TWiG 766 transcript

May 2nd 2024

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

0:00:01 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this weekend, google.

Jeff Jarvis is here, paris Martineau is here. Of course, we've got Alphabet's results. It was a very good quarter enough to put them into the $2 trillion club Congratulations. They celebrated by adding farts to the Android phone app. Okay, that's very mature. And then the Rabbit R1. Is it just an Android phone with one app? All that and more coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twig. This is Twig this week in Google, episode 766 for May Day 2024. Area man Buys Onion. It's time for Twig this Week in Google, a show where we cover the latest news from Google and the Googleverse, which is Twitter and AI. We do a lot of AI these days. I bet you're not surprised. Jeff Jarvis is here. He is the host of the AI Inside Show with Jason Howell every Wednesday morning. He comes here in the Wednesday afternoon to do our this Week in Google show. He is also the emeritus professor at the Latin Larry Town professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Craig Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City.

0:01:25 - Jeff Jarvis
University of Newark. So yesterday I held an event We'll talk about it more, I'm sure, in a minute, but I wanted to do this preamble at Civic Hall, which is this new wonderful space in New York which Craig Newmark helped pay for, and Craig has an office there. And I brought Craig down, he gave a welcome for our event and, it so happens, the sound guy, kevin I'm pretty sure I hope that's your name, kevin was there. I'm walking down the hall looking for the restroom. He said Mr Jarvis, you want the restroom? I thought, boy, he can really read my name tag from the distance. He said no, no, I'm a Twig fan, oh, bob's Twig. So here, by my first fanboy moment, I saw it's great. And so then craig came in. So I said, craig, you got to meet somebody and I brought him over and I said this is craig. Craig, craig newmark.

0:02:12 - Leo Laporte
Nobody really liked my joke very much. Craig probably didn't even like it. You should have sung him the pigeon man song and then he would have been yeah, yeah, also here. Uh, actually they finally met in person. Paris martineau from the information, martineau zero one on the signal, and you and jeff hobnobbed photographic evidence I went to jeff's event at civic hall.

0:02:36 - Paris Martineau
It was lovely, uh, and we got a photo together for proof of life that we both exist in meat space you said you learned uh, you learned a bit, quite a bit, in the morning from the morning session.

0:02:46 - Leo Laporte
You liked it. There we are.

0:02:46 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it was fantastic, it was super informative.

0:02:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you so much.

0:02:50 - Paris Martineau
Really interesting.

0:02:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeff is a great emcee, but I mean, we all know that You're so great Mike Masnick did a super, super presentation of the dangers to the open internet by all this copyright stuff. He did 150 slides in five minutes. That's the way to do.

0:03:04 - Paris Martineau
His was really funny too, it was great, it was just wonderful.

0:03:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not surprised. Yeah, guard styro. Uh, who's the editor of vg, which is the the new york times of norway? I? Said how do you say vg in norwegian? And he said vg. He gave a great presentation about all the rather rather than suing AI companies there. They're trying to figure out how to use AI for better journalism and they're just doing amazing things. Why can't we be more like Norway?

0:03:37 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah.

0:03:38 - Paris Martineau
I was amazed by all the different ways they're integrating AI into their CMS to allow, like they have, a Slack channel where, instead of people pinging their data journalists with dumb questions, it'll just automatically kind of answer the questions for them. Yeah, it was quite well done.

0:03:53 - Jeff Jarvis
They have an editing buddy to put the stories through. They found that people read short summaries of stories, so they have the AI writing those because the reporters hate writing them. So they have the AI writing those because the reporters hate writing them.

0:04:05 - Paris Martineau
Oh, one thing I thought was interesting is, if they want to like put their stories on social, they have a tool where, essentially, you can be like oh, I want to. You know, I've got a video that was embedded in this story. Here's kind of the text that we want to have it on like a vertical video and then you can pick from like a handful of different like emotions or tones for the video and it creates oh, we use that.

0:04:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I generated video. You know those clips that we send you. That's how we do those. Yeah, those are, yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, here in america, uh, google has added fart sounds to its phone calling app hey, is it the changelog?

0:04:43 - Jeff Jarvis
that was the changelog.

0:04:44 - Leo Laporte
That was the only thing in the changelog I know, but it's so american right, uh, audio emoji so that you're on a phone call with somebody you can press applause, crying cheers or, yes, a poop emoji I guess makes a fart sound okay, I actually really get behind this because I think we all need to uh, be pivoting to kind of a shock jock um yeah, basically you're making your phone call into morning radio yeah, I want to.

0:05:13 - Paris Martineau
Every phone call should be morning zoo oh man, there's clapping, laughing party.

0:05:19 - Leo Laporte
There's a trombone, sad trombone. There's poop and there's a sting, but I'm pumped, you know, a rim shot so you put this in in your texts you will be able no in your phone call.

So this is rolling out, right now I looked at today because I tried to do it to somebody but I couldn't, uh, but look for it in your google a phone app. So you're making a phone call and in the settings I think there's a more button. Yeah, there is. There's a three dot more button and you'll see if you've got an audio emoji. I really wanted to play it for y'all, but I don't have it yet. There does seem, according to nine to five googled, to be a limit on how often you can use these sounds. There's a cool down in between that prevents you from I think, from harassing people.

0:06:10 - Jeff Jarvis
You farted too often.

0:06:11 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's right, so pause briefly.

0:06:14 - Jeff Jarvis
You know where it's going to get used is spam calls.

0:06:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

0:06:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Somebody's calling you. That's how you get back at Spamorus.

0:06:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think you're right. So it's in the beta channel version 128. It'll be launching for all users in the weeks to come and that's your google change. I just couldn't the juxt. Thank you very much. There you go thank you the juxtaposition between all this stuff they're doing with AI in Norwegian newsrooms and this Farting.

0:06:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That's American Says it all Farting and suing.

0:06:49 - Leo Laporte
All we do is fart and sue, fart and sue, and sometimes, as in the case of Donald Trump, we do it both at the same time.

0:06:55 - Jeff Jarvis
So Sorry, you didn't mean to get me. And by the way, let's just make clear, Howard Stern, the original shock jock is no longer a shock jock. He doesn't do it anymore. Instead of farting, he has the President of the United States on.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
So this is really interesting because Biden will not give an interview to the New York Times, and by the way. I saw your piece slamming the New York Times no. But at the same time as they said no, no, no to the nation's newspaper of record, they said yes, yes, yes to Howard Stern, and it was an amazing.

