This Week in Tech 1011 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit 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 Micah Sargent is here, father Robert Balliser and, from Windows Weekly, richard Campbell. A very special Twit up next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:29
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1011, recorded Sunday, december 22nd, 2024. The year in review. It's time for Twit this week in tech, the last show of 2024. Thank God, we'll take next week off for a best of, and then we will be roaring come roaring back. What is that? January 4th? I don't actually don't know. I should probably find out January 5th, so a couple of weeks off. But you know what we do at the end of the year. We like to do kind of a review of the year and and we like to do it with people in the family. It's a family show. Micah Sargent is here. Hello. Cousin Micah.

01:32
Yeah, cousin Micah my nephew. He does, of course, hands-on Technology. Tech News Weekly, two of our most popular shows. Ios Today also most popular, probably more than the other two, i't know anyway he does them all and micah's crafting corner, and you're building I see it behind you a little tiny that's.

01:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's one that we're currently. I just finished a shelf, uh. So there's a little tiny shelf and I've got he is the elf on the little tiny shelf.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's been a lot of fun building these little things yeah, I saw your kitchen, yeah, so that's fun, that's part of the club. Uh, behind the scenes club stuff we do merry christmas, micah, great to see you.

02:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Christmas to you I love your sweater thank you so much, or whatever this is, it's uh, if this thing sheds, it literally drops these little baubles and it's a mess, so I have to walk around very carefully.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, good to know. That's why I use the word baubles. Richard campbell is here. Hello, richard, good to see you in the traditional christmas garb of a canadian I don't have a choice.

02:33 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
This is what we wear coming to us from vancouver.

02:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, good to see you.

02:38 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Vancouver, canada yep, uh, I'm actually in the city this time, so left the coast to come down for the Christmas thing, so we're in a kind of an apartment and taking it easy. It's raining, of course, because that's the time of year. Dotnet rocks with carl franklin is an expert on.

02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is a um. I think you're the closest thing to a polymath that I know. You study everything. You become an expert on everything.

03:10 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's wonderful do you like to tell stories, so I gotta go yes I love them.

03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of storytelling, padre has the greatest story ever told. Wait, hey, stop drinking that stuff, father robert balancer pretending to drink a disgusting Italian aperitif or, sorry, digestif. Hello, robert Good to see you.

03:33 - Padre (Guest)
It's great to see you, my goodness, and you are right, I'm so happy to see 2024 go away, but it's beautiful here in the Eternal City, so it can't be all bad.

03:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's calling to us from the Vatican. I see he has his DEFCON badge running a video behind him of candles and bubbles.

03:50 - Padre (Guest)
Hackers got to hack Leo. I love that. It's good.

03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's enough power in a DEFCON badge to do that. That's impressive.

03:57 - Padre (Guest)
Almost. If you notice, the frame rate is not great, so it can kind of run video. I think it's very pleasant actually.

04:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad you did that. Great to have all three of you. Paris was going to try to make it Paris Martineau from this Week in Google, but her flight plans did not work out or she had to do some last minute stuff for the information. I think so anyway, but it's great to have all three of you. 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 let me just see a count here well over 200. Yeah, I have 271 stories, so I don't know if we're going to get to all of those, but we're going to do our darndest.

04:46 - Padre (Guest)
We're going to end the show before 2025, right, maybe let's hope that's the goal.

04:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I thought we'd just go in chronological order. 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, but we didn't hear the full story till later in the year. There was a number of stories that were slow brewing. There was one story, though, that began the year that we thought would be kind of the signature story of the year didn't end up being, which is the mass layoffs in the beginning of 2024. Everybody laid off thousands of people. There was a website dedicated to it it layoffsai. I was just going to go there, layoffsai, um, and yeah, let me just see what the total. They were keeping a running count. I wonder if they're still around because, uh, they were keeping a running total of all of them. Notai, what was it? Layoffsfyi, maybe that's it. 25,000 in the first months, intel, everybody, everybody, had layoffs. So layoffsfyi In 2024, wow the final tally is 150,000 layoffs.

06:09 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Stunning, isn't it? Yeah, the? The question is, that's what they reported. Did they really lay them off? Like most of the folks I know at microsoft who got so-called rift, got 90-day notices. Basically go find yourself a new job inside of microsoft, or you'll be late.

06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's not bad, but I have a feeling intel didn't have a whole lot of other jobs to go to 15,000 laid off at Intel. Tesla laid off 14,000 in their Austin plant. Google laid off 12,000. Meta laid off 11,000. And then another 10,000. Yeah, Microsoft has 10,000, but you're saying most of them just moved around a little.

06:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, I don't know if they actually did right. It's just this question of mobility and what works available, but it's sort of a game you play, right? These companies all have record profits. This has nothing to do with profitability, it has to do with stock price Right. That reporting layoffs early in the season bumps your stock price up at the beginning of the year, and so they all do it. It's becoming a routine thing here. There's another side of this which I find interesting. Just before the pandemic especially the tech giants you saw a lot of labor unrest and then the pandemic scared everybody, so labor unrest went away and it almost feels like they're keeping a thumb on the employees that if you keep them afraid, they won't organize yeah, it's not in here, but there were certainly in fact it's going on right now amazon, uh workers on strike at some of the some of the um uh big distribution centers, um and starbucks.

07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple employees tried to organize it at many apple stores. Uh, in our profession a number of publications organized yeah, so maybe that's it. You know, the layoffs tapered as the year went by. In fact there's a graph here at layoffsfyi that shows they really kind of the companies with layoffs is blue, company employees laid off is red for some reason. There was a bump in august and a bump in april, but really january was the big month, yeah, and the industry it really got hit and stayed.

08:13 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Hit was gaming. Yeah, yeah, gaming's the one that took the beating this year. Uh, that and this, a lot of studios closed. There's been a lot of reshuffling is that that because gaming's struggling? No, no. Well, the problem is that games are too expensive to make right now, and so it has to be a billion-dollar game. You know, it's two, three hundred people in 18 months to make a game, and that's just so costly you can't afford to gamble, and so gaming's struggling.

08:39
Unless it's Duke Nukem forever then, unless it's Duke Nukem, forever, then it's decades. Well, and here's the thing. It's like you could name the top 12 games right. They're the same every year. They're the next version of Call of Duty. It's that kind of mechanism. Original games are rare and so often as these studios are consolidating, the risky games get cut.

08:59 - Benito (Announcement)
Hi, this is Benito. Oh, by the way, Benito Gonzalez, who has been our producer for the year.

09:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to have you, Benito. Yeah, happy holidays.

09:05 - Benito (Announcement)
With the gaming industry. A lot of it is also like the trend of the games that they're making these days are games as a service. So like those games really cost a lot more to keep and operate. So, like you know, the Ubisoft put out their multiplayer shooter or something like that that they closed like in a week or something like that.

09:23
Like it's those games, that's a lot of money down the tube, those, those triple a companies are making those kinds of games only right now and those could those kinds of games really cost a lot, not just to make but to operate.

09:33 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, they don't get the run time working well right away, enough seats and they can't maintain the team like it.

09:40 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So it's crazy that they spent all the money to develop the game and then, literally within a month of putting it up, they're like nope, shut it down does it not kind of build on itself a little bit, though, because you would think you you start to I mean in a negative way, you you see these shutting down right, and then you've got the creatives, who are facing two things one, the fear of more shutdown and more job loss, so you're not maybe putting as much work into it and you're also distracted by looking for other jobs elsewhere, coupled with artificial intelligence playing a role in the generation of new kinds of content for gaming, and I can only imagine you start to feel a little beat down, which leads to more loss overall in the industry and a shift there as well, less focus on the creative aspect of it, more focus on, as Benito was kind of talking about, 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.

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 pulled away from it as well, as people are looking towards shorter content in general, but also just-.

11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You mean like on Twitch and yeah, on Twitch and elsewhere, the let's Play videos and things like that.

11:05 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The let's Play. Yeah, I feel like I have not seen as much attention and excitement around that, but I mean that could just be sort of in my own little area that I've noticed a shift away from that.

11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robert, you're a big gamer.

11:19 - Padre (Guest)
I am, but I'm a subset of gamers, so I'm not.

11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody is a subset.

11:25 - Padre (Guest)
I don't do Call of Duty anymore, right, I can't compete. I'm tired of getting fragged by seven-year-olds who are playing the most credit card. I know, I know, 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, six years ago. So, yes, I think the quality has gone up on some of these cinematics. I think there's actually a couple of games that have characters that don't make me run for the uncanny valley, but I haven't really been compelled since maybe no man's sky to go out and pre-order a triple a title you got burned on no man's sky but.

12:12
But I mean, have you, have you visited or did?

12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you love. No, man.

12:15 - Padre (Guest)
No, I hear it got much better later on, but it started off as a horrible, horrible release 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.

12:27
It is now probably the best space shooter slash, really gathering game on and I have to play it they have turned it around entirely, and the great thing is they're not charging more, so if you bought the game way back, then you have access to the full game. Now that's the sort of of uh 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, and if they're not even going to charge me for every single DLC package, it means that it's going to be light in my wallet.

12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm down for that, here's something that'll make you feel old. 2024 was the 20th anniversary of the release of World of Warcraft. 20th anniversary of the World of.

13:05 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
World of Warcraft. 20th anniversary of the World of Warcraft and still with a big customer base, still a bunch of loyal players, still packs coming out routinely.

13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that the game that made these online games the hit that they are? Was that the first one, Ultima Online? I?

13:20 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
think Ultima Online Would be the real anchor to that.

13:23 - Benito (Announcement)
I think EverQuest was the first massive success EverCrack we called it yes, Because you couldn't stop. Did you?

13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
play that Benito.

13:32 - Benito (Announcement)
I did yes, of course.

13:34 - Padre (Guest)
No, no, no. For me, the very first crack at game was Civilization. Oh yeah, that's the first time I started playing a game at night, thinking I'm going to do a couple of hours, and then you see the sun coming up and you're like, oh, wow, so you're not going to preorder Civ 7, padre. Have they changed anything since Civ 4?

13:53 - Benito (Announcement)
Dude, it's a big changes in Civ 7.

13:55 - Padre (Guest)
Really, really, look it up.

13:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't tell him yet because we want to finish the show. He may run off.

14:06
Well, I didn't think we'd start with gaming, but we did. That's great. I like it. I like it. What else happened? In January, I came very close, this close, benito and I both came very close to ordering the Rabbit R1 AI Assistant, beautifully designed by Teenage Engineering. The idea was it would do all the work for you. You would say, hey, rabbit, get me an Uber, and it would get you an Uber. Except it turned out, as the year went by, we found out 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. Dumb app. A simple one, simple app that you could easily put on your phone to do all of that. Uh, according to later stories, they not only sold about or at least they might have sold many, but they only about 2 000 were still in use by the end of the year.

14:55 - Benito (Announcement)
Actually, today I got an email from teenage engineering being like you know, we still have these rabbits you can buy. You can buy three for the price of one now three for the price of one.

15:04 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Now, wow, three for the price of one, all within one year.

15:07 - Padre (Guest)
When I was on Twit right after CES and you started talking about how you were going to get this rabbit and I was screaming at you it's a piece of trash, don't do it. You knew, 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? What are you talking?

15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's, it's nothing it's literally nothing two hundred dollars, which wasn't bad, although you have to pay for your wi-fi, your wireless bill, because it uses 5g to connect, is there?

15:36 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
another way to do? Is there another consumer accessible way to do what it promised? Because it wasn't the idea with it? It's an's an Omni app, and so it can call uh, call dominoes for you and it can get you a car. Do we yet have that by way of of AI? Is that a gentrification underway? Uh, because it is like it is, but yeah, so what's?

16:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happening is, uh, anthropic, announced it, I think, with Claude, and then OpenAI said oh, we have that too, which is agentic AI. In fact, that's the new Arc browser. Dia is going to be agentic, so in a sense, it's exactly that, which is you say what you want and then it goes out like a browser using your browser. Does Microsoft have something?

16:22 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
like that. It's not a product, it's a feature in a phone, right?

16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's a feature.

16:25 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, all it is, yeah it's the voice interface over top of a set of features. I think we're going to see that, though I think that's one of the things that we're definitely headed on that I give them credit for doing that earlier on.

16:36 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I guess is is what I don't know they didn't do it, but that's the thing I think they I think this is what a lot of AI.

16:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to let you speak in a second, robert, because I know you have something to say, but a lot of what happened in AI was people spotting a trend and announcing something to capitalize on it as quickly as possible. Go ahead, robert.

16:56 - Padre (Guest)
So the big thing that the rabbit was trying to do was to say we're your personal assistant because you can tell us to do anything. Now the thing is, any of the main manufacturers you can go Google, you can go Samsung, you can go Apple they all have that baked in. If you tell it to do something, it can do it. But the promise of of the rabbit, the one that really got people interested does exist, and that is the ability to look at your, your current digital footprint and suggest actions that either you should take or you're scheduled to take. And that exists. It's called Microsoft Copilot.

17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been around for a long time, also announced this year.

17:34 - Padre (Guest)
Well, no, the Copilot plus.

17:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
PCs. But yeah, yeah, it goes earlier than that. Yeah, so does Copilot have agentic capabilities.

17:43 - Padre (Guest)
It can't order an Uber for you, you, yet not yet, because they haven't enabled that, but I mean it could. Knows everything that's in your footprint, it knows your calendar, it knows your contacts, it knows your patterns of activity. 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.

18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Recall yeah, oh, sorry.

18:06 - Padre (Guest)
Recall.

18:08 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
This was the thing that every other app does for you at the end of the year.

18:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's your Rewind. I'm still waiting for my Rewind pin. By the way, I ordered a number of AI.

18:16 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I did not get the rabbit the pendant. I didn't get my pendant. I didn't get my Brilliant Labs glasses, yet Nothing. I think the pendant was a really cool idea, mostly because I love having receipts, let me tell you, so that when someone comes to me and they say you said you were going to do that and I can go, no, actually I said very specifically that I could do that if I did this and you did this.

18:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I want, want those that's the interesting thing about the all the co-pilot backlash, which is, I think people want that capability. Yeah, uh, this is rewindai, your ai assistant that knows everything you've seen, said or heard. This is worse than recall.

19:00 - Padre (Guest)
It sounds like a threat really yeah and then I ordered this and it still hasn't come.

19:06 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
This is the pin that that records everything and then ties into rewind what does the site say in terms of what? How about you, let's?

19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
see the launch video was from earlier this year.

19:18 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Um do you not have like an order number you can call up to say oh, what the hell happened?

19:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where's my pendant? This was so. It's funny because AI and this certainly was the year of AI, right as next year will probably be the year of AI, yeah, and last year, and last year was the year of.

19:36 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
AI Every year, the years of AI.

19:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this was the year where AI promised a lot. I guess it kind of delivered. So this was the year where AI promised a lot. I guess it kind of delivered, just maybe in unpredictable ways. But that is, in a way. The sense I have of AI is that it succeeds in unexpected ways. Right, we expect it to be like HAL 9000.

20:01 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And instead it's writing a science fiction problem Right.

20:11 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Everybody's contaminated by Jarvis and Ulttron, and right, I want jarvis, yeah, but you're going to get elton star trek computer, that's all I want. Yeah, the idea that I can say speculate and it that that is so fun to me. I, I want to be, I want to give it a problem and it's like, honestly, I don't think I know the answer that and I can just go speculate and then I mean, I know I can do that with this, but I want it in the computer from Star Trek, kind of way.

20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I, you know. So now I'm trying to decide if I want to be rigid in our in our chronology and just go month to month. I think maybe not. Well, I think we're going to jump ahead to May, when Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Plus PCs. Of course, microsoft had been pushing Copilot for some time and it was with these Copilot Plus PCs we were supposed to get Microsoft Recall the article. That kind of got everybody up in arms before it even came out. By the way, before before recall was even available, kevin beaumont's piece in in medium stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed. Stealing everything you've ever typed or viewed on your own windows pc is now possible with two lines of code. Uh, this scared everybody so much microsoft said okay, hold on, we won't release it yet. I think this was perhaps a little bit of a panic.

21:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I'm almost wondering if it was an intentional attack. I mean, at the simplest level you could say, hey, the security folks jumped on this and it became an easy win for clicks. It wasn't in the wild, nobody really knew anything about it, you'd only barely heard a description of it. You were able to get copies of the code. You misused it like we never got anywhere. But I'm I'm almost at a point now because it was so odd how quickly folks came out against it. It was like was this an intentional attack to derail microsoft, like it's? And it went nowhere right, like other than it scared microsoft, which did not present it.

22:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's true that was the only. The real mistake was they did not explain clearly enough, and when they came back and explained it everybody said oh well whatever.

22:12 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And now and now it's out there for insiders, right and no drama yeah, so six months later it came out.

22:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the way microsoft uh did it was they rolled it out to insiders first. Uh, only they delayed it and then uh said we fixed it and the messaging was really a mess, to be honest that's really.

22:33 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The only thing they fixed was the messaging.

22:35 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I don't think the product changed at all yeah, 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, 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 any user. Yet, yeah, it was, yeah, not even available to anyone. And then, even in the the like small amount of testing that was being done internally, it was not the final result and so it felt like a lynching right it was it was just ironically, I thought I we were just showing this limitless pin and the rewindai.

23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think people want the feature and ironically, I think Paul Theriot said this a couple of weeks ago on Windows Weekly the recall that Microsoft is shipping whether because of the security worries or whatever is so hobbled, it's not near, it's only on one computer at a time. You know your desktop doesn't know what your laptop did.

23:52 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Mobility to share within your suite of machines?

23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and so it actually is much less useful.

24:00 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And so it's simultaneously scary and not useful. But it's the best compliment for any product. They say I want to use it more and in more places. Right, but you're right. The only people that were outraged back in June were the security people. Regular humans do not care, they just want the capability. Right.

24:20 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
And I think that they didn't get the opportunity to really show what that could be. 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 and, you know, investigating it and researching it, yes, but without the product actually existing. Yeah, exactly, it absolutely was.

24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's another, there's a different moral to extract extract from this, which is that people don't trust microsoft. Yeah, they don't trust anybody I mean they might trust, I mean they might have headed the whole thing off with six words.

24:57 - Padre (Guest)
If they had started the press release with, you can choose to enable recall. Right, that was it the messaging was so bad.

