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TWiT 1011: The Year in Review - A Look at the Top Stories of 2024
Update: 2024-12-23
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- What's behind the tech industry's mass layoffs in 2024? : NPR
- Rabbit R1 AI Assistant: Price, Specs, Release Date | WIRED
- Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own Windows
- PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.
- Microsoft delays Recall after security concerns, and asks Windows Insiders for help
- The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting To Know Oryon and Adreno X1
- Elon Musk: First Human Receives Neuralink Brain Chip
- Apple hit with €1.8bn fine for breaking EU law over music streaming
- Bluesky emerges
- The hidden high cost of return-to-office mandates
- Apple's Car Was Doomed by Its Lofty Ambitions to Outdo Tesla
- SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms
- U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction
- Google Says It Won't Force Gemini on Partners in Antitrust Remedy Proposal
- U.S. Accuses Chinese Hackers of Targeting Critical Infrastructure in America
- U.S. Agency Warns Employees About Phone Use Amid Ongoing China Hack
- AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in new data breach
- National Public Data confirms breach exposing Social Security numbers
- Schools Want to Ban Phones. Parents Say No.
- New York passes legislation that would ban 'addictive' social media algorithms for kids
- GPT-4o (omni) + new "Her"-style AI assistant (it's nuts)
- Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges
- Trump proposes strategic national crypto stockpile at Bitcoin Conference
- Ten additional US states join DOJ antitrust lawsuit looking to break up Live Nation and TicketmasterThe Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending
- Hezbollah Pagers Explode in Apparent Attack Across Lebanon
- OpenAI raises $6.6 billion in largest VC round ever
- Painting by A.I.-Powered Robot Sells for $1.1 Million
- Netflix's Live Mike Tyson Vs. Jake Paul Fight Battling Sound & Streaming Glitches In Lead-Up To Main Event
- Infowars Sale to The Onion Rejected by Federal Bankruptcy Judge
- Supreme Court agrees to hear challenge to TikTok ban
- So You Want to Solve the NJ Drone Mystery? Our Expert Has Some Ideas
- Beeper's push for iMessage on Android is really over
- The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams
- Japan finally ends mandatory form submission on floppy disks
- We'll Miss You: Pioneering instant messaging program ICQ is finally shutting down after nearly 30 years
- Spotify is going to break every Car Thing gadget it ever sold
- Game Informer to Shut Down After 33 Years
- In Memoriam
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, Richard Campbell, and Mikah Sargent
Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech
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Transcript
00:00:00
It's time for Tweet everybody and a special show, our last show of 2024, and as our want, we will be doing a review of the biggest stories from 2024 with three of my favorite people.
00:00:12
Micah Sargent is here, Father Robert Ballacere, and from Windows Weekly, Richard Campbell, a very special Tweet.
00:00:20
Up next.
00:00:21
Podcasts You Love.
00:00:25
From People You Trust.
00:00:27
This is Tweet.
00:00:29
This is Tweet, this week in tech, episode 1,011, recorded Sunday,
00:00:39
December 22, 2024, the year in review.
00:00:47
It's time for Tweet, this week in tech,
00:00:58
the last show of 2024.
00:01:01
Thank God.
00:01:03
We'll take next week off for a best of, and then we will be roaring, come roaring back.
00:01:09
What is that January 4th?
00:01:13
I don't actually don't know.
00:01:15
I should probably find out January 5th.
00:01:17
So, a couple of weeks off, but you know what we do at the end of the year?
00:01:20
We like to do kind of a review of the year.
00:01:23
And we like to do it with people in the family.
00:01:26
It's a family show.
00:01:28
Micah Sargent is here.
00:01:30
Yeah, cousin Micah.
00:01:32
Yeah, cousin Micah, my nephew.
00:01:35
He does, of course, hands-on technology, tech news, weekly two of our most popular shows, Iowa, today also, most popular, probably more than the other two.
00:01:43
I don't know.
00:01:44
Anyway, it doesn't all.
00:01:45
And Micah is a crafting corner, and you're building, I see it behind you, a little tiny.
00:01:49
That's one that we're currently, I just finished a shelf.
00:01:54
So, there's a little tiny shelf, and I've got-- You use the elf on the little tiny shelf.
00:01:58
Yeah.
00:01:59
It's been a while for you.
00:02:00
Very fun building these old things.
00:02:01
Yeah, I saw your kitchen.
00:02:03
Yeah.
00:02:04
So, that's fun.
00:02:05
That's part of the club behind the scenes club stuff we do.
00:02:08
Merry Christmas, Micah.
00:02:09
Great to see you.
00:02:10
Merry Christmas to you, Liam.
00:02:11
I love your sweater.
00:02:12
Thank you so much.
00:02:13
Or whatever.
00:02:14
But if this thing sheds, it literally drops these little bobbles, and it's a mess.
00:02:20
I walk around with your balls.
00:02:22
Okay.
00:02:23
Good to know.
00:02:24
That's why you use the word bobbles.
00:02:26
Richard Campbell is here.
00:02:27
Hello, Richard.
00:02:28
Good to see you.
00:02:29
Hello.
00:02:30
In the traditional Christmas garb of a Canadian.
00:02:32
I don't have a choice.
00:02:33
This is what we wear.
00:02:34
Coming to us from Vancouver.
00:02:36
Good to see you.
00:02:38
Vancouver, Canada.
00:02:39
Yep.
00:02:40
I'm actually in the city this time.
00:02:43
So, left the coast.
00:02:44
Right.
00:02:45
To come down for the Christmas things.
00:02:46
So, we're in a government apartment and taking it easy.
00:02:49
It's raining, of course, because that's the time of year.
00:02:51
Yeah.
00:02:52
Richard is the regular host, of course.
00:02:54
As you know, Windows Weekly with Paul Thorotten has his own podcast.
00:02:57
Ron is radio and does a podcast called .net rocks with Carl Franklin.
00:03:01
There's an expert on, he is a, I think you're the closest thing to a polymath.
00:03:06
But I know.
00:03:07
You study everything.
00:03:08
You become an expert in everything.
00:03:10
It's wonderful.
00:03:11
Do you like to tell stories?
00:03:12
Yeah.
00:03:13
I love him.
00:03:14
Speaking of storytelling, Padre has the greatest story ever told.
00:03:19
Wait, hey, stop drinking that stuff.
00:03:22
Father Robert Ballacere pretending to drink a disgusting Italian to paratief.
00:03:28
Sorry, Digestief.
00:03:29
Yeah.
00:03:30
Hello, Robert.
00:03:31
Good to see you.
00:03:32
It's great to see you.
00:03:33
My goodness.
00:03:34
And you are right.
00:03:35
I'm so happy to see 2024 go away.
00:03:38
But it's beautiful here in the eternal city.
00:03:40
So, can't be all that.
00:03:42
He's calling to us from the Vatican.
00:03:44
I see he has his Defcon badge running a video behind him of candles and bubbles.
00:03:50
Hacker's got a hack, Leo.
00:03:51
I love that.
00:03:52
It's good.
00:03:53
So there's enough power and a Defcon badge to do that.
00:03:55
That's a mad pressure.
00:03:56
Almost.
00:03:57
If you notice, the frame rate is not great.
00:04:01
So it can kind of run video.
00:04:04
Kind.
00:04:05
I think it's very pleasant, actually.
00:04:06
I'm glad you did that.
00:04:08
Great to have all three of you.
00:04:10
Paris was going to try to make it.
00:04:12
Paris Martenau from this week in Google.
00:04:14
But her flight plans did not work out.
00:04:16
Or she had to do some last minute stuff for the information, I think.
00:04:19
So anyway, but it's great to have all three of you.
00:04:22
What I did in my spare time was went through every single show of the year and picked out the best stories from each, which ended up being,
00:04:33
let me just see a count here.
00:04:35
Over 200.
00:04:37
Yeah, I have 271 stories.
00:04:39
So I don't know if we're going to get to all of those.
00:04:43
But we're going to do our darnedest.
00:04:45
We're going to end the show before 2025, right?
00:04:48
Maybe.
00:04:49
That's the goal.
00:04:52
So I thought we'd just go in chronological order.
00:04:54
But what's interesting, and one of the things I noticed as I'm doing this, is there are stories that broke early in the year.
00:05:02
But we didn't hear the full story to later in the year.
00:05:06
There were a number of stories that were slow brewing.
00:05:10
There was one story, though, that began the year that we thought would be kind of the signature story that you didn't end up being, which is the mass layoffs in the beginning of 2024.
00:05:18
Everybody laid off thousands of people.
00:05:22
There was a website dedicated to layoffs.
00:05:26
It's just going to go there layoffs.ai.
00:05:33
Let me just see what the total-- they were keeping a running count.
00:05:36
I wonder if they're still around.
00:05:38
Because they were keeping a running total of all of them.
00:05:41
Da-na-da-de-ai.
00:05:42
What was it?
00:05:43
Layoffs.ai.
00:05:44
Maybe that's it.
00:05:46
25,000 in the first months until everybody had layoffs.
00:05:53
So layoffs.ai.
00:05:55
In 2024, wow, the final toll, it tally, is 150,000 layoffs.
00:06:03
Stunning, isn't it?
00:06:05
The question is, that's what they reported.
00:06:08
Did they really lay them off?
00:06:10
Most of the folks I know at Microsoft who got a so-called rift, got 90-day notices.
00:06:16
Basically, go find yourself a new job inside of Microsoft or you'll be laid.
00:06:20
Well, that's not bad.
00:06:21
But I have a feeling Intel didn't have a whole lot of other jobs to go to.
00:06:25
15,000 layoff at Intel.
00:06:27
Tesla layoff, 14,000 in their Austin plant.
00:06:31
Google layoff, 12,000.
00:06:33
Meta layoff, 11,000.
00:06:35
And then another 10,000.
00:06:38
Microsoft has 10,000.
00:06:40
But you're saying most of them just moved around a little bit.
00:06:43
Well, I don't know if they actually did, right?
00:06:45
This is the question of mobility and what works available.
00:06:48
But it's sort of a game you play, right?
00:06:51
These companies all have record profits.
00:06:53
This is nothing you do with profitability.
00:06:54
It has to do with stock price.
00:06:56
Right.
00:06:57
That reporting layoffs early in the season, bumps your stock price up at the beginning of the year.
00:07:01
And so they all do it.
00:07:04
It's just becoming a routine thing here.
00:07:07
There's another side of this, which I find interesting, just before the pandemic.
00:07:11
Especially the tech giants.
00:07:12
You saw a lot of labor unrest.
00:07:14
And then the pandemic scared everybody.
00:07:16
So labor unrest turned away.
00:07:18
And it's almost feels like they're keeping a thumb on the employees.
00:07:22
But if you keep them afraid, maybe they won't organize.
00:07:25
Yeah, it's not in here.
00:07:27
But there were certainly things going on right now.
00:07:29
Amazon workers on strike.
00:07:32
At some of the some of the big distribution centers.
00:07:38
And Starbucks, Apple employees tried to organize at many Apple stores.
00:07:43
In our profession, a number of publications organized.
00:07:50
Yes, so maybe that's it.
00:07:52
You know, the layoffs tapered as the year went by.
00:07:55
In fact, there's a graph here at layoffs at FYI that shows they really kind of.
00:08:01
The companies with layoffs is blue company employees laid off as red.
00:08:05
For some reason, there was a bump in August and a bump in April.
00:08:08
But really January was the big month.
00:08:10
And the industry I really got hit and stayed hit was gaming.
00:08:14
Yeah.
00:08:15
Yeah.
00:08:16
The gaming is the one that took the beating this year.
00:08:18
And this lot of studios closed.
00:08:20
There's been a lot of reshuffling.
00:08:22
Is that because gaming struggling?
00:08:24
No.
00:08:25
No.
00:08:26
Well, the problem is that games are too expensive to make right now.
00:08:29
And so it has to be a billion dollar game.
00:08:32
But you know, it's two 300 people in 18 months to make a game.
00:08:35
And that's just so costly, you can't afford to gamble.
00:08:38
And so gaming doesn't really come forever.
00:08:41
Then it's decades.
00:08:42
Well, it is the thing.
00:08:43
It's like you could name the top 12 games, right?
00:08:45
They're the same every year.
00:08:46
They're the next version of Call of Duty.
00:08:48
There's, you know, it's that kind of mechanism.
00:08:50
Original games are rare.
00:08:51
And so often as these studios are consolidating, the risky games get cut.
00:08:56
Hi.
00:08:57
This is Benito.
00:08:58
Oh, Benito Gonzalez, who has been our producer for the year.
00:09:02
It's great to have you, Benito.
00:09:04
Yeah.
00:09:05
With the gaming industry, a lot of it is also like the trend of the game.
00:09:07
That they're making these days are games as a service.
00:09:10
So like those games really cost a lot more to keep and operate.
00:09:14
So like, you know, the Ubisoft put out their multiplayer shooter or something that they close like in a week or something like that.
00:09:22
Like it's those games.
00:09:23
That's a lot of money down the two.
00:09:25
Because those AAA companies are making those kinds of games only right now.
00:09:28
And those kinds of games really cost a lot, not just to make, but to operate.
00:09:32
Well, they don't get the run time working well right away.
00:09:36
Enough seats and they can't maintain the team.
00:09:39
So it's crazy that they spend all of my development game.
00:09:42
And then literally within a month of putting it up, they're like, no, shut it down.
00:09:47
Does it not kind of build on itself a little bit though?
00:09:49
You would think.
00:09:50
You start to, I mean, in a negative way.
00:09:52
You see these shutting down, right?
00:09:55
And then you've got the creatives who are facing two things.
00:09:59
One, the fear of more shutdown and more job loss.
00:10:02
So you're not maybe putting as much work into it.
00:10:04
And you're also distracted by looking for other jobs elsewhere.
00:10:07
Coupled with artificial intelligence playing a role in the generation of new kinds of content for gaming.
00:10:14
And I can only imagine you start to feel a little beat down, which leads to more loss overall in the industry.
00:10:21
And a shift there as well, less focus on the creative aspect of it.
00:10:26
More focus on, as Benito was kind of talking about, you know, you're hiring the developers who make the server side aspects of it and keep that up and running so that the company can continue to make money in that way.
00:10:38
And I wonder too, I'm curious, if overall what I've seen anecdotally is what you all or some of you have maybe seen where the game streaming area is getting a little focus pull the way from it as well as people are looking towards shorter content in general,
00:11:00
but also just...
00:11:01
And you mean like on Twitch and...
00:11:03
Yeah, on Twitch in elsewhere.
00:11:04
So let's play videos.
00:11:05
The let's play.
00:11:06
Yeah, I feel like I have not seen as much attention and excitement around that.
00:11:10
But I mean, that could just be sort of in my own little area that I've noticed a shift away from that.
00:11:16
Robert, you're a big gamer.
00:11:19
I am, but I'm a subset of gamers.
00:11:21
So I'm not...
00:11:22
Everybody is a subset.
00:11:23
I don't do Call of Duty anymore.
00:11:26
I can't compete.
00:11:27
I'm tired of getting fracked by seven-year-olds.
00:11:30
Yeah, I know.
00:11:31
I know.
00:11:32
But I think my group, my group of gamers, we are a little bit fatigued by the endless release of AAA titles at a ridiculous amount of money that are probably going to sit in your Steam queue forever because you're still playing the game that you bought five years ago,
00:11:48
six years ago.
00:11:49
So, yes, I think the quality has gone up on some of these cinematics.
00:11:54
I think the...
00:11:55
There's actually a couple of games that have characters that don't make me run for the Uncanny Valley.
00:12:00
But I haven't really been compelled since maybe No Man's Sky to go out and pre-order a AAA title.
00:12:09
I got burned on No Man's Sky.
00:12:11
But I mean, have you visited The Man's Sky?
00:12:13
Did you or did you love No Man?
00:12:14
No, I hear it got much better later on.
00:12:16
It started off as a horrible, horrible release.
00:12:20
And a really good example of why you do not pre-order a game and why you don't have an indie studio working with a big studio.
00:12:26
It is now probably the best space shooter/recent gathering game on the game.
00:12:32
I have to play it.
00:12:33
They have turned it around entirely.
00:12:35
And the great thing is, they're not charging more.
00:12:37
So, if you bought the game way back then, you have access to the full game now.
00:12:41
That's the sort of company that I want to give my gaming loyalty to, because I know that they're going to give me updates, they're going to refresh the game.
00:12:49
And if they're not even going to charge me for every single DLC package, it means that it's going to be light on my wallet.
00:12:56
I'm down for that.
00:12:57
Here's something I'll make you feel old.
00:12:59
2024 was the 20th anniversary of the release of World of Warcraft.
00:13:03
20th anniversary of the World of Warcraft.
00:13:07
And still with a big customer base, still a bunch of loyal players, still acts coming out routinely.
00:13:13
Was that the game that made these online games the hit that they are?
00:13:18
Was that the first one?
00:13:19
Well, the ultimate online, I think.
00:13:20
The ultimate online would be the real anchor to that.
00:13:23
I think every quest was the first massive success.
00:13:25
Evercrack.
00:13:26
We called it, yes.
00:13:28
Because you couldn't stop.
00:13:30
Did you play that, Benino?
00:13:31
I did, yes, of course.
00:13:33
No, no, for me, the very first crack a game was civilization.
00:13:38
Oh, yeah.
00:13:39
And that's the first time I started playing a game at night thinking I'm going to do a couple of hours.
00:13:44
And then you see the sun coming up and you're like, oh, wow.
00:13:47
So you're not going to pre-order Civ 7, Padre?
00:13:50
Have they changed anything since Civ 4?
00:13:52
Dude, it's a big changes in Civ 7.
00:13:55
Really?
00:13:56
Really?
00:13:57
Look it up.
00:13:58
Look it up.
00:14:05
Well, I didn't think we'd start with gaming, but we did.
00:14:08
That's great.
00:14:09
I like it.
00:14:10
I like it.
00:14:11
What else happened?
00:14:12
In January, I came very close, this close.
00:14:15
Benino and I both came very close to ordering the rabbit R1 AI assistant.
00:14:23
Beautifully designed by Teenage Engineering.
00:14:26
The idea was it would do all the work for you.
00:14:30
You would say, hey, rabbit, get me an Uber.
00:14:33
And it would get you an Uber except it turned out as the year went by we found out.
00:14:37
It was nothing more than an Android device with a dumb app, a simple, one simple app that you could easily put on your phone to do all of that.
00:14:46
According to later stories, they only sold about, or at least they many have sold many, but the only about 2,000 were still in use by the end of the year.
00:14:54
Actually, today, I got an email from Teenage Engineering being, you know, we still have these rabbits.
00:14:59
You can buy three for the price of one now.
00:15:01
Three for the price of one.
00:15:04
All of in one year.
00:15:06
When I was on Twitter right after CES, and you started talking about how you were going to get this rabbit.
00:15:12
And I was screaming at you.
00:15:13
It's a piece of trash.
00:15:14
Don't do it.
00:15:15
I tried it.
00:15:16
I knew, well, anyone who touched it knew, but the buzz from CES was this was the big device, and those of us who actually played with it were like, what are you talking about?
00:15:25
It's nothing.
00:15:26
It's literally nothing.
00:15:27
$200, which wasn't bad, although you have to pay for your Wi-Fi or your wireless bill because it uses 5G to connect.
00:15:35
Is there another way to do, is there another consumer accessible way to do what it promised?
00:15:42
There wasn't any idea with it.
00:15:46
It's an Omni app, and so it can call dominoes for you and it can get you a car.
00:15:50
Do we yet have that by way of AI?
00:15:53
Is that a gentrification underway?
00:15:56
It is.
00:15:57
It is.
00:15:58
It is, but yeah.
00:15:59
So what's happening is, andthropic announced it, I think, with Claude, and then open AI said, we have that too, which is a gentric AI.
00:16:09
In fact, that's the new ARC browser, Dia is going to be agentic.
00:16:14
So in a sense, it's exactly that, which is you say what you want, and then it goes out as a browser using your browser.
00:16:21
Does Microsoft have something like that?
00:16:22
It's not a product.
00:16:23
It gets a feature in a phone.
00:16:24
It's a feature.
00:16:25
Yeah.
00:16:26
It's a voice interface over top of a set of features.
00:16:29
I think we're going to see that, though.
00:16:30
I think that's one of the things people want.
00:16:32
We're going to hit it on that.
00:16:33
I give them credit for doing that earlier on, I guess, is what-- I don't know, but I think they didn't do it.
00:16:40
That's the thing.
00:16:41
That's true.
00:16:42
I think this is what a lot of happened in AI.
00:16:44
I'm going to let you speak a second, Robert, because I know you have something to say.
00:16:46
But a lot of what happened in AI was people spotting a trend and announcing something to capitalize on it.
00:16:52
True.
00:16:53
As quickly as possible, go ahead, Robert.
00:16:56
So the big thing that the rabbit was trying to do was to say, were your personal assistant because you can tell us to do anything.
00:17:02
That thing is any of the main manufacturers.
00:17:05
You can go Google, you can go Samsung, you can go Apple.
00:17:08
They all have that baked in.
00:17:10
If you tell it to do something, it can do it.
00:17:12
But the promise of the rabbit, the one that really got people interested, does exist.
00:17:19
And that is the ability to look at your current digital footprint and suggest actions that either you should take or your schedule to take.
00:17:26
And that exists.
00:17:27
It's called Microsoft Copilot.
00:17:30
It's been around for a long time.
00:17:32
Also announced this year.
00:17:33
Well, no, the Copilot plus PCs, but yeah, yeah, it goes, goes earlier than that.
00:17:38
Yeah.
00:17:39
So does Copilot have agente capabilities?
00:17:41
You can't, it can't order an Uber for you yet.
00:17:45
Not yet because they haven't enabled that.
00:17:47
But I mean, it knows everything that's in your footprint.
00:17:51
It knows your calendar.
00:17:52
It knows your contacts.
00:17:53
It knows your patterns of activity.
00:17:55
So the only reason why Microsoft hasn't allowed that yet is because people are so freaked out by something like the rewind that there's no way they're going to want this on.
00:18:05
Recall, yeah.
00:18:06
Oh, sorry, recall.
00:18:07
This was the thing that every other app does for you at the end of the year.
00:18:10
Here's your rewind.
00:18:11
I'm so worried for my rewind in by the way.
00:18:14
I ordered a number of AI.
00:18:16
Oh, yeah.
00:18:17
I did not get the rabbit.
00:18:18
Appendent.
00:18:19
You didn't get my pendant.
00:18:20
I didn't get my brilliant labs glasses yet.
00:18:22
Nothing.
00:18:23
I think the pendant was a really cool idea.
00:18:26
I, mostly because I love having receipts.
00:18:30
Let me tell you.
00:18:31
So that when someone comes to me and they say, I, you said you were going to do that and I can go.
00:18:36
No, actually, I said very specifically that I could do that if I did this and you did this.
00:18:43
Yeah, I want those.
00:18:44
That's the interesting thing about the all the copilot backlash, which is I think people want that capability.
00:18:50
Yeah.
00:18:51
This is rewind.ai.
00:18:52
Your AI assistant that knows everything you've seen set or heard.
00:18:57
This is worse than recall.
00:19:00
It sounds like a threat, really.
00:19:01
Yeah.
00:19:02
Yeah.
00:19:03
And I ordered this.
00:19:04
And it's still more so as it comes.
00:19:06
This is the pin that records everything and then ties into rewind.
00:19:10
What does the site say in terms of what about you getting?
00:19:14
Let's see.
00:19:15
The launch video was from earlier this year.
00:19:18
Do you not have like an order number you can call up to say, Oh, what's all happened?
00:19:25
Where's my pendant?
00:19:27
This was so it's funny because AI and this certainly was the year of AI, right?
00:19:31
As next year will probably be the year of AI.
00:19:34
And last year.
00:19:35
And last year was the year of every year.
00:19:37
The years of AI.
00:19:39
But this was the year where AI promised a lot.
00:19:43
I guess it kind of delivered just maybe in unpredictable ways.
00:19:47
But that is in a way the sense I have of AI is that it succeeds in unexpected ways.
00:19:54
Right?
00:19:55
We expect it to be like how 9,000.
00:19:59
And instead it's raining as expensive problems, right?
00:20:02
Everybody dominated by.
00:20:04
Right.
00:20:05
Jarvis and Ultron.
00:20:06
Right.
00:20:07
I want Jarvis.
00:20:08
Yeah.
00:20:09
But you're going to get.
00:20:10
I want Star Trek computer.
00:20:12
That's all I want.
00:20:13
Yeah.
00:20:14
The idea that I can say speculate.
00:20:17
And that is so fun to me.
00:20:19
I want to give it a problem.
00:20:21
And it's like, honestly, I don't think I know the answer to that.
00:20:24
And I can just go speculate.
00:20:25
And then I know I can do that with this.
00:20:27
But I want it in the computer from Star Trek kind of way.
00:20:32
Well, you know, so now I'm trying to decide if I want to be rigid in our chronology and just go months to months.
00:20:39
I think maybe not.
00:20:40
Well, I think we're going to jump ahead to May.
00:20:43
I just unveiled the co-pilot plus PCs.
00:20:47
Of course, Microsoft had been pushing co-pilot for some time.
00:20:51
And it was with these co-pilot plus PCs, we were supposed to get Microsoft recall.
00:20:57
The article that kind of got everybody up in arms.
00:21:01
Before it even came out, by the way, before recall was even available.
00:21:06
Kevin Beaumont's piece in medium stealing.
00:21:08
Everything you've ever typed your view, stealing everything you've ever typed your view on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code.
00:21:18
This scared everybody so much.
00:21:20
Microsoft said, OK, hold on.
00:21:22
We won't release it yet.
00:21:26
I think this was perhaps a little bit of a panic.
00:21:30
I'm almost wonder if it was an intentional attack.
00:21:33
I mean, the simplest of it could say, hey, the security folks jumped on this and it became an easy win for clicks.
00:21:40
Without, you know, it wasn't in the wild.
00:21:42
Nobody really knew anything about it.
00:21:43
You'd only barely heard the description of it.
00:21:44
You were able to get copies of the code.
00:21:46
You misused it.
00:21:47
Like, we never got anywhere.