0:07:26 - Jeff Jarvis
You hear it by chance? No, was it. It was phenomenal. Yeah, it was amazing. Howard is with more than an hour um, I learned more about biden's character and soul from that interview. I'll have to anything I've ever heard, uh, and it's classic. Howard stern in his best interview ways I love he starts off you, you do too. I'm surrounded by Stern lovers. I'm just so mad at myself. I wanted to set my alarm Monday morning to call him, because he actually answers my calls.

0:07:55 - Leo Laporte
He knows how I want to call in. He appears on the show regularly.

0:08:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, not regularly, but when I have something to say. I had something to say. I wanted to praise him. I emailed Gary Delabate over the weekend saying I hope you make the whole interview public. It's necessary for the democracy.

Anyway, howard starts off getting Biden to talk about his father. Not that there was anything necessarily new to hear, but it was really illuminating about his character and his upbringing and how he became who he was. He had him talk about his first wife and that tragedy. Uh, in a way that was was quite amazing. Um and um. The finally yeah, got to some stuff, but but then the you know the newspapers are going to make fun of them. So the times. There was political coverage this week that says that ag seltzberger, now the chairman of the times company and publisher of the Times newspaper, is, according to an unnamed journalist of the Times, basically blessing all of the anti-Biden age coverage they've been doing, because AG is pissed off that Biden hasn't given an interview, he considers this his birthright and that the publisher of the Times should interview every president. It did used to be that way.

0:09:07 - Benito Gonzalez
That was kind of a regular thing, but AG Salzberger is not a journalist.

0:09:11 - Leo Laporte
even he just is the owner?

0:09:14 - Jeff Jarvis
He is no, he is no. He did good journalistic work. He did his time outside the Times Company. No, he has journalistic stripes, but this is petulant BS. And so the Times then responded this is what made me set off and I said I've had it with the Times, the Times is broken. I finally said it out loud. The Times' response was not self-reflection. The Times' response was still smashing Biden for not interviewing us. And so Biden that is a little petulant the interview friday with howard stern. And then at the white house correspondence dinner, he makes a point of saying you mentioned interview. Yeah, howard stern. Yeah, not at the time I'm curious though.

0:09:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean, has biden done any interviews with, like actual journalists recently? Uh, very recently, no, but he's also not doing the big places, I mean it makes sense, I guess, from a pr strategy, that you would say, hey, let's try and get your story out there in a much lighter, more favorable light with an interview with someone like howard versus yeah, what's probably going to be a hard-hitting, difficult interview you weren't born when bill clinton went on the arsenio hall show to play the saxophone, but that was actually considered.

0:10:28 - Leo Laporte
I've seen that video though In 1991, when he did that, it was considered groundbreaking, because presidents usually were more dignified than that, but also a major success in bringing out the vote for Bill Clinton. So I think that that's what's going on, and it makes me mad because for the same reason that Biden appeared on Howard Stern, he also has a TikTok as a campaign, has a TikTok account at the same time as he's banning it. And just it's really to me pandering to young people saying well, you know, it's the same reason. They brought influencers into the white house, influencers they'll never bring me in and and then you know, and then ban tiktok, right?

I mean it's like, come on, yeah. By the way, just so you know, here it is on the howard stern website, howardsterncom, they put a little tiny 59 second clip in public. Oh, I want to watch more press watch more. Oh, look, there it is president joe biden video. I have to subscribe to sirius xm and I sure as hell I'm not going to do that because they are the evil empire, so I guess I won't be seeing it radio, radio, bitter radio beef.

0:11:40 - Paris Martineau
Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute wait a minute.

0:11:42 - Leo Laporte
Buy a car with sirius xm in it okay, almost all new cars come with it for six months some limited time and then see how many emails, mails, letters, calls, how many times they try to bill you you can't once they glom onto you that you can never get rid of sirius xm. It's a nightmare company and it's dead meat because it's a satellite radio company. Who the hell needs that? Have you ever heard of a smartphone? Anyway, howard, you're still just a bit of radio.

No no, I'm not. I don't have any. Look, I quit radio. I'm out of radio. I'm a podcaster, don't you know? We mention all this not because it has anything to do with tech, but jeff is in the bag for howard stern, so baba buoy to y'all.

0:12:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I am baba buoy to us all baba buoy to my, my favorite, one of my favorite moments. Wait a minute, I take it back.

0:12:31 - Leo Laporte
Podcast are available via sirius xm. I love those guys. I think large-scale marketing is great. I've just been handed this note whoops, never mind well.

0:12:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's just like. Howard hates podcasts and makes fun of podcasts. It's a podcast, he's not radio and all that. And then Sirius XM does podcasts, so now he has to be nice to them. When I reviewed him the first time in TV Guide, my favorite line was that Howard is more than the sum of his farts.

0:12:59 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's really good.

0:13:07 - Leo Laporte
I can never really get past the fact that at one point he had a guy playing the piano with his penis on the radio.

0:13:12 - Jeff Jarvis
That was pretty much great when I stopped creativity and howard stern.

0:13:14 - Leo Laporte
That was it. I never listened again and I know everybody says, oh no, no, it's the new, he's a great interviewer, that's he's a phenomenal.

0:13:22 - Paris Martineau
There are lots of great interviews, formative radio experiences of my childhood was being in the car, when there was a time where like howard would do this bit, where if someone came like late to the studio they'd prank them and one of his producers sat. This guy, sal, had like showed up late and it was also the day they were supposed to like renew their contract for the next decade. And they go on this whole hour-long diatribe of telling everybody in the studio that they're canceling the show just to prank sal and like everybody's crying, this guy is gonna lose his job. He's devastated and after an hour of committing to the bit, he's like what happened today, sal? And he's like what? He's like you were late, right? And he's like, yeah, he's like what happens when you get late? And he's like you get goofed on.

And he's like, yeah, you get goofed on I remember like being in the car listening to that and be like this is radio gold well, this proves how hip your parents are.

0:14:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that they would play howard stern in front of you? That's risky, that's pain, that's edgy, it's pain, yeah I'm sorry, I'm sorry sorry, he's brilliant, he's the best. Oh, he's not brilliant all right here he is yes, he is fart man. You know he had a character, you know this oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he had a boy, he had a movie in a movie, yeah, yeah well, do you think the bits on our show are any?

0:14:42 - Leo Laporte
better.

0:14:43 - Paris Martineau
Yes we don't, we don't. We've opened multiple shows in the last month by just listening to AI songs and laughing yeah, but we celebrate the body electric.

0:14:54 - Leo Laporte
We don't exploit people, we don't exploit people, god. Bitter old radio part.

