hear it worry for a friend turn to hope finding comfort in small joys and shared moments

Leo had a day marked by concern for his friend H, who was unreachable despite plans to meet. Seeking solace, Leo checked the weather in Petaluma and finding it to be a partly cloudy 54 degrees dropping to 42 overnight. Later...

Wow, I didn't realize. Later, Leo offered comforting words to somebody whose somebody faces a potential diagnosis, reassuring her that things would be okay. As the day progressed, Leo confirmed the absence of rain. It's very worried about the weather. Reminisced about a past event in 922 and ended the night impatiently waiting to leave.

while someone sifted sand okay the sifted sand comes from the fact that i was practicing a song all day all night marianne sitting by the seashore sifting sand so apparently it confused me singing that song with me just sitting here waiting for her to finish sifting the sand

Here's the atmosphere. Yesterday's atmosphere. Leo's day had an undercurrent of worry balanced by moments of reassurance and lightheartedness.

for somebody's well-being and somebody's son created a somber tone, while casual conversations about the weather and humorous anecdotes brought moments of levity. I love the weather. Is this a product for someone with, like, amnesia? Like, who is supposed to be... Who is the story for? But my conspiracy theory is this is a product for a certain class of tech

bro CEO that is doing so many drugs that he can't remember what has happened and he wants to look back and be like wow you know I had some moments of somber reflection about the rain I just don't understand like weren't you it's written like a LinkedIn post yeah

Yes, but I remember them now, but I might not tomorrow or the next week or next year. It's basically keeping a journal for me. Now, more importantly, it also keeps track of agreements that I have made. Here we go. Here's number one on my to-do list. Ensure the feather pillow with three layers ordered by Lisa arrives and is satisfactory. That's on my to-do list.

that's i mean look this is this is the reason that we were putting all the world's best engineers to work on ai and we're using up all the cycles why we're burning the this is the reason why we were like f you to all of our climate pledges we're just gonna you know set the earth aflame because leo's got to remember some of this is good explore using instagram as an alternative to tick tock especially considering do you need a reminder for that

I feel like there's a huge upsell opportunity where they could provide access for other people to add things to the list of things you agree to do. And by the way, a visit to Walmart would not be out of line. Yeah, exactly. I don't know what this is. It says, stare at the new fake toys for cats and see if they capture their interest. Did a cat write this?

I do think your cat has gotten in there. Your cat has hacked the system. This is like an inside joke of the AIs because most of the experts say that AI is about as intelligent. Today's AIs are about as intelligent as the average house cat.

And so, you know, that's the house cats, you know, getting their revenge on the AI. I think they're a little bit better than that. I've met some very smart cats. Exactly. I've also met some very smart cats, though, so I suspect the average is actually pretty low. I was going to say the same thing. I was going to say, I've got some cats that are way smarter than some of the AIs that I've interacted with in the past few months. I do think there are like 10 cats just dragging that average down. Yeah, no, like the whole,

orange cat population that shares one brain that shares one singular brain cell among all of them. That's dragging the average down. It's a spider's George situation, you know? The calicos have the high end for sure. Yeah. So that was, I found that, that was at CES, the bee thing. There's another one I ordered as well.

um this is the this is a article uh from wired by Julian uh chocatu your next AI wearable will listen to everything all the time so there's the B which I got but I also ordered this this is the omi and it uh you glue it to your temple it's a little pearlescent thing you glue to your temple every day

Every day, forever, always. I feel like you'll get a rash. By the way, was it you, Paris, who pointed out that the women in this picture who are looking at the guy with the pearl in his temple are laughing? I did not. No, it looks almost either like they're making fun of him or they're like, wow, who's that? He's so cute. Studded something on his temple. Because they can't see his temple. That's why as soon as he turns his head, they're going to rear back in shock. If I saw someone with that out in the world, I would...

stare clear. I would be like, something's gone wrong. I think I would think it was like a new medical device of some kind. Like it looks almost like a very fancy like cochlear implant. Well, okay. You're not far off because the creator Nikita Shevchenko

says that the Omi is trained to recognize specific brain waves when you focus on speaking to it. So instead of having to say a hot word, you just think.

And it will respond. Wait, so you don't speak? No, you don't need to. You just think it. Wow. I think you have to speak to it. But I think to wake it, you just have to think, oh, me. Yes. And I do not believe that that works. We're going to find out when it comes. In three to five years. But I did order the Plod, which has been around for a while. It ties into either ChatGPT 4.0 or to Anthropix Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Both of which are, I have to say, I know you laugh and you mock, but these are actually very good. They are better than Chachi Pichu, I would say. No, they're good. I just can't get over the fact that it's called Plod. Yeah, that's fair. It just feels awful coming out of your mouth. It's coming from China. So...

By the way, some of the AI is as smart as the average house cat was not just an average, you know, um, you know, person saying this, it was, it was Yon LeCun, the head of Meta's AI research, right? He said that he said that he said it is dumber than the average. I was, I actually overestimated it. He said it's, it's not as smart as the average house cat. So yeah. So he's team cat.

He's Team Cat on this one. And he's the head of AI for, you know, for meta, you know. He knows. He's quite respected. In fact, I have a lot of respect for him. Same. I think, you know, and he's also not an overhyper. So I appreciate that. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if he included the orange tabbies in that, but I'm assuming that it's implied, you know. Yeah.

I feel like your strategy with all of these devices is just to DDoS the data collection agencies with so much information. Well, it's a way of fuzzing it. Yeah. We can't tell if he's a good driver or bad. Exactly. We can't create a profile on you.

You've given us too much. Leo is also being recorded basically 24-7 at this point, so it doesn't even matter. Anyway. There's no more data to collect. That's my point. I don't have any privacy, so I'm the one who should try this stuff out. An LLM could just go through all of your shows and create an insurance profile on you that is almost going to be perfect, right? Yeah.

Of what you can do. All right. Here's one of the AI. I was about to say, Gizmo, are you smarter than the average AI? Gizmo has already added a catnip toy to your shopping list. I was about to say. Yeah, it's already in route. She just hit, you know, bye. How close are we to your company hiring an AI to replace you

As a PhD level programmer, maybe closer than you think. We're going to take a little break. No, Jason says no, that's not going to happen. House cat level programmer. House cat level. Would you let your house cat write your code? I don't know. We're going to take a little break. When we come back, we'll have more. You're watching This Week in Tech. Molly Wood, Jason Heiner, Paris Martineau, and Gizmo the Wonder Cat. It's great to have all four of you. Our show today brought to you by NetSuite.com.

