This Week in Tech 1015 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. This week in tech, Jason Heiner is here. Editor-in-chief of ZDNet. Molly White of the Web3 is going just great website. And from this week in Google, Paris Martineau. We're going to talk about, of course, the Trump coin and now the competing Melania coin. I kid you not. Molly will explain a little bit about the technology behind meme coins. We'll also talk about insurance spying on you. Isn't that a good way to bring down premiums? Maybe not. And what Apple's going to do with its AI-based news alerts. I'll give you a hint. Bye-bye, it's all coming up. Next on this Week in Tech Podcasts you love, From people you trust.

00:45
This is in Tech Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:48
This is Twit. This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1015. Recorded Sunday, january 19th 2025. Smarter than a house cat. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. What a week and what a week it is. If you're not interested in TikTok, this might not be the show for you. What a saga. Let me introduce our panel. Uh, molly White is here. So glad to have. Molly White of the famous web3 is going. Just great. Her newsletter citation needed. She's an expert. She's a long time Wikipedia editor. I brought you on because we were thinking about Wikipedia, but then things happened and there's other things to talk about. Very nice to have you, molly. It's great to see you thank you to be back.

01:47
Yes, jason Heiner is also here, editor-in-chief of zdnet, longtime friend of the show. One time you elected me president and uh the internet of the internet. Well, at the time that was really the most important thing to be president of. But that's true. Times have changed. Welcome back. Good to see you, jasonason. Always a pleasure also from this week in google, the wonderful paris martineau, hello.

02:12 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
So uh, leo, is it you who's getting inaugurated tomorrow?

02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
tomorrow I will be no. My term as president of the internet ended and no one replaced me, right, jason?

02:21 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
that makes a lot of sense actually it was unending.

02:25 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
The term never ended you, you are still the president of the internet I mean you, I'm surprised you haven't crowned yourself king it was a smaller time then.

02:33 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Well, you know, I've got some notes for you on your tenure then I take no responsibility for anything that happened after 1998.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I should have, as it turns out, created my own uh meme coin, and I could have been rich, it's true. So, um, we'll do the tick tock, I, I we'll get to the tick tock. I'm waiting to see what happens. There's something could happen the next 10 minutes, so I just want to make sure we get the latest news I've heard it's been going in and out since we got on this last night I'm, uh, I'm watching the football game and somebody says tiktok's down.

03:13
I said it's only 7 30, it's supposed to end at midnight and of course, tiktok, uh, they shut down early and and it's really clear at this point, it was a stunt, right that they wanted everybody in the world to know that it was, you know, the us government shut us down and it even said fortunately, president trump says he's going to save us, so stay tuned. This morning I get up he's not president, by the way president-elect trump saved him miraculously and it's back up.

03:48 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
But it says in the message president trump saved us, which I think is a bit telling. It's just incredibly odd how heavy-handed they are being with the political theater here. I mean, I think anyone watching this kind of understood intuitively that, even when TikTok signaled earlier this week in messages to employees that were reported on first by the information like that hey, we're going to go dark on Sunday, which they technically didn't have to do. Well, I'm not clear that they didn't.

04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, the law didn't require it, I guess Huh didn't.

04:28 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean the law didn't require it, I guess. Huh, well, it's judging by the fact that right now they're no longer dark, I would say that throws into question the whole thing because, yes, the law requires them to like.

04:36
What is happening here is um. The law penalizes both bite dance, tiktok, the company for um, remaining active in violation of this law, as well as everybody downstream and upstream of them, that's, the app store providers, as well as hosting companies like Oracle and I'm forgetting the other one. It starts with an A and those penalties range anywhere from, I think, like $500 per user per instance to like $5,000 per user per instance, and it's not just unique downloads. So that adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars of potential liabilities for these companies. And nothing has changed, except for TikTok says that Trump essentially reached out to Oracle and the one other internet service provider kind of working on the back end and assured them that he wouldn't come after them for those fines, which is a bit of a question mark for me, because I'm not sure that trump has the power to do that or not, if he was strange so this is a law that was duly passed by congress, signed by the president, took effect on the 19th.

05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Today, yeah, as we record, um, they of course Tick Tock, appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, nine to nothing said the first amendment does not protect you because you're a foreign entity and you're an enemy of the country and for security reasons security reasons, trump. The First Amendment and they voted 9-0. I mean, this was a very clear vote that no, you're going to be shut down. On Sunday, justice Kagan and we talked about this on Wednesday, paris, with our friend Kathy Gellis, who is admitted to the Supreme Court, was at the oral hearings hearings and she told us that judges. Justice kagan said it would be problematic if a president could just unilaterally say yeah, we're not going to do that. We don't want to put the president's situation where he overrides congress and the supreme court. Trump's not even president, but apparently can do that trump's not even president but apparently can do that.

06:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I think it's an executive branch sort of thing like the the job of the executive branch is to carry out the law, enforce it.

06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you can say I'm not going to enforce it right, right, so I.

06:56 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So I, I think, on a technicality, that that's their, their, their stance, but it did go. I mean, even apple released a statement last night, you know, saying a quote, unquote quote apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Limited and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, capcut, lemonade and others, will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store starting January 19th 2025.

07:26 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
So it's worth noting that that hasn't changed, despite the fact that TikTok is now available to people who already had it downloaded. The App Store still haven't blinked on this, and I'm fascinated as to what the internal conversations are happening behind closed doors at a place like Oracleacle, because technically they're taking on hundreds of billions of dollars of liability. And these financial provisions as misguided as many people uh believe they are, they do have like provisions in them that the government would told the supreme court last week that it could conceivably enforce these financial penalties up to five years later, so, like Oracle, could be penalized under whoever the next president is.

08:10 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
They're taking on a lot of risk.

08:12 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, that's a huge amount of risk.

08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But Larry Ellison, the Oracle guy, is a big Trump guy too, so you know he may be making this into a political thing, or at least very willing to listen to trump's promises well, I mean, yeah, if you want to pull that thread um, one of the big investors in tiktok is an american and a republican donor, trump donor jess, who owns 15 and did, in fact, talk to trump, uh, shortly before he changed his mind. On TikTok. There's Jeff Yass. There's also the fact that the CEO of TikTok went to Mar-a-Lago and sat down and broke bread with President-elect Trump and Elon Musk, and then there's the invitation to sit next to Musk in the inaugural dais tomorrow. So there's very clear message. But you know, this is what America wanted, right? This is not what Congress wanted, not what Trump wanted in 2020 when he first declared that he was going to ban TikTok, not what Biden wanted when he signed the law, not what the nine justices of the Supreme Court wanted, but 171 million Americans who use TikTok seem pretty clear.

09:29
I asked my son, who you know, and I've said this before and I should probably say it again. I have a conflict of interest on this, because my son is a TikTok chef who has a career, a very good career because of TikTok clearly because of TikTok. He decided to start posting videos of him making sandwiches on TikTok, went from a few thousand followers into two and a half million followers in a matter of months, parlayed that into a cookbook. Oh, by the way, he wasn't dumb. He parlayed that into an Instagram account as well and is opening a restaurant in Manhattan in two months all because of TikTok's algorithm. I asked him today do you think that could have happened on Facebook, on Instagram, facebook's Instagram? He said no.

10:15
He said TikTok's algorithm is what made me. The algorithm is much better than anything else, but he was also smart enough to move to insta. He he says he knows many, many people who were telling him I'm gonna have to go back to work. He had a friend who quit his job last week because tiktok was making the money and he says he's gonna have to go back hat in hand to get his job back. Uh, many millions of americans made money on tiktok. Henry never got much money from tiktok directly, but the advertising he sold on his tick tock channel um made it, so he never had to work right, it's been a huge success. So tick tock is there will. Would have been a lot of creators disenfranchised by this ban something I think that is interesting about this.

11:02 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean it does like assuming everything plays out the way it seems poised to right now, which is kind of a silly statement, because I'm sure that will change about 20 times during the recording of this from his perspective. I'm curious as to what is going to happen, because it seems like people there are still a number of parties out there that technically have standing to sue, to challenge the lack of enforcement of this in court. Like it's unclear exactly who that would be, but maybe like TikTok users who supported the ban or, you know, competitors of tiktok, they could ostensibly sue and say it's like they're having harm for the fact that the government is not following the law and enforcing this, and that could result in financial penalties for all these companies too, as well as like a lengthy, costly legal battle. I'm just baffled that this is in this strange limbo right now it's not in limbo.

12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I don't know. If it's in limbo, there may even be a constitutional crisis created by trump not enforcing the law um tick tock constitutional crisis.

12:16 - Molly White (Guest)
Welcome to 2025.

12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
isn't that funny, molly boy, we've been talking about this, I'm. You started saying something and I interrupted you. What do you think?

12:29 - Molly White (Guest)
I was just going to say I think it's really interesting that the Supreme Court sort of took the stance that this is about whether or not, like TikTok or China, has a right to freedom of speech and they sort of didn't address the freedom of information aspect of it, where, you know, supreme Court decisions in the past have established that people have a right to receive information and you know the idea that this needs to be blocked because it is like China who doesn't have a free speech right just seems really out there to me, especially compared to past decisions.

13:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, as Kathy Gellis has said, it's not the free speech of China, it's the free speech of the 170 million Americans who are on TikTok. You are shutting them down.

13:17 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, but a lot of the conversation about the Supreme Court decision has been basically like well, China doesn't have a free speech right, which seems like very, very misguided as far as the way that speech even happens online.

13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't make our laws based on what China does and doesn't do.

13:36 - Molly White (Guest)
I'm sorry, well, we apparently do.

13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's not a good basis for making or not making a law. There is the question of whether TikTok is some sort of security risk and the Supreme Court said it overrides any. First Amendment concerns that the Congress has decided that there is. The Congress and and the intelligence agencies have never given us those reasons they've just said. Take it on faith.

13:59 - Molly White (Guest)
It's a Chinese company, so it's a problem yeah, but I mean there have been plenty of cases that have gone to the Supreme Court in the past that have made those arguments that have not come out in that in favor of the government.

14:11
I mean the Pentagon Papers case is a good example where they argued you know, this is a securities risk, a security risk, you can't publish this. And you know the Supreme Court didn't shut down the New York Times. They said that you know people have a right to receive information and you know this is something that you can publish. And we ended up with the Pentagon Papers and now it seems like a sort of total reversal of that stance, based on sort of hand-wavy national security concerns that have not been really discussed, that have not been really discussed. I mean I sort of understand that you know the government can't just come out and say you know detail every national security concern that they have. But there is a lot of just sort of like no trust us, china is doing something nefarious that we can't tell you about and there's been no reporting really of what that might be.

15:02 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, I think perhaps the reason that the Supreme Court acted the way it did because it was a little bit of a separation of powers issue, potentially because the Congress had passed this you know we can debate the merits of it and the President signed it I think for the Supreme Court to overrule it and uphold it it would have to be.

15:29
My understanding is there would have to be like overwhelming evidence that this encroached on constitutional rights, or very clear, you know, abrogation of laws. And I think that because there was some lack of clarity and confusion, my interpretation was the reason why the Supreme Court didn't act was because it is so gray and for them to overrule the votes of the Congress and the signature of the president, it would have to be something that was really clear and essentially kind of egregious um for them to do it. That that's how I understood it from just like a legal um standpoint, let alone sort of the merits of it, because there are some real, there's some real interesting issues, you know, debates at the at the heart of this that I think are worth talking about, but I but I think that's why they didn't act there are constitutional issues that are raised by it, though, and Kathy gellis has said in, as somebody is pointing out, we're not attorneys and we're not.

16:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not attempting to be attorneys, but kathy gallus is admitted to, in fact, to uh uh talk before the supreme court, so she presumably knows of which she speaks. She said that a the supreme court's decision raises some serious issues, and the court has perhaps undermined that. Not only undermined the first amendment, but also given, um the president, uh, some powers that he didn't previously have, not that? That's the first time they've done that. So, uh, it is. It's just. It's just a weird situation. It's pretty clear. Tick, tock brought itself down as a stunt right last night. Uh, knowing that would get people up in arms and get everybody's attention, because they didn't stay down very long.

17:27 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I mean, they played their cards really well for all again, sort of the values of the thing aside, tick tock played this thing really well. They said like, look, if they, if they pass the band, we're just shutting down like we're not gonna keep appealing, and all that. And I think they counted on the fact that there would be an outcry, right they?

17:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the big losers on this are the democrats, frankly and biden um it. Trump comes off looking like a savior, and tiktoks, by the way particularly crazy because he's the one that started all of this.

17:56 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
He's the one who instigated the tiktok ban, and yet he continued. He gets the credit for stopping what he started.

18:05 - Molly White (Guest)
I feel like the national memory is a little bit shorter than a couple of years. It's just wild.

18:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so there are people. So what will probably happen? We don't know. Trump is going to have to issue an executive order. Honestly, I don't think this is the most important thing he'll be weighing in on on january 20th, but uh he says yeah, there are a few other things.

18:29
Uh, deporting, uh, everybody in chicago apparently he's also on the agenda, but uh, he, apparently what he's going to do is is extend the deadline, which is the least legally troubling thing he can do. Rather than saying I'm just not this, I'm this, I don't like this law, not going to enforce it, he's going to extend the deadline and give an american company a chance to buy. There are a lot of suitors. Uh, it's not clear who's going to win in this one. Larry ellison, of course, is there, but so is elon musk. They've the tiktok bite dance has denied that, but uh, there have been reports that musk is interested in buying at least a part of TikTok. Well, so are many others. Perplexity, an AI company called Perplexity, has put its hat in the ring and, of course, the former owner of the LA Dodgers, frank McCourt, says I got 20 billion right here, I'm ready to throw it at you. China has said we're not going to let TikTok sell the algorithm.

19:29 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Something that I think is interesting, though, is if Trump wants to use the option you can trigger this 90-day extension. In order to do that, he has to certify to Congress that TikTok has agreed to sell, and I don't know if that's entirely correct that tiktok has agreed to sell, because I think, in order to sell tiktok, you'd have to sell parts that china has said tiktok cannot sell right namely the algorithm it's and what's sad is okay.

19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To me, tiktok is the least. To me, tiktok is the least danger. I mean, china is allowed to propagandize us on X, on Elon Musk's own platform, as is Russia and on Meta, and nobody's doing anything about that. If you're concerned about China propagandizing us, americans are the most thoroughly propagandized people in the world, I think at this point, on all sides, we're fed misinformation from all directions, so that's not a really good argument. The second argument is oh well, they're getting all of our data. That's a terrible argument, because Congress is clearly unwilling to pass and this was TikTok's argument for the Supreme Court Congress, if they wanted to, could protect us by passing a comprehensive data privacy bill. They clearly don't want that. Uh and anyway, china doesn't need tick tock to get all that information. They just can buy it on the open market, because meta is collecting it and selling it on, as is everybody else. Data brokers have all that information.

21:05 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I mean, I don't think. I think we know that China doesn't have to buy it, that they've for years, they've infiltrated AT&T. They've, you know, they've, they've exfiltrated data. You know, I guess the you know, I think the data argument is there is some there. It is a little bit compelling, though, because the ease at which their government sensors could have access to the data is a little bit different from that standpoint. Now, supposedly it's because of data sovereignty and Oracle now, the way they store the data and that. So who knows what the reality is? I think there's not many people who do, but I think that the ease of access to data and the ability to manipulate the algorithm I think there is something to that. I mean, there have been so many videos that talk about channels that, just as an experiment, they they went to tiktok. They created a huge following. They said one negative thing about the chinese government and, like overnight, 90 percent right drops there's no.

22:14 - Molly White (Guest)
There's no question about that but of course you can't say pixel fit on meta either I was gonna say yeah, you can really replicate that experiment anywhere else.

22:22 - Molly White (Guest)
I mean say, cisgender those are american censors guys.

22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's different um, yeah, and I I okay, so maybe there is a threat from tiktok. It does seem weird that our, that our government's focused on that instead of so many other things that are so threatening, and we're spending so many cycles on this subject. It's just a social network, it's not that important.

23:06 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean, I do think it's the consequence of this increased, not to you know.

23:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bring up a phrase from the speaking Google that we use but this phase of moral panics that we've been seeing over the last couple of years.

23:10 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
You've been listening to jeff jarvis, think of the children, think of like. There has been this huge whipping up of fear and rage over companies like tiktok, and it also is coming at a time of increased like, xenophobia and fear of anything that is foreign. And it makes sense, of course, that the natural conclusion of this would be the kind of first foray into something actually happening a ban of a foreign social media platform that spirals out of control, where none of the people actually enforcing it seem like they want to be enforcing it. But we've gotten to this point anyway.

