TWiT 1064: TWiT Best 0f 2025 - 2025's Best Moments on TWiT

32:01Amy Webb:uh code uh openai does have a command line version of codex cli they've updated uh that as well you know uh i use a note-taking app called obsidian which has a ridiculous number of plugins and one of the things i've thought might be really useful for me i can't write a obsidian plugin it's kind of javascript plus uh you know it's a little it's beyond my ken but i could certainly vibe code plugins for myself oh yeah and i'm starting to think really how useful that would be uh writing bash scripts you know for your cron jobs all these are there are a lot of little jobs that you could do that you could easily you know they're not going to blow the world up if you use them.

32:45I think this is the thing that is the most interesting for me. A friend of mine just tweeted, you know, I've been vibe coding replacements for various SaaS products that I pay for. I'm up to build equivalent of three for three attempts. And I think that's kind of where we're faced. And what I find fascinating as well is that things are changing so fast that I would fully expect a product to be released where someone says, you know, describe the SaaS company that you want or the SaaS product you want. And it just takes care of all of the data storage. We'll just make it for you right there. Oh, you're a landlord of only pigs?

33:24Great. Oh, you're a farmer that only grows dandelions? Perfect. Here's the product for you. Because you just need the constraints that that problem has. And then the AI will generate it for you.

33:35Amy Webb:We have a sponsor, OutSystems, that did for years, did low code, right? And now they've added AI assistance so that you can basically, instead of their whole pitches, used to be you decide build or buy. Now you just, you know, you buy our system and you build whatever you want. You don't have to buy anything ever again. And do you think it makes it easier for startups? Because the paradigm of startups was always you had, you know, one guy with the idea, one guy who had the business insight, and then you needed a technical co-founder. Right. the guy that can actually build the thing that you had the insight for.

34:14Do you think it replaces the technical co-founder? I think this is now the time of the business guy. They have been waiting in the wings of all the MBAs. My reaction exactly, Devinder. They're like sitting back there in every business school. David Zavloff, you're in. There's a little thing they filled out that said looking for a tech co-founder, and they're just ripping it up and being like, finally, it's our time. Don't need a co-founder. Zipping up their sweater vests. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

34:45Amy Webb:I hate to interrupt, especially Harper Reid. He is fascinating. But we have an ad for our special year-end episode, and we're very grateful to Zscaler. We've been talking to you about Zscaler for the whole year, our sponsor for the holiday episode of This Week in Tech. You know, one of the things that Zscaler does that's so brilliant is it solves a problem businesses have with AI. the potential rewards of ai are fantastic right every business has to look at whether they can use ai to improve efficiencies to streamline production to write code but there's also risks the loss of sensitive data and of course bad guys are using ai against us creating amazing phishing emails that are indistinguishable from the real thing and and attacks malware attacks at scale at a speed that nobody's seen before.

35:38Amy Webb:Generative AI is helping bad guys as much as it's helping businesses these days. So there are some real AI threats, but Zscaler can solve that problem. You know, there are 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications by users inadvertently. ChatGPT and Microsoft co-pilot this year saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. It's easy to do by accident, but there is a solution, a modern approach. It's Zscaler's Zero Trust plus AI. It does really a whole lot of things. Of course, because Zscaler is a Zero Trust security solution, it removes your attack's surface. It secures your data, but it also works with AI to safeguard your use of public and private AI.

36:26Amy Webb:It protects you against those crazy AI-powered phishing attacks. It protects you against ransomware. Nothing does better than zero trust against ransomware. You don't have to trust me. Ask Siva. He's the director of security and infrastructure at Zuora. He uses eScaler and he has this to say about it. AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security. The benefit of zScaler with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees are using various Gen.I. tools. So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information, according to companies' data classification, does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc.

37:13Amy Webb:With Zero Trust Plus AI, you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition. You can remain resilient, even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. Now back to the show. One of our biggest topics of this year in AI, of course, there are a lot, but one of the real concerns people have is job loss. And of course, we had a real expert on the show to talk about this, Jason Calacanis, and our Twit panel talking about AI. Watch. for much of my career you know in in as an adult the last 35 years or so in tech we had um i was kind of indoctrinated into the tech's going to happen so we might as well build it and society will figure out a way it's this inevitability of tech right so we just might as well accelerate into it i think everybody's going to benefit at least in the tech industry that's still the general belief.

38:19Amy Webb:Like I would say that you could try to stop it, but why it's going to happen whether you want to or not. Yeah. And I was at a conference this week and I've been, you know, since I'm on the inside now as an investor, I started as a journalist entrepreneur and then became an investor. So I went from, you know, an outsider trying to figure out what was going on inside the room to being inside the room where they make the decisions of, you know, who to give a check to and what to bet on. And that starts the whole process of building this technology. So what I realized is I think the job displacement this time will be different.