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dot com slash twit it's free along with a lot of wonderful other free stuff at NetSuite N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E netsuite.com slash twit we thank them so much for supporting behind the curtain coming soon PhD level super agents this is Axios Mike Allen and Jim Vander High it's an opinion piece so yeah it's not exactly a news piece

um but there's some interesting stuff in here there's some juice sam altman has scheduled a closed-door briefing for u.s government officials at the end of the month the over hyper in chief by the way yes i want to tell you a secret yeah um there is a lot of chatter about ai replacing mid-level software engineers sometime soon maybe even

This year. And so Axios is speculating that maybe what Sam Altman wants to tell Congress about is, I guess, 4-0-1.

one or 402 what's the what's the next one yeah whatever the next one is i mean look he's been saying i mean what was it he was saying recently it was going to be it was like hundreds of days until you know we reach super intelligence and he's the one that's been over hyping this thing from you know the beginning and that's not to say that llms are are not an important breakthrough that are going to do some really interesting things because they are there there's no doubt about that um but

you know, Sam Altman, you know, also is, is grinding an ax with this too, right? Um, he, he is, uh, uh,

you know moving his at first he was it open eyes open and i open ai saying no you know i don't i don't i'm i'm rich enough i don't need to make any more money um you know there's no um there's no reason for me i'm i'm in this for the for the good for good of humanity um and and now they've sort of changed the whole all of the bylaws and and that are in the process of so that they can um

you know, monetize. And he's raised more money than any company in the history of money raising.

So, yeah, I think, you know, him hyping this, it's just tough to really believe that it's not about the race, right? That's not about winning and OpenAI, you know, gaining as much sort of power and influence as they possibly can. I don't believe that they have anything even close to a PhD. I don't think they have anything close to a house cat, you know, necessarily yet either. So I think, but with OpenAI,

I think we have to, it's not that OpenAI isn't doing important work and there's people there that are, but I think Sam Altman, I think we really have to question his motives. I think it's good for us to question his motives and also good for us to really not buy into the hype that he peddles about where OpenAI is and what it does. And the last thing I'll say about the

programmer piece. I don't know about anybody else, but I know in every company I've ever worked for, we can't get the programmers to get enough done fast enough for us to get all the work done we'd like them to do. So I think it's the much more likely scenario because I think this does replace some types of coding the LLMs can. But in fact, what it's likely to do is make them much more efficient and

to make them have them to do less, a lot more of the sort of really boring, repetitive tasks encoding so that they become a lot more productive and potentially get projects done faster. I think we are seeing some of that already. And so I actually am more bullish on it being helpful to programmers and not so much

you know, putting programmers at our jobs, because it can't do it by itself, right? It can't code things by itself, it still needs to be shepherded by somebody who actually knows what they're trying to build and what they're doing. This has been sort of been said for decades that, you know, coders are soon going to be out of business, there was the sort of no code, low code, which is a good thing. There's lots of good things that have come out of that as well. But

I think that some of this is some hype, not for, you know, they say those things about coders that aren't true, I think because they're trying to hype up the value of what these AIs can create, which is still, there's a lot to be shown in terms of their ability to replace work that people are doing. I think that part's just not close.

I do think there's some evidence that AI is scaling very rapidly, smarter and smarter. At the start of the year last year, AI models scored 5% on the ARC AGI benchmark. September, 32%. OpenAI's 03 claims, and they haven't shown it yet, but they claim that it's at 88%.

on this AGI benchmark. I think you have to take with a grain of salt, though, that that could continue on sort of a linear trajectory because... It's a lot better! 88%! No, no, no, I know. But there's also been all these reports about how they're basically running out of data. And, you know, there is... We are running out of things on which to train these AI models. And so the idea that there is just sort of this infinite improvement based on, you know, the quality of the training data, at least, is certainly not...

the case. And now they're making synthetic data, right, to help train the models, which is also a really weird challenge. I think this stuff is changing so fast that some of those things that we've heard and believe to be true are

turning out to be not as much of a problem as we thought. For instance, there's a strong case to be made that we have enough information, that we don't need a whole lot of new information. We just need maybe better LLMs or different models besides LLMs or more computation capability. There seems to be some real scaling happening. OpenAI's O3 is scoring 25% on a very difficult

Math benchmark. Expert crafted math problems designed to evaluate advanced reasoning in AI systems. Gemini and ChatGPT-4 solved 2%. OpenAI's O3 is 25%. Based on whose evaluation? This is a new frontier math benchmark. It's called Frontier Math. Right, but is it a third party evaluation or is it the company? It is, but...

you're right to be a little skeptical because open ai has announced those scores but they haven't released the actual information yet i this is how much i think it's also like how much of the tests do they have access to how much of it's in the training data like it's worth noting that this narrative that i feel like the ai hype cycle is promoting which is that like every update we're seeing is exponentially better than the last and it's going to only continue that way that narrative

hasn't really been borne out so far. Like already in just a couple months ago, my colleagues at The Information reported that like OpenAI had found that the rate of improvement has like slown, has gotten a lot slower for whatever current GPT they're working on Orion versus the jumps they'd seen in previous models. And in part, that's because of the data issue. But

I think it's worth taking stuff like this into consideration when what we've been sold as kind of a collective is that everything about this is just going to get better and better. It's completely inevitable. So everybody should give us all of their money now because the victory in this field is just a foregone conclusion at this point. And by the way, Molly, you're right, because there is...

a blog post that claims open AI funded frontier math and had access ahead of time to the problem set. So until we, I mean, this is until we really see,

you know, this has to be done kind of in the open instead of an announcement from open AI. There's an AI hype crash that's coming for sure. You know, it could be or maybe not. Isn't it possible that we may also be blown away? You don't think that that's possible? I think both things can be true. Like, I think that there's a hype crash coming because it's like, you know, you ask most people, even people I ask in the tech industry, what are the things you use every day that that from the AI revolution?

And a lot of them struggle to get me. They're like, at the end of it, they're like, well, I've used chat TPT to help write a cover letter. You know, they struggle. I'm like, well, you know, you... I've talked to a lot of coders, including our own guys, Paul Therot and Steve Gibson, who have used it to write code. Jason Snell on MacBreak Weekly says it writes perfect Apple script. He's been using, I can't remember which one, I think Sonnet.

to write his Apple script. - One of the examples that does work well. Like it saves people time from writing code sometimes. - I also had to untangle some of its disasters, so. - Yes, for sure. It still needs human oversight. - Do you have an AI is going just great site yet? - I do not, no, I don't. - You ask her this every time she's on the show, Leo, and she says, "No, I'm not opening that can of worms."