00:21:49
But I'm almost at a point now because it was so odd how quickly folks came out against it.
00:21:54
It was like, was this an intentional attack to derail Microsoft?
00:21:58
And it went nowhere, right, like other than it scared Microsoft, which did not present it well.
00:22:04
That's true.
00:22:05
That was the only, the real mistake was they did not explain clearly enough.
00:22:08
And when they came back and explained it, everybody said, oh, whatever.
00:22:11
And now it's out there for insiders.
00:22:14
Right.
00:22:15
And no drama.
00:22:16
Yeah.
00:22:17
So six months later it came out.
00:22:19
The way Microsoft did it was they rolled it out to insiders first only, they delayed it and then said we're fixed it.
00:22:29
And the messaging was really a mess to be honest.
00:22:32
That's really the only thing they fixed was the messaging.
00:22:35
I don't think the product changed at all.
00:22:37
Yeah.
00:22:38
Well, and one of the things that I talked to you, gentlemen, on Windows Weekly about this every time I was on, the thing that really bothered me about this specifically was not even the company itself.
00:22:51
It was the outside handling of the coverage of this technology because of the fact that they were talking about something that literally was not available to a user.
00:23:07
Yeah, it was, yeah, we're not even available to anyone.
00:23:12
And then even in the, like, small amount of testing that was being done internally, it was not the final result.
00:23:19
And so it felt like a lynching.
00:23:21
Right.
00:23:22
It was, it was just.
00:23:23
Ironically.
00:23:24
I mean, we were just showing this limit, this limitless pen and the rewind that AI, I think people want the feature.
00:23:33
And ironically, I think Paul Therot said this a couple of weeks ago in Windows Weekly, the recall of Microsoft is shipping weather because of, you know, the security worries or whatever is so hobbled.
00:23:45
It's not near.
00:23:46
It's only on one computer at a time.
00:23:48
You know, your desktop doesn't know what your laptop did.
00:23:52
Obility share within your suite of machines.
00:23:54
Yeah.
00:23:55
And so it actually is much less useful.
00:24:09
Right.
00:24:09
But you're right.
00:24:10
The only people that are outraged back in June were the security people.
00:24:13
Regular humans do not care.
00:24:16
They just want the capability.
00:24:18
Right.
00:24:19
And I think that they didn't get the opportunity to really show what that could be.
00:24:24
And that's what bothered me about it is that like I understand you've got the security folks have to do their job of expressing concern.
00:24:33
And, and you know, investigating it and researching it.
00:24:36
Yes.
00:24:37
But without the problems that can exist.
00:24:40
Yeah, exactly.
00:24:41
It absolutely was.
00:24:42
I think there's another.
00:24:43
There's a different moral to extract from this, which is that people don't trust Microsoft.
00:24:48
Yeah.
00:24:49
They don't trust anybody.
00:24:50
But they might trust.
00:24:51
I mean, they could have headed the whole thing off with six words.
00:24:56
If they had started the press release with you can choose to enable recall.
00:25:01
Right.
00:25:02
That was it.
00:25:03
The messaging was so bad.
00:25:04
Well, that was a big change that was on by default.
00:25:06
And they changed it to on by off by default, right?
00:25:09
Right.
00:25:10
And immediately if they had come in and said, oh, oh, wait a minute.
00:25:12
You can, we think this is a great feature.
00:25:14
You can turn it on if you'd like.
00:25:16
But because it was automatically on and automatically downloaded with the, with new versions of Windows 11 and going down.
00:25:24
It became this while Microsoft's making a power grab.
00:25:27
And they were so tone deaf to what people were giving them in feedback that they thought that this was an issue with.
00:25:34
Oh, so we shouldn't install it automatically.
00:25:37
It's like, no, no, no.
00:25:38
Just tell us what it is first.
00:25:40
We had this conversation.
00:25:41
And I believe this was, this was that, that week on Twitter, Leo, that we went back and forth about who likes it.
00:25:48
And nobody on the panel liked it.
00:25:50
Not because of what it did, but because of how it was announced.
00:25:54
Yeah.
00:25:55
It was reminiscent of the old opt-in opt-out controversies that we've had from time immemorial on the internet.
00:26:00
Which is, tell me what you're going to do.
00:26:02
And I'll choose whether or not I want to turn it on.
00:26:04
And ultimately, that's why it's now a great feature.
00:26:07
People will turn it on if they like it.
00:26:09
And I think the conflict of interest that Microsoft had was this was the only AI feature they had in a co-pilot plus PC.
00:26:16
Right.
00:26:17
The only thing missing here was to sell co-pilot plus PC.
00:26:20
And specifically the Snapdragon one.
00:26:23
And so this was the thing that was going to get you to buy this new laptop.
00:26:28
This arm on Windows laptop was recall.
00:26:30
Yeah.
00:26:31
And with again, no sense of what the customer actually wanted, no sense of how the customer actually wants it presented.
00:26:38
Like it was just a fail because they were, they're really afraid of windows on arm failing again.
00:26:45
Actually, that was the one of the other big stories of the year.
00:26:49
In 2023, we saw a Qualcomm event where they touted the new Snapdragon said faster than the Apple M1 processor.
00:26:58
And my reaction, and I think this is almost a universal reaction, is what we've heard that story from you before Qualcomm.
00:27:05
Can you, can you produce?
00:27:07
And then by the summer of 2024, when they finally did release the Snapdragon Elite X, it became clear that this time they did it.
00:27:16
Yeah.
00:27:17
A low power chip.
00:27:18
It was very fast.
00:27:20
You got one, didn't you?
00:27:22
Oh, so that's another one.
00:27:24
I did get one.
00:27:25
That's another story.
00:27:26
So Richard and I both bought the Snapdragon DevKit, which was offered by Qualcomm.
00:27:33
And went through, it kept getting delayed and delayed.
00:27:36
In fact, this was a running gag on Wednesday.
00:27:38
It was running gag on the show, yeah.
00:27:39
Richard and I would look at our emails from Arrow, the distributor saying, oh, when are we getting it?
00:27:43
Well, they shipped it last week, but it's coming next month or it's coming next, they shipped it next month and it's coming last week.
00:27:49
And it was always a mess.
00:27:51
Then.
00:27:52
Then they actually get my thing.
00:27:54
They said, hey, by the way, we didn't get FCC approval.
00:27:58
Yeah, they didn't, they didn't admit that.
00:27:59
I think I, I was the one who suggested that and everyone's ultimately agreed with me on that way.
00:28:02
It's like, hey, you're going to have an Asian Matterport, we're going to include a USBC to Asia, my dongle.
00:28:07
Which is fine.
00:28:08
Yeah.
00:28:09
That's my, my lap, my Apple MacBook Air does that.
00:28:12
That's fine.
00:28:14
Then.
00:28:16
A couple of YouTubers, Jeff Geerling at least got one, showed it, demoed it.
00:28:22
Then I got mine.
00:28:24
And Richard got theirs.
00:28:25
Yeah.
00:28:26
And almost immediately after we saw word that they were discontinuing it and refunding everyone their money.
00:28:34
So it cost us nothing, but we did get one 200 people, they say got one.
00:28:38
Got them.
00:28:39
Yeah, we got the early set, but it also speaks to how problematic that advice actually is.
00:28:44
Well, we don't know why we don't want to take care of it.
00:28:48
It costs you nothing.
00:28:49
Here's your money.
00:28:50
This is probably not a reflection on the Snapdragon, right?
00:28:53
We don't even know, we haven't seen a problem with it yet.
00:28:56
So I dev kit, this was supposed to be out before the laptop, but that's the point.
00:29:01
You don't really need it now.
00:29:02
All of us to get their software ready for Windows on arm.
00:29:06
It's a good point.
00:29:07
Until what?
00:29:08
October, November?
00:29:09
Later.
00:29:10
Yeah.
00:29:11
Uh, so and what were the good news is we didn't have to pay for it.
00:29:14
And I set mine to Paul.
00:29:15
So Paul has it and you have, have you set yours up yet?
00:29:18
No.
00:29:19
No.
00:29:20
It's a holiday project.
00:29:23
Yeah.
00:29:24
However, uh, when, when we finally did in June, see the Snapdragon X, it was very impressive.
00:29:30
Yes.
00:29:31
Great.
00:29:32
Windows on arm is very impressive.
00:29:34
It's quite well.
00:29:35
All throughout rarely giggles.
00:29:37
But those Snapdragon laptops make him giggle.
00:29:40
It's very good.
00:29:41
Yeah.
00:29:42
Instant on, which he always wanted.
00:29:44
Something that was done a three years apart.
00:29:46
Yeah.
00:29:47
Uh, good battery life.
00:29:48
It doesn't, he, he's always had a hot bag problem.
00:29:51
Uh, who hasn't?
00:29:52
But his hot bag was that his surfaces would not turn off or sleep properly.
00:29:57
Hmm.
00:29:58
But can he play counter strike on it?
00:30:02
Sorry.
00:30:03
Can he play counter strike on it?
00:30:06
He, uh, he plays call it duty.
00:30:08
Let's get it straight.
00:30:09
Yeah.
00:30:10
And he can.
00:30:11
Now he's more of a CSGO guy, I think.
00:30:13
He was very impressed.
00:30:14
He was very impressed.
00:30:15
He's not telling you.
00:30:16
He actually, I think it was, uh, this year that Paul decided to, uh, go cold turkey on cod.
00:30:23
Low break.
00:30:24
Yeah.
00:30:25
Or cold.
00:30:26
Yeah.
00:30:27
He did a cold cod for a year.
00:30:28
Uh, is playing again.
00:30:29
But I think not, uh, well, he says he's almost prestige.
00:30:32
So maybe he's playing as hard as usual.
00:30:34
I don't know.
00:30:36
He's a detoxed.
00:30:37
Let's, let's put it that way.
00:30:39
Counter strike does run.
00:30:41
Diablo 4 does not.
00:30:43
Hell divers to know.
00:30:46
Those are copy protection issues.
00:30:47
Yes.
00:30:48
I think a lot of them are copy protection because it does have a problem with one of the major, um, anti cheat tools.
00:30:54
Right.
00:30:55
Yeah.
00:30:56
Well, they shouldn't put those on there anyway.
00:30:59
Actually, Hell divers was the one that Sony kind of rug pulled on selling it to people on steam.
00:31:05
And then telling them, oh, no, you got to register for a Sony account to use it.
00:31:08
Is there such an upcry?
00:31:10
Sorry.
00:31:11
HDMI out doesn't have the proper copyright hardware.
00:31:14
Well, my, yeah, my guess with the dev kit was they didn't get an FCC license certification.
00:31:19
And they'd already built the unit.
00:31:21
And so that point.
00:31:22
And gearling was the guy who took it apart immediately and found it.
00:31:25
Did the soldered marks and it's like, yep, I think you called it.
00:31:28
There was no hole on the case for HDMI.
00:31:31
Yeah.
00:31:32
But they did take it off.
00:31:33
Yeah, they took it off whatever.
00:31:35
Yeah.
00:31:36
Um, um, anyway, so Hell divers too, that was probably the biggest gamer revolt of the year.
00:31:44
There's so many this year.
00:31:45
Like gamers are definitely fighting the gaming.
00:31:47
It went from five stars to no stars in the back of five stars.
00:31:51
And then back to five stars when Sony retracted.
00:31:54
Yeah.
00:31:55
But you know, you know, you know, it's the great thing about the Hell divers.
00:31:57
You story.
00:31:58
It shows that not only Microsoft messes up their connection with their customers.
00:32:01
Oh, Sony's notorious.
00:32:02
They're the ones that put the root kit on.
00:32:04
Yeah.
00:32:05
They're, they're CD, they're audio CD.
00:32:08
Yeah.
00:32:09
So you couldn't steal it.
00:32:10
That was a, that's gone back going back a few years.
00:32:13
Mm hmm.
00:32:14
I think Sony was just an nostalgic.
00:32:15
They wanted to remind people, no, no, no, we screwed up the user experience way before my career.
00:32:20
We were one of the first ladies in gentlemen.
00:32:22
Although the PlayStation Pro was released this year.
00:32:25
Uh, I think somewhat of a success.
00:32:27
No.
00:32:28
For those who do know how much things cost.
00:32:31
Right.
00:32:32
Yeah, the only, the only friend I have is the one that, that has one is the one who was like, that's not relevant to me.
00:32:38
I just want the latest and greatest.
00:32:39
And that's.
00:32:40
I have one for my Lamborghini.
00:32:41
Um, uh, uh, uh, I thought it was a disappointment in the sense that it was kind of like,
00:32:53
oh, I thought you were going to show us something new and good.
00:32:57
This is not new and good enough to have warranted all of the hype leading up to it.
00:33:03
And then the fact that it was out, and it's just like, maybe we could have just waited until you had more to offer than just these, you know, it wasn't on my agenda for the show.
00:33:12
But was, is this the last year that console gaming still has legs?
00:33:17
No.
00:33:18
No.
00:33:19
Well, you know, they're now saying, yeah, you're, you have an Xbox everywhere, right?
00:33:25
Is that just them saying, yeah, we failed the console gaming and then we're going to let it at Sony.
00:33:29
Have it.
00:33:30
Do you know the, the most popular console ever sold the one that is old, sold every other console?
00:33:35
It's an Nintendo.
00:33:36
I'm sure.
00:33:37
Yeah.
00:33:38
There's something right.
00:33:39
It's the PS2.
00:33:40
Oh, 160 million units and they still sell millions of units every, every year because they're pirated.
00:33:46
Yes.
00:33:47
Because you can pirate the games.
00:33:48
Yeah.
00:33:49
That's why that's not going anywhere.
00:33:50
No.
00:33:51
Okay.
00:33:52
Gaming has legs, if you're not Microsoft, but I do feel like the console gaming got itself into a corner.
00:33:58
The race to bigger and bigger hardware led to more and more expensive game creation.
00:34:02
Yeah.
00:34:03
If you're spending $700 on a console, you want a game that presses the limit of that console.
00:34:08
Right.
00:34:09
But that, that game costs $400 million to make and let's say sell a billion dollars plus of that game.
00:34:15
It doesn't make sense.
00:34:16
Right.
00:34:17
And there isn't enough consoles to make that kind of money.
00:34:20
Wow.
00:34:21
Unless you're Nintendo.
00:34:22
Yeah.
00:34:23
The Switches don't cost that much to make because they didn't play the hardware way.
00:34:27
Right.
00:34:28
Right.
00:34:29
Right.
00:34:30
Yeah.
00:34:31
There's 720p right.
00:34:32
And Microsoft happily run down the more and more processing power path till they literally box themselves out of being able to make good games for it.
00:34:38
And Nintendo goes not playing that.
00:34:40
Keep it simple, downscale the hardware, make the game fun to play.
00:34:45
And it works.
00:34:46
Yeah.
00:34:47
Just saying console gaming, I was thinking mostly Xbox and PlayStation, but really if you consider the Switch a console, console gaming is alive and well, the new Switch will come out in 2025.
00:35:01
If you consider Steam Deck a console, I think Steam Deck's done pretty well in its clones, the Legion and so forth.
00:35:09
We're never not going to eat away to waste our time.
00:35:13
And you can't totally be the phone because there's not enough battery in the world.
00:35:20
So you need another device to drain the battery up to do.
00:35:24
You're watching the last tweet of 2024.
00:35:29
We're covering the stories that made 2024.
00:35:32
So.
00:35:33
So 2024.
00:35:36
So 2024.
00:35:37
Micah Sergeant is here, it's great to have you father Robert Ballacere, the digital Jesuit.
00:35:42
And of course, from Windows, Weekly, Richard Campbell, we will have more in just a moment.
00:35:47
We're still in January, guys, we gotta, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to move down to May.
00:35:52
I guess we're going back up.
00:35:53
Oh, yeah, we're going back and forth a little bit.
00:35:55
Yeah, trends.
00:35:56
That's right.
00:35:57
Trends.
00:35:58
Coming up, we haven't mentioned the big story of the year and I'll let you think about that.
00:36:03
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00:36:39
the one I use, bit warden.
00:36:42
We, we love our bit warden.
00:36:46
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00:36:55
You can generate unique emails in conjunction with partners like a fast mail, along with credit cards, identities, even past keys for new accounts directly from the in line auto fill menu.
00:37:09
I don't know if you use bit warden, but they've done a beautiful redesign that just came out a couple of days ago and now it's so much more capable and there's a reason why this is important for security.
00:37:20
Bit warden will not auto fill on a site that's a spoof site.
00:37:25
It will not put your password into a site that's fake Twitter or fake Shopify, it will put it only in the path in the site that really is the real thing.
00:37:34
Same with the credit cards, same with the addresses.
00:37:38
That's a real important point of security.
00:37:41
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00:37:49
It also elevates your security, I'll give you an example, use Microsoft Intune.
00:37:53
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00:38:04
making it very easy to onboard your staff, that's including desktops and mobile devices.
00:38:10
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00:38:20
Do you use Vanta?
00:38:21
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00:38:32
Here's one I really thought was cool.
00:38:34
I mean, there are literally dozens of these, but bit warden works with Rapid 7 to ensure improve threat detection and response because it can correlate credential usage with security events.
00:38:48
Who used that password during that time frame?
00:38:53
That's pretty.
00:38:54
Pretty cool use of bit warden.
00:38:57
Bit warden is a fantastic solution for home and office for every business.
00:39:03
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00:39:36
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00:39:41
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00:39:48
Get started today with Bit warden's free trial of a team's or enterprise plan.
00:39:52
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00:40:02
even support for hard work keys, bit warden.com/twit.
00:40:07
It's the only password manager I use.
00:40:09
The only one I recommend, bit warden.com/twit, we thank them so much for their support of our year end show on this week in tech.
00:40:21
This was Elon Musk's year in so many ways.
00:40:26
I would love to see a study of how much of the news cycle he dominated from beginning to end.
00:40:31
The first story of the year was in February when the first human received a neural link brain chip implant.
00:40:39
Very impressive, too.
00:40:40
The guy was playing video games with his neural link.
00:40:45
The guy was shown playing video games with his neural link shown.
00:40:48
You don't believe it?
00:40:50
Or Elon has really lost credibility, I'm sorry to say.
00:40:54
I think somebody interviewed him, didn't we interview him or somebody we know interview him?
00:41:00
Yes, I remember the story.
00:41:01
Someone just talked to him, right?
00:41:02
It wasn't.
00:41:03
Yeah, it might have been this week in space.
00:41:05
I can't remember.
00:41:06
Anyway, at the time, he was anonymous appropriately, but he's since come forth.
00:41:11
I think it did stop working after a while, but it was the first functionality.
00:41:17
It was the first one.
00:41:18
It's pretty amazing.
00:41:19
Not the only company doing transplant only lived a few weeks.
00:41:23
That's right.
00:41:24
Reality is.
00:41:25
It's still alive.
00:41:26
Right.
00:41:27
Yeah, that's a good, that's a good thing.
00:41:31
There will be many more Elon stories to come.
00:41:33
In fact, I think Elon probably is the story of the year, but we'll vote on that later.
00:41:40
This is in February.
00:41:41
Apple got hit with a 1.8 billion euro fine.
00:41:45
This is mostly a complaint, I think, from Spotify.
00:41:49
It went to the EU.
00:41:50
This is kind of the story of EU regulation, which is the EU company says, "Hey, the Americans are eating our lunch.
00:41:57
What can you do about it?"
00:42:00
They were fine for, quote, "restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative cheaper music surfaces," in what side of the Apple ecosystem?
00:42:12
You can't tell anybody about Spotify, okay?
00:42:16
Look, I have kind of bit of mixed minds when it comes to the EU stuff, and in particular,
00:42:27
when we're looking at another large company complaining about another large company, I will say, though, that I understand the spirit of this argument when I am on my phone and three different ways Apple is telling me about some stupid concert that they're going to be streaming on Apple TV.
00:42:52
In the music app, I'm seeing that coming up, it's going to be doing this on Apple TV, and then I'm just using my Apple TV remote, and everything is taken over with that, and I am,
00:43:04
I don't know, in the app store, and there's also something there.
00:43:07
I get how the argument can be made that because Apple on its own platform is able to advertise its services in so many ways,
00:43:17
and in a way make it a little more difficult for others to compete in that space, I get that argument.
00:43:25
But again, it does, in a way, kind of, as a word, chuff, I guess, that it's coming from another large company.
00:43:33
The argument could be made, though, that only another large company has the financial means to have the legal means to have any sort of pull on making a difference with this.
00:43:46
I don't know.
00:43:47
I'm curious how everybody else feels, though.
00:43:50
Does Microsoft have years of antitrust concerns and maybe some upcoming antitrust concerns?
00:43:57
I'm sure that you have some storied history when it comes to that, Richard.
00:44:02
I think we said this on Windows Weekly recently.
00:44:06
I think Microsoft's delighted to actually be back into the antitrust conversations because it means they're relevant again.
00:44:13
You know, it had been interesting way of being relevant, but we're important enough that the regulators are looking at us again.
00:44:24
I mean, look, this year, the US government started to step up in regulating big tech, but until then, it really was up to the EU to do something.
00:44:34
You are in the process of having a administration change, so all bets are on.
00:44:41
They may go back to the good old days of the E.
00:44:43
of Margarit, the Vistai year, who was considering the cluster of tech roads you've got hanging around Mar-a-Lago these days.
00:44:50
Seems unlikely.
00:44:51
Yeah.
00:44:52
And actually, that's okay.
00:44:53
We skip ahead to December, but that's really the Elon Musk story was, it turned out all along Elon was playing 3D chess.
00:45:02
When he bought Twitter in October of 2022, I think it was, for $44 billion, everybody said, "That's ridiculous.
00:45:12
It's not worth that."
00:45:13
He then fired half the staff, I and many others said, "Oh, you're going to destroy Twitter."
00:45:19
No, it didn't.
00:45:20
It survived.
00:45:21
He had a little trouble with live streams of various people.
00:45:26
It survived.
00:45:28
It kind of turned into a right-wing cesspool, but it also gave Elon huge clout.
00:45:38
You may argue that the quarter of a billion dollars Elon put into electing President Trump was part of it, but the bully pulpit that he has on Twitter is another part of it.
00:45:49
We just saw it with the negotiations over the debt ceiling, where he used his cloud on Twitter to scare the hell out of Congress.
00:46:00
So at least we know Congress believes he has a huge amount of money.
00:46:04
Well, he used something out of the Trump playbook, which is, "I'm going to primary you.
00:46:11
If you're a Republican member of Congress and you don't go along, if you vote for this bill, we're going to make sure that there are primary candidates running against you."
00:46:20
That was enough to scare them all into and get them in line.
00:46:24
But he could have done that on a morning news show, and it would have scared them, because it wasn't Twitter that scared him, it was the money.
00:46:31
They know that in the money.
00:46:32
So he didn't really need Twitter, but Twitter is such a great place to be public about it.
00:46:38
If Twitter had remained what it was before Elon, he would have had just as much influence, because they would dare to have silenced him.
00:46:46
In fact, he would have even more of an influence, because people would see him as he's the one raging against the machine.
00:46:53
But he is the machine now.
00:46:54
He is the man.
00:46:55
He owns everything.
00:46:56
And we can do that too.
00:46:57
How interesting.
00:46:58
I didn't think that Twitter hasn't disappeared.
00:47:01
But if you take a look at the bits of information that we can get about the financials, like what the investment banks have done to their evaluation of their investments in Musk Twitter,
00:47:12
in X, they've downgraded them by at least half, in some cases, down by 75%.
00:47:18
So that's off the top.
00:47:19
They've lost the value of that investment, plus we all know that he's losing money, a lot of money.
00:47:26
And probably in three or four years, the debt service on X is going to be more than the total revenue of the company.
00:47:34
That's just the debt service.
00:47:35
That's before they pay anything for the operation of the company.
00:47:38
We know this because we know what things cost.
00:47:40
It might already be true, Robert, too.
00:47:42
It probably is.
00:47:43
It probably is.
00:47:44
Right.
00:47:45
And my Twitter has its doors still open, it's because Musk is willing to keep funding it.
00:47:50
Is what he can afford?
00:47:51
He can afford it.
00:47:52
He can afford it.
00:47:53
He can afford it.
00:47:54
It's also not just him, right?
00:47:56
Like he has big pocketed people around him to push them into doing it.
00:47:59
I don't think this was a grand strategy.
00:48:01
I think he did get duped into buying Twitter.
00:48:04
He tried to get out of his 3D chess.
00:48:06
But then it worked out.
00:48:07
It did work out.
00:48:08
I think his play towards the federal government makes a lot of sense when you look at how much trouble he's in over full self-driving.
00:48:16
All of the conflicts he's having with the FAA, it's SpaceX.
00:48:18
I think the pile of problems he had, it suddenly made sense to go.
00:48:21
If I go play with the feds, maybe I can put to bed a bunch of these things that are problematic for me.
00:48:27
Interesting.
00:48:28
You know what you thought?
00:48:29
That was good for him, which is the bad for the rest of us.
00:48:32
Twitter had become sort of the de facto town hall for people who actually did research and actually knew what they were talking about.
00:48:41
In Opsack, in Space, in Tech, there are big names who were not tied to the millstone that is currently around of what they would call mainstream media who were actually doing pretty good investigative reporting.
00:48:55
So he cleared them out.
00:48:56
They're all gone.
00:48:57
They've all gone elsewhere or they've gone silent, waiting for the next platform to rise.
00:49:01
Some people think that's going to be blue sky.
00:49:03
It's probably not going to be mastodon.
00:49:05
It's definitely not threads.
00:49:07
And Facebook was lost a long time ago.
00:49:08
But in the meantime, he's got the only platform where people used to gather.
00:49:14
And he scared a lot of money to hold value as it diminishes.
00:49:18
Yeah.
00:49:19
Correct.
00:49:20
He's writing it all the way to the ground.
00:49:21
This was the year of blue sky.
00:49:22
Wasn't it?
00:49:23
Blue sky opened to the public this year.
00:49:26
It was an invite only until I think March, I haven't here somewhere.
00:49:32
And it has grown very, very rapidly with the kind of the demise of Twitter, the changes at Twitter.