38:49Everybody tries to make an analogy towards the industrial revolution, stopping farming and only 1 % of people work in agriculture today. But when I started doing the back of the envelope math and I started looking at how quick this displacement is happening, I've come to the conclusion that in the next 10 years, we're going to see serious job displacement. And we were talking about this prior to ChatGPT being lost. And you might remember Sam Altman doing when he was at Y Combinator, a study on universal basic income that he funded. And everybody talked about it constantly, very publicly. And the last year -

39:22Amy Webb:That's kind of been the antidote to job losses. Oh, well, don't worry, because there's going to be so much surplus, thanks to technology, that we'll be able to pay everybody a universal basic income. Yes. There's really like two or three different solutions to the job destruction problem. We can get into that. It always seemed to me kind of a little hand wavy because where's all that money going to come from? It's extremely hand wavy. Who's paying for this UBI? Is it the federal government? I mean, we have UBI today in the form of a lot of different programs we have. Entitlements, yeah. If you took all the entitlements together and you just wrote people a check, and there's people who have theorized just doing this.

40:03But how big a check would it be? Actually, you could do the math. I think it'd probably be low thousands per month for people who are at the bottom of the income ladder. So you can't even pay rent in Petaluma for low thousands a month. I know. It would be like unemployment or food stamps and these kind of things. Yeah, it would be subsistence. So, you know, the question is, will we create enough new jobs to make up for the ones that are lost, right? So the typing pool went away, the mailroom went away, photocopy room went away. You know, we've watched all these jobs go away over time. This time, I just think we have to be a little more thoughtful about it because, you know, today Tesla launched their Austin self-driving.

40:41I got to drive last week in one of those prototypes. Oh, wow.

40:45Amy Webb:Yeah. And immediately, by the way, the state of Texas passed a law saying you got to have a permit to do that. Yeah. So people are, yeah. Obviously aimed at Elon. I mean, Elon does have a safety driver still, which lets him off the hook for a while. Yeah. I think they have a safety operator. It's interesting. It's in the passenger side. Oh, he's not in front of the wheel? not in front of the wheel but there's a stop oh that's not encouraging it's it's kind of like right in between what waymo did there's a big stop button and a pullover button on the dashboard so if something happens and they're going only low speed in a small area um and then i was talking to zipline which is before you before you move on how was that ride was it i know you're friends with elon yeah are you still buddies yeah oh yeah still best friends yeah um i have um uh the latest hardware for Tesla Juniper Model Y, and I put a couple hundred miles on it doing self-driving.

41:36I think the cyber cabs, the robo taxis have a little bit of a better version of that. It feels a little more aggressive and confident. That's Elon. Well, yeah.

41:48Amy Webb:It was doing rolling stops. It was doing California stops for a while. And somebody said, well, that's because Elon trained it and that's how Elon drives. Well, it is a neural net. That's how it drives. So it's studying humans. I do think that this technology is here and it works. It should just be very regulated and you should have to have a safety driver for the first 10 ,000 miles or 10 ,000 rides, maybe a million. So GM gave up on cruise and basically dissolved the division. Google's going ahead with Waymo big time. You can't go around San Francisco without seeing a thousand Waymo every other car.

42:23Amy Webb:Yeah. Elon wants to get into this business, but he's not alone. This is the one of the hot businesses right now is robo taxis. There'll be many winners. Volkswagen has a very competitive product. There's company Pony AI. There's WeRide. Amazon has Zoox. Zoox. Yeah, there are in the United States. Oh, well, we'll never know what we'll have in the United States. Jason, you know, one of the things when you work outside. These technologies are taking the low-hanging fruits of the gig economy, which is one of the few things. Yes. It's sad. And I know people have alluded to this before, but essentially the key to driving this with capitalism is that it's replacing the most expensive and least efficient part of the capitalist system, which is the people.

43:14Which sounds great, and it will increase your profits short term until there's no one who can afford to buy your goods and services.

43:19Amy Webb:Yeah, the people are now out of work. i think that i remember reading an estimate there was something i think 14 million truck drivers in the united states and of course uh trucks are one of the very first things that will go autonomous absolutely uh so in his article we'll get back to when jason comes back but he talks about three solutions the ubi new job creation which is all you know often the response to industrial disruption or technological disruption uh it was in the industrial era people you know stopped making buggy whips but found oh this is his laptop overheated in the sun oh welcome to los angeles uh and then his third solution he says his favorite is ai vacation uh which surprises me coming from jason i will have to ask him about this uh he's also talking about andy jassy at amazon uh saying get ready because we're going to replace a lot of executives Okay, so a couple of trends that I've seen at these conferences that I've been doing.

44:24First, everyone loves to talk about AI, but almost everyone doesn't think that their job can be done by AI. Mine can't.

44:32Amy Webb:You couldn't have an AI podcaster, could you? Right. I think Google already does. Yeah, yeah. But one of the other issues has also been that they're thinking of this as an overlay on top of the existing system. We can fix it with X, Y, and Z, universal basic income, et cetera, et cetera. Social services increase. But what we're going to have with the coming of AI as it gets perfected, it's not just the changing of the economic structure of the society. It's going to change society itself. We could actually see the reversal of what we saw starting with the industrial revolution where population centers rushed to the cities.

