TWiT 1012: Our Best Of 2024 - The Best Moments From TWiT's 2024

Happy holidays, everybody. It's time for Twit and our annual best of episode coming up. The best moments from 2024.

This is Twit, this weekend tech, episode 1012 for 1229 2024, our best of 2024.

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

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

But the three display ports. Right. Two display ports on an HDMI. Right. As well as... And a... Of course, Ethernet. And Thunderbolt, right. Thunderbolt. But that's actually a KVM.

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

It's something like, remember mouse without borders from Microsoft? This does that, but I can use Mac, I can use Windows, I can use Linux, it doesn't matter, it's OS agnostic. Again, I know that this is super niche, but if you're like a system administrator or just a guy who needs multiple machines on his desk, that thing is incredible. It's so much nicer than having two sets of keyboards and mice. I might get this because I have that big 55 inch OLED with

have a little multiple computers. And if I just took this up, I have my nice, you know, keyboard, my key cron keyboard. I have my classic Microsoft to tell a mouse and I just plug those into this. And then that's all I need. I have the monitor keyboard or mouse and I have multiple systems. When that was first pitched to me, I didn't get it. I'm like, what? KVMs, KVMs are 20 years ago. Nobody even makes them. No one makes them. But this actually, that absolutely made sense to me. All right. That's how much. It's again, enterprise products. So you're looking at four fifty

Yeah, it's high, it's high up there. What else we got? Okay, so this is Runhood, so this is their 1200. This is sort of a home, away from home camping unit. So we've got the solar panels, we've got this 1200 watt power unit. Now the cool thing about this. So it's charging up from the solar panels. It can charge up from the solar panels. How much wattage does these generate? In partial sunlight, this will do 100 watts.

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

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

swap your modules in and out and grab what you need to power whatever you're doing. So you want to day at the beach. Maybe you don't need the whole system. You just pull one of these out. And this is more than enough to run your laptop, your phones, your desk. It looks like it also could be an emergency. That's actually what I'm going for. This is going to be part of my, my. The bad.

It's a design by Italians. It's not functional, but it looks good. Actually, it looks great. You know what I found out? I actually finally put a signal analyzer on our power. Is it a little choppy? They've lowered down the voltage to the bare minimum before it starts destroying things.

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

And that's actually why I like them because first, they're lower priced. I love the modular design and they're standards based. There's a lot of companies that makes them really nice stuff and I'm not going to call them out because their design is great, but it's all proprietary. Could I get multiple panels like these? And so I could expand my capability. This uses the standard solar connector. So the solar panels at your house, you could actually plug that into this. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Okay.

Runhood. Runhood. And they're a Bay Area located company. I like them. Yeah. Brand new. How about this? This is something that you might like for your travels. This was the Poly Voyager free 60 UC. What is a Poly Voyager 360 UC? So earbuds. They're earbuds, but they're really designed. They're inside.

Now, the cool thing about this is you see that little screen at the top. Yeah, what is that all about? That actually gives you a touch screen that can control like a zoom call. So connecting and disconnecting calls. You can switch between modes. And actually, the reason why I like this set is it has a cable that lets you hook it up to a 3.5 millimeter audio jack.

Oh, that's kind of nice. So you lose battery life or no, you still need batteries. You still need the batteries. But by the way, this thing runs forever. And the case is actually a battery for the earbuds as well. I also like it. It's got a little USB adapter in the case, which is fantastic. That's the wireless adapter. Correct. It's really been designed for UC people. So this, again, it's an enterprise product. I know it's niche. Here's something that you might like. It's cooler. This is Anker's newest Qi charger.

You know, I've been looking at, there's a lot of companies make these after Apple decided not to make theirs, that will charge Apple Watch and Apple Phone and the earbuds all at once. But this one folds up, which is kind of cool. Pull it back there. Look at that, it's very compact. They have to be good for travel. It would be good for travel, and they have another version that they're gonna be releasing that actually has a battery pack built into it. And it's Anker, and Anker has great reputation. So is this out? This is out, this is out right now, yeah.

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

Let's be frank. Let's be a little frank. Now, the nice thing about this though is it's Bluetooth 5.0. So it's super, super clear as long as you've got a Bluetooth 5.0 system. And it's infinitely expandable. How many speakers are there? Just one? There's one over there. There's that one right there. Go ahead and turn that on. So you could make this 5.0 system if you bought enough speakers. You could make it as long as it's within the Bluetooth range, the power button is in the back. You can add as many speakers as you'd like.

And once you start playing it, it actually... We're gonna rock out here. There's a subwoofer somewhere. Am I sitting on it? No, see, I haven't even turned that on. Oh. But they all use... Oh, it looks like a purse. A capacious, extraordinarily capacious purse. Hey, it sounds pretty good.

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

I love it. I love it. I look forward to it every year. I don't think, unfortunately, Padra is going to CES this year, but we will do our CES wrap-up show in, I guess, next week, right, in the new year. You're watching the best of 2024 for this week in tech. We're so glad you're here. Happy holidays, everybody. On we go on the best of with the word of the year,

Corey Doctorow, the man who coined it, explains in justification. So in justification, and this is how Corey begins that now, I think, classic blog post. Here is how platforms die. First, they're good to their users.

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

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

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

Well, they were here for like a long time millennia, right? And so maybe they didn't at first, right? They just figured it out. Yeah, if we don't burn it, it will. God will. So yeah. So ending good fire didn't end fire. It just ended control fire and that now we have wildfire, right? So even if we resolve the climate emergency, California is still going to burn because we have all this fire debt. And in the same way, also the ecological cycle, it's part of how it works. Yeah, there's a whole

much of plants that only reproduce by creating fire and then their seed pods open and the fire and stuff. But the same thing used to be true of tech. It used to be prior to the Carter era especially, but then slowly less and less in the years afterwards, that companies weren't really allowed to buy their competitors or merge with their competitors. They weren't allowed to sell goods below cost in order to prevent other firms from entering their markets.

Those were all just generally prohibited. There were exceptions around the margins, but that was the way things worked. And so it meant that when no one at Cray could figure out how to make a good computer anymore, that was the end of Cray. And it meant that, you know, when

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

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

Plug compatible and if you used Mac OS and your CIO wanted to take your computer away and replace it with windows machine because Mac office was so bad that you couldn't communicate with your colleagues. Steve jobs could just have his technologist reverse engineer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimately, the way you keep users safe is by evacuating them from the fire zone, not by adding more fire suppression to the zone, which tempts more people to pile into this place that is going to burn, and that we're there in danger all the time. There are a few people in our world today.

Donald Trump's one of them, Elon Musk's another, who are masterful at grabbing the headline, right, at changing the conversation. Tesla stock started to go down severely. So he announces, oh, we're going to have a Tesla Robotaxi Augustates. And what happens to stock price? Boom. Will they have a Robotaxi product in Augustates? Who knows? That's not the important thing.

This is the man who's been saying since 2015 that self-driving cars are any day now. He said, I think five years ago, every Tesla owner would be able to turn on this feature that would let other people rent your car when you're not using it and it would just drive them around. That never happened.