But you did open the code for the site, so somebody could make that site. I hope somebody will. It is open source, yeah, by all means. And use AI to do it. And use AI to build it, for sure. You know, so the thing is, like, that...

where AI works really well, and LLMs are starting to change this a little bit, but it's still the case that where there is a very concrete set of data and a very clear set of parameters,

AI is better than human, right? So some of the coding, it can do faster than a human because it has a very defined set of parameters. And so it is mostly computational, right? So it's still very good at those things. Where it's not good is where, and where it falls down is where it needs context and it has to fill in gaps. Well, it doesn't even understand context, right? It doesn't know any of that. It's not...

That's not how it works. That's why there's another story in there about, you know, they've been trying to get it to do history, you know, um, uh, to answer history questions. And, uh, it's not so good at that. It's about 46% on average, which is really about the same as anybody just guessing. Um,

It is not good at those things. Anything that demands those sort of higher levels of understanding. And so I think those are the things that there are promises in the AI ecosystem today that it's

reach exceeds its grasp. It can't and it won't quite get there. That's why I say that there's an AI hype crash coming. Yet, there are also still amazing things that LLMs can do and that are going to continue to drive advances. But like any of these hype cycles, there's going to be all of the people that are going to

that are just in it for the quick buck, right, are going to flee. And the people who really understand it and really are sort of true believers will stick around. But, you know, it could be this year, it could be next year, it could be next month. But I do think there's a crash coming. Alex Lindsay, who is one of the hosts of MacBreak Weekly, also is in our

uh irc or actually in our discord right now says uses sonnet and chat gpt to write and compile swift and xcode that's something that was recently added to apple's xcode uh it's he uses it to create fully functioning apps not smooth enough to release but usable for me and i have seen uh startup um

founders say, yeah, we're starting to use AI to write our MVPs because it's fast, quick to market, and we can do that without hiring somebody to do it.

One thing I think that is kind of remarkable about the Axios piece that you linked is the example that they give is imagine telling your agent, build me new payment software. The agent could design, test and deliver a functioning product. And like that example is about... Let's not do that. Some of the most high risk, highly regulated, like portions of software. That's like saying like...

fly an airplane for me. You know, like they're using like one of the riskiest examples in that article. Whereas like most software engineers will say, like, if you were to use AI, like it can do boilerplate well, it can maybe do a prototype, but I would not just like ship it out the door and certainly not with payments involved. Well, I think that underscores what, what we're talking about here really underscores that AI is appropriate for some uses, not all.

Maybe don't use it as a historian or to write your cash app, but there are certainly uses for it. And I think maybe we've also gotten a little kind of taking it for granted. We're getting a little jaundiced here. You know, this is pretty amazing what it's able to do right now is remarkable with not something I would have predicted three years ago.

I understand that feeling and that impetus to kind of be defensive around it, but I also don't think that... I think that AI is getting...

It's laurels, you know, nobody, nobody I would say could correctly argue that AI isn't being appropriately hyped or hyped enough. It has gotten way more hype than I'd say it deserves given the current reality of the product. I mean, I totally agree as someone who I'd say is a bit of a skeptic in this field. Like, yeah.

AI and the AI tools and chatbots we have access to currently are incredibly useful in certain limited capacities and for specific tasks like what you're just talking about. When you mentioned that coding thing, I realized like, oh, I've been trying to figure out how to get an animated cursor on my site and doing a thing. Why don't I ask ChatGPT? It gave me some answers that I'll look into later that could

you know, quite useful. But I don't think that that means that we should extend the entire AI industry enough grace to allow them to do whatever they want and procure as much money they want as they want without any scrutiny. I think that because this is the biggest industry right now and receiving an outsized amount of attention and frankly money from investors, it deserves scrutiny.

And I also think there's like reasonable questions to be asked about, you know, is a tool that can like generate code to help you animate your cursor? Like, does that justify the cost in terms of the, you know, energy end of things, the environmental end of things? Totally agree. You know, does the end justify the means is a worthwhile question as well. For instance, I just asked Chad to do that. And frankly, all of the answers it gave me, I'd already seen from searching through Reddit,

and like stack overflow and stuff like that or other things like that. It was nothing new. But yet, how much environmental damage did I do? Probably shouldn't think about that. But also, we probably should. Well, it's okay now because your Google searches also use a lot of... Yeah, no, everything's bad. It's kind of a good place. Well, they've incorporated AI into Google, so now everything is wasting that much electricity. Yeah.

Yeah. We write about AI every day on ZDNet. It's our most popular topic. It has been since almost the month that ChatGPT was released. And we write about the good things. We write about the bad things. We ask the questions. We talk about...

you know, where the rubber hits the road, the way companies are using it, the way individuals are using it. So there's a lot happening. I do think, and I think it is fair to question some of the overhype. And I, that's why I, I really think that the rubber doesn't meet the road where some of the hype is around it. And I think that that's why there's, there's a lot of money. There's a lot of energy. There's a lot being poured into it that I think is it's gotten over at skis. And so that's,

and that's because we, you know, I, we read stories about it every day. We read the problems people are having with it. We read the things that they're, that are going great, the things that are amazing. Um, it's not going anywhere. It's not, it's not gonna, um, uh, you know, disappear. Um,

But kind of like the dot-com bust, right? When the dot-com bust happened, then a lot of the real work got done afterwards when the people hung around and really invested in it. And it wasn't just sort of a hype cycle. But that's how hype cycles go, right? There's sort of the hype cycle. It goes way up. Then there's sort of the trough of disillusionment. And then there's the real work getting done from there. And we have to expect any hype cycle that

that's as high as what this one is right now, it's going to hit a bumpy moment inevitably. I would point out that after the 2022 crash in crypto, now we have Trump meme coins.

Something I hadn't thought about is when comparing this to the dot-com bubble, at least the dot-com bubble, we got like a wacky little sock puppet guy to kind of associate with it. We need to have a weird little mascot for some of the AI companies. It needs its sock puppet, yeah. We actually got more than that. We got...

dark fibers underneath most of the continent, in fact, much of the world. And this is one of the things that does happen with those boom bus cycles. The same thing happened with the transcontinental railway. Those railroads went bankrupt, but we had railways as a result. We got infrastructure as a result.

And data centers, we're going to get a bunch of data centers. We're going to have a lot of data centers. We're going to have nuclear power plants. A lot of data centers in places like Arizona that are already totally running out of water, but the data centers get the water contracts. On the right side, they are converting some of the Bitcoin mining rigs into a... So that's like, oh, hey, that's something.

I'm trying to find a graph I saw, and I don't remember where I saw it. Not Bitcoin, the crypto. Blockchain, yeah. I'm trying to find the graph. I can't. But I saw a graph that actually showed in perspective to a lot of the other energy uses. And actually, AI is not, the question to a chat GPT is not as bad as it,

The truth is we use energy for everything. Google searches everything. We're going crazy. Credit card purchases everywhere.