0:15:01 - Jeff Jarvis
We would never do a prank on air.

0:15:03 - Leo Laporte
He's a nightmare exploiter. I'm sorry I I don't, I can't anyway.

0:15:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, the rabbit r1, once again paris, and I find kismet, I know I think I'm glad you guys yeah, please don't have me over, you're left out.

0:15:18 - Leo Laporte
You can have your howard stern listening party on your own, you, he punks you well that's a good idea I read his book. I saw the movie. I've listened to him many, many times. I'm not, I'm not against him, I'm just I'm you're just a bitter old radio fart I I feel like it's like bill clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall. It's kind of blatant pandering.

0:15:49 - Paris Martineau
And I guess, as a politician you've got to do that.

0:15:51 - PC
Well, I guess you have to do that as a politician.

0:15:54 - Leo Laporte
But well, we'll see. Is he going to?

0:16:01 - Paris Martineau
do some serious interviews. Well, all of them are technically serious. He's trying to renovate his.

0:16:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's trying to renovate his image with young people. I guess that's what you have to do to get elected at this point.

0:16:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't know how young Howard Stern's audience is actually.

0:16:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the irony of it, I'm sure Biden's people think he's hip. I mean, the audience is young, arsenio wasn't that hip either Believe me.

0:16:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, so hillary, when she finally did appear on the show, admitted that not doing howard was a big mistake.

0:16:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm sure it is makes me even more angry. Just what we need. I'm sure biden will do, joe rogan don't god help us yeah, well, I feel about howard stern, about the same way I feel about jo Rogan.

0:16:44 - Jeff Jarvis
That's not fair. That's not fair. Paris, let's go on strike.

0:16:49 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we're out, sorry.

0:16:51 - Leo Laporte
All right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be controversial.

0:16:55 - Jeff Jarvis
That's it. I'm out of here.

0:16:57 - Leo Laporte
Michelle Roman got a big scoop. I didn't notice. Jeff turning off his lights as a gag on an on a podcast is really quite funny so you know the rabbit r1, which is that ai thing with it. I tell you what this is. How you get an ai winner is you over promise and you under deliver the humane pin. Good example, now this, the rabbit r1, which I liked, benito, you and I liked the design because it was teenage engineering I like the hardware very cool.

Well, guess what? It's just an android phone with one app on it. Michelle ramen, you can even he even got the apk off and was able to run it on a pixel 6 as an app Until they blocked it.

0:17:47 - Jeff Jarvis
The news story came out. They blocked it while he was on the show talking about it. Jason told me all this yeah.

0:17:53 - Leo Laporte
Rabbit reached out to Android Authority with a statement from its founder and CEO at 1 am this morning, Jesse Liu. The statement argues the R1's interface is not an app. The company explains the LLM it uses runs on the cloud. Yeah, you know what. So does chat GPT on my phone, which is something we never question, says Android Authority. We'll be following up with another article. We should get Michal on, actually, and talk to him about it.

That'd be fun yeah, that'd be fun. Um he he on his on his twitter account, he showed a uh um pixel 6 running the rabbit r1 interface. I don't if that's not an android app, I don't know what you call it. It's an apk.

0:18:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, anyway, uh so is it so wrong to um, so I, I? The moral would seem to be it doesn't need to be a hardware device because it could be on your phone, right, but is it so wrong to make a hardware device? No, for special use?

0:18:57 - Leo Laporte
I guess not. I don't know, benito, you were thinking about buying the R1, as I was, you and I both kind of pulled back from the cliff. What do you think? Does this sully it a little?

0:19:10 - Benito Gonzalez
bit. Well, I would have taken off the software on it anyway and put whatever.

0:19:14 - Leo Laporte
I wanted on there. Oh, you just like the hardware. I like the hardware, yeah, because they make great little synthesizers and stuff. So what essentially happens on this R1 is you talk to it and it goes out and does something like books and Uber or whatever. I mean if you can actually do it on your phone. So that actually ties into the story today.

So I had Kevin Rose on Sunday on Twitter and he said have you tried Gemini, google's rebranded BARD? And I said no. He said you got to try Gemini Advanced. It's really good. So I did. I gave it some of my test questions with my you know coding examples and it did really really well without any training. I had to train chat gpt to get the same answers. Google also offers on the pixel uh, the gemini uh app and in fact, let me, you can act, go ahead, you can show it. You can actually switch to Gemini from Google Assistant. So in a way this is kind of like the R1 if you want to use an AI in your phone. Now there is. There are some downsides. It says if you don't, if you take off assistant, you'll lose some things like the assistant routines. I don't use those, so that's okay. Things like you know. Say good night. I'm not thrilled about translate conversations in real time.

0:20:26 - Paris Martineau
That was why can't gemini do that I bet it will.

0:20:30 - Leo Laporte
But if you switch to gem but it won't right now, I guess, is the point if you switch to gemini, it can create custom images, it can write emails, posts and more make learning easy. This is all. Google set up alarms, timers and reminders. That's what most people use google's Assistant for, anyway. Right and more. So I'm going to switch. I saved this for you. I'm going to switch over and now you have to read things like well, it might be wrong, it might do things wrong, it might hallucinate, don't worry.

It will do things wrong. Yeah, so now when I press you know, when I don't remember how I invoke the Google Assistant they don't have a button anymore, do they? They used to Used to be able to squeeze it right, get the Assistant. But when I press this, I can say translate I really don't like Howard Stern and his childish antics. Into French. It'll sound better in French. It's thinking. It's taking better in French. It's thinking.

0:21:27 - Paris Martineau
It's taking its sweet time.

0:21:30 - Leo Laporte
Close. Of course, I can help you with that. Here's a translation in French. Oh, I didn't say it out loud. Je n'aime vraiment pas.

0:21:36 - Benito Gonzalez
You can press the speaker.

0:21:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, where is it there? It is, of course, I can help you with that. Here's the translation in French. Je n'aime vraiment pas the word sterne. I can help you with that. Here's the translation in French so there. How was the accent? It was very good. Your mother smells like elderberries and your father is a cow in French. Anyway, that's enough.

0:22:03 - PC
But that's enough. So now my but that's interesting.

0:22:05 - Leo Laporte
The Google Assistant is now the Gemini AI. You're paying for this 20 bucks a month. It's part of Google One, so it's an additional fee on top of Google One.

0:22:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I got it. I actually got offered it corporate, but I think my corporate because guess what kind of account I have.

0:22:21 - Leo Laporte
Workspace has it as well. I think it's $30 on Workspace. Yeah, you know what I pay $20 for it. $20 is a going rate these days.