23:44 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, and I think there's also just sort of the larger conversation about, you know, access to information and sort of the ability to you know, disseminate and receive information that is really being is really changing in recent times. You know where Republicans were sort of once the party of free speech, and now you know we're seeing these sort of unprecedented attacks on the press from Donald Trump and other allies. There's been sort of bipartisan attacks on speech coming, you know, with TikTok. You know, with other proposed bills around, moral panics with. You know, kids, online safety and you know those types of bills, age verification. You know, access to content that's deemed obscene or, you know, otherwise inappropriate for minors, and so it does feel like it's a part of sort of a broader pattern of cracking down on access to information. That is really concerning, I think, um, especially going into this new administration, where it seems like those types of things are going to heat up even more yes, we, we don't mind social media as long as we control, uh, its use.

24:57 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
In other words, right um, as in. Who's the we in that scenario? Leo like as a society no people in power people. Okay, I think we call them the oligarchs.

25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm gonna call them the oligarchs, the oligarchs, the oligarchs um it was also interesting the reaction of Tick Tock users.

25:18
The number one app all week was a little red book, uh, or actually they called it what they call a red notebook, but it's, but it's, uh, xiao hong shu is little red book. Uh, the ceo says that's because I went to stanford, but I think it's maybe more than a nod to chairman mao's little red book. Anyway, little red book was suddenly, even though it was mostly chinese, suddenly the number one download on apple's store suddenly the number one download on apple's store.

25:49 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Um, and it was interesting seeing, I mean, on various I didn't download it myself, but I saw a variety of like posts from uh users who tried it out on various social networks. And the thing that struck me, as many people were saying, I came to this new platform because on tiktok I, you know, really found a place for the LGBTQ community and to find like fellow people in my community and express my sexual identity, and you cannot do that on Red Note or Red Book, whatever it's called, and you can't probably do it on TikTok. Can you? Maybe you can? No, you can on TikTok, but you literally cannot use most hashtags that are very stringent about that, and so I saw a bunch of people from these communities that I'm in posting. Oh well, you know, on Redbook you've got to do hashtag LE instead of lesbian, because you can't put lesbian because then you'll get taken down and I'm like, how is this better?

26:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How are you jumping into? It's a gesture. They know it's not better. It's a gesture it's saying go ahead and stop us. You know what are you going to do. You're going to stop everything. What are you going to do? And I think that that's a strong signal. Really, the the, the biggest losers here are the democrats who, who, uh, who fell for the, fell for trump's faint. He did a head faint. He said we're gonna ban tiktok, right, and they all fell for it. I mean, I would argue.

27:16 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I think it's less. I think positioning it as trump being playing some 4d chess here is probably a little malinformed, in the sense that I don't know we can say for certain that Trump had any idea that this was going to play out the way it did when he made that first executive order. I think that everybody was just reacting in terms of this I don't know wave of moral panic we've seen rise and no one really thought about the consequences and it ends up being the Democrats are left holding the bag in this yeah, I mean they're the.

27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, look, they made some uh, they made some real enemies among, uh, among millennials and and uh, what's younger than millennial gen alphas z. What's the youngest? I don't know. I never liked those labels then beta.

28:02 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Is it like, that's like the ones that are just being born now, gen Beta?

28:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You all are just jealous of us baby boomers because we have a legit designation and you all just trying to get you know your own.

28:13 - Benito (Announcement)
But no, uh-uh, there's no, X, Y and Z. They're all piggybacking off the Gen X.

28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but that Gen X wanted to be baby boomers, that's all.

28:25 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
They baby boomers, that's all. They just didn't like it that we had it.

28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, everyone wants to be babies, everybody wants to be baby boomers. You know that. All right. All right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, uh, why? There's just I don't. All right, we're gonna do, we're gonna talk about I want to find out. Molly's gonna explain what solana is right and then, and then we're going to find out.

28:45 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
This is your cross to bear, molly this is the curse that you have sorry.

28:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Molly you're the crypto expert here. You're watching this week in tech. Molly White is here, web three is going just great and, of course, citation needed which is an excellent newsletter.

29:00
You should all subscribe to find it all at mollywhitenet and and or molly f x o, o, o. Right, did I get that right? Zero x f f, f, f, f. Yeah, my hex is so bad. Zero x f f, which is hex four, white, white, clever. Thank you for being here, molly jason heiner from zdnet. He is the man in charge editor-in-chief at zdnet. You've risen. You've risen to the top, my friend.

29:32 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I, I mean of a sorts.

29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean it doesn't get better than that. Congrats, it's good.

29:39 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Thank you yeah always good to be here you deserve.

29:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know no one who deserves it more than you. You're fantastic. And, of course, the wonderful paris martineau, who works for the information, who had the you. You mentioned it, but let's, let's emphasize this the scoop that tiktok was gonna yeah, not me, but my colleagues.

29:57 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I've been all over it all weekend I've been watching. I mean, they're working right now it's a changing story. It's truly so impressive. I mean, and it's times like these that I'm happy to be in a newsroom that has a great China team as well.

30:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it was actually Oracle that started shutting down the servers, which is interesting yeah.

30:22 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean that's part of the reason why tick tock went offline last night and part of the reason that it's so interesting that it came back today, because it seems to be as a result of these backroom negotiations between trump giving these assurances and companies like oracle and again, I'm forgetting the name. The other one, yeah, commie or something.

30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wild, wild wild story probably akamai ak, hey, that's it, akamai. Yeah, akamai. Yep, they probably weren't hosting it, but they were providing CDN, I'm sure.

30:50
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31:28
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32:39
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34:01
Visit joindeletemecom slash twit. The offer code twit will get you 20 percent off. That's join, delete me dot com slash twit. And don't forget the offer code TWIT for 20 percent off. That does two things Gets you 20 percent off, but also lets them know hey, they saw this on twit, and that's that's helps us join. Delete me dot com. Slash twit. Offer code TWIT for 20 percent off. It really works. We know we used it, so this is kind of unprecedented. I don't even know what to say. Thank goodness Molly white is here and it's right at the top. Of web 3 is going just great. President Trump, president-elect Trump, the day before his inauguration, created a meme coin. Trump. It's called. You call it an s coin. I'll call it a meme coin. Uh, dollar sign trump. If you go to get trump memescom, you can buy it and I'm not hiding it because so many people have done so. It is now worth what is it?

35:06 - Molly White (Guest)
32 billion dollars well, there's actually some sort of breaking news that changes that, which is that melania trump just launched her meme coin what no, and the meme coin has crashed like 65 wait a minute.

35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People sold trump to buy melania.

35:26 - Molly White (Guest)
Yes, no, come on, you're teasing us down, melania up.

35:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am not joking what is the name of melania's coin? Melania boy, that's like an hour ago. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like there's trouble in paradise. Here's a what no between them camelot man.

35:47
Uh, here's uh, the uh post from the new, new soon to be new president. My new official trump meme is here. It's time to celebrate everything we stand for winning. Get your dollar sign trump. Now go to trumpmemescom, have fun. Um, oh boy, let me just see what it costs to do. I have to give him money. Oh, you can buy it with a debit card or crypto. What? And it's based on solana, is that right, molly?

36:19 - Molly White (Guest)
that's correct, yeah what is? Solana. So solana is another blockchain, uh sort of like. There's the Bitcoin blockchain, ethereum, and then there's Solana. It was very popular around the Sam Bankman Freed era. He was very into Solana and then it sort of had a nosedive around the time. Those things fell apart. But it's been back and a lot of the recent meme coin trend has taken place on Solana.

36:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was Haktua coin on Solana.

36:51 - Molly White (Guest)
I believe it was yes.

36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what that means is I could create a dollar sign, leo coin, but I wouldn't have to actually do any math. There's no math involved, right, I don't. I don't have to come up with a with miners or anything. This is all handled with some.

37:09 - Molly White (Guest)
This solana does it yeah, and there have been sort of these recent platforms, uh, developed to make it very easy for anyone to create a meme coin on solana without necessarily having to have a ton of technical expertise. You've always been able to create your own token on an Ethereum or Solana or anything like that, but some of these new platforms that really try to make it easier have caused this sort of explosion in interest in meme coins over the past-.

37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So one hour before we went on the air, Melania released Melania. It has grown 4,487% since in the first hour. Oh, it's down a little now. Are people you think selling Trump to buy Melania?

38:00 - Molly White (Guest)
Uh, potentially, I mean, or people are getting out of Trump for other reasons and they think that you know this is all, uh, you know, a bad sign for the Trump financial world. I don't know. You know they're worried that the Trump meme coin is about to crash, or something like that.

38:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump is right now worth $45 and 47 cents, but you're right it did drop. It was uh started the day. It's almost 70 dollars.

38:26 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
so it is down 34 percent that's got to be the set price, right, because 45, 47 his president numbers oh, everybody's aiming at 47.

38:38 - Molly White (Guest)
I think that's actually coincidence, but that's crazy yeah that's funny.

38:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the the concern on this I mean my son, I'm talking to Henry about TikTok and he said, by the way, is that legal Is now so and that was one of the things and one of the reasons the crypto industry was all in on Trump because he said we're going to fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC. That's been saying that cryptocurrencies should be regulated like securities, which I mean. That seems sensible to me, but it's very clear that under this new administration, they will not be regulated like securities, if at all, which means and I guess the president-elect is basically announcing this by creating his own coin, as is Melania. Here is the bank of Trump and if you decide you want to contribute to the new administration without all these rules and things, you just buy Trump coin, and presumably the president-elect has a big stake.

39:45
We do we know how much um, I think 80 of the token is currently when the price goes up control his, his money, his value, its value goes up and he, he kind of it's paper money, but so is tesla. I mean it's paper money, but it's a way of kind of indirectly giving money to our, our leader.

40:10 - Molly White (Guest)
I would say rather directly actually.

40:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean the only thing more directly is if you just write him a check, but that there's all sorts of stickiness around that.

40:19 - Molly White (Guest)
So Right, yeah, that's a regulated.

40:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not. This is not regulated.

40:24 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, and it's not that much of a. You know, the the newest trump meme coin is really not that much of a departure from his previous actions where he had a meme coin, didn't he's? Uh, there were trump themed meme coins, but I don't know if any of those were ever definitively connected to him there was actually a lot of coin, that baron did with him. Baron has a coin.

40:48 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
No baron was the czar of a coin or something like that.

40:51 - Molly White (Guest)
He was the crypto officer yeah, so there's a couple different things. There was a trump themed meme coin that was believed to have been backed by uh or like that baron trump was speculated to be involved with, but that was all going off of claims by, like, martin Shkreli well, there's a reliable source yeah, and so he was never really definitively linked to that.

41:13
but there is a project called world liberty financial, which is a crypto project that Trump is basically a beneficiary of, but he's not technically an officer of the company, even though he clearly has a strong say in the control of and direction of the project. But he makes like 70, I think 75% of protocol revenues off of that, and so people were already basically funneling money to Trump through that project.

41:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are protocol revenues? What is that? Is that like gas fees? What is that?

41:51 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, so the thing with World Liberty Financial is that theoretically it's supposed to become a DeFi protocol where you could actually like use the app to do crypto trading, and if you were to do so, that would generate revenue for the protocol, and then a percentage of that goes to trump so they rake off a little bit yeah, but in in its current form there is no functionality, so basically it doesn't really do anything but this is more direct the trump Trump coin this seems to be very direct.

42:25
yes, and you know there is really no business behind it in the way that World Liberty Financial at least claims that there will be some sort of app or something that you could use eventually, maybe.

42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, immediately on X there are pseudo accounts created.

42:47 - Molly White (Guest)
Yes, like when I first saw the the tweet about the trump meme coin, I thought that donald trump's twitter account had been hacked, like that's what I assumed, because on twitter this happens all the time, where celebrities accounts are compromised and then they pretend to launch a meme coin and the hacker makes off with whatever revenue there is and then eventually the person regains control of their Twitter account and it turns out it wasn't their meme coin, it was just some person, and I assumed that was what was happening with the Trump coin, which I don't know why. I didn't think it was likely that he would pull a stunt like this, which in hindsight seems very in character for him, but so there.

43:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's only a 10 public allocation of this meme coin. 80 of it is the president-elect's money. 10 is going to somebody else, I don't know, maybe that's solana or skits that got cut or something.

43:44 - Molly White (Guest)
10 goes to the public the idea is that over time, the uh 80 allocation would be released to the public. I believe, um, but at the moment that is the case.

43:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, so and this is so. Um, if you listened to or read the interview that the New York Times Rastutat did with Mark Andreessen Mark's company, as you know, mark Andreessen created Netscape Mozilla before that made a lot of money when Netscape went public and has become a venture capitalist. That made a lot of money when Netscape went public and has become a venture capitalist. Uh, many of their investments at Andreessen Horowitz are, uh, crypto companies web3. They were a big web3 proponent, uh, and Andreessen says this is why he's become radicalized. He was a Democrat his whole life but he but he realized the Democrats wanted to kill crypto. He's the one who talked about debanking of crypto companies on Joe Rogan uh, the democrats wanted to kill crypto. He's the one who talked about debanking of crypto companies on joe rogan uh, the democrats wanted to kill crypto. And so he's become a a real supporter of the republicans and especially of donald trump, because, uh, donald trump's pro-crypto.

45:00
But you can see the problem with crypto right here that it is on because it's unregulated. It's a really easy way to scam people like crazy. It's not to mention it's facilitated ransomware. I mean the ransomware explosion is is primarily because they can get their ransomware in Bitcoin right. Um, a lot of people made a lot of money. I'm not saying they haven't, but I imagine there's also a lot of people who lost money. You know, it's a zero-sum game.

45:28 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah for people to make a lot of money, a lot of people have to lose a lot of money I mean, I know there's more bitcoin being created all the time, so that's not.

45:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not exactly zero, that's true that's true, but, um, it's pretty close to it. Um, how does, how does this trump coin work? Is there more trump coin being mined or is there a a set pool of trump coin?

45:50 - Molly White (Guest)
uh, there's a set pool of it and, like I said, there's that initial allocation to the team and I think the idea is that the team will sort of distribute more of it over time.

46:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's really why would they do that for all? Why should they do that? To make more money oh yeah, because if they do that, then maybe more people will buy it yeah, I think there's.

46:11 - Molly White (Guest)
I mean, I think I think there's probably not much of a long-term plan with this. There doesn't tend to be with meme coins. They're sort of like a yeah you know, can you?

46:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
still buy hawk tua I don't think you can. You can, yeah. Why would you they're?

46:23 - Molly White (Guest)
all basically tradable forever, but it's just the question of does anyone actually trade them?

46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do people understand this when they're? I think certainly the people who are buying Trump coin are not looking at this allocation table and saying, oh yeah, okay. Well, there's eight total groups. The total admission duration is 36 months. Circulating supply at TGE 200 million. The maximum card supply is 1 billion. I'm going to make money on this. I think this is good. What is the emission schedule? What the hell does that mean Is that?

46:54 - Molly White (Guest)
when they release their 80%. Yeah, that's about new tokens being released.

46:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, not mined Right.

47:03 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, so Solana and some other blockchains have a different uh consensus mechanism. So bitcoin is a mining network where it's all about, you know, a lot of computers doing a lot of calculations at once.

47:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Solana, ethereum, some of these other blockchains use a different process called validating uh to validate blocks instead of mine blocks and it's more, you know, eco-friendly and and all that kind of thing yeah, I mean, and the basic idea is you have a decentralized ledger that is everybody can see of who owns what and it's validated somehow magically, whether through mining or validation or proof of work or proof of stake or whatever it is. Um, but it's interesting, you can just wave your hand and say, yeah, I'm going to create a billion trump coins yep and they're, and they magically appear yeah, I mean we in fairness

47:58 - Molly White (Guest)
you've been able to do this for a long time. You know, the theory network has been doing this for a long time and people have been launching new tokens on, you know, all sorts of different blockchains.

48:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you have to back it up? Do you have to buy some Solana to back it up?

48:12 - Molly White (Guest)
Not necessarily, but in practice, most people will set up what's called a liquidity pool so that if someone wants to buy some Trump tokens, there is someone on the other end of the trade, uh. But you know, as time goes on, uh, other people will sort of join into those activities and become liquidity providers oh, that's what the other 10 is, by the way is liquidity yeah so it's 80 trump, 80 liquidity, 10 public distribution.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand what any of this means, by the way, and I'm gonna bet that 99 of the people who are buying it don't, and therein lies the problem yeah, I mean, meme coins are really just based on vibes.