We are using a ton of energy now. Zoom meetings. Yeah, but I mean, the thing is... Podcasts, Bitcoins. Yes, I agree. We use electricity and energy for everything. But it is notable the amount of energy that these AI tools use. And the fact that AI is now being woven into absolutely everything with no... In many cases, there's no way to say, no, I don't want...

AI to be suddenly part of this other thing that I use every single day and thus amplifying the environmental impacts of my actions. It's just all getting a bit worse. And I also think that, like, it is notable that it was AI that caused so many of these companies to completely go back on any environmental commitments. You know, that was not something that the credit card transactions, you know, required of them, apparently. Right.

Here's the Wall Street Journal article. Thank you, Jason, for putting that in. Jan LaCoon thinks AI is dumber than a cat. I got to point out that was October. Things have changed, okay? We've come a long way. We've come a long way. That was months ago. It is the case. And I think that that's something that Steve Gibson pointed out on Security Now, that this is moving faster than anything we've ever seen before. And anything that you think is true today,

may well not be true tomorrow. And I think it's important to keep an open mind to what is happening while at the same time acknowledging, yeah, we're in a hype cycle. That's for sure true. That's not the case, but I think that there's something going, there's something happening here. I don't know. - Both things can be true, right? Like we have an overhype cycle and we have interesting and powerful things happening, right? - Yeah. All right, let's take a little break. You're watching This Week in Tech.

And I'm sure something else happened, but we'll find it when we come back. Actually, there was CES. Did you go to CES, Jason? I had a back injury the week before CES. Oh, you sent people. I wasn't there. I did. I sent focus on my team. All right.

Well, if there's anything besides the AI wristlet and the temple pearl, you let me know. There are a couple of things. Yeah. Although I'm looking forward to coming on. We're renaming Twig Intelligent Machines, by the way, next month because we want to cover this more. And I'm looking forward to coming on as the boy with the pearl temple piece. You know, I think that'll be...

That'll be my trademark. I'll be like a Borg. I'm sure that'll go over really well with me and Jeff and will not result in any ridicule. I don't mind. I can take it. I can take it.

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Canary.tools/twit. I love this thing, the Thinkst Canary. We're so glad to have him back with us for 2025. Canary.tools/twit. Thank you, Thinkst. Okay, Samsung's coming up. By the way, so CES is over. Apple doesn't go. Microsoft doesn't go. IBM, nobody goes. Just a lot of smaller companies and TV manufacturers and car manufacturers.

Samsung wasn't there, but they are going to have their own event. That's why people don't need to go to CES anymore. Wednesday, the S25 event. Now, Jason, I'm trying to figure out if I should get up early on Wednesday, an hour before Windows Weekly, and cover this. We've seen everything there is to be seen about the S25, yes? I mean, yes, probably. It's got the new chip from Qualcomm that they announced last fall. I mean...

You know, they're going to talk AI. Speaking of AI. They're going to talk a lot about AI. You know, Samsung's not a software company. It's never gone really well for them from a software standpoint. There is Bixby. Just say the words Bixby. I have a Bixby button on my TV remote, and I always...

It makes me so mad when I hit it by accident. There used to be a Bixby button on the phone too. Yeah. For a while. Terrible. So the most interesting thing is, will there be a tease for,

from this event. Remember, if you remember last year, they teased that the Ring was coming. They didn't really show it. - Right. Is the Ring out? The Ring is out now, right? - The Ring is out. - Okay. - Yeah. And it's not bad. I mean, the most interesting thing is that they were the first of the big tech companies to really release a smart ring, right? These have been mostly been done by kind of smaller companies, mostly startups led by Aura, of course.

So the most interesting thing is, will Samsung tease something? And there's kind of four possibilities of what they could tease. One, and this would be very Samsung. You know, Apple, of course, is rumored to be releasing a slim, the iPhone slim this year. And so it would be by the way, slim is two millimeters thinner.

It's not, that's not really noticeable. That's sort of as much as the phone two years ago, I think it was because they've been getting thicker. Right. So anyway, so Apple is rumored to be doing a slim version of the iPhone this year. So it would be just like Samsung to tease sort of, oh, and we're also going to do a Galaxy S25 slim, you know, potentially this year. We'll see. That wouldn't be that interesting, to be honest.

There's the Galaxy Ring 2. Maybe they teased that. Again, wouldn't be super interesting. But now it starts to get more interesting. They announced this XR headset. Not great timing, right? XR headsets are not having the moment that they were a year ago, for sure. But they did announce Project Mohan recently.

And maybe they tell us more about when that's coming. Would they use their own software? Would they license Meta's software? Would it be Android? Android XR would be what they would do. Actually, even Meta's using Android now, aren't they? Yeah.

Well, theirs has always been based on a version of Android, a proprietary version, a basically modded version of Android. So the most interesting thing of the scenarios, if they were to tease something, would be their competitor to Ray-Ban, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

The crazy thing is these glasses, they mostly are just audio, but they were probably one of the hottest selling products last year in terms of stuff that was sold out.

And so now we know because last fall, the Qualcomm CEO teased that Qualcomm, Meta and Google were working on a pair of smart glasses. So this has already been teased that it's out there and it's coming. And I think that people are much more interested in smart glasses than they are in VR headsets, for sure. I think you're right. Yeah. And, you know,

The interesting thing, we did a little bit of reporting on this and what we found last year when these things were when the Ray-Ban metas were sold out so much, you know, we went into some of the like sunglass huts and lens crafters where they sell these things. And the interesting thing was a lot of times they had these kiosks in there. Right. And a lot of times when these tech companies put these kiosks in places like this.

the people on the floor selling them, they know nothing about them. Or if they tell you information about them, it's often wrong. So this was interesting. The people that we talked to, they knew these products very well and they were like,

yeah, we don't have one of those you can look at, but the guy down at the, at the, that sells the jewelry at the jewelry store, go down there. He has a pair and he loves them and he'll tell you about them. And by the way, like, yeah, I bought a pair for my girlfriend and she loves them. She wears them to the beach and we take photos and we go on vacations. And so it was really interesting. We found that the, the sort of,

average the interest from that sort of average person on these was pretty high and that was when most of them were sold out in the first quarter last year and then of course since then they've been selling much better so you know they don't do a lot um but even having a little bit of a camera this is like an a camera that's only as good as like the iphone 12 or 13 yeah but but that's

But that's fine, right? For most people, being able to use your sunglasses to take a photo instead of... Yeah, there you go. You got them. It means you don't have to take your camera out of your pocket on vacation. People like that. They also are good for listening to podcasts and listening to audiobooks and things like that, taking a phone call. So...