0:22:29 - Jeff Jarvis
On Workspace. It's $30 per user. So I've got two colleagues of mine I haven't worked with in 10 years who I gave email addresses to, so I pay for them every month because I don't want to act like I'm a cheapskate on my Workspace.

0:22:45 - Leo Laporte
So I would have to pay three times that? Huh, that's not good.

0:22:48 - Paris Martineau
Not what you want.

0:22:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no. Anyway, apple is, of course, talking to Google about using their. You know Apple's going to make, apparently, this big AI push come June at the Worldwide Developers Conference with the announcement of AI features in iOS 18. And it is rumored, with new iPads next week, that we'll have a special version of the M chip, the M4 chip, that has additional AI capabilities built in. They want to make that iPad an AI device, but Apple's not known for AI. In fact, their assistant, siri, is kind of known for being the dunce. But they're negotiating not only with Google. Now we just learned that we're also negotiating with OpenAI. So I wonder if they're going to do the same thing, which is take that voice assistant and give it to something smarter. And then, I wonder, amazon announced their Q. Did you talk about that today? On AI Inside.

Yeah, just a bit yeah that's Amazon's AI, a generative, ai-powered assistant. I wonder if that's going to become Alexa.

0:23:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, I think it's a difference, Leo, is that they only open it up to AWS users. Right, it's for business.

0:24:05 - PC
This strikes me.

0:24:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm curious what you should say about this. My theory is that this is their B2B play. They're enabling others to do it, and it's also a rag play. What I mean by that is that when you just talk to the raw model, you get crap because it has no sense of fact or meaning, right. But if you talk to one and if you try to tune that and put in guardrails, it still has no sense of meaning or fact and it's still going to give you crap. But if you do one that uses RAG, whatever RAG stands for I forget what RAG stands for, which is to say that it calls on a set corpus of data you've given it, or, as Leo would tell me, corpora of data, both being plural of data. You've given it, or, as Leo would tell me, corpora of data, both being plural. Then you get decent answers. So I wonder whether Q is like a database, a backend of the web, and applications are the front end of AI. I wonder if we go back to a backend front end that would make sense.

0:25:03 - Paris Martineau
RAG stands for Retrieval, augmented Generation.

0:25:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's that thing we've been talking about with both Notebook LM and the various AI-assisted local ones. I've been talking about where you give it your information and it does retrieval of those to augment its generation.

0:25:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Of course the back-end, the raw model, could still be used for things like creativity and fun songs and other things. But for business you've got to just use that as the back end and then you've got to have the front end of something that's going to be reliable things like the humane pin and the R one don't end up hurting.

0:25:46 - Leo Laporte
You know, be kind of. The real fear is that they'll create a new AI winner by disappointing people and then people at some point go, eh, you see it doesn't work, and turn their back on it. I don't. I think we're past that point. I'm hoping we're past.

0:25:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I think we are too. Well, you've got glasses coming out. At our event yesterday, parag Agarwal was one of the panelists and at the dinner the night before the speaker's dinner I looked at his glasses and it said Ray-Ban and it was thick. Oh, he had the Metas.

0:26:12 - PC
He had the Metas. Oh, those are the.

0:26:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Metas. He said yes, yes, yes, and you know that we're accepting of. Though the interesting thing was he said he's not basically using the ai, he's taking pictures of his kids and he's listening to sound on it, says it sounds good the ai is relatively new.

0:26:27 - Leo Laporte
He may not even have it yet. With the ai, with the, that's in the last couple of days, you can look at, you can say what is that? I'm looking, what is that, what is that thing? But that's brand.

0:26:36 - Jeff Jarvis
He said he's not talking to it.

0:26:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can you know, like like you will be, that you may not have it yet?

0:26:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, we shall see. So AI devices are kind of silly right now. Yeah. Do you ever see a point at which they actually make sense? Oh, absolutely.

0:26:57 - Paris Martineau
I feel like I mean, I'm even a skeptic and I see a point where they're going to make sense. Let me take a walk with you on the beach, because I appreciate this. There will be one pair of footprints.

Because Leo will be carrying both of us. No, I think we're right now in a silly period of this. There are going to be uses for AI devices, I'm guessing. We probably can't even guess what they are. They might be surprising to us right now, but there is going to be a use case for this that we'll figure out and then it'll be useful. But we're not there yet.

0:27:29 - Benito Gonzalez
Isn't a robot, an AI device, though?

0:27:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, robot is too sure.

0:27:34 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, but I think what we're talking about is like a personal AI device, like any of these wearables or small pocketable devices that we're seeing be shopped around, or small pocketable devices that we're seeing be shopped around. I feel like there's probably going to be some version of that that will work eventually.

0:27:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think I'm going to need it when dementia sets in, which is going to be any minute now. I think it'll be nice that it's recorded everything and I can say who was that I was talking to a minute ago or something, and it would know. I think there's going to be some real valuable features for older people. We baby boomers are heading right there, we're heading to the home.

0:28:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah. Well, there's words, there's a few words that are stuck in bad tracks in my head For years. This is not to mention I have not been able to get. There's some words I always forget, always oh yeah, yeah. So now I can go. Now I go to AI and I say what does the word mean? That does this, this and this? And boom, it comes back. It's like a Mondo reverse stupid person's thesaurus.

0:28:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, google's results are out. We will take a break. When we come back we will share that with you. In short, it was a very good year, google, very happy, and the stock market, which has not been very happy, still rewarded Google, so that's good news. You are listening to this Week in Google, our show today, brought to you by our friends at KOLIDE K-O-L-I-D-E. You've heard us talk about KOLIDE I know you have. We've been talking about them quite a bit, but did you hear the news? Kolide has been acquired, partnered with 1Password. That's really good news because both companies specialize in protecting you and your stuff.

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Earnings are out and it was, I think, a very good year. They have revenue of $80 billion in the quarter. That's up 15%. Operating income $22.5 billion. Net income $23.66 billion. That's in three months. That's nice. It was $15 billion a year ago. That is a big, big jump. They are now a two trillion dollar company. On the basis of this jump, who will join the club? Yeah, there's this. It's a good time to be a tech company. Advertising revenues a big, big boost. Uh, cloud went up from $7.5 billion to $9.5 billion. Ad revenue $8.09 billion versus $6.69 billion last year, so significant increases. Of course, there's all the other stuff Google does. I mean they're really an ad company. Google subscriptions platforms and devices, hardware, hardware play store, non-advertising youtube revenues revenues 8.74 billion. That's up over 7.4 billion. Other bets loses money. It reported 495 million dollars in revenue from 288 million in q1, but it still lost a billion dollars A little a touch less than last year. Very good.