48:55 - Molly White (Guest)
You know. There is no business or anything behind it. There is no sort of project underlying it, even in the way that a lot of crypto projects like I don't know. A year ago they at least claim to be doing something and most of them didn't, but they claim to be. And now there's meme coins, which is just like maybe number go up and that's sort of the whole philosophy behind them, and people are just trying to get in quickly enough and like pick the right meme coins so that they're the ones buying low and selling high and not the part of like 99% of people doing the opposite.

49:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But just to make you feel better, there is a disclaimer at the bottom of the page at gettrumpmemescom, which I'm going to bet is mostly hand-waving, but it makes it feel like this is somehow regulated. Trump memes are intended to function as an expression of support for and engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol dollar sign, trump and the associated artwork, and not intended to be or to be the subject of an investment opportunity, investment contract or security of any type. Get trumpmemescom is not political, has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or government agency, because then the FEC would rule in. Cic Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the Trump cards and are subject to a three-year unlocking schedule. Cic Digital LLC and Celebration Cards LLC, the owners of Fight Fight, fight Fight LLC, will receive trading revenue derived from trading activities of Trump meme cards. Those are those fees you were talking about, molly. See terms and conditions here. Okay, I'm gonna click terms and conditions.

50:34 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Sometimes I just I see something like this and I want to go like find a way to print this out and send just a screenshot of that back in time. A decade and one shot kill me. You know, like imagine reading this like a decade ago, no context. I don't think I would survive, I think my brain would explode trying to comprehend it.

50:54 - Molly White (Guest)
But you see, these disclaimers on basically every crypto project website because they sort of think they've found a get out of jail free card where, like, if you put this at the bottom the website, then the securities exchange commission can't come after us. And in this case I guess it's probably true because of the, you know, trump administration changes to the sec. But uh, it is just sort of this, like it's like when, um, uh, financial influencers are like not financial advice and then they proceed to give you like give you financial advice.

51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, financial advice, please be aware, this is in the. Yeah, financial advice, please be aware, this is in the tnc. Please be aware. The price of trump memes may be extremely volatile well, we just found that out when melania released hers and you may experience substantial losses in connection with a sale or other disposition of trump memes. We make absolutely no promise or guarantee that the trump memes will increase in value or maintain the same value as the amount you paid to purchase. Same, there remains your sole and exclusive responsibility, go ahead.

51:52 - Molly White (Guest)
I was going to say I believe there's also a clause about class action, litigation against the. Trump meme project, which is sort of a legally controversial clause where you know you're only allowed to I forget what the terms are, but it's something like. You know you have three weeks to file a lawsuit and then you basically automatically waive all class complaints.

52:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mean, I feel bad because, obviously, the people who buy this. Well, there's two categories of people who are going to buy this. There are people who love Trump, or Trump supporters, like my in-laws, who have his flag flying over their house and they just they say you know, we're in, this is great, we're going to give them, and they're on a fixed income. They don't have a lot of money. They're going to give them some money just to show their support, right. There's a second category, which are foreign actors, nationals uh, people who want influence with the government. Who will, when you buy this, it's public, right, it's not hidden.

53:00 - Molly White (Guest)
they know you just bought some, right it's public in the sense that people can see your blockchain address, but there you would have to connect the blockchain wallet address with the actual person so if you bought it with crypto, there wouldn't be. But they do allow you to buy it with a debit card, so you yeah, there is the added portion of this, which is not a feature of most meme coins, which is that you could buy it with a credit card or a debit card or whatever it is.

53:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And.

53:29 - Molly White (Guest)
I assume that goes through some sort of you know they've got a partnership with I don't know, coinbase or something. Who is doing, who's facilitating that? But that is probably not as public because of the traditional financial end of things.

53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the the way, it's your sole and exclusive responsibility to assure the purchase and sale of trump memes and the use of cryptocurrencies complies with laws and regulations in your jurisdiction.

53:53 - Molly White (Guest)
That's your problem, buddy, not my problem um, it turns out, though, that it is actually very much their problem. Yeah, I don't think you can just disclaim that away.

54:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah I don't think it's any accident that this was introduced the day before inaugural.

54:09 - Molly White (Guest)
It was also introduced on the day of the crypto ball in DC, which was a black tie event put on by the crypto industry $2,500 tickets. Dinner will not be served. Reporters are strictly forbidden.

54:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And incidentally it was headlined by snoop yeah, apparently he's a trump guy now who was, uh, even as recently as the day of the election, very anti-trump.

54:36 - Molly White (Guest)
There is now a cancel snoop movement because he has been into crypto for a long time, so that wasn't too much of a surprise.

54:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But so that's what. That's really what you're. What you're seeing here is, um. The crypto community is extraordinarily happy, if I'm not saying it is. If it were a pyramid scheme, um, and you had put a lot of money into it, you would very much like more suckers to come along and buy out your share, wouldn't you? I mean, that's how I think schemes work, for sure yes, I mean more like a ponzi scheme.

55:12 - Molly White (Guest)
Ponzi, you know well, there's some of both, I think, but yeah that's true, you're right.

55:16 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
You're right. It is both um, yeah, I mean crypto, any of these things, just like meme stocks, just like penny stocks, you know a lot of. It's like finding someone, whoever. Can you know? We're finding the demand to buy the next one right, like that's the. That's what it's always about, and so this thing is short lived. I think it's interesting in that it's likely to create a bunch of blather around crypto for the next few months, but at the same time, when people put some money in and they see something that they put even $500 in, and then it's worth $0.25 two months later, they tend to say, well, I'm never doing that again. That's what sort of typically happens in these meme coin.

56:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know rises and falls, and so so do you think it's a shrinking pool of people who will put money into this stuff?

56:14 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I mean, there's a lot of people that have gotten, a lot of the sort of the average folks that rise and fall 22. And so I think that, yeah, it's like a new pool of people who maybe are now giving it a try. But what tends to happen with meme coins is what happens every time is like, again, people put in 100 bucks and then they find how is what was 100 bucks, you know two weeks ago now worth 75 cents? And then people are like, well, I know two weeks ago, now worth 75 cents. And. And then people are like, well, I'm never doing that again, sort of phenomenon.

56:48 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Well, that's the rational response and in most cases that does happen, but I think, as we've seen from the whole original meme, stock craze and everything that's currently going on with GameStop stockholders and former Bed Bath Beyond stockholders who believe they still have stock, there is a small but mighty percentage of people that this just sends them into a whirlwind of conspiratorial thinking, and I'm interested to see how that plays out when you combine something as volatile as politics and these sort of communities.

57:26
I've been looking at with idle fascination, but interested in this phenomenon within the GameStop, bed, bath, beyond people, because it reminds me of the conspiratorial thinking you see with QAnon. But if you have the Venn diagram of people who believe in QAnon and who also are potentially prone to that, it becomes a strange circle and I'm morbidly curious to see how that turns out.

57:53 - Molly White (Guest)
I would also say there is sort of a third demographic here, which is people who are prone to gambling addiction, who see a big loss on something like a Trump meme coin and they aren't like, oh God, that was a bad idea, I should never do that again. Their reaction is I picked the wrong one. I should pick the right one next time. Yeah, and I'll make it back next time.

58:14
It wasn't fast enough, right? And there is so much of that in the crypto world, where there is this tendency for people to really blame themselves in a way that is very unusual, where it's like, oh, I shouldn't have done this and my wallet was hacked and that was all my fault, or, oh, I just picked the wrong token, I made the wrong trade, but it's never. You know, they don't sort of see the flaws in the system. They often just attribute it to their own personal failings and then believe that if they just trade better or if they just behave in a different way, and then believe that if they just trade better or if they just behave in a different way, you know that they can suddenly become the Lamborghini driving people that they follow on Twitter Should this be regulated.

58:56
Well, I think there's reasonable arguments to be made in sort of both directions. You know there is this enormous market, such that it is, that is, a wild west, and so you know it would be nice if there wasn't this blatant fraud happening. And I would point out that you can handle fraud without bespoke regulations like stealing is still illegal, even if you do it with crypto. But there is sort of this argument which I am sympathetic to, which is that the more you regulate it, the more you legitimize it and the more you sort of make it look like a sound investment. But I also wonder if maybe that ship has sailed a little bit. You know we already have Bitcoin ETFs, for example, and so we've already legitimized it to some extent, and maybe that's a better.

59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's something that worries me a little bit, because ETFs make it very easy for you to put Bitcoin in your IRA in your retirement funds.

59:52 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, it's easy to invest. Maybe not 401k, but yes, certainly an IRA.

59:57 - Molly White (Guest)
They are getting to that point though, where 401k managers are considering adding Bitcoin, etf options managers are considering adding Bitcoin. Etf options?

01:00:06 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I do think something that's worth keeping in mind here is like I think there's this tendency and I certainly fell prey to it like when we're talking about meme coins and this whole kind of wild west of an industry to view the victims and losers of this as people who had it coming or just made a poor choice. But as these products get more and more popular and they're extraordinarily popular right now oftentimes the average victim of these financial scams are everyday well-meaning Americans who suffer huge financial losses that are devastating to them and people who support them. And I think, when we're thinking about regulation, part of the reason to do something like that is to protect the average consumer from harms that they may not realize they're getting themselves into yeah, I mean, americans love a get-rich-quick scheme, right like yeah, I mean

01:00:56 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
since 1850 it's been like a long string of them.

01:00:59 - Molly White (Guest)
Um, yeah, yeah it's a little different when it's in the white house yeah, um, your point is really well made, because I I hear that a lot as someone who covers crypto scams. I get a lot of people saying like oh, they had it coming, they shouldn't have been so dumb. Like anyone who puts money into a meme coin deserves everything they get, and so on. Um, but like watching the crypto world for the past couple of years and seeing the victims of these scams, it really people really do not understand the types of people that we're talking about. You know when, and the types of things that people believe about that are just like they believe to be inherently true about anything that is available for them to buy. This is particularly the case with Americans, where people believe that, because they can buy it, it is regulated.

01:01:49
It must be okay, yeah, and there is someone making sure that it's not a scam.

01:01:54
And so when companies like Celsius and Voyager collapsed, for example, in 2022, those were two large crypto companies based in the United States there were all of these people who believed that they had, like FDIC protection on their Celsius accounts, because Celsius kept saying that it was safer than a bank, and so people just assumed that they had protection from those types of losses.

01:02:18
People believed that if it was a scam, they wouldn't be allowed to be registered in the United States, and so they. I mean, people do not expect like CEOs to just lie to their faces, even though they do it very frequently some 20-year-old guy who has money to burn, who is very technologically savvy, who understands what he's getting into and understands the risk that's involved, and therefore you shouldn't feel bad for him when he loses everything. But if you actually look at it, I mean, there are retirees who are told that this is the only way that they're going to be able to retire comfortably. There are people who are trying to pay medical debts able to retire comfortably. There are people who are trying to pay medical debts. There are very compelling stories of people who are in a bad situation and trying to get out of it, who believe that this is kind of the only way that they can get out of it and often really don't understand what they're getting involved in.

01:03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are there any regulations at all? Is this regulated in any way?

01:03:22 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, like I said, stealing from people is illegal, so yeah, you, you know, there are. I don't. I haven't seen one a single.

01:03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I guess Samuel Bankman freed, yeah, and.

01:03:32 - Molly White (Guest)
Celsius, you know there's the there is, but that's usually unfortunately. That usually happens after the fraud it's too late, it's not.

01:03:40 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
It's like running a pump and dump for a mean coin. Is that regulated?

01:03:46 - Molly White (Guest)
And well, there is some debate over who is in charge of that regulation. But pumping and dumping is also illegal, although people, I think, sometimes forget that in the crypto world. And so the SEC has brought cases about pump and dumps, but because they're so frequent and prevalent, they really only bring them against, like high profile cases where they feel like they can send a message. Um. So, for example, they went after kim kardashian, they've gone after you know, a couple of other celebrities for um getting involved in these pump and dumps, or for undisclosed promotion of these tokens.

01:04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that's right, I remember they, they went after the celebrities that uh Fortune favors the brave, you know uh all of those ads on the Super. Bowl, but nothing ever happened.

01:04:37 - Molly White (Guest)
I don't you know Matt Damon's not in jail well, I think those were class action and not coming from the sec. They were regulated regulation okay yeah, but um, so they they do do those types of lawsuits, but I think they've unfortunately just sent the message that, like, if you're not a celebrity, no one's gonna come after you. And so there's all of this meme corn activity anyway, um also when, when the president-elect does it, it is a very strong signal, right?

01:05:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, you know, come on in, guys. The water is great. I'm looking. There are 66 political coins on coin ranking right now at coinrankingcom. Number one, of course, the official trump coin that came out yesterday, but there isa mega coin. Actually there's quite a few. There's a coin, there's a doland trump coin, a geo baden coin, there's a pepe coin, there's the trump token, there's trump ai trump. Mega mega fight for trump, baby trump, tooker curlson, mega trump, huge, mega baby Trump, son of Trump. Not only can you buy these, they have a market cap. Jd Vance there's a Vance coin. Doesn't mean Vance did it right, just somebody else just named it that there's a Kamala Harris coin. Make America great. There are quite a few MAGA coins Are these scammers trying to take advantage of? I mean, there's a real Donald Trump coin, but I don't think it's really Donald Trump. Nobody says you can't do that.

01:06:12 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, no, I mean, these tokens have been around for a long time, you know, even before Trump was launching meme coins. People just will launch a meme coin about anything and everything they can think of, and there have been a bunch of them that are politically involved with some political thing. But anything that happens, like if there's some big news, there'll be a meme coin about it immediately. It's just sort of a free for all.

01:06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I mean by it's not any practical way regulated.

01:06:42 - Molly White (Guest)
Correct. I would agree with that and especially with the way things are looking like they'll be going. I would not expect that to change much.

01:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When they say the market cap of Trump coin is 9.25 billion that's the current market cap Does that mean there's actually nine point, not that many people bought it, or does that just some made up?

01:06:59 - Molly White (Guest)
number, yeah, so I actually wrote a piece about this on my blog a long time ago about cryptocurrency market caps, which people like to say big numbers, and so they'll say things like there's a $15 billion market cap or something like that, and the way that those market caps are calculated is very naive.

01:07:20
So it basically means what they're doing is they're taking the current price of the token and they're multiplying it by the number of tokens in circulation. In some cases, I actually saw the New York Times do this recently, which was really kind of horrifying. But they actually were multiplying the current price by what's called the fully diluted valuation, which is like if every token in existence were to be created. Multiply that by the current price and you get these huge numbers, like almost trillions of dollars in this case, but it's nowhere connected to reality. Like you could not in any reasonable world actually cash out something close to that. I like to give the example of basically like if I were to create a Molly coin and I were to sell one Molly coin to somebody else for a dollar and then I had a million Molly coins that existed, they would be saying that the Molly coin market cap was a million dollars, even though $1 went into that ecosystem, yeah, um so it's really.

01:08:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
You really have to find a million people to actually buy it for a dollar, right? No, right, so market and they.

01:08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too bad. They use market cap because that's a well-known phrase in the stock market, in equities, and it means writing in an equity. Now they also also use trading volume and I think this is real the the value of all trades of trump coin in the last 24 hours is 18.9 billion dollars so I would put an asterisk around that too, because really, that's not real trading in crypto markets is unbelievably endemic, like it is just a normal activity, practically like you can hire doing they're selling it to themselves, and then back again yeah, pretty much.

01:09:06 - Molly White (Guest)
They're faking volume for that exact reason, because it makes it look like the token is more liquid than it is, like there's a deeper market for it than there is so it's fake?

01:09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it could be, we don't know it often is fake.

01:09:18 - Molly White (Guest)
I would say we don't know.

01:09:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, okay, well, I just it's a little sketch to be doing this, to be honest, a little, but it does send a signal that this is going to be a great four years for crypto.

01:09:32 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, I would actually point out. You mentioned this earlier. You made a comment about how you know crypto is very excited about this, but I've actually seen a surprising amount of sort of shock and horror from the crypto world about the Trump meme coin. I think the crypto world has really come to expect something very different than what they're going to get with the Trump administration, and they are kind of horrified to see what looks like a total grifty cash grab. It's obviously not great for the reputation of crypto when Trump is out there doing these types of things. People A real leopard's eating faces, mel. It is very much that yes of crypto. When Trump is out there doing these types of things, people A real leopard's eating faces Mel.

01:10:07
It is very much that, yes, but I think that you know, I'm actually really interested in watching over the next couple of years how the crypto world's like you know, the normal everyday people who are buying and selling crypto react to the sort of political reality that they are, that they sort of signed up for, in a way, where they were like, okay, I guess we'll back, you know, we'll, we'll get behind this political project and we'll support these crypto executives who are, you know, getting in bed with Trump, with the idea that those crypto executives, the like billionaire executives and venture capitalists, will do what is good for the little guy in crypto, even though history has shown repeatedly that billionaires don't usually care about the little guy very much.