I mean, the thing you should take away from the story is not that, oh, robo-taxes are coming, but rather that the street is desperate to believe that Elon Musk and Tesla are still a good bet. I mean, this is the thing is I'd be looking at scans of the street rather than taking the story as factual period. In 2016, Elon said, you'll be able to send one of our cars on a cross-country drive all by itself. Why would you want to?

they've been talking about this autonomous robo taxi that will turn its cars into level three automated vehicles but it hasn't happened so you know they've been talking they've been talking he's good at that we're gonna talk

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

That's not a problem for the user. The thing is, is you have to persuade consumers that you want that they want robo-taxis. Like, what problem are you solving for consumers where they're going to pick this? Have you ever ridden in one of those Waymo's or...

Lifts or cruises or whatever they want to hear you have I remember we've been in a cruise when there were cruises in San Francisco I saw somebody this week last week say they prefer Waymo's to Ubers or left San Francisco because they don't have to drop your drink

Well, yeah, I mean, if you don't love talking to drivers, you might find the privacy of a soft driving car to be appealing. He also claimed that the waymos are better drivers than human drivers. They drive like grandma's, though, right? They're very costless. I want my grandma driving me places. That's what I want, because here's... That's because your grandma's 52. Well, and also, I don't... That might be true.

But I also don't have to be perfectly blunt. If your grandma were my age, you might not want her to be driving. I don't have to worry about my grandma being, like, to believe that aliens have probed her that anti-vaccinations. I have been in so many different... I'm a sovereign citizen.

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

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

When you remove people from the equation, you're kind of removing an incentive for consumers to get your product because they don't trust you to do right by them. See, this is the difference between you and me. And I think Micah and you, you like people.

I find people really interesting. I'm not sure that's the same. That's the difference. I do like people, but my problem is I have trouble setting boundaries. And so the moment I get in that vehicle, I don't care how I feel. I'm going to talk to you if you want to talk to me. And I don't want to talk to you, but because you want to talk, I'm going to talk to you because I'm not good at being like, no.

So you've never hopped in and said, hey, I'd rather work right now. I can't do that. If Uber has a button on the app, though, that's why I'm going to use that button either because it seems mean. I mean, I once had a cab ride from the Savannah, a torture airport at midnight where they can be drove me through the Pine Barons and talked about how easy it was to hide the body. See, that's why. Obviously, a Sopranos fan. That's where they...

And I remember like writing down like his number and putting it on a piece of paper and be like, maybe they'll find that I'm going to find my body. Yeah, I'm like, but my point is there. You know, I wanted to hide a body. Practicing your fucking way. Oh my god. No, no, like this was also the sit that I went for like, we all actually know the book.

that the right back to the report was more terrifying because the dude like turned down a second fair and then talked about the shotgun he had under his seat and I was like I was not aware they're fired. You know the robots won't talk about the shotgun under their seat so they'll just have the button that you can press to shoot things. No but my point is they're

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

You know I should go back and look at the things we talked about 19 years ago in the first Twitter I don't think it was this we didn't imagine a TikTok Right we weren't really worried about privacy yet

We didn't even know what social media really was. In 2005, probably not. Twitter didn't even exist yet. It's pre-Twitter. We're older than Twitter. 34 minutes of skyping fun episode one. Oh, you pulled it as a thing. Yeah, it was still a thing. That's how long ago that was. I saw John Oliver. A couple of weeks ago said, Skype, how did you miss this? How did you lose? In COVID, how did that happen?

That is kind of sad. It is. You had one job. I just don't understand how you butcher that, yeah.

Uh, what else were we talking about in 2005? Well, you know, it was Patrick Norton. It was Kevin Rose. Yeah, and, uh, Robert Herron. Robert Herron Day was a sense of people from the screen savers. I mean, you know, it was so early in podcasting that apparently show notes weren't built with topics. We didn't know show notes. One of those. I mean, there are show notes, but they say nothing about the actual topics. April 17th, just kind of like, we're doing this thing. Trust me, in 35 minutes, there wasn't a lot. We were in a brew pub.

And San Francisco is right after Macworld, one of the last Macworld expos. No, I guess they went on for another five or six years. Actually, seven years, right? We plan to do this weekly with the rotating cast of characters. Your input is welcome, parentheses. Anyone want to design a logo?

We didn't have a logo. Dorothy Yamamoto, who was a retired graphic designer, she'd retired to raise her family and went, I want to get back into graphic design. She designed that twit bug. She had it sideways, because it was more like an and gate, or an and gate. I never knew that. Yeah, and I said, well, let's turn it this way so it has legs and put an eye in it. And to personify it a little bit, it became the twit bug, which you could see right behind me on the gear up here.

And then you can see this leg, I guess. It kind of looks like the gear is smiling at you, right? The gear is smiling. Hi, gear. And then we didn't have the name either. It was called the Revenge of the Screen Savers. R-O-T-S-S. R-O-T-S-S and immediately Comcast sent us this letter. So we're still using that name. You can't use it. They kept it for G4 TV.

So we also asked the audience to name it. Does anybody around back then in the beginning? You got a lot of name suggestions where, yeah, yeah. The one name that kind of rang a bell in my head was this week in geek or the week in geek. I said, I don't want to use the word geek. What about just this week in tech and then the acronym?

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

Yeah. That is a fun fact. Funnest. Anyway, 19 years later, and we're still doing it. It's kind of amazing. Yeah. We used to have a round table. We've lost half of it. Other than that,

Everything else. Knights of the half table. Everything else is still the same. It's been a nice 19 years. And I thank everybody who's made that possible. And you know all of you, especially my wife and our executive producer and our CEO, Lisa Laport, who put us on a sound financial footing. I had to hire her. I didn't, I didn't met her. My, my, our tax guy said, you're going to jail.

You need to immediately hire somebody to put these books in order. These are terrible. You're going to go to jail. And I said, OK, what do I mean? I don't know. What do I know about books? OK. This is about 2008, I think, 2007. I said, OK, what do I do? He said, well, I got two names.

I'm gonna give you these names and you can hire one of them to do this. The first one was Lisa. I never found out what the second name was. Lisa had a specialty bookkeeping business where she would take people who are going to jail and fix their books. No? Come on. I heard some stories. It's not a sword. I'm anyway, she fixed the book.

You didn't go to jail. Yeah. And I thought, well, I should marry that woman. Anyway, so she actually put us in a sound financial footprint, a footing and kept me out of jail, which is pretty darn good.

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

On we go with the best of 2024 with our own Father Robert Ballisare, the digital Jesuit, and the AI Priest. This is what we need AI for. When they have AI that can do all of our dailies for the games that we play, that... Oh my gosh, that's so funny. It's a good point though.

I just want to do penance. Can I confess? My hours wasted playing Animal Crossing. That's real. Bring up the AI Priest. Is there an AI Priest? Can he give? Can he grant absolution is what I want to know or perform an exercise? It's the only time I'm interested.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't mind this. No, I'm not a Catholic. It doesn't seem too bad. Georgia, you like this. It's important to express our concerns and disagreements and a respectful and loving manner. Pray for the wisdom and patience to handle such situations.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, it's got electrolytes. It's the wrong. I mean, that one's an easy one. I mean, if we could baptize in Gatorade, we could get sponsorships that we think so. Oh, my gosh. You started a new thing. They're going to be contacting you. You should get some rights to that. You know, when the Swiss guard come for me, they're next door. So it's really not a long commute for them.