0:32:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Importantly, they also offered a dividend for the first time, which is really very old company of them.

0:32:36 - Leo Laporte
It is.

0:32:37 - Jeff Jarvis
And a stock buyback.

0:32:39 - Leo Laporte
So then that's very new. Company Stock buybacks are probably not what you would want a company to do. You want them to invest in R&D.

0:32:49 - Jeff Jarvis
And full disclosure. I still have Google stock for many years. So the stock before all these announcements I'm looking back here was 153. It shot up to 181.

0:33:02 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, alphabet shares rose about 13 to uh 13 percent in after hours trading after these earnings came out, they came back down yeah, I mean, the market's going through a tough time because of uh, they're worried about the fed's interest rates.

0:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Um, so this isn't a good time for any company. But if a tech company can do well right now, that's not so bad, all right. Well, good on you, google. We don't. I mean, honestly, when we report on that kind of thing, we're not investors.

0:33:34 - Benito Gonzalez
We don't.

0:33:35 - Leo Laporte
well, I don't know, you might have some stock, but we only.

0:33:38 - Paris Martineau
I don't have any stock.

0:33:39 - Leo Laporte
Good for you. You should go into old age impoverished, like the rest of us.

0:33:45 - Paris Martineau
I think that would be really nice and also very likely given the current state of things.

0:33:51 - Leo Laporte
I feel so sorry for your generation. Oh my god, what did we do. What did we do?

0:33:58 - Paris Martineau
that's why I'm so filled with spite on this show. You should be angry you should be furious.

0:34:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, makes perfect sense. Um, anyway, uh, good, good, a good quarter for google. They're building a three billion dollar data center in indiana, virginia, which is confusing. Which is it? I don't? I don't know. Make up your mind a data center, google data center, Virginia, Both actually yeah.

0:34:29 - Paris Martineau
Virginia's data center city.

0:34:31 - Leo Laporte
It's going to build a $2 billion campus in Fort Wayne, indiana, which is where they make the tires, so that's good. Yeah, I guess I never liked Fort Wayne because it's a little smoggy from tire manufacture. And a billion dollars to expand three existing data center campuses in Virginia it's probably NOVA, right, the Virginia Triangle up there. $75 million Google AI Opportunity Fund to train Americans on AI skills how to work. Did you used to be a plumber? Now you can be an ai technician guru. You know what? Learn how to be a plumber. You'll make more money, really. Uh, all right. Is that all the financial news? Is there anything else?

0:35:19 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, well, meta didn't do so well though uh didn't, they it had. They didn't do well, it had a good quarter. But the stock market punished, oh yeah, yeah, the stock, because they were spending money, you know, just in terms of stock price. Because they were, because, yeah, I was surprised at what was happening no, they had actually they.

0:35:35 - Leo Laporte
They beat the market. But then mark zuckerberg comes on. The analyst, call all gloomy gus, all eeyore says well, we're not going to make any money on any of these investments.

0:35:44 - Jeff Jarvis
We've got to spend well.

0:35:46 - Leo Laporte
For a long time.

0:35:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Well anyways. What he was saying, though, was we're going to invest a lot in AI. It's going to cost a lot of money and that scared them Plus. I think there was. I saw one report. I think there was some hope that they too might have a dividend, but no.

0:35:59 - Leo Laporte
Huh, that is very old school.

0:36:10 - Paris Martineau
Amazon did well in. Yes, microsoft did really well. Yeah, amazon's international e-commerce business turned a profit for the first quarter in quite a few years and the operating margin for their North American business increased significantly and AWS profit margins increased. It all seems to be coming up, amazon.

0:36:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, and I think a lot of this is AI right.

0:36:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know if you can credit much to AI Because it's also expensive.

0:36:37 - Paris Martineau
It's also a huge source of operating expenses, but it is also a huge source of sales, I guess, for cloud services and whatnot.

0:36:47 - Benito Gonzalez
So, andrew McAfee, it's AWS. Yeah, they make all the.

0:36:50 - Leo Laporte
AWS, you know for Amazon, you're right, and for Microsoft, same thing, very lucrative. But you know, what really struck me is how well all these big ones are doing in ad sales. You know that's the money we're not getting.

0:37:02 - Paris Martineau
I think it's also notable that we're finally in a period where, like the last year or two, these companies were contending with the problem of they were being compared to their COVID era spikes, when you're comparing earnings to the year ago period. And so now you're finally out of that where the comparison period is once again a normal growth period, so the fact that they're doing well seems even better yeah.

0:37:28 - Jeff Jarvis
So andrew mcafee, the author and professor you know um. He just put up on um linkedin linked. I didn't know this. He spent a tour of duty as a visiting fellow in google's technology and society group. Huh, I, I'd like that, that gig. I'm air quotes retired. I'll do that Anyway. So he just did a report on the economic impact of generative AI, and I think it's early for that, but obviously he's going to argue that there's value to be had here and it fits in a larger context of working hours. Reduced standard of living is going up, lifespan is longer, except in parts of the US. Disease is down, except for a pandemic, and this enters in, so it's a time for rapid improvement.

0:38:19 - Benito Gonzalez
Does he talk about energy consumption though?

0:38:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, huge issue, isn't it?

0:38:23 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a great question.

0:38:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, nobody's talking about that question. Yeah, no, nobody's talking about that. Yeah, no one's talking about that. Yeah, um, now, meanwhile, uh, google has laid off a bunch of people. Um, they're in their python group. Their entire entire Python group is laid off. Uh, it's funny how these companies make so much money and then uh, for some reason, decides to uh fire a bunch of people. Google has laid off hundreds of this is from CNBC core employees and moving many of these jobs to India and Mexico at least 200 employees from its core organization. What does core mean? I think kind of like infrastructure. The Python group was responsible for making Python. Google uses a lot of Python, making sure that Python worked in Google systems, keeping it up to date, contributing back to Python. I mean, these are kind of not. They're fundamental to the overall operation, I would guess.

0:39:33 - Jeff Jarvis
They also laid off from Flutter and Dart Flutter and Dart Flutter is more development, right? Yeah, well, so is.

0:39:39 - Leo Laporte
Python. Yeah, I mean, these are. I think these are fairly important teams, but you know Ruth Porat is a ruthless oh yes. Meanwhile, you know, under the light of all these layoffs, you might want to consider whether you protest at Google. Google has fired now more than 50 employees for protesting mostly over Gaza right and Google's involvement in making tools for the Israeli military. They fired most of them and now more than 50 employees have alleged unlawful retaliation and have gone to the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, saying they want their jobs back.