01:10:53
And I think there is going to be kind of a reckoning where maybe the people who are like Coinbase executives don't actually have the interests of everyday people in mind and they actually are more interested in protecting their bottom line or padding their wallets a little bit. And I think that this is kind of an early preview of that to some extent.

01:11:15 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, there are still true believers in crypto and blockchain who truly believe that this is a vehicle that will democratize finance. Remember, cryptocurrency came out of the financial collapse of the banks in 2010, 2011. And the whole idea was to create this principles-based, decentralized monetary system that is separate from sort of an oligarch controlled monetary system where the people in power are not accountable for mistakes that they make and then the little person pays for their mistakes instead of them having to be accountable for them. And so there are people in the crypto ecosystem that still firmly believe in those ideals and in that idea, and that there is a way that cryptocurrency can democratize finance in ways that especially apply to places outside of the US and places where there are a lot of unbanked people who are still at the mercy of sometimes very corrupt money lenders and banks.

01:12:30
So I think for that crowd, seeing crypto get a bunch of publicity around meme coins is probably one of the worst possible scenarios, right, because it's going to take crypto and turn it into essentially just people thinking it's just a Ponzi scheme. It's always going to be a sort of a cheap meme scop, you know, ponzi scheme sort of place, when there are people who really believe in this and are have put their you know they could be working on AI things, but they're invested in the crypto ecosystem because they are essentially true believers in the original ideals of, you know, 2010 and the post, you know, and post Lehman Brothers and other bank collapses, and so I think that's one of the risks here for that crowd, this could be a rough, you know, this could be a rough year for them, and maybe even a rough sort of couple of years.

01:13:25 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, and that crowd, I think, was looking at things like Bitcoin ETFs. I mean, the idea of BlackRock offering a Bitcoin ETF is like completely antithetical to so much of the Bitcoin ethos, which is like no big finance people getting involved in this, and then so I think there were. There have been a lot of people who have seen the direction of crypto in the last you know five or 10 years and are sort of like, oh God, this is not what we wanted at all. But I also think that a lot of those people have either left or perhaps maybe abandoned those ideals.

01:13:59 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
And maybe it was a little naive Some of them are AI startups for right?

01:14:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI is the new crypto. All right, we're going to take a break. Great panel, it's great to have you. I'm so glad you could be here. Molly White, this is your time. It's your time. Molly White is at mollywhitenet, paris Martineau at theinformationcom and editor-in-chief of ZDNet. So great to have you, jason Miner. Just going for the ride.

01:14:24
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01:18:07
So, boy, I can just go on and on about great stuff. Molly, you're not in the la area, are you? No, jason, la area, no, and I know you're not. You, you're in Brooklyn, paris. So our again, it's still burning in LA and our thoughts and love go out to all of our friends in LA, many, many of our listeners and many of our contributors. Kevin Rose lost his house. It's just. It's been devastating out there, so stay safe. I guess that's all I have to say about that. Um, let's see, what should we talk about? I didn't put these in order, so I'm just going to go through them kind of randomly. Texas is suing all state. Actually, this is one of a number of suits over driver data. State of Texas accuses Arity, an all-state subsidiary, of collecting data about people's driving behavior through mobile apps, leading to increases in drivers' insurance rates. Well, isn't that how it's kind of supposed to work?

01:19:12 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I think you're supposed to know about it, though. Oh, okay.

01:19:16 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah, this is, or consent from the cashmere hill article I can't recall if it could have been three years ago, it could have been six months ago where she found essentially that um a number of insurers were using data um from like their customers cars in order, not just their cars their cars, their phones a million other things, like if you have life 360 to keep track of your family members.

01:19:43
You're right, she wrote this in june and that's where that, that's where this came from and the important thing is, unlike there are programs that these insurers have right where you sign on to do this legitimately. That's not what she's talking about here, or what her investigation found. It was this whole collection of different sources that uh users and drivers had no idea were sending information about stuff like what time you're driving at night or are you braking slightly quickly when you come to a you know stop sign, and that was being used to increase someone's insurance score or insurance payment significantly. Uh just because they've gone out.

01:20:23
A couple like their, their, uh, you know life 360 app or something else would tell their insurer covertly hey, this person's often driving after 11 pm and then the insurer's like maybe that's risky, they're going to have to pay more for their insurance and it's really dirty, it's really it is, and it's different from the like you said.

01:20:41 - Molly White (Guest)
There are programs where the insurance company is like hey, we'll give you 15 off your policy if you download this app that sends us your data, which, like, is still kind of gross surveillance but is at least you know you opt in yeah, you opt in to do and one.

01:20:57 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
One of the cases I recall from this article that I thought was the most skeevy was she had an example of a customer who I guess when they were buying whatever car they were buying, they had said no, I don't want to sign up for the program where all of my car's data is automatically sent. The insurance companies and the uh car dealership employees signed them up anyway and that was their internal policies. No matter what the customers say, everyone's getting signed up for this data auto sharing program.

01:21:28 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I'm sure they were getting a draw on it. They were getting every person they signed up, they got, you know, 100 bucks or something you know yeah, like a commission fee yeah what's?

01:21:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's hysterical is some of the apps that you sign up for. I mentioned life 360. Uh, there's also my radar, a weather forecast app, and gas buddy, which helps you save on fuel cuts, have opt-in driving analysis features. Uh, ostensibly for that app like how's your teenager driving? We'll let you know. But what's also happening is that data is being sent on to the insurance companies, uh, without your, without your knowledge.

01:22:05
Now I'm gonna play a little devil's advocate here, but the job of an insurance company is to give you a premium that will correctly reflect the risk that you're gonna make a claim. Right, and insurance companies, you know, maybe they get rapacious and they charge you too much, but the but the idea is we're going to charge you, uh, a fee commensurate with the risk. That's why teenage drivers pay more for their car insurance and, to the degree that they don't do that, we all all pay. So if I'm a really safe driver and this is why I sign up for those plans the insurer knows that that's going to bring my cost down, shouldn't? I also think it's a good thing for the insurance companies to know who's a terrible driver, because I don't want to subsidize their insurance. They should pay an insurance premium commensurate with their risk.

01:22:59 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yes, but doing it in underhanded ways, where they're going and you know, essentially doing some very you might have to.

01:23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who's going to let the insurance company know they're a crappy driver, they're a terrible driver? Well, we also Leo.

01:23:13 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
We also have laws around data privacy and security that say you've got to get people's consent.

01:23:19 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I know, I know it's really shocking. You have the right to not let the insurance company know you are a really terrible driver.

01:23:26 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
You know every person, or at least that should be listed somewhere in the terms of service. Hey, we're squealing on all your data to the insurance company, but it's not.

01:23:35 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Or it might be and you're signing up for those. I think one of the my my takeaway is like really be more careful than ever about the apps that you download and the things that you and and delete stuff off your phone that you're not using because you know we've seen a number of apps also abuse, you know the, the data that they're collecting and like we just you know consumers have to be more careful, and Arity's response to this is that well, you did agree.

01:24:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that phrase. We may collect third-party data and reports. That's in the fine print in your user agreement. Yeah, they'll say that it comes. That's what that means we're gonna sell your data, yeah and I bet you, if you look at your EULA, they're gonna sell it uh yeah, it often says we will share it with uh third parties to improve their experience and our partners here's one example from a New York Times article.

01:24:37 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Gas Buddy, for instance, is, I guess, an app you can download to help save on fuel costs. I assume it tells you where certain fuel costs are or where the various cheaper gas you can find. Feature that rates the fuel efficiency of their drives, a feature quote powered by arietti, um, and when you do that, says the company, you agree to the privacy statement. Uh, before they opt into this function, however, in this agreement is a small in small gray font font under a big red button labeled join drives. There's a tiny disclosure that says, by clicking join drives, you will share, quote certain information with arietti and agree to arietti's privacy statement. And this is not the area yet. This is the gas buddy thing, and yeah, the language doesn't explain what arietti is or what it does.

01:25:31
They disclosed it.

01:25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, notice, they call it already not all states.

01:25:35 - Molly White (Guest)
I understand, yeah, you would know who all state is, yeah, but still, there are also requirements about how prominent you are allowed to make various disclosures and, like tiny, we're going to fix all that starting tomorrow, don't you?

01:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't you worry about that. We're getting rid of that consumer financial protection board. That's ridiculous. This is what also from Cash's article, article the bigger appeal of telematics. It could more accurately predict risk for individual drivers and be a fairer way to set rates. Most insurers will charge a 24 year old man who lives in a busy city more than a 50 year old woman who lives in the suburbs. And, as that 50 year old woman, I think that's a good thing. Think that's a good thing. Um, uh, everybody eventually will have a driving score.

01:26:25
It says one consultant, and you might prefer it. Don't judge me. This is alan demers, founder of insure tech consulting. Guess what they do. Don't judge me based on everyone else. Judge me based on me. That seems fair, but all right. So then they should disclose it and and you should be very clear that they are collecting that data and it should impact your insurance, although if you're a terrible driver, well, you're not gonna like that I think it's also an example that sticks with me is from, I think, uh cashmere's original article about this in March 2024.

01:27:00 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
This was the example with how automakers are sharing this data. She gives the example of this guy, ken Dahl, a 65-year-old man who was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21%, like nothing had really changed about his life. He ends up requesting data, gets back a 260 page consumer disclosure report from data broker LexisNexis. That included over 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven their Chevy Bolt over the previous six months, include the dates of 640 trips, start and end times, distance driven.

01:27:39
He had never gotten in an accident once over this entire time, but because he had things like he was really hard he had two hard breaks on an early morning in June and that's why his uh payment went up 20 and I think that's a little ridiculous yeah, I put.

01:27:56 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I put a link in the show notes here about the skyrocketing car insurance premiums and you can see this chart. It is unbelievable. So they're doing all of this data and the thing is, I don't even know how much they're using it other than to just try to increase everybody's car insurance premiums to just insane levels, that's another issue isn't it Five years, you know?

01:28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are they doing what they should do, which is reducing the cost for safe drivers while increasing it for unsafe drivers? No, they're just using it as an excuse to raise everybody's rates, Exactly.

01:28:32 - Molly White (Guest)
But I also feel like the sort of like if you're not doing anything wrong, you know you shouldn't have a problem with this type of thing doesn't really work, because, like, if you're not doing anything wrong, you know you shouldn't have a problem with this type of thing doesn't really work. Because, like, if you were to think like, try to think of like an analogous situation where you know, like health insurance, for example, like you could make the argument that health insurers should put a camera in everybody's house to see, like, how much they're sitting on the couch versus going for a run, well, yeah, that might be a little intrusive, okay.

01:28:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, that might be a little intrusive, okay.

01:28:57 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, exactly.

01:28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although they have done that. That's called a smart TV.

01:29:00 - Molly White (Guest)
Right, but I would argue that someone just taking the data about where I drive and when I drive is just as intrusive as someone putting a camera in my house.

01:29:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I will give you the other side of that. So California, a couple of decades ago, had an initiative which passed limiting home insurance premiums. They actually cut them by about 20%. As a result, insurers were not able to send a signal to homeowners that were building in fire zones by raising their insurance. They couldn't. They were statutorily limited to how much they could charge raising their insurance. They couldn't. They were statutorily limited to how much they could charge them for insurance. You could make the argument that, as a result, in those 20 years, many people have built in areas where there were real risks of wildfire, but they weren't given the signal from the insurance company. In other words, their insurance wasn't raised and, as a result, meant this has happened up here in sonoma county a couple of years ago just happened in la. Many of these people have lost their homes and now insurers are leaving the state because the state won't let them charge the proper amount for the risk I'll put on my devil horns a little bit and do some advocacy.

01:30:16 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Couldn't have those insurers. Couldn't have those insurers at some point just said we're not going to insure people who build in these areas we think are risky.

01:30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they are now.

01:30:27 - Molly White (Guest)
I mean, they are now the insurance company is warning people about fire zones. I feel like that is something that could happen outside of the insurance industry. Yeah, maybe.

01:30:37 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah outside of the insurance industry?

01:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, maybe, yeah, uh, I just I think that the amount you pay for insurance is a director is the group that we should be feeling bad for well, but the amount you pay for your insurance is a direct reflection of or should be, I I think, a direct reflection of the risk, and when it's statutorily prohibited from that, uh, I think that's when you get the problems that we're having right now I don't know if the problem I mean the wildfires are not because of insurance premiums no, no, no, not, absolutely not.

01:31:15 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean I think we can look at what's going on with homeowners insurance in florida to see a example of what would happen in a totally unregulated area or part like version of this industry, where they don't have caps there and, as a result, many people in these areas just have been unable to get home insurance I'm getting this argument I should give him credit from nolan gray, who is the senior director of legislation and research at california's yimby institute and the author of a book called arbitrary lines how zoning broke the american city and how to fix it.

01:31:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wrote a piece in the atlantic how well-intentioned policies fueled la's fires, in which he refers to specifically, um this California, uh, 1988, california voters passed prop 103 reducing rates by 20, subjecting future rate increases to public oversight, and of course I understand why they did that. But as a result, um, he says, the politicization of risk has been a catastrophe. Artificially low premiums encouraged more Californians to live in the state's most dangerous areas and they reduced the incentive for homeowners to protect their houses, such as by installing fire-resistant roof and siding materials.

01:32:32 - Molly White (Guest)
Were insurance companies required to provide insurance.

01:32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, what's happened? That's a good question. No, they could have. I guess they could have left. I don't know. I think maybe they were required to they, maybe they could have left. I don't know. What has happened is california has to create, has created its own public insurer of last resort? Uh, and unfortunately, the state is the public insurer of last resort. The Fair Plan? Yeah, f-a-i-r. Oh, interesting. They unfortunately covered in 2023, $284 billion in home value. Much of that in Los Angeles. Within the next few years, nolan writes, california taxpayers could be on the hook for more than a trillion dollars. The state insurance commissioner is scrambling to bring insurers back. It may be too late, so insurers have left. For sure, we are uh, we don't actually live in a fire zone anymore, but our, our homeowners insurance has announced they're canceling us in June, probably because we're in California probably because of the camera they put in your house or the camera they put in our house, that's smart tv could be.

01:33:43 - Molly White (Guest)
They found out I'm a fire eater and they've been, yeah, even chewing on all the wires in there.

01:33:49 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
They've been slurping the data from those 200 connected devices in your home well, they're like no, no, no.

01:33:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, they probably are, if it okay. So admittedly we don't really. They're like this guy's a podcaster.

01:34:02 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
We can't. Yeah, we found out, I'm broadcasting from the house.

01:34:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh boy, um. But in the perfect world with perfect information and insurers that were honorable, wouldn't that be the best way to do it?

01:34:16 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I think the last point honorable is a hard word to apply to mega corporations in a in capitalism yeah, I would also argue that in a perfect world, insurance companies would not have my information yeah, so I would pay the same as you would I mean I, so I drive like a grandma.

01:34:38 - Molly White (Guest)
I mean I am like, I am a very careful grandma.

01:34:42
So there you go, I'm saying I'm in the same demographic as you are. I don't even I rarely drive at night. I rarely drive at all, actually and I still don't sign up for the policy where they take however much off of my insurance, because for me, the privacy aspect of it is is enough to so, like I think there is. I think there are plenty of safe drivers who don't want to be spied on, and I think the same thing goes for other forms of insurance and data collection as well.

01:35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you? So you don't mind that you're paying, maybe paying the same as some hot rod and 20 year old, uh, you know who? No, you don't care. I mean?

01:35:16 - Molly White (Guest)
mean they? They obviously go off my driving record and all the sort of. You know the historic ways that they go off. You know that insurance is that okay? Yeah, I think so I I think that's okay. I mean, if I get into an accident, I think it's okay that people know about that. But you know, I don't think they need date like very deep how often you break yeah yeah, but where I go and when I go there and how I break and all that kind of thing, yeah because, like if I pay 50 a month more then that's fine with our producer benito, weighing in, yes, but I

01:35:46 - Benito (Announcement)
feel like they're just trying to moneyball it right, like that's what they're doing.

01:35:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're trying to call, but that's what insurance is benito that's why there's people called actuaries who figure out what the likely your likelihood of having an accident or dying or having your house burned down is, and then, in theory, the premiums reflect that, so that they can make a little bit of money on top of the risk. And it works in aggregate.