Here's the AI, if you want to see the AI avatar of Father Justin, which kind of looks like the woman who painted over the Jesus. Oh, find that photo. That is a great photo. I love that one. But actually, the funny thing about that photo, Leo, is it's terrible. It's a terrible restoration. But because of how terrible it was and how much popularity that got, that town is now on the map. People visit just to see that terrible restoration.

We've been talking about this on this week in Google, the small businesses and big businesses who are losing traction as Google changes its search results to perhaps get rid of spammy and SEO-driven links. This is the problem. It's hard to know if this is Google responding to the crappification of the web.

or the crappic vacation of Google and Facebook. Yeah, or if it's part of this larger trend that I feel like people have been paying more attention to recently, which is the Google search team being increasingly influenced by Google ads and the money make. Yes. I'm sure none of that will be mentioned at Google IO. They're typically, I feel like very opaque when it comes to how search was like the nitty gritty behind how search results work.

in part because they don't want people to gain the system. But it's quite interesting to have as an undercurrent to this event to have it be a time where a lot of small, medium businesses as well as major media companies have seen a major hit to their SCO traffic based on just strange behind-the-scenes changes that no one can seem to explain.

This coincides with the loss of traffic from social. So it's pretty tough to have a website these days.

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

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

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

They have other priorities. Is some of this really Google hand waving trying to get us to, no, don't look at that. Look over here, AI. We're going to have AI. Here's the story from the Verge. They quote the story we've talked about a couple of weeks ago from HouseFresh, which is an air purifier reviews site. They wrote in February about how

They were losing traffic because people were creating pages that were bogus review pages, but we're getting all the traffic from Google. And now then we see that Google starts to cut the results on these other sites. It's gotten very sketch out there. And I guess the real issue is, what does Google owe the web?

What is the webo Google? And can you make money on the web these days? Or maybe the whole idea of a website with ads is flagging, is not as futurilous. The other stat I just throw in here is that 52% of all Americans, according to Pew, use ad blockers, more than half. Yeah, it's tough for everybody out there. Have you heard about or talked about the dead internet theory?

No, it doesn't sound good. It's a conspiracy theory. It's one of those conspiracy theories that's pretty much mostly true, which is that the rise in synthetic content, algorithmic curation bots and stuff like that is now the majority of the vast majority of the stuff on the internet. So this problem with

small websites getting traffic is, you know, as you pointed out from Google side, there's just so much garbage out there being automatically turned out. I've seen YouTube videos where people are like, yeah, you can write a book in three hours with chat TPT and they're writing like several books a day.

and just churning them out and as a book authors have to sort of, it's not about competing with an AI generated book, which is going to be absolute garbage, but it's just like getting

noticed when the number of players in the game is exponentially larger. I think that's a big, big thing that's happening. But the dead internet theory is at least fun. There's some true believers who take a very conspiratorial look at it, but it's a fun thing to search for and look at and talk to AI about. There's an excellent article in the Atlantic

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

true or it's the trend. Well, obviously, this was a scam. It's a scam too harsh. It was no. No, no, no, no. Look, I'm not going to call the rabbit a scam because I have one. I will call the NFT thing a scam. Yeah, that I think you're the same person who did this.

The CEO of Gamma was and is a guy named Jesse Liu. He's the co-founder of Rabbit. He's also on the board, by the way, at Teenage Engineering. Does this tarnish the Rabbit? We've also learned that the Rabbit really is just an Android device running an Android app, that the AI involved is chat GPT 3.5. And then every time you try to use it to do anything, it seems to fail. Have you ever been able to get an Uber with your Rabbit?

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

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

And this text doesn't look super retina. It's off. Also, why is my password manager not auto-filling my Spotify credentials? Oh, well, it turns out I'm not actually logging into a Spotify login through an OAuth connector, as I would expect. But instead, they've hidden a VM using a WebVNC client. So I'm actually logging into

some random computer in the cloud with my credentials. And that's how it's giving it access to my things, right? And then security people were able to pop some of those containers, not the ones where you log in, apparently, with your credentials, but they were able to log into some of the ones, I guess, where it's supposed to be doing the ordering of the Uber or the DoorDash or what have you. And that makes me pause very much. It goes, OK, I don't know how secure your cloud stuff is. And I am going to guess that you have not spent a lot of money

on security because you did this thing in six months. So of course you haven't. But I know they're not getting my Uber credentials. There's no way I would even attempt to order an Uber with it. They have made a raise $30 million to make the device 60. Sorry. They sold quite a few, what, a million of them? They sold a lot of them, right?

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

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

correct. So you got a deal. I've justified myself. Plus I get a toy from my graveyard collection of tech. The thing is we're having to buy it later. But for people who really thought that it was going to be

exactly what it showed off or didn't understand, you know, like the nature of these sorts of projects, I can understand how they feel misled was concerning to me. And some of this is anecdotal, but some of this is actually based on real stuff is that I know at least as of 10 days ago, if you canceled your order, they would refund people fairly quickly.

but a friend of mine she ordered one and she tried to cancel her and there's been a response and there've been anecdotal words reports that i've seen on reddit that they're not really being responsive to the to the order cancellations now uh... i can't speak to any of that i can't speak to my personal friend who you know when i actually told me oh yeah email them to cancel haven't heard anything that that makes me a little bit more concerned uh... maybe they've had more cancellations than they expected i don't know uh...

But yeah, I mean, it's not a scam, but it's also not what it was sold at.

Look, I'm back to our comments about AI and trust. Correct, but trust is, yeah. Here's an example again, something coming out that's not quite what it was. In a way, this is too bad. And I think that Google failings with the AI overview is too bad. A lot of this, because I think there is real promise. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's real promise with AI. I think we've already seen some amazing uses of it. I think that potentially AI could be amazing for human beings in so many ways.

It's very easy. We've seen it happen to fall into an AI winter where people throw up their hands, give up and move on. And I would hate to see these scams and failures chase people away from AI because I think the potential is so great. So isn't there a risk with all of this that we are going to scare people away from something that is potentially very good?

I think Christina buys everything. Partly she buys it cause she wants a collection of obsolete antiquated and weird gadgets. I have a feeling that our one will join that pile. You're watching the best of 2024 on this week in tech and we're so glad you're here. We continue the best of 2024 with one of the biggest breaches in 2024. Perfect for this time of year, snowflake.

Continuing saga, the snowflake breaches continue. Snowflake now, I think they said there's 155 companies that used snowflake software and that have been hacked as a result. So you can't completely blame AT&T for this. Snowflake is, oh good, look at their headline. Generative AI is easier in the cloud.

stuff like is a cloud solution that AT&T and many others were using and as a result breaches happen AT&T says criminals stole phone records of quote nearly all wireless customers nearly all wireless customers in a new data breach and oh by the way if they were calling you on any other carrier you're in there too and if they were calling you on a landline that's in there too

Friday. Don't worry, Leo. It's just metadata, which is, by the way, the most important kind, the one that is the most privacy invading. People think, well, it wasn't the actual

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

than an AT&T fund that we're interacting with during the six month period beginning May 1st, 2022 through October 31st, 2022. It's discovered in April. Yeah. It sounds like everybody is to blame because AT&T was not using any kind of multifactor security and snowflake didn't make them do it. So you can't fully blame snowflake.