One employee said all I did is I went to the lounge on the 10th floor of the New York City office around lunchtime just to see what was going on. When I got there there were 20 people sitting on the floor. I didn't talk to them. I talked to folks who were standing up passing out flyers, doing other roles. The worker went back to his desk, then returned to protest around 5 again, chatted with him, didn't sit down, didn't wear the T-shirt. He said oh wow, you're still sitting here. How's it going? Finished his work day when he came back to Google the next day, no problem. But that night while at dinner he got an email from Google saying you've been fired.

0:41:09 - Paris Martineau
That is wild.

0:41:11 - Leo Laporte
Don't go anywhere near those protesters.

0:41:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's true in a lot of places these days. Yeah, Try a university folks.

0:41:22 - Leo Laporte
You know, really it's so I don't want to get into politics or Israel because we've been avoiding that, but it is so weird I'm sure you feel the same way, jeff of people of our age to see that, because it reminds me so much of 1968 and 1967, and protests that I, as a student, participated in.

0:41:42 - Jeff Jarvis
The other thing that reminds me of Leo is the Nazis marching in skokie, something that the aclu then defended, and it was it became common belief in the us that to to defend free speech is to defend noxious speech. Right, um, but we're not there now and um.

0:42:07 - Leo Laporte
It is the first amendment right to figure it out, to peacefully protest. I guess the issue is whether they are peacefully protesting and whether they're occupying. They're trespassing by occupying uh campus buildings. I, I just remember the same thing happened in 1968 for what at the time I considered a very, very just cause protesting against the Vietnam War. I remember the police brutality in Chicago and Kent State and Ohio and I just you know I was watching on TV last night and praying. No one got hurt, to their credit. It looks like thed um were careful not to hurt anybody.

It's hard to tell, but they certainly went in with a big presence and a and a very military militarized presence, but no national guard, right, that's what happened at kent state. God, god help us.

0:43:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, yeah, they're not as well trained and it's a little riskier there well, I was talking to a poly side professor, uh, at my event yesterday and he said um, they're going as well trained and it's a little riskier there. Well, I was talking to a poli sci professor at my event yesterday and he said, um, they're going to regret picking Chicago for the democratic convention this year. Oh boy, oh.

0:43:14 - Leo Laporte
I hope that doesn't happen. I.

0:43:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I hope the same thing.

0:43:20 - Leo Laporte
Um Jane Chung, a spokesperson for no tech for apartheid, had told the verge of the firings at Google included non-participating bystanders. Google, the NLRB says, or the complaint with the NLRB says retaliated against approximately 50 employees, interfered with their section seven rights by terminating and or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely participation or perceived participation in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to the terms and conditions of their work.

0:44:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, how is it directly connected to the terms and conditions of their work.

0:44:02 - Leo Laporte
They didn't want to do the work that they were being asked to do. They were protesting against.

0:44:09 - Paris Martineau
Google initially put nine employees on administrative leave for occupying its offices in New York City, sunnyvale, california, in protest of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Those workers were also arrested.

0:44:27 - Leo Laporte
But remember, a few years ago, 600 Google workers protested Project Dragonfly, an effort to build a search engine for China, and Google's response there was not to fire them, but to stop the project.

0:44:39 - Paris Martineau
a search engine for China, and Google's response there was not to fire them, but to stop the project. I think it's also worth noting that Google is a, I guess, unique company as far as large companies go, and that historically it has welcomed activism exactly within its ranks it has fostered a like culture of debate and a kind of rab-rousing among its employees, and I think it is more of a statement about this the current political climate we find ourselves in than anything to do with these specific employees' actions.

0:45:10 - Leo Laporte
That fired software engineer said there's been a total change in the way Google responds to employees trying to have a voice in their workplace. It's night and day from Google of even five or 10 years ago. Google's changed. I mean, I think that that's the bottom line. We're going to have Ed Zittrain on next week. You've had him on when I was gone, but I wanted to have him back because he's the one who wrote Yay, he's the one who wrote your friend, he's the one who wrote that story that we was on his blog Boy. Did that get picked up? It did get picked up. I saw a follow-up story today.

0:45:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Who is the man who ruined Google search?

0:45:46 - Leo Laporte
Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs search, who also ran Yahoo search into the ground prior to his employment at Google. That makes a pretty strong case. You know why I think it got picked up? Because I think everybody kind of senses that Google is not as good as it used to.

0:46:03 - Paris Martineau
Be right that the google search has been complaints bubbling up online for quite a yeah quite at least a few weeks, if not months, around the change in how google search is presented. I mean, it's even small things like the fact that you see your AI generated summary up top, the fact that it's not as easy to easily identify what is an ad versus what is an organic search result. It's disappointing, and I think that's why this article really resonated with people.

0:46:34 - Leo Laporte
We will ask Ed because it's his premise, his thesis. We'll ask Ed because it's his premise, his thesis. But in short, he says the reason Raghavan showed up and made head of search replacing Gomez was because this ad division said revenues are dwindling and it's your job search. To get people to stick around, you need to modify search to improve our ad revenues Search. Historically it said no, no, no, no, there's, these are separate. This is church and state. And ragavan, apparently, according to ed we'll talk to him next week said no, yeah, no, we got to get revenues up and and what you see is the inshittification of google search as a result.

0:47:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Very direct but I I I will talk about that coming in. There's a lot of other factors here. Yeah, a lot of people are cramming the web itself with junk.

0:47:28 - Leo Laporte
True, I mean, maybe Google just reflects what's out there.

0:47:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I think they tried. I think they tried not to. I mean, that's Matt Cutts was there, so I'd love to have come on too. But I think we have to realize those other factors.

0:47:44 - Leo Laporte
Let's let Ed stand up for his thesis next week.

0:47:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, he'll shoot me down.

0:47:49 - Paris Martineau
I wasn't here. Yeah, we should put a content warning on that episode.

0:47:51 - Leo Laporte
I heard that last episode I wasn't here, but okay, we're getting ready. That'll be fun next week. So I'm still a little mad about tiktok, I'm gonna admit it. Howard stern oh no, I don't care about who howard who. Um, I am mad that they banned tiktok. The tiktok has nine months to sell or get out. Chinese government, uh, and bite dance, say we're not selling, we're getting out. Uh, whether they do or not, whether they mean it or not, creators are starting to look at other alternatives, much to the benefit of Meta and others. In fact, some would say Meta lobbied for this for years and finally got what they wanted. In fact, there was a great article in the New York Times today. I know you hate the New York Times. Do you mind if I quote them? Yes, it's fine. Oh, I'll tell you what it's Washington Post. You love them, right?