01:36:07 - Benito (Announcement)
But the data that they're collecting is arbitrary and it's also like they're the ones deciding what makes a quote unquote safe driver or not. So like what if I work a night shift? But what if my regular circadian rhythm is fine? But so like what if I work a night shift? But what if my regular circadian rhythm is fine, but I work a night shift and like so my insurance is gonna be more expensive now just because of that.

01:36:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, cuz you're more likely to have an accident. Why Cuz you are?

01:36:29
Based on stats. Well, look, I mean I pay if I had it life insurance. Or say I don't anymore because I'm too old. But that makes sense, right? I Shouldn't have life insurance. So I'm too old, but that makes sense, right? I shouldn't have life insurance if I'm close to death. Now you might say well, that's no fair. You're the one who needs it. You're about to die. No, that's just how it works. Life insurance is cheaper when you're younger and healthier, because you're less likely to need it. That's, that's the insurance market.

01:36:55 - Molly White (Guest)
That's how but there are also limits to how much information we give to health insurers right when health insurers are not sitting on our shoulders every day checking if we're getting the large fries at McDonald's.

01:37:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They will be soon, though, don't you think?

01:37:09 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, actually they are trying to be, especially when you look at Fitbits and those types of devices, but I would love for that not to continue in that direction. But I would love for that not to continue in that direction. And I worry about the extent to which people are sort of you know the boiled frog thing, where we're now just becoming okay with that data being shipped everywhere.

01:37:28 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean, yeah, I think this is why it's important, if you care about privacy, to resist all attempts to encroach upon your data privacy, like I whenever I go to the airport. Now they want to do the face scan thing. I every time I'm like I want to opt out, do the other thing, and the TSA agent inevitably is like well, you know, we've already got scans of your face and I'm like I know it's just the principle of it, no more please.

01:37:51
Yeah, I would just like to reduce the amount and it's, you know, 30 seconds.

01:37:56 - Molly White (Guest)
I think also like the more we allow this data to be collected and the more normalized it is, like the more we have to grapple with the fact that data breaches happen all the time and this kind of data the more and more granular it is. It's not going to be kept private, it's not going to just be your health insurance that knows exactly what you're doing and where you're going and how quickly you're breaking.

01:38:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if it were done by an ai?

01:38:21 - Molly White (Guest)
well, and if we put it on the blockchain?

01:38:25 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
but what if we were done, done by an ai, put on the blockchain? What?

01:38:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if we're done in such a way that was guaranteed to be fair. No human was ever going to see that we're talking about ai well, all right, baby.

01:38:39 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
You really tried there for a good few. I believe in AI.

01:38:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll have to. You'll have to excuse me, but I I am an AI.

01:38:46 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
He's having his AI resurgent. He was uh, you know, he was down in the reality with us for the last couple of months.

01:38:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't make me wear my glasses. Okay, leo, do you want to tell the? Audience when you ordered those glasses and when they were supposed to arrive, and I ordered these glasses before cashmere hill wrote that article more than a year ago more than a year ago.

01:39:07 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
They were supposed to arrive last april. He got them this week and they don't work they don't do much why do they don't do anything?

01:39:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
work. They don't do much. Why do they don't do anything? And he's like look what I got them. Ai is the future. Ai is the future.

01:39:23
They look like joke nerd glasses like, if you wanted to be a nerd in like a broadway play you know what they're not actually joke nerd glasses, they're just nerd glasses do they have your prescription in them at least no, no, they couldn't do that. That's what took so long. They gave me a discount for some clip-ons with my prescription, so I can clip that on, but I'm wearing, just in case you didn't look nerdy enough do you also have sunglass clip-ons that can add like a third level?

01:39:55
you flip them up and you flip them down. Yeah, what's wrong with that?

01:40:00 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
um, those are the brilliant labs ones, right? How did you know?

01:40:04 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
you see, he knows jason, he's been waiting, this is one of like five ai hype products leo ordered last year that hasn't arrived yet I've ordered more.

01:40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, since I've talked to you last, the best thing is wrong with you. The way you charge it is. It has this orange thing that you stick on the nose.

01:40:23 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, it is a clown. Yes, it does, it does. This is. This is real, that's amazing.

01:40:31 - Molly White (Guest)
Why did they have to make it orange?

01:40:34 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
the humpty hump nose so you won't lose it yeah, yeah, no, um, these are the open sourced ones, though interesting well, that's why I'm intrigued by it.

01:40:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't do anything much, yeah, but it potentially could, because it's open it doesn't do anything, but it potentially could.

01:40:55 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I've been hearing about that, about blockchains, for a long time yeah.

01:41:00 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
You have like this thing, you have to you like with a command line. Like you can, you can command line yeah.

01:41:07 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
So really what you're buying is hardware. Nfts aren't doing anything right now, but eventually they're going to do something.

01:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a hardware platform that needs software. Right now, it's just got this little prism that's pointing down at a screen underneath here. So it's just got this little prism that's pointing down at a screen underneath here, so it's heads up display. It's basically google glass built into the lens, is all it really is. And then you know, right now, in theory, if I tap it, the ai comes alive and I can ask it a question. Then tap it again and I could read the answer. But it doesn't. It's I don't know, it's not really doing anything, but it doesn't do that, it doesn't work do what you's supposed to do.

01:41:39
I also bought and I showed this to to paris the, the wristband that records everything but paris. I found a better one. A friend of mine has one. I didn't buy it for the longest time because it was advertised incessantly on tiktok and I thought, well, this is not going to be good, that plaud p-l-a-u-d but then did you get an ad for it on instagram like that's no a friend of mine has it.

01:42:00
Friend of mine has it and he showed me, makes a mind map of your conversations and all this stuff, this thing that leo is talking about, the wrist thing that is not plot.

01:42:09 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
He showed it to us on this weekend it is a little weird wrist uh bracelet that just records all of your conversations, everything I was going to say, and then gives you little like butt kicking summaries of your day in conversation Like Leo was really cerebral while watching the football game. You want me to read? You. He made fantastic points as he was discussing plays with his big, beautiful mind.

01:42:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want me to read you. I'll read you Yesterday's. You can see it. You can see it right here. Let's hear it. Worry for a friend turned to hope, finding comfort in small joys and shared moments.

01:42:52 - Molly White (Guest)
You were there. Why did I have to tell you?

01:42:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo had a day marked by concern for for his friend h, who was unreachable despite plans to meet. Seeking solace, leo checked the weather in petaluma and finding it to be a partly cloudy 54 degrees, dropping to 42 overnight later. To 42 overnight later Wow, I didn't realize. Later, leo offered comforting words to somebody whose somebody faces a potential diagnosis, reassuring her that things would be okay. As the day progressed, leo confirmed the the absence of rain it's very worried about the weather.

01:43:37 - Molly White (Guest)
This is important.

01:43:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, these are the things that are important to me. Reminisced about a past event in 922 and ended the night impatiently waiting to leave while someone sifted sand. Okay, the sifted sand comes from the fact that I was practicing a song all day, all night, marianne, sitting by the seashore sifting sand, so apparently it confused me singing that song, with me just sitting here waiting for her to finish sifting the sand uh, here's the atmosphere, yesterday's atmosphere.

01:44:12
Leo's day had an under current of worry balanced by moments of reassurance and lightheartedness. Concern for somebody's well-being and somebody's son created a somber tone, while casual conversations about the weather and humorous anecdotes you love the weather I love the weather is this a product for someone with like amnesia, like who is supposed to be, who is?

01:44:35 - Molly White (Guest)
who is this, I think for I, but my conspiracy theory is this is who is the story?

01:44:39 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
for I think my conspiracy theory is this is a product for a certain class of tech bro CEO that is doing so many drugs that he can't remember what has happened and he wants to look back and be like wow, you know, I had some moments of somber reflection about the rain. Wow, I just don't understand. I had some moments of somber reflection about the rain.

01:44:59 - Molly White (Guest)
I just don't understand Like weren't you Because it's written like a LinkedIn post.

01:45:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For all of these conversations, yes, but I remember them now, but I might not tomorrow or the next week or next year. This is a. It's basically keeping a journal for me Now. More importantly, it also keeps track of agreements that I have made. Um, here we go. Here's, here's number one on my to-do list ensure the feather pillow with three layers ordered by lisa arrives and is satisfactory. That's, that's on my to-do list that's.

01:45:34 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I mean, look, this is. This is the reason that we were putting all the world's best engineers to work on AI and we're using up all the cycles. That's why, we're burning the climate.

01:45:42 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
This is the reason why we were like F you to all of our climate pledges. We're just going to, you know, set the earth aflame, because Leo's got to remember.

01:45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some of this is good. Explore using Instagram as an alternative to TikTok, especially considering Do you need a reminder for that especially considering.

01:46:00 - Molly White (Guest)
Do you need a reminder for that? I feel like there's a huge upsell opportunity where they could provide access for other people to add things to the list of things you agree and, by the way, a visit to walmart would not be out of line.

01:46:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, here, I don't know what this is. It says stare at the new fake toys for cats and see if they capture their interest.

01:46:17 - Molly White (Guest)
Did a cat write this? It's very possible.

01:46:24 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Your cat has gotten in there. Your cat has hacked the system.

01:46:26 - Molly White (Guest)
The cat has hacked the system.

01:46:27 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
This is like an inside joke of the AIs, because most of the experts say the AI is about as intelligent. Today's AIs are about as intelligent as the average house cat, and so that's the house cats getting as intelligent as the average house cat, and so you know that's the house cats, you know getting their revenge on you.

01:46:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they're a little bit better than that.

01:46:44 - Molly White (Guest)
I've met some very smart cats. I've also met mine cats, so I suspect the average is actually pretty low.

01:46:52 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I was going to say the same thing I was going to say. I've got some cats that are way smarter than some of the A that I've interacted with in the past few months I do think there are like 10 cats just dragging that average down.

01:47:03 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah, no, like the whole orange, uh cat population one brain that shares one singular brain cell among all of them, that's, that's dragging the average down. It's a spider's george situation, you know Right.

01:47:16 - Molly White (Guest)
The Calicos have the high end for sure.

01:47:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that was. I found that that was at CES. The B thing. There's another one I ordered as well. This is an article from Wired by Julian Chokatu. Your next AI wearable will listen to everything all the time. So there's the B which I got, but I also ordered this. This is the Omi and you glue it to your temple. It's a little pearlescent thing you glue to your temple.

01:47:51 - Molly White (Guest)
Every day.

01:47:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every day, forever, always, I feel like you'll get a rash. By the way, was it you, Paris, who pointed out that the women in this picture who are looking at the guy with the pearl in his temple are laughing.

01:48:07 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I did not. No, it looks almost either like they're making fun of him or they're like wow, who's that?

01:48:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's so cute, studded something on his temple, because they can't see his temple. That's why, as soon as he turns his head, they're going to rear back in shock.

01:48:19 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
If I saw someone with that out in the world. I would stare clear. I would be like something's gone wrong.

01:48:31 - Molly White (Guest)
I think I would think it was like a new medical device of some kind, like it looks almost like a very fancy cochlear implant.

01:48:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, okay, you're not far off, because the creator, nikita shevchenko uh, says that the omi is trained to recognize specific brain waves when you focus on speaking to it. So, instead of having to say a hot word, you just think oh me, and it will, it will respond wait, so you don't speak.

01:48:59 - Molly White (Guest)
No, you don't need to you.

01:49:00 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Just think it wow I think you have to speak to it, but I think to wake it you just have to think oh me, yes, and I do not believe that that works we're gonna find out when it comes in, but I did order the plod which has been around for a while.

01:49:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It ties into either chat gpt 4.0 or to um uh anthropics claude 3.5 sonnet, both of which are, I have to say. I know you laugh and you mock, but these are actually very good in fact they are better than chat gpt.

01:49:31 - Molly White (Guest)
I would say they're good.

01:49:33 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I just can't get over the fact that it's called plod yeah it just feels awful coming out of your mouth.

01:49:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's coming from china.

01:49:42 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So, by the way, some of the laws from pyongyang the ai is as smart as the average house cat was not just an average you know um. You know person saying this. This was jan lacoon, the head of meta's ai research right that was supposed to be a good thing he said that.

01:50:01
He said it is dumber than the average I. I was. I actually overestimated. He said it's it's not as smart as the average house cat. So yeah, so he's team cat, he's team cat on this one and he's the head of ai for you know, for meta you he knows he's quite respected.

01:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact I have a lot of respect for him.

01:50:21 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Same, I think you know, and he's also not an overhyper, so I appreciate that. Yeah, exactly, I don't know if he included the orange tabbies in that, but I'm assuming that it's implied, you know.

01:50:35 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. I feel like your strategy with all of these devices is just to ddos the uh data collection agencies with so much information.

01:50:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well it's, it's a way of fuzzing it.

01:50:49 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, you can't even create a good driver or bad exactly you can't create a profile.

01:50:56 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Leo is also being recorded, basically 24, 7 at this point, so it doesn't even matter anyway, there's no more.

01:51:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my point. I don't have any privacy, so this is I'm the one who should try this stuff out, and llm can just go through all of your shows and create a, an insurance profile on you.

01:51:12 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
That is almost going to be perfect, right of of what you can do.

01:51:18 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
All right, here's one of the AI I was about to say Gizmo, are you smarter than the average AI? Gizmo?

01:51:24 - Molly White (Guest)
has already added a catnip toy to your shopping list. I was about to say yeah it's already in route.

01:51:30 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
She just hit, you know, bye.

01:51:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How close are we to your company, hiring an AI to replace you as a PhD level programmer? Maybe closer than you think. We're going to take a little break. No, jason says no, that's not going to happen.

01:51:47 - Molly White (Guest)
House cat level programmer.

01:51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
House cat level. Would you let your house cat write your code? I don't know. We're going to take a little break. When we come back we'll have more.

01:51:58
You're watching this Week in Tech Molly Wood, jason Heiner, paris Martineau and Gizmo the Wonder Cat. It's great to have all four of you Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. You know this is why you listen to this show you want to know what's ahead. What does the future hold? What does the future hold for business? Problem is, you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Rates will rise or fall, inflation's going up or maybe it's going down. Could someone please invent a crystal ball, or maybe just a little pearl I can wear on my temple?

01:52:33
Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into a single fluid platform. That's awesome. With one unified business management suite, there's a single source of truth, right, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. It's much clearer With real-time insights and forecasting. You're peering into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time on what's next. This is what you really need. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, netsuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. I wish I needed an ERP solution, because this is the one I'd use Right now.

01:53:30
There is something you might want to download a lot smarter than a cat the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. It's available free. They have actually a lot of free white papers there NetSuitecom slash twit, but if you're interested in what this means to your business, this is a great place to start. Netsuitecom slash Twit it's free, along with a lot of wonderful other free stuff at NetSuite N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E, netsuitecom slash Twit. We thank them so much for supporting Behind the curtain Coming soon PhD. We thank him so much for supporting behind the curtain coming soon phd level super agents. This is axios mike allen and jim vanderhuy. It's an opinion piece, so yeah, it's not exactly a news piece, um, but there's some interesting stuff in here. There's some juice. Sam altman has scheduled a closed door briefing for US government officials at the end of the month the over hyper in chief, by the way, yes, I want to tell you a secret.

01:54:33
Yeah, there is a lot of chatter about AI replacing mid-level software engineers sometime soon, maybe even this year, and so axios is speculating that maybe what sam altman wants to tell congress about is, uh, I guess, 401 or 402. What? What's the? What's the?

01:54:58 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
next one, yeah, whatever the next one is. I mean, look, he's. He's been saying, I mean, what was it he was saying recently it was going to be, it was like hundreds of days until, you know, we reached super intelligence. And he's the one that's been over hyping this thing from, you know, the beginning. And that's not to say that LLMs are not an important breakthrough, that are going to do some really interesting things, because they are there, there's no doubt about that.

01:55:24
But you know, sam Altman, you know also is is grinding an axe with this too, right, he is, you know, moving his. At first he was at open eyes open, an eye open AI saying no, you know, I don't, I don't, I'm, I'm rich, rich enough, I don't need to make any more money. Um, you know, there's no, um, there's no reason for me. I'm, I'm in this for the, for the good, for good of humanity, um, and and now they've sort of changed the whole, all of the bylaws and and that are in the process of, so that they can, um, you know, monetize and he's raised more money than any company in the history of money raising.

01:56:03
So, yeah, I think you know him hyping this. It's just tough to really believe that. It's not about the race, right? That's not about winning and OpenAI, you know, gaining as much sort of power and influence as they possibly can. I don't believe that they have anything even close to a PhD. I don't think they have anything close to a house cat, you know, necessarily yet either. So I think but with I think we have to it's not that OpenAI isn't doing important work and there's people there that are. But I think you know Sam Altman. I think we really have to question, you know, his motives. I think it's good for us to question his motives and also good for us to really not buy into the hype that he peddles about where OpenAI is and what it does.