00:49:40
I see you have a blue, you're using a blue sky handle now.
00:49:43
I am.
00:49:44
I remember Leo.
00:49:45
I told you that I would stay on Twitter like Slim Pickens writing that atomic bomb.
00:49:50
And right about, I realized I spent so much time away from Twitter starting this year.
00:49:58
And I didn't miss it.
00:49:59
And I wasn't missing the engagement.
00:50:01
And most of the interesting people that I followed had stopped posting.
00:50:05
So I still have an account there.
00:50:06
It hasn't had anything of substance added to it for months.
00:50:10
And I am actually getting engagement now on blue sky way more than I got on Macedon.
00:50:15
And a lot of the people that I missed are now over there.
00:50:18
I think blue sky has actually passed that critical mass.
00:50:22
It's not going to challenge Twitter for size at any given time.
00:50:27
But they don't have to because they're not running a multi-billion dollar debt.
00:50:30
They are at a, what was it, a hundred million monthly active users now or daily active users?
00:50:35
Like getting close, Twitter is $350 million, something like that.
00:50:40
So they're in the, they're in the right order of magnitude anyway.
00:50:44
Mike Maznik, one of the stories we have, Mike Maznik joined the blue sky board from Techdirt as Jack Dorsey left.
00:50:53
That was a good transition.
00:50:54
I think any association with Twitter left with Jack Dorsey, who had funded it as a CEO of Twitter.
00:51:01
And Mike Maznik is very well known as kind of the opposition to what happened at Twitter.
00:51:07
He wrote a very funny piece for Elon on how to, how to speed run the moderation curve.
00:51:14
And Elon followed it pretty exactly doing all the mistakes that Mike Maznik said he would make.
00:51:21
I don't know yet.
00:51:22
Maybe blue sky is a winner.
00:51:23
I'm wondering, I don't feel the need for a Twitter anymore.
00:51:28
Do we need still need something and a national public square?
00:51:33
But that's okay.
00:51:34
Sorry.
00:51:35
Go ahead.
00:51:36
No, no, no, you go.
00:51:37
I was just going to say that people spent almost two decades building up successful presences on Twitter.
00:51:43
And I'm not talking just about the multi-million dollar, multi-million user accounts.
00:51:47
But the ones that became niche and really known for doing what they do well, you know, 16 years, 17 years in some cases, to build up a loyal following and prove that they knew what they were talking about.
00:52:00
We are at that inflection point where people have jumped off of Twitter and they're not sure if they want to do it again.
00:52:05
Exactly.
00:52:06
I've been burnt.
00:52:07
Exhausted.
00:52:08
I'm exhausted.
00:52:09
Exhausted.
00:52:10
The amount of energy that I want to build another social graph like that, I've exactly done, which is why threads got a big jump because it had the Instagram.
00:52:18
So it was easy.
00:52:19
In fact, even though threads numbers are at least comparable, if not better than blue skies, you have to wonder how much of that is legitimate.
00:52:27
I think Mark Zuckerberg recently said 100 million monthly, daily active users, 300 million monthly active users.
00:52:34
But since Instagram accounts get ported over to blue sky, you wonder how many of those people are, you know, accidentally-- Yeah, because there are threads shown, thread posts showing Instagram things.
00:52:44
It's easy to accidentally hit that count.
00:52:46
Yeah.
00:52:47
I've done it.
00:52:48
And then blue sky put together starter packs a few months ago.
00:52:52
The starter packs are huge.
00:52:54
And that's the sweetest simplified building a social graph getting over the primary hurdle.
00:52:58
People want the square.
00:52:59
They just don't want to build it again.
00:53:01
Exactly.
00:53:02
Yep.
00:53:03
They want it as readers more than as posters.
00:53:06
Is that fair?
00:53:07
They're in the right place, right?
00:53:08
Yeah.
00:53:09
You're trying to find out where the common green is.
00:53:11
Yeah.
00:53:12
Somebody in there.
00:53:13
Somebody used to know where it was.
00:53:14
And now it's, I go, okay, I've got some friends who are over here.
00:53:17
I've got the people who I want to listen to who are over here, and I've got the people who I don't want to listen to, but also where interesting things might be happening over here.
00:53:26
That's threads.
00:53:27
And so all of those places, and I don't know which one to go to or which one matters.
00:53:31
And there's no way I'm spending my time on all three.
00:53:33
So I just go, I don't care enough anymore because what I had before where it was one place was so much easier.
00:53:40
And as you said, the commitment that we made and the time that we put into it, I don't have the energy for that.
00:53:45
What was I-- Yeah.
00:53:47
I saw a post this morning that 100 members of Congress are now on Blue Sky, it's not all of them.
00:53:54
It's only about a third of them, right?
00:53:56
If they had the resources, Blue Sky could put together a crack team and make an importer.
00:54:02
Say, look, we will look at your Twitter account.
00:54:05
We will see who you're following.
00:54:06
We will see who's following you, and we will find all of these people on their different social media accounts and make it easy to port them in.
00:54:13
If you people have made those tools, haven't they?
00:54:16
Yeah, they made it.
00:54:17
But they're so clunky.
00:54:18
They're so, so clunky.
00:54:19
They're not really follow-up.
00:54:20
They're not really follow-up.
00:54:21
Matching so much as moving content.
00:54:23
Right.
00:54:24
Exactly.
00:54:25
And if someone moves a name to a different-- if they move to a different account name on a different service, it's not going to find them.
00:54:31
If Blue Sky could do that and make it one click easy to try to bring over at least most of the experience you care about, I don't know who would stay on Twitter.
00:54:40
It has become such a toxic place.
00:54:42
I'd log in every once in a while and I'd go, "Why was I ever here?"
00:54:45
Well, let's see.
00:54:46
You know, Microsoft Word because it read and wrote Word Perfect Documents.
00:54:49
Oh, you're exactly right.
00:54:52
If they build a tool, and then you send it to the county clerks, "Hey, you've got a Twitter feed right now.
00:54:58
Here's how you flip it to feed to-- here's how you lose sky to that."
00:55:02
Right.
00:55:03
Don't take course.
00:55:04
You add to Blue Sky into the loop so that it becomes that square that people want.
00:55:08
Elon would probably block such a tool, right?
00:55:11
Well, I mean, I got personal experience from that.
00:55:15
It's not possible.
00:55:16
You can block me from using your computer.
00:55:18
You cannot block me from scraping data off your site.
00:55:21
Okay.
00:55:22
Anybody wants to know more?
00:55:23
Contact the Digital Jesuit, Vatican.
00:55:28
What is it?
00:55:29
VA?
00:55:30
What is the Vatican City's-- Vatican.VA.
00:55:32
Vatican.VA.
00:55:33
Okay.
00:55:34
By the way, the best U.S.
00:55:36
government site on Blue Sky account is the U.S.
00:55:38
Consumer Product Safety Commission.
00:55:40
They make these unhinged graphics that are hilarious around how they mean they have these like ghosts carrying knives, and there was one said, "What are your Christmas tree?"
00:55:52
And it shows this skeleton coming out of the Christmas tree because, of course, you basically have this dry-as-bone skeleton underneath the tree.
00:56:01
They're really funny.
00:56:02
They've done a great job, and I'm kind of worried about whether the budget will be there in the new year.
00:56:07
Oh, man.
00:56:08
That's so great.
00:56:09
Look at that.
00:56:10
That's a follow.
00:56:11
I got that.
00:56:12
Oh, nice.
00:56:13
Yeah.
00:56:14
That's nice.
00:56:15
Yeah.
00:56:16
So, these are all a legit consumer product safety concerns.
00:56:21
This is going to be a good canary in the coal mine to see if this survives under the new administration.
00:56:27
Exactly.
00:56:28
How long before donors say that they want to kill it?
00:56:31
Yeah.
00:56:32
That's a waste of money.
00:56:33
Yeah.
00:56:34
This is number one of his lists because it also tracks defects on Teslas.
00:56:36
Right.
00:56:40
Okay.
00:56:41
We're going to try to kill him for the nonce, anyway.
00:56:44
He wants to kill the U.S.
00:56:45
consumer product safety bureau, the organization of ACPSC.
00:56:48
Yes, he's informed.
00:56:49
He wants to be a consumer at what's the name of finance?
00:56:55
Yes, right.
00:56:56
That's right.
00:56:57
That's right.
00:56:58
Such a terrible name.
00:56:59
The one that was fighting for your rights against credit card companies and banks.
00:57:02
That's right.
00:57:03
You want to kill that, too?
00:57:04
Yeah.
00:57:05
Let's kill that, too, because it's a waste of money.
00:57:06
And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that he's trying to turn Tesla into a giant financial institution because he doesn't ever want to do an outhouse funding for one of his cars.
00:57:15
I'm sure that's not it at all.
00:57:17
That's weird.
00:57:18
Well, there was some argument that the reason he didn't like the Omnibus bill to keep the government open was because it had a clause in it that said,
00:57:28
you can't build any more plants in China.
00:57:30
And he's about to build a big Tesla plant in Shanghai.
00:57:34
So the other big story early in the year, and I think it's going to be a continuing story, is the mandate to return to office.
00:57:43
Some have said this is a guarantee that you'll lose your best employees just when you need the most.
00:57:50
This is Mike Elgin writing in the computer world.
00:57:53
He says, if you force employees to commute and work in an office every day, you can expect to lose your best employees.
00:57:58
And yet a number of very big companies, including Amazon, have announced, I think Tesla too.
00:58:04
I know Elon has done it with Twitter.
00:58:06
You got to come in and work in the office.
00:58:09
Is the office kind of some have said it's an industrial era, you know, confection that doesn't really apply in the modern digital era that it's kind of work,
00:58:22
but certainly for information workers, it is a good way to keep bad managers to treat their employees badly.
00:58:29
Yeah.
00:58:30
If somebody in Washington State, somebody in Canada, somebody in the Vatican City on this show, someone in this is our office, this is our office, you know, we don't need to,
00:58:42
we don't need to be in and altogether in the same place.
00:58:45
And for a lot of work, that's the case.
00:58:47
Now, if you're building a Tesla, of course, yeah, there are some jobs where you need to be in person.
00:58:53
I was, I wish I could remember where I had read about this, but there was some speculation that, um, if you, if they were comparing the,
00:59:04
um, the investments that CEOs and other C suite folks were making in, um, in, and now I'm forgetting the word as well.
00:59:15
It was real estate.
00:59:16
Thank you.
00:59:17
Yes.
00:59:18
For, uh, commercial real estate.
00:59:20
And the fact that if people start working from home, those investments are going to tank.
00:59:25
And so they kind of all are working together to make sure the people continue to work in these, uh, these commercial real estate buildings so that they can all make sure they continue to make money off of their investments in commercial real estate.
00:59:37
Yeah.
00:59:38
Oh, like that massive sales force building in downtown San Francisco, you know, that would empty out.
00:59:43
That's not probably worked too much anymore.
00:59:45
Yeah.
00:59:46
I'm working closely with a company that was looking at a work to return to work mandate.
00:59:52
And then actually figured out where everybody had moved to over the three years of the pandemic, considering we, we, we're asking people to move again.
00:59:59
And that's not reasonable and be, we only need half the office.
01:00:02
So why have any of the office, right?
01:00:05
This has to bypass the executive suite and go directly to the stockholders because you can present to the stockholders, the shareholders.
01:00:13
What is it that you want from us?
01:00:15
Are you looking for butts and seats?
01:00:17
Or are you looking for productivity?
01:00:18
Because if you're going to eliminate everyone who doesn't want to be a butt in a seat you are guaranteeing that you're going to lose your most competent talent.
01:00:26
And that's going to affect your bottom line.
01:00:29
So what, what exactly do you want?
01:00:31
What are you hoping your company will produce?
01:00:34
If you, if you want to produce time sheets, then okay, sure, let's do return to office.
01:00:38
If not, you need to change the questions that you're asking.
01:00:42
Well, you also force managers to be better.
01:00:45
You don't get to manage by looking over people's shoulders by counting heads and seats.
01:00:50
You actually have to engage with your people without interrupting, without impairing their productivity and understand what they're doing.
01:00:56
So in a lot of ways, the remote work made management more effective.
01:01:01
If you weren't effective, you got out of it and that was more effective.
01:01:04
Exactly.
01:01:05
You did figure out how to treat people reasonably.
01:01:07
So do you think that this return to office mandate is doomed that companies like the Washington Post and Tell and Amazon who have said five days a week are going to back down?
01:01:17
They flipped back and forth at least three times already that I can count.
01:01:20
Remember, because back in 2022, they were saying, oh, but return to work is happening.
01:01:25
2023, they backed off 80% of the CEOs that they had asked said, we're re-evaluating it because we realized.
01:01:31
And Robert called it because the best people walk is they have an exact way to work.
01:01:35
And so suddenly you lose a bunch of town and go, oh, and you train, how about flex?
01:01:41
It does look like the trend is towards around three days a week in the office to at home.
01:01:46
Is that viable?
01:01:47
Are employees going to accept that?
01:01:48
Well, it is true.
01:01:49
If you're part of the decision, it's way more acceptable.
01:01:53
I've talked to somewhere they're doing one, but everybody does the same one.
01:01:56
So they shrunk the office down and the aims come in together one day a week and is a lot more hot than me and shared workspaces, but why are you going to the office to be face-to-face with my team?
01:02:09
That's why.
01:02:10
I mean, I'm convinced that this is why AI is as big as it is, even though it's not true AI and the usefulness has not yet been proved.
01:02:17
It's because you've got executives who know that they can scare part of their workforce and saying, well, if you don't want to come back to work, we'll just replace you with AI, which is not going to work.
01:02:28
I mean, there's another good way to direct your business, right?
01:02:31
Like, there's a lot of choices now.
01:02:32
You can wreck your business in many ways.
01:02:36
You can speed run the bankruptcy any way you'd like.
01:02:39
I'm going to annoy all my employees and then I'm going to threaten them and try and replace them with technology as it doesn't work.
01:02:44
Things are going well.
01:02:45
Oh, my God.
01:02:46
Do you think one thing that I haven't really seen is someone talking to the CEO,
01:02:56
whoever it happens to be that's doing these mandates outside of, to be clear, the other CEOs and C-suite who feel the same way, they talk plenty to each other and share,
01:03:06
you know, this is why everybody should return to work.
01:03:09
I would love to hear what it truly is.
01:03:12
Is it paranoia?
01:03:14
They can't possibly be getting work done where they are and I'm wasting money here.
01:03:18
What is the actual thing behind it when you do start to look at the cost-benefit analysis, the loss of talent, that kind of thing?
01:03:28
And I wonder, I posit that part of what gets you into one of those leadership positions in this sort of classic job setup is a certain level of ego,
01:03:46
which some might describe as narcissism.
01:03:52
And when you aren't able to be surrounded by people who you can boss around regularly, I think that starts to have an effect on you.
01:04:00
And I think that-- It's not the CEO there in that situation, Micah.
01:04:04
It's the favorite mid-tier manager.
01:04:06
Middle-tier.
01:04:07
That's right.
01:04:08
Thinking of big-oing.
01:04:09
Is it better to have people in the office or not?
01:04:14
Right.
01:04:15
I'd love it.
01:04:16
Pencil the team.
01:04:17
Pencil the team.
01:04:18
Yep.
01:04:19
Pencil the team.
01:04:20
Pencil how you ask and whose job it is.
01:04:22
You know who's amazing in the office.
01:04:24
You know who wants to be in the office, really?
01:04:26
Me.
01:04:27
Cold-call salespeople.
01:04:28
Oh.
01:04:29
Yeah.
01:04:30
It's a lonely, horrible job.
01:04:31
So they sit together and support each other.
01:04:34
Misery.
01:04:35
It's a personality that can make 100 calls a day and get 99 nose.
01:04:39
It's a different kind of human, not me, but I worked with a bunch of them and they take care of each other.
01:04:44
Salespeople are social.
01:04:46
They're very social.
01:04:47
Yeah.
01:04:48
They're very social.
01:04:49
They need to be around other people, right?
01:04:50
Yeah.
01:04:51
But it's important.
01:04:52
I cannot do that job.
01:04:53
Right.
01:04:54
I feel like I have to put this claim right here because I am arguing for remote work.
01:04:57
And my organization is the biggest return to office organization on the planet and it is 100% hard to do massive from the house, I guess.
01:05:05
Although, you know, actually, your organization probably is looking at ways to do remote service in a variety of ways I would imagine or no.
01:05:16
Well, look, we're still smarting over the fact that they released the printing press.
01:05:20
That's darn luther.
01:05:22
That's darn luther.
01:05:23
That's down there.
01:05:24
Nothing.
01:05:25
It all went downhill from the house.
01:05:26
No, actually, I'm thinking about maybe not the Catholic Church, but certainly a lot of other Christian denominations are very much in support of remote services.
01:05:37
I mean, I think your pastoral duties often need to be in person, but you certainly could do services remotely.
01:05:46
Does the Catholic Church do remote services or is that only Protestant?
01:05:49
We do not.
01:05:50
Yeah.
01:05:51
There's been some interesting tests and theological bubble arguments, but no, everything is still in person.
01:05:59
I feel like I want to have a personal connection.
01:06:03
Yeah, exactly.
01:06:04
No, the base theology is based on personal connection.
01:06:05
You cannot get that personal connection if the person's not in front of you.
01:06:08
Right.
01:06:09
I think there's something to be said for that.
01:06:13
You're watching a very interesting, and I'm probably because of the brilliant people we've got here, a year and episode of this week and tech our traditional kind of look back at the year with Father Robert Balace there,
01:06:26
the digital Jesuit.
01:06:28
Look now, but it's portions, portions of the building seem to be burning down behind you.
01:06:32
Oh, that's your horse.
01:06:33
Or is that just a preview of the happens?
01:06:36
A preview of learning your tricks in the background, so we've got a few heretics, some witches.
01:06:41
No, big.
01:06:42
No, I love your, I love your virtual you log.
01:06:45
It's great to have you.
01:06:46
I miss you so much, Robert.
01:06:47
Your one person I miss returned to office, I would, I would bring you back.
01:06:53
You're going to do the CES thing this year.
01:06:55
Yes.
01:06:56
I am.
01:06:57
I am.
01:06:58
I brought in a bunch of stuff to the show.
01:07:00
There's nowhere to bring it now.
01:07:02
I will make a package for you, Leo.
01:07:03
No, no, no, I don't want that, but I, I take me, we got to figure out a way to do, maybe there on your desk or something, all the, you are going to CES this year.
01:07:12
Oh, yeah, yeah.
01:07:13
No, it's, it's, it's kind of a mecha for me.
01:07:16
My, my CES is going to be cut a little bit short because I'm caring for my parents after surgery, but I'm definitely going to do the first two and a half days, which if you've done CES before,
01:07:26
that's basically all you need to do.
01:07:28
Last two days are killed.
01:07:29
Oh, yeah.
01:07:30
You meant to videopackage.
01:07:32
Oh, that too.
01:07:33
No, I hope.
01:07:34
Oh, yeah.
01:07:35
We do run your video packages.
01:07:36
If you do those, I would love that.
01:07:37
Yeah.
01:07:38
No, but I, I can make a hardware package too.
01:07:40
I mean, I just, oh, oh, you made a video package.
01:07:42
Yeah, yeah.
01:07:43
I'll take your video package.
01:07:44
I just didn't want a bunch of stuff.
01:07:46
I had kind of enough stuff.
01:07:47
I want to get rid of stuff, but I want to hear about stuff.
01:07:51
I want to hear about stuff.
01:07:52
You're giving away e-bikes now.
01:07:53
And you can get an e-bike.
01:07:54
Oh, I know.
01:07:55
We have too many e-bikes actually.
01:07:56
The garage is full.
01:07:58
Anyway, wonderful to have you, Father.
01:07:59
I hope your parents are okay.
01:08:01
And we just, we thank you, prayers and, and, and, and thoughts go on your way.
01:08:06
We love you.
01:08:07
And it's great to see you.
01:08:08
I miss you.
01:08:09
I miss you.
01:08:10
I miss you very much.
01:08:11
One of our newest family members, Rich Campbell, has really jumped in and become a real part of the family on Windows Weekly.
01:08:18
Just love having you on, Richard, especially.
01:08:20
Not, not exclusively, but definitely your brown liquor picks every week.
01:08:24
It seems to be popular.
01:08:25
A very nice substitute for Mary Jo's beer picks.
01:08:29
But I just love, as I said, you're an auto-diadach.
01:08:33
You'd love everything.
01:08:34
You've learned about everything and you, and your information, your history is fantastic.
01:08:38
It's great to have you.
01:08:39
And, you know, actually, all three of you are that way.
01:08:42
Of course, Micah Sargent, who is our, our last remaining host besides me at the Twit Studios.
01:08:49
But you've moved your studios up north.
01:08:52
How is it up there?
01:08:53
You like it?
01:08:54
Yes.
01:08:55
Portland?
01:08:56
Yeah.
01:08:57
Portland.
01:08:58
Yep.
01:08:59
And the weather has been exactly what I like.
01:09:02
Good.
01:09:03
I wish there was a little more snow here.
01:09:05
That's the only thing.
01:09:06
Yeah.
01:09:07
It's very rarely.
01:09:08
Richard, go up to visit Richard.
01:09:09
You can get some snow.
01:09:10
Yeah.
01:09:11
But we keep our snow in the mountains.
01:09:12
There's none of this.
01:09:13
Yeah.
01:09:14
Whistler.
01:09:15
Yeah.
01:09:16
And separately, he's trying to make an argument for Vancouver Washington is like, we've got the real Vancouver up here.
01:09:21
That's right.
01:09:22
There is no.
01:09:23
Washington time, British Columbia, was the British side of the Columbia River?
01:09:26
Oh, interesting.
01:09:27
Huh.
01:09:28
Didn't know.
01:09:29
That makes sense.
01:09:30
Yeah.
01:09:31
Anyway, love having all three of you on.
01:09:32
You're making the show much more interesting than I, than I thought it would be.
01:09:37
It wasn't a bad year.
01:09:39
There was a lot of stuff happen.
01:09:40
A lot.
01:09:41
I mean, and we're in, you know, there's more far more to talk about, Leo, like my goodness.
01:09:45
There is.
01:09:46
And we're getting there with this week in tech for this week.
01:09:51
Let's go to March.
01:09:52
Look at that.
01:09:53
The March of time in March, Apple said, we're not going to do a car after all, 10 billion, at least.
01:10:01
We do, we don't know how much, but estimated as much as $10 billion later, they realized there's no hope.
01:10:08
There's no future.
01:10:09
They tried a lot of different ideas, self-driving, none of it, none of it really worked for them.
01:10:15
And so Apple.
01:10:16
This made me sad.
01:10:17
I don't normally root for Apple, but I was really hoping that they were going to come up in this space.
01:10:21
It's interesting to see what they did, wouldn't it?
01:10:24
Yeah.
01:10:25
Bloomberg said it was because they were trying to outdo Tesla.
01:10:28
I don't know if that's strictly true.
01:10:30
I think it's a very difficult business to get into.
01:10:34
A lot.
01:10:35
In fact, Tesla is facing some headwinds these days.
01:10:38
So I think Apple realized that it's pretty hard to become a metal bender from zero.
01:10:46
Also a low margin business, like why are you going into something like that?
01:10:49
My father.
01:10:50
Yeah.
01:10:51
They make phones.
01:10:52
You're making a bundle.
01:10:53
Right.
01:10:54
I think Apple's very desperate to find the next thing, right?
01:10:58
When you look at what Apple has done for their hit products, they always have at one of the base levels of discussion, how quickly can we move this so that everything is in house?
01:11:09
That's right.
01:11:10
They like to control the Tesla technologies that go into their product.
01:11:14
And I'm sure they were looking at cars and saying that it will never happen.
01:11:17
We will never be able to make all the technologies that need to go into a car.
01:11:21
And it's not worth it to try it.
01:11:22
However, I will say that they spent, based on who you believe, between $10 and $15 billion on their Apple car project.
01:11:32
They could have bought Tesla for that 15 years ago.
01:11:37
The valuation was not great.
01:11:38
In fact, it was in debt.
01:11:40
If they had just done that as it was rumored that they were going to for their, I can't remember.
01:11:44
It was a project titan of one of them.
01:11:46
They were actually considering making a tender offer for Tesla, which was in debt at the time.
01:11:52
Imagine how things would have played out differently.
01:11:54
Yeah.
01:11:55
Probably we still don't have a major electric car.
01:11:57
No.
01:11:58
Yeah.
01:11:59
The Tesla wasn't a great car either.
01:12:01
That's the innovation, the brilliant moments that, and I don't think that's Elon per say, but Elon having the right engineers and pushing them as far as they did, you know, put the electric car actually on the map.
01:12:12
I don't think that would have succeeded.
01:12:14
It's unfortunate with his behavior today to remember how fundamental he changed the electric car.
01:12:23
Yeah.
01:12:24
It's almost a shame because I owned a Model X when it first came out.
01:12:30
I remember going to the factory in Fremont and literally tearing up because I was so moved by his vision of what he wanted to do.
01:12:39
The guy that I follow closely on this that I really appreciate it was Sandy Monroe.
01:12:43
Andy Monroe is an old school car guy and his business is tearing down cars and explaining how they're made across the industry and he did not like the Tesla for the longest time.
01:12:54
But when Sandy Monroe realized the brilliance in the Tesla, he talked about it.
01:13:00
To the point where he's saying to the rest of the industry, if you don't understand how important the heat exchanging system is in here, how his battery menace is like, you'll never succeed.
01:13:10
He doesn't know how to make a car but his infrastructure is unbelievable for the way the car functions.
01:13:18
Those are the best storytellers.
01:13:19
This is an old school car guy who fought Tesla every tooth and nail all the way along.
01:13:24
But when he was profoundly right, he was profoundly right.
01:13:29
And our Tesla also broke away from the dealership model, which was the de facto standard for so many years and really sort of constricted consumer options.
01:13:40
So the fact that he, and that was him, that wasn't a design thing.
01:13:43
That was that was musk fighting for something to do it, right?
01:13:46
Exactly.
01:13:47
And it worked.
01:13:48
He fought the big guys.
01:13:49
He fought the large car manufacturer.