0:48:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually, they're pissing me off too, Keep going.

0:48:48 - Leo Laporte
Between you and me, everything sucks. Yeah, we're grumpy, we're just grump, grump.

0:48:53 - Jeff Jarvis
We hate everything and, like Paris is trying to put on her, I'm Mary, sunshine face, when she's the one who calls herself a nihilist.

0:49:01 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know, listen, I'm an optimistic nihilist.

0:49:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I like that. I'm a cheerful nihilist. I like that. A cheerful nihilist. That's the right. Yes.

0:49:10 - Leo Laporte
This is the article by Elizabeth Dwoskin, drew Harwell who's very good Kat Zakarowski the tech billionaires who helped ban tick tock want to write a I rules for Trump. They're talking about something called the Hill and Valley Forum, which Jacob Helberg put together a small group of Silicon Valley insiders and a dinner that they would go to on Washington's Embassy Row, an informal supper club which would eventually receive funding from our favorite, uh evil, uh genius, peter teal. Um, this group turn has turned into one of the most powerful lobbying forces for the technology industry in washington, helping draft to promote one of the country's only pieces of tech legislation in decades the law signed by president biden calling for the forced sailor ban of TikTok. Hey, nice job, one piece of tech legislation and it's banning TikTok. Now you might say, well, wait a minute. These are lobbying forces for the technology industry. Yeah, who benefits from the banning of TikTok? The American-made technology industry.

Well, it's just like what's happening with the newspaper industry, lobbies they to get help for them, but screw all their competitors and all newcomers. Hellberg, fresh off that win, is aiming to expand its mission. He's prepping an executive order that a new, newly elected president, trump, would sign, to dismantle the biden administration's rules on artificial intelligence. They'll push government to pour money into AI grants and contracts that could benefit many in the group. They aim to undercut China's status as a US training partner and are designing legislation that would shift the AI supply chain, including costly semiconductor chips, to domestic manufacturers.

0:51:05 - Jeff Jarvis
What do you think is going to happen?

0:51:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm curious, both of you in the courts on this? Nothing, you know. Masnick's the one to ask and Kathy Gellis also. Kathy Gellis, kathy Gellis. But there is a long history of courts allowing the federal government to get involved in overseas international commerce. To protect this is First Amendment maybe. Well, that's the question, In fact.

0:51:34 - Jeff Jarvis
I think we talked about this last week. I think those who are standing?

0:51:37 - Paris Martineau
I mean it's also. I think they'll probably try and drag national security into it.

0:51:41 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, and the Supreme Court, the experts I've heard and we talked about this last week say that security will trump. The First Amendment has trumped the First Amendment in the past and the Supreme Court is very likely to be receptive to the argument that we're protecting our national security. So you know too bad about the creators and you know what everybody says. I hear it from everybody. It's no big deal to just go to Instagram or YouTube Shorts. It's no big deal.

0:52:09 - Paris Martineau
And it's also, by the way, no coincidence. It's like a kind of dangerous president.

0:52:12 - Leo Laporte
I agree, and it's no coincidence that both Instagram and YouTube have directly copied TikTok to prepare for this day.

0:52:22 - Benito Gonzalez
I've got a quick question If TikTok does get sold and gets shut down or whatever in the United States, what prevents anybody from like? Or what prevents ByteDance from just starting a new one? With their algorithm?

0:52:36 - Paris Martineau
They have the algorithm, nothing but they won't have, they won't be able to transfer over all of their users.

0:52:42 - Leo Laporte
They have to do it with a shadow US company. Right that you know. They pretend they're doing it.

0:52:48 - Benito Gonzalez
But if the algorithm is the secret sauce, the thing that really gets them their users and all that, then they can just do it again, right, right.

0:52:54 - Leo Laporte
And presumably the.

Chinese government would support that because if it's such a dangerous tool for the chinese government, they'll figure out a way to come back. I my contention is and I'm not alone, a lot of people agree with this uh, the chinese government has plenty of other ways to get that information to influence our uh, our electorate. Look at twitter, look at facebook. This doesn't change a thing. Absent more extensive privacy regulation in the United States, and I don't think we're ever going to be able to say or want to say, we will not allow CCTV, the Chinese television network in the United States. You can watch it on your cable system.

0:53:35 - Jeff Jarvis
We had RT here for a long time and RT, but it was not taken out by law. It was taken out because they went to war and people said we don't want this on our cable systems. It was taken out by proper public pressure and by individual companies deciding this. But we had RT as part of free speech in this country. It was here, it was noxious, but it was here uh, one of the.

0:54:08 - Leo Laporte
So this article is really kind of terrifying if you read about it. Um hellberg, uh enlisted, besides peter teal, uh vinod kosla and a number of senators, including Chuck Schumer Khosla is a co-founder of Sun has also embraced the role of a vocal TikTok critic. He and Helberg co-signed a full-page ad in April last month in the Times, calling TikTok a Chinese weapon of war. And well, we don't stand to lose anything from the bill. We're just private citizens doing this out of love for the country. Okay, he thinks they do protest too much.

Coastless venture firm invests in open AI. A University of Washington law professor's quote is saying Doomsdaying is good. Marketing. The political theater of anti-TikTok bands and Cold War talk distracts from more pressing needs like properly funding NIST. Okay, the event closed with a video message from Donald Trump, who thanked attendees for keeping their chin up. Our country's going through a lot of problems right now, but we're going to make it bigger, better, stronger than ever before.

I'm sure that there are people in our audience who are going to vote for donald trump. That's fine. I'm not. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. That's your absolute right and I hope you vote. I think I'm actually have much more problem with people just don't bother to vote, saying it doesn't matter, um, but I, I have to say I'm a little concerned that, uh, this is the tip of the iceberg under a new regime and I use the regime intentionally yep, the next chinese firm to be banned, america's favorite drone maker, dji, congress is weighing legislation to ban it. They will ban, uh have the fcc ban us telecommunications company from doing business with dji, which, of course, would, would knock the drone out of the air because they use the phone system, the cellular system, to navigate. That's the only way they can do it, because it's too far. You know they go miles, a mile away. That distance, uh, your, your dji, your existing dji would be safe, but any new dji drones would be.

0:56:28 - Jeff Jarvis
But hold on, okay, okay. So what's it? Go ahead, I was gonna say the.