25:05
Well, that was a big change, that was on by default and they changed it to on by off, by default right right and immediately if they had come in and said oh, oh, wait a minute, you could. We think this is a great feature, you can turn it on if you'd like, but because it was automatically on and automatically downloaded. With the, with new versions of windows 11 and going down, it became this well, microsoft's making a power grab and they were so tone deaf to what people were giving them in feedback that they thought that this was an issue with oh so we shouldn't install it automatically. It's like no, no, no, just tell us what it is. First we had this conversation I believe this was that week on Twit Leo that we went back and forth about who likes it and nobody on the panel liked it, not because of what it did, but because of how it was announced no-transcript.

26:10 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And I think the conflict of interest that Microsoft had was this was the only AI feature they had in a Copilot Plus PC Right, the only distinguishing feature, the whole point here was to sell Copilot Plus PCs, and specifically the Snapdragon one, and so this was the thing that was going to get you to buy this new laptop.

26:28
This arm on windows laptop was recall. Yeah, and with, again, no sense of what the customer actually wanted, no sense of how the customer actually wants it presented Like it was just a fail, because they're they're really afraid of windows on arm failing again.

26:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, that was the one of the other big stories of the year. Uh, in 2023, we saw a qualcomm event where they touted the new snapdragon, said faster than the apple m1 processor, and we? My reaction I think this was almost a universal reaction is well, we've heard that story from you before qualcomm. My reaction and I think this was almost a universal reaction is well, we've heard that story from you before. Qualcomm, can you produce. 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 A low-powered chip that was very fast.

27:20
You got one, didn't you? Oh, so that's another story. So Richard and I both bought the Snapdragon dev kit which was offered by Qualcomm and went through. It kept getting delayed and delayed. In fact, this was a running gag on Windows, running gag on the show. Yeah, richard and I would look at our emails from Arrow, the distributor, saying oh, when are we getting it? Well, they shipped it last week, but it's coming next month. They shipped it next month and it's coming last week, and it was always a mess.

27:53 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Then the HDMI thing. They said hey, by the way, we didn't get FCC approval. Yeah, they didn't admit that. I think I was the one who suggested that and everyone ultimately with me on that way. It's like hey, you know, you're going to have an HDMI port, we're going to include a USB-C to HDMI dongle which is fine.

28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's my, my lap, my Apple MacBook air does that. That's fine. Um then, uh, a couple of YouTubers Jeff Geerling, at least, showed it, demoed it. Then I got mine and richard got theirs, yeah, his and almost immediately after we saw word that they were discontinuing it and refunding everyone their money so it cost us nothing, but we did get one 200 people they say, got one, got them.

28:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, we got the early set. But it also speaks to how problematic the device actually is. We don't know yet why we don't want to take care of it. It costs you nothing.

28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's your money this is probably not a reflection on the snapdragon right. It's whatever. We don't even know. We haven't seen a problem with it yet so I dev kit.

28:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
This was supposed to be out before the laptop, but that's the point you don't really need it now developers to get their software ready for windows on arm. It's a good point. Until what? October, november later?

29:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, uh so, and the good news is we didn't have to pay for it and I sent mine to paul, so paul has it and you have. Have you set yours up yet? No, no, it's a holiday project yeah however, uh, when, when we finally did in june see the snapdragon x, it was very impressive, yes, and windows on arm is very impressive. Runs quite well. All therot rarely giggles.

29:37 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But those snapdragon laptops make him giggle because they're very good yeah, instant on which he always wanted something that was done for years yeah, uh, good battery life, it doesn't he.

29:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's always had a hot bag problem. Uh, who hasn't but his? Hot bag was that his surfaces would not turn off or sleep properly but can he play counter-strike on it?

30:02 - Padre (Guest)
sorry, can he play counter-strike on it?

30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he, uh, he plays, call it duty, let's get it straight. Yeah, and he can.

30:11 - Padre (Guest)
Now he's more of a csgo guy, I think he was, he was very.

30:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's not telling you he's not telling you he actually. I think it was uh this year that paul decided to uh go cold turkey on cod break, yeah, or cold cod as a cold. Yeah, he did cold cod for a year. Uh is playing again, but I think not at well. He says he's almost prestige, so maybe he's playing as hard as usual. I don't know. He's he uh detoxed, let's, let's put it that way counter strike does run.

30:41 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Diablo 4 does not hell divers 2 no, those are copy protection issues. Yes, yeah, I think a lot of them are copy protection, because it does have a problem with one of the major um anti-cheat tools right.

30:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, they shouldn't put those on there anyway. Actually, hell divers was the one that sony kind of rug pulled on selling it to people on Steam and then telling them oh no, you got to register for a Sony account to use it.

31:09 - Padre (Guest)
There was such an upcry. The HDMI out doesn't have the proper copyright hardware.

31:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, yeah, my guess with the dev kit was they didn't get an FCC certification and they'd already built the unit and so at that point and Geerling was the guy who took it apart immediately and found it did these soldered marks.

31:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like yep, I think you called it there was no hole on the case for hdmi, but they did take it off. Yeah, they took it on board. Yeah, um, anyway, so hell. Divers 2 that was probably the biggest gamer revolt of the year.

31:44 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
There's so many this year. Gamers are definitely fighting the gaming industry.

31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It went from five stars to no stars in about three seconds.

31:50 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, back to five stars. And then back to five stars when Sony retracted, yeah, but you know what's the great thing about the Hell Divers 2 story? It shows that not only Microsoft messes up their connection with their customers.

32:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, sony's notorious. They're the ones that put the root kit on. Yeah uh, their their cd, their audio cd, yeah, so you couldn't steal it.

32:14 - Padre (Guest)
That was, uh, that's gone back, going back a few years, I think. Sony was just nostalgic. They wanted to remind people. No, no, no. We screwed up the user experience way before my we were one of the first.

32:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, although the playstation pro was released this year. I think somewhat of a success.

32:27 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
No, for those who do not care how much things cost, right, seven hundred dollars. Yeah, the only the only friend I have is the one that has. One is the one who, like that's not relevant to me.

32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want the latest and greatest, and that's I have one for my lamborghini just in case I get bored on the road and the winter chalet but for everybody else it was.

32:48 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I thought it seemed like it was a disappointment, in the sense that it was kind of like oh, I thought you were going to show us something new and good, and this is not new and good enough to have warranted all of the hype leading up to it. And then the fact that it was out there, and it's just like maybe we could have just waited until you had more to offer than just these this wasn't on my uh agenda for the show, but what is this?

33:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the last year that console gaming still has legs? No, no, microsoft's not gonna. They're now saying, yeah, you're, you have an xbox and everywhere, yeah right.

33:25 - Padre (Guest)
Is that just them saying, yeah, we're you have an Xbox and everywhere, yeah right is that just them saying, yeah, we failed at console gaming and we're gonna let it ask Sony have it? Do you know the? The most popular console ever sold, the one that is also outsold every other console it's a Nintendo.

33:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure yes or something right, it's the PS2.

33:39 - Padre (Guest)
Oh, 160 million units and they still sell millions of units every every year because they're pirated yes, because you can pirate the games.

33:47 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, that's why that's not going anywhere.

33:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
No, okay, so console gaming has legs, if you're not Microsoft but I do feel like the console gaming got itself into a corner. The race to bigger and bigger hardware led to more and more expensive game creation yeah, if you're spending $700 on a console. You want a game that presses the limit of that console, right, but that game costs $400 million to make. Unless I sell a billion dollars plus of that game, it doesn't make sense and there isn't enough consoles to make that kind of money.

34:20 - Benito (Announcement)
Wow, unless you're Nintendo.

34:23 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, nintendo games don't cost that much to make because they didn't play the hardware. Right, right, right. Yeah, there's 720p 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. And nintendo goes not playing that. Keep it simple.

34:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Downscale the hardware, make the game fun to play and it works yeah, when I was saying console gaming, I was thinking mostly xbox and playstation, but really, if you consider the switch a console, uh, console gaming is alive and well. The new switch will come out in 2025. Um, if you consider steam deck a console, I I think Steam Deck's done pretty well in its clones, the Legion and so forth.

35:09 - Padre (Guest)
We're never not going to need a way to waste our time. It's a good way to waste time.

35:16 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And you can't only be the phone, because there's not enough battery in the world, so you need another device to drain the battery up.

35:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching the last twit of 2024. We're covering the stories that made 2024 so interesting, so 2024. Micah Sargent is here it's great to have you Father Robert Ballasare, the Digital Jesuit, and, of course, from Windows Weekly, richard Campbell. We will have more in just a moment. We're still in January, guys.

35:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
We're going to have to move down to May. I guess we're going back up again.

35:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, we're going back and forth a little bit. Yeah, trends, that's right, trends Coming up. We haven't mentioned the big story of the year and I'll let you think about that while I tell you about our sponsor, and we thank them so much for sponsoring our year-end show. They've been a great sponsor all year long.

36:10
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37:17
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40:04
Bitwardencom slash twit. It's the only password manager I use. It's the only one I recommend. Bitwarden dot com slash twitter. We thank them so much for their support of our year-end show on this week in tech. This was, uh, elon musk's year in so many ways. I would love to see a study of how much of the news cycle he dominated from beginning to end. The first story of the year was in february, when the first human received a neural link brain chip implant. Very impressive too. The guy was playing video games, uh, with his neural link.

40:45 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The guy was shown playing video games with his neural link shown you don't believe it.

40:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Poor elon has really lost credibility. I'm sorry to say uh, I think somebody interviewed him. Didn't we interview him, or somebody we know interview him?

41:00 - Benito (Announcement)
yes, I remember the story. Someone just talked to him, right, yeah?

41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it might have been this week in space, I can't remember. Anyway, at the time he was anonymous, appropriately, but he's since come forth. I think it did stop working after a while, but it was the first one Lost some functionality, yeah it was the first one and it's pretty amazing.

41:20 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Not the only company doing this. The transplant only lived a few weeks.

41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. The reality is Nolan.

41:26 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Auerbach is still alive.

41:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Yeah, that's a good thing. There will be many more Elon stories to come. In fact, I think Elon probably is the story of the year, but we'll vote on that later. This is in February. Apple got hit with a 1.8 billion euro fine. This is mostly a complaint, I think, from Spotify Went to the EU and this is kind of the story of EU regulation, which is the EU company says hey, the Americans are eating our lunch, what can you do about it? They were fined for quote restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services Outside of the Apple ecosystem. You can't tell anybody about Spotify, ok.

42:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Look, I have. I have kind of been of mixed minds when it comes to the EU stuff, and, in particular, 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, 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, and so 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, I don't know, in the app store, and there's also something there.

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 and, in a way, make it a little more difficult for others to compete in that space, I get that argument, but again it does, in a way, kind of there's a word chuff, I guess that it's coming from another large company. 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. So I don't know. I'm curious how everybody else feels, though. Does Microsoft, having years of antitrust concerns and maybe some upcoming antitrust concerns? I'm sure that you have some storied history when it comes to that, richard.

44:04 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I think we said this on Windows Weekly recently. I think Microsoft's delighted to actually be back into the antitrust conversations because it means they're relevant again.

44:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it had been uh yeah, interesting way of being relevant, I guess but they're important enough that they, like regulators, are looking at us again I. 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 yeah to do something like you are in the process of having a uh a uh administration change, so all bets are off. That may go back to the uh, good old days of the e of margaret the vista. Who's?

44:45 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
retired. Considering the cluster of tech bros you've got hanging around Mar-a-Lago these days, seems unlikely yeah.

44:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And actually that's OK, we skip ahead to December. But that's really the Elon Musk story, was? It turned out all along? Elon was playing 3D chess when he bought Twitter in october of 2022 I think it was for 44 billion dollars. Everybody said that's ridiculous, it's not worth that. He then fired half the staff. I and many others said, oh, you're going to destroy twitter? No, it didn't. It survived and he had a little trouble with live streams of various people, but it survived. Uh it. It kind of turned into a, a right-wing cesspool, but it also gave Elon huge clout. Uh, you may argue that the quarter of a billion dollars Elonon put into electing president trump was part of it, but the, the, the bully pulpit that he has on twitter, is another part of it, and we just saw it with the? Uh negotiations over the debt ceiling. Uh, where he used his uh, his cloud on twitter to scare the hell out of congress so I think at least we know congress believes he has huge.

46:04
Yeah, well, that's it. He used something out of the Trump playbook which is I'm going to primary you 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, and that was enough to scare them all and get them in line.

46:28 - Padre (Guest)
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 scared them.

46:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the money and they know the money, yeah, the money so he didn't really need.

46:34 - Padre (Guest)
Twitter, but Twitter is such a great place to be public about it, right if Twitter had remained what it was before Elon, he would have had just as much, that's true, because they wouldn't that's fair to have silenced him. Elon, he would have had just as much influence because they wouldn't dare to have silenced him. In fact, he would have even more of an influence because people would see him as he's the one raging against the machine. But he is the machine now. He is the man.

46:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He owns everything he's definitely weakened that tool for that. How interesting. I didn't think of that Twitter hasn't disappeared.

47:00 - Padre (Guest)
But if you take a look at the financial the bits of information that we can get about the financials, like what the investment banks have done to the valuation of their investments in Musk Twitter, in X, they've downgraded them by at least half, in some cases down by 75%. So that's off the top. They've lost the value of that investment. Plus, we all know that he's losing money, a lot of money, and probably in three or four years the debt service on X is going to be more than the total revenue of the company. That's just the debt service. That's before they pay anything for the operation of the company, and we know this because we know what things cost.

47:40 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It might already be true, robert too. Right, it's part of the company now.

47:45 - Padre (Guest)
Right. The only reason why Twitter has its doors still open is because musk is willing to keep funding it. He's willing he can afford it the money. Yeah, he can get it he he can afford it.

47:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's also not just him, right like he has big pocketed people around him that pushed him into doing it. I don't think this was a grand strategy. I think he did get duped into buying twitter.

48:04
He tried you don't think it was 3d chess, but then it worked out. Yeah, it did work out. 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 you know all of the conflicts he's having with the faa at spacex, like, I think, the pile of problems he had it suddenly made sense to go. If I go play with feds, maybe I can put to bed a bunch of these things that are problematic for me.

48:27 - Padre (Guest)
Interesting you know what he thought that was good for him, which is bad for the rest of us. Twitter had become sort of the de facto town hall for people who actually did research and actually knew what they were talking about In OPSEC, in space, in tech. They're big names who are not tied to the millstone that is currently around of what they would call mainstream media, who are actually doing pretty good investigative reporting. So he cleared them out. They're all gone. They've all gone elsewhere or they've gone silent waiting for the next platform to rise. Some people think it's going to be Blue Sky, it's probably not going to be Mastodon, it's definitely not Threads, and Facebook was lost a long time ago. But in the meantime he's got the only platform where people used to gather.

49:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And he's trading on its old value as it diminishes, correct?

49:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's riding it all the way into the ground. This was the year of blue sky, wasn't it? Blue sky opened to the public this year. It was an invite, only until, I think, march. I have it in here somewhere and it has grown very, very rapidly with kind of the demise of Twitter, the changes at Twitter. I see you have a blue. You're using a blue sky handle now.

49:43 - Padre (Guest)
I am. Remember, leo, I told you that I would stay on Twitter like Slim Pickens riding that atomic bomb, and right about I realized I spent so much time away from Twitter starting this year. Yeah, and I didn't miss it. And I wasn't missing the engagement and most of the interesting people that I followed had stopped posting. So I still have an account there. It hasn't had anything of substance added to it for months and I am actually getting engagement now on Blue Sky, way more than I got on Macedon, and a lot of the people that I missed are now over there. I think Blue Sky has actually passed that critical mass. It's not going to challenge Twitter for size at any given time, but they don't have to because they're not running a multi-billion dollar debt.

50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are at a what was it? 100 million monthly active users now, or daily active users? That's getting close. Twitter is 300, 350 million, something like that, so they're in the right order of magnitude. Anyway, Mike Masnick one of the stories we have. Mike Masnick joined the Blue Sky Board from Tech Dirt as Jack Dorsey left. That was a good transition. I think any association with Twitter left with Jack Dorsey who had funded it as a CEO of Twitter, and Mike Masnick is very well known as kind of the opposition to what happened at Twitter. He wrote a very funny piece for Elon on how to speed run the moderation curve and Elon followed it pretty exactly, doing all the mistakes that Mike Masnick said he would make. I don't know, Maybe blue sky is the winner. I'm wondering. I don't feel the need for a Twitter anymore. Do we need still need something and a national public square?

51:33 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
But that's okay. Oh sorry, go ahead. Good, no, no, no, you go, you go.

51:37 - Padre (Guest)
I was just going to say that people spent almost two decades building up successful presences on Twitter and I'm not talking just about the multi-million user accounts, 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. 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 Exactly. I've been burnt right, exhausted. I'm exhausted. Exhausted.

52:10 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The amount of energy that I was pouring into it. You certainly don't want to build another social graph like that. Yeah, exactly, it's done, which is why Threads got a big jump. Because it had the Instagram.

52:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was easy In fact, even though Thread's numbers are at least comparable, if not better than Blue Sky's, you have to wonder how much of that is legitimate. I think Mark Zuckerberg recently said 100 million daily active users, 300 million monthly active users, but since Instagram accounts get ported over to Blue Sky, you wonder how many of those people are accidentally… Ported over Threads? Yeah, because there are.

52:41 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Threads shown.

52:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thread posts shown on Instagram, it's easy to accidentally hit that count yeah, I've done it and said, oh, I don't want threads?

52:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well then, blue Sky put together starter packs a few months ago. Starter packs are huge and that's a way to simplify building a social graph, getting over the primary hurdle. People want the square, they just don't want to build it again.

53:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly Yep.

53:07 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They want it as readers more than as posters. Is that fair? They're in the right place, right? Yeah, you're fine trying to find out where the common green is.

53:12 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, I used to know where it was and now it's. I go. Okay, I've got some friends who are over here, 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. That's threads, and so all of those places, and I don't know which one to go to or which one matters, and there's no way I'm spending my time on all three, so I just go. I don't care enough anymore because what I had before, where it was one place, was so much easier 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. What was it?

53:46
that you said in the chat.

53:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw a post this morning that 100 members of Congress are now on Blue Sky.

53:52 - Padre (Guest)
It's not all of them, it's only about a third of them If they had the resources, blue Sky could put together a crack team and make an importer Say look, we will look at your Twitter account, we will see who you're following, 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.

54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People have made those tools, haven't they? Yeah, they've made it.

54:16 - Padre (Guest)
They've made them, but they're so clunky, they're so, so clunky.

54:19 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They're not really follow-up matching, so much as moving content, exactly, exactly.

54:24 - Padre (Guest)
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. 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. It has become such a toxic place. I log in every once in a while and I go why Twitter it has become such a toxic place.

54:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I log in every once in a while and I go why was I ever here? Well, let's see, you know Microsoft Word because it read and wrote Word perfect documents. No, you're exactly right. If they built the tool and then you send it to, you know the county clerks? Hey, you've got a Twitter feed right now. Here's how you flip it to feed to be. Here's how you add blue sky to that. Right, don't, take course, add to blue sky into the loop so that it becomes that square that people want.

55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon would probably block such a tool right well, there's only well, I mean I got personal experience from that.

55:15 - Padre (Guest)
It's not possible. You can block me from using your. You cannot block me from scraping data off your site.

55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, Anybody wants to know more? Contact? The digital. Jesuit Vatican. What is it VA? What is the Vatican cities? Vaticanva va Okay.

55:34 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
By the way, the best US government site on Blue Sky account is the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. They make these unhinged graphics that are hilarious. Around Halloween they had these ghosts carrying knives and there was one that said water your Christmas tree, 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. They're really funny. They've done a great job and I'm kind of worried about whether the budget will be there in the new year. Oh man, that's so great. Look at that.

56:10 - Padre (Guest)
That's a follow. I got that. Oh nice, that's nice.

56:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so these are all a legit consumer product safety concerns. This is going to be a good canary in the coal mine to see if this survives under the new administration.

56:27 - Padre (Guest)
Exactly how long before Doge says that's a waste of money. Elon has already said that he wants to kill it.

56:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a waste of money.

56:33 - Padre (Guest)
This is number one on his list because it also tracks defects on Teslas, so hmm, right. Ah, okay, well, I'm following him for the nonce. Anyway, he wants to kill the US Consumer Product Safety Bureau, the organization that was formed.

56:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also the consumer. What's the name of it? Finance, that's right.

56:58 - Padre (Guest)
Such a terrible acronym, the one that was fighting for your rights against credit card companies and banks.

57:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he wants to kill that too. Yeah, he wants to kill that too, because it's a waste of money.

57:06 - Padre (Guest)
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.

57:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure that's not it at all. He didn't like the omnibus bill to keep the government open was because it had a clause in it that said you can't build any more plants in China, and he's about to build a big Tesla plant in Shanghai. So the other another big story early in the year and I think it's going to be a continuing story is the mandate to return to office. Some have said this is a guarantee that you'll lose your best employees just when you need the most. This is Mike Elgin writing in Computer World. He says if you force employees to commute and work in an office every day, you can expect to lose your best employees. And yet a number of very big companies, including Amazon, have announced, I think, tesla too. I know Elon has done it with Twitter. You got to come in and work in the office. Is the office kind of a? Some have said it's an industrial era. You know confection that doesn't really apply in the modern digital era.

58:22 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's not the kind of work, but certainly for information workers. It is a place for bad managers to treat their employees badly.

58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, look, we have somebody in Washington State, somebody in Canada, somebody in the Vatican City on this show. This is our office. This is our office. We don't need to be altogether in the in the same place and for a lot of work. That's the case now. If you're building a tesla, of course you gotta.

58:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, there are some jobs where you need to be in in person. Um, I was. I I wish I could remember where I had read about this, but there was uh some speculation that, um, if you, if they were comparing the um, the investments that CEOs and other C-suite folks were making in, um, in and now I'm forgetting the word as well in real estate. Thank you, yes, for uh, commercial real estate and the fact that if people start working from home, those investments are going to tank and so they kind of all are working together to make sure that people continue to work in 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.

59:38 - Padre (Guest)
Oh, like that massive Salesforce building in downtown San Francisco that would empty out. That's not probably worth too much anymore.

59:45 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, I'm working closely with a company that was looking at a return-to-work mandate and then actually figured out where everybody had moved to over the three years of the pandemic. That's it A we're asking people to move again and that's not reasonable. And B we only need half the office, so why have any of the office?

01:00:03 - Padre (Guest)
Right. This has to bypass the executive suite and go directly to the stockholders, because you can present to the stockholders, the shareholders. What is it that you want from us? Are you looking for butts in seats or are you looking for productivity? 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, and that's going to affect your bottom line. So what exactly do you want? What are you hoping your company will produce? If you want to produce timesheets, then okay, sure, let's do return to office. If not, you need to change the questions that you're asking.

01:00:41 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, you also force managers to be better. You don't get to manage by looking over people's shoulders, by counting heads in seats. You actually have to engage with your people, without interrupting them, without impairing their productivity, and understand what they're doing. So in a lot of ways, remote work made management more effective. If you weren't effective, you got out of it, and that was more effective exactly.

01:01:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You didn't figure out how to treat people reasonably so do you think that the this return to office mandate is doomed, that companies like the washington post, intel and amazon, who have said five days a week, are going to back down?

01:01:17 - Padre (Guest)
they flip back and forth at least three times already that I can count. Remember, Because back in 2022, they were saying, oh, return to work is happening. 2023, they backed off.

01:01:26 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
80% of the CEOs that they had asked said we're reevaluating it because we realized it's not and Robert called it because the best people walk because they have a place to work, and so suddenly you lose a bunch of talent and go oh ah, how about flex?

01:01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does look like the trend is towards around three days a week in the office, two at home. Is that viable? Are employees going to accept that? Well, it is true, if you've moved, it's not going to help.

01:01:51 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's way more acceptable. I've talked to some where they're doing one, but everybody does the same one. So they shrunk the office down and the team come in together one day a week and it's a lot more hot desk and shared workspaces. Like, why are you going to the office to be face to face with my team? That's why.

01:02:10 - Padre (Guest)
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. It's because you've got executives who know that they can scare part of their workforce and say 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 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Another good way to wreck your business right Like there's an array of choices now. You can wreck your business in many ways.

01:02:36 - Padre (Guest)
You can speed run to bankruptcy any way you'd like.

01:02:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I'm going to annoy all my employees and then I'm going to threaten them and try and replace them with. Technology doesn't work. Things are going well, oh my God, do you?

01:02:46 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
think one thing that I haven't really seen is someone talking to the C levels, the, the, you know, the CEO or whoever it happens to be that's doing these mandates outside of, to be clear, the other CEOs and C-suites who feel the same way. They talk plenty to each other and share. This is why everybody should return to work. I would love to hear what it truly is. Is it paranoia? They can't possibly be getting work done where they are and I'm wasting money here. 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 and I wonder I posit that part of what gets you into one of those leadership positions in the sort of classic positions, in the sort of classic job setup, is a certain level of ego, which some might describe as narcissism. 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 and I think that it's not the CEO there.

01:04:03 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
in that situation, micah, it's the favorite mid-tier manager.

01:04:07 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yes, that's more accurate. I'm thinking of bigger companies.

01:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is a reasonable question, though Is it better to have people in the office or not. Right Depends on the team Depends on the team.

01:04:18 - Padre (Guest)
Yep Depends on how you ask and whose job is dependent on people being in the office. You know who's amazing in the office.

01:04:24 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
You know who wants to be in the office. Really Me Cold call salespeople, oh yeah. It's a lonely horrible job, so they sit together and support each other. Miserate yeah, the personality that can make 100 calls a day and get 99 no's is a different kind of human. Not calls a day and get 99 no's is a different kind of human Not me, but I've worked with a bunch of them and they take care of each other.

01:04:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're better at it. Salespeople are social. They're very social. I think they're a social breed and they need to be around other people.

01:04:50 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's important. They cannot do that job Right.

01:04:53 - Padre (Guest)
I feel like I have to put a disclaimer here, because I am arguing for remote work and my organization is the biggest return to office organization on the planet and it is 100.

01:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of hard to do massive from the house. I guess, 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?

01:05:17 - Padre (Guest)
look, we're still smarting over the fact that they released the printing press. Gosh darn.

01:05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Luther. That's down the list. Nothing. It all went downhill from there. 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. I mean, I think your pastoral duties often need to be in person, but you certainly could do services remotely.

01:05:44 - Padre (Guest)
The megachurches, the megachurches that would be absolutely fantastic.

01:05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does the Catholic Church do remote services, or is that only Protestant?

01:05:49 - Padre (Guest)
We do not there's been some interesting tests and theological bubble arguments, but no, everything is still in person and that's I kind of like that.

01:06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like I want to have a personal connection?

01:06:03 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, exactly no. The base theology is based on personal connection. You cannot get that personal connection if the person's not in front of you, Right?

01:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's something to be said for that. You're watching a very interesting and probably because of the brilliant people we've got here year-end episode of this Week in Tech, our traditional kind of look back at the year with Father Robert Ballasare, the digital Jesuit. Don't look now, but portions of the building seem to be burning down behind you. Or is that just a preview of the?

01:06:36 - Padre (Guest)
future, you might be burning heretics in the background.

01:06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got a few heretics, some no big uh. No, I love your. I love your, uh, virtual ulog, it's great to have you. I miss you so much. Robert, you're one person I miss return to office. I would, I would bring you back. You're gonna do the ces thing this year. Yes, I am, I am, yes. But see, in the years past you've brought in a bunch of stuff to the show.

01:07:00
There's nowhere to bring it now I will make a package for you, leo no, no, no, I don't want that, but I I think maybe we got to figure out a way to do I. Maybe they're on your desk or something. All the you are going to ces this year oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, it's, it's.

01:07:14 - Padre (Guest)
It's kind of a mecca for me. 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, that's basically all you need to do. That's, the last two days are kill time.

01:07:29 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, you meant a video package.

01:07:32 - Padre (Guest)
Oh, that too, no, I hope. Oh yeah, we can run your video packages.

01:07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you do those, I would love that. Yeah, no those.

01:07:38 - Padre (Guest)
I would love that. Yeah, no, but I, I can make a hardware package too. I mean I just, oh, you made a video package yeah, I'll take your video package.

01:07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just didn't want a bunch of stuff. I got enough stuff. I want to get rid of stuff. I want to hear about giving away e-bikes now and you can get an e-bike. I know we have too many e-bikes. Actually the garage is full. Anyway, wonderful to have you, father. I hope your parents are okay and uh, we just prayers and thoughts go on your way. We love you and it's great to see you. I miss you.

01:08:10
I miss you very much. One of our newest family members, rich Campbell, has really jumped in and become a real part of the family. On Windows Weekly, just love having you on, richard especially. Oh, thank you, not exclusively, but definitely. Your brown liquor picks every week Seems to be popular A very nice substitute for Mary Jo's beer picks, but I just love. As I said, you're an autodidact, you love everything, you learn about everything and your information, your history is fantastic. It's great to have you. You know, actually all three of you are that way. Of course, micah Sargent, who is our last remaining host besides me at the Twit Studios, but you've moved your studios up north. How is it up there? You like it?

01:08:54 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, yes, the weather's been great. Yeah, portland, yep, and the is has been exactly what I like good I minus. I wish there was a little more snow here. That's the only thing. There's it very rarely richard.

01:09:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You go up and visit richard, you can get some snow and yeah, but we keep our snow in the mountains.

01:09:11 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
There's none in this. Yeah, whistler, yeah, and he, separately, is trying to make an argument for vancouver. Washington is like listen, we've got the real vancouver up here, that's right. There is no but, once upon a time, british columbia was the british side of the columbia river oh interesting.

01:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huh, didn't know that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, anyway, love having all three of you on.

01:09:32 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
You're making this show much more interesting than I, than I thought it would be 20 it wasn't a bad year there was a lot of stuff happened, a lot, I mean, and we're near. There's more, far more to talk about.

01:09:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo, like my goodness there is and we're getting there. Uh, with this week in tech, for this week, let's go to march. Look at that, the the march of time. Uh, in march, apple said we're not going to do a car after all. $10 billion at least we don't know how much, but estimate it as much as $10 billion. Later they realized there's no hope, there's no future. They tried a lot of different ideas Self-driving. None of it really worked for them.

01:10:16 - Padre (Guest)
This made me sad, and 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 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Be interesting to see what they did, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah, bloomberg said it was because they were trying to outdo Tesla. I don't know if that's strictly true. I think it's a very difficult business to get into. In fact, tesla's facing some headwinds these days, so I think Apple realized that it's pretty hard to become a metal bender from from zero.

01:10:45 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's also a low margin business like why are you going into something might bother? Yeah, relatively little money make phones. You're making a bundle, right.

01:10:54 - Padre (Guest)
I think apple's very desperate to find the next thing right when you look at what apple has done for their hit products, they always have at one of the the base levels of discussion how quickly can we move this so that everything is in-house?

01:11:10
they like to control the core technologies that go into their product, and I'm sure they were looking at car and saying it will never happen. We will never be able to make all the technologies that need to go into a car and it's not worth it to try it. However, I will say that they spent based on who you believe between $10 and $15 billion on their Apple Car project. They could have bought Tesla for that 15 years ago. The valuation was not great. In fact, it was in debt. If they had just done that, as it was rumored that they were going to for their I can't remember, was it Project Titan, one of them they were actually considering making a tender offer for Tesla, which was in debt at the time. Imagine how things would have played out differently.

01:11:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, probably we would still not have a major electric car. No, in debt. Tesla wasn't a great car either. The tesla wasn't a great car either. The innovation, the brilliant moments that and I don't say that's elon per se, but elon having the right engineers and pushing them as far as they did, you know, put the electric car actually on the map. I don't think they would have succeeded.

01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's it's hard, it's unfortunate, with his behavior today to remember how fundamental he changed the electric car yeah, it's almost a shame that his because, uh, I was, I owned a model x when it first came out. I remember going to the factory in fremont and and literally tearing up because I was so moved by his vision of what he wanted to do.

01:12:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
the guy that I follow closely on this that I really appreciate was Sandy Monroe. And so Sandy 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. But when Sandy Monroe realized the brilliance in the Tesla, he talked about it. He talked 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 management is like, you'll never succeed. This he's. He doesn't know how to make a car, but his infrastructure is unbelievable for the way that the car functions. Yeah, and that and that you know. Those are the best storytellers. This is an old school car guy who fought Tesla every tooth and nail all the way along, but when he was profoundly right, he was profoundly right.

01:13:29 - Padre (Guest)
And remember, 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. So the fact that he and that was him, that wasn't a design thing, that was that was Musk fighting for something. He had the fight state to do it right, exactly, and it worked he. He fought the big guys, he fought the large car manufacturers, he fought the government and he won. So he was, he was in folk hero status until he went full culture war. When he went full culture war, he went full culture war it started being wait a minute, I thought you were just a tech guy who understood what people wanted.

01:14:05 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Now it turns out that you already flew his sports car into space. I like this.

01:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was very cool let's also remember that in october, uh, he figured out a way to capture a returning uh falcon heavy booster with chopsticks turning falcon heavy booster with chopsticks, which is very impressive. So credit to somebody. Now maybe it's you know, his is, of course, many, many engineers at SpaceX and many, many engineers at Tesla who actually made it happen, but he had the vision and the building is catching a 25 building. That's pretty amazing yeah.

01:14:46
So we're going to say some bad things about Elon, but let's not forget that this guy for many years really was Ironman, yeah.

01:14:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He revolutionized space flight. He took it from $20,000 a kilo to $1,800 a kilo. That's where it is today. They flew more rockets than the rest of the world combined last year. And well and going forward.

01:15:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They probably are going to be the ones that fly all the rockets right at least whoever can get a falcon nine or gate can get it.

01:15:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
you know the the chinese are the number two because they fly their own rockets and are trying to land their own rockets too. What he's done is really set the bar. You have to do this now. At the moment there's only one well, one and a half, like Starship's done it once, but now there'll be New Glenn, which was supposed to fly at the end of this year but probably won't fly until early next year. It's interesting that China poses.

01:15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon's greatest competition, not just for rockets, but for electric vehicles, exactly right, 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, but there may well even be a ban on electric vehicles from china, uh, starting next year, um, which is too bad, because I think I would buy a $20,000 EV. Yeah, a lot of his competition is coming from China, both in space and in cars.

01:16:12 - Padre (Guest)
Actually, leo, the EV that I kind of want to get my hands on right now, because it was so bad and then it actually became decent, is the Vietnamese one. Have you seen that? No, what's it called? Do you know? I can't Just put Vietnamese EV.

01:16:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can Google that it was comically, is that it VinFast?

01:16:33 - Padre (Guest)
That's right. It was comically bad when it was first released.

01:16:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As bad as a.

01:16:39 - Padre (Guest)
Fisker that bad, oh no Way worse. The release like so bad as a Fisker that bad, oh no way worse. Because this the Fisker was embarrassing, this could kill you, uh, but within, oh, I like their e-bike, that's nice they, they've really stepped up. They've, they've, uh, they've, made the car safer. They're still very affordable. They actually look decently inside.

01:16:57 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Um wait safer from it can kill you. Doesn't sound very safe.

01:17:01 - Padre (Guest)
Well, I mean now, it will only kill you on a bad day, but you know, previously it was, it would kill you if you stepped into it.

01:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of which, what do we think? Was 2024 a good year for full self-driving or a bad year for full self-driving?

01:17:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
There have been no good years.

01:17:16 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, it was a good year in the sense that people finally figured out that there's no such told to them about full self-driving was BS. That's fair.

01:17:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was actually earlier this year that Elon announced the Tesla robo-taxi. Yeah, any day now.

01:17:34 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm sure. Yeah, you know, teslas have killed more people than the Ford Pinto.

01:17:38 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, but the Ford Pinto was a giant joke.

01:17:41 - Padre (Guest)
There are Ford P pintos, yeah uh, the cyber truck has been recalled more times than the ford pinto the cyber truck almost isn't a vehicle.

01:17:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
What?

01:17:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it? That's the question. Is it a brick on wheels? What is?

01:17:57 - Padre (Guest)
it. No, the cyber truck is a simp mobile. 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. All of those posts on reddit about everything wrong with my cyber truck, but I still love it. It doesn't work in the rain, but I love it. It fell apart in my driveway but I love it. It only made it two miles from the dealership but I still still the best car I've ever driven. It killed my dog, but I love it exactly.

01:18:25
It was some weird brazil type stuff going on here. It's the sip.

01:18:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Put off my fingers that's the best explanation I've heard, father. Honestly, that's really brilliant uh cruise.

01:18:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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. But Google continues with its robo-taxi, the Waymo, and in fact is expanding. Why did GM drop out?

01:18:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Money.

01:18:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just too expensive.

01:19:00 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, they didn't see the ROI.

01:19:02 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, it's a. It's a longer term investment, like you want to be positioned, but they thought it'd be sooner than it actually is. So suddenly you're looking at it, we need two or three more years of many billions and it's like or five years or 10 years, and they're like I can't bet that far. I got other things to spend on things to spend on what Google?