People seem to like this far more and are showing far more interest in this than they are in any VR headsets. I'm interested in what you've, I guess, heard from people just generally about their reasons for liking the Meta Glasses. I mean, I know this is totally anecdotal. Yes. But everyone I've talked to who's a big Meta, like Ray-Ban glasses fan, I've asked them about what they use it for and they don't use it.

any of the AR features, it is always, they're like, I like being able to listen to music or podcasts without having it in my ear. That's every single time. And it sounds good. I know. But I think it's interesting that they're popular. Maybe this is just a one-off of all the people I talk to, but

if that is a larger trend, I think it's interesting that their popularity is being seen as a sign that AR products are something that folks want when it could just be people want headphones options that aren't little pods in your ears. Don't they make like bone conducting headphones though? They do. Yeah. We had an advertiser that made them. I don't know. And I've asked people. They are better than the bone conducting. They're better than that. Yeah. I've never used them, so I don't know. Yeah. And you can say, hey Meta, what am I looking at right now?

- But how often do you do that? - Never. I just cut these out. I wasn't even sure if they were charged. - When I tried your glasses though, Leo, it was really the audio quality. - The audio's amazing. - That's the thing that really surprised me, that it sounded good. So I think that's enough. That's really enough to sell those things. - Whether it's these glasses or the Brilliant Labs glasses or the wrist or even the temple piece, people are intrigued by what's gonna be next.

and they just want a little taste of it they know this isn't gonna this isn't gonna change their lives in fact it's good that they got some use out of it it's a decent headphones but honestly i think people want to want to be part of the they want to kind of see into the future don't they what's that just me so i think so one the research that we had is very similar to what you said paris like mostly they use them to take phone calls and listen to podcasts and not have to have you know things in their ears

The one asterisk to that was a few people who work in jobs where their hands might be full, right? So like somebody, IT professionals working in a server room, and they're trying to remember, oh, what's the name of this

product versus that one. And they'll do the sort of, Hey, meta thing, or even just, you know, you can hold down the button to, to do it and ask the question. And they'll ask the question, you know, when they've got other stuff in their hands on, you know, essentially doing like a Google search from their, their glasses, um, you know, audibly without having to pull out their phone. So people did like doing, just being able to do some searches. It doesn't always work. It was like, maybe people have said 50% of the time it works, but, um,

but they like the idea that there are some cases where they can do it hands-free if they're working with their hands on something. So that's the only thing we found that people were using it for a lot, but these things, to Meta's credit, and I don't really trust Meta, I'll be honest, like with much data, but to their credit, they have actually added features throughout the year. There really wasn't a lot you could do with them before, right? Except essentially do that work.

audio search, but they now do have that thing of like, what's this, the name of this monument or painting that I'm looking at or things like that, you know, searches, some visual searches, Google lens kind of searches and some other things like some where you can make a note essentially. And, and, and those,

sort of deals, but I think they are still very early in this. But I think the usability of it does seem to be attracting people a little bit more. We're going to get there. I don't think Samsung's got anything any different than what Meta is doing. And I think people probably buy Meta just because it's Meta.

Right. Well, they are working with Google, though. So so I think, you know, that this is supposedly a partnership. What the Qualcomm CEO talked about in September was that Meta, Google and Qualcomm. Sorry.

Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm. Sorry, not Meta. We're working on this smart glasses competitor. This is Project Muhan, they're calling it. So Project Muhan is the XR headset. Oh, that's the AR. Okay. That's right. This is something different. This is something else.

Does Samsung have the brand name glasses too? Like how Meta went with Ray-Ban or there's just like... I know, we don't really know. They look like Ray-Bans. We'll find out on Wednesday. I'm curious if they found another one yet. You found something we want to know. That picture is of Meta Ray-Bans. That's what the Samsung, you know. Oh, okay. For a second, I thought that they managed to get a partnership with Ray-Ban too and the Ray-Ban was just like playing the field. Yeah.

No, no. That said, like, there's plenty of other glasses providers they could, you know, they could partner with. Well, I mean, Ray-Ban is part of Luxottica, which is like every glasses. All the brands, all the brands. It's true.

Okay, well, I'll be back Wednesday, maybe at 10 a.m., maybe at 11. I don't know yet. They might bring a new set of glasses. That's true, with the new glasses. They might wait for Mobile World Congress to do that. That's probably the only, you know, maybe asterisk there. Yeah. I think you should find a way to wear all the glasses at once and compare them.

live simultaneously well I do what I think I will do all the wristbands at once and the temple just like all I really do I know it's crazy and I know it's a huge invasion of privacy and everything but I think there's something there to listening to everything I do throughout the day and giving me summaries action items

I feel like that's useful. And I mean, how else would I know that you have strong opinions about bleach in laundry? If not for, uh, that's something they went over on this. And I do, I do. It does make some hysterical mistakes. In fact, Apple is now finally admitting that, yeah, maybe the AI summaries, the Apple

The Apple and Sony summaries are so bad. They're rough. I think they're funny. They're funny, but they're just bad at what they're supposed to be doing. Something I've realized where they are true, because I've turned them off on almost all the apps, but I still have a few on in the hopes that they're okay or just as a data gathering thing. And for instance, when it comes to summarizing notifications from Twitter or Blue Sky, it's just...

wrong every time it will say leo commented on your post yeah leo did not leo didn't even like my post where is that coming from i don't know but it's wrong every time and i'm just like how are you so bad at the thing you're supposed to do like you just have three data points how are you struggling to summarize those into one sentence well apple has announced that they're going to uh

A, they're going to turn off, I think, the news summaries, but they're also going to italicize them. That's the fix, by the way. So they're now going to be italicized. So you'll know that it... I don't know what you'll know. It's italicized. Yeah, didn't they get into some hot water where they were like... Yeah, BBC is pissed. Yeah, exactly. They attributed some stuff to the news outlets that was just absolutely wrong. So the AI summaries...

and by the way this is from a beta of uh ios it's not apple hasn't announced anything but if you the baby bc did a little victory lap apple suspends error strewn ai generated news alerts but we don't know what's going to really happen this is just one example of how it's getting this wrong right now i have an ai summary for new york times notifications that say says trump

Trump promised to repeal executive actions. Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners. The first point of that, completely wrong. The thing it's trying to summon says Donald Trump promised to sign executive orders, not repeal them. Completely wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

I have them turned on just because they're hysterical. I think, I mean, look, you shouldn't look at those and say, oh my God, you should look at them and go, I wonder what they're really saying. I just think, I mean, I'm not saying from a... Yeah, I just think it's very interesting that Apple used to be known as a company that wouldn't release a product that was completely, or an update that was completely terrible and bad at doing what it stated it was supposed to do.

supposed to do and so now it is because ai right 2024 was a rough year for them they should not have released the vision pro the way they did we we wrote about this in january this is the one year anniversary by the way of the release of the vision of the announcement it's changed everything guys i mean we're all talking from we're all uh podcasting with her have you been on a call with somebody using the vision pro thing yeah it's brutal it is brutal

- Brutal. - It's genuinely terrifying. It looks terrifying. It's the most uncanny valley thing you've ever seen. - Yeah, it's brutal. So we wrote about this in January. We sort of gave it a... We said, "Look, technologically, they've accomplished something really interesting."