45:12If we're all on UBI and if most of those repetitive jobs are now being done by AI, There's no reason to stay in expensive city centers. So what happens when your population disperses? Well, it changes the way that people relate to one another. It changes the way that communities are built. It changes the way that demographics are handled. You start seeing balkanization of communities because why not live with the people that you like if you no longer have to live in big cities? So these are all the concerns that are being brought up right now in the Vatican. Just a couple of yards away, there are high-level discussions about who do we bring in?

45:47in to have these conversations not just universal basic income not just economists but you have to bring in sociologists you have to bring in psychologists you have to bring in experts in ai it's it's basically going to touch every part of every human society across the planet i just fundamentally don't trust the tech industry to make changes to people's jobs in the way they have in the past. Like you could say that Amazon and Amazon warehouses have created as many jobs as Amazon took away. But I don't think that people working in Amazon fulfillment centers is a sustainable job.

46:31Amy Webb:And let the robots have that one. In fact, Amazon's moving rapidly in that direction. I mean, yeah, I mean, but I mean, I just I think I mean, even like as in Jason's article says for 24 hours a day, these$10 ,000 robots will get the job done without bathroom breaks or threatening a union drive. They cost less than$1 an hour. And like, yeah, that's like, this is what the tech companies want because you can abuse robots in a way that you can't get away with abusing humans. Yeah. Humans have, uh, sorry about that. My laptop. He's in the shade now. Now I'm in the shade. Um, you know, you're, if everybody's going to have to have radical self-reliance, Amanda.

47:15This idea that the corporation is there for you and you're going to be a corporate person for X number of years, that's gone.

47:22Amy Webb:We've been moving in that direction for a while. And that's where we started, right? There was no concept that the corporation would be with you for your entire life. Well, there was feudalism, I guess, yeah. But now, self-reliance is going to be what it's all about, and these are going to be complicated issues. Andy Jassy wrote a piece this week, and when a CEO writes a manifesto, and publishes it to everybody, you know, in the company, and then publishes it publicly before it gets leaked to Amanda and TechCrunch, you know, it's important. And he goes through this, and there's about two dozen examples of AI, and what they're working on.

48:00And in that story, he mentions towards the end that there will be a different footprint of the company. And, And in my piece that I wrote on my Substack, I explained, and I haven't written a piece in a long time, years, but I felt like I needed to bring this up because to your point, Amanda, the tech industry, we just build the most efficient companies with the highest profits that lower the prices for consumers. That's called capitalism. And it's the best system in the world for creating abundance, but it's the most imperfect one. It's just the best one we've figured out so far. And, you know, when he writes a story like that on the Amazon website, I think this is a way of him preparing investors for higher profits and employees for less jobs.

48:47And this is a high and low situation, Leo. You know, you are seeing it in white collar jobs doing chores. So if you were at a company and your job consisted of chores, which is anything other than the core product. So on a podcast, there's somebody who's, you know, the host and they edit it. That's like the core product. But everybody around it, you know, if there's an accountant, a lawyer, an operations person, most of those jobs, which are would be defined as chores, things necessary to produce the main thing.

49:16Amy Webb:those are all going away and so and they're going to go away radical um independence or self-sufficiency doesn't answer the question of but how am i going to pay the rent and make a living i agree you know a lot of people do jobs they hate they don't like that are demeaning there there isn't a lot of dignity and a lot of jobs but at the same time people need to eat Yeah, this is my big concern. I think there's a number of people in the tech industry who have hit peak employment. In other words, their job at Google or Amazon that they had for$300 ,000 a year or something amazing, they may not be able to find that job as a middle manager.

49:59And if you look at companies like Uber, Google, Microsoft, they have less employees now than they did three or four years ago, and they're making twice as much money. Well, that's the other side of this.

50:10Amy Webb:And I think the real issue might end up being all of this really looks like it's not to make society better, but to enrich a small number of people, the executives, the CEOs, the investors. And it's just going to drive incoming inequality crazy. And I don't think that that's a sustainable way for a society. It's not to be right. It's not. Every time we've seen that in the past, there's been a guillotine involved. The thing is, when you hear tech execs talking about radical self-reliance, and I understand that, I understand that need, the problem is they think that only applies to the people. if we move into what looks to be the final destination of AI, corporations will need radical self-reliance in the sense that they will no longer be able to judge their profitability quarter to quarter as the success metric for their companies.

51:09If you no longer have the same massive pool of consumers to consume your products and goods, it no longer becomes whether or not you're providing services that people want. It's do you provide services for the good of that society? society yeah it changes the rules entirely and they're not looking at that part i think they

51:26Amy Webb:should also be worried about a vast and growing underclass that is not half this apple event on uh tuesday i guess it was wednesday we well no it was tuesday it was tuesday had nothing of surprise right i mean everything that they announced had already been leaked which is kind of unusual for apple there was no one more thing no surprises or were there not everything I mean, there were a lot of rumors that were wrong, too, right? A lot of stuff about the AirPods, stuff about AirPods that weren't leaked. You know, there were certainly a number of things that were either leaked wrong. And none of that, you know, you're never going to see Bloomberg, you know, go on and say, by the way, we were wrong about seven out of the 28 things that we had here.