01:19:19 - Padre (Guest)
gets with Waymo is way more than a self-driving taxi. And this is so much data collection.

01:19:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the thing that big tech has. It's why you can't beat Apple at music. They're not trying to make money at music. You know 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. That was big. Now there are a couple of question marks. First of all, the lawsuit had its flaws in the way they defined, you know, monopoly, because Apple isn't really a monopoly except in its own ecosystem. So it really was almost a criticism of the ecosystem lock-in. But that would be interesting. Lock-in, jason Snell wrote, will be on trial. But it's also a question whether it will survive inauguration day next year. There are a lot of, you know, google's being sued. 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. Apple probably could just sit back and and wait, I would imagine well, and google got to.

01:20:48 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The is now in the same place that microsoft was in at the end of 99, where, okay, now the negotiation begins, right right now, a consent decree has to be drafted. It's not going away. You, you have to make a deal and ultimately, you want a deal.

01:21:08 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I had Lydia Nyland of Bloomberg, who was a fantastic antitrust reporter on Tech News Weekly, a few times to kind of keep us updated on what was going on with the Google thing. 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, there was another tech antitrust reporters kind of gather together and celebrate a little bit the fact that for the first time in so long, there was another tech antitrust situation going on. It's kind of like, oh, we finally have something to pay attention to, but also kind of getting you know, getting ready for what's going to be a very long drawn out process and well, what could be a very long Well that's the thing.

01:21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It may be truncated. We don't know. There's going to be a new attorney general in a few days.

01:21:47 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Already hanging out. No, no, no, I take that back. They didn't hang out, they did a phone call. Many of the other big tech leaders have already hung out.

01:21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Senator Pichai went to Mar-a-Lago.

01:21:58
All of them have contributed to the inauguration, which is kind of a non-partisan way of of sending money to the new administration. Google did file yesterday uh its uh response to the department of justice. On friday, google proposed a series actually day before yesterday a series of restrictions for three years. Okay, uh, that would bar the company from requiring device manufacturers, browsers and wireless carrier licensees to distribute their AI. What a concession right. On the other hand, department of Justice says no, we're going to make you sell Chrome, so there'll be a hearing on this in April. To make you sell chrome? So we'll be, there'll be a hearing on this in april. Uh, judge meta, uh, we'll have to decide the hearings uh are in april. Expected to release his decision by august. I guess this isn't something a new administration could change. The trial's over.

01:22:53 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They lost yeah, no, no.

01:22:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Definitely the remediation could be the enforcement, the doj could back off, could say well in the end they could just be encouraged just like, yeah, we'll never get around to having that meeting.

01:23:05 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, exactly yeah, 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 into microsoft for the antitrust on on browsers and they were the driving force to make microsoft include that little well, there was no Google in 1998 when the DOJ sued Microsoft.

01:23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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.

01:23:32 - Padre (Guest)
When we got to browser choice. I mean that was the whole thing.

01:23:36 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well.

01:23:37 - Padre (Guest)
I need to have a way to choose a browser rather than downloading one 50 seconds after I finished installation. I think there's no, Andre.

01:23:44 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
to be clear here, Internet Explorer was an essential part of Windows.

01:23:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't take it out. Bill Gates said we can't take it out. And then they did a demonstration version without it and it broke. It didn't work. And see, we told you we couldn't take it out, well it well.

01:24:01
I mean yeah, things break when you leave critical components out for the demo I mean, that's just kind of how that works um, let's see back in march, uh, the beginning of a story that really there was interesting. When I was doing this, I noticed there were a number of stories that kind of broke in the spring and then got worse and worse and worse. One was the microsoft hack exchange problem. Uh, with microsoft's executive emails being and then, bit by bit, microsoft said more and more about it and it got seemed like it got worse and worse through the year. I don't know if we've heard the the last of it. Maybe more to come on that one I don't think we're going to hear anymore.

01:24:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
We're done. No, I think the feds have gotten involved. The subtext of a lot of the statements they made around there this being a state actor and so forth. It's like there's some three-letter entities involved. Now. Yes, they don't want anybody talking about anything. I've definitely been pushing into those teams to say what can we say? I've definitely been pushing into those teams to say what can we say? And to the point where folks have said not only can I not talk to you, I have to report that I told you no, and that is an intelligence agency behavior.

01:25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this was also in the spring of this year, when the US accused Chinese hackers of targeting critical infrastructure. This is a story from the New York Times. It was published in March of 2024. Then we found out that actually, chinese agents were not only in our grid, but they were in our phone system, listening in on phone calls at the highest level in Washington DC and the Trump campaign. 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. You wouldn't have known that. In March, when you read the first inklings of this, senator Warner, chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, mark Warner said my hair's on fire when he heard about all of the threats in our communications infrastructure.

01:26:20 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I mean I would bring up as someone who's done shows and stuff on breaches is like it does take weeks to even understand the scope of a breach.

01:26:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:26:28 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
So they they may not have known in March when it was first talked about, but I think another important side of this is, especially when you're dealing with government entities, they and and intelligence related stuff they won't talk unless they have to Right. So often. Intelligence related stuff they won't talk unless they have to right so often. I see this six month lag because it's actually press doing freedom of information requests that force the story out so they make the initial release because they have to. They have to make a thing, nothing more.

01:26:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then the fois go out and it did get worse and worse and worse as the year went by at one point the intelligence agency were saying, and the phone companies were saying we can't fix it.

01:27:07
The intelligence agencies last month started demanding you've got to fix this. All the major US carriers, including AT&T, verizon and T-Mobile, were hacked, were hacked. The mark warner says the hackers are still inside the us system and there is no obvious way to get them out that doesn't involve physically replacing old equipment. And that's the real problem is that ss7, the signaling system these they use, has been hacked for years, that the equipment has been hacked for years. This requires a reinvention of our telecommunications system at this.

01:27:41 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
well, what it requires is a giant pile of money, yeah.

01:27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a hack.

01:27:46 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And really what the Pelicos are saying to government is if you want to fix this, pay up, give us billions and we'll replace all of this equipment at once.

01:27:54 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, can you clarify what you mean by that, father Robert?

01:27:56 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, our traditional way of understanding a hack or a breach is that a bad actor has penetrated the defenses, the firewall, of your network and has been able to exfiltrate data. 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. The problem is this is so pervasive and it's been running for so many years. There is no breach. It's a library. Our network is a library. It's Parasite, it's their network so many years. There is no breach.

01:28:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a library our network, living there, library, it's parasite, their network it's the movie parasite they're living in the house yeah, so how do you clean that?

01:28:29 - Padre (Guest)
you can't. 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. This they did allocate another few billion for rip and replace.

01:28:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, just a couple of months ago, the, or a couple of weeks ago actually, for the FCC, and the incoming chairman of the FCC, carr, says he's all in favor of spending billions more to rip and replace all this Chinese equipment. That's a lot of equipment that has been taken out.

01:28:52 - Padre (Guest)
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. 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. That's the only way we can be sure that our data is safe. Now that works for us because we have a relatively limited scope organization that needs secure information. But if you're looking at the telecom system, that's not billions, that's trillions of dollars of equipment and labor While you're still trying to use the system. It's just not feasible.

01:29:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're going to have to eat that elephant one bite at a time as an example, last month the consumer financial protection bureau there you go, there's the acronym cfpb told its workers maybe don't use the cell phone so much because of uh, they're not secure. The fbi told americans start using encrypted messaging systems. But then they had a caveat. They said appropriately managed encrypted messaging systems, ie systems we can subpoena and get the clear text from. So it was one of those. They're wiretapping us. That's bad, but we want to be able to wiretap you. That's good. And the truth is all of this started 20 years ago with CALEA, the law enforcement act that provided digital wiretaps. The fbi said we've got to have wiretaps in these digital phone systems. Congress agreed and it turns out those are the back doors that the chinese are using. So what goes around comes around we did it to ourselves we did it to ourselves and and now we're telling.

01:30:43
Now the, now the fbi is saying but use encrypted messaging as long as we can get into it, it's appropriate which is not signal, by the way or or any other good end-to-end encrypted system.

01:30:54
Um, don't use rcs. Anyway, you're watching. I'm trying not to be indignant. We're celebrating the end of 2024 and the beginning of a brand new year. On this Week in Tech, we also are celebrating several thousand new members to our club and we welcome you all. We're so happy to have you.

01:31:21
We had a bit of a crisis over the last month. Uh, we were really worried about going into the new year. Our finances and the club members stepped up. A bunch of new people joined and thank you I. I mentioned that we I kind of hinted we might need some help, uh, but we're not out of the woods yet completely. I have to say. We did book almost a million dollars with advertising last week, but it costs much more than that to run a twit. So your help is still very, very important. We love our advertisers, but we also love our club members.

01:31:55
If you're not yet a member, seven bucks a month, ad-free versions of all the shows. You get to watch Micah build little tiny furniture in micah's crafting corner. We do our coffee show. We're going to do more of those. With mark prince. We, uh, we're going to do some more. Uh, christopher marquart, our photo guy, is going to do a monthly, is doing a monthly photo segment. Stacy's book club went so well this week, we're going to do more of those. All of those appear in the twit plus feed.

01:32:19
The club members make it possible for us to stream everywhere. By the way, we are now streaming not only in the Club Twit Discord. To me, that's the best benefit. The Club Twit Discord is a great place to hang out with nerdy people having a grand old time Full of animated GIFs too, I must say. So that's part of the benefit. But you also get the special events, the community, the sense of the community and the warm feeling that you're helping us stay on the air. If you like the shows we do, that's how you vote Join the club twittv, slash club twit, and we thank you in advance for all your support. But I am happy to say, unexpectedly, a lot of the advertisers who were ghosting us decided right at the end of the month okay, we're going to get some ads, we guess we're going to need some ads. So that's good news. That's good news.

01:33:17
We're continuing on with our stuff, continuing on with the look back at the year 2024. Uh, another story that we didn't find, that we found out about in march but ended up developing through the year. At t, in march, sent out a notice to all its customers you, we need to reset your passcode. What? Uh? Yeah, just you know, don't worry about it, just we've reset your passcode. Well, it turns out, by the end of the year, at&t said yeah, criminals stole the foreign phone records of nearly all our customers, nearly all of our customers. The pin notice was just the tip of the iceberg. So they, if you are an at t customer, uh, you should know that the stolen data contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers. At t records of calls and text messages, the metadata, not the content, for a six-month period between May 2022 and October 2022.

01:34:25 - Padre (Guest)
Okay, Don't we have a law about timely disclosure? Yeah, I don't understand.

01:34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think companies are saying well, we told you what we knew, when we knew it.

01:34:36 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it takes time to fully understand the scope of a problem. Right, you do have to bring in a team. It takes a lot of analysis to really put a picture around it, and while you're doing that, you're assembling your PR crisis team. Right, it's pretty embarrassing, isn't it?

01:34:52
Yeah, but if you handle it correctly, it goes away quickly, right? The reality is that breaches have very low consequences to most companies if they use the experts. There's a group of folks there who make a living handling these disclosures, putting them out there in a way that they fully disclose, they're compliant and the news story dies within a couple of months or so.

01:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually the biggest. I think the biggest breach of the year was national public data. A data broker that had information pretty much on everybody and pretty much all of it was exfiltrated including, by the way, social Security numbers because we found out it's not illegal to sell, to collect and sell people's Social Security numbers. We found that out because the FCC announced just a couple of weeks ago they're thinking about making it illegal. We're thinking about that, what do you think? So the National Public Data breach it's it's 2.7 billion data records. A lot of them were duplicates because otherwise it would be everybody in the world, but it did include this was in August social security numbers. I looked, I found my social security number, so did Steve Gibson. National Public Data went out of business. I put that in air quotes because I think all they did is change their name. But the problem really is that there are many, many data brokers and there is no consequence for being a data broker or, as you said, richard, really for having a breach.

01:36:33 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They just change their name and get on with it, crying out loud. Ashley madison is still in business and they're yeah, there's a good example. All of the data proved that their entire business model is a lie.

01:36:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who would trust Ashley Madison after that.

01:36:46 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, yeah, your data is going to get leaked and you're not actually talking to a real person. There's no women, they're all bots. Still going Still going.

01:36:56 - Padre (Guest)
I mean, that's Palantir's business model. They're employed by the US government, which part of it is their business model.

01:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just clarify yeah, data collection, oh okay, and actually it's not Not fembots.

01:37:08 - Padre (Guest)
It's not-.

01:37:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not in the fembots. Why are you?

01:37:11 - Padre (Guest)
stuck on fembots. It's a thing, but.

01:37:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean their business model is selling data to the government that our government couldn't gather on us exactly why there's no law against civil rights yeah, there's no law against it, because that's the easiest way for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to get information about us now.

01:37:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's not up to them. Ultimately, you have a congress that passes those laws we I've heard we have a congress I know

01:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
when it rarely does, you know I don't know what they're actually up to these days they're, they're nervously starting at twitter these days one of the big debates this year was should kids be allowed to have cell phones in schools?

01:38:04
No, I think not, and more and more schools are banning it. California passed a law. This story from April. California passed a law saying schools can may order kids to leave their phones at the door. Order kids to leave their phones at the door. But some of this comes along with the moral panic over cell phones making kids crazy and I mean like literally mentally ill, is it?

01:38:34 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, it's not actually a moral panic, it's a bunch of empirical data.

01:38:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's correlation not causation.

01:38:39 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, that's the problem. The thing that you're seeing when the schools do remove the phones is that the kids change their socialization strategies and actually tend to use their phones less. Yeah, Really. So the empirical data so far has shown that 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, right?

01:39:02 - Padre (Guest)
As a former teacher you know pre-2000, I cannot imagine teaching again with those devices in my classroom. Their attention would be so much more divided even than it was back then.

01:39:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Parents push back because they want to be able to reach their kids Plus, it's happened several times during school shootings. Then, yeah, parents push back because they want to be able to reach their kids. Plus with this, it's happened several times during school shootings.

01:39:24 - Padre (Guest)
This is when kids are able to reach their parents and say we got a problem uh, that has a different solution that's not related to the phone, but no one wants to that's a separate problem.

01:39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Only one country has that problem padre or, as the onion says, the the one country that says we can't do anything about it. It keeps happening. Uh yeah, school shootings have raised parents anxieties from wall street journal in april. As a mother of three, I'm certainly worried. I think it's probably. I mean, what's the harm of saying to the kid as they go into the classroom put your phone in the rack, turn it off and put it in the rack.

01:40:02 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I think that's the right thing to do, absolutely I was in a high school classroom last week doing the day of tech careers and things, and that's exactly what they did. They kids, those, those are high school students 15 to 17 year old. They all have phones and as they came into the room, they all put them in a in a rack and then.

01:40:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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. New york passed a bill to ban, in a very loosely defined, addictive social media algorithms for kids. It's not really clear how they're going to enforce this. Australia passed something even more draconian kids under 16 are not allowed to be on social media. They're also unclear on how it's going to be enforced.

01:40:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
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 mined, right that terrifies them, of course but the issue becomes how do you identify?

01:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how do you? But how do you identify the age of a user?

01:41:14 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
without? Yeah, well, that's going to be their problem that's what the that's what the australian legislature says that's your problem, you figure it out.

01:41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have a year and a half to figure. A year and a month now to figure it out.

01:41:28 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Um, the new york. They've been largely complying with kappa, which was 13 and under right right, so well but where do you draw the line, though?

01:41:36 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
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? Yes, what is the extent of the social media company's responsibility If I put in a prompt that says are you over 13? Yes, what is your birthday and the kid lies? Will the social media company still be held responsible?

01:41:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's what COPPA has had Facial recognition, and yeah, exactly. Coppa has been widely ignored by you know, I mean, kids just lie. Yeah, Parents often lie.

01:42:02 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
You know, and I think the australians 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. That's one on the side of freedom.

01:42:13 - Padre (Guest)
I mean, I believe that's 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 games maybe video games should be on the list. They'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. The rules have to change. The rules are, at least for now. 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. We all know that social media is having a terrible effect on the development of children. We know that's not a rumor. We have empirical studies that show it affects the way that kids think, not for the better.

01:42:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So maybe People said that about violent video games, Father. Oh yeah, they said it about books. They said it about TV.

01:43:03 - Padre (Guest)
They said that, but without any proof. We've actually got people who did clinical scans of children who were using social media and they found that, yeah, the development of different parts of the brain changed. So it's not. Oh, I think there's something wrong here. It's. Let me show you what's wrong. Let me show you why it's not good that this part of the brain is underdeveloped. 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 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the debate that did rage during 2024, started by jonathan haight's book. Uh, saying? There's book saying there's a social media-caused epidemic among kids. There are a number of experts in the field, which Jonathan Haidt is not, who debate his findings. In fact, here's Candace Odgers who in fact does study this.

01:43:57
Her piece in Nature was a review of Jonathan Haidt's book the Anxious Generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. She says correlation does not equal causation. It seems it's an easy thing to say. Well, I see all the cell phones in the kids' hands. It must be causing this problem.

01:44:16
But she says hundreds of researchers have searched for the kinds of large effects suggested by hate. Our efforts have produced a mix of no small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When 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. In other words, it's not the cause, it's a symptom. And her, her problem with the prescription that jonathan height comes up with is it it doesn't solve the problem, it solves a symptom and we're not really addressing the roots of the problem. She says. These are not just our data or my opinion. Several mental analyses and systemic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the rollout of social media globally.

01:45:34 - Padre (Guest)
This is the debate. You and I are opposite ends of the spectrum on this, robert. 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, that's also an adult thing.

01:45:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The counter argument is that for many kids, this is their social life, especially for marginalized kids who are gay or transgender. This is their only opportunity to learn and find a community that accepts them.

01:46:01 - Padre (Guest)
This is true. Okay, I absolutely agree with that. That is one of the great things that social media has allowed. In fact, I would even go before that. So it's one of the things that the internet has allowed, this idea of a great interconnected network. However, this then becomes a greater good argument. So, yes, there are edge edge cases, but are the edge cases worth what we're seeing in the development of generation x, the millennial generation, generation and I don't think that an outright bland is the answer.

01:46:33 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The idea is, how do we get to moderation like? What I like about the school thing is it's an interruption in the addiction poke yeah, I don't, I have no problem.

01:46:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree with you, no problem with saying no cell phones in class. That's obvious, right? 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, and teachers learned you have to say close the laptops, yeah, you can't use the laptop while we're, you know, talking in class and moderation has to be taught. It has to be taught and I think that's the problem with a ban 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, but we also limit access to alcohol and we limit access to driving, like there is a concept of a minimal, a minimal capable function level before you can take responsibility for such a device.