We cannot recommend it for one single person other than if you are a developer wanting to develop for this maybe longer term for AI on the bet that you want to get ahead. But even then, we just can't recommend it. And they've marketed it to the wrong people. They want it as this movie device to watch movies in airplanes.

why would you want to do that and not just use your iPad? Like it's, um, you know, it's, it's, it's crazy. And so now we took a lot of flack for that. We also recommended everybody that bought it. We, we sort of said you have, if you buy it, you've got a, we, we publicize the return policy very clear, um,

You know, this is the return policy. Know it. Be ready because you're very likely going to want to return it. And we saw that probably, you know, the most returned product ever. And that doesn't mean that it wasn't a technological breakthrough because in many ways it was, but it was not marketed well. It was a developer kit that they somehow decided they wanted to turn it into a movie watching device and it just can't compete with an iPad. Then you have AI, you know, they released AI on,

really too early as Paris was saying, when they really were not, those products were not ready yet. And so 2024, I think is gonna go down as one of the most challenging years when Apple really departed from some of its core values in the ways that it brings product to market and releases them. And they've got a lot of work to do this year to sort of fix some of the missteps from last year.

let's take a little break final break before we i can't believe how fast uh two hours went by before we wrap things up you're watching this week in tech jason heiner love you it's great to see you editor-in-chief zdnet uh he has a little fez behind him look at that right beneath your mac plus or mac pro

right there right there there's the fez Molly White would you like a fez Molly because we can get you one you want a fez all right Fez is for all Molly white.net yay and uh and uh of course Paris Martineau who is the host of the last few episodes actually one more episode of this we can Google and then on your birthday February 5th

the brand new show, Intelligent Machines, where I go crazy about how wonderful AI is and you and Jeff shoot me down. It's going to be a great show. Yeah, it'll be great. Will I be there on the day we rebrand? Will I be eating a multi-course meal somewhere in Brooklyn? Oh, you think you might not be there for the show? It depends. I need to check my resident notifications on us. It depends on when I am able to obtain the reservation. Oh, you're trying to get a reservation. I am, you know. Well,

We'll find out. What if I say I can get you a reservation for Salt Hanks Sandwich Restaurant in the West Village? I'd hope so. I'd hope I'm able to go to Salt Hanks Sandwich Restaurant in the former home of Slutty Vegan. That's right. Right next to John's Pizza on Bleecker Street. But it won't be, unfortunately, in time for your birthday. It won't be probably until... Well, you know how it is with restaurants. He's already...

It's so funny. He's already bitching about regulations. I was going to say the permitting process for open that baby is going to take forever. He's already saying. They turn Republican. I know. He says, oh man, this Eric Adams, he's killing me here. It's pretty funny. You got to be like, son, pay a visit to zero bond, slip a couple 20s over on that table and your problems will be taken care of. I just told him that this is what happens.

In fact, I think John Dvorak used to quote, oh, who was it? It was Thoreau, who says, "If you're not a liberal in your youth, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative in your old age, you have no brains."

oh or you don't have a sandwich restaurant in new york city but uh either way yeah that's probably the latter yeah it sounds like the road says dad what's going on what's going on i said son it's society protecting itself against you corrupt moguls so there

someday maybe he will be a mogul I hope to be the son of a the father of an oligarch sandwich mogul sandwich mogul good name for a restaurant actually sandwich sandwich mogul yeah

i'll suggest it he was going to call it salt hank because that's you know his name and all that but i just bought the domain sandwich mogul.com yeah well i just trademarked it so oh man he's gonna have to happen fast now he is a sandwich muggle it's true it's true uh our show today brought to you by actually there's no accident

There are no coincidences. Shopify. How did Henry become a sandwich mogul? Thank you, Shopify. If you go to his website, salthank.com, and you buy some of his delicious salts, soon, by the way, pickles, pickled cucumbers, pickled peppers, pickled onions, you'll be using Shopify. It's 2025. A new year means new opportunities.

Maybe for a lot of you out there, you've been thinking about one thing over the holidays, starting your own business, looking at people like Saul Hank. You know, Saul Hank asked me, my son asked me, he said, you know, how do I do this? How do I come up with a brand? How do I sell stuff to people? What? And he said, what, dad? What am I even going to sell? I said, son, sell salt.

The profit margins are high and it never goes bad. And he's doing really well. He actually, he answered his own questions. Shopify fixed it for him. The best time to start your new business right now. Shopify, by the way, my daughter also uses Shopify to sell her custom t-shirts. Come to think of it, the whole family uses Shopify. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand,

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Like taxes, payments from one single dashboard, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if somebody beats you to your brilliant idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything. Ladies and gentlemen, with Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think.

established in 2025. that is a nice ring to it doesn't it sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash twit go to shopify.com slash twit start selling with Shopify today it's all lowercase shopify.com slash Shopify and uh if you if you look at your salt salt Hank's site

Powered by Shopify. You know, as much as we said that TikTok was empowering for him, I think he'll agree. Shopify made it possible for him to start a business. And ultimately, that's kind of the dream of the whole thing. The Salt Lovers Club. There it is. Home to the best pickles and seasoning in the effing world. Let me see. Oh, look. Huge Salt Hank night for...

For you. Yeah. Yeah. There's the pickles. There's the pickles coming soon. Get the cookbook. It's out now. There he is. And somewhere in here, it says Power by Shopify. It's pretty cool. It's pretty darn cool. Thank you, Shopify. Makes it easy for me. Don't have to support him anymore.

uh let's see what else is there anything else in our uh U.S finalizes rule banning smart cars with Russia and Chinese Tech see while they're banning or unbanning and banning and unbanning Tick Tock they're going and actually banning Chinese cars I wonder why is there anybody in the United States who sells smart vehicles no couldn't be no

Actually, Biden did this, which is hysterical. I wonder actually what the Trump administration is going to do about AI. I mean, Silicon Valley thinks they're very favorable to AI. Mark Andreessen said that's the whole reason he became a Trump supporter, because the Biden administration wanted AI to be controlled by a handful of big companies. I don't know.