52:08You know, they're never going to do that.

52:10Amy Webb:What Mark Gurman always says, and I think it's some of it's actually legit, is these These are pre-announced products and Apple often will pull a product before it's announced. Like they'll change their mind on it. That's true. And also sometimes. For instance, infrared cameras supposedly might be in the AirPods. Obviously, you're not going to pull that because you have to be. They've been making them for months. So whatever features are in the AirPods, the new AirPod Pros are obviously were kind of locked in months ago. The reason to have the event, though, we hear lots of rumors, but the rumors don't put it in context for why are they doing it?

52:49What's the purpose that they think these features could have? And so it's like having a collection of parts to make a computer, but it doesn't run anything, right? It doesn't do anything until you actually put it together. you know the event is where they put it together and they tell us like this is why we're doing it this is who we're aiming this for this is why i think it'll make a difference there's another word for that that's called smart well it's also storytelling too yeah i mean storytelling marketing

53:18Amy Webb:it's all roughly the same idea which is here's a set of features here's a set of facts let us tell you let us shape what that means and to some degree that that's what the briefings are too is to kind of give you an idea of what Apple's thinking is about all this. Go ahead, Dan. Oh, I think it's exactly that. And Jason hit the keyword, it is context and saying who this product is intended for. And that storytelling element is pretty important. And earned media is even for Apple, they need earned media. What we're doing right now earns them media. Every review, every post, it will shut out their competition and earn them millions of dollars of media all right otherwise would have to buy so i know that victoria is uh i know you're somewhat restrained but you can talk about the event right and you can yeah like you live blogged it on on the verge i did i did do i did have feelings and i blogged while it was happening um it was you and allison johnson and jacob uh castronakis were there yeah yeah it was it was a weird event i'll say just because um you know i think going in you can assess what the thesis of the event will be and this year it was a little hard to figure out what that was and then when we got there and we were sitting down in the theater it became pretty clear that the thesis was design design they even showed a video at the beginning celebrating you know the click wheel and apple's you know heritage of design this what is it six years since johnny i have left the company they're back on design I think at one point in the live blog, I couldn't, you know, promote alcoholism, but I kind of wanted to say drink if you hear the word design again, because it was just brought up so often.

55:09You know, you saw it when they were talking about the iPhone Air, just everything that went into it and, you know, the floofy, you know, interstitial movie stuff. And then, you know, they talked about liquid glass and I'm of the opinion it's liquid ass. I'm not a liquid glass fan.

55:30Amy Webb:I haven't. Believe it or not. I haven't heard that yet. Wow. That's somebody who hates it. It just makes it's fine, except in certain situations. You know, I've been using the beta for the last couple of months. They're just situations where it becomes illegible because of how the transparency is. I find it strains my eyes over a long period of use. Other people are like, oh, maybe you should get your eyes checked. Listen, I've been very upfront that I have garbage eyeballs and that I can't use dark mode because that strains my eyes over a long period of time. I'm stuck with light mode, even though dark mode is much cooler looking.

56:11I'm sure that a lot of people find the transparency effect really cool. I have a harder time reading and I get annoyed.

56:22Amy Webb:So there's absolutely no question it reduces accessibility. And the good news is there is a switch. You can turn it off. I agree with you. I don't think I have garbage eyeballs, but I agree with you. It does not enhance legibility. Let's put it that way. It's more, it's sizzle, more sizzle than steak. Yeah. Yeah. And it feels like a lot of the whole thing was like orange. It's orange. So, you know, we're talking about design that way. I like your strawberry sweater, but it's orange. Yes. So I'm not an orange lover, but every once in a while, there'll be something that's orange that I will accept.

56:58And, you know, with the leaks for the iPhone Pro Max or the Pro Series, I was looking at the orange in the leaks and I was like, oh, no, it's looking like a doo-doo brown kind of orange.

57:09Amy Webb:Yeah, yeah. We didn't know what the orange was. People were saying, oh, no, that's going to be copper. It's going to be more muted because Apple's not traditionally a bright color. Certainly not on the pro devices. It's certainly not. It's very orange. It's extremely orange. It's a pumpkin spice orange. It's not a sorbet orange. Oh, please don't say it's pumpkin spice. Oh, no. By the way, I ordered orange. I even have an orange case. I am ready. I am going all orange. I can't wait. It's an autumnal orange. So like a very nice, deep orange. it's pretty it's not like biohazard not pumpkin spice just pumpkin it's pumpkin orange it's not biohazard orange it's not gonna like burn your eyeballs out uh but it seemed pretty divisive online i sure sorry sorry you have an orange chair you must like orange the orange sweater like we've got all kinds of like where's your orange yeah where's your embargo too you know that's a hint that's right chair is an easter eggs so um go ahead sorry the event uh usually we don't see uh what happens at the apple campus there was outside by the rainbow uh stage or was it inside it was inside the space were you there too jason i was yeah okay yeah dan were you there no no i'm i mean i write for jason every two months but i haven't been a journalist for a minute i've never been a journalist so there you go so uh it was out inside the steve jobs theater yes oh okay that's nice yeah um and then tim cooks to the campus well it's it's before you go in right they don't let us too close to the right to the circle right a little bit uh and well did you get the golf cart treatment because victoria got the golf cart i i did get the golf cart.