01:13:51
He fought the government and he won.
01:13:53
So he was, he was in folk hero status until he went full culture war.
01:13:58
When he went full culture war, it started being, wait a minute, I thought you would just a tech guy who understood what people wanted.
01:14:05
Now it turns out that you were very fluid sports car into space.
01:14:08
I guess it's very cool.
01:14:11
Let's also remember that in October, he figured out a way to capture a returning Falcon Heavy booster with chopsticks,
01:14:21
which is very impressive.
01:14:24
So credit to somebody, you know, maybe it's, you know, his, his, of course, many, many engineers at SpaceX and many, many engineers at Tesla who actually made it happen.
01:14:35
But catching the vision and the money, it's catching a 25 story building.
01:14:40
It's pretty amazing.
01:14:41
So we're going to say some bad things about Elon, but let's not forget that this guy, for many years,
01:14:52
really was Iron Man.
01:14:53
Yeah.
01:14:54
Right.
01:14:55
He revolutionized space.
01:14:56
He took it from $20,000 a kilo to a little bit to $1,800 a kilo.
01:15:00
That is today.
01:15:01
They flew more rockets than the rest of the world combined last year.
01:15:06
And going forward, they probably are going to be the ones that fly all the rockets, right?
01:15:11
At least whoever can get a Falcon 9 or get, you know, the Chinese are the number two because they fly their own rockets and are trying to land their own rockets too.
01:15:23
What he's done is really set the bar.
01:15:24
You have to do this now, right?
01:15:26
At the moment there's only one, well, one and a half, like starships done at once.
01:15:32
But now they'll be New Glenn, which was supposed to fly the end of this year, but probably won't fly to the next year.
01:15:37
It's interesting that China poses Elon's greatest competition, not just for rockets, but for electric vehicles.
01:15:42
Exactly right.
01:15:44
And I would expect that if there will certainly be, or it seems there will certainly be a large tariff on products from China as much as 60 percent, but there may well even be a ban on electric vehicles from China starting next year,
01:15:59
which is too bad because I think I would buy a $20,000 EV.
01:16:06
Yeah.
01:16:07
A lot of his competitions coming from China, both in space and in cars.
01:16:13
The EV that I kind of want to get my hands on right now, because it was so bad.
01:16:18
And then it actually became decent is the Vietnamese one.
01:16:23
Have you seen that?
01:16:24
No, what's it called?
01:16:25
Do you know?
01:16:26
I can't just put Vietnamese EV, I can Google that.
01:16:31
It was, if it's fast, is that it?
01:16:33
That's right.
01:16:34
It was comically bad when it was first released, like, so bad is a Fisker.
01:16:40
That bad?
01:16:41
No way worse.
01:16:42
I mean, because this, the Fisker was embarrassing.
01:16:43
This could kill you, but within, I like their e-bike.
01:16:49
That's nice.
01:16:50
Yeah, they've really stepped up, they've made the car safer, they're still very affordable, they actually look decently inside.
01:16:57
I would safer from it can kill you, doesn't sound very safe.
01:17:01
Well, I mean, now it's, we'll only kill you on bad day, but, you know, previously it would kill you if you stepped into it.
01:17:07
Speaking of which, what do we think it was 2024, a good year for full self-driving or a bad year for full self-driving?
01:17:15
There have been no good years.
01:17:16
Yeah.
01:17:17
It was a good year in the sense that people finally figured out that there's no such thing and told them about full self-driving or something else.
01:17:24
Yeah.
01:17:25
Yeah.
01:17:26
It was actually this, earlier this year, that Elon announced the Tesla Robo Taxi any day now.
01:17:33
I'm sure.
01:17:34
Yeah.
01:17:35
You know, a Tesla has killed more people than the Ford Pinto.
01:17:37
Yeah.
01:17:38
Later.
01:17:39
But the Ford Pinto was a giant joke.
01:17:41
There are Ford Pintos.
01:17:43
Yeah.
01:17:44
The Cybertruck has been recalled more times than the Ford Pinto.
01:17:51
The Cybertruck almost eased a vehicle.
01:17:54
What is it?
01:17:55
That's a question.
01:17:56
Is it a vehicle or a wheel?
01:17:57
What is it?
01:17:58
No, the Cybertruck is a simp-mobile.
01:18:00
It was the test of loyalty on whether or not you had the appropriate amount of reverence for Elon Musk, because if you did, nothing could go wrong.
01:18:09
All of those posts on Reddit about everything wrong with my Cybertruck, but I still love it.
01:18:13
It doesn't work in the rain, but I love it.
01:18:16
It fell apart in my driveway, but I love it.
01:18:18
It only made it two miles from the dealership, but I still, still the best car I've ever driven.
01:18:22
It kills my dogs, but I love it.
01:18:24
Exactly.
01:18:25
It was some weird Brazil-type stuff going on here.
01:18:29
It was the sip that off my finger, but I love the wheel.
01:18:31
It was the best explanation I've heard, Father, honestly, because it's really brilliant.
01:18:37
Cruise GM got out of the self-driving taxi, the Robo Taxi business this year after investing billions, and, of course, they had partners like Honda who also invested billions.
01:18:47
But Google continues with its Robo Taxi, the Waymo, and in fact, it's expanding.
01:18:55
Why did GM drop out?
01:18:58
Money.
01:18:59
Just too expensive.
01:19:00
Yeah.
01:19:01
They didn't see the ROI.
01:19:02
Yeah.
01:19:03
It's a longer-term investment.
01:19:04
It's like, you want to be positioned, but they thought it'd be sooner than it actually is.
01:19:10
Similarly, we need two or three more years of many billions, and it's like five years or ten years, and they're like, oh, I can't bet that far.
01:19:16
I've got other things to spend on.
01:19:18
What Google gets with Waymo is way more than a sob driving taxi.
01:19:22
And this is so much data collection.
01:19:24
This is the thing that Big Tech has.
01:19:26
It's why you can't beat Apple at music.
01:19:28
They're not trying to make money at music.
01:19:33
These companies make money in other ways, and that somebody can't just come along and say, oh, yeah, I'm going to make money that way as well.
01:19:41
This was the month March that the United States Department of Justice, and 15 states plus the District of Columbia decided to sue Apple for being a monopoly.
01:19:53
That was big.
01:19:55
Now, there are a couple of question marks.
01:19:57
First of all, the lawsuit had its flaws in the way they defined monopoly, because Apple isn't really a monopoly except in its own ecosystem.
01:20:09
So it really was almost a criticism of the ecosystem lock-in, but that would be interesting.
01:20:14
Lock-in, Jason Stone wrote, will be on trial.
01:20:20
But it's also a question whether it will survive an auguration day next year.
01:20:27
There are a lot of, you know, Google's being sued.
01:20:29
In fact, the Department of Justice is at this point trying to figure out what Google already lost, what Google's penalty should be, including selling Chrome or breaking the company up,
01:20:41
Apple probably could just sit back and wait.
01:20:45
I would imagine.
01:20:46
Well, and Google is now in the same place that Microsoft was in at the end of '99, where okay, now the negotiation begins.
01:20:54
Right.
01:20:55
Right.
01:20:56
Now, consent decree has to be drafted.
01:20:57
It's not going away.
01:20:58
You have to make a deal.
01:20:59
I have a deal.
01:21:00
I have to leave you a nylon of Bloomberg, who was a fantastic antitrust reporter on techniques weekly a few times to kind of keep us updated on what was going on with the Google thing.
01:21:13
And basically, not only did she and other antitrust reporters kind of gather together and celebrate a little bit the fact that for the first time in so long,
01:21:24
there was another tech antitrust situation going on.
01:21:27
It's kind of like, oh, we finally have something to pay attention to, but also kind of getting ready for what's going to be a very long drawn out process.
01:21:39
And well, what could be a very long process?
01:21:41
Well, that's a thing.
01:21:42
It may be truncated.
01:21:43
We know.
01:21:44
No.
01:21:45
There's going to be a new attorney general, a few days.
01:21:47
Already hanging out.
01:21:48
Yeah.
01:21:49
No, no, no.
01:21:50
I take that back.
01:21:51
They didn't hang out.
01:21:52
They did a phone call.
01:21:53
Many of the other big tech leaders.
01:21:55
I think Senator Pachai went to Mara Laga, all of them have contributed to the inauguration, which is kind of a nonpartisan way of sending money to the new administration.
01:22:04
Google did file yesterday.
01:22:08
It's a response to the Department of Justice on Friday.
01:22:11
Google proposes actually a day before yesterday, a series of restrictions for three years.
01:22:19
Okay.
01:22:20
That would bar the company from requiring device manufacturers, browsers and wireless carrier licensees to distribute it their AI.
01:22:30
What a concession, right?
01:22:35
On the other hand, Department of Justice says, no, we're going to make you sell chrome.
01:22:38
So we'll be, they'll be a hearing on this in April.
01:22:42
Judge Metta will have to decide the hearings are in April, expected to release his decision by August.
01:22:49
I guess this isn't something a new administration could change.
01:22:52
The trial's over.
01:22:53
They lost.
01:22:54
No, but definitely the remediation could be the enforcement.
01:22:57
The DOJ could back off, could say, you know, or they could just be encouraged.
01:23:03
Just like, I will never get around to having that meeting.
01:23:04
Yeah.
01:23:05
Exactly.
01:23:06
I mean, there is a little bit of poetic justice, because if you wind the clock back 25 years, it was Google that was really sticking it to Microsoft for the antitrust on browsers.
01:23:15
And they were the driving force to make Microsoft include that a little bit.
01:23:19
There was no Google in 1998 when the DOJ sued Microsoft, but there are those who made the case that the consent decree that Microsoft made with the Department of Justice made way for companies like Google.
01:23:31
Exactly.
01:23:32
When we got to browser choice, right?
01:23:34
That was it.
01:23:35
That was the whole thing.
01:23:36
That was the EU.
01:23:37
That pushed you off.
01:23:38
I need to have a way to choose a browser rather than downloading one 50 seconds after I've finished installation.
01:23:42
I think there's no-- Audrey, be clear here, Internet Explorer was an essential part of Windows.
01:23:49
You could not be-- You can't take it out.
01:23:51
Bill Gates said, we can't take it out.
01:23:53
Yeah, no, it's-- And then they did a demonstration version without it.
01:23:57
And it broke.
01:23:58
It didn't work.
01:23:59
And see, we told you we couldn't take it out.
01:24:01
Well, I mean, yeah.
01:24:02
Things break when you leave critical components out for a demo.
01:24:05
I mean, that's just kind of how that works.
01:24:08
Let's see.
01:24:09
Back in March, the beginning of a story that really, they're an-- it was interesting when I was doing this.
01:24:14
I noticed there were a number of stories that kind of broke in the spring and then got worse and worse and worse.
01:24:22
One was the Microsoft hack exchange problem with Microsoft's executive emails being-- And then bit by bit, Microsoft said more and more about it.
01:24:33
It seemed like it got worse and worse through the year.
01:24:36
I don't know if we've heard the last of it, maybe more to come on that one.
01:24:41
It was-- Yeah.
01:24:43
I think we're done.
01:24:44
I think the feds have gotten involved.
01:24:47
The subtext of a lot of the statements they made around there, this being a state actor and so forth is like, there's some three-letter entities involved now.
01:24:54
Yes.
01:24:55
Don't want anybody talking about anything.
01:24:57
That's-- I've definitely been pushing into those teams to say, what can we say?
01:25:02
And to the point where folks who said, "Not only can I not talk to you, I have to report that I told you no."
01:25:07
And that is an intelligence agency behavior.
01:25:11
Well, this was also in the spring of this year when the US accused Chinese hackers of targeting critical infrastructure.
01:25:19
This is a story from the New York Times has published in March of 2024.
01:25:25
Then we found out that actually Chinese agents were not only in our grid, but they were in our phone system listening on phone calls at the highest level in Washington,
01:25:35
D.C.
01:25:36
and the Trump campaign.
01:25:39
In fact, at one point, later in the year, as it all came out, it turned out that intelligence agencies called this attack Salt Typhoon and said it might be the worst hack in our nation's history.
01:25:56
You wouldn't have known that in March when you've read the first inklings of this.
01:26:02
Senator Warner, chairman of the U.S.
01:26:05
Senate Intelligence Committee, as Mark Warner said, my hair's on fire when he heard about all of the threats in our communications infrastructure.
01:26:19
I mean, I would bring up as someone who's done the shows and stuff on breaches.
01:26:23
It does take weeks to even understand the scope of a breach.
01:26:27
Yeah.
01:26:28
They may not have known in March when it was first talked about.
01:26:31
And I think another important side of this is, especially when you're dealing with government entities and intelligence related stuff, they won't talk unless they have to.
01:26:39
Right.
01:26:40
So I might see this six month lag because it's actually press doing freedom of information requests that force the story out.
01:26:49
So they make the initial release because they have to.
01:26:52
They have to make a thing, but they nothing more than the FOI's go out.
01:26:56
It did get worse and worse and worse as the year went by.
01:27:00
At one point, the intelligence, they were saying, and the phone companies were saying, "We can't fix it."
01:27:07
The intelligence agencies last month started demanding, "You got to fix this."
01:27:13
All the major U.S.
01:27:14
carriers, including AT&T Verizon and T-Mobile, were hacked.
01:27:19
Mark Warner says the hackers are still inside the U.S.
01:27:22
system and there is no obvious way to get them out that doesn't involve physically replacing old equipment.
01:27:28
And that's the real problem, is that SS7, the signaling system they use has been hacked for years, that the equipment has been hacked for years.
01:27:37
This requires a reinvention of our telecommunications system at this point.
01:27:41
Well, what it requires is the giant pile of money.
01:27:44
Yeah.
01:27:45
It's not a hack.
01:27:46
It's not a hack.
01:27:47
And really what the Pelcos are saying has got to government is, if you want to fix this, pay up.
01:27:50
Give us billions and we'll replace all of this equipment at once.
01:27:53
Yeah.
01:27:54
Can you clarify what you mean by that, Father Robert?
01:27:56
Our traditional way of understanding a hacker breach is that a bad actor has penetrated the defenses, the firewall of your network and has been able to exfiltrate data.
01:28:05
So you can probably, through forensic investigation, look at when the breach started, what they got and when it ended, and then you can clean the system.
01:28:14
The problem is this is so pervasive and it's been running for so many years.
01:28:17
There is no breach.
01:28:18
It's a library.
01:28:19
They're living there.
01:28:20
It's a library.
01:28:21
It's a parasite.
01:28:22
It's their network.
01:28:23
Their movie parasite, they're living in the house.
01:28:27
Yeah.
01:28:28
So how do you clean that?
01:28:29
You can't.
01:28:30
You have to burn the house down and there's no way for us to burn the house down while we're still living in it.
01:28:34
They did allocate another few billion for Rip and Replace just a couple of months ago, a couple of weeks ago actually for the FCC.
01:28:42
And the incoming chairman of the SEC car says he's all in favor of spending billions more to rip and replace all his Chinese equipment.
01:28:50
There's a lot of equipment that I speak.
01:28:51
You can.
01:28:52
It's way too much and not only that, unless you get everything, every last bit that's in the network, you can never assume that it's secure.
01:29:01
So the only way and actually what we're doing over here is we're assuming the network's not secure and we're building out a network within the network.
01:29:08
That's the only way we can be sure that our data is safe.
01:29:11
Now that works for us because we have a relatively limited scope organization that needs secure information.
01:29:17
And if you're looking at the US telecom system, that's not billions, that's trillions of dollars of equipment and labor while you're still trying to use the system.
01:29:28
It's just not feasible.
01:29:29
Well, they're going to have to eat that elephant one, but it's not.
01:29:34
Well, as an example, last month, the consumer financial protection bureau, there you go.
01:29:41
There's the acronym CFPB, told its workers, maybe don't use the cell phone so much.
01:29:47
Because they're not secure.
01:29:50
The FBI told Americans start using encrypted messaging systems.
01:29:56
But then they had a caveat.
01:29:58
They said appropriately managed encrypted messaging systems, ie systems we can subpoena and get the clear text from.
01:30:10
So it was one of those, they're wiretapping us.
01:30:14
That's bad, but we want to be able to wiretape you.
01:30:16
That's good.
01:30:17
And the truth is, all of this started 20 years ago with Kalea, the Law Enforcement Act that provided digital wiretaps, the FBI said we've got to have wiretaps in these digital phone systems.
01:30:29
Congress agreed and it turns out those are the backdoors that the Chinese are using.
01:30:36
So what goes around comes around.
01:30:39
We did it to ourselves.
01:30:40
We did it to ourselves and now we're telling, now the FBI is saying, but using encrypted messaging as long as we can get into it, it's appropriate.
01:30:49
Which is not signal, by the way, or any other good end to end encrypted system.
01:30:56
Don't use RCS.
01:30:58
Anyway, you're watching, I'm trying not to be indignant.
01:31:06
We're celebrating the end of 2024 and the beginning of a brand new year on this week in Tech.
01:31:13
We also are celebrating several thousand new members to our club and we welcome you all.
01:31:19
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01:31:21
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01:31:25
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01:31:29
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01:31:32
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01:31:33
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01:31:39
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01:33:01
But I am happy to say unexpectedly, a lot of the advertisers who were ghosting us decided right at the end of the month.
01:33:10
Okay, we're going to get some ads, we guess we're going to need some ads.
01:33:15
That's good news.
01:33:16
That's good news.
01:33:17
We're continuing on with our stuff.
01:33:21
Continuing on with the look back at the year 2024, another story that we didn't find that we found out about in March,
01:33:32
but ended up developing through the year, AT&T in March sent out a notice to all its customers.
01:33:40
We need to reset your passcode.
01:33:44
What?
01:33:45
Yeah, just don't worry about it, just reset your passcode.
01:33:48
Well, it turns out by the end of the year, AT&T said, yeah, criminals stole the phone records of nearly all our customers,
01:33:59
nearly all of our customers.
01:34:01
The pin notice was just the tip of the iceberg.
01:34:06
So if you are an AT&T customer, you should know that the stolen data contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers, AT&T records of calls and text messages,
01:34:17
the metadata and not the content for a six month period between May 2022 and October 2022.
01:34:26
Don't we have a law about timely disclosure?
01:34:29
Yeah.
01:34:30
I don't understand.
01:34:31
I think companies are saying, well, we told you what we knew when we knew it.
01:34:36
Yeah.
01:34:37
Yeah.
01:34:38
Well, it takes time to fully understand the scope of a problem, right?
01:34:41
You do have to bring in a team.
01:34:42
It takes a lot of analysis to really put a picture around it.
01:34:45
And while you're doing that, you're assembling your PR crisis team.
01:34:50
It's pretty embarrassing, isn't it?
01:34:52
Yeah.
01:34:53
But if you handle it correctly, it goes away quickly, right?
01:34:57
The reality is that breaches have very low consequences to most companies, if they use the experts as a group of folks that are making a living, handling this disclosure, putting them out there in a way that they fully disclose their compliance and the new story dies within a couple of months or so.
01:35:12
Actually, I think the biggest breach of the year was national public data, a data broker that had information pretty much on everybody.
01:35:23
And pretty much all of it was ex-filterated, including, by the way, social security numbers.
01:35:30
Because we found out, it's not illegal to collect and sell people's social security numbers.
01:35:38
We found that out because the FCC announced just a couple of weeks ago, they're thinking about making it illegal.
01:35:45
We're thinking about that.
01:35:47
What do you think?
01:35:50
So the national public data breach, it's 2.7 billion data records.
01:35:56
A lot of them are duplicates because otherwise, it would be everybody in the world.
01:36:02
But it did include, this was in August, social security numbers.
01:36:07
I looked, I found my social security number, so to Steve Gibson, national public data went out of business.
01:36:18
I put that in air quotes because I think all it is changed their name.
01:36:21
But the problem really is that there are many, many data brokers and there is no consequence for being a data broker.
01:36:30
Or as you said, Richard, really, for having a breach, they just changed their name and get on with it.
01:36:36
So Ashley Madison is still in business and there's a good example of all of the data approved that their entire business model is a lie.
01:36:43
Who would trust Ashley Madison after that?
01:36:46
Well, yeah, if your data is going to get leaked and you're not actually talking to a person.
01:36:51
There's no women.
01:36:52
It's all, they're all bots.
01:36:53
Still going.
01:36:54
Still going.
01:36:55
I mean, that's Palantir's business model, and they're employed by the US government.
01:37:00
Which part of it is their business model?
01:37:02
I just clarify.
01:37:03
Yeah.
01:37:04
Data collection.
01:37:05
Okay.
01:37:06
It's not about FEM bots.
01:37:08
It's not.
01:37:10
They're not in the FEM bots.
01:37:11
Why are you stuck on FEM bots?
01:37:18
Their business model is selling data to the government that our government couldn't gather on us.
01:37:24
Exactly why there's no law against it.
01:37:27
Yeah.
01:37:28
There's no law against it because that's the easiest way for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to get the information about us.
01:37:39
Now it's up to them.
01:37:40
Ultimately, you have a Congress that passes those laws.
01:37:43
I've heard we have a Congress.
01:37:45
I don't know when it rarely does.
01:37:46
I don't know what they're up to these days.
01:37:50
They're nervously starting at Twitter these days.
01:37:52
Absolutely.
01:37:53
You are.
01:37:54
You won Musks Account.
01:37:56
One of the big debates this year was, should kids be allowed to have cell phones in schools?
01:38:04
No.
01:38:05
I think not.
01:38:06
And more and more schools are banning it.
01:38:08
California passed a law, this story from April.
01:38:12
California passed a law saying schools can may order kids to leave their phones at the door.
01:38:20
But some of this comes along with the moral panic over cell phones making kids crazy.
01:38:30
And I mean, like literally mentally ill.
01:38:33
Is it?
01:38:34
Yeah.
01:38:35
It's not actually a moral panic.
01:38:36
It's a bunch of empirical data.
01:38:37
And it's correlation, not causation.
01:38:39
Yeah.
01:38:40
And the problem.
01:38:41
The thing that you're seeing with the schools do remove the phones is that the kids change their socialization strategies and actually tend to use their phones less.
01:38:48
Yeah.
01:38:49
Really?
01:38:50
So the empirical data so far has shown that not just getting them out of the bubble on the routine basis helps because then they realize they're in a bubble in the first place.
01:38:59
Right.
01:39:01
As a former teacher, you know, pre-2000, that I cannot imagine teaching again with those devices in my classroom.
01:39:12
It just, their attention would be so much more divided even than it was back then.
01:39:17
And parents push back because they want to be able to reach their kids.
01:39:20
Plus with this happens several times during school shootings, this is when kids are able to reach their parents and say we got a problem.
01:39:29
But I think that has a different solution that's not related to the phone, but one wants to have a problem.
01:39:34
But only one country has that problem, Audrey.
01:39:40
Or as the onion says, the one country that says we can't do anything about it, it keeps happening.
01:39:46
Yeah.
01:39:47
The school shootings have raised parents' anxieties from Wall Street Journal in April as a mother of three.
01:39:51
I'm certainly worried.
01:39:52
Well, I think it's probably, I mean, what's the harm of saying to the kid is they go into the classroom, put your phone in the rack, turn it off and put it in the rack.
01:40:02
I think that's the right thing to do, absolutely.
01:40:04
I was in a high school classroom last week doing the day of tech careers and things.
01:40:11
And that's exactly what they did.
01:40:13
They kids, those are high school students, 15 to 17, they all have phones.
01:40:18
And as they came into the room, they all put them in a rack.
01:40:22
And then there's the next step beyond that, because if you buy into that, maybe the next thing you're going to say is we should ban social media for kids.
01:40:32
New York passed a bill to ban very loosely to find addictive social media algorithms for kids.
01:40:42
It's not really clear how they're going to enforce this.
01:40:47
Australia passed something even more draconian, kids under 16 are not allowed to be on social media.
01:40:54
They're also unclear on how it's going to be enforced.
01:40:57
Part of the problem is that when someone under 16 has an incident, it gets traced back to social media, the social media company gets heavily fine, right?
01:41:06
That terrifies them, of course, but the issue is how do you identify, how do you, but how do you identify the age of a user with that?
01:41:15
Yeah, well, that's going to be their problem.
01:41:18
That's what that's what the Australian, I think it's your problem.
01:41:22
You figure it out.
01:41:23
They have a year and a half to figure a year and a month now to figure it out.
01:41:28
The New York, they've been largely complying with copper, which was 13 and under, right?
01:41:34
So, well, where do you draw the line, though, because if what is the extent of the social media company's responsibility, if I put in a prompt that says, are you over 13,
01:41:45
yes, what is your birthday and the kid lies, will the social media company still be held responsible?
01:41:51
Well, that's what copper has had to do.
01:41:53
Facial recognition.
01:41:54
Yeah, exactly.
01:41:55
Copper has been widely ignored by, you know, I mean, kids just lie.
01:41:59
Yeah.
01:42:00
Parents often lie.
01:42:01
Yeah.
01:42:02
And I think the Indians are going to make the right play, which is just when an incident happens, we're going to come at you and it's going to cost you a lot of money.
01:42:11
That's one thing.
01:42:12
They're on the side of freedom.
01:42:13
I mean, I believe that's a good default to have to say, look, this is something that we can't legislate because if you start legislating, what you believe is unhealthy, whatever, what else goes on the list, video games, maybe video games should be on the list.
01:42:24
I've been satanic panicking about it for generations, but I think the way that we can explain it to people is we're in the middle of an epidemic right now.
01:42:35
The rules have to change.
01:42:36
The rules are at least for now.
01:42:38
We have to use a different set of rules because we are so deep in it that's the only way to pull ourselves out.
01:42:43
We all know that social media is having a terrible effect on the development of children.
01:42:47
We know that's not a rumor that we have empirical studies that show it affects the way that kids think, not for the better.
01:42:56
So maybe people said that about violent video games, father, they said about books, they said about TV.
01:43:02
They said that, but we've actually got people who did clinical scans of children who were using social media and they found that the development of different parts of the brain changed.
01:43:15
So it's not, oh, I think there's something wrong here, it's, let me show you what's wrong.
01:43:20
I mean, let me show you why it's not good that this part of the brain is underdeveloped.