That's true. Who's the guy who's the new eyes are? Is that David Sacks? David Sacks. Yeah. Another South African. And crypto. And crypto. Oh, yeah. Together. Even though he does not have a dog in either hunt, which actually is probably good. It's just unusual.

um he probably has a dog and a lot of hunts actually yeah i would not be so confident on that statement let's put it this way he's never run a crypto or ai company how about that the bar is in hell that's the bar oh yeah i think he's on the boards of lots oh probably yeah yeah yeah good because you don't really want you can obfuscate your involvement that way yeah

Sorry, it's so cynical. So you are. But I don't think that I don't think that, boy, the it's like talk about DDoS, like DDoSing conflicts of interest have been DDoSed so badly already before this thing is even started that it's like, where do you even. There's no such thing.

you know where do you even it's like just up your arms and and say oh you know how there is absolutely such a thing I think they're actually each trying to hit a high score that's what they want the Max trying to hit the high score who gets the maximum conflicts of interest I mean and it's the same in like you know money and politics it's like what

what happened? Like it was less than a generation ago where the number one issue, political issue was like campaign finance reform. And now it's just like, again, just throwing up the arms on conflict of interest and money in politics. It's like remove all the caps, remove all of the restraints, remove everything. People spend as much money as they want, waste as much money as they want, essentially on political campaigns. And is it a waste? Is it really a waste?

You know, we all laughed when Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter. I think he got his money worth. I mean, the crypto guys that spent, like, they raised like $200 billion and they've already made it back in terms of just like Bitcoin gains and stock price. They have hundreds of members of Congress. They've got a very pro-crypto White House. Yeah, I think the money pays off. I think you could argue that Elon's ex has become...

uh a very powerful source of information and ultimately of uh you're talking about crimes for a second I also thought you were right as well as Grimes I think uh everybody's wondering what crimes is talking she's so powerful she is moving into the compound I thought she was the only holdout but she's changed her plan she's moving into the uh Musk baby compound

I just never thought these are the kind of things we talk about on Twitter you know all right let's talk about this uh Bill Gates only kidding Bill Gates there's a name you might remember from the blast from the past has been promoting uh these new nuclear power plants that use salt instead of water

they're called Natrium plants, got the permit to start building in Wyoming. They still do not have permits from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but how long before that will happen? There's Bill. I wonder if he knows how to drive one of those bulldozers. The Wyoming Industrial Siting Council has granted a construction permit to Terra Power for its Natrium Nuclear Power Plant. These are...

I don't know. Can you call them pocket power plants? It's safer, they say, because they're not using water for cooling. The unique Natrium design enables the company to start non-nuclear construction. Ah, so that's it. They're able to build every bit but the nuclear part until they get the NRC approval. Ah, I get it. I get it.

uh there are lots of people think we need nuclear power that that's uh that's the most proximate way to get out of burning fossil fuels it's true you know I think the thing you know we haven't built nuclear plants in like 40 years in in the US very very expensive very expensive but there are we know a lot more as a as a sort

world community, we know a lot more about building safe, efficient, better nuclear plants than we did 40 years ago when the worst scares of what can happen when you don't do it well stopped everybody from

from building them. So I think it certainly deserves a look, right? I think there are, we've run up against challenges with, when it comes to energy and technology, like we've run up in challenges of efficiency, of storage, of being able to transfer, you know, solar, wind, hydro. We can harness those things really well. But one of our challenges is the power grid, right? We don't export, we can't move power

power around very well, which is why we still are as dependent on oil as we are. There's a number of problems that have to be solved. I think that Bill Gates and others are showing this interest because we've hit some challenges of power with the other clean power methods that I was just talking about.

you know, it certainly should be part of the conversation, I think. And that's why people are starting to sort of make the case that it could be part of a clean energy future. But of this century, I think still power is going to be the number one concern. It powers everything. And the more that we get into AI and crypto and other things, the more it creates urgency around solving the challenges. We need the power. We need the power.

These are little air plants. They're cooled with liquid sodium. The plant will generate 345 megawatts of power.

capable of ramping up to 500 megawatts for short periods of time. To compare, the Three Mile Island plant that Microsoft is bringing back online does well over 800 megawatts of power. So these are about half the size of Three Mile Island, had multiple plants of the single Three Mile Island plant that's coming back. But they plan to put, if it goes well, dozens of Natrium plants across the globe, including several more in Wyoming.

and certainly Bill Gates has the money to do it. First steps, first steps. Cash app fined $175 million for, according to the CFPB, its woefully incomplete response to fraud. I love how the Biden administration in the waning hours of the administration has just done all of this stuff knowing that, you know,

Already Musk has said and Doge have said that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau should be deleted, I think is the word they used. So they're trying to do as much as they can before they are deleted. They find Cash App because it implied...

It failed to address fraud in the mobile payment network. It created the conditions for fraud to proliferate. When things went wrong, Cash App flouted its responsibilities, even burdened local banks with problems. The company, Cause Cash, you may remember, is run by Block, which is Jack Dorsey's company. It was a Jack Dorsey startup after...

I think he was still at Twitter when he started it. He was running it in Twitter for quite some time, as I remember. He renamed it to Block during the blockchain craze, the 2021 blockchain craze. Now he's kind of like, oh, well, I guess we don't want to go back. At least it's kind of vague, though. Like, you can get away with that. It's true. It's Block-ish. It's not blockchain, it's just Block-ish.

One thing that's sort of tangential to this is the CFPB also recently published, I think it's, it's at this point it's like in the comment stage, but they are looking to basically, um, interpret that same, I think it's that same rule, uh, to apply to both crypto holdings and also digital game, some digital game assets that are sort of cash like.

Yes, because they should be, they're treated, you can trade them in for dollars. They should be regulated. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Yeah. So the idea is like basically the same law that makes it so that if you like, you know, if you like leave your debit card in an ATM and someone withdraws $200 and you call your bank within like a pretty short period of time, your bank will give you that money back.

They basically want to have that same type of thing apply to crypto assets and like if someone steals all your Robux or whatever, which is, I think, really interesting. But also, you know, given the political end of things, I'm not super confident that that is going to go anywhere.

I'm hoping that RFK Jr. gets behind this. Now, smokers may not be like this much, but the FDA has proposed reducing nicotine in cigarettes from 14% to less than 1%, to a literally non-addictive level, which means you'd basically be buying some herbs that you could burn that didn't deliver. They were not a nicotine delivery system.

This is not going to be a rule until there's a long comment period. I think it's eight or nine months. But I think they're proposing to cap the nicotine level at 0.7 milligrams per gram of tobacco. And what about vapes and stuff like that? Are they still allowed to have nicotine? It would apply to cigarettes, cigarette, tobacco, roll your own tobacco, most cigars, and pipe tobacco, but not e-cigarettes. Nicotine pouches...

heated tobacco products for the vape industry hookahs it's gonna be it's there's gonna be an explosion of hookah hookah bars smokeless tobacco products or premium cigars yeah I think it just creates a black market for nicotine delivery systems yeah yeah they legalize weed and they criminalize nicotine that's right what a world what a world

All right, I think we can stop right here and say we have done our job of bringing light to the world, explaining what's happening in the world around us.