59:01Did you have music on your golf cart? No, I didn't have any music on it. I only had music in the golf cart at Dub Dub. I didn't have any music this time. I feel like Dub Dub gets the fancier golf carts. This could just be my memory playing tricks, but I'm pretty sure when we were on the golf carts at Dub Dub, I was like, ooh. Yeah, and I think there are speakers around the actual spaceship. There are speakers. Like Disneyland. There's speakers in the bushes. There are speakers in the bushes for sure. That's hysterical. For sure. Yeah, yeah.

59:32Amy Webb:So, okay, you're sitting, here's, I have some of your pictures, Victoria. You're sitting in the beautiful Steve Jobs Theater with, I've got to say this, the awe-dropping logo of the Apple looked like it was pretty hot, which is not what you want in a phone, but I guess they wanted to tout the vapor cooling. I don't know why they did that. Honestly, I didn't know what was awe-dropping about the, because usually, you know, the fans go and they think about what does the tagline of the event mean? And sometimes it makes a lot of sense. Sometimes like the time flies event spring forward. You can kind of go, ah, I see it.

1:00:11I don't really know what the odd dropping was. Cause I was like, why not just call it jaw dropping? Under odd. Yeah. Marketing definitely came up with that one. It was like, this is like the, the, the proper title would have been, it would have been like a little bit more than incremental you know would have been probably but they're never going to use that right they're never going to use that that's why they don't

1:00:34Amy Webb:hire me to do their marketing but next year is supposed to be the little bit more than just a little bit two years next year well there's gonna be if we think a folding phone and we'll get to the slim phone because i think the air is kind of a preak it's like the john the baptist to the jesus phone and then excuse me excuse the i apologize the heresy and then um and then uh the year after will be even more odd dropping because that'll be the 20th anniversary of the iphone and so yeah completely invisible like you won't even see it like it'll float it'll literally float this one didn't float that's you just give apple a thousand dollars so victoria there were a lot of influencers at the event yes this was uh apple's gotten more and more focused on influencers over over uh reporters i would guess oh yes there was um so there's the annual walk down the the spiral staircase um you know reporters generally get there early there's a little light snacks around because you're going to be running around to get a hands-on right after this thing and you know you're a reporter because you pull out that little spiral bound reporter's notebook right Right.

1:01:42Amy Webb:And a pen or pencil behind your ear and you'll lift them back. Yeah, I'm pretty analog. So I do have those things. I do have like a big A5 notebook. You do. Good on you. Good on you. But, you know, usually when I first started going to these events, maybe four or five years ago, I don't remember. They all blur together. But, you know, you'd go down. It was pretty brisk because everyone's like, I need to get my seat. I need to be well positioned for the live blog. I need to get the perfect angle for the photo. Are the seats reserved or? no it's like it's like southwest airlines you have to yeah that's right okay first come first serve so you know you have some reporters who are just like hawks they know they have like a sixth sense of like when when the descent is going to begin and so they kind of hang around the staircases oh so there's the doors open are they velvet ropes what how do they signal just i i i'm never at the at the front because my my priority is getting to the hands-on so i sit at the back on purpose i'm not trying to get smart you want to get it same see just like southwest you you want to sit up close to the exit so you can be off the plane yeah quick um but you know with each subsequent year that i've been going there's more and more selfie sticks being held up and yeah because everyone's gonna be like come with me while i go to the iphone launch event here we are walking down the thing and you can see them doing the making the content as you go painstakingly slow down this spiral staircase and you're just like oh my god let me just said there was somebody dancing there was an influencer uh she you know was just kind of doing a thing where she had her i was just watching her fascinated because she had her phone and she was just going like and she's dancing to this like invisible music that i know she's to edit it or whatnot and she just did a whole thing getting the shot i was watching her and i was like oh i'm just here trying to get my wi-fi on my laptop you're doing a whole production over there and then in the hands-on she was doing the same kind of thing and i'm sure that's just for her audience and to to make that sort of um content but it's interesting to see these events that were pretty much geared towards media to start discourse in the history of tech journalism as far as I've had a career, kind of get co-opted.

1:04:03I don't know if co-opted is the right word, but just to see influencers have a bigger seat at the table and in many cases get prioritized was really interesting. I think the Made by Google event about a month ago was like a really, that was a really interesting change.