No, but it seems like I mean, got stuff this important, not locking that down as well as you possibly could and not having multiple layers of authentication before you get in. And incidentally, it's not just the phone numbers. Some of the stolen records will include cell site identification numbers, which gives you a kind of a location data as well, not the GPS quality, but approximate location where the call or text message.

originated 110 AT&T customers will be notified if you are or have a hundred and a million million. Did I say under 10? I left an important part of that number. 110 million. There is an AT&T press release where you can read all about it and see if you were affected. How will I know? How will I know if your data was affected? They will contact you.

and let you know. I'll be curious because I had an AT&T account in that time period. So I'm waiting. I'm waiting for my call. Because I understand that they're not going to contact me because I have T-Mobile. But you're in there. If I was interacting with anybody on AT&T, which I do. Of course you did. I'm going to be in there too.

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

They're using all this data to do stuff. Oh, that's interesting. So TechCrunch says it's not clear why AT&T was storing customer data in Snowflake, and AT&T's spokesperson would not say. But good news, Denise Howell will.

So they're using Snowflake to do data analytics. They can use other cloud storage. They could have their own servers. Snowflake offers other services that these companies are using.

And I'm sure in the fine print of their terms of service with users, people are signing their life away and allowing those analytics to take place. But is it right? Is it good? Should we have companies out there pursuing different models saying, hey, we don't do this to you.

Uh-huh. Everybody's concerned about security. That's why so many people, Microsoft says 8.5 million Windows users installed CrowdStrike and the CrowdStrike sensors. Now CrowdStrike used to be a sponsor, so I know a little bit of how they operate, but I remember interviewing their CTO. And one of the things that makes CrowdStrike work so well is these sensors are out there in the world monitoring malicious traffic. So they have kind of a

an early warning system about all kinds of attacks going on. Unfortunately, on the 19th, a couple of days ago, CrowdStrike pushed a sensor that had a bug. Pretty bad bug. It forced a blue screen of death on Windows machines that were running CrowdStrike. Microsoft says it was 8.5 million Windows machines, but that underestimates the impact of it because

It was everywhere. Blue screens everywhere. Delta and America Airlines down. The Las Vegas sphere, a blue screen of death.

It was mind boggling. When did you learn about this, Lisa? I woke up to it. My phone blew up. They pushed it out in the early morning hours, and it was Australia, of course, at first saw this happen. You could hear the yells all the way up here in the Northern Hemisphere.

I we've heard from listeners who are IT professionals who have been up two or three nights in a row. There is a fix.

You remove a file from the CrowdStrike director. You got to boot into Sifmo to do it. Apparently, Microsoft has created a USB key that will perform the fix automatically. That's what they're saying. I haven't heard about anything about it. But it's all physical, right? You have to physically access. This is the problem. You got to get into it. You got to go to the machine.

One of our listeners in Twitch Social said, my feet are killing me. You got to go to every machine, reboot it in safe mode, remove the file, which you can do pretty quickly, and then you're good to go. But you got to do to each one. One by one. Holy cow, what a Friday it was. A great disturbance in the force. Millions of computers suddenly cried out in terror.

Suddenly silence. So what have we learned? We've learned that CrowdStrike's team that checks these things either missed a step or they're just not big enough or well staffed enough to do the kind of testing you need to do before you will do. They're one of the premier companies in security.

And then there's something wrong with their rollout process, then, because this is, you literally have one job and you didn't do it. Yeah. This is called a skill issue. This is a skill issue. I mean, I'm a dummy as far as IT, but it just, it seems like this isn't like a really deep into QA thing. It seems like a, like you just install it and turn the computer on and it doesn't work and you realize like, that's bad. That seems bad. Yeah. Why was? Yeah.

That's the thing is I'm wondering if they had a staff reduction last year that was linked to the company wanting to reduce head count by rolling out a return to office order. So people left, of course, and they've been reconfigured. And what I'm wondering is how many people and the QA and product launch teams are no longer there and are no longer insisting that we test the six ways to send it before it gets pushed out.

Because this seems like a serious failure on the part of the people who made the decision to say, yeah, yeah, it's fine, send it. They should not have made that decision, and they didn't have the right data to make that decision. And that means there was a breakdown somewhere in the chain.

Here's the toots, if you were, from our listener in Twitch Social Aid Acosta. So I just ended my second time, second overtime shift thanks to CrowdStrike today. What I've learned these past two days is primitive modern operating systems like Windows remain.

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

He says they should have better recovery options. And I think I probably agree with that. Sure, but also like don't break it. That feels like the first thing that should not happen. But yes, yeah. Well, I mean, Microsoft for this would be like blaming a human being for their cat perpetually knocking things off of a dresser. Like that's a good analogy. Cats be doing what cats be doing. But you should move things off the dresser, right?

or have a squirt bottle one of the other. But like someone who's kept me up all night last night. I'm not interested. It's time for tweet this week in tech. The show we covered the week's tech news. Our last in studio show in the east side studio. We're moving out this week. So we thought we'd do something kind of fun and special. Thanks to Alex Lindsay. We can.

Hello. It's in Scaryo. Scaryo. This is a 3D version of the show, which only people with vision pros can see. Is that right? You can open it. If you see it, if you see the link, you can actually use Safari to open it, and you can see a flat version of it. What's the point of that? But if you're watching a flat version, if you're watching a flat version, it's not as... Gary just got it. Look at him. I would watch...

But it will, you better off just watching the regular Twitch stream if you're going to watch a 2D version. But if you have, if you have Apple Vision Pro and you want to feel like you're part of the audience, you can do, see, hi, if you're in the Vision Pro, I can wave at you. And that should be dimensional. You should see it in 3D.

Is there any way to see it in the browser with like the two images side by side, then you can cross your eyes. Not really. The eyes that's always the thing to do. We used to have a switch that we could hit that we built into our into our compositors for that where it would swap the eyes and you get people real comfortable and you push a little button and they're like, oh, so. But the no, because the way that the way that the phone delivers this is an HMB HEVC.

And so what it does is it takes the left eye and it captures that and takes the right eye and only only sends the delta between the two. And it sends that out as a stream. It's much more efficient stream and that's how it's being delivered to the Apple vision pro. So it's not a true you can now with compressor.

have it converted to left and right, side-by-side SPS, or you can take SPS and convert it back to the MVA HEVC. So those tools are coming, but you can't do it in real time. So the Vision Pro needs to have it delivered in the way that it's designed to send it out.

Sorry. There we go. I'll leave it at that. No, no, no, no. Don't worry, guys. It's got to do. But I haven't even introduced this guy over here. It's got to mention. The tech sploder is in the house. We welcome back Jason Howell. Yeah. Of course, the host of AI inside with Jeff Jarvis now at a new time.