01:43:24
Let me show you why the part of the brain that deals with interpersonal relationships being much smaller than it is in a person pre-social media is a bad thing for society as a whole.
01:43:34
This is the debate that did rage during 2024, started by Jonathan Hates book saying there's a social, there's a social media caused epidemic among kids.
01:43:45
There are a number of experts in the field, which Jonathan Hates is not.
01:43:48
That's true.
01:43:49
Who debate his findings?
01:43:52
In fact, here's Candace Audgers, who in fact does study this.
01:43:57
Her piece in nature was a review of Jonathan Hates book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
01:44:06
She says correlation does not equal causation.
01:44:09
It seems, it's an easy thing to say, well, I see all the cell phones in the kids' hands.
01:44:13
It must be causing this problem, but she says hundreds of researchers have searched for the kinds of large effects suggested by Hate.
01:44:22
Our efforts have produced a mix of no small and mixed associations, most data are correlative.
01:44:28
Some associations over time are found they suggest not that social media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.
01:44:42
In other words, it's not the cause.
01:44:44
It's a symptom.
01:44:46
Her problem with the prescription that Jonathan Hates comes up with is it doesn't solve the problem.
01:44:54
It solves the symptom and we're not really addressing the roots of the problem.
01:44:59
She says, these are not just our data, in my opinion, several mental analyses and systemic reviews converge on the same message and analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the rollout of social media globally.
01:45:16
This is the debate.
01:45:17
You and I are opposite ends of the spectrum on this rubber.
01:45:20
Well, I mean, again, normally I'm on your side, I'm just saying empirically from what I've seen from being in the classroom, what I've seen as an adult,
01:45:31
social media is not a good thing for someone who doesn't at least have some of their life figured out.
01:45:37
If you're not at least developed enough to do critical analysis of what information you're receiving, it's a terrible place and that's not just a child thing.
01:45:45
That's also an adult thing.
01:45:47
The counter argument is that for many kids, this is their social life, especially for marginalized kids who are gay or transgender.
01:45:54
This is their only opportunity to learn and find a community that accepts them.
01:46:01
This is true.
01:46:02
Okay.
01:46:03
I absolutely agree with that.
01:46:05
That is one of the great things that social media has allowed.
01:46:08
In fact, I would even go before that.
01:46:10
That's one of the things that the internet has allowed.
01:46:13
This idea of a great interconnected network.
01:46:16
However, this then becomes a greater good argument.
01:46:21
Yes, there are edge cases, but are the edge cases worth what we're seeing in the development of generation X, the millennial generation generation.
01:46:31
I don't think that an outright plan is the answer.
01:46:33
The idea is how do we get to moderation?
01:46:35
What I like about the school thing is it's an interruption in the addiction poke.
01:46:40
Yeah.
01:46:41
I have no problem.
01:46:42
Yeah, I agree with you.
01:46:44
No problem with saying no cell phones in class.
01:46:46
That's obvious, right?
01:46:48
I used to be on the board of a high school, local high school, had a one-to-one program the early days where you give every student matriculating gets a laptop.
01:46:58
And teachers learned you have to say, close the laptops.
01:47:02
You can't use the laptop while we're talking in class.
01:47:07
And moderation has to be taught.
01:47:09
It has to be taught.
01:47:10
I think that's the problem with a band is that you're going to have a kid who until the age of 16 had no access to this and suddenly he's going to have unlimited access to it.
01:47:20
But we also limit access to alcohol and we limit access to driving like there is a minimal capable function level before you can take responsibility for such a device.
01:47:32
That's reasonable.
01:47:34
To finish Ajore's piece, researchers, she says there are unfortunately no simple answers.
01:47:40
The onset and development of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors.
01:47:48
Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the last 20 years in the US.
01:47:54
Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination in racism, sexism, and sexual abuse.
01:48:01
The opioid epidemic, economic hardships, social isolation, and I will add to this the isolation of the COVID pandemic, which sent a lot of kids home from school for several years.
01:48:12
And really for a lot of kids in that age group, retarded their social development.
01:48:19
So there's a lot of reasons and I think you focus on banning social media.
01:48:23
You maybe are not considering the wide spectrum of things.
01:48:28
On the other hand, I agree with you, both of you, Richard and Robert, that there are appropriate things you can do.
01:48:36
I just think the entire, the ban of the entire thing to kids under 16 is...
01:48:42
I'm grateful for the Australians to do the experiment down there.
01:48:44
Let's see what happens.
01:48:46
Let's see what happens down there.
01:48:47
People data for the rest of us.
01:48:49
Yeah.
01:48:50
I mean, everyone was saying the same thing with when Australia banned guns, said this will never work.
01:48:54
It's hasn't been proven that there's a causal...
01:48:56
It did work, didn't it?
01:48:57
It worked.
01:48:58
That's true.
01:48:59
The Tasmanian massacre, they had a huge gun bag, buy back, they banned guns and it worked.
01:49:06
You're watching this week in tech, our year end edition with three of my favorite people.
01:49:12
We do this every year.
01:49:13
We try to bring in our...
01:49:14
No, I know.
01:49:15
Who is that, Robert?
01:49:16
We bring in our regulars and have a great time talking about what happened in the year past.
01:49:22
Next week is the best of episode, clips from the whole year.
01:49:26
And then we will reconvene with a brand new episode of this week in tech on January 5th.
01:49:32
All the shows are going to have best ups for this week because this is a Christmas week, of course, and that will continue through New Year's Day and I think we'll get back onto our regular schedule with Twit on January 5th.
01:49:43
I don't know.
01:49:44
Are you doing a tech news weekly on January 2nd, Micah?
01:49:46
No.
01:49:47
It'll be...
01:49:48
No, it'll be the week.
01:49:49
So the first new show of the New Year will be this show in two weeks.
01:49:54
So I hope you've saved up some old shows.
01:49:59
And if I get really lonely, I might get on the streams and do something.
01:50:04
I don't know.
01:50:05
There will be clips on the show.
01:50:06
You know what?
01:50:07
2025 is going to be awesome.
01:50:08
Wait, everything is going to be cool.
01:50:09
You're right.
01:50:10
It's going to be wonderful, okay?
01:50:11
This January 2nd is...
01:50:12
Hold that as long as we can.
01:50:13
So tech news weekly will be the first show back in January 2nd.
01:50:15
And Benito said there's going to be some club shows.
01:50:17
What are the club shows?
01:50:18
And the club shows hands-on windows.
01:50:19
We'll have a January 2nd episode.
01:50:20
I'm not sure if Michael's hands-on Mac.
01:50:22
Oh, never mind.
01:50:23
So you guys are getting back to work early.
01:50:26
Thank you.
01:50:27
I appreciate that.
01:50:28
Oh, on we go.
01:50:31
Let's see.
01:50:32
We're only to April.
01:50:36
Holy cow.
01:50:37
Okay.
01:50:38
No, but we're going to go...
01:50:39
Oh, oh.
01:50:40
Here's one of my favorite things.
01:50:41
In May, did you watch OpenAI's Reveal of GPT-40 with the Scarlett Johansson voice built in.
01:50:51
Her.
01:50:52
Her.
01:50:53
Who tweeted that out?
01:50:55
Wasn't it a Sam Altman actually just tweeted the word heard just to make it very obvious?
01:50:59
That turns out that might have been a mistake.
01:51:02
Scarlett Johansson was shocked and angered.
01:51:05
I'm shocked and angered, she said.
01:51:07
Well, when she heard OpenAI's voice.
01:51:09
She's actually competent too.
01:51:11
Yeah.
01:51:12
Woman well-equipped to defend her brand and good honor.
01:51:15
Well, in fact, I think her Disney lawsuit over box office receipts when she does that.
01:51:20
That was the one where you knew this.
01:51:21
She got it going on.
01:51:22
Yeah.
01:51:23
She was at the time and I think probably still is the highest paid actress in motion pictures and certainly has a lot of clout in Hollywood.
01:51:31
She said, last September 2023, I received an offer from Sam Altman who wanted to hire me to voice the current chat GPT-40 system.
01:51:43
He said he felt my voice would be comforting to people after much consideration and for personal reasons I declined the offer.
01:51:50
Now I have to say it did sound like her but it sounded like other people too.
01:51:55
Anyway, I'm sad because I liked it but it's gone.
01:51:59
There are other voices.
01:52:01
There are other voices.
01:52:03
I found myself rarely using the voice interaction.
01:52:06
I used it a lot at first.
01:52:07
It was fun, different, but now I just type.
01:52:12
This was a good year for AI in general though, despite Sam Altman's over-the-top proclamations and you know, AGI is just around the corner and soon comfortable.
01:52:22
Yeah, he said that early in the year and then he also said in his AI, his weird AI manifesto that you shouldn't worry about making a living because universal basic income is going to take care of everybody.
01:52:36
Yeah.
01:52:37
The productivity improvements of AI would make it possible for everybody not to work.
01:52:42
Another kind of mechanism going on here is coral.
01:52:45
Do you live in where you must not know the price of anything that you really believe that that's going to happen?
01:52:52
Yeah.
01:52:53
Billion, you're a billionaire and you get indifferent to a lot of reality.
01:52:55
Yes.
01:52:56
Benito opened my eyes.
01:52:57
What does a banana cost anyway?
01:52:58
$10?
01:52:59
$10.
01:53:00
Eggs.
01:53:01
They're $100 each.
01:53:02
How do we live?
01:53:05
You opened my eyes though, Benito, because you said something I thought was really important.
01:53:09
We don't make music for the end product.
01:53:12
We make music because we enjoy making music.
01:53:17
We don't let AI take away all the things we enjoy so that we can what sit on our ass and collect universal basic income.
01:53:26
We're going to always make music.
01:53:28
There will always be musicians.
01:53:30
Yeah, even if musicians never make another cent from today on, people will still make music.
01:53:34
Of course.
01:53:35
And we've seen it happen before with chess.
01:53:37
I remember when Deep Blue beat the world champion and it was everybody saying, well, that's it for chess.
01:53:44
It's beatable.
01:53:45
And in fact, the computer you put on your phone these days can beat grandmasters.
01:53:50
I mean, it's really good.
01:53:53
Still play chess.
01:53:54
Love playing chess because we love playing chess.
01:53:58
It didn't stop our interest in creation.
01:54:02
Yeah, everywhere they've tested universal basic income.
01:54:05
People don't only do one of two things.
01:54:08
They either start their own business or they go get more education.
01:54:13
In both kind of to make more money, right, or because they work to do things that matter.
01:54:17
We've got to work.
01:54:18
We like to work.
01:54:19
Yeah.
01:54:20
We want to make a difference.
01:54:21
We don't want to flip burgers.
01:54:22
I admit that, but we like to work.
01:54:25
Actually, when I worked at McDonald's in high school, I liked flipping burgers.
01:54:29
I was very proud to be on the grill.
01:54:31
That was like, I made it.
01:54:33
I was on the washing floor and washing toilets, right?
01:54:35
Yeah.
01:54:36
See, the shake machine, you start on the shake machine, but that's not.
01:54:40
That was the last time I ever ordered a shake.
01:54:42
When I saw what was in there when I was cleaning that thing out, I was like, yeah, that was this.
01:54:47
Sorry.
01:54:48
So it McDonald's, anyway, you move from cashier to shakes to fries.
01:54:53
And then if you didn't scald yourself with oil, then you got to move to the grill.
01:54:58
I never got to the grill.
01:54:59
Yeah, my career cut short before I reached the pinnacle.
01:55:04
That's a pinnacle.
01:55:05
And I loved it.
01:55:06
I loved working at McDonald's because one of the things they said is always be busy.
01:55:09
There's always a surface to wipe.
01:55:11
You're always doing, people like doing stuff.
01:55:15
We like working.
01:55:16
We don't take it away from us.
01:55:19
Anyway, I don't think we're a CAGI, but more and more we saw this year, AI doing some amazing things.
01:55:27
There's notebook LN from Google, AI can make podcasts.
01:55:30
Yeah.
01:55:31
Well, that was a lot of automated voices sound a lot like me.
01:55:35
It was eerie, yes, but it was the pauses and the voice clearing and the little vocal ticks that really sold that as, I mean,
01:55:46
it's still not incredibly realistic when you started to listen to what they were saying, but yeah, but just going past your ear, you would think that somebody was listening to a podcast.
01:55:56
I wanted to say the thing that stuck out to me in terms of AI this year didn't come until I think last week, maybe two weeks ago, I have been having a whole heck of a lot of fun using Gemini's new research tool where you basically can set it on a task and what it does is it creates a research plan where it will go out and look at a bunch of different websites to gather information and then after it's gathered that information,
01:56:25
present research to you.
01:56:27
So I had just a, I wanted to see how it would work and so I said, help me create the best gluten free sugar cookie recipe for making Christmas cookies that I can cut out.
01:56:43
So I said, then it said, okay, you're going to want something that's gluten free.
01:56:48
You're going to want something where the cookies will hold their shape.
01:56:51
You want something that, you know, that tastes good, that can receive icing, that I'll go look at all these sites, it went and visited like 25, 30 different recipe sites and read everything that was there and combine that together to provide not only a recipe,
01:57:08
but also tips that people in the comments had, tips that were part of the recipe that said, here's how you do it just right.
01:57:15
Here's what you should do before, here's where there were pitfalls and that to me was, was very cool where I'm not just getting this, you know, huge glob of information that it's pulling from,
01:57:28
it's from its training set, but that's a little more specific, but does something that I as a human could do over the course of the next, you know, five hours in,
01:57:38
I think it was, you know, 10 minutes later that it had that feeling.
01:57:41
I think more and more, you're, we're hearing people with stories, not that particular story, but each person has another story like that where they go, well,
01:57:51
yeah, AI's dumb, but boy, I did this thing was so cool, sometimes it's a programmer, Steve Gibson got very excited about chat GPT knowing 86, X86 assembly language.
01:58:03
Yeah, the coding side with the GitHub Copilot and it's like has been the kind of win area.
01:58:09
Yeah.
01:58:10
But it's not, I don't think it's the only one.
01:58:11
I think, you know, have you seen, they just released YouTube, but we've seen a number of movie clip generators and they've gotten better and better and better.
01:58:22
Robert, you seem skeptical.
01:58:24
You're all using AI the way that I like to use it, which is to enhance the content that I create, enhance the work that I do.
01:58:31
There is a subset that is extremely profitable and that is using AI to boost all the worst things about content pandering.
01:58:42
And you see them on YouTube right now where they are taking all the best buzzwords, they're taking all of the words that they know that the algorithm is looking for and they are generating content around it very quickly,
01:58:53
very cheaply, but with no care for whether or not the information that they're passing along is true.
01:59:00
And I have seen what that's been doing, especially in older communities that I work with in Nevada, where they're stuck on YouTube all day watching video after video that has been custom tailored for them.
01:59:12
That contains not an ayoda of real information.
01:59:15
It's pink slime.
01:59:17
It's pink slime.
01:59:18
Humans do that.
01:59:19
I remember, this goes back, I first, my eyes were opened with Kevin Rose's dig, which was a really cool thing.
01:59:27
But once people figured out the algorithm, they started gaming it and it killed it.
01:59:33
And humans will do that.
01:59:34
It's killed Google search by gaming the algorithm.
01:59:37
It's killing YouTube because, and I don't blame AI for this.
01:59:41
I blame humans for this.
01:59:42
They always want to game the algorithm.
01:59:45
Well, yeah, as long as the algorithm is the way to profitability, let's face it, as consumers of YouTube, we're actually the product,
01:59:55
not the customer.
01:59:56
The customer is the advertiser.
01:59:58
Right.
01:59:59
So as long as we're in that trap, there's going to be a mechanism for manipulating an advertising revenue, and it'll destroy YouTube, and it's up to YouTube to protect it.
02:00:10
If you want to keep us as the product, they'll find a way to feed the right thing.
02:00:16
YouTube's had multiple ad poccalipses because they weren't responsible with their algorithm.
02:00:20
And the advertiser's yank out, because they realize their ad money's being wasted.
02:00:26
So this is the problem with AI, I think, in general, is that it's being advertised, it's being marketed to everybody as whole cloth creation.
02:00:34
Make something out of nothing, and that's not really how, what you guys were to use it for is the actual way to, as a supplement, as like a-- AI is best when mixed with a human.
02:00:45
Yeah, but see that will never be profitable, I don't think, like that side of it will never be profitable.
02:00:50
Well, what's profitable is that we will buy these AI facilities so that we can mix it with humans, right?
02:00:57
So that it can be an assistant or a helper or-- I mean, that's why recall has its problem.
02:01:01
It's co-pilot-3 if you're using Visual Studio Code or-- Well, this is the other part of the story.
02:01:09
In July, Google admitted, you know, AI's costing us a lot in emissions.
02:01:15
Their emissions jumped 50% over five years.
02:01:19
It's not sustainable.
02:01:20
It's the new AI started to burn the world.
02:01:23
They're saying we can still reach net zero by 2030, but now I'm-- there's a lot of question whether that's possible.
02:01:31
No, it's going to take longer, but I think the-- the interesting side of this is the push towards these tech companies are not going to make their own electricity, because the grid can't keep up with their demand, which is the other problem,
02:01:42
right?
02:01:43
Yeah, that was the other story.
02:01:44
Amazon building a nuclear power plant for their modular nukes.
02:01:47
Yeah.
02:01:48
So, I wrote Microsoft Restoring Through Mile Island, because it's a cheaper way to make electricity for AI.
02:01:56
Go ahead.
02:01:57
You're an expert on this, Rich.
02:01:58
Well, I ended up being-- I had been asked to write the talk for a while.
02:02:01
I did it in August, and then all the tech companies jumped in, and now I'm doing it everywhere.
02:02:06
But the-- I mean, the three-mile-on-one is interesting, because it was shut down in 2019, with an easily another 10 years of life left in it, because it was too expensive to operate compared to natural gas-peaker plants,
02:02:16
to combine cycle natural gas plants, which are all over Pennsylvania.
02:02:21
And so, they shut it off for that.
02:02:23
Microsoft doesn't care.
02:02:24
It's 800 megawatts of electricity, so they'll build a couple of data centers there, and they also promise to sell the access at RAC rate into the rest of Pennsylvania.
02:02:33
So, the state's on board.
02:02:34
Everybody benefits.
02:02:35
Yeah.
02:02:36
It's an asset.
02:02:37
New-scale technologies out of Idaho had basically a certified small modular reactor design just before the pandemic.
02:02:45
So, they'd actually gotten through the regulatory process.
02:02:48
They'd done a lot of really hard work, and they had Nevada and Idaho on board for a four-billion-dollar prototype.
02:02:56
And by the end of the pandemic, it was a nine-billion-dollar prototype, and the state's pulled out.
02:03:01
But that's a drop in the bucket to a Google or an Amazon, so it's entirely likely that these companies will spend the money to be able to build off-grid power, power, not supplied to the grid,
02:03:12
just to their power plants, but also get over the hump of maturing that technology to the point where grid operators will be willing to buy it.
02:03:19
Grid offers never experiment.
02:03:21
Nobody wants experimental power.
02:03:23
They want reliable power.
02:03:25
So, somebody has to pay for it, and typically it's governments, but now you're seeing these tech giants.
02:03:30
So, following the William Gibson dystopic cyber squirrel, where now your Amazon prime comes with 100 kilowatts a month, right?
02:03:39
Like, we're on that path.
02:03:40
But it's been solving their problem of wanting to build more data centers faster than more electricity.
02:03:46
You can come online.
02:03:47
In the Gibson books, the world government is the Koretsu's, the conglomerates, the big companies.
02:03:52
And we seem to be moving in that direction.
02:03:54
In fact, the election is a big story.
02:03:58
The election is a big story because Silicon Valley, and particularly Bitcoin, bros, put a lot of money into the 2024 election,
02:04:10
not just the presidential election, and got many, I think, several hundred represented, pro-Bitcoin representatives elected, got a pro-Bitcoin president elected.
02:04:22
I think we weren't paying close enough attention in July when Trump spoke to the Bitcoin conference and proposed a strategic national crypto stockpile.
02:04:35
He said he wants America to be the number one holder of Bitcoin, and said he'd fire the chief of the SEC Gary Gensler to standing ovation.
02:04:45
He said it three times because they liked it so much.
02:04:48
He is going to fire Gensler and replace him with chairman of the SEC who will be pro-Bitcoin.
02:04:55
In fact, something we'll say, this was the year of Bitcoin, it started the year at $44,000, what over $106,000 a couple of weeks ago is now hovering around $96,000,
02:05:06
I think.
02:05:07
More than doubled its value in one year.
02:05:09
Yeah, I made a lot of money off of that, so thanks for that announcement.
02:05:14
You had Dogecoin, I thought.
02:05:16
I had Dogecoin which I cashed in and then started playing the crypto field.
02:05:20
By the way Doge is doing very well.
02:05:22
Have you made a lot of money on Bitcoin?
02:05:24
So it was roughly cashing in about $8,000 worth of Dogecoin, went through that spell from 2022.
02:05:33
Which by the way, you didn't buy it and make money.
02:05:34
You bought it because it was a meme and you thought it was funny.
02:05:37
It was funny.
02:05:38
Yeah.
02:05:39
But right now with the bump and I just sold last week to let the market calm down, that $8,000 is now worth about $3,000,
02:05:50
$3,000.
02:05:51
What?
02:05:52
Do you have to give it to the church?
02:05:54
I have been breaking off small pieces for missions as we have groups that need cash.
02:05:59
So in that case, it's good.
02:06:01
It's a good thing.
02:06:03
But that's a big improvement from $8,000 to $300,000.
02:06:06
That's 500%.
02:06:07
I mean, that or something.
02:06:09
It was all it was a speculation.
02:06:11
There's nothing there.
02:06:12
That's the problem.
02:06:13
Yeah.
02:06:14
And the other problem, I mean, it's hard enough in the stock market to know when to buy and when to sell.
02:06:18
Timing, you can't do market timing.
02:06:20
But it's even worse with Bitcoin because there's nothing to tie it to.
02:06:24
I lucked out on this last cycle because I sold it 106.
02:06:28
And then a media like a day after I dropped down below 100.
02:06:30
But imagine you're a holder of a lot of Bitcoin and you want a way to unload a whole bunch.
02:06:36
You know what a good way to do it is, invents a government that it needs to hold a balance in there.
02:06:42
That's what, to me, this Bitcoin conference was all about, how can we take our stake and make it more valuable?
02:06:50
What could the government do to make me richer?
02:06:53
And they, by the way, they got their dreams.
02:06:56
Yeah.
02:06:57
They're going to have to spend a whole bunch of US dollars to buy Bitcoin and guess who gets the US dollars.
02:07:02
You know who's making money in crypto right now?
02:07:05
While doing rug pulls, rug pulls are making so much cash.
02:07:08
You mean, like, Hock to a girl?
02:07:10
Hock to a girl?
02:07:11
Jack Doherty did a rug, did several rug pulls actually.
02:07:15
And yeah, they're raking in millions.
02:07:17
You know, if there, if there's any good thing that happened in 2024, it's that NFTs disappeared from the national.
02:07:25
The Overton window slammed shut.
02:07:28
If there's any bad thing, it's that all those NFT grifters moved into crypto.
02:07:33
I mean, it's, it's really the same group, the, the, the, the, and I remember NFT and crypto broses.
02:07:39
I know.
02:07:40
Circle.
02:07:41
So, what else happened this year?
02:07:44
Actually, the good thing the DOJ, everybody agrees, did 10 additional states join the DOJ lawsuit seeking to break up live nation and ticket master.
02:07:54
Woo.
02:07:56
Yeah.
02:07:57
And the crowd goes wild.
02:07:58
There is nobody I've talked to who defended live nation and ticket master.
02:08:06
So, 39 US states and the District of Columbia now join the lawsuit.
02:08:11
Sorry.
02:08:12
He's one of only two true bipartisan movements in this.
02:08:14
True.
02:08:15
There is a trust and daylight savings time.
02:08:18
That's it.
02:08:19
It's only.
02:08:20
You know what?
02:08:21
The president-elect says he's going to get rid of daylight saving time.
02:08:25
I've heard it.
02:08:26
But don't the states decide that, the states decide that though.
02:08:29
California did a, did a stupid thing.
02:08:31
We had a referendum to get rid of standard time to put California on saving time.
02:08:39
That the states cannot do.
02:08:40
That is a federal time zone.
02:08:44
And you can't change your time zone, you know, literally.
02:08:47
So I think we could say, we could, I think we could get rid of daylight.
02:08:51
I think the feds could get rid of daylight.
02:08:53
Certainly on the Pacific.
02:08:54
We started British Columbia and Washington and Oregon, all have laws in the books that says once everyone in the Pacific time zone agrees to change, we'll all change.
02:09:02
Right.
02:09:03
So we were all basically waiting for California to figure themselves out.
02:09:06
The real problem is, the real problem really is, first of all, you guys way up north have a bigger dog in this hunt than we do down here because you're going to, you have your days or what,
02:09:17
five hours or something, you know, we have Leo, electrical light, it's a big thing.
02:09:23
I highly recommend it.
02:09:26
And that's one of the arguments is that you don't want kids to be getting up and going to school in the, in the middle of the night.
02:09:32
Exactly.
02:09:33
Yeah.
02:09:34
They're on the phone.
02:09:35
They can do the middle of the night.
02:09:36
So who cares?
02:09:37
The problem.
02:09:38
And I think a lot of the people say, let's stay with David, David, saving time, say that because they love the summer.
02:09:42
But you're going to get winter.
02:09:43
No matter what you do.
02:09:44
And you're going to get summer too.
02:09:46
So it's off by an hour.
02:09:47
Who cares?
02:09:48
I want to kill.
02:09:49
I want to kill people.
02:09:50
It's terrible.
02:09:51
I want to keep daylight savings, but modify it so that we jump forward and we never jump back.
02:09:57
So every year, we just go.
02:09:58
Just completely nutty to say we should all be on one time zone.
02:10:04
It should be UTC and everybody at the same time.
02:10:07
That's what China does while spanning nine time zones for us.
02:10:11
No, it's not.
02:10:12
That math is not that hard.
02:10:14
Really.
02:10:15
It's really not.