1:04:22Amy Webb:The Jimmy Fallon event. Yeah, I was at that event as well in the front row and I was just like, what is happening? This is terrible. feel like i'm in an episode of wandavision and i just like something is uncanny and something is wrong and it's because that event was not for me it was not for the nerds it was not for the pixel gadget lovers it was for an audience that yeah i would argue that was maybe not for that was produced by people who did not think about who this is for it was for nobody um yeah and you know somebody different you know i said this to some google people and it was for someone different and i went who and they went just different so rug emoji they're they're trying to reach the normies and they don't want to say normies because that's insulting but that's what they're trying to do is reach normies yeah but like apple i think allen no yeah right i think mistake uh i said this during the pre-show and i'll just repeat it here for the larger audience But Vic's reporting guided me through and Jason's as well, but guided me through especially the IoT portions of this event in large part because her reporting is authentic and it's honest.

1:05:34And YouTube was loaded with those ridiculous influencers. Some are fantastic. Some are just reading the press release. In fact, the vast majority of YouTubers I saw were just reading off a press release. It was very difficult to tell, to have insights into the event and the products and to say, you know, what Jason said a few moments ago, the context, to put this into context. Who are these products for? What story is being told? And is this something that is amazing? Or is this like, Victoria, in your reporting, is this within the context of IoT or health or something that is maybe very good for you, but not like jaw-dropping, aw-dropping?

1:06:19Amy Webb:As somebody in our chat room said, it was naw-dropping. Naw-dropping. Hey, don't let me interrupt. I know we're having a blast here reliving 2025, but I thought this would be a good time to mention something we do every year around this time that's very important to us and to our ad sales. It's our Twit survey. We do it because we don't really, and no podcast does, know anything about you. That's, I think, a good thing. We respect your privacy. But we also would like to know a little bit about you to the degree you're willing to help us out. just some basic information that helps us go to advertisers and say things like, well, 80 % of our audience is IT decision makers, that kind of thing.

1:07:01Amy Webb:That's why we do this annual survey. It should only take a few minutes of your time. As I said, it is one of the ways you can contribute to keeping TWIT on the air. If you would like to before too long in the next couple of weeks, do it now while you're watching. Go to twit.tv slash survey26. 2026. It's our annual 2026 Twit listener and viewer survey. It's very important to us. And I thank you. I really appreciate. And of course, if you don't want to do it or there's questions you don't want to answer, that's fine too. But anyway, you can help us out. We appreciate it. All right. Now back to the show.

1:07:37Do you have like five minutes? Okay. Can you please come on to the show and tell Leo about the computer that you built from scratch? And just, it'll be worth it i promise come here just you gotta give him headphones or something though this is now

1:07:50Amy Webb:he's just gonna sit down i'll sit next to him here can you hear what's going on yeah yeah just start from the explain like the tour de france thing and then this is hey brian first of all great to meet you finally after all this time i don't know i'm a big fan big fan this is a kind of i'm a little excited oh that's great well we got two questions for you but first of all you you just built a computer we're talking about privacy and we're talking about privacy and how lots of regulations around the books trying to ban kids from like age verification but you built something that circumvents everything and also relevant to the point you have a teenage daughter so true but you're also parents what happened was uh amy wanted to watch the tour de france and she didn't like the american commentators and so uh we kept so we'd paid for all the uh legal access to it and everything else, but you got the American version of it.

1:08:47And so I took it upon myself to figure out if I could get her the European version. And so relatively straightforward setup, put in a VPN, figured it out, got ourselves an account over in England, and then proceeded to get it to stream, which was a small technical problem, but solvable. But that got me thinking, could I make a laptop that was completely disassociated to myself. Oh, interesting. So could I create a laptop that had no back connection to me? And that started a process. Actually, this was my experiment of using chat GPT to see, you know, I would use it as kind of a planner and whatnot.

1:09:31I learned that chat GPT makes many, many mistakes very confidently. Yes. And so there was a lot of debugging that. But basically, I figured out how to set up a laptop from scratch.

1:09:44Amy Webb:Now, I didn't want to go into a nation state problem. So if you're using Windows, you've got to use a Microsoft account, which immediately identifies you. It turns out you don't. You can actually get a trial account. So anyway, through a long process of back and forth, and I wasn't going for nation state security. The insane things that you did, though, because that's... So one of the problems is... Amy's coaching you. Well, she's right, because one of the problems is getting the VPN set up. You have to buy access to the VPN. So how do you do that? So it turns out - There are some that take crypto, I think.