Oh, yeah. So while we've been doing it on Wednesdays, we just moved it to 10 because as someone pointed out, they were like, well, you know what, 11, you don't want your step in on Windows weekly. And I was like, you know, I want to cross my mind, but you're so right. Like I don't want to interfere. And you know, maybe that means more people show up. If you're into AI, that's the play. And you can watch that at youtube.com slash text bloder. Yeah. And then of course, the podcast downloads. Yeah.

We missed you, Jason. So nice to see you. Thank you. I miss being here. And it's so weird being here and seeing like panels removed. Yeah, your set is gone. Yeah. Yeah. I took that home, actually. You showed a pre-show. I took it home.

I think it looks really good, actually. I think I'm happy when the studio setup looks awesome. Yeah, well, we'll see. The new Addicts Studio. Also with us, Jason Snow. We wanted to have all in studio for our last, you know. It's great to be here. Especially with our good friend, dear friends, for the longest time. You just got to keep your Jason's next to each other. All my Jason's are on the left. Over here. Yeah. I keep my Jason's on the left and my Alex is on the right.

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

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

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

which is far more than it is on product. For obvious reasons. Yeah, it's like in the 70s versus in the 30s, 40s, Apple's hardware margins are really good, by the way. They're very, very good. But services, essentially, you do it once. It's time to be total profit. It's almost your profit. And for the Google search deal is pure profit. That's essentially the key. And I think that's one of the things that's deceiving about services is a significant chunk of that is Google.

Yeah, an App Store 30% is another big chunk of it. We think of it as, and they encourage us to think of it as things like Apple TV+, or Apple News+, but the truth is iCloud, AppleCare is in there, but a lot of this is the Google search stuff.

And it's by design. I mean, they've been pushing services because you can't keep on, I think they're right. There's at some point you saturate the world with iPhones. Exactly. And they knew, and this started seven or eight years ago, they made their first target about services revenue where they said, we are going to double our services revenue in the next three years or something. And they beat that. That was an easy target. They knew they were going to beat it.

If they are trying to satisfy Wall Street and Wall Street once growth, and as you said, Alex, they know that even though the iPhone and the Mac and the iPad are still growing, but they're growing slowly, they're not going to grow at 20% again. The services grows every year. And what I thought of this time is this is not a high quarter for iPhone sales. That'll come in the holiday quarter. Services keeps going up and the disparity in profit margin means we're close. I did the math. We're not there yet, but we are the closest we've ever been.

to Apple making more profit out of services than it does out of its hardware. And that is undoubtedly going to happen in the next generation. And again, I think that was completely by design. Yes, absolutely. And I also don't think that it's Apple abandoning. I think the danger is that people at Apple stop keeping their eye on the ball in terms of hardware because I do think that the services revenue stems entirely from the hardware. And if they're not successful selling their hardware, they're not going to have any success with their services.

The tail needs to not wag the dog. I'm not saying the tail is wagging the dog right now. And there's some people who are like, how dare you say that? It's like, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying. The iPhone is still a big part of the revenue. The iPhone is an enormous part. I'm just saying it's an interesting thing to watch when Apple starts making more profit from its services than it does from the devices it sells, which will probably happen next year.

It's kind of sad to leave the old place, but as I said, I'm happy up here. You're watching our best of 2024 on this week in tech.

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

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

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

I'm gonna break format a little bit briefly here because I'm a proud papa. And my son's new cookbook is coming out on Tuesday and I thought I just, I thought I'd get salt hank on just to talk a little bit about salt hank, about the cookbook, give them a little bit of a plug. And then we'll get to our panel. We've got a great panel for you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to somebody I know pretty well. Well, a long time member of the family since he was born. I've known this guy. My son, Henry Laport, better known as salt hank. What's going on? The author of a brand new cookbook, which comes out Tuesday from Simon and Schuster. Yes. Salt hank, a five napkin situation. Got it right here.

Look at this look at there is stuff in his mouth. I have a disgusting. It's more than a cookbook, though. Flip through it a little bit because it's really a picture book. I mean, this is on your coffee table is bonkers. Oh my god. What is that? Poutine? This is like basically animal fries. It's recreated animal fries from in and out, but we had to call them feral fries for copyright.

reasons that they are like just very gourmet versions of animal fries. That's one of the, honestly, my favorite. Somebody's asking, Keith and our Discord, don't parents just teach their kids how to cook so they can get them to make lunch for them. I want to tell you something. I have never had anything Hank has made. That's not completely true, I don't think. I've had your french fries, which are a miracle. You cook them like three times.

Well, it depends what kind of french fries are making. If you're doing shoe strings, cook them once, if you're doing like the Michelin star fries where you boil them, take them out, fry them, take them out and fry them again, that's the three times the thing. Henry's on his house boat where he does his salt tanks studio. It's actually called the Salt Lovers Club. We should get that straight. The Salt Lovers Club. Oh, that's just the salt company. So that's a little bit separate. That's we sell seasonings and pickles and stuff like that.

And that's the name of it. Yeah, Salt Lovers Club. And we have a big neon sign above kind of where it comes from. Yeah. Like when I see you cooking on the Insta, you're there in front of your sign that says the Salt Lovers Club right there like that. Well, that's just to promote the hack out of the salt company. But right now I'm like not. But isn't the salt company really just like a sideline for salt hank?

What do you mean? Like a side hustle, side business? Side hustle. Like Mr. B. Spurgers. Yeah, it's kind of like that. I mean, if you want to be like, if you want to start a product, that's kind of a way into like the longevity of the influencer world a little bit. And then you can, you know, make cool stuff like pickles. I literally can't wait. And by the way, really pumped to send you some of these pickles. They're disclaimer.

I am an investor in the pickle business. I think FTC regulations say that if I'm going to tell you promote something that I have a financial stake. You're an investor in all this. You gave me my first camera. So technically, you basically own a chunk of this entire business. Okay, where do I get paid off?

Owning a chunk means mainly I just yeah, I gave you cameras I what you were into D drones you have drones I want to work in this stuff and little do I know but you when you were a kid all you ever did is watch those extreme Food videos on YouTube. Yeah, really good food porn Matty Matheson my boy my daddy who loves you now by the way Isn't that cool that you've become friends with Matty Madison?

That part's pretty wild. I don't know if he knows how crazy it is for me when he calls me. I'm like, dude, I hear my hero. You were on his show just a couple of weeks ago. He woke you up. Yeah. It was literally, I was laying in bed right there, completely sleepy. He's like, hey, what's up? You're on the show. We're like, what's going on? Describe what you're doing right now. And then he's cursing you out for these steak sandwiches. And yet,

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

I had to like get him to come to a video with us. Oh, look at that. Oh, dipped and gypped in queso. Oh, man. Oh, huge. Maddie's doing the cooking. I recognize those tats. I literally didn't cook much at all during this video. I was just filming them like kind of go crazy. And I made the brown patties and the little lot of good things that we chopped up and put in the burrito button that Maddie was just going.

not in the kitchen. So if you like food porn, because this is what Henry grew up on his food porn, follow salt hank on Instagram salt underscore hank. Thank you, dad. Yes. And the cookbook.

Get the cookbook because the cookbook is out Tuesday and you can get 40% off a target right now. You get 40% off on Walmart. What's the sweepstakes? I can't do sweepstakes. That's illegal. So I won't. You could buy salt from the salt lovers club. What are you looking at right now?