02:10:16
It's changing it.
02:10:17
Well, the real issue here is, it's, oh, it's, oh, dark 15 right now in the universal time zone.
02:10:23
This is the UTC.
02:10:24
Dark up here too.
02:10:25
Yeah.
02:10:26
Yeah.
02:10:27
Let's see.
02:10:30
The Internet Archive got D-dost and lost in court over their ebook lending.
02:10:36
Shame.
02:10:37
That.
02:10:38
Yeah.
02:10:39
Shame.
02:10:40
Yeah, there was that it was, there was two prominent a, no, a draw.
02:10:48
The real argument is publishers hate libraries.
02:10:52
They can't get rid of actual libraries yet.
02:10:56
So, but they're definitely not going to have digital libraries unless you buy the digital books from them, right?
02:11:02
If this is the first time you heard this story, I wanted to explain what the argument was.
02:11:06
Please do.
02:11:07
Yes.
02:11:08
Basically, because the donate button was right there on the page where you could go to the lending library, then the Internet Archive was just trying to make money off of offering these ebooks.
02:11:19
And as Leo has pointed out, no, that's not really what the underlying argument was.
02:11:23
That's just how they took it to court, right?
02:11:25
And the real problem was that the Internet Archive was not buying digital copies for their ebook lending.
02:11:30
They were taking, they were buying regular copies like a library does scanning it and lending it out.
02:11:36
And COVID, they had an emergency lending library where they could do unlimited numbers.
02:11:40
But they reverted back to what other libraries do, which is only as many books as they have bought, could be borrowed.
02:11:48
And they were borrowed for a limited time.
02:11:49
They did everything a library does.
02:11:51
The publishers just said, no, we got you on this one.
02:11:54
And Cory Doctoros talked about this a lot a lot.
02:11:56
The publishers are not acting, and authors interest, they're acting, and the publisher's interest.
02:12:02
Here's a story that was huge, first, to my knowledge, use by a nation state of IEDs,
02:12:13
Israel put explosives in pages that were then sold to Hezbollah and killed nine, actually the number went up after this article from the Wall Street Journal,
02:12:25
2800.
02:12:25
What did argue were they really impromised?
02:12:27
This was very profound.
02:12:28
They weren't exactly impromised, explosive devices, but they won the bid from a head full by creating a company in checker clever, and then manufactured these things with an explosive inside of it.
02:12:42
They did kill some innocent children, and so forth.
02:12:46
Injured a lot of people.
02:12:48
Injured a lot of people, but they probably also did a lot of damage to Hezbollah, and then did it again with the radios.
02:12:56
Yeah, and then they blew up the radios.
02:12:59
This has been a 10-year process, of course, from his career.
02:13:03
Apparently they were complaining the whole time of the battery life wasn't sufficient.
02:13:07
Really?
02:13:08
Were they?
02:13:09
Yeah.
02:13:10
That's because you got a little bit of C4 in there where you're bad.
02:13:12
We're going a little bit.
02:13:13
Yeah, I fix it guys would have found this immediately.
02:13:14
Yeah, tear down.
02:13:15
Yeah, man.
02:13:16
What did he do to tear down?
02:13:17
I don't, I think it's a bad precedent.
02:13:19
Yes.
02:13:20
Yes.
02:13:21
Okay.
02:13:22
Absolutely.
02:13:23
Also not unprecedented, right?
02:13:25
These sorts of things happen during the Cold War.
02:13:28
It's kind of a lash back.
02:13:29
On a onesy-toosy basis, though.
02:13:31
Yeah.
02:13:32
On this scale, that's unprecedented.
02:13:33
Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable.
02:13:35
And odds are, we'll never happen again.
02:13:36
You only get to pull it stunt once.
02:13:40
And nobody's saying anything good about Hezbollah.
02:13:43
I mean, these are terrorists.
02:13:44
Of course.
02:13:45
This is a terrorist group, and these are terrorist leaders.
02:13:47
And arguably have been completely dismantled in this current crisis.
02:13:50
Yeah.
02:13:51
Yeah.
02:13:52
So open AI did have a very good October.
02:13:55
They had the largest VC rays in history, $6.6 billion.
02:14:03
That's a lot of people who believe in AI.
02:14:06
I know.
02:14:07
I think it's a lot of people who believe in making money, Leo.
02:14:09
Oh, making money.
02:14:10
They're in it for the money.
02:14:12
Yeah.
02:14:13
It's a profit thing.
02:14:14
They think there's going to be money there.
02:14:17
I mean, I would argue this is a poisonous amount of money, right?
02:14:20
Like, you don't have a plan for how to spend $6.6 well.
02:14:25
But you've also now committed to making $60 billion with it.
02:14:29
The few people I know in my business who raised money through venture capital, spent it unwisely and then fell apart.
02:14:39
You're right.
02:14:41
Getting a big check is always problematic.
02:14:44
Yeah.
02:14:45
Open AI got $6 billion or got $6 point.
02:14:47
What would I say?
02:14:48
$6.6 billion.
02:14:49
But Elon got $6 billion for Groc, for XAI.
02:14:54
So there is a, what do you call that?
02:14:58
Is it a bubble?
02:15:00
Yeah.
02:15:01
And this is-- Admittedly, it's probably multi-tronched with milestones.
02:15:05
So they didn't get a check for $6.6 billion.
02:15:07
What they got was-- Right.
02:15:09
Burn them on a cash.
02:15:10
Now, you have to reach these milestones as the next tranche cash and so forth.
02:15:13
Like, that's a normal investment pattern over several years.
02:15:17
And if you burn it faster, you do other raises and so forth.
02:15:20
But it's the buyouts that are also toxic.
02:15:23
But the real problem here is if you're not spending the money fast enough, you will get heat to spend the money faster.
02:15:28
The budget.
02:15:29
But do they have to?
02:15:30
Because they know that open AI is the B and Elon Musk's bonnet.
02:15:36
He is the Whipply Scydlash of the-- What is it?
02:15:40
Whipp-- Scydly Whipplash.
02:15:42
Scydly Whipplash.
02:15:43
Scydly Whipplash.
02:15:44
Whipply Scydlash is good.
02:15:45
Yeah.
02:15:46
They're giving six billion now, thinking that in a couple of years, Elon is going to be so upset that he keeps losing to open AI.
02:15:54
He's going to lose the case about them going for power.
02:15:56
He's suing because he doesn't want them to go now.
02:15:58
He's suing.
02:15:59
He's absolutely going to sue.
02:16:00
But at some point, he's just going to say, you know what?
02:16:01
I'm going to give you $60 billion to make you go away and I'm going to buy you out.
02:16:06
And they've made themselves vulnerable to that by having a set of VCs whose goal is to make money on this.
02:16:10
Precisely.
02:16:11
Precisely.
02:16:12
And so everyone's going to buy you an AI out.
02:16:13
And I tell the investors, I'll be the investor, here's your money.
02:16:16
Correct.
02:16:17
Correct.
02:16:18
And they'll take it just like they did with Twitter because they made them an offer they could not refuse.
02:16:23
They knew that their company was never going to make money on its own, not at that scale.
02:16:27
And here's a man who's going to white knight and give them everything that they want.
02:16:31
And all he asks in return is that you kill everything that made the company special in the first place.
02:16:38
Speaking of money for AI, a portrait of British mathematician Alan Turing as the god of artificial intelligence sold at auction for 1.1 million dollars its creator,
02:16:50
a robot named AI that represents a woman with a bob haircut.
02:16:55
There's the painting, but did it have a banana?
02:16:59
No they ate the banana and that was the problem they had to come up with something else.
02:17:03
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
02:17:06
That sold for 1.1 million dollars.
02:17:08
Probably because somebody figured this is going to be the first AI painting.
02:17:15
It's not a bubble.
02:17:17
It's not a bubble.
02:17:18
Oh, was it early on?
02:17:19
Was it early on?
02:17:20
No, early on.
02:17:21
Well, it was August.
02:17:22
That was in November.
02:17:24
November?
02:17:25
Yeah.
02:17:26
Yeah.
02:17:27
So no, no, no, November 8th.
02:17:28
Yeah, right after the election.
02:17:30
I can go online and use any of the AI platforms to make something that looks nice better than that.
02:17:36
I know it really is ugly.
02:17:38
But it was painted by this robot with a bob haircut.
02:17:41
Oh, so it's actually shaped.
02:17:42
So it was basically painted.
02:17:44
That sold a swinton in a costume.
02:17:46
So when we covered this article, I submitted that ADA is the piece of art here, not those things.
02:17:51
Yeah.
02:17:52
I think you're right, but you know that the robot is the art.
02:17:54
That's the art.
02:17:55
But that's not a robot.
02:17:56
No, they only got the painting.
02:17:57
Ah, see, I think they should.
02:17:59
They should be there.
02:18:00
So that answers the questions.
02:18:01
What if someone paid 1.1 million dollars for an NFT?
02:18:04
There you go.
02:18:05
You know what that is.
02:18:06
A few people did.
02:18:07
You know, like the fine arts industry is very much just mind-alongering promotion for the most part.
02:18:13
Yeah, that's true.
02:18:14
That's true.
02:18:15
And even if it's not, tastes are very much dictated by fashion and style.
02:18:20
It's performative.
02:18:21
It's like the Banksy painting that auto-destructed when it was bought.
02:18:24
It became worth more because it auto-destructed.
02:18:27
So.
02:18:28
Who is the artist?
02:18:29
The guy who put the banana in the exhibit or the guy who ate it?
02:18:32
I think the guy who ate it.
02:18:33
The guy who made the sale.
02:18:35
Yeah.
02:18:36
And a car selling a banana.
02:18:38
You're watching our year-end episode, only a few more segments.
02:18:41
We're wrapping up pretty quickly here with Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly, the digital Jesuit himself, Father Robert Ballister.
02:18:48
I liked this.
02:18:49
Did you have anything to do with the Vatican, the digital, the VR Vatican or the VR St.
02:18:54
Peters?
02:18:55
That is so cool.
02:18:57
We do not discuss products, projects like that because you don't want it to make into a fame thing.
02:19:04
But probably this.
02:19:07
So I, of course, last year visited for the first time Vatican City and I was the scale of St.
02:19:14
Peters.
02:19:15
It's hard to imagine.
02:19:18
Of course you should go.
02:19:21
You must go to see the Pietà, go underneath and see the bones of St.
02:19:25
Peter and all of that.
02:19:26
There's so much to see.
02:19:27
But you can do this virtually at Vatican.va.
02:19:31
I think that's...
02:19:32
No, but you can see, I think, are they on display there?
02:19:38
If you go to the Scavi Tour, they are.
02:19:40
If you know the right guy, is that...
02:19:42
No, no, not even the right guy.
02:19:43
If you go to the Scavi Tour, they are.
02:19:46
Huh?
02:19:47
Well, you have...
02:19:48
There is a...
02:19:49
It's in this as well.
02:19:50
You've got to punch a hole at the bottom here.
02:19:52
So the...
02:19:53
Yeah.
02:19:54
So the...
02:19:55
No, there...
02:19:56
You have...
02:19:57
It's another room.
02:19:58
I love where the...it's presumed the body of St.
02:20:01
Peter was buried.
02:20:02
Yes.
02:20:03
Is that right?
02:20:04
Correct.
02:20:05
So, wow.
02:20:06
Wow.
02:20:07
So you can't...
02:20:08
You've got to get...
02:20:09
You've got to get...
02:20:10
It joins your way down there.
02:20:11
No, you don't have to get...
02:20:12
You can go there directly.
02:20:13
It's called...
02:20:14
It's called...
02:20:15
It's called the Scavi Tour.
02:20:16
The Scavi Tour goes all the way down to the Necropolis.
02:20:18
I want to go down...
02:20:19
How do I...
02:20:20
Scavi Tour?
02:20:21
Is that what I need?
02:20:22
I've got to do the Scavi Tour.
02:20:24
SCAVI.
02:20:25
I take 120 people a day, spread over up to six different lines.
02:20:30
If I tell them I know you, will it help?
02:20:32
Yes.
02:20:33
Okay.
02:20:34
I'm going back.
02:20:35
I loved Rome.
02:20:36
I loved Rome.
02:20:37
It was so amazing.
02:20:38
I told you, Leo, I have a place for you to stay.
02:20:41
I know.
02:20:42
You can broadcast from here.
02:20:43
I could do this show.
02:20:44
You're trying to promote right now.
02:20:45
Yeah.
02:20:46
True.
02:20:47
At least then I had a little argument.
02:20:48
You are in Vatican City, right?
02:20:49
You're not in Rome.
02:20:51
No, no, no.
02:20:52
So we are on the Vatican.
02:20:53
We are in the Vatican.
02:20:54
We are not in Vatican City.
02:20:56
So Vatican City is a very specific part of the Vatican.
02:21:00
So when you come into our property, you are now in zona extraterritoriali or you're leaving Italy.
02:21:06
Right.
02:21:07
But you're not in Vatican City until you pass the wall.
02:21:10
That's extremely confusing.
02:21:11
What is it?
02:21:12
What are you in?
02:21:13
Do you have a name?
02:21:14
Like the zone of extraterritori?
02:21:15
The zone of extraterritori?
02:21:16
The zone of extraterritori.
02:21:17
The zone of extraterritori.
02:21:18
The zone of extraterritori.
02:21:19
Yeah.
02:21:20
Wow.
02:21:21
This is Vatican property.
02:21:22
So we are on Vatican land.
02:21:23
Yeah.
02:21:24
But you're not in the city.
02:21:25
But you're not in the Vatican.
02:21:26
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02:23:14
And they said when she sings, put a ring on it.
02:23:16
Everybody put the ring on your finger, turn it on and wave it.
02:23:20
It's so cool.
02:23:21
But as you know, if you put a ring under your seat that could switch on, people are not going to wait until the halftime show and a destined child is to put a ring on it anyway.
02:23:33
Well, because we're all cats.
02:23:35
And cats will just run.
02:23:36
Exactly.
02:23:37
And shiny.
02:23:39
Ooh.
02:23:41
You wanted to talk about-- we were talking about the kind of distant sentives, the perverse incentives of algorithms and streaming on YouTube.
02:23:51
You wanted to talk a little bit about something.
02:23:54
I did not know about Robert.
02:23:57
Oh, the newson streamers.
02:23:59
Yeah.
02:24:00
Newson streamers.
02:24:01
I didn't even know such a thing existed.
02:24:03
It's a category.
02:24:04
Speaking of Jake Paul.
02:24:05
A lot of people say it started with Paul.
02:24:07
Because he had a house.
02:24:09
He said a mattress on fire.
02:24:10
Yeah, and he popularized it.
02:24:13
And then he made it profitable.
02:24:15
Now, you remember many years back when Logan Paul did that the walk through the suicide woods in Japan.
02:24:22
Oh.
02:24:23
And that's how people come.
02:24:24
It's so much trouble.
02:24:25
Yeah.
02:24:26
Yeah, wait.
02:24:27
This is a little bit of cringe.
02:24:28
Well, the new generation have really turned it up a notch.
02:24:30
You've got people like Johnny Somali.
02:24:32
Jack Ford.
02:24:33
You know, it's funny.
02:24:34
I searched for newson streamers and Johnny Somali's name is the first thing that came up.
02:24:38
Because he single-handedly is going to get put into law things that we've all wanted for a long time.
02:24:44
Which is you've got countries who are finally saying we have to criminalize this behavior.
02:24:49
So he's a troll.
02:24:50
Basically.
02:24:51
He's a troll.
02:24:52
He will, like all the newson streamers, he goes out and he tries to make people react.
02:24:56
Like Jack Doherty would get his bodyguard to stand behind him and he would go and push his elbow his way into a crowd and try to start a fight and then have his bodyguard beat the guy up.
02:25:05
Oh, that's terrible.
02:25:06
And that was content.
02:25:07
That was content.
02:25:08
And yeah, he got fined, but he made way more.
02:25:12
And that's the perverse incentive is that if you can get enough links, clicks, and views, you make millions.
02:25:19
And so it's worth it.
02:25:20
It's not worth the profitable.
02:25:21
It's not worth the profitable.
02:25:22
It's not worth the profitable.
02:25:23
Somali has been banished from Twitch.
02:25:25
He's been banned from Kick.
02:25:27
As of May of this year.
02:25:30
He's done it on Twitch.
02:25:32
Twitch Kick and Rumble.
02:25:35
As a tourist, he's said offensive things in the subway and so forth.
02:25:40
Is that it?
02:25:41
Well, no.
02:25:42
So he did it in Israel where he went there.
02:25:44
Yeah.
02:25:45
And he basically, he just finds the worst thing that you can possibly say in public.
02:25:49
Right.
02:25:50
To try to get people to react.
02:25:51
So you can imagine what he did in Israel.
02:25:52
In Japan, he went into the subway and he started screaming.
02:25:55
He was Shima Nagasaki.
02:25:56
We're going to do Nagasaki again.
02:25:58
To try to get a reaction.
02:25:59
He was charged, but then they basically said the guy's an idiot, so they kicked him out of the country.
02:26:06
Then, because there was no ramifications, legal ramifications for him, he went to South Korea.
02:26:11
So he's hitting up all of his money.
02:26:13
This is basically Borat.
02:26:14
But it took a light.
02:26:15
Yeah.
02:26:16
But not funny.
02:26:17
Borat didn't Sasha Baron Cohen invent this?
02:26:20
I would say Tom Green invented this.
02:26:22
Tom Green and the Jackass people invented this.
02:26:25
But I mean, these people, they would do it IRL.
02:26:28
They do it on a stream because they need to prove that this is not fake.
02:26:31
Well, in South Korea, he met his match.
02:26:33
Because he's now facing 10 years, 10 years is the current high watermark.
02:26:39
But as they add charges, it could go up to 60 years in prison in Korea.
02:26:44
Because he made terrorist threats.
02:26:46
He played the national anthem of North Korea on the subway.
02:26:49
Which is illegal.
02:26:50
You cannot do that.
02:26:51
He interfered with business.
02:26:52
And the big one, the one that's probably going to get him in prison for a decade is using broadcasting AI deepfakes as illegal in South Korea.
02:27:01
And he did it to prove that he had another streamer, a popular South Korean streamer, was his girlfriend.
02:27:07
So he single-handedly is getting several different law-making bodies around the world to look at how they can criminalize news and streaming.
02:27:15
Wow.
02:27:16
And if we end 2024 doing that, I will actually be very happy because that's a light of hope.
02:27:22
I'm also in reading-- That's like the South Koreans are playing this where they've trapped him in South Korea.
02:27:26
Yeah.
02:27:27
They won't let him leave.
02:27:28
So they've charged him and they've taken away his passport.
02:27:31
So he cannot leave South Korea.
02:27:33
And if you know South Korea, there is no way he can escape by land.
02:27:38
But they haven't arrested him and incarcerated him.
02:27:41
So he is responsible for paying for his own room and board, his own protection.
02:27:46
And because he came in on a tourist visit, these are-- he cannot work.
02:27:50
Doesn't he realize some punishment here, too, though?
02:27:53
Yes.
02:27:54
Because that's who created this incentive.
02:27:57
Here's something I don't want to encourage.
02:28:00
A jury acquitted a man, this is from our discord, of shooting a YouTube prankster.
02:28:07
Mm-hmm.
02:28:08
He said, oh, no.
02:28:10
They deserved it.
02:28:11
He acted in self-defense.
02:28:14
There was one just two days ago, Charles Smith, who he has made a ton of money.
02:28:20
$10,000 a shot by doing things like walking in the back door of the McDonald's and throwing a dead pigeon into the deep fry.
02:28:27
Oh, my God.
02:28:28
But two days ago, he did a prank where he went around a grocery store and sprayed bug killer into produce and on sandwiches and on food.
02:28:38
So now he's arrested.
02:28:40
He's been arrested finally.
02:28:41
They're going to look back at everything that he's done and that they're realizing, oh, we need a law to be able to charge people for stuff for crimes that they documented.
02:28:50
Yep, that they themselves documented.
02:28:53
Wait, but back in the day, like if you put this on TV, it would have been like the TV network that got sued.
02:28:57
So like, YouTube should be paying something for YouTube.
02:29:00
I agree.
02:29:01
There's some illegal YouTube long ago.
02:29:03
Right?
02:29:04
That's the thing, twitch the stuff on them.
02:29:06
They rumble, they've all kicked them off.
02:29:08
Yeah, it's somewhere.
02:29:09
So where is he still doing stuff now?
02:29:11
Right.
02:29:12
No, he has to do, he has to do alternate accounts.
02:29:14
But remember, he wasn't kicked off until South Korea arrested him.
02:29:19
So all of those companies were perfectly fine with the views he would bring in as long as there wasn't a legal ramification for them.
02:29:28
They're just selling ads.
02:29:30
Yep.
02:29:31
Now here's a prank I can support.
02:29:34
Info Wars got sold to the onion.
02:29:37
It was a good day, wasn't it?
02:29:39
It was a good day.
02:29:40
Unfortunately, the bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale and has sent it back to the bankruptcy advocate who will figure out if this is an appropriate sale, because they took less money,
02:29:51
less cash to sell it to the people.
02:29:55
The people who were taking less cash wanted it.
02:29:58
We're the victims of Sandy Hook families.
02:30:00
Yeah.
02:30:01
They said it's good.
02:30:02
We don't want Info Wars back in Alex Jones' hands.
02:30:05
We'd much prefer it to be in a set tire.
02:30:07
Yeah, their mission wasn't to make money.
02:30:09
Their mission was to make sure this doesn't happen again.
02:30:11
Right.
02:30:12
And what the onion play was doing was going to turn Info Wars into a site to make this the farce that it actually is.
02:30:19
All right.
02:30:20
The three biggest stories of the year, we haven't even touched them yet.
02:30:23
We're going to take a break when we come back.
02:30:25
The three biggest stories of the year.
02:30:26
And then get some sad music, Benito, because I have an immemorium segment.
02:30:32
But not just people who passed, but websites that are no longer with us.
02:30:37
Coming up, the year and addition of this week in tech.
02:30:41
Can I ask a favor?
02:30:42
We have a survey.
02:30:43
We do this every year.
02:30:44
We started a little earlier this year.
02:30:46
But you have to, I think the middle of January, it's at twit.tv/survey.
02:30:52
It's our one and only way every year of finding out a little bit more about you.
02:30:57
It helps us sell ads.
02:30:59
We don't reveal any personal information.
02:31:01
Obviously it's all an aggregate.
02:31:03
But it shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes.
02:31:05
And it really does help us out.
02:31:06
So if you will, twit.tv/survey.
02:31:09
Oh, oh, and one more thing, I've just learned from our engineer, Patrick Delahanti, that we will be,
02:31:19
so I don't know if you remember.
02:31:21
In 2014 and 2015, we did a New Year's, 24-hour New Year's event.
02:31:26
The second one, ending the year 2014, beginning of the year 2015, was a benefit for UNICEF.
02:31:33
We raised a little, quite a bit of money.
02:31:35
And it had some very fun things, including me getting a tattoo and my head shaved.
02:31:40
We, Patrick has decided to re-broadcast that in a way.
02:31:45
He is going to post to our Blue Sky account each hour, the link, because we've divided it up and chunked it up into the hour by hour on YouTube.
02:31:55
So if you are interested in celebrating New Year's with us, or the us that was celebrating New Year's in 2014, 24 hours in New Year's,
02:32:07
follow the Blue Sky Twitter account at twitonbluesky.social.
02:32:12
That'll be fun.
02:32:13
Thank you, Patrick.
02:32:15
So I said the three biggest stories of the year, we didn't even touch them, Intel.
02:32:19
Number one, Pat Gelsinger departed just a couple of weeks ago.
02:32:24
The CEO of Intel was brought in to save the company.
02:32:27
His plan to save the company apparently wasn't fast enough, or sufficient for the board.
02:32:32
They've fired him.
02:32:34
Now what's next for Intel?
02:32:36
We spend a lot of time talking about this.
02:32:38
This is one of Paul's rants on Windows Weekly.
02:32:41
Richard, can you summarize, is Intel out of business?
02:32:44
What's next?
02:32:45
Yeah, we've been pulled back all forth on this affair a bit.
02:32:47
But Intel has been a vertically integrated company from the very beginning, because largely they invented making CPUs.
02:32:55
And so vertical integration serves when you're innovating to both be the design and the fabricator.
02:33:00
But as the innovation is tapered off and it's become far more commodity, the goal is to be efficient and Intel has not been efficient.
02:33:09
The bigger argument here is they never got into the extreme ultraviolet devices.
02:33:15
Although there's a strong case for why they didn't, because they missed mobile.
02:33:18
If you're only going to make a few hundred million chips a year, it didn't make sense to build these machines that you really need to make a billion chips a year.
02:33:26
Which makes sense if you're in the mobile space.
02:33:28
Did they?
02:33:29
I mean, this was a technology that TSMC developed a UV.
02:33:32
ESMC did not develop, but it's Dutch.
02:33:34
Oh, it's Dutch.
02:33:35
Okay.
02:33:36
So Intel would have had access to this.
02:33:38
Absolutely.
02:33:39
It could have bought them.
02:33:40
In fact, they were planning on buying them.
02:33:41
But again, they didn't have the production numbers.
02:33:42
It didn't make sense for what it was going to cost because they'd missed mobile.
02:33:48
So strategically, these failures go back at least ten years.
02:33:51
Longer.
02:33:52
Yeah, easily.
02:33:53
They missed a few opportunities there.
02:33:55
The Apple started looking at replacing Intel with their own chips back in 2011, according to TSMC's chairman.
02:34:02
Only if Microsoft took a swing at ARM back in the win eight days for the situation that they couldn't make a viable tablet.
02:34:09
Right.
02:34:10
And then Intel made the atom to try and compensate, which had its limitations.
02:34:13
So you've had an instead of improving their processes and so forth.
02:34:17
What do they do is they use their money to protect their market, which makes them, you know, play monopolistic games and primary games instead.
02:34:25
So you're at a point where with Gail Singer's departure, he's basically told you get a choice.
02:34:30
You can be fired or you can retire.
02:34:32
So he retired.
02:34:33
You're seeing kind of an active board setup.
02:34:35
I think we're going to get a PE firm in there.