01:47:32 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's reasonable.

01:47:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, to finish, uh, auger's piece researchers, she says there are unfortunately no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders such as anxiety and depression are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the last 20 years in the US. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, 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 and really, for a lot of kids in that age group, retarded their social development. So there's a lot of reasons and I think you focus on banning social media. You maybe are not considering this, the wide spectrum of things on the, on the other hand, I agree with you that you know both of you, uh, richard and Rob Robert, that they're. You know there are appropriate things you can do. I just think this, the entire, the ban of the entire thing to kids under 16, is.

01:48:42 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I'm grateful for the australians to do the experiment. Let's see what happens let's see what happens down the usual data for the rest of us.

01:48:48 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, yeah I mean everyone was saying the same thing with when australia banned guns said this will never work this. It hasn't been proven that there's a causal it did work, didn't it?

01:48:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it worked it totally worked so after the the tasmanian massacre, they had a huge gun buyback. They banned guns and it worked. You're watching this week in tech, our year-end edition with three of my favorite uh people. We do this every year. We try to bring in our no I know who is that, robert we bring in uh, we bring in our regulars and uh have a great time talking about what happened in the year past. Next week is a best of episode clips from the whole year and then we will reconvene with a brand new episode of this Week in Tech on January 5th. All the shows are going to have best ofs for this week, because it's 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. I don't know, are you doing a Tech News Weekly on January 2nd?

01:49:46 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Micah, no, it'll be the week after.

01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The first new show of the new year will be this show in two weeks. So I hope you've saved up some old shows and if I get really lonely I might get on the streams and and do something I don't know there will be, you know what 2025 is going to be awesome wait, everything is going to be great, it's going to be wonderful. Okay, this january hold that as long as we can so tech news weekly will be the first show back january 2nd and benito said there's gonna be some club shows. What are?

01:50:17 - Benito (Announcement)
the club shows hands-on windows. We'll have a january 2nd episode. I'm not sure if michael's hands on mac oh never mind.

01:50:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you guys are getting back to work early. Thank you, I appreciate that. Ah on, we go. Let's see. We're only to uh, april, holy cow. Okay, we're gonna. No, but we're gonna go. Oh, here's one of my favorite things In May. Did you watch OpenAI's reveal of GPT-4-0 with the Scarlett Johansson voice built in?

01:50:51 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Her Her yeah, and who tweeted that out? Wasn't it a Sam Altman actually just tweeted the word her, just to make it very obvious.

01:50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That turns out that might've been a mistake. Scarlett Johansson was shocked and angered.

01:51:05 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I'm shocked and angered, she said when she heard OpenAI's voice and she was confident too. Yeah, A woman well-equipped to defend her brand and good on her, Well in fact I think her Disney lawsuit over box office receipts. No, that was the one where you knew this. She got it going on.

01:51:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, 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. She said last September 2023, I received an offer from Sam Altman who wanted to hire me to voice the current chat GPT four oh system. He said he felt my voice would be comforting to people. After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Now I have to say, uh, it did sound like her, but it sounded like other people too. Anyway, I'm sad because I liked it, but it's gone. There's gone. There are other voices. There are other voices.

01:52:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I find myself rarely using the voice interaction. I used it a lot at first. It was fun, different, but now I just type.

01:52:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was a good year for AI in general, though, despite Sam Altman's over-the-top proclamations, agi is just around the corner.

01:52:21 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
AI is going to be uncomfortable.

01:52:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Comfortable and yeah, he said that earlier in the year and then he also said in his ai is weird ai manifesto that you shouldn't worry about making a living because universal basic income is going to take care of everybody. That the productivity improvements of ai would make it possible for everybody not to work another kind of cultism going on here, what?

01:52:44 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
kind of world 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 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
yeah, billions, you're a billionaire and you get indifferent to a lot of reality benito opened my eyes.

01:52:57 - Benito (Announcement)
What does a banana cost anyway? $10?

01:52:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
$10. Eggs they're $100 each. How do we live? You opened my eyes though, benito, because you said something I thought was really important. We don't make music for the end product. We make music because we enjoy making music. 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. We're going to always make music. There will always be musicians.

01:53:30 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, even if musicians never make another cent from today on, people will still make music, of course, and we've seen it happen before with chess.

01:53:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember when Deep Blue beat the world champion and it was everybody saying, well, that's it for chess, it's, it's, it's beatable and in fact you know, the computer you put on your phone these days can beat grand masters. I mean, it's really good, still play chess, love playing chess because we love playing chess. It didn't. It didn't stop our interest in creation. Everywhere they've tested universal basic income.

01:54:05 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
People only do one of two things they either start their own business or they go get more education but in both kind of to make more money right or because they want to do things that we want to work. We like to work.

01:54:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we want to make a difference right, we don't want to flip burgers, I admit that, but we like to work.

01:54:25 - Padre (Guest)
There's actually when I worked at mcdonald's in high school I liked flipping burgers.

01:54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was very proud to be on the grill.

01:54:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That was like I made it I was on the floors and washing toilets yeah, see the shake machine.

01:54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You start on the shake machine, but that's not that's.

01:54:40 - Padre (Guest)
That was the last time I ever ordered a shake.

01:54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I saw what was in there when I was cleaning that thing out, I'm like, yeah, sorry so at mcdonald's anyway, you move from uh cashier to shakes, to fries, and then if you didn't scald yourself with oil, then you got to move to the grill I never got to the grill.

01:55:00 - Padre (Guest)
My career cut short before I reached the pinnacle.

01:55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the pinnacle and I loved it. I loved working at McDonald's because one of the things they said is always be busy. There's always a surface to wipe, you're always doing. People like doing stuff, we like working. We don't take it away from us. Anyway, I don't think we're cagi, but more and more we saw this year ai doing some amazing things notebook ln from google.

01:55:29 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Ai can make podcasts no yeah, well, that was automated voices sound a lot like me it was eerie.

01:55:37 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yes, the, it was the, the pauses and the voice clearing and the little vocal tics that really sold that. I mean it's still not incredibly realistic when you started to listen to what they were saying.

01:55:51 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Content-wise it was terrible.

01:55:52 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, but just going past your ear. You 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, present research to you. 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. So then it said okay, you're going to want something that's gluten-free. You're going to want something where the cookies will hold their shape. You want something that tastes good, that can receive icing. Da-da-da, I'll go look at all these sites.

01:56:56
It went and visited like 25, 30 different recipe sites and read everything that was there and combined that together to provide not only a recipe 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, here's what you should do before. Here's where there were pitfalls and that to me, was very cool, where I'm not just getting this. You know huge glob of information that it's pulling from that's, 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, I think it was. You know 10 minutes later that it had that. I think more and more that you're.

01:57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're hearing people with stories, not that particular story, but each person has another story like that where they go well, yeah, ai is dumb, but boy, I did this thing. It was so cool. Sometimes it's a programmer.

01:57:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Steve Gibson got very excited about chat GPT, knowing 86 x86 assembly language yeah, the coding side with the GitHub copilot and it's like has been the kind of win area. Yeah, well, no, but it's not I don't think it's the only one I think you know?

01:58:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have you seen? Uh, they just released view too. But we've seen a number of movie clip generators and they've gotten better and better and better. Robert, you seem skeptical.

01:58:24 - Padre (Guest)
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. There is a subset that is extremely profitable and that is using AI to boost all the worst things about content pandering. 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, very cheaply, but with no care for whether or not the information that they're passing along is true. And I have seen what that's been doing, especially in older communities that I work with in in Nevada, um, where they're stuck on YouTube all day, watching video after video that has been custom tailored for them that contains not an iota of real information. It's pink slime it's been slime.

01:59:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Humans do that. I remember this goes back. I first my eyes were opened with Kevin Rose's dig, which was a really cool thing, but once people figured out the algorithm, they started gaming it and it killed it. Yeah, and humans will do that. It killed google search by gaming the algorithm. It's killing youtube because human. I don't blame ai for this, I blame humans for this. They always want to game the algorithm.

01:59:45 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, as long, yeah, as long as the algorithm is the way to profitability right, as long as let's face it, as consumers of youtube, we're actually the product, you know, not the customer. The customer is the advertiser, right. So as long as we're in that trap, there's going to be a mechanism for manipulating that advertising revenue and it's and it'll destroy YouTube. It's up to YouTube to protect us. If they want to keep us as the product, they'll find a way to feed the right thing. Youtube's had multiple adpocalypses because they weren't responsible with their algorithm, and the advertisers yank out because they realize their ad money's being wasted.

02:00:26 - Benito (Announcement)
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. You know, make something out of nothing, and that's not really how what you guys were to use it for is the actual way as a supplement, as like a-.

02:00:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI is best when mixed with a human. Yeah, but see, see, that will never be profitable.

02:00:47 - Benito (Announcement)
I don't think like that side of it will never be profitable. What's?

02:00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
profitable is that we will buy these ai facilities, uh, so that we can mix it with humans, right, so that it can be an assistant or a helper, or I mean.

02:01:00 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's why recall has such promise copilot free if you're using visual studio code or well this is the other part of the story.

02:01:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In july, google admitted you know ai's costing us a lot in emissions. Their admissions jumped 50 over five years. It's not sustainable. It's the new ai started to burn the world. They're saying we can still reach net zero by 2030, but now I'm it.

02:01:29 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
There's a lot of question whether that's possible 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 bubble, right?

02:01:42 - Padre (Guest)
yeah, that was the other story. Amazon building a nuclear power plant for their Modular nukes, yeah.

02:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I wrote my nuclear power talk. Microsoft is restoring Three Mile Island because it's a cheaper way to make electricity for AI Go ahead. You're an expert on this.

02:01:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Richard. Well, I ended up being. I had been asked to write the talk for a while. I did it in August and then all the tech companies jumped in and now I'm doing it everywhere.

02:02:05
But the I mean the three mile on one is interesting because it was shut down in 2019 with other with easily another 10 years of life left in it, because it was too expensive to operate compared to natural gas peaker plants, to to to combine cycle natural gas plants, which are all over Pennsylvania, and so they shut it off. For that Microsoft doesn't care. It's 800 megawatts of electricity, so they'll build a couple of data centers there, and they also promised to sell the access at rack rate into the rest of Pennsylvania. So the state's on board. Everybody benefits. Yeah, it's an asset, but new scale technologies out of Idaho had basically a certified small modular reactor design just before the pandemic, so they'd actually gotten through the regulatory process, they'd done a lot of really hard work and they had Nevada and Idaho on board for a $4 billion prototype and by the end of the pandemic it was a $9 billion prototype and the states pulled out. But that's a drop in the bucket to a Google or an Amazon.

02:03:04
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, just powered to the power plants but also get over the hump of maturing that technology to the point where grid operators will be willing to buy it. Grid operators never experiment. Nobody wants experimental power. They want reliable power. So somebody has to pay for it, and typically it's governments. But now you're seeing these tech giants, you know, following the william gibson dystopic cyber world, where now your amazon prime comes with 100 kilowatts a month. Right like we're on that path. But it's been solving their problem of wanting to build more data centers faster the more electricity can come online in the gibson books.

02:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The world government is the koretsus, the conglomerates, the big, the big companies, and we seem to be moving in that direction, in fact the election is a big story yeah, the election is a big story because silicon valley and particularly Bitcoin bros put a lot of money into the 2024 election not just the presidential election and got many I think several hundred pro-Bitcoin representatives elected. When Trump spoke to the Bitcoin conference and proposed a strategic national crypto stockpile, 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 a standing ovation. He said it three times because they liked it so much. He is going to fire Gensler and replace him with the chairman of the SEC, who will be pro-Bitcoin and, in fact, some will say this was the year of Bitcoin. It started the year at $44,000, went over $106,000 a couple of weeks ago, is now hovering around $96,000, I think More than doubled its value in one year.

02:05:11 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, I made a lot of money off of that, so thanks for that announcement. You had Dogecoin. I thought I had Dogecoin, which I cashed in and then started playing the crypto field. By the way, Doge is doing very well, have you made a lot of money on Bitcoin, so it was roughly cashing in about eight thousand dollars worth of dogecoin.

02:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, went through that spell from 2022 which, by the way, you didn't buy to make money. You bought it because it was a meme and you thought it was funny it was funny.

02:05:38 - Padre (Guest)
exactly, yeah, that's, but right now, with the bump and I just sold last week uh, week, to let the market calm down that 8,000 is now worth about 320, 330. What Do you have to give it to the church? Yeah, I've been breaking off small pieces for missions, as we have groups that need cash, so in that case, it's good. It's a good thing. It's a good thing.

02:06:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but that's a big improvement from 8,000 to 300-some thousand. That's 500% or something.

02:06:09 - Padre (Guest)
All it was was speculation. There's nothing there. That's the problem and the other problem.

02:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's hard enough in the stock market to know when to buy and when to sell. Timing you can't do market timing. But it's even worse with Bitcoin because there's nothing to tie it to.

02:06:31 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I lucked out on this last cycle because I sold at 106 and then, immediately, like a day after it, dropped down below 100. But imagine you're a holder of a lot of Bitcoin and you want a way to unload a whole bunch. You know what a good way to do it is Convince the government that it needs to hold a balance.

02:06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what, to me, this Bitcoin conference was all about. How can we take our stake and make it more valuable? What could the government do to make me richer? And they, by the way, they got their dreams.

02:06:56 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, they. 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 - Padre (Guest)
you know who's making money in crypto right now? People doing rug pulls. Rug pulls are making so much cash, like hawk to a girl, hawk to a girl. Jack doherty did a rug, did several rug pools actually. Uh and yeah, they're raking in millions, you know if there.

02:07:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If there's any good thing that happened in 2024, it's that nfts disappeared from the national the overton window slammed shut. If there's any bad thing, it's that all those nft grifters moved into crypto I mean it's, it's really the same group, the, the nft and crypto bros I

02:07:39
know circle, so it's uh, what else happened, uh, this year? Uh, actually, the good thing the doj everybody agrees did. Ten additional states joined the DOJ lawsuit seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Woo-hoo. And the crowd goes wild. There is nobody I've talked to who defended Live Nation and Ticketmaster, so 39. Us states and the District of Columbia now join the lawsuit.

02:08:11 - Padre (Guest)
It's one of only two true bipartisan movements in the United States.

02:08:16 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It's.

02:08:16 - Padre (Guest)
Ticketmaster and Daylight Savings Time, that's it.

02:08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the only thing we can all agree on. The president-elect says he's going to get rid of Daylight Savings Time.

02:08:25 - Benito (Announcement)
I've heard it before, but don't the states decide that. The states decide that though.

02:08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
California did a stupid thing. We had a referendum to get rid of standard time, to put California on saving time that the states cannot do. That is a federal time zone and you can't change your time zone unilaterally. So I think we could say I think we could get rid of daylight, I think the feds could get rid of daylight certainly on the pacific.

02:08:55 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
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, right.

02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're all basically waiting for california to figure themselves out 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 gonna. You have your days, are what?

02:09:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
five hours or something you know what we have leo electric light. It's an evening I highly recommend uh, that's.

02:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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 happens anyway they're on the phone in the middle of the night, so who cares this? Is the problem, and I think a lot of the people say let's stay with David. Did I savings time? Say that because they love the summer, but you're gonna get winter no matter what you do.

02:09:44 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And you're going to get summer too. So it's off by an hour. Who cares? I? Want to keep. Time kills people. It's a stupid thing to do.

02:09:52 - Padre (Guest)
I want to keep daylight savings but modify it so that we jump forward and we never jump back. So every year we just keep going.

02:10:00 - Benito (Announcement)
Is it?

02:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
completely nutty to say we should all be on one time zone or it should be UTC and everybody at the same time.

02:10:13 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's what China does, while spanning nine time zones for everyone else. No, it's not. That math is not that hard, really. It's. It's. I mean, come on, really not it's changing it. Well, the real issue here is it's oh it's oh dark. 15 right now in the universal time zone this is the utc clock, you know, yeah uh, let's see.

02:10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The internet archive got ddossed and lost in court over their ebook lending.

02:10:36 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Shame that yeah shame the argument there was that it was um there was too prominent a draw. The real argument is publishers hate libraries.

02:10:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They can't get rid of actual libraries yet, so, but they're definitely not going to allow digital libraries unless you buy the digital books from them right.

02:11:02 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
If this is the first time you heard this story, I wanted to explain what the argument was, please do yes them right If?

02:11:07
this is the first time you heard this story. I wanted to explain what the argument was, which was that, 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 e-books and, as Leo has pointed out, no, that's not really what the underlying argument was. That's just how they took it to court.

02:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the real problem was that the Internet internet archive was not buying digital copies for their ebook lending. They were taking, they were buying regular copies, like a library does, scanning it and lending it out, and during covid they had an emergency lending library where they could do unlimited numbers, but they reverted back to what other libraries do, which is only as many books as they have bought could be borrowed, and they were borrowed for a limited time. They did everything a library does. The publishers just said no, we got you on this one, and corey doctor has talked about this an awful lot. The publishers are not acting in author's interest, they're acting in the publisher's interest. Here's a story that was huge. First, to my knowledge, use by a nation state of IEDs. Israel put explosives in pagers that were then sold to Hezbollah and killed nine. Actually, the number went up after this article from the Wall Street Journal 2,800.

02:12:26 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I would argue, were they really improvised? This was very professional.

02:12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They weren't exactly improvised explosive devices. They won the bid from hezbollah by creating a company in czechoslovakia, in czech republic, yeah, and then manufactured these things with an explosive inside of it, yeah they did kill some innocent children and so forth, injured a lot of people, injured a lot of people, but they probably also did a lot of damage to hezbollah. And then did it again with the radios, yeah, and then they blew up the radios, the, the. This has been a 10-year process, of course uh, from israel.

02:13:03 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Apparently they were complaining the whole time that the battery life wasn't sufficient really were they.

02:13:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's because you got a little bit of C4 in there, where your battery a little bit.

02:13:11 - Padre (Guest)
It was two thirds of the guy's would have found this immediately. Yeah, tear down oh man nobody did a tear down.

02:13:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't. I think it's a bad precedent. Yes, yes, okay absolutely.

02:13:23 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's also not unprecedented, right like these sorts of things happen during the cold war. It's it's kind of a lash back on a onesie, twosie basis, though yeah on this scale, that's unprecedented. Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable and the and odds are, will never happen again. You only get to pull a stunt once right and nobody's saying anything good about hezbollah.

02:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, these are terrorists, this is a terrorist group and these are terrorist leaders and, arguably, have been completely dismantled in this current crisis.

02:13:50 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, yeah uh open.

02:13:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai did have a very good October. They had the largest VC raise in history, 6.6 billion dollars.

02:14:03 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's a lot of people who believe in AI and, and I think that's a lot of people who believe in making money, leo, oh, making money. They're in it for the money yeah, it's a profit thing they think there's going to be money there. I mean I would argue this is a poisonous amount of money. Right, like you, you don't have a plan for how to spell and spend 6.6 well, but you've also now committed to making 60 billion with it.

02:14:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The few people I know in my business who raised money through venture capital, spent it unwisely and then fell apart. You're right. Getting a big check is always problematic. Yeah, open AI. Uh, got six billion, or got six, point, what would I say? 6.6 billion. But Elon got six billion for grok, for xai. So there is a a um, what do you call that? Is it a bubble? Uh this is from the 80s.

02:15:02 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
admittedly it's probably multi-trenched with Milestones, so they're not. They didn't get a check for $6.6 billion. What they got was a certain amount of cash. Now you have to reach these milestones as the next tranche of cash and so forth Like that's a normal investment pattern over several years, and if you burn it faster you have to do other raises and so forth. But it's the buyouts that are also toxic. But the real problem here is if you're not spending the money fast enough, like you will get heat to spend the money faster.

02:15:28 - Padre (Guest)
The budget. But do they have to? Because they know that OpenAI is the bee in Elon Musk's bonnet? He is the Whipley Snidelash of the what is it Snidely Whiplash?

02:15:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like Whiplash. Wow, you reversed that.

02:15:47 - Padre (Guest)
Whipley Sniplash is good though. Yeah, so they're giving. 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. He's going to lose the case about them going forward he's suing because he doesn't want him to go. He's absolutely going to sue, but at some point he's just going to say you know what?

02:16:01 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I'm going to give you 60 billion dollars to make you go away and I'm going to buy you out, 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 - Padre (Guest)
Precisely, precisely.

02:16:11 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And so everyone's on the same page. If you're not going to buy OpenAI out, he's going to tell the investors I'll be the investor. Here's your money, Correct?

02:16:17 - Padre (Guest)
Correct, and they'll take it, just like they did to white knight, and give them everything that they want, and all he asks in return is that you kill everything that made the company special in the first place 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.

02:16:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Its creator, a robot named AI-da that represents a woman with a bob haircut. There's the painting.

02:16:57 - Padre (Guest)
But did it have a banana?

02:16:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they ate the banana, and that was the problem. They had to come up with something else. I know what you're talking about. That sold for $1.1 million $1.1 million, probably because somebody figured this is going to be the first AI painting. It's not a bubble. It's not a bubble.

02:17:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh was it early on.

02:17:19 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Was it early on.

02:17:20 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
No, it was early on. Well, it was August that was in November, november, yeah, november 8 August.

02:17:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, so November, november 8th, yeah, right after the election.

02:17:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I can go online and use any of the AI platforms to make something that looks better than that.

02:17:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know it really is ugly, but it was painted by this robot with a Bob haircut.

02:17:40 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, so it's actually shaped. So I was physically painted in a costume.

02:17:46 - Benito (Announcement)
So when we covered this article, I submitted that Ada is the piece of art here, not those things.

02:17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're right, Benito.

02:17:52 - Benito (Announcement)
The robot is the art.

02:17:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's not what's sold.

02:17:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
No, they only got the painting. Ah see, I think they should figure that out, so that answers the questions.

02:18:01 - Padre (Guest)
What if someone paid $1.1 million for an NFT?

02:18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. That's basically what that is.

02:18:06 - Benito (Announcement)
A few people did you know like the fine arts industry is very much just money laundering.

02:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For most of the most part, yeah, that's true. That's true. And even if it's not, tastes are very much dictated by fashion and style.

02:18:20 - Padre (Guest)
It's performative it's like that the banksy painting that auto-destructed when it was bought.

02:18:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it became worth more because it auto-destructed when it was bought, it became worth more because it auto-destructed. Who was the artist? The guy who put the banana in the exhibit or the guy who ate it? I think the guy who ate it, the guy who made the sale.

02:18:35 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, amen A car artist Selling a banana.

02:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching our year-end episode. Only a few more segments. We're wrapping up pretty quickly here with, uh, richard campbell from windows weekly, the digital jesuit himself, father robert balancer, I like this. Did you have anything to do with the vatican, the digital, the vr vatican or the vr st peters?

02:18:55 - Padre (Guest)
that is so cool we do not discuss uh products, uh projects like that, because you don't want it to make a into a fame thing. But uh probably this.

02:19:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I, of course, uh, last year visited for the first time vatican city and I was the. The scale of saint peter's is hard to imagine. Yeah, uh, of course you should go, uh, you know you must go to see the pieta, go underneath and see the bones of saint peter and all of that. There's so much to see. But you can do this virtually at vaticanva, I think those aren't on display, right like that's no, but, but. But you can see it, I think, are they on display if you go to the scavi tour they are.

02:19:40 - Padre (Guest)
If you know the right guy, is that? No, no, not even the right guy.

02:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you go to the scavi tour, they are ah, well, you have, there is a it's in this as well, you got to punch a hole at the bottom here so the yeah, so the uh, no, there you have is another room, but the the uh. The altar is above where the it's presumed the body of saint peter was was buried. Yes, is that right correct?

02:20:05 - Benito (Announcement)
so, uh, wow, wow and so you can't any of jones your way down there no, you don't have to get.

02:20:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can go there directly it's called.

02:20:14 - Padre (Guest)
It's come telling you. It's called the scavi tour. The scavi tour goes all the way down to the necropolis.

02:20:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to go down. How do I scavi tour? Is that what I need? I gotta do the. Do the SCAVI tour.

02:20:24 - Padre (Guest)
S-C-A-V-I. They only take 120 people a day, spread over up to six different languages.

02:20:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I tell them, I know you, will it help? Yes, okay, I'm going back. I loved Rome. I loved Rome. It was so amazing.

02:20:39 - Padre (Guest)
I told you, Leo, I have a place for you to stay. Come from-. You can broadcast from here. You are entirely remote right now.

02:20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and Lisa and I had a little argument. You are in Vatican City, right? You're not in Rome.

02:20:51 - Padre (Guest)
No, no, no. So we are in the Vatican, we are not in Vatican City. So Vatican City is a very specific part of the Vatican. So when you come into our property, you are now in zona extraterritoriale.

02:21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're leaving Italy, but you're not in zona extraterritoriali are you leaving italy, but you're not in vatican city until you pass the wall.

02:21:12 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's extremely confusing. What is it? What are you in? Could you have a name like?

02:21:15 - Padre (Guest)
the zona extraterritoriali, yeah, wow, this is vatican property, so we we are on vatican land yeah, but it's not within that you're not in the city. Vatican City is a very specific place. It's a small area. Remind me.

02:21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this comes. I think this goes down to the various battles over the centuries between Holy Roman Emperors and Popes. Yeah. And no, this is yours. No, this is mine, this is yours.

02:21:41 - Padre (Guest)
And the weird thing is those pieces of land are not contiguous.

02:21:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thing is, those pieces of land are not contiguous I know so there's churches that were gifted. I know it's very wild, yeah, very wild. Anyway, great to have you. Father robert micah sergeant is here. I don't know whose bones he's living above, but uh, you know, someone's probably land seated by the.

02:22:02 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I am in a basement, so there's probably some bones.

02:22:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah yeah, but you know, you're decorating it beautifully bit by bit. It's going to take a while. Is that a?

02:22:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
gas station behind you Gas station? No, that's a coffee shop. Yeah, a little cafe, oh cute.

02:22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would bring it over but it's plugged in.

02:22:20 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So no, that's fine, it's got lighting you just have to watch micah's crafting corner exactly.

02:22:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See it evolve. Richard campbell, micah sergeant. Father robert, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. You're watching this week in tech, our year end year in review episode. Netflix streamed a boxing match between mike tyson and jake paul. That was what that was. Huh, everybody was watching it and it glitched. And now they say they're going to do a Christmas Day NFL extravaganza. Yeah, with.

02:22:54 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Beyonce and everybody's a little nervous With Beyonce.

02:22:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As the halftime I saw Beyonce do her last halftime show. Did you know that In New?

02:23:03
Orleans. Yeah, yeah, they put light light up, rings under the seat and they and the instruction was when beyonce because, because destiny's child came out and they said when she sings, put a ring on it everybody put the ring on your finger, turn it on and wave it. It's so cool, but as you, as, 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 Destin's child to put a ring on it anyway.

02:23:34 - Padre (Guest)
Well, because we're all cats and cats will do what they want to do. That's right, exactly.

02:23:38 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
And shiny.

02:23:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wanted to talk about. We were talking about the kind of disincentives, the perverse incentives of algorithms and streaming on YouTube. You wanted to talk a little bit about something I did not know about, robert. Oh, the nuisance streamers. Nuisance streamers. I didn't even know such a thing existed.

02:24:04 - Padre (Guest)
It's a category.

02:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of Jake Paul. Yeah, A lot of people say it started with with uh, with paul because, because he had a house and he set a mattress on fire and yeah, yeah, yeah and he popularized it and then he made it.

02:24:14 - Padre (Guest)
He made it profitable. Um, now, you remember many years back when logan paul did that, uh, the walk through the suicide woods in japan and that's what people got so much trouble yeah yeah, wait, this is a little bit of cringe. Well, the new generation have really turned it up a notch. You've got people like johnny somali jack you know it's funny.

02:24:33
I searched for nuisance streamers and johnny somali's name is the first thing that came up because he, single-handedly, is going to get put into law things that we've all wanted for a long time, which is, you've got countries who are finally saying we have to criminalize this behavior. So he's a troll. Basically he's a troll. Uh, he will, like all the nuisance streamers, he goes out and he tries to make people react, 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 and that was content.

02:25:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was content and, yeah, he got fined, but he made way more, and that's that's the perverse incentive is that if you can get enough links, clicks and views, you make millions, and so it's worth it. Profitable, outrageous profitable. Somali has been banned from Twit. He's been banned from Kik as of May of this year. He's done it on Twitch, kik and Rumble as a tourist. He's said offensive things in the subway and so forth. Is that it?

02:25:42 - Padre (Guest)
Well, no. So he did it in Israel, where he went there, and he basically he just finds the worst thing that you can possibly say in public right to try to get people to react. So you can imagine what he did in israel. In japan, he went into the subway and he started screaming hiroshima, nagasaki, we're going to do nagasaki again to try to get a reaction. They, he was charged, but then they basically said, uh, the guy's an idiot. So they they kicked him out of the country. Then, because there was no ramifications legal ramifications for him, he went to South Korea.

02:26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he's heating up all this is basically Borat to polite yeah, but no, didn't Sasha Baron Cohen invent this?

02:26:20 - Benito (Announcement)
I would say, tom Green invented this Tom.

02:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Green and the jackass people invented.

02:26:26 - Padre (Guest)
But I mean these people. They would do it irl, they do it on a stream, because they need to prove that this is not fake. Well, in south korea he met his match because he's now facing 10 years at min. 10 years is the current uh high watermark, but as they add charges, it could go up to 60 years in prison. In Korea because he made terroristic threats. He played the national anthem of North Korea on the subway, which is illegal. You cannot do that. He interfered with business, and the big one, the one that's probably going to get him in prison for a decade is using broadcasting AI.

02:27:00
Deepfakes is illegal in South Korea and he did it to prove that he another streamer, a popular south korean streamer, was his girlfriend. So he, single-handedly, is getting several different law-making bodies around the world to look at how they can criminalize nuisance streaming. And if if we end 2024 doing that, I will actually be very happy because that's a light of hope I'm also reading planes are playing this where they've trapped him in South Korea.

02:27:28
Yeah, they won't let him leave. So they've charged him and they've taken away his passport. So he cannot leave South Korea and if you know South Korea, there is no way he can escape by land. But they haven't arrested him and incarcerated him. So he is responsible for paying for his own room and board. His own room and board, his own protection and because he's he came in on a tourist visit he visa, he cannot work.

02:27:52 - Benito (Announcement)
Doesn't you deserve some punishment? Here too, though, like I feel?

02:27:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, because that's who created this disincentive, this incentive. Here's a. Here's something I don't want to encourage. A jury acquitted a man this is from our Discord of shooting a YouTube prankster.

02:28:09 - Padre (Guest)
He said, oh no, he, he, they deserved it, he acted in self-defense there was one just two days ago, charles Smith, who he has made a ton of money ten thousand dollars a shot by doing things like walking in the back door of a McDonald's and throwing a dead pigeon into the deep fryer oh my God. But two days ago he did a prank where he went around a grocery store and sprayed bug killer into produce and on sandwiches on food that's so now he's now, he's arrested, he's been arrested, finally now they're gonna look back at everything that he's done and they're realizing oh, we need a law to be able to charge people for stuff, for crimes that they documented yep that they themselves

02:28:52 - Benito (Announcement)
documented wait, but back in the day, like if you put this on tv, it would have been like the tv network that got sued, so like youtube should be paying something.

02:29:00 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I agree that youtube deserves some liability youtube long ago. Right, this was, that's the thing twitch.

02:29:05 - Benito (Announcement)
Where's the stuff on then?

02:29:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they rumble, they've all kicked him off.

02:29:09 - Benito (Announcement)
He's got somewhere. Where is he still doing stuff now, right? No, he has to do alternate accounts.

02:29:15 - Padre (Guest)
But remember, he wasn't kicked off until South Korea arrested him. So all of those companies were perfectly fine with the views he would bring in. And there's the problem, as long as there wasn't a legal ramification for them, right, yeah?

02:29:29 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
they're just selling ads.

02:29:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, that was it. Now here's a prank I can support.

02:29:35 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Infowars got sold to the onion it was a good day, wasn't it?

02:29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it was a good day. Unfortunately, the bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale and then sent it back to the bankruptcy uh advocate, who will figure out if this is an appropriate sale, because they took less money, less cash, uh to sell it to the people who were taking less cash wanted it were the victims, the sandy hook families. Yeah, they said it's good we want. We don't want info wars back in alex' hands. We'd much prefer it to be in a satire.

02:30:08 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Their mission wasn't to make money. Their mission was to make sure this doesn't happen again. Right, and what the Onion Play was doing was going to turn InfoWars into a site to make this the farce that it actually is.

02:30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, the three biggest stories of the year. We haven't even touched them yet. We're going to take a break when we come back the three biggest stories of the year and then get some sad music, benito, because I have an in-memoriam segment, but not just people who passed, but websites that are no longer with us. Coming up, the year-end edition of this Week in Tech. Can I ask a favor? We have a survey. We do do this every year. We started a little earlier this year, but you have till, I think, the middle of january. It's at twittv survey. It's our one and only way every year of finding out a little bit more about you. It helps us sell ads. Um, we don't reveal any personal information. Obviously, it's all an aggregate, but it shouldn't take you more than a couple of minutes and it really does help us out. So, if you will, twittv slash survey. Oh, oh, and one more thing I've just learned from our engineer, patrick delahanty, that we will be. So I don't know if you remember, in 2014 and 2015, uh, we did a new year's 24-hour New Year's event. The second one ending the year 2014, beginning the year 2015, was a benefit for UNICEF. We raised quite a bit of money and it had some very fun things, including me getting a tattoo and my head shaved. Patrick has decided to rebroadcast that in a way. Patrick has decided to rebroadcast that in a way. 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 hour by hour on YouTube. 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 of New Year's years in 2014, 24 hours of new years uh, follow the blue sky. Uh, twit account at twit on blueskysocial. That'll be fun. Thank you, patrick. So I said the three biggest stories of the year. We didn't even touch them.

02:32:21
Intel number one uh, pat gelsinger departed just a couple of weeks ago. The ceo of intel was brought in to save the company. His plan to save the company apparently wasn't fast enough or sufficient for the board. They've fired him. Now what's next for Intel? We spent a lot of time talking about this. This is one of Paul's rants on Windows Weekly. Richard, can you summarize? Is Intel out of business? What's next?

02:32:46 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
We've gone back and forth on this a fair bit, but Intel has been a vertically integrated company from the very beginning because largely they invented making CPUs, and so vertical integration serves when you're innovating, to both be the design and the fabricator. But as the innovation has tapered off and it's become far more commodity, the goal is to be efficient, and Intel has not been efficient. The bigger argument here is they never got into the extreme ultraviolet devices, although there's a strong case for why they didn't because they missed mobile. 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, with, which makes sense if you're in the mobile space.

02:33:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did they? I mean, this was a technology that TSMC developed. Euv TSMC did not develop it. It's Dutch, oh, it's Dutch, okay, so Intel would have had access to this Absolutely.

02:33:38 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It could have bought them, and in fact they were planning on buying them, but didn't have the production numbers. It didn't make sense for what it was going to cost because they'd missed mobile, uh.

02:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But so, strategically, these failures go back at least 10 years longer. Yeah, easily. They missed a few opportunities there.

02:33:57 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The apple started looking at replacing intel with their own chips back in 2011, according to tsmc's chairman microsoft took a swing at arm back in the win eight days for the same preparation that they couldn't make a viable tablet Right. And then Intel, you know, made the Atom to try and compensate, which had its limitations. So you've had, and instead of improving their processes and so forth, what do they do is they use their money to protect their market, which makes them, you know, play monopolistic games and bribery games instead. Them, you know, play monopolistic games and primary games instead. So you're at a point where, uh, with gail singer's departure, when he's basically told you get a choice you can be fired or you can retire. So he retired.

02:34:34
You're seeing kind of an active if ward set up. I think we're going to get a pe firm in there and it's going to be sold for parts, um, which is not a bad outcome. 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 and better, more efficient fabrication. But it'll take a couple of years to figure that out. And the big challenge here is that they're deeply intertwined with federal government, with Department of Justice, department of Defense, you know, all of those contracts and agreements that they have have to be protected. 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.

02:35:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Briefly, qualcomm considered a bid for Intel and they probably took a look at all of those things and said, yeah, never mind.

02:35:24 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I disagree, leo. I think they made that bid just to let it be known. There is a possible buyer there, ah Right, and then you always go, oh to kind of trigger to put it in play in effect, yeah, and what we saw over the course of this year was people interested in every part of Intel, which is a great signal to a PE firm. We can take this part and sell it.

02:35:46 - Padre (Guest)
Interesting, great signal to a pe firm, we can take this part and sell it interesting. Does amd survive without intel?