I'm looking at your salt hank.comi.io. Oh, yeah, this is like the lintry thing. Yeah, it's got all got everything. You can buy the signed copies. Look at that. Hmm. Oh, yeah. And a crapload of them. But yeah, 40% off at Target and Amazon right now. Wait, wait, wait. How many did you sign like 2,500 or something? Oh, my God. Your hand must be killing you.

No, I actually taught me how to I didn't have a signature before and I did enough. You do. Yeah. 500. I was like, Oh, okay. Here it is. October 2nd, uh, salt hank will be at the Barnes and Noble and Mira Mesa, San Diego, California. Cooking or do you just, uh, do you do a reading from your book?

No, I wanted to do pop-ups. I thought that would have been like so cool to like do like if you buy a book you get a free sandwich like you know and just make a Bunch of sandwiches in all these cities, but but just gonna be in like Barnes and Nobles kind of doing little chats with people from those Okay, it's funny to do a reading from a cookbook

Now then you take the onions and you slice them. It's not that. He will also be in Los Angeles on the third at Diesel Brentwood. Owen Hahn, his sandwich buddy, he'll join him. San Francisco book passage up our way on the fifth. We love book passage. That's one of the best bookstores in the world in Chicago and Anderson's North Central College on October 7th. And in Brooklyn, October 8th powerhouse arena,

Brooklyn's a big one if anyone knows wishbone kitchen or Olivia teed their giant They're gonna be co-hosting with me for that one. So if your fans should come out to that It's gonna be sweet and the book comes out Tuesday. You could pre-order now 40% off at Walmart If you go to Hank's Instagram page, you will see that

I didn't really get to interview you. We're going to do the regular show now, Hank. No, yeah, do your thing. I don't want to come back Wednesday on twig because I know Paris and Jeff want to hang and I will interview then and find out how you got into this. Well, Wednesday is the first book tour. Do it from the hotel. It's okay. It's possible. I'll let you get Pacific. I got to check it with my own son. Won't even come. I would love to. You don't want to kick me off right now.

I mean this is the first day of the book tour but I absolutely will. That's okay Henry. I'm very proud of you. You've done you've done good son. Okay. Thank you guys. Sorry for interrupting. I love you to anybody that's listening. Take care. All right. Don't forget salt hank of five napkin situation. He did not pay me for this ad by the way. I just you know.

I just thought, hey, it's my son. I could do that. Benita, show the whole group here because this is a pretty special group of people for a 1,000 episode. You know, Twitter's gone through a lot of iterations and generations. It's almost 20 years and lots of different people have come and gone and so forth. But these are the cats that started. There's one face missing, though. Anybody who listened to our early episodes will say, hey,

Where's Kevin Rose? And Kevin couldn't be here, but he did send us this greeting.

Hey Leo, Kevin Rose here. Just wanted to say a huge congratulations. Really bummed I can't be there for episode number 1000. I'm actually going to be in London during the recording. Otherwise, I would 100% be there. I remember going up for episode number one. We were shooting in some little tiny cubby kind of back office thing on the ground. And that was just the beginning of watching you embark upon this amazing journey to create all this great content over the years and

You know i think back at that time in obviously with tech to be moving to los angeles and all the other things you could have done in media. The fact that you chose to take the entrepreneurial path is just really inspiring and i just want to say thank you for doing that thank you for going independent for building the media empire that you have today.

and for entertaining and informing all of us over many, many years and many, many episodes. So a couple quick reminders though, when we started this episode or we started this podcast, the iPhone didn't exist. Bitcoin was not invented. Social media and Facebook was one year old and it was a college only at that time. Twitter did not exist.

Windows XP was the dominant OS, and YouTube had just been founded in February of 2005. It's crazy what has happened and what we've witnessed, what has changed over the years. Netflix was also a mail-in service at that time, so it was mail-in only. There was no online streaming of Netflix.

And lastly, the fastest processor at that time was an Intel Pentium 4, and it went up to 3.8 gigahertz, which oddly doesn't seem far off from where they are today, but maybe that explains some of the problems.

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

Thanks. Thank you, Kevin. It's great to see all of you to such great memories. All of us were at Tech TV. I think that's how this all got started as we worked at Tech TV, which started in 1998. And I guess the picnic is for the 25th anniversary, is that right?

Wow, that's I think you remember David down. He was the studio. Yeah, I left. Yeah, more director. And he had a voice like this. He did. And he would call it the Speedway, Sware. Remember these? Everyone's a lot. So this is this is that I think. And Mark is him and Marcus Buick. Putting it together. So Marcus, Marcus was the sound guy. Great sound guy. Yeah. Who is that going to be? Oh, next Saturday.

well i guess i better uh... find my invitation it's uh... i think it's just an open invite as long as you're on the detective here's the problem it's face book isn't it face it exactly it's on it's on it's you've heard the start up it's called uh... it's all text-based it's called uh... uh... what's called and we'll see uh... no no no no it's a text-based it's a text-based event app called uh... partyful

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

is almost 20 years. Kevin, actually I'm glad he put that list together because I was thinking of doing it and getting around to it. Do we want X to go away or do we want X to get better or do we care?

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

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

that is a serious risk that's that's a real good some uh... a very concerned about more than destabilize or democracy actually fuel violence and uh... and i worry about that i think that that's that's a but what i don't know what we can do about it but it just really scares me cuz i don't think you want is in his right mind at this point whether or not it was a good financial investment

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

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

also continued to be sort of like the children's table at media, which even after him sort of hobbling it, it still isn't. It's still incredibly powerful.

I think he saw the power, I was very obvious the power was there, and I think he saw the power, and I don't think it was, look, the guy's on paper worth almost a trillion dollars, losing $44 billion, especially since he was able to finagle banks and to borrow lending him half of that, is not a huge cost for gaining what he did gain, which is an incredible

number of people who will laugh at his dad jokes i think that's true and i think although obviously a forced liquidation of his twitter holdings would uh... of his uh... tesla holdings to make uh... margin call would be really bad for who and cascade through a lot of his other carwood that what's this how would that happen

So if he has to, if, if like they want their interest payment and he can't make it because Twitter didn't have it and he staked his Tesla stock as collateral though for a liquidation and forcing a mass liquidation of Tesla stock would tank Tesla share price. And so that would be really bad for him. It'd be really bad for his future at Tesla. It might empower his board to finally do what they keep trying to do and, and, and kick him out and so on.

does it work out is isn't the board his uh... a tame board is not a tame board well i mean the board can be replaced right because that there's your holders and shareholders yeah i want to go back to the thing you said before about um... do we want x to fail so you know if you've if you've seen the documentary uh... fiddler on the roof uh... uh... if i want a rich man uh... so you know the tragedy of that movie it's not that they like

Um, that anatefka is a good place to live, right? Like the basic plot of, of, of filler on the roof is every 15 minutes, the cossacks ride through and kick the shit out of everyone, right? So, so if this is not a good place to live, but they're there because they love each other. And the reason the ending is tragic when they're all like, okay, we're leaving anatefka because the czar is kick the Jews out.