01:56:55
And the last thing I'll say about the programmer piece. I don't know about anybody else, but I know in every company I've ever worked for, we can't get the programmers to get enough done fast enough for us to get all the work done we'd like them to do. So I think it's the much more likely scenario, because I think this does replace some types of coding that LLMs can, but in fact what it's likely to do is make them much more efficient, to make them, have them to do less, a lot more of the sort of really boring, repetitive tasks encoding so that they become a lot more, a lot more productive and potentially get, you know, projects done faster. I think we're seeing some of that already, and so I actually am more bullish on it being helpful to programmers and not so much, you know, putting programmers at our jobs, because it can't do it by itself right, it can't code things by itself. It still needs to be shepherded by somebody who actually knows what they're trying to build and what they're doing.

01:58:00
This has been sort of been said for decades that, you know, coders are soon going to be out of business. There was the no code, low code, which is a good thing. There's lots of good things that have come out of that as well, but I think that some of this is some hype. They say those things about coders that aren't true, I think, because they're trying to hype up the value of what these AIs can create, which is still there's a lot to be shown in terms of their ability to replace work that people are doing. I think that part's just not close.

01:58:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do think there's some evidence that AI is scaling very rapidly, smarter and smarter. At the start of the year last year, ai models scored 5% on the ARC AGI benchmark. September, 32% OpenAI's 03 claims and they haven't shown it yet, but they claim that it's at 88% on this AGI benchmark.

01:59:04 - Molly White (Guest)
I think it's a grain of salt, though, that that could continue on sort of a linear trajectory.

01:59:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a lot better 88%, no, no, no, I know.

01:59:12 - Molly White (Guest)
But there's also been all these reports about how they're basically running out of data and we are running out of things on which to train these AI models, and so the idea that there is just sort of this infinite improvement, based on the quality of the training data at least, is certainly not the case.

01:59:33 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
And now they're making synthetic data right to help train the models, which is also a really weird challenge.

01:59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this stuff is changing so fast that some of those things that we've heard and believe to be true are turning out to be not as much of a problem as we thought. For instance, there's a strong case to be made that we have enough information, that we don't need a whole lot of new information. We just need maybe better LLMs or different models besides LLMs, or more computation capability. There seems to be some real scaling happening. Openai's O3 is scoring 25% on a very difficult math benchmark. Expert crafted math problems designed to evaluate advanced reasoning in AI systems. Gemini and ChatGPT-4 solved two percent. Open ai's o3 is three is 25 percent based on whose evaluation?

02:00:31
this is uh, this is a new frontier math benchmark.

02:00:34 - Molly White (Guest)
It's called front right, but is it is the? Is it a third party evaluation or is it the?

02:00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is, but you're right to be a little skeptical because open ai has announced those scores but they haven't released the actual information yet.

02:00:48 - Molly White (Guest)
I this is how much, and I think it's also like how much of the tests do they have access to, how much of it's in the training data, like?

02:00:55 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
it's worth noting that this narrative that I feel like the ai hype cycle is promoting, which is that, like, every update we're seeing is exponentially better than the last and it's going to only continue that way, that narrative hasn't really been borne out so far, like already in just a couple months ago, um, my colleagues the information reported that, like open, ai had found that, um, the rate of improvement has like slown, uh, has gotten a lot slower for whatever current gpt they're working on, orion, versus the jumps they'd seen in previous models, and in part that's because of the data issue. But I think it's worth taking stuff like this into consideration, when what we've been sold as kind of a collective is that everything about this is just going to get better and better. It's completely inevitable. So everybody should give us all of their money now, because the victory in this field is just a foregone conclusion at this point.

02:01:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, Molly, you're right, because there is a blog post that claims OpenAI funded FrontierMath and had access ahead of time to the problem set. So until we I mean this is, until we really see, you know, this has to be done kind of in the open instead of an announcement from OpenAI.

02:02:10 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
There's an AI hype crash. That's coming for sure, you know it could be, or maybe not.

02:02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't it possible that there we may also be blown away? You don't think that that's possible.

02:02:20 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I think both things can be true, like I think that that's possible. I think both things can be true, like I think that there's an AI hype crash coming, because it's like you know, you ask most people, even people I ask, in the tech industry, what are the things you use every day that that from the AI revolution? And a lot of them struggle to give me. They're like, at the end of the day, like well, I've used chat, gpt to help write a cover letter. You know, they, they, they, they struggle.

02:02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like well, you know, I've talked to a lot of coders, including our own guys, Paul Thorat and Steve Gibson, who have used it to write code.

02:02:52 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Well.

02:02:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason Snell on MacBreak Weekly says it writes perfect Apple script he's been using I can't remember which one I think Sonnet to write his Apple script.

02:03:01 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
One of the examples that does work well. Like sonnet to write his apple script. One of the examples that does work well. Like it, it, it saves people time from writing code.

02:03:08 - Molly White (Guest)
Sometimes I also had to untangle some of its disasters.

02:03:11 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So yes, for sure, it's still an oversight, do you?

02:03:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have an a, do you have an? Ai is going just great site yet I do not.

02:03:19 - Molly White (Guest)
No, I don't.

02:03:19 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
You ask her this every time she's on the show Leo and she says no.

02:03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not opening that can of worms.

02:03:28 - Molly White (Guest)
But you did open the code for the site so somebody could make that site.

02:03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope somebody will.

02:03:32 - Molly White (Guest)
It is open source yeah, by all means, and use AI to do it and use AI to build it for sure, you know.

02:03:40 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So the thing is like that where AI works really well, and LLMs are starting to change this a little bit, but it's still the case that where there is a very concrete set of data and a very clear set of parameters, ai is better than human right. So some of the coding it can do faster than a human because it has a very defined set of parameters, and so it is mostly computational right. So it's still very good at those things. Where it's not good is where and where it's falls down is where it needs context and it has to fill in gaps where there are areas it doesn't even understand context.

02:04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it doesn't know any of that. It's not. That's not how it works.

02:04:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
That's why there's another story in there about you know they've been trying to get it to do history. You know to answer history questions and it's not so good at that.

02:04:34
It's about 46% on average, which is really about the same as anybody just guessing. You know it is not good at those things. Anything that demands you know those sort of higher levels of understanding. I think those are the things that there are promises in the AI ecosystem today that its reach exceeds its grasp. It can't and it won't quite get there. I think. That's why I think that that's why I say that there is a there's a AI hype crash coming, and yet there are also still amazing things that LLMs can do and that are going to continue to to drive advances. But like any of these hype cycles right, there's, there's going to be all of the people that are going to that are that are just in it for the quick buck right, are going to flee and the people who really understand it and really are sort of true believers will stick around. But you know, it could be this year, it could be next year, it could be next month, but I do think there's a crash coming.

02:05:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alex Lindsay, who is one of the hosts of MacBreak Weekly, also is in our IRC or actually in our Discord right now, says he uses Sonnet and Chat chat GPT to write and compile Swift and Xcode. That's something that was recently added to Apple's Xcode it's he uses it to create fully functioning apps not smooth enough to release but usable for me, and I have seen startup founders say we have, we're starting to use AI to write our MVPs because it's fast, quick to market and we can do that without hiring somebody to do it.

02:06:12 - Molly White (Guest)
One thing I think that is kind of remarkable about the Axios piece that you linked is the example that they give is imagine telling your agent build me new payment software. The agent could design, test and deliver functioning product and like that example is about Okay, let's not do that.

02:06:29
Some of the most high risk, highly regulated, like portions of software. That's like saying, like, fly an airplane for me. You know like they're using like one of the riskiest examples in that article, whereas, like most software engineers will say, like if you were to use AI, like it can do boilerplate, well, it can maybe do a prototype, but I would not just like ship it out the door and certainly not with payments involved.

02:06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think that underscores what we're talking about here, really underscores that AI is appropriate for some uses not all. Maybe don't use it as a historian or to write your cash app, but there are certainly uses for it and it. I think maybe we've also gotten a little, um, kind of taking it for granted. We're getting a little jaundiced here. You know, this is pretty amazing. What it's able to do right now is remarkable, with not something I would have predicted three years ago.

02:07:33 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I understand that feeling and that impetus to kind of be defensive around it, but I also don't think that I think that AI is getting its laurels.

02:07:40
Nobody, I would say, could correctly argue that AI isn't being appropriately hyped or hyped enough. It has gotten way more hype than I'd say it deserves, given the current reality of the product. I mean, I totally agree as someone who, I'd say, is a bit of a skeptic in this field, like, yeah, ai and the AI tools and chatbots we have access to currently are incredibly useful in certain limited capacities and for specific tasks like what you're just talking about. When you mentioned that coding thing, I realized like, oh, I've been trying to figure out how to get an animated cursor on my site and doing a thing. Why don't I ask ChatGPT? It gave me some answers that I'll look into later. That could be quite useful. But I don't think that that means that we should extend the entire ai industry enough grace to allow them to do whatever they want and procure as much money they want as they want without any scrutiny. I think that because this is the biggest industry right now and, uh, receiving an outsized amount of attention and, frankly, money from investors, it deserves scrutiny.

02:08:50 - Molly White (Guest)
And I also think there's reasonable questions to be asked about, you know, is a tool that can generate code to help you animate your cursor like does that justify the cost in terms of the, you know, energy end of things, the environmental end of things? Totally agree, you know. Does the end justify the means? Is a worthwhile question as well.

02:09:13 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
For instance, I just asked Chad to do that and, frankly, all of the answers it gave me I'd already seen from searching through Reddit and like Stack Overflow and stuff like that or other things like that. It was nothing new. But yet how much environmental damage did I do? Probably shouldn't think about that, but also we probably should.

02:09:33 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, it's okay now, because your Google searches also use a lot of-.

02:09:37 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah, no, everything's bad, it's kind of a good place.

02:09:41 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, they've incorporated AI into Google, so now everything is wasting that much electricity.

02:09:46 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, we write about AI every day on ZDNet. It's our most popular topic. It has been since almost the month that ChatGPT was released and we write about the good things, we write about the bad things, we ask the questions, we talk about where the rubber hits the road, the way companies are using it, the way individuals are using it. So there's a lot happening. I do think, and I think it is fair to question some of the overhype, and that's why I really think that the rubber doesn't meet the road where some of the hype is around it, and I think that that's why there's a lot of money, there's a lot of energy, there's a lot of energy, there's a lot being poured into it that I think it's gotten over its skis, and that's because we read stories about it every day. We read the problems people are having with it, we read the things that are going great, the things that are amazing.

02:10:38
Ai is not going anywhere. It's not going to disappear, as not going anywhere. It's not. It's not going to, you know, disappear, but but kind of like the dotcom bust, right, when the dotcom bust happened, then a lot of the real work got done, you know afterwards, when the people hung around and really invested in it and it wasn't just sort of a hype cycle. But that's how hype cycles go Right. There's the there's sort of the hype cycle goes way up, then there's sort of the trough of disillusionment and then there's the like you know, real work getting done from there and we have to expect any hype cycle that's as high as what this one is right now, like it's going to have. It's going to hit a bumpy moment, you know, inevitably.

02:11:16 - Molly White (Guest)
I would point out that, after the 2022 crash in crypto, now we have Trump meme coins.

02:11:27 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
So, yes, something I hadn't thought about is when, comparing this to the uh dot-com bubble at least the dot-com bubble we got, like a wacky little sock puppet guy to uh kind of associate with it. We need to have a weird little mascot for some of the.

02:11:37 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Ai needs its sock puppet.

02:11:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we actually got more than that. We got, uh, dark fibers underneath most of the continent, in fact, much of the world, and this is one of the things that does happen with those boom bus cycles. The same thing happened with the transcontinental railway. Those railroads went bankrupt, but we had railways as a result, we got infrastructure as a result and, um, data centers.

02:11:59 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
We're going to get a bunch of data centers. We're going to have a lot of data centers.

02:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to have nuclear, a lot of data centers in places like arizona that are already totally running out of water.

02:12:04 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
But the data centers we're going to have a lot of data centers. We're going to have nuclear, a lot of data centers in places like arizona that are already totally running out of water, but the data centers get the water contracts on the right side, they are converting some of the bitcoin mining rigs into uh so that's like

02:12:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh hey, that's something I'm trying to find a graph I saw, and I don't remember where I saw the crypto blockchain. Yeah, the um. I'm trying to find the graph. I can't, but I saw a graph that actually showed in perspective to a lot of the other energy uses. Uh, and actually ai is not the question to a chat. Gpt is not as bad as it it. The truth is we use energy for everything google searches, everything. We're going crazy, credit card purchases.

02:12:47 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
We are using a ton of meetings yeah, zoom meetings, podcasts yes I agree we use electricity and energy for everything, but it is notable the amount of uh energy that these ai tools use and the fact that ai is now being woven into absolutely everything with no. In many cases, there's no way to say no. I don't want AI to be suddenly part of this other thing that I use every single day and thus amplifying the environmental impacts of my actions. It's just all getting a bit worse.

02:13:20 - Molly White (Guest)
And I also think that, like it is notable that it was AI that caused so many of these companies to completely go back on any environmental commitments, that was not something that the credit card transactions required of them, apparently.

02:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Here's the Wall Street Journal article. Thank you, Jason, for putting that in. Jan LaCoon thinks AI is dumber than a cat. I got to point out that was October. Things have changed. Okay, We've come a long way We've come a long way.

02:13:50
That was months ago. It is the case and I think that that's something that Steve Gibson pointed out on Security Now that this is moving faster than anything we've ever seen before, and anything that you think is true today may well not be true tomorrow and I think it's important to keep an open mind to what is happening, uh, while at the same time acknowledging yeah, we're in a hype cycle, that's for sure. True, that's not that's not not the case, but uh, I think that there's something going, there's something happening here.

02:14:18 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I don't know both things can be true, right like we have an overhype cycle and we have interesting and powerful things happening right yeah.

02:14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break. You're watching this Week in Tech and I'm sure something else happened, but we'll find it when we come back. Actually, there was CES. Did you go to CES, Jason?

02:14:41 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I had a back injury the week before CES. Oh you sent people.

02:14:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wasn't there I did, I sent, I sent focus on my team, all right well, if there's anything besides the ai wristlet and the and the temple pearl, you let me know. There are a couple things, yeah, although I'm looking forward to coming on twig we're renaming twig intelligent machines, by the way, next month because we want to cover this more and I'm looking forward to coming on as the boy with the pearl temple piece.

02:15:07 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
You know, I think that'll be, that'll be my trademark I'll be like sure that'll go over really well with me and jeff and will not result in any ridicule I don't mind, I can take it.

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I love this thing, the Thinkst Canary. We're so glad to have him back with us for 2025. Canarytools slash twit. Thank you, thinks, uh. Okay, samsung's coming up, by the way. So ces is over. Apple doesn't go, microsoft doesn't go, ibm that nobody goes, just a lot of smaller companies and TV manufacturers and car manufacturers. Samsung, uh, wasn't there, but they are going to have their own event. That's why people don't need to go to CES anymore. Um, wednesday, the s25 event. Now, jason, I'm trying to figure out if we should, if I should, get up early on Wednesday, an hour before Windows Weekly, and cover this is. We've seen everything there is to be seen about the S25, yes.

02:20:09 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I mean, yes, probably it's got the new chip from Qualcomm that they announced last fall. I mean they're going to talk AI. Speaking of AI. They're going to talk a lot about AI. Samsung's not a software company. Um, it's never gone really well for them from a from a software standpoint. There is bixby.

02:20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just say the words bixby every time I have a bixby button on my tv remote and I always. It makes me so mad when I hit it by accident there used to be a bixby button on the phone too.

02:20:43 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, um for a while, yeah, yeah so the most interesting thing is will there be a tease? Uh, from um this event? Remember, if you remember, last year they teased that the ring was coming. They didn't really show it right, um, so there's the ring out. The ring is out now right the ring is out okay yeah, and it's not bad.

02:21:07
I mean, the most interesting thing is that they were the first of the big tech companies to really release a smart ring right. These have been mostly been done by kind of smaller companies, mostly startups, um led by aura, of course. So the most interesting thing is will samsung tease something? And there's kind of four possibilities of what they could tease um one, and this would be very samsung. You know, apple, of course is is uh rumored to be releasing a slim, the iphone slim, this year, and so it would be, by the way, slim is two millimeters thinner.

02:21:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not.