02:35:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
absolutely yeah, and arguably does very well, because they have always been, uh been more efficient than intel.

02:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just do they license x86 from intel?

02:35:59 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
they were well you know. Be clear intel was required to license x86. Okay to am. You can't at that time and this was a friend, it is family the OD insisted there had to be a second supplier, right.

02:36:12 - Benito (Announcement)
It had to be a different design Right, Right the same.

02:36:16 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The same way that airliners fly with at least two completely disparate gypsies Right On their computers. The pilot and co-pilot have a different meal. Yeah, you, on their computers, the pilot and co-pilot have a different meal. Yeah, you know all those sorts of games right. It's redundant that in airplane.

02:36:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, the other of the three big stories we hadn't touched. Early in the year, congress said tick, tock, you either sell to an american company or you're out of business. Weirdly, they set the deadline for januaryth, one day before the inauguration of a new presidential administration. Tiktok fought it, fought it, fought it, 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 TikTok. There were lots of battles back and forth over this, lots of disagreement over whether TikTok is a threat to America and its security or one of the best things that ever happened to creators. Well, you know, the end of this story will come, probably next year.

02:37:23
Kathy Gellis, who is as, as you know, are one of our great lawyers, she is admitted to the supreme court, so she can she can actually write briefs and so forth. We'll be talking about this after the oral arguments on our show. Uh, what is that? The 15th, yep january, 15th, january 15th. So we'll get the inside story on what? What she thinks the scotus. So we'll get the inside story on what what she thinks the scotus will do to this. The final of the three big stories is a breaking story right now what the hell's going on with the drones over new jersey?

02:37:57 - Padre (Guest)
sorry about that.

02:37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I had to ask the drone father because everybody said we talked about this a couple of weeks ago on twit, you know, uh, emily forlini really wanted us to shoot at them and we said no. She said I didn't mean us, I mean the military. Um, no one knows what they are and everybody said we should ask the drone father. The drone father is in the house, father Robert. What is it? What are they? Are they consumer drones? Are they military drones?

02:38:24 - Padre (Guest)
are they? By the last count, just from the purchased drones in the united states there's, there's over. Is it 120 million in the united states? That's just the ones you can purchase purchase commercially. That does not include the quad father.

02:38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, jammer b corrects me, you're not the drone father, you're the cause. They used to be called quad copters. I don't know if anybody even knows that anymore.

02:38:46 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Wow, back in the day back in the day, back in the day.

02:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're saying there's so many drones like I have one right here in a drawer. Yep, yep, there are, we don't? We don't know where they're coming from, but that?

02:38:57 - Padre (Guest)
but they look and we won't know because, and and you can't really shoot these things down the military is not going to waste a 1010 million missile to spread shrapnel all over New Jersey. That's just not how these work. And also people who are saying, well, we have to be able to track them, we have to do a better job of holding DJI to account. You don't know who made these things. I can homebrew these things with what I've got in this office right now. So what exactly are you trying to regulate? What exactly are you trying to prevent? It's annoying, yes, and I'm sure someone is trolling various population centers, but really, unless you want to declare war on an imaginary enemy, there's no way to solve this.

02:39:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I think the military is doing the right thing is they are bringing in proper drone tracking hardware. There's no chance that the car drone is a real thing that would show up a conventional radar. So that's not true. But real drones don't show up on radar too small. But the military, because they are taking drones very seriously, have built equipment to do that. So picatinny, which normally doesn't deal with drones, is now getting the sensor equipment to figure out is there actually something going on up there precisely?

02:40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so, and all the what's your advice to people who are terrified?

02:40:14 - Padre (Guest)
uh, go inside and look on your phone, don't?

02:40:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
look up, don't look up. I think there was a movie by that name actually last. Indeed, train your neighborhood crows. Oh, crows are smart, they can take those drones down.

02:40:28 - Padre (Guest)
The old countermeasures that I used when I was at TWIT. They don't work anymore. I had signal jamming guns that you could try to block out, both the flight control transmissions and the cameras you had like a skunk works in the basement, didn't you? What do you think we did down there? Why was I there for so many hours? Um, but those don't work anymore because a lot of these are now autonomous. You, you program in a um, a flight plan, and it just follows.

02:40:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want you back. I want a basement and I want to put you in it could that keep?

02:41:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
it from returning home. No, I guess not, because you just program in the flight path home too.

02:41:04 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, you could do that if you wanted to jam gps. But if you jam gps, that's that's a. I think that's a felony yeah, you can't do that.

02:41:13 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
The military if the military is actually serious about wanting to take these drones down, they would use microwaves. Yeah right, there you go. We cook the electronics on the spot.

02:41:21 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The thing would fall out of the sky, which is still a risk, but there's no reason it's going to fall somewhere they're not they're not going to if they thought it was, if they thought it was an issue remember the balloons was that this year the the weather balloon crisis, the chinese was like that was a long time these balloons.

02:41:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that this year? I left that out it was last year.

02:41:41 - Padre (Guest)
Okay, it's the end of last year when I heard the story about the drones, I thought of that scene from independence day. It was a fake newscast. And then they're saying los angelinos are being told not to fire at the aliens. If this happened over texas there'd be a lot of rounds.

02:41:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, there would be. Do not shoot the drones again.

02:42:02 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I say well, and those are old laws from the 20s, when early aircraft were shot at by people who didn't understand what they were. And often aircraft have navigation or communications problems and they need to have safe passage to get somewhere to land. So it's just a really bad practice to shoot at things in the sky because those bullets go somewhere down, they come down.

02:42:25 - Padre (Guest)
What goes up, must come down Now high-powered green lasers, those you can shoot at drones, but don't.

02:42:31 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Please don't. But don't because it's certainly not a drone and it's incredibly dangerous and illegal and it'll hurt people.

02:42:37 - Padre (Guest)
It'll hurt a pilot, so don't do that.

02:42:40 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
So none of these things are the right thing to do. It's almost certainly almost no drones at all. Yeah Right, it's almost certainly almost no drones at all. Yeah Right, like, when you actually analyze the footage, it ends up being stars and aircraft and lights. It's other things Good, it's a historical reaction, which is not unusual when people are as stressed as they are. Yeah, it's stress.

02:43:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what it is.

02:43:02 - Padre (Guest)
It's stress. Wouldn't it be amazing if it actually is aliens and we're bearing the lead?

02:43:07 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
we were waiting to see if you guys would shoot us down, and you didn't, so we left exactly, we kept, we kept there's no intelligent life here.

02:43:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going home. Yeah, uh, that might be sadly true. They took a look at our uh streamers and said, yeah, we don.

02:43:24 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
We were good right up until Logan Paul. Then we're like we're out of here.

02:43:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take one last little time out, one last pause, and we will do the sad stuff. The end of the line segment. We are watching the end of the year this week in tech with Micah Sargent, father Robert Balasera and Richard Campbell. You know. Let me start off with websites that disappeared and apps that disappeared. Beeper didn't make it. Oh, beeper, they tried. They tried so hard. You had them on your show. No, beeper didn't make it.

02:44:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Beeper said look, we're going to do our best, we're going to make this work.

02:44:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The idea was android users could message iphone users, of course. Now you don't have to, because apple made that possible. Yes, came along, so never mind anyway that beeper. Thank you, beeper, you made it happen. Another uh, another alternative. Uh passed away ello, which I joined way back in the day. Elloco, the whole idea of Ello was a Facebook replacement. That was privacy forward. Nobody wanted it.

02:44:34 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I had forgotten about it until I saw the logo. And then I said oh, I remember that Hello.

02:44:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hello Mike, hello yeah, japan finally ended the mandatory form submission on floppy disks this year that that hits me where I live. Yeah, finally, no, there's, although you know, my ex said I have a bunch of family over and I have a cd player. Do you have a cd player anywhere? Because I can't play these cds. And I thought I did, but I couldn't find it either. I can't find my floppy drives either.

02:45:06 - Padre (Guest)
Japan is saying goodbye to the floppy drive oh, but it was the 3.5, I mean, if it's not the least contemporary. Oh, come on yeah yeah, the five and a quarter were the the real chance.

02:45:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's not a floppy disk. That's a save icon, if you do need a floppy disk.

02:45:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the registercom says go to floppy diskcom where you can buy old floppies.

02:45:30 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
wow, okay, look at all these save icons. Who needs 50 of them?

02:45:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, somebody, somebody, somewhere needs a hundred percent guaranteed printed.

02:45:41 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Is that what this is do?

02:45:43 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
you make art out of them.

02:45:45 - Padre (Guest)
I don't know. You know, Leo, those things are the reason why I had any sort of money when I was growing up.

02:45:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You sold floppies for a living.

02:45:54 - Padre (Guest)
Well, from dumpster diving. Near where I lived in the Bay Area were several disk duplication businesses. Wow, and I would go dumpster diving and I would find the rejects. And the rejects were the ones that couldn't be used in the mass duplication machines, but they were still fine if you formatted them individually. So I would get them for free. Format them and then sell them.

02:46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was great, you are so funny. Anybody want a floppy. Got your floppy disk here. I got floppy disks. We got one and a quarter, we got five and a half. What do you need? I got it floppy. This here. Uh, do you remember icq micah?

02:46:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
you might be too young to remember icq.

02:46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, thank you 450985 yeah, do you remember your icq number? Look at that. Uh, I do not remember mine. I remember my copy serve number, but I don't. I don't remember. Icq was still around in 2024, finally shutting down after 30 years was really one of the first popular messaging systems there was probably a group of users who have been using it since the beginning, where like that's the ones who are sad.

02:46:58
Yeah, yeah, uh. The icq website said uh, it's over, go home. I mean, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

02:47:08 - Padre (Guest)
I missed the day of instant messaging in clear text, because that was, that was fun.

02:47:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you were a network engineer, you could just see all these conversations going past, floating through the yeah uh, if you had a car thing, this was the year your car thing died this is the year your car thing died actually, there is apparently a brisk uh aftermarket. Now people are trying to open source it. Figure out a way to keep it alive. This is the spotify gadget that added spotify to your older car. Um, they can't. They stopped making it 2022. They announced they're going to turn the servers off.

02:47:44 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They did just uh, december 9th oh boy, I hope they open source it somehow, that would be cool.

02:47:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People like Robert would find it. Take it apart, turn it into a floppy disk inside.

02:47:57 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Put a floppy.

02:47:57 - Padre (Guest)
Yes, but unless they're willing to release the code base for it, it's no longer fun right to have to backwards engineer everything they did longer fun right to to have to backwards engineer everything they did.

02:48:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, uh, a number of websites uh went away.

02:48:10 - Padre (Guest)
Game informer was shut down after 33 years um, that is legitimately older than me, wow yeah, up down down left right, left, right, abba start yep, that's all it took to get something to happen.

02:48:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was it that you got when you did that?

02:48:27 - Padre (Guest)
That was the Contra code it depended on the game.

02:48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the yeah.

02:48:30 - Padre (Guest)
That was a.

02:48:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But originally it was just one game that it worked for, and then other people thought, oh, this would be funny if we put this in as an Easter egg, right?

02:48:38 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, what was the original? Up, down, up down.

02:48:39 - Padre (Guest)
These are actually for developers down left right, left right, a, b, b, a select.

02:48:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Start like that was developers to get into the back end, so they could well that one that goes so that, so that play testers could get all the way to the end of the game. Yeah, because that you know, were you a play tester?

02:48:55 - Benito (Announcement)
you feel like you were a play tester no, I wasn't a play tester, but I did make marketing stuff for 2k at one point. Oh, all right, it's in the the game. Yeah, that's ea sorry oh sorry, so confusing.

02:49:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nasa is shutting down nasa tv on cable to focus on something called nasa plus, because why not?

02:49:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
everybody's got a plus because everyone's got plus, yeah the netflix.

02:49:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think people didn't actually watch it on cable probably I watched it, did you? When I was in the states.

02:49:26 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It was cool, it was free, it was high quality yeah, but some of the stuff was just like can we get to the point?

02:49:34 - Padre (Guest)
yeah, I heard it yeah, I preferred it when they just did the live streams of, like, the cameras on the ISS. I didn't. The commentary stuff was that's.

02:49:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I started to hate the SpaceX broadcast because they got these gen Xers in and just show me the rocket, just that's all I care about, really you're no walter cronkite, that's all I can say.

02:49:51 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah they usually have a. They usually have a um, a tech feed which is just the actual.

02:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what you want the c-span of spaceships?

02:50:00 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
yeah, that's why I go to the tech feed. It's, you know. Is it online? Yep, it's on. Okay, well, it was on YouTube. Now it's only on X, I don't know why. Oh wait, do you know why? Efficiency okay, you know what it is. I haven't had a crashing stream lately, so let's go to that let's just see what happens um.

02:50:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe Netflix should put the football games on X. There you go. Anand Tech said goodbye this year. This was a sad one. Anand left a long time ago to go work for Apple, I think but the website was the place to go for tech information. What I want to know about the Snapdragon, that's where I went. The Anand Tech website 27 years of hardcore tech information. Tom's Hardware is going to continue. They're all part of the future. You were part of future at iMore. Right, you have some memories.

02:51:00 - Padre (Guest)
We're coming to the end of the tech blogging iMore also went away this year.

02:51:06 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It did. Yeah, rest in peace. I'm warren.

02:51:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, for the same reason, same reason hololens discontinued this year after the army gave up on him. Who needed it? Is there going to be a hololens 3? Richard, I think he's died. Is he alive? Somebody pinch him.

02:51:31 - Padre (Guest)
He's frozen solid.

02:51:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richardexe has stopped responding Is there going to be a HoloLens? He's coming to us from X.

02:51:42 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
No, no, you have to do it right, hey, richard Will there be, a. Hololens 3? Oh, hollow lens three, you crashed it.

02:51:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that's good I'll give you his answer no, no, no, um. And finally, oh, we already did. Uh, gm calling quits on cruise. So 50 billion dollars down the tubes. Who Now? This is the sad part. These are 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 passing away. David Kahn, who wrote the book on crypto. I loved his book, the code breakers. What I forgot was it came out in 1967, but it was the bible for crypto for many, many years. The story of cryptography. Great, great book. Highly recommend the code breakers. Still, uh, passed away in january at the age of 94. One thing you'll notice most of these guys are pretty old. I guess there's a correlation. Are we still? Are we ever getting Richard back?

02:52:56 - Benito (Announcement)
I don't know.

02:52:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I sure hope so. Do you think we have? Have we lost the West Coast? Oh my God.

02:53:02 - Padre (Guest)
Wait, Canada, we've lost Canada.

02:53:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If he used a Starlink, Elon might've been pissed that we were bashing I actually have a starlink dish on the roof here because, uh, comcast is less than perfect, shall we say. Uh, we lost bob heil this year who was one of our great show hosts. I've been kind of waiting, you know I'll probably be the first to go, but Bob passed away at the age of 83. Wonderful fellow God. I love Bob. I miss Bob. 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.

02:53:42 - Padre (Guest)
We're all using his mics. Raw high sound.

02:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, yep, he was a legend in rock and roll sound, created the quadraphonic sound for the who created and some may say this was a good thing, some say a bad thing the mouth synthesizer for peter frampton. I love that thing, I want you all. Uh, he invented it. He tells the story. It's a wonderful story that peter frampton's wife came to him, said I need to give peter something for christmas and bob said well, I've got, I can figure out. He attached a tube to us to a microphone, to a mic, to 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 have you seen the tick tock of the guy who does that?

02:54:29 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
for like he does comedy with, uh with a mouth synthesizer, oh wow. Or whatever you call it, mouth sense it's called the talk box talk box.

02:54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the name, that's right. Joe walsh used it to great effect and apparently it's t-pain has also used it, t-pain wow I don't know did bob get royalties from team pain because he should probably not should have?

02:54:48 - Benito (Announcement)
no, that's auto-tune. That's a different tool.

02:54:50 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
No, I've seen t-pain use one of those before. He doesn't regularly do it, but yeah, I've seen.

02:54:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, bob was also a great theater organist, in fact, that's kind of how he got his start and sound. Uh he anyway, wonderful fellow, uh. Amateur radio operator from the age of 13, k9 eid silent key, I had to go run and restart the router. You know network internet connection are they crank based these days, or do you have a steam?

02:55:17 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I had a pull cable, so okay fix a couple of good chunks and tweak the choke and off it goes boom.

02:55:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Science fiction author verner vingy passed away this year. What a great writer, yeah, um, uh and uh. A visionary who really, for men, he was kind of the science fiction writer science fiction writer absolutely beloved. Cory doctor had some great stories about him which he shared on twit um phd in, so he knew what he was talking about.

02:55:50 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
He had a great view on what a post-singularity society would look like.

02:55:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, in fact I think he was the guy who coined the phrase, the term singularity. As I remember he was the one who said it first, but don't blame him for that. Daniel Kahneman passed away, a psychology of economics professor who wrote one of the most important books in this field, Thinking Fast and Slow, nobel Prize winner, passed away at the age of 90. He was a Nobel in economic science and his book Thinking Fast and Slow is incredible, is incredible, highly recommended, really important to understanding how our thought processes work. This name you may not recognize, but you will recognize his product, mahboud Modadam, who created Genius. Later, rap Genius passed away way too early, at the age of 41. He had a brain tumor, but Rap Genius was the place to go to find out what the hell those singers are singing. 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. He proposed the Higgs boson. Well, I don't think he named it, but it was named after him. He proposed the higgs boson. Peter higgs passed away at the age of 94. Showed how particles bind the universe. The higgs both boson was completely theoretical until it was discovered at cern. At where was it cern?

02:57:23 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
large hadron collider was built to find the higgs boson, and they did.

02:57:27 - Padre (Guest)
They found it people said don't find it, it'll be the end of the world they thought it was going to create a micro black hole and to which the entire planet would fall it did create our crisis, though, in cosmology, which actually you know what it might have and we're all.

02:57:41 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
We just don't know. We don't know, we're in it?

02:57:45 - Benito (Announcement)
no, it answered it. It answered a question that we thought was right and it didn't give us any more questions to ask. Is the problem like it didn't give us no it?

02:57:53 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
wasn't where we expected it to be, it wasn't the energy level expected, and it did turn up a bunch of other weird things that have created a crisis in the standard model. The crisis that has across and called cosmology is really because of the james webb space telescope. Really, yeah, what did the? What is? What is the web show? It found stuff that we didn't think. No, we galaxies way too. So there's basically two measure ways to measure the age of the universe. One uses near cephids, like near field stars. Another one uses very old things, and then two measurements, as they get more accurate, are getting further apart, and so James Webb was helping to pull that together and actually spread it even further apart. But it's teaching us that we need to know more that the, that the early stages of the universe are more different than we thought, which is a good thing, and so did the large Hadron collider. Large Hadron collider is pointed to possibilities of supersymmetry into Penta quarks, like whole new areas of research, and we probably need a bigger collider.