1:10:17Some that take crypto. I wasn't ready to tackle the crypto beast. That's not something I'm familiar with and I didn't want to take it on. Right. But it turns out a company called Molvad will allow you to buy prepaid Molvad cards anonymously through, I got mine through Best Buy. And you just walk in and take that. So you go to Best Buy, you buy a card, and you don't want to associate you have to buy cash you go down no pictures no no no pictures and you go in and you get your mulved vpn and you pay cash for it because okay otherwise the credit card's attached to it no no credit cards and then once you have the the vpn access through

1:10:56Amy Webb:the credit card now you have to somehow get this laptop online by the way joe says you can also sell it send mulved cash in an envelope you can but then you have to provide an address to say Oh, that's right. I thought about that. So one of the tricks is you now have this MoVAD VPN access. So you're able to mask your computer. But how do you set it up for the first time? How do you get this laptop online just enough to get it to log into MoVAD and then go silent? And that was a bit of a puzzle. And it turns out public libraries. ah so i spent some time and i had i drove around to several public libraries before i could figure out because i kept getting locked out for various reasons of you know extra security um but anyway i managed to finally get online finally get into mulvad with a totally private untraceable back to myself account and then once mulvad was installed now you're masked behind their vpn and they have a very aggressive VPN structure with multi-hop and various other things that hide you quite well.

1:12:05So once you were then cloaked behind the VPN, then the next step was setting up everything else. And so you had to get a Windows version that was stripped down and all the bloatware was removed. You had to get a Firefox extension with all the phone home stuff shut down and all the whatnot. So that's actually been sort of auto-figured out by a lot of people before me. and I was just following their task. But the hard part was trying to figure out how to get that initial contact. So now I have this laptop that technically is not traceable back to myself. Well, wait a minute. He had, so Leo, Brian's little key base group.

1:12:42You guys had your geek friends over. Oh yeah, I didn't want to. Well, some of them, listen. Shout out to them. They were amazing. They came over and all it took was some barbecue and they were willing to. Penetration testing. And they set it up and did a pen.

1:12:55Amy Webb:Oh, they actually tried to attack you, tried to de-anonymize you. Yeah, so they set up a ghost Wi-Fi account that was on one of their sniffers things. And I'm probably using some of these words out of alignment, but you get the general idea. And so I connected to this ghost account that they were sniffing. And it turns out Mulved is really, really good at blocking everything. So even on a reboot and a fresh startup, it would never expose the IP or anything else. No leaking, IP leaking, no DNS leaking. Modern laptops don't let you do IP Mac address changing. No. They're built in to prevent it. So I use a USB plug-in one that is capable of doing Mac address hiding because apparently that's what it's basically built for.

1:13:44Amy Webb:So that was a USB Wi-Fi adapter that did allow you to rotate Mac addresses. But now I've got a stealth Mac address hooked up to a stealth laptop. And then I got a little crazy. I set up a cell phone modem so that theoretically it could only get tracked to a cell site. You couldn't get it close enough to the house. But again, if you get into the nation state level security, you've got to basically build the laptop, use it once and then shred it. Shred it immediately. If you're trying to. Just add a curious. first of all brian what's your last name so we can give you a lower third when we when we edit this wolf w-o-o-l-f brian wolf w-o-o-l-f yeah okay okay and what do you want in your lower third uh ophthalmologist uh privacy advocate uh random crazy geek yeah how about just you know amy's crazy husband amy's crazy husband okay uh wow that so i mean it does beg the question what the hell do you need that for nothing it serves no general purpose it was just an exercise it was just a fun game of trying to separate out but the yes and the you are not an engineer no so the fact that he was able to build this i mean he can buy all the skincare products in california that he wants as a 11 you can have retin a up your wazoo if you wanted to but he he was able to do this you know he's got a lot of background but like he was able to do this on his own it's interesting thanks to ai no thank you legitimately it was my experiment with chat gpt i wanted to learn how to like i know some people are uh what's it called assistant programming there's a term for it vibe coding programming yeah and uh so i'm not a programmer but i was like uh using it as a tool um to see this is really an interesting area now because people are doing things that they couldn't do before you know earlier we're going to talk about ram prices and i was curious uh what percentage of the market uh micron had and i just add ask gemini it's on my google voice all my google devices now and it told me oh yes 20 i mean it's really facts are at your fingertips in a way that we never have before.

1:16:04What really amazed me is how confident ChatGP is wrong. That's the problem. It's confidently wrong. So if you don't know enough to know that it's snowballing you, for example, it gave me, I was trying to set up a stealth profile under Firefox and there was someone who's already figured this out and you run a script and that script then strips out all the bad stuff. Anyway, so I said, okay, here's the website to go get this script. and I click on it and it's all in Thai, the language of Thailand.

1:16:34Amy Webb:But one night in Bangkok, you know people in Thailand, my friend. All right. Well done. Well done. Just ask Murray Head. He can tell you. I go back to ChatGPT and I'm like, this is all in the language of Thai. Are you sure this is right? And of course it goes like, oh, no good catch. You know, that site's been compromised. But multiple times, if you didn't have a good background structure of what you wanted it to do, it was very easy to be led astray. And that was really interesting to me, kind of proving what AI can do. And again, it was a tool I could never have done this without. But at the same time, if I didn't have the base knowledge to play with it, it would have left me.

1:17:12So it just kind of showed me a little bit about what AI is capable of and what it is not capable of. Very interesting.