02:21:43 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
That's not really noticeable that's sort of as much as the phone. Two years ago I think it was because they've been getting thicker, right, so, right, um, anyway. So apple is rumored to be in doing a slim version of the iphone this year. So it would be just like samsung to tease sort of oh, and we're also going to do a galaxy s25 slim um, you know, potentially this year We'll see that wouldn't be that interesting, to be honest. There's the Galaxy Ring 2. Maybe they teased that Again. Wouldn't be super interesting. But now it starts to get more interesting. They announced this XR headset. Not great timing, right? Xr headsets are not having the moment that. They were a year ago, for sure. But they did announce Project Mohan and maybe they tell us more about when that's coming.

02:22:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would they use their own software? Would they license Meta's software? Would? It be Android, android XR would be what they would do Meta's using Android now, aren't they? Yeah?

02:22:46 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Well, theirs has always been based on a version of Android, a proprietary version, a basically modded version of Android. So the most interesting thing of the scenarios if they were to tease something would be their competitor to Ray-Ban the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Competitor to Ray-Ban, the the meta Ray-Ban meta smart glasses. The crazy thing is these glasses they mostly are just audio, but they were probably one of the hottest selling products last year in terms of stuff that was sold out. And so now we we know, because last fall the Qualcomm CEO teased that Qualcomm, meta and Google were working on a pair of smart glasses. So this has already been teased, that it's out there and it's coming, and I think that people are much more interested in smart glasses than they are in VR headsets.

02:23:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For sure I think you're right, yeah.

02:23:45 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
And you know the interesting thing, we did a little bit of reporting on this and what we found last year when these things were, when the Ray-Ban metas were sold out, so much you know we went into some of the like sunglass huts and lens crafters where they sell these things and the interesting thing was a lot of times they had these kiosks in there, right, and a lot of times when these tech companies put these kiosks in places like this, the people on the floor selling them they know nothing about them, right? Or if they tell you information about them, it's often wrong. So this was interesting. The people that we talked to, they knew these products very well and they were like oh yeah, we don't have one of those you can look at. But the guy down at the, at the uh that sells the jewelry at the jewelry store, go down there, he has a pair and he loves them and he'll tell you about them. And, by the way, like, yeah, um, I, I bought a pair for uh, my girlfriend and she loves them, she wears them to the beach and we take photos and we go on vacations, and so it was really interesting.

02:24:42
We found that the the sort of average, the interest from that sort of average person on these was pretty high, and that was when most of them were sold out in the first quarter last year and then, of course, since then, they've been selling much better. So you know they don't do a lot, um, but even having a little bit of a camera, this is like an a camera that's only as good as like the iphone 12 or 13, yeah, but, but that's but. That's fine, right for most people being able to to to use your glass, your sunglasses, to take a photo instead of um, yeah, there you go, you got them. Um is uh, and it means you don't have to take your, your camera out of your pocket on vacation. People like that. They also are good for like listening to podcasts and listening to, um, you know, audiobooks and things like that, taking a phone call. So people seem to like this far more and are showing far more interest in this than they are in any VR headsets.

02:25:35 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I'm interested in what you've, I guess, heard from people just generally about their reasons for liking the MetaGlasses. I mean, I know this is this is totally anecdotal. Yes, everyone I've talked to who's a big medic, like Ray-Ban glasses fan. I've asked them about what they use it for and they don't use any of the AR features. It is always they're like I like being able to listen to yeah, their music or podcasts right without having it in my ear.

02:26:00
That's every single time, I know, but I think it's interesting that they're popular like maybe this is just a one-off of all the people I talk to, but if that is a larger trend, I think it's interesting that their popularity is being seen as a sign that ar products are something that folks want, when it could just be.

02:26:19 - Molly White (Guest)
People want headphones, options that aren't no little pods in your ears, don't they make like bone conducting headphones though?

02:26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they do. Yeah, we had an advertiser that made I don't know, and I've asked, they are better than the bones, they're better than that.

02:26:31 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah, I've never used them.

02:26:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't know yeah, and you can say hey, meta, what am I looking at right now? But how? Often do you do that never I just got these out I wasn't even sure if they were charged, like when I tried your glasses though, Leo.

02:26:45 - Benito (Announcement)
it was really the audio quality, the audio is amazing, that's the thing that really surprised me that it sounded good so. I think that's enough, that's really enough to sell those things, whether it's these glasses, or the Brilliant Labs glasses, or the wrist or even the temple piece.

02:27:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People are intrigued by what's going to be next and they just want a little taste of it. They know this isn't going to, this isn't going to change their lives. In fact, it's good that they got some use out of it. It's a decent headphones, um, but honestly, I think people want to want to be part of the. They want to kind of see into the future, don't they? What's that just?

02:27:20 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
me. So I think so one. The research that we had is very similar to what you said. Paris, like, mostly they use them to take phone calls and listen to podcasts and not have to have, you know, things in their ears.

02:27:32
The one asterisk to that was a few people who work, um, in in jobs where, like, their hands might be full right and they, uh or so like somebody, it professionals working in a server room and they're like you know, they're trying to remember oh, what was that, what's the name of this product versus that one, and they'll do the sort of hey, meta thing, or even just, you know, you can hold down the button to do it and ask the question, and they'll ask the question, you know, when they've got other stuff in their hands and you know, essentially doing like a Google search from their their glasses, um, you know, audibly, without having to pull out their phone. So people did like doing just being able to do some searches. It doesn't always work. It was like maybe people have said 50% of the time it works, but, um, but they liked the idea that there are some cases where they can do it hands-free if they're working with their hands on something. So that's the only thing we found that people were using it for a lot.

02:28:28
But these things to Meta's credit and I don't really trust Meta, I'll be honest, like with much data, but to their credit they have actually added features throughout the year. There really wasn't a lot you could do with them before, right, except essentially, do that audio, that uh, audio search. But they now do have that thing of like what's this the name of this monument or painting that I'm looking at, or things like that. You know, searches, some visual searches, google lens kind of searches, uh, and some other things, like some where you can make a note, essentially uh, uh and and those sort of deals. But I, I think they are still very early in this, uh, but I but I think the usability of it does seem to be attracting people a little bit more. We're gonna get there.

02:29:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think samsung's got anything any different than what meta is doing, and I think people probably buy metas just because it's meta right well, they are working with google, though, so right, so so I think you know that this is supposedly a partnership.

02:29:31 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
What the qualcomm ceo talked about in september was that meta google and qualcomm sorry, um, samsung meta, so that samsung google and qualcomm sorry. Nota. We're working on this. Smart glasses competitor.

02:29:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Project Muhan they're calling it.

02:29:47 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So Project Muhan is the XR headset. Oh, that's the AR. Okay, that's right. This is something different. This is something else.

02:29:55 - Molly White (Guest)
Does Samsung have the brand name glasses too, like how Meta went with Ray-Ban, or there's just like I know we don't, we don't really know. I'm curious if they like found another one yet.

02:30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you found something we want to know.

02:30:08 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
That picture is is is of Meta Ray-Bans. That's what the Samsung you know, who knows?

02:30:14 - Molly White (Guest)
But then again, I thought that they managed to get a partnership with Ray-Ban too, and the Ray-Ban was just like playing the field, no no, that said, like there's plenty of other glasses providers they could you know um they could partner with well, I mean, ray-ban is part of luxottica, which is, like every glasses all the brands, all the

02:30:33 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
brands it's true okay.

02:30:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll be back wednesday, maybe at 10 am, maybe at 11, I don't know yet they might bring a new set of glasses, that's true.

02:30:44 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
With the new glasses. They might wait for Mobile World Congress to do that. That's probably the only you know. Maybe asterisk there, yeah.

02:30:52 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I think you should find a way to wear all the glasses at once and compare them live simultaneously.

02:30:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I do want I think I will do all the wristbands at once and the temple, Just like all. I really do all the wristbands at once and the temple piece. I know it's crazy and I know it's a huge invasion of privacy and everything, but I think there's something there to listening to everything I do throughout the day and giving me summaries, action items.

02:31:18 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I feel like that's useful, I mean how else would I know that you have strong opinions about bleach in laundry if not for? That's something they went over on this week in Google. I do.

02:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does make some hysterical mistakes. In fact, apple is now finally admitting that. Yeah, maybe the AI summaries, the Apple and Sony summaries are so bad.

02:31:42 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
They're rough. I think they're funny. Okay, they're funny, but they're just.

02:31:44 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
That's okay. They're funny, but they're just bad. They're at what they're supposed to be doing something. I've realized where they are true because I've turned them off on almost all the apps, but I still have a few on in the hopes that they're okay, or just as a data gathering thing and, for instance, when it comes to summarizing notifications from, uh, twitter or blue sky, it's just wrong. Every time it will say leo commented on your post yeah leo did not.

02:32:11
Leo didn't even like my post. Where is that coming from, I don't know, but it's wrong every time and I'm just like how are you so bad at the thing you're supposed to do? Like you just have three data points, how are you struggling to summarize those into one sentence?

02:32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, apple has announced that they're going to uh, a, they're gonna, they're not gonna, they're gonna turn off the, I think, the news summaries, but they're also gonna italicize them. That's the fix, by the way. So they're now gonna be italicized. So you'll know that it I don't know what you'll know it's italicized.

02:32:45 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, didn't they get into some hot water?

02:32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
where they were. Like yeah, BBC is pissed.

02:32:49 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, they like attributed some stuff to the news outlets. That was just absolutely wrong.

02:32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the AI summaries and, by the way, this is from a beta of iOS, it's not. Apple hasn't announced anything. But if you, baby bc, did a little victory lap, apple suspends. Error strewn. Ai generated news alerts, but we don't know what's going to really happen.

02:33:15 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
This is just in a one example of how it's getting this wrong. Right now I have an ai summary for new york times notifications that say says trump promised to repeal executive actions. Israel released 90 palestinian prisoners. The first point of that completely wrong. The thing it's trying to summon says donald trump promised to sign executive orders right, not repeal them completely wrong yeah, I have them turned on just because they're hysterical.

02:33:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I mean, look, you shouldn't look at those and say, oh my God, you should look at them and go. I wonder what they're really saying.

02:33:51 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I just think.

02:33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm not saying from a.

02:33:54 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah, I just think it's very interesting that Apple used to be known as a company that wouldn't release a product that was completely or an update that was completely terrible and bad at doing what it stated it was supposed to do, and so now it is because AI right 2024 was a rough year for them.

02:34:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They should not have released the Vision Pro the way they did we we wrote about this in January this is the one year anniversary, by the way, of the release of the vision pro it's changed everything, guys.

02:34:23 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I mean we're all talking from we're all uh podcasting with her legless have you? Have you been on a call with somebody using the vision pro thing?

02:34:32 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
yeah, it's brutal. It is brutal though it's genuinely terrifying.

02:34:37 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
It looks terrifying. It's the most uncanny valley thing you've ever seen.

02:34:44 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, it's brutal. So we wrote about this in January. You know we sort of gave it a. We said, look, technologically they've accomplished something really interesting. But we cannot recommend it for one single person, other than if you are a developer wanting to develop for this, maybe longer term, for AI, on the bet that you want to get ahead. But even then, like you know it's, we just can't recommend it. And they've they've marketed it to the wrong people Like they want it to as this like movie device to watch movies in in airplanes. You know why would you want to do that and not just use your iPad Like it's, you know it's, it's crazy. And so now we took a lot of flack for that. We also recommended everybody that bought it. We we sort of said you have, if you buy it, you've got a.

02:35:33
We publicized the return policy very clear. You know that this is, this is the return policy. Know it be ready because you're very likely going to want to return it. And we saw that probably, you know, the most returned product ever. And that doesn't mean that it wasn't a technological breakthrough, because in many ways it was, but it was not marketed well. It was a developer kit that they somehow decided they wanted to turn it into a movie watching device and it just can't compete with an iPad. Then you have AI. You know they released AI really too early as, as Paris was saying, you know, when they really were not those, those products were not ready yet. And so 2024, I think, is going to go down as one of the most challenging years when, when you know, apple really departed from some of its core values in in the ways that it brings product to market and releases them. And they've got they've got a lot of work to do this year to sort of fix some of the missteps from last year.

02:36:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break, final break before we. I can't believe how fast two hours went by before we wrap things up. You're watching this Week in Tech. Jason Heiner love you. It's great to see you. Editor-in-chief ZDNet. He has a little Fez behind him. Look at that, right beneath your Mac Plus or Mac Pro, right there. Right there, there's the Fez. Molly White. Would you like a Fez, molly? Because we can get you one. I want a Fez, you want a Fez? All right, fez is for all. Mollywhitenet. Yay. And of course, paris Martineau, who is the host of the last few episodes actually one more episode of this Week in Google. And then, on your birthday, february 5th, the brand new show Intelligent Machines, where I go crazy about how wonderful AI is and you and Jeff shoot me down. It's going to be a great show.

02:37:21 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Yeah, it'll be great, will I be? There on the day we rebrand, will I be eating a multi-course meal somewhere in brooklyn?

02:37:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
who's oh, you think you might not be there for the show it depends.

02:37:31 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I need to check my resident notifications.

02:37:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, it depends on when I am able to obtain you're trying to get a reservation well, you know, we'll find out what if I say I can get you a reservation for Salt Hanks Sandwich Restaurant in the West Village.

02:37:47 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I'd hope so. I'd hope I'm able to go to Salt Hanks Sandwich. Restaurant in the former home of Slutty Vegan.

02:37:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, right next to John's Pizza on Bleecker Street, but it won't be, unfortunately, in time for your birthday. It won't be probably till well, you know how it is with restaurants.

02:38:08 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
He's already. It's so funny he's already bitching about regulations. I was going to say the permitting process for open that baby is going to take forever. He's already saying they turn republican he says oh man, this eric adams, he's killing me here it's pretty funny you got to be like son pay a visit to zero bond, slip a couple 20s over on that table and your problems will be taken care of I just told him that this is what happens.

02:38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know, in fact, I think uh, john dvorak used to quote oh, who was? It was a thoreau says if you're, if you're not a liberal in your youth, you have no heart. If you're not a liberal in your youth, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative in your old age, you have no brains. Or you don't have a sandwich restaurant in New York City.

02:38:49 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
But either way, I think that's what he said. Yeah, that was probably the latter.

02:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it sounds like Thoreau. He says Dad, what's going on? What's going on? And I said son, it's society protecting itself against you corrupt moguls. So there sunnets society protecting itself against you corrupt moguls, so there someday maybe he will be a mogul, I hope to be the son of a the father of an oligarch sandwich, mogul sandwich mogul, a good name for a restaurant actually sandwich mogul? Yeah, I'll suggest it. He was going to call it salt hank, because that's you know his name and all that.

02:39:24 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
But I just watched the domain sandwich mogulcom.

02:39:26 - Molly White (Guest)
yeah well, I just trademarked it.

02:39:29 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
So oh man, he's gonna have to happen fast now he is a sandwich muggle.

02:39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's true. It's true. Uh, our show today brought to you by. Actually, there's no accident. There are no coincidences, shopify. How did henry become a sandwich mogul? Thank you, shopify. If you go to his website, salthankcom, and you buy some of his delicious salts soon, by the way, pickles, pickled cucumbers, pickled peppers, pickled onions you'll be using Shopify. It's 2025.

02:40:01
A new year means new opportunities. Maybe for a lot of you out there, you've been thinking about one thing over the holidays starting your own business. Looking at people like Saul Hank. Saul Hank asked me, my son asked me. He said how do I do this? How do I come up with a brand? How do I sell stuff to people? What? And he said what, dad, what am I even gonna sell? I said, said son, sell salt. The profit margins are high and it and it never goes bad and he's, uh, doing really well. He actually he answered his own questions. Shopify fixed it for him. The best time to start your new business right now Shopify. By the way, my daughter also uses Shopify to sell her custom t-shirts. Come to think of it, the whole family uses Shopify.

02:40:52
Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open your business and get your first sale. Get your store up and running easily with thousands of customizable templates. There's no coding or design skills required. All you need to do just drag and drop their powerful social media tools. Let you connect all your channels and create shoppable posts and help you sell everywhere people scroll. Shopify makes it easy to manage your growing business. They help with the details, like shipping, like taxes, payments, from one single dashboard, allowing you to focus on the important stuff, like growing your business.

02:41:31
What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if somebody beats you to your brilliant idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything. Ladies and gentlemen, with Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think, established in 2025, that is a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify comm slash twit. Go to Shopify comm slash twit. Start selling with shopify. Today, it's all lowercase shopifycom slash twit, shopify and uh, if you, if you look at your salt salt hank site powered by shopify, uh, you know as much as we said that um tiktok was empowering for him. I think he'll agree. Shopify made it possible for him to start a business and ultimately that's kind of the dream of the whole thing the salt lovers Club. There it is, home to the best pickles and seasoning in the effing world.