And you know i'm going to chicago and you're going to new york and he's going to crack off and we're just never gonna see each other again like nominally you think leaving a place where you get the beat out of you every 15 minutes would be a happy ending but the fact is that they're gonna lose each other yeah right and so i don't i don't care if if twitter succeeds or survives right but you know

How many communities were lost forever when live journal liquidated, right? Or, you know, became what it became today, the, you know, Russian hell. So you think Twitter is Anatefka?

Yeah, Twitter is on a tough cut. That's really an interesting take. It really is. And the czar is Elon? Yeah, Elon is the czar. You need to write that article, Corey. I think that's the best take I've heard yet. Yeah. And Cat Turd is the Cossack. And Drip is one of the people we love. We lost. Yeah. Drill, I mean, not drill. Drill. I knew you meant.

If I were an instrument, you know what? That actually, as crazy as that analogy, Corey's doctor or his analogy was. I've used it several times since. And I noticed we are still using X. We still stream live on X every week. It's hard to leave your friends behind, isn't it? Until you're kicked out anyway. You're watching the best of this weekend tech for 2024. We're so glad you're here. Happy holidays. All we go with the best of this weekend tech with

I think one of the most touching or at least most interesting moments of the year, advice for parents when it comes to their kids online.

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

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

Right. And the parent has the ultimate responsibility of citing whether even to give the kid a phone.

Or not. Yes, I agree. I agree. But I think there are limits to that. Not every parent is super tech savvy, and that goes into other things as well. I know. And kids are also going to go in and get a beer sometimes at the convenience store. Absolutely. Nothing's perfect. But I think parents are really the ones who should make these decisions. And I'm not against giving them tools. But parental controls are tools.

I think we agree, but I think currently in our world of tech and internet.

the tools are maybe a little bit lacking. And they could be better. What do you think, Wesley? Because you've got a 12-year-old. So you're right in the middle of this right now. So the phone's locked down. They can't use it outside of our view. And so it stays home. They can't take it. It doesn't leave the house. And we have the parental control. So I know what apps are in there. And they can't install new apps without talking to us first. They have no social media access.

And what is their reaction to, especially the 12-year-old? They don't know what they're missing because they don't experience it. They're not taking anything away from them. It's normal. This is your job. First place. You also don't let them have a beer. I mean, it's just, it's your job. There's a big beer. There's a great. There's a big conversation happening here about porn sites, I guess, all over the world, about porn sites. And I think we are a little bit

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

changing the relationship. Kids, very young teenagers sometimes have with sexuality and sexual partners. And so the idea that you need to lock down porn sites and to have them do age verification properly is not as ridiculous as we would think it would be because Wesley, you're saying the phones are locked down. Do they not have access to the internet? Maybe they don't.

and maybe, you know, that's the way- They don't. They don't. They don't have the browsers. Right. No browser. The cry of like, these companies aren't doing the same thing, coming from the same party that says, we can't teach sex education in schools. You can't, you can't shrug your responsibility. You can't just say on one hand,

they can't be exposed, but on the other hand, we can't give them the tools so that they can even understand what can cannot be done. Removing something and just saying, let's just act like it doesn't exist is not a solution.

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

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

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

I just find it very strange that right now we're discussing earlier on the show, the idea that the Republican Party wants to do away with Section 232, limit corporations ability to filter trash from their platforms. And at the same time, the same party is saying that, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, we must protect the children and we must have age-gated verification for lewd content. Good luck sorting out what that means.

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

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

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

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

I don't want to get the government. I don't. Forget about the government. Let's say there is a new technique, the facial recognition technique, that with absolute accuracy, the camera on your phone can say how old you are and then give you access to age-appropriate stuff. Would that be okay? Is that okay, Patrick? Yeah, I think that's the way I would phrase it better.

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

Oh, okay. So, I mean, I've heard that if France, you give your kids wine sometimes watered down a little bit. I've heard that. Well, a long time ago, probably. Yes, but not so much. Wesley makes a really good point. I want to go back to Wes's point about sexual education in the United States because it might sound odd to our foreign audiences, but in the US, what counts as lewd has various interpretations across the political spectrum based on religion mostly.

in different states, by the way. Different states. And so what we're saying here is we're framing this around parents taking care of children. And I think it's going to be very hard to argue against that. But the way this would be implemented, I think, Patrick, in the US in a practical sense, without Leo's magical machine that knows my age perfectly every time, is that we're going to have people who are very, very opposed to any discussion of human sexuality at all trying to ban that from anyone over the age of 18 or.

So let's say you're gay or you think you might be gay and you want, and you're 12 years old and you want to know what does that mean? What am I? That could be, that would very likely by. Count as lewd in Oklahoma. Yeah. And Utah and Louisiana. It's really very hypothetical because there is no way of asserting, ascertaining somebody's age without violating every user's privacy. In the UK for a while, they talked about, oh, you just go into a pub.

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

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

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

Yeah, it's complicated. But I see where you're coming from. And I understand that concern. It's intractable. It's really difficult. And no matter what you do, there are going to be negatives to it, which are serious and concerning. All right.

Since this is the pop-up podcast, I'm just going to say this to all the other parents listening. One bit of advice that I got was that the world is a very large place and your job is not to keep the world out because that's an impossible task. Your job is to give your kids the tool to take on all the things that they're going to experience because you don't have control about what they'll eventually run into.

That's right. So giving them the tools mentally and emotionally and understanding how they can navigate the world that is none under your control, that is your primary role. Because if your role or your thinking is that I'm just going to keep the world out, that's not going to happen. Bingo. Well said. Well said, Wesley. Yes, but. And also, don't call me, but.

I know I think that that's that's absolutely true. It's true. That's how I raise my kids. I was a very less a fair parent. I let them play video games as long as they wanted them, whatever. But I did what you said, which is I tried to instill in them. And it's not, you know, as a parent, you're really our role model, uh, try to instill in them the values and the judgment to navigate the world that I knew that I couldn't control even when, frankly, even when they were young, uh, you know,

After about 10, the peer group becomes much more important than the parenting group. So you want to make sure they're prepared for that. I agree with you, Wesley. I think that's true. You don't like this metric. It's not like you're making it seem a little bit. The subtext is

So laws don't matter. And I know that's not what you mean, Wesley, obviously. But there are still laws and still things that collect the laws. It's a bad word, I think, in the US. It's things that we collectively decide, OK, this, we should agree, all of us, kids shouldn't do. And so we'll do what we can to make sure they don't do it.

You know, this election ended up being very interesting. Turns out Elon Musk now with the FEC, you know, information has come out, donated a quarter of a billion dollars, or very nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to President Trump's campaign.

And he got a good payout. I think he got his money's worth because he is very much part of the transition team. New York Times story, I think a couple of days ago actually says it's not just Elon, but it's Elon's buddies. And they are not just doing doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency. They are in on the interviews.

Right at the beginning, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison of Oracle were house guests, went to the first transition meeting. I brought the two richest people in the world today. Trump told his advisors, what did you bring? His mom may, Musk has actually been in, apparently, on some of the meetings.