02:34:38
And it's going to be sold for parts, which is not a bad outcome.
02:34:41
It's still arguably Intel chips will get better and cheaper because the separation of the design from the fab means you'll get better designs.
02:34:49
And better, more efficient fabrication.
02:34:51
But it'll take a couple of years to figure that out.
02:34:54
And the big challenge here is that they're deeply intertwined with federal government with Department of Defense.
02:35:01
You know, all of those contracts and agreements that they have have to be protected.
02:35:04
So it's going to take a very savvy PE group to navigate through all of the federal requirements to protect things as the US government wants them protected while actually making a more efficient entity in the end.
02:35:17
And briefly, Qualcomm considered a bid for Intel.
02:35:20
And they probably took a look at all of those things and said, "Yeah, never mind."
02:35:23
I disagree, Leo.
02:35:24
I think they made that bid just to let it be known.
02:35:26
There is a possible buyer there.
02:35:28
Right?
02:35:29
And then you always go, "Oh, to put it in play in effect."
02:35:33
Yeah.
02:35:34
And what we saw over the course of this year was all of the...
02:35:37
It was people interested in every part of Intel, which is a great signal to a PE firm.
02:35:43
We can take this part and sell it.
02:35:45
Interesting.
02:35:46
Does AMD survive without Intel?
02:35:49
Absolutely.
02:35:50
Yeah.
02:35:51
And arguably that's very well, because they have always been...
02:35:54
Been more efficient than Intel.
02:35:56
Did they license 686 from Intel?
02:35:58
Well, you know, be clear.
02:36:00
Intel was required to license 686 to AMD.
02:36:04
You can't...
02:36:05
At that time...
02:36:06
It was a friend.
02:36:07
And the EUD insisted there had to be a second supplier.
02:36:10
Right.
02:36:11
And it had to be a different design.
02:36:13
Right?
02:36:14
Right.
02:36:15
The same way that airliners fly with at least two completely disparate chipsets.
02:36:20
Right.
02:36:21
On their computers.
02:36:22
The pilot and co-pilot have a different meal.
02:36:24
Yeah.
02:36:25
All those sorts of games, right, is redundant.
02:36:27
It's on that airplane.
02:36:29
The other of the three big stories that we hadn't had touched early in the year, Congress said, "Tick-tock, you either sell to an American company or you're at a business.
02:36:41
Weirdly, they set the deadline for January 19th, one day before the inauguration of a new presidential administration.
02:36:48
Tick-tock fought it and fought it.
02:36:50
And the latest is that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear their challenge, oral arguments, January 10th, nine days before the mandated sale or closure of Tick-tock.
02:37:06
There were lots of battles back and forth over this.
02:37:09
Lots of disagreement over whether Tick-tock is a threat to the America and its security or one of the best things that ever happened to creators."
02:37:18
Well, you know, the end of this story will come probably next year.
02:37:23
Kathy Gellis, who is, as you know, one of our great lawyers.
02:37:27
She is admitted to the Supreme Court so she can actually write briefs and so forth.
02:37:33
We'll be talking about this after the oral arguments on our show.
02:37:38
What is that, the 15th?
02:37:40
January 15th.
02:37:42
So we'll get the inside story on what she thinks the SCOTUS will do to this.
02:37:48
The final of the three big stories is a breaking story right now.
02:37:53
What the hell's going on with the drones over New Jersey?
02:37:57
Sorry about that.
02:37:58
Sorry.
02:37:59
I had asked the drone father because everybody said we talked about this a couple of weeks ago on Twitter.
02:38:04
You know, Emily Forlini really wanted us to shoot at them and we said no.
02:38:09
She said I didn't mean us, I mean the military.
02:38:12
No one knows what they are and everybody said we should ask the drone father.
02:38:17
The drone father is in the house.
02:38:19
Father Robert, what is it?
02:38:21
What are they?
02:38:22
Are they consumer drones?
02:38:23
Are they military drones?
02:38:24
Are they diesel?
02:38:25
By the last count just from the purchase drones in the United States.
02:38:29
There's over 120 million in the United States.
02:38:34
That's just the ones that you can purchase commercially.
02:38:37
That does not include the quad father.
02:38:39
Sorry.
02:38:40
Jammer B.
02:38:41
Corrects me.
02:38:41
You're not the drone father.
02:38:42
You're the quad.
02:38:43
Because they used to be called quadcopters.
02:38:44
I don't know if anybody even knows that anymore.
02:38:46
Wow, back in the day.
02:38:47
Back in the day.
02:38:48
Back in the day.
02:38:49
So you're saying there's so many drones.
02:38:51
Like I have one right here in a drawer.
02:38:53
Yep.
02:38:54
We don't know where they're coming from.
02:38:56
And we won't know.
02:38:59
And you can't really shoot these things down.
02:39:01
The military is not going to waste a $10 million missile to spread shrapnel all over New Jersey.
02:39:08
That's just not how these work.
02:39:10
And also, people who are saying, well, we have to be able to track them.
02:39:13
We have to do a better job of holding DJI to a camp.
02:39:16
You don't know who made these things.
02:39:18
I can home brew these things with what I've got in this office right now.
02:39:22
So what exactly are you trying to regulate?
02:39:25
What exactly are you trying to prevent?
02:39:28
It's annoying.
02:39:29
Yes.
02:39:30
And I'm sure someone is trolling various population centers.
02:39:35
But really, unless you wanted to clear war on an imaginary enemy, there's no way to solve this.
02:39:42
I think the military's doing the right thing is they are bringing in proper drone tracking hardware.
02:39:47
Right.
02:39:48
No chance that the car-sized drone is a real thing.
02:39:50
That would show up a conventional radar.
02:39:52
But real drones don't show up on radar too small.
02:39:56
But the military, because they are taking drones very seriously, have built equipment to do that.
02:40:00
So Picatinny, which don't only doesn't deal with drones, is now getting the sensor equipment to figure out is there actually something going on there?
02:40:07
Precisely.
02:40:09
And all the-- What's your advice to people who are terrified?
02:40:13
Go inside in the helmet.
02:40:15
Don't look up.
02:40:17
Don't look up.
02:40:18
I think there was a movie by that name, actually.
02:40:20
It's, indeed.
02:40:21
Train your neighborhood crows.
02:40:23
Oh, crows are smart.
02:40:25
They could take those drones.
02:40:27
The old countermeasures that I used when I was at Twitter, they don't work anymore.
02:40:31
I had signal jamming guns that you could try to block out the flight control.
02:40:37
I didn't even know about that.
02:40:38
And the cameras.
02:40:39
You had like a skunk works in the basement, didn't you?
02:40:42
What do you think we did down there?
02:40:44
Why was I there for so many hours?
02:40:47
But those don't work anymore, because a lot of these are now autonomous.
02:40:49
You program in a flight plan and it just follows.
02:40:54
I want you back.
02:40:55
I want a basement.
02:40:56
And I want to put you in it.
02:40:58
Could I keep it from returning home?
02:41:00
No, I guess not, because you just program in the flight path home, too.
02:41:03
You could do that if you wanted the GPS.
02:41:06
But if you jam GPS, I think that's a felony.
02:41:10
You can't do that.
02:41:12
If the military was actually serious about wanting to take these drones down, they would use microwaves.
02:41:17
Yeah.
02:41:18
There you go.
02:41:19
We cooked the electronics on the SCOCO.
02:41:20
The thing would fall out of the sky.
02:41:21
Which is still a risk.
02:41:22
But there's no need for it.
02:41:23
It's going to fall somewhere.
02:41:24
Exactly.
02:41:25
They're not going to.
02:41:26
They're not going to.
02:41:27
If they thought it was an issue.
02:41:28
Remember the balloons?
02:41:29
Was that this year the weather balloon crisis that you met with the Chinese boys?
02:41:36
That was the Chinese balloons.
02:41:37
Was that this year?
02:41:38
I left that out.
02:41:39
It was last year.
02:41:40
OK.
02:41:41
It was the end of last year.
02:41:42
When I heard the story about the drones, I thought of that scene from Independence Day.
02:41:47
It was a fake newscast.
02:41:49
And there's like Los Angelinos are being told not to fire at the aliens.
02:41:53
If this happened over Texas, there'd be a lot of rounds of this.
02:41:57
Yes.
02:41:58
Yes, there would be.
02:41:59
Do not shoot the drones.
02:42:01
Again, I say.
02:42:02
Well, and those are old laws from the 20s.
02:42:05
When early aircraft were shot at by people who didn't understand what they were.
02:42:10
And often aircraft have navigation or communications problems.
02:42:15
And they need to have safe passage to get somewhere to land.
02:42:18
So it's just a really bad practice to shoot at things this guy.
02:42:21
Because those bullets go somewhere.
02:42:23
They come down.
02:42:24
They come down.
02:42:25
Because that must come down.
02:42:27
Now, high powered green lasers.
02:42:29
Those you can't shoot at drones.
02:42:31
But don't.
02:42:32
Please don't.
02:42:33
Because one is not a drone.
02:42:34
And it's incredibly dangerous and illegal.
02:42:36
And it'll hurt people.
02:42:37
They'll hurt a pilot.
02:42:38
They'll do that.
02:42:39
So none of these things are the right thing to do.
02:42:41
It's almost certainly almost no drones at all.
02:42:44
Right?
02:42:45
When you actually analyze the footage and answer being stars and aircraft and lights, it's other things.
02:42:52
Good.
02:42:53
Historical Relaction, which is not unusual when people are as stressed as they are.
02:42:58
Yeah.
02:42:59
It's stress.
02:43:00
That's what it is.
02:43:01
It's stress.
02:43:02
Wouldn't it be amazing if it actually is aliens?
02:43:05
Yeah.
02:43:06
We were waiting to see you guys would shoot us down and you didn't.
02:43:09
So we laughed.
02:43:10
Exactly.
02:43:11
We kept.
02:43:12
There's no intelligent life here.
02:43:14
We're going home.
02:43:15
Yeah.
02:43:16
That might be sadly true.
02:43:19
They took a look at our streamers and said, yeah, we know.
02:43:23
We were good right up until Logan Paul.
02:43:27
Then we're like, we're out of here.
02:43:29
All right.
02:43:30
Let's take one last little time out.
02:43:32
One last pause.
02:43:33
And we will do the sad stuff.
02:43:35
The end of the line segment.
02:43:37
We were watching the end of the year this week in tech with Michael Sargent, Father Robert Ballacere and Richard Campbell.
02:43:47
You know, let me start off with the websites that disappeared and apps that disappeared.
02:43:53
Beeper didn't make it.
02:43:55
Oh.
02:43:56
Beeper.
02:43:57
They tried.
02:43:58
They tried so hard.
02:43:59
You had them on your show.
02:44:00
No.
02:44:01
Beeper didn't make it.
02:44:02
Beeper said, look, we're going to do our best.
02:44:04
We're going to make this work.
02:44:06
The idea was Android users could message iPhone users.
02:44:10
Of course, now you don't have to.
02:44:12
Because Apple made that pause.
02:44:14
Yes, came along.
02:44:15
Never mind any of that.
02:44:16
Never mind any of that.
02:44:17
Beeper.
02:44:18
Thank you, Beeper.
02:44:19
You made it happen.
02:44:20
Another alternative passed away.
02:44:23
Hello.
02:44:24
Which I joined way back in the day.
02:44:26
Hello.co.
02:44:28
The whole idea of hello was a Facebook replacement that was privacy forward.
02:44:32
Nobody wanted it.
02:44:33
I had forgotten about it until I saw the logo.
02:44:35
And I said, oh, I remember this.
02:44:37
Hello.
02:44:38
Hello.
02:44:39
I know.
02:44:40
Yeah.
02:44:41
Japan finally ended the mandatory form submission on floppy disks this year.
02:44:47
That hits me where I live.
02:44:50
Yeah.
02:44:51
Finally, no.
02:44:53
Although, you know, my ex said I have a bunch of family over and I have a CD player.
02:44:58
Do you have a CD player anywhere?
02:45:00
Because I can't play these CDs.
02:45:02
And I thought I did, but I couldn't find it either.
02:45:04
I can't find my floppy drives either.
02:45:06
Japan is saying goodbye to the floppy drive.
02:45:09
Oh, but it was a 3.5.
02:45:11
I mean, if it's not the floppy chamber.
02:45:13
Oh, right.
02:45:14
Yeah.
02:45:15
The five in the quarter were the real chance.
02:45:17
It's not a floppy disk.
02:45:18
That's a save icon.
02:45:19
If you do need a floppy disk, the register.co.com says go to floppydisk.com where you can buy old floppies.
02:45:30
Wow.
02:45:31
Okay.
02:45:32
Look at all these save icons.
02:45:33
Who needs 50 of them?
02:45:35
Yeah.
02:45:36
Somebody, somebody somewhere needs a 100 percent guarantee.
02:45:40
Are you stupid?
02:45:41
Are you stupid?
02:45:42
Is that what this is?
02:45:43
Do you make a heart out of them?
02:45:44
I, I don't know.
02:45:45
I make good notes.
02:45:46
You know, Leo, those things are the reason why I had any sort of money when I was growing up.
02:45:52
You sold floppies for a living?
02:45:54
Well, from dumpster diving near where I lived in the Bay Area was where several disk duplications businesses.
02:46:02
Wow.
02:46:03
And I would go dumpster diving and I would find the rejects.
02:46:05
And the rejects were the ones that couldn't be used in the mass duplication machines.
02:46:09
But they were still fine if you, if you formatted them individually.
02:46:12
So I would get them for free, formatted them and sell them.
02:46:15
You are so funny.
02:46:17
Yeah.
02:46:18
Anybody want a floppy?
02:46:19
You've got your floppy disk.
02:46:20
Yeah.
02:46:21
I got floppy disk.
02:46:22
We got one in a quarter.
02:46:23
We got five and a half.
02:46:24
What do you need?
02:46:25
I got a floppy disk here.
02:46:27
Do you remember I see Q?
02:46:29
No, no.
02:46:30
Oh, no.
02:46:31
You might be too young to remember I see Q.
02:46:32
Oh.
02:46:33
I see Q.
02:46:34
Or 50985.
02:46:35
Yeah.
02:46:36
Do you remember your I see Q number?
02:46:38
You.
02:46:39
Look at that.
02:46:40
I do not remember mine.
02:46:41
I remember my copy of Served Number, but I don't remember.
02:46:43
I see Q was still around in 2024, finally shutting down after 30 years.
02:46:50
Was it really one of the first popular messaging systems, right?
02:46:53
There was probably a group of users who have been using it since the beginning.
02:46:57
That's the ones who are sad.
02:47:01
Yeah.
02:47:02
Yeah.
02:47:03
The I CQ website said it's over.
02:47:04
Go home.
02:47:05
Go home.
02:47:06
I mean, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
02:47:09
Exactly.
02:47:10
I missed the day of instant messaging in clear text because that was fun if you were a network engineer.
02:47:16
You could just see all these conversations going past, floating through the, yeah.
02:47:20
If you had a car thing, this was the year your car thing died.
02:47:24
Actually, there is apparently a brisk after market.
02:47:31
Now people are trying to open source it, figure out a way to keep it alive.
02:47:34
I don't think so.
02:47:35
This is the Spotify gadget that had Spotify to your older car.
02:47:40
They stopped making it in 2022.
02:47:42
They announced they're going to turn the servers off.
02:47:44
They did just December nights.
02:47:46
No, boy.
02:47:47
I hope they open source it somehow.
02:47:50
That would be cool.
02:47:52
All like Robert would find it, take it apart, turn it into a floppy disk inside.
02:47:57
Put a floppy.
02:47:58
Yes.
02:47:59
But unless they're willing to release the code base for it, it's no longer fun to have the backwards engineer everything they did.
02:48:07
A number of websites went away.
02:48:10
Game Informer was shut down after 33 years.
02:48:16
That is legitimately older than me.
02:48:18
Wow.
02:48:19
All right.
02:48:22
That's all it took to get something to happen.
02:48:25
What was it that you got when you did that?
02:48:27
That was the contract code.
02:48:28
That was the...
02:48:29
Yeah.
02:48:30
That was it.
02:48:31
Very nice.
02:48:32
But originally it was just one game that it worked for, and then other people said, oh, this would be funny if we put this in as an easter egg, right?
02:48:37
Yeah.
02:48:38
What was the original up-down?
02:48:39
These are actually for developers.
02:48:40
No, it's developers.
02:48:41
Up-up and down-down.
02:48:42
Left-right, left-right, A, B, B, A, select-start.
02:48:44
That was developers to get into the back end so they could...
02:48:47
Well, that one.
02:48:48
Well, that's awesome.
02:48:49
So that playtester could get all the way to the end of the game, right?
02:48:52
Yeah.
02:48:53
Because that game...
02:48:54
When you were a playtester, you feel like you were a playtester and you're...
02:48:56
No, I wasn't a playtester, but I did make marketing stuff for 2K at one point.
02:49:00
Oh.
02:49:01
All right.
02:49:02
It's in the game.
02:49:03
Yeah.
02:49:04
No, that's EA, sorry.
02:49:05
Oh, sorry.
02:49:07
So confusing.
02:49:08
NASA is shutting down NASA TV on cable to focus on something called NASA Plus because why not?
02:49:17
Everybody's got a plus these days.
02:49:18
It's a plus.
02:49:19
Yeah.
02:49:20
The Netflix.
02:49:21
I think people didn't actually watch it on cable, probably right?
02:49:23
I watched it.
02:49:24
Did you?
02:49:25
When I was in the States.
02:49:26
It was cool.
02:49:27
It was free.
02:49:28
It was high quality.
02:49:29
Yeah, but some of the stuff was just like, "Can we get to the point?"
02:49:32
Yeah.
02:49:33
Everything moves so fast.
02:49:34
Well, does it hurt it?
02:49:35
Yeah, I preferred it when they just did the live streams of like the cameras on the ISS.
02:49:39
I didn't...
02:49:40
The commentary stuff was...
02:49:41
That's...
02:49:42
I started to hate the SpaceX broadcast because they got these gen-exers in and...
02:49:45
Yeah.
02:49:46
Yeah.
02:49:47
Just show me the rocket.
02:49:48
That's all I care about, really.
02:49:49
You're no Walter Cronkite.
02:49:50
That's all I can say.
02:49:51
Yeah.
02:49:52
I'm not.
02:49:53
They usually have a tech feed, which is just the actual...
02:49:57
That's what you want.
02:49:58
The sea span of space ships.
02:50:00
Yeah.
02:50:01
That's what I want.
02:50:02
That's what I want.
02:50:03
So I go to the tech feed.
02:50:04
Is it online?
02:50:05
Yep.
02:50:06
It's online.
02:50:07
Well, it was on YouTube.
02:50:08
Now it's only on X.
02:50:09
I don't know why.
02:50:10
Oh, wait.
02:50:11
You know why.
02:50:13
Efficiency.
02:50:14
Okay.
02:50:15
You know what it is?
02:50:16
I haven't had it crashing stream lately.
02:50:18
So let's put it.
02:50:21
Let's just see what happens.
02:50:25
Maybe Netflix should put the football games on X.
02:50:28
There you go.
02:50:29
A non-tech said goodbye this year.
02:50:32
This was a sad one.
02:50:34
A non-left a long time ago to go work for Apple, I think.
02:50:38
But the website was the place to go for tech information.
02:50:42
What I want to know about the Snapdragon, that's where I went to the non-tech website.
02:50:47
27 years of hard core tech information.
02:50:53
Tom's hardware is going to continue.
02:50:55
They're all part of the future.
02:50:56
You were part of future at Imore, right?
02:50:59
You have some memories.
02:51:00
We're coming to the end.
02:51:01
Oh, yeah.
02:51:02
I remember tech vlogging.
02:51:03
Yeah.
02:51:04
Imore also went away this year.
02:51:06
It did.
02:51:07
Yeah.
02:51:08
Rest in peace, Imore.
02:51:09
Yeah.
02:51:10
For the same reason.
02:51:11
HoloLens discontinued this year, after the army gave up on them.
02:51:18
Who needed it?
02:51:19
Is there going to be a HoloLens three-riched?
02:51:23
I think he's dies.
02:51:26
Yeah.
02:51:27
Is he alive?
02:51:28
I think he's just like, I'm not even thinking.
02:51:30
Somebody pinch him.
02:51:31
He's dead.
02:51:32
He's dead.
02:51:33
Yeah.
02:51:34
He has stopped responding.
02:51:35
Is there going to be a HoloLens?
02:51:39
He's coming rich, he's sure to do it right.
02:51:43
Hey, Richard.
02:51:44
Yeah.
02:51:45
Will there be a HoloLens three?
02:51:47
I'll see.
02:51:48
Oh, you crashed it.
02:51:49
No, let's go.
02:51:50
I'll give you his answer.
02:51:53
No.
02:51:54
No.
02:51:55
No.
02:51:56
And finally, oh, we already did GM calling quits on cruise, so $50 billion down the tubes.
02:52:04
Yeah.
02:52:05
Who needs it?
02:52:06
Now, this is the sad part.
02:52:07
The people who passed away in 2024, some of the greats, we're at that period now in technology where it's been around long enough that the early pioneers are,
02:52:21
you know, passing away.
02:52:23
David Conn, who wrote the book on crypto, I loved his book, The Codebreakers.
02:52:30
What I forgot was it came out in 1967, but it was the Bible for crypto for many, many years.
02:52:38
The story of cryptography, great, great book, highly recommend The Codebreakers still, passed away in January at the age of 94.
02:52:48
One thing you'll notice most of these guys are pretty old.
02:52:50
I guess there's a correlation.
02:52:52
Are we still, are we, are we ever getting Richard back?
02:52:55
I think it's, no, no, I sure hope so.
02:52:58
Do you think we have, if we lost the West Coast?
02:53:00
Oh, my God.
02:53:01
Wait, hey, we lost Starlink.
02:53:04
If he was a Starlink heal on might have been pissed that we were badgering.
02:53:09
I actually have a Starlink dish on the roof here because Comcast is less than perfect, shall we say.
02:53:16
We lost Bob Hyle this year, who was one of our great show hosts.
02:53:20
I've been kind of waiting, you know, I probably the first to go, but Bob, Bob passed away at the age of 83.
02:53:27
Wonderful fellow.
02:53:28
God, I love Bob.
02:53:29
Silent key for one of the greats he did, Ham Nation for us, introduced me and many others to amateur radio, made the microphones that we still use to this day.
02:53:41
We're all, we're all using his sound.
02:53:43
Yep.
02:53:44
Yep.
02:53:45
He was a legend in rock and roll sound, created the quadrophonic sound for the who, created and some may say this was a good thing, some say a bad thing.
02:53:55
The mouth synthesizer for Peter Frampton, I love that thing.
02:54:03
I walk.
02:54:04
He invented it.
02:54:05
He tells the story.
02:54:06
It's a wonderful story that Peter Frampton's wife came to him and said, "I need to keep pay to something for Christmas."
02:54:11
And Bob said, "Well, I've got.
02:54:12
I can figure out."
02:54:13
He attached a tube to a microphone, to a mic guitar, and then you put it in your mouth and the guitar sound would go into the tube and then come back into the microphone and...
02:54:26
Have you seen the TikTok of the guy who does that for like, he does comedy with the synthesizer?
02:54:32
Oh, wow.
02:54:33
Whatever you call it, mouth synthesizer.
02:54:34
He's gone to Talkbox.
02:54:35
Talkbox, that's the name, that's right.
02:54:37
Joe Walsh used it to great effect, and apparently, T-Pain is also used it.
02:54:41
T-Pain?
02:54:42
Wow.
02:54:43
I don't know if Bob did that.
02:54:44
Did Bob get royalties from T-Pain?
02:54:46
Because he probably not.
02:54:47
He should have.
02:54:48
No, that's auto tune.
02:54:49
That's a different tool.
02:54:50
No, I've seen T-Pain use one of those before.
02:54:52
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, he doesn't regularly do it, but yeah, I've seen, you know.
02:54:57
Bob was also a great theater organist.
02:54:59
In fact, that's kind of how he got his start and sound.
02:55:04
Anyway, wonderful fellow amateur radio operator from the age of 13 K-9 E-I-D silent key.
02:55:10
I had to go run and restart the router, you know, network, internet connection.
02:55:14
Are they crank based these days, or do you have a steam?
02:55:17
I had a poll cable.
02:55:18
OK, picked a couple of good chunks and tweaked the choke and off it go.
02:55:24
Science fiction author, Werner Vinji, passed away this year.
02:55:29
What a great writer.
02:55:32
And a visionary who really, for men, he was kind of the science fiction writer, science fiction writer.
02:55:41
Absolutely beloved.
02:55:42
Cory Doctor had some great stories about him when she shared on Twitter, PhD in mathematics.
02:55:47
So he knew what he was talking about.
02:55:50
He had a great view on what a post-signularity society would look like.
02:55:54
Yes.
02:55:55
In fact, I think he was the guy who coined the phrase, the term singularity, as I remember.
02:56:00
He was the one who said it first.
02:56:05
But don't blame him for that.
02:56:07
Daniel Kahneman passed away, a psychology of economics professor who wrote one of the most important books in this field, thinking fast and slow.
02:56:17
Nobel Prize winner passed away at the age of 90.
02:56:21
He was a Nobel in economic science.
02:56:25
And his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, is incredible, highly recommended.
02:56:29
Really important to understanding how our thought processes work.
02:56:38
This name, you may not recognize, but you will recognize his product, Mahbod, Madagam, Madadam, who created genius, later rap genius,
02:56:49
passed away way too early at the age of 41.
02:56:52
He had a brain tumor.
02:56:54
But rap genius was the place to go to find out what the hell those singers are singing.
02:56:59
What are they saying?
02:57:02
The man who named the Higgs boson, well, I don't think he named it, but it was named after him.
02:57:08
He proposed the Higgs boson.
02:57:10
Peter Higgs passed away at the age of 94, showed how particles bind the universe.
02:57:16
The Higgs boson was completely theoretical until it was discovered at where was it?
02:57:22
Sirn?
02:57:23
I remember when George Hadron-Collider was built to find the Higgs boson.
02:57:26
And they did.
02:57:27
They found it.