Molly, I'm always so glad to have Molly White with us. MollyWhite.net. Subscribe to Citation Needed. It's her newsletter. Of course, Web3 is going just great. Citation Needed is your big thing, but you do a lot of podcasts too, I know. Yeah, I am a professional podcast guest. Yeah, and the best. That's why you're so good.

You can read her work at mollywhite.net. Thank you so much for being here. I really, I knew as soon as I saw the Trump coin come out yesterday, I said, I'm so glad we got Molly. Thank you, Molly. Happy to be here. Thanks. Always great to have you on. Same for you, Jason Heiner. He is the EIC at ZDNet and just a good guy all around. It's always great to have you on. I appreciate it. I didn't get to ask you about CNET.

Was there anything you got excited about besides all of those great AI bracelets? There was some interesting stuff this year. I will say the sort of most interesting and a little bit strange thing was there was these set of headphones, over-the-ear headphones. They looked like they were over-the-ear headphones. And when you put them on, what they are is they're actually ear cleaners. Oh, no. And they shoot water into your ears. No. And they have cameras in them.

no that show it washing what your ears look like being washed by this thing so it was like one of the most ces products ever um oh you weren't there like that at the end of 30 rock where jack donaghy's like oh i've got it it's dishwashers but the front is clear so you can see what's going on inside it's just that it's brilliant exactly i think it's an ear bidet yeah it's like an ear bidet that is the perfect but with a camera

With a camera to watch your ear. Leo's already purchased this. I'm looking where I can buy this. Is it a real product or it was just a perspective? No, I believe it is a actual real product that is for sale. And here it is. Yeah. These ear cleaning headphones I saw at CES makes so much sense.

Written by Jada Jones on ZDNet. Earsight flow is the name of this product. This can't become mainstream because as someone who uses Q-tips way more than I should, I can't, there can't be another level of this for me to mess my ears up. $199, Molly. They're sold out. That's actually less than I expected. Inventory is on the way. I'm ordering it right now. I'll wear them with my brilliant glasses.

There you go. And I'll be a chick. This is a Leo product. You know, Leo, I have to say like how much I love that you are the techno optimist of, uh, always, always. And I, uh, I always appreciate that about you. And at the end of the day, you know, I mean, I, I know I was also, we, we, we were, we were poo pooing a lot of things on here and it's part of our job, but, um,

I do think it is true that the optimists do own the future. And so I love it served you well. And you've always had such an amazing perspective on the tech industry. And it's why I'm not a Robert Scoble. Let's not go crazy. I'm not like everything is the best thing ever. But I hope that we can come up with some things that are going to make our lives a little bit better and

And I'm also completely willing when it doesn't to admit that I was very skeptical about the vision pros, for instance. You were. You were. Not to rain on this great optimism parade. If you scroll down on the Earsight Flow, it has a photo of what you could see inside your ear. And it's the most upsetting thing I've seen in a while. It's not good.

I don't know. I think I want this. I think this cleans and sanitizes. The yellow hole? The yellow, fleshy hole? No.

I've never seen the inside of my ear and I think I'm happy to leave it that way. There's some things that we just shouldn't know. I've just said I can't buy it right now. That's all. Yeah. Your ears are going to be really clean this year. I need it. Leo, I have a feeling. I need it. I do. Beebird. Beebird sells a lot of other stuff. That's the sign of a great product. If you go

their home page it's something that just says love resonates in every ear care moment apparently mostly what they do is ear stuff yeah they're specialized oh my god wow i don't know what that was and i can't unsee it oh i'm so sorry to do that to you i hope you were watching the video

Paris Martineau will be back on Wednesday, right? For this week in Google. And every weekend on theinformation.com. So great to have you, Paris. I appreciate it. We wanted to have you on our year-end show. You couldn't make it.

I've had a series of unfortunate events that have kept me from Twitter the last couple of weeks. So I'm glad I'm fine. We're so glad we can get you on. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining us. We do a Twitter every Sunday afternoon, 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern 2200 UTC. You can watch us do it live. If you would like, we stream it used to be eight platforms. We can't get back on Tik TOK for some reason.

it won't let us on i don't i think there's maybe a it's coming i guess but so we weren't on tick tock this week we if we can get back on tick tock we certainly will discord youtube twitch

x.com facebook linkedin and kick and maybe next time on tiktok that's so you can watch live but you don't have to watch live i didn't mention discord that is actually an exclusive behind the velvet rope experience exclusive to our club twit members now if you're not a member of club twit i want to invite you to join it's one of the ways that we keep ourselves on the air it's

It's really been a great experience all around. We've met some wonderful people, about 12,000 people in our club. Seven bucks a month, you get ad-free versions of the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord.

So you can meet the other club members. There are special shows just for you, like Stacy's Book Club, the photo show and the coffee show and all that. So for more information, twit.tv slash club twit. I also want to remind you, you have a couple of weeks maybe left to do our survey. I think we'll finish it at the end of the month. That is how we get to know you. We only do this once a year. As you know, as a podcast, we're an RSS feed. This ain't Spotify kids. We don't know anything about you.

So in order to get to know you a little better, we do this survey thing. It takes about 10 minutes. We do it once a year just to get an idea of who's out there, who's listening. It's helpful for us in determining programming. It's also really helpful for us in selling advertising. We don't tell them anything about you individually, but it's nice for us to be able to say, well, 75% of our audience are IT decision makers. That's something advertisers want to know.

If you would twit.tv slash survey member of the club or not, that's another way you can help us out. Any help you can give us. We, we really appreciate after the fact on demand versions of all of our shows available at the website, twit.tv. When you get there, there's also a link to the YouTube channel for twit. Great way to share a little clips. If you want to do that. Uh, let's see what else. Oh, best way to get it is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. Uh,

at the minute Benito finishes polishing it up. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, our producer. Are you editing tonight or is it Kevin editing it tonight? Kevin tonight. Kevin. All right. Well, thanks to Kevin King then for taking out all those cuss words and that part where I lit my hair on fire and all that stuff. You won't see that. Thanks to Kevin. And you'll be able to get that if you subscribe audio or video in just a few hours after the show ends. Thank you everybody for joining us. This is our 20th anniversary year.

We've been doing this for a long time. I know. It's amazing. For a long time. And I am very grateful to all the people who make this show possible, including you three. It's fantastic. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next week. And as I have said, for 20 years, another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.