1:17:17Amy Webb:I think it's one of the reasons I like to use AI orchestrators like Perplexity or Kagi Assistant, because they are much more focused on actual resources and they always give you links to the information and so forth. And I find it a lot easier to vet the information I get from them than just raw chat GPT or although Gemini has become awfully good. I have to say thanks to Google's backend of search. All right. Hang on, because I do have another question for you. Okay. uh and you're i'm giving i'm unfortunately launching this at you without any uh preparation prior preparation but there uh i saw a story in fast company in fact when i put it in because i thought oh i wonder if we can get brian to talk about this there's a new fda approved glasses by essalor of course uh to slow nearsightedness in kids and i'm just curious oh that is so funny tomorrow I actually have a meeting with Essilor set up to discuss that very product.

1:18:18So I can give you the basic background of how the concept works. I don't know how this particular paragraph works.

1:18:24Amy Webb:Hang on because we're going to take a break, but I would like to talk about that. Just give me a minute to do an ad. Brian Wolf is our guest, along with Amy Webb and Kathy Gellis. It's great to have all three of you on the show. And yes, I think Father Robert, you know what? we maybe should get Brian and father Robert together. Our, we, our favorite hacker is actually a Vatican priest who is an expert in fuzzing his identity online. He's, he actually intentionally creates multiple identities to fuzz information gathering about him. He's become quite adept at it. I think maybe we should get you two together and do a little special.

1:19:03Amy Webb:I could definitely use a lot of tips. I think it'd be, well, I think it'd be interesting to talk about. We will, we'll get on, get on that. job before we switch topics is to make sure that legal process can't undo what you're trying to do to subpoena you right can they and anybody again amy talked about the links on the chain any of those links on the chain are in theory targets that somebody will try to use legal process to find whatever footprint you have left and then they'll go up the stream to see if they can put together an identity so to to frustrate that technically is great but that may not be enough.

1:19:39And my job is to make sure that the First Amendment act acts to protect things because anonymous speech is lawful and only undo. Yeah, it's it's it's protected by the First Amendment. And there's not enough case law that has fully cemented that protection from the practical incursions of legal process, search warrants, subpoenas, grand jury subpoenas, all sorts of different things and this is an issue that needs more attention too uh i agree i agree um i think

1:20:10Amy Webb:brian's done everything he can to be non-subpoenaable because if there's no information about your identity admitted it but um well that's true i mean you've you've ruined the whole thing brian we now know your name your address your phone number so don't try anything okay yes like if If we're trying to make sure that the law works in this regard is really tricky, even as a practitioner and even where the law should work, it doesn't always work well. So if you can if you can make it that no none of these links in the chain have something useful to disclose. Great. You're much better off than somebody who just has to hope that it won't get disclosed.

1:20:49Amy Webb:Right. Well, that's it for the best of 2025. 2025, but you know who really is the best of 2025? Our amazing Twit team. Anthony Nielsen sitting next to me right now overseeing this. He is our VP for creative content. Benito Gonzalez, who produces Twit, technical directs it, often edits it. We'll probably be editing this. Of course, Kevin King also often edits Twit. John Ashley, who is of course on MacBreak Weekly, but does a lot of the work around the studio, one of our great editors. I can't forget Burke, who keeps the studio running and brings his dog Lily by once in a while for a little breath of fresh air.

1:21:34Amy Webb:Lisa, my beautiful wife and our CEO, and she runs a great team. Ty, our marketing director. Sebastian, Viva, and Debbie in our continuity department. It's a small family. It's a tight-knit family, but they work very hard. behind the scenes to give you what you see on every episode on our network. And of course, really deep thanks to all of our hosts, so many wonderful people who take time on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening, or sometimes in the middle of the night on a Monday, to do This Week in Tech and all of our other shows too, for that matter. We really appreciate all of them. But you know who I'm most grateful to?

1:22:13Amy Webb:It's you. 20 years we've been doing this, And it wouldn't be two decades of this show without your kind forbearance. If you didn't listen, there'd be really no point. And I really appreciate you letting us do this show and bring this to you every week. I hope you like what you hear. I guess you must if you're even listening to the holiday show. Thank you. We couldn't do it without you, your support. and of course a deep thanks to our club to it members who give us the financial support as well as their moral support that financial support makes a very big difference to our bottom line and we really really appreciate you too I I'm very grateful to be able to sit in this every week and do this show it is an absolute honor and a privilege I want to thank you for that and I look forward to many many more years of doing it with your support and we'll be back Back in 2026 for a great year, there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening in tech.

1:23:14Amy Webb:And I can promise you, we will talk about it. We will cover it. We'll bring you insight. We'll bring you a little fun as well. Every Sunday on This Week in Tech. Thank you, all of you. I hope you're having a great holiday. Wish you all the best for a peaceful and prosperous 2026. We'll see you in the new year. And now, as I have said for 20 years, and I have to say it again, happily so, another twit is in the can. Happy New Year, everybody.