02:42:34 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Let me see, oh look you can get the Hank Knight for for you, yeah yeah, there's the pickles.

02:42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's the pickles coming soon. Get the cookbook, it's out now. There he is, and somewhere in here it says power by shopify. It's pretty, it's pretty cool. It's pretty darn cool. Thank you. Shopify makes it easy for me. You don't have to support him anymore, makes it easy for me, you don't have to support him anymore. Um, uh, let's see what else. Is there anything else in our? Uh, us finalizes rule banning smart cars with russia and chinese tech. See, while they're banning or unbanning and banning and unbanning, tick tock, they're going and actually banning chinese cars. I wonder why? Hmm, is there anybody in the?

02:43:29 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
United States who sells smart vehicles? No, couldn't be.

02:43:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, actually Biden did this, which is hysterical. I wonder actually what the Trump administration is going to do about AI. I mean, silicon Valley thinks they're very favorable to AI. Mark Andreessen said that's the whole reason. He became a trump supporter because the biden administration wanted ai to be controlled by a handful of big companies.

02:43:49 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I don't know if that's true who's the guy who's the new ai eyes are? Is that's david?

02:43:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
david sacks. Yeah, another south african ai and crypto and crypto, oh yeah, together, even though he does not have a dog in either hunt, which actually is probably good. It's just unusual um, probably has a dog at a lot of hunts actually yeah, I would not be so confident on that statement let's put it this way he's never run a crypto or ai company. How about that?

02:44:16 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
the bar is in hell.

02:44:18 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
That's the bar yeah, I think he's on the boards of lots of probably, yeah, yeah yeah good, because you don't really want you can obfuscate your involvement that way.

02:44:28
Yeah, sorry it's so cynical so you are, but I don't think that. I don't think that um boy, the, the, the, the. It's like talk about ddos, like ddosing. Um, uh, conflicts of interest have been ddosed so badly already, before this thing has even started, that it's like where do you even? There's no such thing, you know, where do you even? It's like just up your arms and and say, oh, you know how there is absolutely such a.

02:44:56 - Molly White (Guest)
Thing I think they're actually each trying to hit a high score that's what they want to hit the high score. Who gets the maximum conflicts of?

02:45:04 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
interest. I mean and it's the same in, like you know, money and politics. It's like what? What happened? Like it was less than a generation ago where the number one issue political issue was like campaign finance reform, and now it's just like again just throwing up the arms on conflict of interest and money and politics, it's like remove all the caps, remove all of the restraints, remove everything. People spend as much money as they want, um, waste as much money as they want, essentially on political campaigns, um, and is it a waste?

02:45:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is it really a waste? You know we all laughed when elon musk spent 44 billion dollars on twitter.

02:45:43 - Molly White (Guest)
I think you guys money worth must spend 44 billion dollars on twitter. I think you guys money worth how? So? I mean the crypto guys that spent like. They raised like 200 billion dollars and they already made it back in terms of just like bitcoin gains and stock price they have hundreds of uh members of congress.

02:45:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've got a very a pro-crypto uh white house. Yeah, I think the money pays off. I think you could argue that Elon's ex has become a very powerful source of information and, ultimately, of power.

02:46:12 - Molly White (Guest)
I thought you were talking about Grimes. For a second, I also thought you were talking about.

02:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Grimes as well as Grimes, I think.

02:46:20 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Everybody's wondering what Grimes is talking about.

02:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's so powerful she is moving into the compound. I thought she was the only holdout but she's changed her clown. She's moving into the uh Musk baby compound.

02:46:35 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I just never thought these are the kind of things we talked about on Twitter you know.

02:46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's talk about this. Uh, bill Gates I'm only kidding Bill Gates, there's a name you might remember from the blast from the past has been promoting, uh, these new nuclear power plants that use salt instead of water they're called natrium plants got the permit to start building in wyoming. They still do not have permits from the united states nuclear regulatory commission, but how long before that will happen? There's bill. I wonder if he he knows how to drive one of those bulldozers. The wyoming industrial siting council has granted a construction permit to terra power for its nutrient natrium nuclear power plant. These are, uh, I don't know, can you call them pocket power plants? Um, it's a safer, they say, because they're not using water for cooling. The unique natrium design enables the company to start non-nuclear construction. Ah, so that's it. They are able to build every bit, but the nuclear part until they get the nrc approval. I get it. I get it. Uh, there are lots of people think we need nuclear power, that that's the most proximate way to get out of burning fossil fuels.

02:47:51 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
It's true, you know, I think, the thing you know we haven't built nuclear plants in like 40 years in the US.

02:47:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very, very expensive.

02:47:59 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Very expensive, but there are. We know a lot more as a sort of world community. We know a lot more about building safe, efficient you know better nuclear plants than we did 40 years ago, when sort of the scare the worst you know scares of what can happen when you don't do it well, scares of what can happen when you don't do it well sort of stopped everybody from building them. So I think it certainly deserves a look right, I think there are. We've run up against challenges with when it comes to energy and technology, like we've run up in challenges of efficiency, of storage, of being able to transfer. You know, solar, wind, hydro we can harness those things really well.

02:48:50
But one of our challenges is the power grid. Right, we don't export, we can't move power around very well, which is why we still are as dependent on oil as we are, and so you know there's a number of problems that have to be solved, and so I think that that Bill Gates and others are are showing this interest because we, we are we've hit some challenges of power with the the other clean power methods that we what I was just talking about, but you know it certainly should be part of the conversation, I think and that's why people are starting to sort of make the case, that it could be part of a clean energy future, but of this century, I think still power is going to be the number one concern. It powers everything and the more that we get into AI and crypto and other things, the more it creates urgency around solving the the right.

02:49:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need the power. We need the power. Uh. These are littler plants. They run um. They're cooled with liquid sodium. The plant will generate 345 megawatts of power. Uh, capable of ramping up to 500 megawatts for short periods of time. To compare, the three mile an island plant that the that microsoft is bringing back online is does well over 800 megawatts of power. So these are about the half the size of three mile of the single of. There were three mile and had multiple plants of the single three mile on island plants. That's coming back. So there, but they plan to put you know, if it goes well, dozens of Natrium plants across the globe, including several more in Wyoming, and, and certainly Bill Gates has the money to do it. Uh, first steps, first steps.

02:50:35
Uh cash app. Find 175 million dollars for its, according to the uh cfpb. It's woefully incomplete response to fraud. I love how the biden administration in the, in the waning hours of the administration, has just done all of this stuff, knowing that you know already. Musk has said and doge have said that the consumer finance protection bureau is uh should be deleted, I think is the word they used um, so they're trying to do as much as they can before they are deleted, they find cash app because, uh, it implied, uh it failed to address fraud on the mobile payment network. It created the conditions for fraud to proliferate. When things went wrong, cash app flouted its responsibilities, even burdened local banks with problems. The company cause cash. You may remember, uh is run by block, which is uh Jack Dorsey's yeah, company. It, uh it was a Jack Dorsey startup. Uh, after I think he was still at Twitter when he started it. He was running it in Twitter for quite some time, as I as I remember he renamed it to block, during the blockchain craze, the 2021 blockchain craze.

02:51:45 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Now he's kind of like oh well, I guess we don't want to go back.

02:51:48 - Molly White (Guest)
At least it's kind of vague, though you can get away with that. It's true, it's blockish.

02:51:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not blockchain, it's blockish.

02:51:56 - Molly White (Guest)
One thing that's sort of tangential to this is the CFPB, also recently published. I think it's's at this point it's like in the comment stage, but they are looking to basically um interpret that same I think it's that same rule, uh, to apply to both crypto holdings and also digital game, some digital game assets that are sort of cash like yes, because they should be.

02:52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're treated. You can trade them in for dollars. They should be regulated. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

02:52:32 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah. So the idea is like basically the same law that makes it so that if you like you know, if you like leave your debit card in an ATM and someone withdraws $200 and you call your bank, within like a pretty short period of time, your bank will give you that money back. They basically want to have that same type of thing apply to crypto assets and like if someone steals all your Robux or whatever, which is, I think, really interesting, but also, you know, given the political end of things, I'm not super confident that that is going to go anywhere. Given the political end of things, I'm not super confident that that is going to go anywhere.

02:53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm hoping that RFK Jr gets behind this. Now. Smokers may not be like this much, but the FDA has proposed reducing nicotine in cigarettes from 14% to less than 1%, to a literally non-addictive level, which means you'd basically be buying some herbs that you could burn that didn't deliver. They were not a nicotine delivery system. Uh, this is not going to be a rule until there's a long comment period I think it's eight or nine months, um, but a very, I think a very. They're proposing to cap the nicotine level at 0.7 milligrams of uh per tobacco, per gram of tobacco and what about, like vapes and stuff like that, are they still allowed to have nicotine?

02:53:52
it would apply to cigarettes, cigarette tobacco, roll your own tobacco, most cigars and pipe tobacco, but not e-cigarettes.

02:53:59 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Nicotine pouches heated tobacco products for the vape industry hookahs.

02:54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's gonna be. It's there's gonna be an explosion of hookah, hookah bars, smokeless tobacco products or premium cigars. Yeah, I think it just creates a black market for nicotine delivery systems yeah yeah they legalize weed and they criminalize nicotine.

02:54:23 - Molly White (Guest)
That's right.

02:54:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a world. What a world. All right, I think we can stop right here and say we have done our job of bringing light to the world, explaining what's happening in the world around us. Molly, I'm always so glad to have Molly White with us. Mollywhitenet. Subscribe to Citation Needed. It's her newsletter. Of course, web3 is going just great. Citation Needed is your big thing, but you do a lot of podcasts too, I know.

02:54:56 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I am a professional podcast guest.

02:54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and the best. That's why you're so good. You can read her work at mollywhitenet. Thank you so much, uh, for being here. I really I knew as soon as I saw the trump coin come out yesterday I said I'm so glad we got molly.

02:55:18 - Molly White (Guest)
Thank you. Molly happy to be here.

02:55:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks, always great to have you on. Uh same for you, jason heiner. He is the eic at zd net and uh just a good guy all around. It's always great to have you on. I appreciate I didn't get to ask you about cnet. Was there anything you got excited about besides all of those great ai bracelets?

02:55:39 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
um, there was some interesting stuff this year, I will say the most sort of most interesting and a little bit strange thing was there was the set of headphones over the ear headphones. They looked like they were over the ear headphones and when you put them on, what they are is they're actually ear cleaners and they, oh, no water into your ears, no. And they have cameras, no, that show it washing what your ears look like being washed by this thing. So it was like one of the most ces products ever.

02:56:09 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Um, oh, you weren't there. Like that I did at the end of 30 rock, where jack donaghy's like oh, I've got it, it's dishwashers, but the front is clear so you can see what's going on inside it's just that it's brilliant, exactly, I think it's an ear bidet.

02:56:23 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, it's like an ear bidet.

02:56:25 - Molly White (Guest)
That is the perfect word for it, but with a camera.

02:56:28 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
With a camera to watch your ear.

02:56:30 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
Leo's already purchased this. I'm looking where I can buy this.

02:56:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a real product or it was just a perspective?

02:56:36 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
No, I believe it is a actual, real product that is for sale.

02:56:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here it is yeah, these that is for sale. And here it is yeah, these ear cleaning headphones I saw at CES makes so much sense.

02:56:47 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
written by Jada Jones on ZDNet ear sight flow is this can't become mainstream someone who uses q-tips way more than I should.

02:56:59 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I can't, there can't be another level of this for me to mess my ears up $199,.

02:57:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Molly, they're sold out, that's actually less than I expected. Inventory is on the way. I'm ordering it right now. I'll wear them with my brilliant glasses. There you go, and I'll be a chick magnet.

02:57:15 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
This is a Leo product. You know, leo, I have to say how much I love that you are the techno-optim, always, always, and I always appreciate that about you. And at the end of the day, you know I mean I know I was also we were poo-pooing a lot of things on here and it's part of our job, but you know, I do think it is true that you know the optimists do own the future, and so I love it, served you well and you've always been such a, had such an amazing perspective on the tech industry, and it's why I'm not a Robert Scoble.

02:57:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's not go crazy. I'm not like everything is the best thing ever, but I hope that we can come up with some things that are going to make our lives a little bit better. And and I'm also completely willing when it doesn't, to admit it I was very skeptical about the Vision Pros, for instance.

02:58:11 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
You were Not to rain on this great optimism parade. If you scroll down on the Earsight Flow, it has a photo of what you could see inside your ear and it's the most upsetting thing I've seen in a while.

02:58:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not good. I don't know. I think I want this.

02:58:30 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I think this will. It cleans and sanitizes. No, the one that was like the yellow hole I've never seen.

02:58:35 - Molly White (Guest)
The yellow fleshy hole. No, I've never seen the inside of my ear and I think I'm happy to leave it that way.

02:58:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some things that we just shouldn't know, I've just said I can't buy it right now, that's all.

02:58:50 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, your ears are going to be really clean this year. I need it, leo. I have a feeling.

02:58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need it. I do Beebird. Beebird sells a lot of other stuff.

02:59:01 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
That's the sign of a great product.

02:59:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They started.

02:59:06 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
If you go, if you go to their home page, it's something that just says. Love resonates in every ear.

02:59:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Care moment, apparently mostly what they do is ear stuff yeah they're specialized, they have a neat, oh my. God, wow, I don't know what that was and I can't unsee it. I'm so sorry to do that to you. I hope you were watching the video. Paris martineau will be back on wednesday, right for this week in google and every weekend on the informationcom. So great to have you, paris. I appreciate we. We wanted to have you on our year-end show. You, you couldn't make it.

02:59:47 - Paris Martineau (Guest)
I've had a series of unfortunate events that have kept me from Twitter the last couple of weeks, so I'm glad I'm finally here.

02:59:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're so glad we could get you on. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining us. We do Twitter every Sunday afternoon, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you would like. We stream it. Used to be eight platforms. We can't get back on TikTok. For some reason it won't let us on. I think there's maybe a hitch. Your day is coming.

03:00:16
It's coming, I guess. So we weren't on TikTok this week. If we can get back on TikTok, we certainly will Discord. Youtube Twitch can get back on tiktok. We certainly will discord, youtube twitch, um xcom, facebook linkedin and kick and maybe next time on tiktok. That's so you can watch live, but you don't have to watch live. I didn't mention discord.

03:00:36
That is actually an exclusive behind the velvet rope experience, exclusive to our club twit members. Now, if you're not a member of Club Twit, I want to invite you to join. It's one of the ways that we keep ourselves on the air. It's really been a great experience all around. We've met some wonderful people about 12,000 people in our club. Seven bucks a month, you get ad-free versions of the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord so you can meet the other club members. Uh, there are special shows just for you, like stacy's book club, the photo show and the coffee show and all that. So for more information, twittv, club twit.

03:01:15
I also want to remind you you have a couple weeks maybe left to do our survey. I think we'll finish it at the end of the month. That is how we get to know you. We only do this once a year. As you know, as as a podcast we're an RSS feed. This ain't Spotify, kids, we don't know anything about you. So in order to get to know you a little better, we do this survey thing. It takes about 10 minutes. We do it once a year just to get an idea of who's out there, who's listening. It's helpful for us in determining programming. It's also really helpful for us in selling advertising. We don't tell them anything about you individually, but it's nice for us to be able to say well, 75% of our audience are IT decision makers. That's something advertisers want to know. And so if you would twittv slash survey member of the club or not, that's another way you can help us out. Any help you can give us we really appreciate.

03:02:03
After the fact, on-demand versions of all of our shows available at the website twittv. When you get there. There's also a link to the YouTube channel for Twit Great way to share little clips. If you want to do that, let's see what else. Oh, best way to get it is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically at the minute benito finishes polishing it up. Thanks to benito gonzalez, our producer.

03:02:27
Are you editing tonight, or is it. Kevin editing it tonight. Kevin tonight, kevin, all right. Well, thanks to kevin king, then, for taking out all those cuss words and um, the, that part where I lit my hair on fire, and all that stuff. You won't see that, thanks to kevin, uh, and you'll be able to get that if you subscribe audio or video in just a few hours after the show ends. Thank you, everybody for joining us. This is our 20th anniversary year. We've been doing this for a long time I know it's amazing For a long time, and I am very grateful to all the people who make this show possible, including you three. It's fantastic. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next week. And, as I have said for 20 years, another twit is in the can. This is amazing.