02:57:28
And people said, don't find it.
02:57:29
It'll be the end of the world.
02:57:30
They thought it was going to create a micro-black hole into which the entire planet would fall.
02:57:35
It did create our crisis, though, in cosmology.
02:57:38
Which actually, you know what?
02:57:39
It might have.
02:57:40
And we're all...
02:57:41
We just don't know.
02:57:42
We don't know.
02:57:43
We're in it.
02:57:44
No, it answered a question that we thought was right and it didn't give us any more questions to ask is the problem.
02:57:51
Like, it didn't give us any last questions.
02:57:53
It wasn't where we expected it to be.
02:57:55
It wasn't the energy level expected and it did turn up a bunch of other weird things that are created at crisis in the standard model.
02:58:01
The crisis that comes in cosmology is really because of the James Webb Space Telescope.
02:58:07
Really?
02:58:08
Yeah.
02:58:09
What is the web?
02:58:10
It found stuff that we didn't think we could.
02:58:12
No, galaxies weigh to...
02:58:14
So there's basically two ways to measure the age of the universe.
02:58:17
One uses near-sephids like near-field stars and other one uses very old things.
02:58:22
And then two measurements, as they get more accurate, are getting further apart.
02:58:26
And so James Webb was helping to pull that together and she spread it even further apart.
02:58:30
But it's teaching us that we need to know more that the early stages of the universe are more different than we thought, which is a good thing.
02:58:37
And so did the Large Hadron Collider.
02:58:38
Large Hadron Collider is pointed to possibilities of supersymmetry, into pentacorics, like whole new areas of research.
02:58:46
And we probably need a bigger collider.
02:58:49
We need to go faster, higher energy.
02:58:51
Higgs won the Nobel in 2013 for his work, showing how the boson helped bind the universe together in the obituary published in the Guardian.
02:59:05
They said he was an immensely shy man who disliked the fuss.
02:59:09
Higgs had left home for a quiet lunch of soup and trout in Leith on the day of the announcement to be stopped by a former neighbor who gave him the news on the way.
02:59:18
Oh, wow.
02:59:19
You've won the Nobel.
02:59:20
Richard, you might know this, the superconducting super collider that we were building in the United States and we canceled that was bigger than the LHC,
02:59:30
right?
02:59:31
Originally.
02:59:32
Yeah, but still in the Carter era, right?
02:59:36
And they were, there being the issue here is that they're still using niobium tin superconductors and they should be using ceramic superconductors using webco superconductors.
02:59:47
Those are less likely to quench, right?
02:59:49
It's less likely to quench.
02:59:50
It's easier to cheaper to operate.
02:59:51
It runs on liquid nitrogen, but you also get about five times the field strength from it.
02:59:56
The bat.
02:59:57
Yeah, it says that those additional fractional speeds that would make a difference.
03:00:00
So it was in 2016 that the alternative timeline began just in case you were going to go back and do it over.
03:00:07
That's why we're in the worst timeline because they're in the bad one.
03:00:10
Clearly, in 2016, it all went downhill.
03:00:12
Well, the large hydride collider was delayed for several years because rodents chewed through some lines and caused 4,000 tons of liquid helium to escape.
03:00:23
Yikes.
03:00:24
And it takes a while.
03:00:25
Was it on at the time?
03:00:26
Was it on at the time?
03:00:27
No.
03:00:28
They were in testing.
03:00:29
And they run with a liquid helium when it escapes as everybody in the neighborhood stocks tucking like this.
03:00:33
Yes.
03:00:34
God.
03:00:35
No.
03:00:36
I mean, if it was running at the time and all that cool and escaped, everything would burn up.
03:00:43
It would burn entirely.
03:00:44
I mean, the other way to think about the large hydride collider and that whole facility is it's the largest anti-matter factory on the planet.
03:00:52
Not good.
03:00:53
It seems not good.
03:00:54
It seems like we're not according to Brown.
03:00:55
Not according to Brown.
03:00:56
According to Brown.
03:00:57
It's over here.
03:00:58
It's about 30 feet away.
03:00:59
Oh, I see.
03:01:00
Oh, that any matter.
03:01:01
Brown.
03:01:02
Yeah.
03:01:03
Brown.
03:01:04
Maybe a little country, but it's up to stuff.
03:01:05
Opus D has a little thing in the basement down there.
03:01:09
The man who invented DRAM passed away this year in '91.
03:01:13
Unfortunately, I don't think he was widely known Robert Denard.
03:01:16
He was an IBM inventor.
03:01:18
Without him, your modern computing would be a lot slower, a lot slower.
03:01:26
He is invention led to previously unimaginable improvements in data handling speed, power, and the cost of computing.
03:01:35
I've got to remember these people.
03:01:40
They're very important.
03:01:41
Not all people.
03:01:42
Some are dogs.
03:01:43
They're like the sad couple, so the sad side-eyeing Shiba Inu lived to eight.
03:01:50
Oh, my God.
03:01:51
Very easy.
03:01:52
He's your doge, baby.
03:01:53
He inspired a long life.
03:01:54
That's the long life.
03:01:55
The picture that started the doge meme.
03:01:59
Aw.
03:02:00
18 years old.
03:02:01
Wow.
03:02:02
Shinaibos are beautiful, aren't they?
03:02:03
Much old.
03:02:04
So small.
03:02:05
So small.
03:02:06
So small.
03:02:07
Wow.
03:02:08
He'd been ill for several years.
03:02:09
His owner, Atsuko Sato, said, "In my head, I still wanted Kabosu to live, but I think I knew it in my soul.
03:02:19
It's time to say goodbye."
03:02:20
You know.
03:02:21
18 years for a pure-bred dog.
03:02:23
Yeah.
03:02:24
That's long story.
03:02:25
That is incredible.
03:02:26
Yeah.
03:02:27
Washington Post gave it the obituary, "In doge speak, much sad soul, very doge."
03:02:36
Gordon Bell passed away.
03:02:37
We're talking about the idea, recall, remembering everything you've done.
03:02:42
He was the guy who actually started this whole idea.
03:02:46
He was the inventor at digital equipment who created the first mini computer, but he also sees, he's wearing it around his neck.
03:02:57
He had the idea of recording everything that happened to him.
03:03:01
So he could search it later.
03:03:03
He made a Meishan Magazine called him the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, a virtuoso of computer architecture, awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991.
03:03:15
I met him.
03:03:17
We interviewed him and his wife.
03:03:18
In fact, I think there's a triangulation with Gordon Bell if you're interested.
03:03:23
His wife, Gwen Bell, had Alzheimer's in, so he became very interested in the idea of how you could remember everything that happened to you, and maybe computers could be a way of recovering that data and searching for that data.
03:03:38
He invented this whole idea that recall has kept alive.
03:03:48
Gordon Bell passed away this year, one of the great computer inventors, also Lynn Conway.
03:03:53
You know Conway because of his game of life.
03:03:58
He also authored a book that is a classic introductions to VLSI systems, a seminal book in the field of chip design.
03:04:07
He was an IBM owner.
03:04:10
She was.
03:04:11
Wait a minute.
03:04:12
I have the wrong Conway.
03:04:13
I'm sorry.
03:04:14
Lynn Conway, we should actually, this is important.
03:04:17
She died at age of 86 famous for her book VLSI.
03:04:21
I don't think she was the game of life Conway.
03:04:23
That was a different way.
03:04:25
No, I apologize.
03:04:26
I'm confused.
03:04:27
I have that book on a shelf.
03:04:29
Do you really?
03:04:30
I have not read it yet.
03:04:32
Yeah.
03:04:33
Wow.
03:04:34
Well, it's a classic.
03:04:35
Maybe this year or maybe this coming year.
03:04:36
When you want to start designing VLSI systems, you might want to take a look.
03:04:41
No, I think the reason that I wanted to mark this is because she was a very famous woman in the 70s who wrote a textbook that was considered the reference work,
03:04:54
the book.
03:04:55
Susan Wajiski also passed away former CEO of YouTube, one of the early Googlers.
03:05:02
She died at 56 of breast cancer, very sad, lost her garage, her mom's garage.
03:05:08
Was it lung cancer?
03:05:10
Yes, I think you're right.
03:05:12
Her mom's garage was where Google was born.
03:05:18
Yes, I'm sorry, apologize.
03:05:21
I got the cause of death wrong.
03:05:24
She was working at Intel, rented the garage of her Menlo Park home to her friends, Larry and Sergey, for $1,700 a month.
03:05:34
That's where a page rank was invented.
03:05:36
That's where Google was launched.
03:05:38
She was one of their earliest highers employee, number 16.
03:05:42
Companies first marketing manager eventually promoted to run YouTube in 2014 and really turned YouTube into the giant that it is.
03:05:54
She acknowledged in this Washington Post obituary, it says she acknowledged that content moderation remained one of the enduring challenges of YouTube and all social media operations.
03:06:06
I know we can do better.
03:06:07
She said, "But we're going to get there, we'll get to a point where we've solved a lot of these issues.
03:06:11
I own this problem and I'm going to fix it."
03:06:14
She didn't get to before passing.
03:06:18
You know, I kept trying to get this into the shows and I never did get to mention it.
03:06:22
I had also interviewed this fellow on triangulation, I believe, Ward Christianson, who invented the BBS passed away at the age of 78.
03:06:31
I know that's in a debt.
03:06:34
Yeah.
03:06:35
Did you ever run a BBS?
03:06:36
Oh, gosh.
03:06:37
Yes.
03:06:38
I mean, it was on one phone line and I had maybe two dozen users, but that's the way it was.
03:06:44
That's how it was.
03:06:45
X modem creator, I pirated a lot of software over X modem, man.
03:06:50
X modem?
03:06:51
That's right.
03:06:52
That's the way to go back in the day.
03:06:53
I think, as the only way that I could relate, sorry, it was the only way to go, as Richard.
03:07:00
Yeah.
03:07:01
In 1977, he invented X modem before he invented the BBS, but I think he probably wouldn't have a BBS with that X modem.
03:07:10
I had a two line BBS.
03:07:12
It was one line at first, but it became two lines.
03:07:15
I had 56 K modems, and I'll never forget when C gate came out with its RLL and coded hard drives.
03:07:23
I was able to go from, I think, five megabytes to 20 megabytes of storage.
03:07:27
It was a big deal.
03:07:28
My BBS became two lines at night when everyone else was asleep, so I just snagged.
03:07:34
It was at, "I'm on the, I'm on the internet."
03:07:37
Mom!
03:07:38
I'm downloading something.
03:07:40
Mom!
03:07:41
Was it Z modem?
03:07:42
was that the first protocol that you could drop the call and pick it up later on?
03:07:49
Yeah, we were comparable.
03:07:50
Yep.
03:07:51
Continue a download.
03:07:52
That was a game changer for me, because I always seemed to just lose it at the very last minute.
03:07:58
Oh.
03:07:59
Ow.
03:08:00
I know.
03:08:01
Isn't that awful at X modem?
03:08:02
Oh, it's gone.
03:08:04
And finally, the guy who wrote the computer language most of us started with Thomas E.
03:08:10
Kurtz.
03:08:11
Oh.
03:08:12
Of Kurtz and Cameni fame, they created Basic back in the day.
03:08:15
Dharma.
03:08:16
Yeah.
03:08:17
Really?
03:08:18
I think so many people started with Basic, and that was the intent of Basic.
03:08:22
It was, what did it stand for?
03:08:24
The Basic algorithmic.
03:08:26
I can't remember.
03:08:27
It wasn't designed for beginners, right?
03:08:29
When Fortran was the dominant language, it was an easy to use language.
03:08:34
In fact, it was how Microsoft got started writing Basic for the Mitz-Altehr, which is a duplicate of right behind me.
03:08:41
I don't think it runs Microsoft Basic, though.
03:08:44
The first iteration of the Snake game and the first iteration of what eventually became Angry Birds were both on Basic.
03:08:52
Really?
03:08:53
Wow.
03:08:54
Gorillas.
03:08:55
Gorillas.
03:08:56
I think it lives on, right?
03:08:58
Microsoft doesn't do GW Basic anymore.
03:09:01
No, no.
03:09:02
They've got...
03:09:03
But they got Visual Basic.
03:09:04
They got Net.
03:09:05
Yeah.
03:09:06
Yeah.
03:09:07
It's a Dot Net.
03:09:08
But you can still write in Visual Basic.
03:09:09
10 print, hello world, 20, go to 10.
03:09:11
Let's go.
03:09:12
No line numbers, but yeah.
03:09:14
The old Visual Basic still had colon separators.
03:09:17
Oh, no.
03:09:18
One of the fun things we used to do is Basic programmers is you try to make a game in one line of code.
03:09:23
One really long line of code.
03:09:26
And so I was writing for magazines at the time, and they wanted the April Fool's Day gag.
03:09:30
And so I made a find your way out of the cave game where you had to get close, you know, based on the where house from the wind was blowing, you're moving the right direction.
03:09:39
But I wrote one line of VB code with popup messages, send it to the editors, and this is the only idea I got.
03:09:46
I know it's not good, but thanks.
03:09:47
You go, "You're not good ideas sucked up half an hour of my time."
03:09:50
Yeah.
03:09:51
Richard, I had no idea that you have that's checkered past.
03:09:57
I got to ask this of Richard, because I mean, I love the fact that you're into nuclear power.
03:10:01
I got a bigger brand on that.
03:10:02
That's the fact that you are down with particle physics.
03:10:06
Now I have to ask, "Tab or space?"
03:10:08
Tabs all the way, brother.
03:10:12
Okay.
03:10:13
Thank you.
03:10:14
We can be friends.
03:10:15
We use a space guy, by the way, so.
03:10:16
Well, you know, good.
03:10:17
Everybody has to have a character flaw.
03:10:18
There's no way around it.
03:10:19
That's a character flaw.
03:10:20
Tabs.
03:10:21
Tabs.
03:10:22
Thank you.
03:10:23
Tab.
03:10:24
Beginners.
03:10:25
All-purpose symbolic instruction code.
03:10:26
Thank you.
03:10:27
Thank you.
03:10:28
I should have remembered that.
03:10:29
I love that you did this list, because we throw around, you know, the word like "genius" too much, describing captains of industry.
03:10:37
These are the people who actually made this stuff that those captains of industry turned into products.
03:10:41
It's right to ran and brought to us.
03:10:43
Like, without those captains of industry, we probably would have known.
03:10:46
You know, it was, it did take the marketers and the promoters to bring it to the world, but first, the inventors.
03:10:53
Yeah.
03:10:54
And I always prefer to celebrate the inventors on this.
03:10:57
Yeah, every time.
03:10:58
Yeah.
03:10:59
Those are the guys.
03:10:59
And they don't get attention.
03:11:01
They don't get their names are not well known.
03:11:03
And I think it's important for us to make a podcast around Microsoft now for 20-something years.
03:11:08
And a lot of the folks that make those things, thank me for telling the stories of what I love it.
03:11:13
Is there awfully busy making them?
03:11:15
Richard Campbell.
03:11:17
Catch him on Windows weekly with Paul Therott every Wednesday on Twitter.
03:11:21
And of course, Runners Radio every week.
03:11:25
And the dot net rocks at runnersradio.com in his, in his Canadian.
03:11:31
My good picture.
03:11:32
You like my tuxedo?
03:11:33
It's Canadian tuxedo.
03:11:34
Richard, I thank you so much for being with us on this show.
03:11:38
A lot of fun.
03:11:39
A lot of fun.
03:11:40
A lot of fun.
03:11:41
And I really appreciate your brains and your knowledge and your history.
03:11:44
And we're going to have to talk more about writing basic programs for magazines next time on Windows Weekly.
03:11:50
Thank you for being here.
03:11:51
Richard, I appreciate it.
03:11:52
Thanks so much.
03:11:53
Mike, a sergeant host, tech news, Wakely iOS today and hands-on technology on our network.
03:12:00
He wears the best ugly Christmas sweaters and it's always a pleasure, Mike.
03:12:04
I miss having you around the studio.
03:12:06
That is one thing I miss.
03:12:07
I wish I could mandate a return to office, but I'm afraid that we've all gone to the seven wins.
03:12:14
But it's really always a pleasure to have you around and work with you and always go to get to hang out.
03:12:19
I'll miss it next to you.
03:12:20
So thank you for being on the show.
03:12:22
I really appreciate it.
03:12:23
Absolutely.
03:12:24
And a pleasure to see you both, Richard and Father Robert as well.
03:12:27
Great to see you.
03:12:28
Thanks, Mike.
03:12:29
Mr.
03:12:30
Father Robert, do you like Father Robert?
03:12:34
Is that what you like to be called?
03:12:36
I go by Robert or Padre.
03:12:37
A very few people call me father unless I'm actually dressed in my, I like Padre.
03:12:42
I like Padre S.J.
03:12:43
But don't call him Bobby.
03:12:44
I just, I think that's the one thing.
03:12:47
Don't call him that.
03:12:48
He has done so many interesting things in his role at the Vatican, including Jesuit Pilgrimage.app.
03:12:54
Highly recommend you can get it on the iOS.
03:12:56
Is that an Android too?
03:12:58
It's iOS and Android.
03:13:00
Nice.
03:13:01
Jesuit Pilgrimage.
03:13:02
And BOS as well.
03:13:04
No, it's not on BOS.
03:13:06
Give me a break.
03:13:07
I should do.
03:13:08
I should port it.
03:13:09
I told you.
03:13:10
Oh, man.
03:13:11
I could.
03:13:12
You should bring BOS back.
03:13:13
The greatest operating system that never was.
03:13:17
There is somewhere a open source support of it.
03:13:20
I can't remember the name of it, but I don't think anybody used it.
03:13:22
It lives on.
03:13:23
It lives on.
03:13:25
Thank you, Robert.
03:13:26
Great.
03:13:27
Great to see you.
03:13:28
Have a very happy.
03:13:29
I understand somebody you care about.
03:13:30
A lot of birth days coming up.
03:13:31
I hope you have a lovely Christmas.
03:13:34
I know you were.
03:13:35
How many masses do you do on Christmas day?
03:13:38
Here only four.
03:13:41
There's a lot of priests in Rome and there's a lot of mass.
03:13:44
Yeah.
03:13:45
But there's also a lot of masses.
03:13:47
That's right.
03:13:48
Do you do it at the Vatican?
03:13:49
Or do you go to a cemetery?
03:13:50
Yeah.
03:13:51
I'll go back here and it will be here.
03:13:52
Have you ever served mass in St.
03:13:54
Peter's?
03:13:54
Of course.
03:13:55
Yeah.
03:13:56
Oh, my gosh.
03:13:57
Oh, yeah.
03:13:58
Wow.
03:13:59
But it's not the masses that take time.
03:14:03
It's the obligation.
03:14:04
It's the obligation.
03:14:05
Oh.
03:14:06
What's reconciliation?
03:14:08
What's Confessions?
03:14:09
Oh.
03:14:10
Yes.
03:14:11
That's multiple hours every day.
03:14:12
So.
03:14:13
Yeah.
03:14:14
I have nothing to confess.
03:14:17
We have our, our Jubilee year starting on the gate.
03:14:22
They're going to open the gate.
03:14:23
They're going to open the gate.
03:14:24
You've got to come back, Leo.
03:14:25
You've got to go through that gate.
03:14:27
Something good happens.
03:14:28
All your sins are washed away when you go through that gate.
03:14:31
Right?
03:14:32
Well, yes.
03:14:33
But see, they've clarified the rules.
03:14:34
You can actually get two indulgences every time you visit.
03:14:39
So you could sell one.
03:14:40
I thought they got rid of that.
03:14:43
No.
03:14:44
They got rid of selling.
03:14:46
Oh, wait.
03:14:47
Yeah.
03:14:48
They got rid of the church selling the indulgences, but I'm not, I mean, that's a third party market.
03:14:55
Individuals.
03:14:56
That's okay.
03:14:57
That's okay.
03:14:58
The Jubilee gate is, is closed.
03:15:01
It's a gate into St.
03:15:02
Peter's, right?
03:15:02
Correct.
03:15:03
Correct.
03:15:04
And it's closed except for Jubilee years.
03:15:05
So it hasn't been opened in 50 years?
03:15:08
How long?
03:15:09
No, no, no.
03:15:10
The third, 14, 13, 13 years, 13 years.
03:15:15
But they clarify it, Jubilee.
03:15:17
Correct.
03:15:18
That's within this power.
03:15:19
But they've already set up the Via Conte de Acione with these little corrals, because they know they're going to have huge groups going through the door, and Italians are terrible at queuing.
03:15:29
So this is the only way to keep people from just plumberishing the door.
03:15:33
What when is Jubilee week?
03:15:35
When is that coming?
03:15:36
It starts Christmas Eve.
03:15:38
It's a year.
03:15:39
It's an entire year.
03:15:40
But the entire country is in it.
03:15:44
So I mean, it's the experience of Italy is different during a Jubilee year.
03:15:49
I bet.
03:15:50
I bet.
03:15:51
All right.
03:15:52
Brian Burnett's coming next year.
03:15:53
Is he?
03:15:54
Oh, no.
03:15:55
I saw Brian the other day.
03:15:57
Thank you, Robert.
03:15:58
Thank you, Micah.
03:15:59
Thank you.
03:16:00
Richard, such a pleasure.
03:16:03
Our last show of the year, but it's always nice to end with a bang.
03:16:05
I appreciate it.
03:16:06
Twitch Sundays, our next show will be January 5th, 2pm Pacific 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC.
03:16:13
You can watch us live on eight different streams on our Discord.
03:16:16
If you are blessed as a club-twit member, you can also watch on YouTube if you're on the unwashed masses category, Twitch, Kick, X,
03:16:26
TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn.
03:16:29
I think I got them all.
03:16:31
But that's only if you want to watch live.
03:16:33
Most people watch after the fact that there are plenty of ways to watch a show.
03:16:36
Of course, you can get it on our website, twitch.tv.
03:16:39
You can watch on our YouTube channel dedicated, youtube.com/twit, and you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically.
03:16:48
The minute we're done, thank you so much, Benito Gonzales, our producer.
03:16:52
Are you editing today, show Benito as well?
03:16:55
I am not.
03:16:56
That's Kevin's job.
03:16:57
Kevin King, our editor, thanks to our creative director, Anthony Nielsen, who worked behind the scenes so hard so often.
03:17:06
Chris John Ashley, who produces and edits many of our shows, thanks to our, we have a wonderful team.
03:17:13
Burke, Burke, Burke, Burke McQuinn, who is the entire engineering team these days.
03:17:21
Thank you, Burke.
03:17:22
It's a little hard to do a remote work when you're an engineer, but he manages somehow to do that.
03:17:29
He's been here.
03:17:30
Wait a minute.
03:17:31
We don't have the studio anymore.
03:17:33
Where does Burke sleep?
03:17:35
I don't know.
03:17:36
I think, honestly, I think there's a hidden chamber in this house, and he's a parasite living there because he just shows up every once in a while.
03:17:45
No, we love Burke.
03:17:46
Thanks to our incredible continuity department, who make, you know, the ads that make the money on Twitter, Debbie Delcini,
03:17:57
to Viva, to Sebastian, and of course to my wife and our CEO who runs the operation and is keeping us afloat,
03:18:07
Lisa Laporte.
03:18:09
Did I miss anybody?
03:18:10
Did I get everybody in mind?
03:18:11
Did you say Patrick?
03:18:12
Ty.
03:18:13
Ty, Patrick and Russell.
03:18:14
I forgot Ty.
03:18:15
Our marketing director.
03:18:16
I forgot.
03:18:17
Patrick, who is off site of our embossing, was the first remote worker.
03:18:20
He does all the engineering and is with us all the time.
03:18:23
He's like constantly here.
03:18:26
And of course, how could I forget, who is the other one?
03:18:31
Russell.
03:18:32
Right.
03:18:33
He doesn't really work for us.
03:18:35
He's our contract engineer, MSP, but Russell is absolutely the guy who knows how all this works.
03:18:41
And the only one, the last one to know how all of this works, thanks to all of you for me.
03:18:46
Ty.
03:18:47
And I give my time.
03:18:48
He's a tie.
03:18:49
He's a tie.
03:18:50
He's a tie.
03:18:51
Yeah.
03:18:52
And the contribution through ClubTWit makes all the difference to us.
03:18:55
We really appreciate it.
03:18:56
So thanks to you, our club members.
03:18:58
Thanks to all of you who've listened.
03:18:59
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season.
03:19:03
Today's fest is today, Festivus.
03:19:04
It's soon tomorrow.
03:19:06
Tomorrow.
03:19:07
I got to get that aluminum pole set up.
03:19:09
I have a group of friends who want to celebrate.
03:19:12
The airing of the disc of the, what is it?
03:19:15
The airing of the grievances.
03:19:16
The grievances.
03:19:17
Then the wrestling.
03:19:18
Then the wrestling.
03:19:19
I believe there's wrestling in the whole.
03:19:20
The test of strength.
03:19:21
Feeds of strength.
03:19:23
Feeds of strength.
03:19:24
When is Robonica?
03:19:26
Robonica.
03:19:27
Who's that?
03:19:28
Oh, that's a future.
03:19:29
Yeah, future Roman.
03:19:30
Yeah.
03:19:31
Robonica.
03:19:32
Is that the robot Christmas?
03:19:33
It's robot Hanukkah, Christmas.
03:19:34
Robonica.
03:19:35
I like that one.
03:19:36
I like that one.
03:19:37
Celebrate the soul.
03:19:38
Listeners.
03:19:39
Wish our listeners.
03:19:40
Who we really think.
03:19:41
Happy holidays to you.
03:19:43
Be stupid of us to sit here talking so much without anybody listening.
03:19:47
But would it stop us?
03:19:48
I don't think so.
03:19:49
Never.
03:19:50
Thank you guys.
03:19:52
Really appreciate it.
03:19:53
Have a wonderful holiday.
03:19:54
We'll see you in the new year.
03:19:55
Another Twit is in the camp.
03:19:56
Bye bye.
03:19:57
It's amazing.
03:19:58
Do the twit.
03:20:04
All right.
03:20:05
Do the twit, baby.
03:20:06
Do the twit.
03:20:07
All right.
03:20:08
Do the twit.
03:20:09