So Elon brought his mom. He also brought a whole bunch of people, including this Jade Burchall. He's the head of Elon Musk's family office. He's been interviewing candidates for the job, for jobs at the State Department, even though that's not his bailiwick.

FTC, FCC, Mark Andreessen is there, of course, the guy who invented Netscape Navigator when he was a student at, you know, which I'm gonna call it, in Illinois, and at the NCSA in Illinois, and he, let's see, who else? Sean McGuire?

uh... who is a caltech phd in physics and investor so koya capital he's been interviewing candidates for defense department jobs david sachs well and that's the big story david sachs who uh... spoke at the republican convention uh... is the host of the all-in podcast is now the white house ai and cryptos are despite the fact that he actually as active as he is he's a part of the paper film mafia he doesn't really have any

active participation in an AI company or a crypto company. I guess that's good. I guess. That we know of. That we know of. All of this has done one thing for sure that we can see, which has propelled Bitcoin well over $100,000 a coin. This is good for crypto. Doge is up. Everything's up. Mean coins are up. Hot to a coin is up. Not that one.

No, not that one's up and then down. But that's another story. I am, if you're an optimist, I think it would be a good time to say, you know, maybe this is all going to work out. The government's going to get much more efficient. Right. And that Bitcoin is going to end up maybe the US will create a digital coin itself, a stable coin that would then kind of, I don't know, I don't understand economics well enough to know what the impact of that would be.

I don't think anybody that's with you. It looks like we might end up with a cryptocurrency reserve. And I don't understand the implications of that. President El-Salvo is very happy about his cryptocurrency reserve, right?

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

But having said that, I'm kind of with Lou here. I'm certainly not bullish and I'm certainly thinking if you don't have money to lose, then you shouldn't be investing in any of these things. But just being completely candid, I don't think that it's a bad idea to talk with whoever handles your investments or if you do it yourself to look at diversifying into crypto if you're looking for the next

I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to touch it. I just don't like something. I agree. You know, I'm dumb. I mean, there's a lot of Bitcoin billionaires. A lot of them, a lot of that money went into the campaign in 2024. So I'm obviously dumb, but I don't want to buy an asset that I don't understand why the asset is valued at what it's valued at, that it's just a random

To me, it's buying a lottery ticket. Just don't put all of your retirement funds into crypto. Well, that's for sure. Absolutely not. Only put stuff you could afford to lose in it. Exactly. But even then, I mean, all I'm saying is at this point, because just my own, similar to Harry, I put $2,000 in a Robinhood account a few years ago. And a lot of that was in Doge when Doge was cheap. And then I didn't sell the Doge when it was at a really good price, because

my nephew had just been born and I wound up like it wound up being underwater on the investment for the better part of three years. It is now

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

stake my retirement or anything important on it. Well, my wife, well, every time we go to Vegas, she or Reno, she has 20 bucks. She says, I'm going to play the slot. Still, it's gone. She's twice now one six hundred and nine hundred dollars. So she's way up. Right. And now any.

No, you know, the temptation is then for me to say, wow, I got to get into this. This is great. You're making a mint out of this. But we know what the reality is. There's also, and I worry about Bitcoin, and maybe I'll address this to you because you're more bullish on it, Lou, but

I worry that what Bitcoin has done is enabled ransomware and all sorts of crime because it is close to untraceable, almost as close to untraceable as cash. It's a lot harder to transfer a million dollars in cash from your headquarters in Virginia Beach to, you know, hungry.

But it also costs a lot in terms of energy use. There are gas fees. Even though Hock Toop maybe hadn't invested in her own coin or it wasn't doing insider trading, she made lots of money on the fees because there's fees. And so all of these things and the speed with which the transaction happens is unpredictable. It's slow unless you pay more to the

minor to validate it, even though now they've got proof of work, so it's not as bad as it was. I think the whole thing has lots of negatives that people don't even know about or don't consider. They're mostly just saying, oh, but I could make so much money.

I feel like we're promoting a technology that is not an ideal technology.

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

And some of this stuff is solvable, or partially solvable, like the sustainability aspect. There's already been some progress with some cryptocurrency, and there's a lot more that can be done. And there's startups working on it since the original way that the stuff was verified was incredibly energy efficient. But that's just not like a given for the whole idea.

Well, we'll find out because the anti well, many considered anti cryptocurrency chairman of the Fed. I'm sorry of the SEC Gary Gensler will be replaced now by a guy named Paul Atkins.

And he is, as far as we can tell, pretty pro cryptocurrency, right? And so while Gensler has been kind of saying, and I kind of agreed with him, crypto currencies should be regulated as securities. But the crypto community does not want it to be seen as a security. And I think that they're going to get their way with this new guy, Paul Atkins.

The President of El Salvador has now got a crypto treasury of $600 million from his initial investment in Bitcoin.

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

Right. Right. But is it great policy? Right. I think the people who are looking at this aren't considering that. They're just saying, well, I don't care because I'm going to make a mint. I'll get mine. I don't understand. I don't understand, even if you're bullish on this stuff, I don't understand. I mean, other than the greed aspect, I don't understand why this would not be a security. That's the thing that I've never understood. It seems to me that it should be capital gains taxes on it. Would you go currently? Absolutely. Yeah.

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

There was a conspiracy theory before the election that Trump didn't really want to govern. He liked being president, and he liked the benefits of it, including putting all the side-all of his convictions, which it apparently has.

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

Protege would be the vice president. He'd be sitting there with musk and teal and and all of these people running the country. It kind of looks like maybe that wasn't a conspiracy theory or at least that's what happened. So now is that a bad thing? Maybe these guys, I mean, they're all great businessmen, right? They know how to run companies. They know how to launch rockets. They know how to. So maybe they should be running the country.

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

are billionaires just because they were in the right place at the right time, but they think they're geniuses, and there's a certain arrogance that comes with that. That worries me a little bit. These are all the blanketed thought of JFK bringing in the Harvard elite, the best and the brightest, right? Or Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals, bringing in the best minds

to help run the country. And maybe that's what's going to happen. I mean, yes, they are arrogant, but so as virtually everybody else at that time. You'll get to be president with us. Trying to be optimistic. I would hope that maybe there's the potential for them.

by sitting in on these meetings to soak up some knowledge they don't already have and that they have enough of a humble side to realize that they are not experts on foreign policy or all these other things outside of their real house.

They're in there for the interviews, maybe just to make sure that the person is competent and smart. And then somebody else is going to do the other part of the interview. I mean, we don't know. It's also not clear how long this will last because I don't like Trump. Trump doesn't get a long wall forever with other people who are as needy as Elon Musk is and that this could just. There's much attention, right? I love with Elon right now. I mean, this could help with him. This could all be kind of brave. He was in love with everybody.

He was in love with Kim Jong Un as well, and he seemed to like Putin quite a bit. That is a story that will continue all year long. Don't you think we will cover it? Not from a political point of view, but from the technology point of view. That's what we do. We like to keep you up to date on what's happening in technology so that you can use it

to make your life better, to help you at your work, help you have fun. I'm very proud of what we do at Twitten, and we really enjoy doing it. I hope you will continue to watch or listen in the new year. And of course, if you're not yet a club twit member, I hope you'll consider joining. That helps us a lot, keeping things on the air.

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