02:58:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need to go faster. Higher energy higgs. Higgs won the nobel in the 2013 uh for his work showing how the boson helped bind the universe together uh. In the uh obituary published in the guardian, they said he was an immensely shy man who disliked the fuss.

02:59:09 - Padre (Guest)
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, oh wow, you've won the nobel oh, richard, you might know this the the superconducting, super collider that we were building in the united states and we canceled that was going to be bigger. It was going to be bigger than the LHC right. Originally.

02:59:32 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah.

02:59:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was killed in the.

02:59:33 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Carter era right, and the issue here is that they're still using IOM Tim superconductors and they should be using Cerami superconductors, using REBCO superconductors.

02:59:47 - Padre (Guest)
Those are less likely to quench right.

02:59:49 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
It's less likely to quench, it's easier, cheaper to operate, it runs on liquid nitrogen, but you also get about five times the field strength from it. Oh, wow. So that, yeah, it's just additional fractional speeds that would make the difference.

03:00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it was in 2016 that the alternative timeline began, just in case you want to go back and do it over.

03:00:06 - Padre (Guest)
So that's why we're in the worst timeline. Yeah, we're in the bad one.

03:00:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clearly in 2016, it all went downhill.

03:00:15 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, the Large Hadron 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 - Padre (Guest)
Yikes, and it takes a while to Was it on at the time.

03:00:28 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Was it running?

03:00:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at the time, was it? No, they were in testing and they learned with the liquid helium when it escapes, is everybody in the neighborhood starts talking like this God no, I mean, if it was running at the time and all that, uh, all that coolant escaped it, everything would.

03:00:42 - Padre (Guest)
It would burn up, it would burn entirely.

03:00:45 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I mean the other way to think about the large hadron Collider and that whole facility is it's the largest antimatter factory on the planet.

03:00:51 - Padre (Guest)
Not good, it seems not good, seems like we should perhaps Not according to Brown. According to Brown, it's over here. It's about 30 feet away. Oh, I see, oh, that any matter, dan Brown, yeah, dan Brown, maybe a little country but it's up to stuff.

03:01:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Opus D has a little thing in the basement down there. The man who invented DRAM passed away this year in 91. Unfortunately I don't think he was widely known Robert Denard. He was an IBM inventor. Without him, your modern computing would be a lot slower, a lot slower.

03:01:25 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Thanks.

03:01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robert. His invention led to previously unimaginable improvements in data handling, speed, power and the cost of computing. Got to remember these people. They're very important. They're not all people. Some are dogs, like the sad Kobusu, the side-eyeing Shiba Inu to 18 my dog very he's your doge baby. He inspects the long life the picture that started the doge meme.

03:01:58 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, 18 years old shina ebos are beautiful, aren't they?

03:02:03 - Padre (Guest)
much old, so much old wow he'd been ill for several years.

03:02:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
His uh owner, uh atsuko sato, said in my head I still wanted kabusu to live, but I think I knew it in my soul.

03:02:19 - Padre (Guest)
It's time to say, you know, bye 18 years for a purebred dog yeah, that's incredible yeah, washington post uh gave it the obituary in doge speak.

03:02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Much sad soul, very doge. Gordon bell passed away. We were talking about, uh, the idea, uh recall, remembering everything you've done. He was the guy who uh actually started this whole idea. He was the inventor at Digital Equipment who created the first mini computer, but he also you see he's wearing it around his neck he had the idea of recording everything that happened to him so he could search it later. Data Nation magazine called him the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, a virtuoso of computer architecture, awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991.

03:03:16
I have met him, we interviewed him and his wife. In fact I think there's a triangulation with Gordon Bell, if you're interested. His wife, gwen Bell, had Alzheimer's and 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. And so he kind of invented this whole idea. That recall kind of has kept alive. Gordon Bell passed away this year. One of the great computer inventors Also, lin Conway and you know Conway because of his game of life right, he also authored a book that is a classic Introductions to VLSI.

03:04:11
Systems, a seminal book in the field of chip design. Uh, he was an ibm, you know she was. Oh, wait a minute, I have the wrong conway. I'm sorry, lynn conway, we should actually. This is important. She died at age of 86, famous for her book vlsi. I don't think she was the game of life, conway, that was a different one.

03:04:25 - Padre (Guest)
No, I apologize, I confused I have that book on a shelf somewhere, do you? Really yeah I have not read it yet yeah, wow.

03:04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's a class this year, maybe this coming year when you, when you want to start designing vlsi systems, you might want to take a look. Uh, no, it's I. 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, the book. Susan Wojcicki also passed away, former CEO of YouTube, one of the early Googlers. She died at 56 of breast cancer. Very sad loss. Her garage, her mom's garage Was it lung cancer? Yes, I think you're right. Her mom's garage was where Google was born. Yes, I'm sorry I apologize, I got the cause of death wrong. She rented she was working at Intel, rented the garage of her Menlo Park home to her friends, larry and Sergey for $1,700 a month. That's where PageRank was invented. That's where Google was launched. She was one of their earliest hires, company's 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. I know we can do better, she said, but we're going to get there. We'll get to a point where we've solved a lot of these issues. I own this problem and I'm going to fix it. She didn't get to before passing. You know, I kept trying to get this into the shows and I never did get to mention it. I had also interviewed this fellow on Triangulation, I believe Ward Christensen it. I had also interviewed this fellow on triangulation, I believe ward christiansen, who invented the bbs, passed away at the age of 78 I owe that man a debt.

03:06:34
Yeah, did you ever run a bbs?

03:06:37 - Padre (Guest)
oh gosh, yes I mean it was on one phone line and I had maybe two dozen users. But yeah, that's the way it was.

03:06:44 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
That's how it was the x modem creator. I pirated a lot of software over x modem, x modem. That's right. That's the way to go back in the day, I think as the only way many of these early sorry no, it was the only way to go.

03:06:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As, richard, yeah, um, in 1977 he invented x modem before he invented the bbs. But I think you probably wouldn't have a BBS without X modem. I had a two-line BBS. It was one line at first but it became two lines. I had 56K modems and I'll never forget when Seagate came out with its RLL encoded hard drives. I was able to go from, I think, 5 megabytes to 20 megabytes of storage. It was a big deal. I was able to go from, I think, 5 megabytes to 20 megabytes of storage.

03:07:28 - Padre (Guest)
It was a big deal. My BBS became two lines at night when everyone else was asleep. So I could snag it was that I'm on the internet.

03:07:36 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Mom, I'm downloading something Mom Hang up, was it Z modem.

03:07:43 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Was that the first protocol? That was the later one, that was the more official.

03:07:46 - Padre (Guest)
That you could drop the call and pick it up later on.

03:07:48 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Yeah, it was recoverable.

03:07:50 - Padre (Guest)
Yep, yep, continue a download. That was a game changer for me, because I always seem to just lose it at the very last minute. Oh ow.

03:07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, isn't that awful at X modem? Oh, it's gone. Oh it's gone. And finally, the guy who wrote the computer language. Most of us started with Thomas E Kurtz Of Kurtz and Kemeny fame. They created BASIC back in the day, dharma, yeah, really, I think so many people started with BASIC and that was the intent of BASIC. What did it stand for? The BASIC algorithmic? I can't remember. It was designed for beginners, right when fortran was the dominant language. Uh, it was an easy to use language, in fact. Uh, it was how microsoft got started writing basic for the mits altair, which is. I have a duplicate of right behind me.

03:08:41 - Benito (Announcement)
I don't think it runs microsoft basic, though the first iteration of the snake game and, uh, the first iteration of what eventually became angry birds were both on basic, really wow gorillas, it was called gorillas I think it lives on right.

03:08:58 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Microsoft doesn't do gw basic anymore no, no, they've got, but they have visual basic visual basic net.

03:09:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they, it's a net, but you can still write in Visual Basic, you can 10, print hello world.

03:09:10 - Padre (Guest)
20, go to 10.

03:09:11 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Let's go. And no line numbers. But yeah, the old Visual Basic still had colon separators and one of the fun things we used to do as basic programmers is you try to make a game in one line of code, one really long line of code. And so I was writing for magazines at the time. They wanted an april fool's day gag and so I made a find your way out of the uh, out of the cave game where you had to get close, you know, based on the warehouse, from the wind was blowing. You're moving the right direction. But I wrote one line of vb code with message, with pop-up messages, send it to the editor and said this is the only idea I got. I know it's not good, but thanks, he goes. You're not good idea. Sucked up half an hour of my time.

03:09:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, I had no idea that you have that checkered past.

03:09:57 - Padre (Guest)
I got to ask this of Richard because I mean, I love the fact that you're into nuclear power. I got to pick your brain on that. I love the fact that you are down with particle physics. Now I have to ask tab or space?

03:10:10 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Tab's all the way, brother.

03:10:12 - Padre (Guest)
Okay, thank you, we can be friends. Leo's a space guy by the way.

03:10:16 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Well, you know, everybody has to have a character flaw. There's no way around it. That's a character flaw. Tabs, Tab.

03:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, Addysink Beginners. All-purpose symbolic instruction code. There you go. I should have remembered that.

03:10:29 - Padre (Guest)
You know, leo, I love that you did this list because we throw around you know the word like genius too much describing captains of industry. These are the people who actually made the stuff that those captains of industry turned into products.

03:10:41 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
They ran and brought to us like without those captains of industry we probably wouldn't have known. You know it was. It does take the marketers and the promoters to bring it to the world, but first the inventors.

03:10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah you have to have, and I always prefer to celebrate the inventors on this yeah, every time. Yeah, those are the guys and they don't get attention, they don't get.

03:11:02 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
Their names are not well known and I think it's important for us to remember them, and I've been making podcasts around Microsoft now for 20-something years and a lot of the folks that make those things thank me for telling the stories of what they're doing. Yeah, I love it Because they're awfully busy making them.

03:11:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell. Catch him on Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot every Wednesday on Twit and, of course, Run as Radio every week and NET Rocks at runasradiocom in his Canadian lumberjack shirt.

03:11:32
You like my tuxedo His Canadian tuxedo. Richard, I thank you so much for being with us on this show. I really appreciate it. It's so much fun and I really appreciate your brains and your knowledge and your history, and we're going to have to talk more about writing basic programs for magazines next time on Windows Weekly. Thank you for being here, richard, I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Micah Sargent hosts Tech News Weekly, ios Today and Hands-On Technology on our network. He wears the best ugly Christmas sweaters and it's always a pleasure. Micah, I miss having you around the studio. That is one thing I miss. I wish I could mandate a return to office, but I'm afraid that we've all gone to the seven wins. But it's really, uh, always a pleasure to have you around and work with you, and always good to get to hang out.

03:12:19
I miss sitting next to you, so thank you for being on the show.

03:12:22 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I really appreciate it absolutely, and a pleasure to see you, both richard, and father robert as well great to see you, thanks mega mr uh, father robert, do you, do you like, father robert?

03:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that what you like to be called?

03:12:36 - Padre (Guest)
I go by robert or padre. Very few people call me father unless I'm actually dressed in my I like padre, I like potter sj, but no, don't call him bobby, I just that's.

03:12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's the one thing. Don't call him Bobby, I think that's the one thing. Don't call him that. He has done so many interesting things in his role at the Vatican, including JesuitPilgrimageapp Highly recommend. You can get it on iOS. Is it on Android too?

03:12:58 - Padre (Guest)
It's iOS and Android, nice and.

03:13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
BEOS as well. No, it's not on, beoso-s, give me a break.

03:13:08 - Padre (Guest)
I should port it.

03:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I totally should port it.

03:13:10 - Padre (Guest)
Oh man, I could.

03:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should bring B-O-S back, the greatest operating system that ever was. No, there is somewhere an open source port of it.

03:13:20 - Padre (Guest)
I can't remember the name of it but I don't think anybody uses it it lives on.

03:13:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It lives on. Anybody uses it lives on. It lives on. Thank you, robert. Great, great to see you have a very happy. I understand somebody you care about a lot's birthdays coming up. I hope you have a lovely uh christmas, I know you're gonna how many? Masses do you do on christmas day?

03:13:37 - Padre (Guest)
uh, here only four.

03:13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot of priests in rome and yeah, yeah, but there's also a lot of priests in Rome, yeah, but there's also a lot of masses, that's right. Do you do it at the Vatican or do you go to a smaller church? I'll go back here and it'll be at St Peter. Have you ever served mass in St Peter's? Of course, yeah, oh my gosh.

03:13:57 - Padre (Guest)
Wow. But it's not the masses that take time, it's the reconciliation what's? Reconciliation. What's confessions? Ah, yes, that that's multiple hours every day, so yeah, I have nothing to confess. We have our our Jubilee year starting they're gonna open the gate.

03:14:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're gonna open the gate everybody to come back.

03:14:24 - Padre (Guest)
Leo, you got.

03:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to go through that gator. Cool, something good happens you're. All your sins are washed away. They're going to open the gate. They're going to open the gate, everybody.

03:14:32 - Padre (Guest)
You've got to come back, leo. I want to go through that gate. Something good happens. All your sins are washed away when you go through that gate, right? Well, yes, but see, they've clarified the rules. You can actually get two indulgences every time you visit, so you?

03:14:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
could sell one. I thought they got rid of that. I thought they got rid of that. I thought they got rid of that.

03:14:46 - Padre (Guest)
No they got rid of selling. Could I go through that?

03:14:48 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
gate. Oh wait, I've seen that.

03:14:49 - Padre (Guest)
Well, yeah, they got rid of the church selling the indulgences, but I'm not. I mean if it's a third-party market.

03:14:54 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I think that's okay, that's okay.

03:14:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Jubilee Gate is closed. It's a gate into St Peter's right Correct, correct. St Peter's right, correct, correct. And it's closed, except for Jubilee years. So it hasn't been opened in 50 years. How long. No, no, no, it's been 13 years, the Pope can declare a Jubilee.

03:15:17 - Padre (Guest)
Correct. That's within his power. But they've already set up the Via Conciliazione with these little corrals because they know they're going to have huge groups going through the door.

03:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Italians are terrible at queuing, so this is the only way to keep people from just bum rushing the door. What, uh? When is jubilee week? When is that coming?

03:15:36 - Padre (Guest)
it starts christmas eve. It's a year, it's an entire year. It's a year, but the entire country is in it. So I mean, I mean it's the experience of Italy is different during a Jubilee year, I bet.

03:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right. Brian Burnett's coming next year, Is he? Oh nice, I saw Brian the other day. Thank you, Robert. Thank you Micah. Thank you.

03:16:00
Richard, such a pleasure Our last show of the year, but it's always nice to end with a bang. I appreciate it. We do Twit Sundays. Our next show will be January 5th, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm, eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different streams on our Discord, if you are blessed as a Club Twit member. You can also watch on YouTube if you're in the unwashed masses category Twitch YouTube. If you run the unwashed masses category, twitch Kick X, tiktok, facebook, linkedin. I think I got them all, but that's only if you want to watch live. Most people watch after the fact. There are plenty of ways to watch a show. Of course, you can get it on our website, twittv. You can watch on our YouTube channel, dedicated youtubecom slash twit, and you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client and get it automatically the minute we're done. Thank you so much.

03:16:50
Benito Gonzalez, our producer, are you editing today's show, benito as well? I am not. That's Kevin's job. Kevin King, our editor. Thanks to our creative director, anthony Nielsen, who works behind the scenes so hard so often. Of course, john Ashley, director anthony nielsen, who works behind the scenes so hard so often. Of course, john ashley, who produces and edits many of our shows. Uh, thanks to our uh, we have a wonderful team burke burkar, burke burkar, burke mcquinn, who uh is the engineering, the entire engineering team these days. Uh, thank you, burke. It's a little hard to do a uh work when you're an engineer, but he manages somehow to do that.

03:17:30 - Padre (Guest)
He's been here. Wait a minute, if we don't have the studio anymore, where does Burke sleep? I don't know.

03:17:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, honestly. I think there's a hidden chamber in this house.

03:17:40 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
There might be.

03:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably, and he's a parasite living there because he just shows up every once in a while. No, we love Burke, parasite living there because he just shows up every once in a while. No, we love Burke. Thanks to our incredible continuity department. Who make you know the ads that make the money on Twit Debbie Delchini, to Viva, to Sebastian and, of course, to my wife and our CEO who runs the operation and is keeping us afloat. Lisa Laporte, did I miss anybody? Did I get everybody in my mind? Did you say Patrick Ty?

03:18:12 - Benito (Announcement)
Ty, patrick and Russell I forgot Ty, our marketing director.

03:18:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I forgot Patrick, who is off-site over in Boston. He was the first remote worker. He does all the engineering and is with us all the time. He's constantly here. And, of course, how could I forget? Who was the other one? Russell. He doesn't really work for us, he's our contract engineer, our MSP. But Russell is absolutely the guy who knows how all this works and the only one, the last one, to know how all of this works. Thanks to all of you for making it possible and I did.

03:18:47
He said uh, there's a lot of people uh behind the scenes and your contribution uh through club, to it makes all the difference to us. We really appreciate it. So, thanks to you, our club members, thanks to all of you who've listened. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. Uh, today's is today. Festivus it's soon, uh, tomorrow, tomorrow, I gotta get that aluminum pole set up.

03:19:09 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
I have a group of friends who want to celebrate for us the airing of the disc of the?

03:19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, what is it the airing? Grievances, grievances yes, then the red and the wrestling. I believe there's wrestling the test of strength, test the feats of strength when is robonica, robonica. Who's that?

03:19:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
for oh, is that from Futurama? Yeah, Futurama.

03:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robonica. Is that the robot Christmas? It's robot Hanukkah? Christmas.

03:19:34 - Padre (Guest)
Robonica.

03:19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like that one.

03:19:36 - Padre (Guest)
I like that one. Celebrate the solstice as you wish Our listeners are who we really thank.

03:19:42 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Happy holidays to you.

03:19:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Be stupid of us to sit here talking so much without anybody listening.

03:19:47 - Richard Campbell (Guest)
But would it stop us?

03:19:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think it would Never. No, thank you. You guys Really appreciate it. Have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you in the new year. Another twit is in the can Bye-bye. This is amazing. Doing the twit, doing the twit, all right, doing the twit.