0:56:34 - Paris Martineau
The article goes on the treasury and commerce departments have penalized dji over the use of its drones for spying on uighur muslims who are held in camps by chinese officials in the xingjiang region I don't know if I pronounced that correctly which I think is a fair, like no wait sort of saying no, it's not listen dji is not doing that.

0:56:55 - Leo Laporte
Dji drones are being used by the Chinese government to do that. Dji is not going and spying any more than DJI is going and doing law enforcement duties. It is the number one drone being used by law enforcement in the United States.

0:57:11 - Paris Martineau
Okay, that is different.

0:57:12 - Leo Laporte
It's not DJI, it's whoever is buying these drones and because they are easily the best drones out there, they're the least expensive. Of course, they're used by the Chinese government and our own government. So I understand you want to punish China. Certainly, their treatment of the Uyghurs is appalling. They put them in prison camps because they're Muslims. But I don't think you know. The problem is we're saying any company that is a Chinese company is a threat to us. But this really leads down a pretty bad road. Our phones and our computers and our telecommunications equipment so much of our infrastructure is made in China hello, yeah you're.

All your Macs are made in china, all your iphones all your pcs are made in china too, by the way, I mean this is this.

0:58:04 - Jeff Jarvis
We really want to cut it off. We really want to balkanize the entire world. To that extent, we've been there, we used to be there all right, I'm sorry we blame richard nixon for that. I'm hoping there's some hope in the courts.

0:58:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm just praying I uh, I'm kind of giving up on the courts, but okay.

0:58:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, yeah, I have too.

0:58:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the problem. There's no backstop. Let's take a little break. When we come back, we're going to talk about something so much more cheerful Massive fines for AT&T, t-mobile and Verizon. You go get them, lena Kahn. You go get them For now, for now horizon.

You go get them, lena khan you go get them, but for now, for now, is this are they gonna, are we gonna be hauled up between, but before a new house, un-american activities committee for being the pinko podcast. I think we are uh-huh. I'm waiting to see if the nypd is amassing outside the doors of our building as we speak I'll go check during the ad would you please, if they have a little ramp going up to your window, I'd get out of there. I would.

I'd get out if you, if you guys, see me after the ad break, if I'm on the run while doing the rest of the show, you'll know you know, when I was a young high schooler, in the middle of the vietnam war, I protested quite vigorously against the war and went to a lot of protests and I'll never forget, you know, being faced with a militarized police force. Even in 1967, 68, 69, somewhere around there. They were met mill the they call them the tax squad remember the tax squad, yep, and they would march like this and they would stop and they I mean it was really terrifying I, to my everlasting shame, cut and ran.

0:59:46 - PC
I got the hell out of there.

0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to. I mean, I had my beliefs, but I wasn't going to get arrested for them. In some ways, I respect somebody who sits down and says, nope, you're gonna have to arrest me Because I believe strongly in what I'm saying my father was until his dying days was a very goldwater republican.

1:00:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, always voted republican. Conservatives could be always said that when you grow up, you're gonna vote republican too. But in new york state the peace symbol was superimposed onto the american flag on a button and that was called desecration of the flag and people were getting arrested for it. Oh yeah, I thought it was a crazy moment with my father. He said get me one of those buttons. Good for your dad. I'm wearing one of those. Good for your dad, yeah, because he's pissed off.

1:00:35 - Leo Laporte
This is not the america I know actually barry goldwater would probably be considered a liberal today.

1:00:40 - Benito Gonzalez
As a matter of fact, All politicians from the 70s and earlier.

1:00:44 - Leo Laporte
I know they were pretty liberal back then.

1:00:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Even Reagan.

1:00:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's not go that far, benito, you're young, you don't remember.

1:00:55 - Benito Gonzalez
No, I do remember, and Reagan actually told the PM of Israel to stop.

1:00:59 - Leo Laporte
That's true. That's a good point. Was it Menachem Begin? No, no, that was Carter. Or was it still Begin after Carter? I can't remember.

1:01:09 - Benito Gonzalez
He said stop, and they did yeah.

1:01:13 - Leo Laporte
Hmm, all right, we live in a. I apologize. I know you want us to talk about smartphones and AI and fun stuff, and I really I hear from people all the time Look, I don't tune into your shows because I want to hear about the current state of the world, because I'm trying to get away from that, and I understand, I feel the same way, but unfortunately we're right in the middle of it, aren't we? And it's all Jeff's fault, frankly, yeah it is it is, I mean all geopolitical chaos leads back to Jeff.

1:01:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Jarvis, it does. I always say this Well, here's the hilarious thing. Someone who doesn't like me recently speculated to someone else, so this is hearsay that I was affiliated with the Heritage Foundation.

1:02:00 - Leo Laporte
That's a mean thing to say. Have you read any single tweet?

1:02:04 - Paris Martineau
of mine.

1:02:05 - Leo Laporte
That is a mean thing.

1:02:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Pick any tweet I've ever written. I have the receipt right there. It doesn't matter what it is. They call me.

1:02:13 - Leo Laporte
Leonard Leo Laporte. So you know, alright, let's take a break. We're going to take a little break, but first a word from our sponsor, yahoo Finance. We're doing all the reporting now and the quarterly results, and I like to get the latest stock prices and sometimes I even show you the graphs and you maybe have noticed I don't know if you've noticed, but when I show you graphs I use Yahoo Finance. I love the graphs. You don't want to see how Google did in response. You know the market treated Google in response to their great earnings. This is where we go. We go see the growth. I love these little spikes here. You can learn so much. Spread it out, you'll see. There was a big jump when they released that earnings report and this was the after hours selling. You can see what their market cap is. You hear us sometimes talk about well, how big is Google? It's a $2 trillion company. Actually, 2.033, according to Yahoo Finance.

Well, I don't just use it at work, I use it at home too, to keep track of my net worth, to keep track of how my stocks are going, my investments, yahoo Finance, when it comes to your financial future, I think you know, you probably think, as I do. You've done everything. You've saved, you've researched, you invested all you could, but now it's time to take those investments to the next level by using what every financial grade has used for the last 25 years, and they're still using it Yahoo Finance. Whether you're a seasoned investor or are looking for extra guidance, yahoo Finance gives you all the tools and data you need in one place. Having information at your fingertips is key, isn't it? Yahoo Finance provides a holistic view of the financial news cycle, including breaking news, original editorial perspectives, analyst ratings and more, and you can do what I do, which is link my brokerage accounts it's completely secure to Yahoo Finance so you can see an overall view of your wealth, even if it's in multiple accounts, including your 401k and all your investments. That bird's eye view, that comprehensive perspective, is what distinguishes great investors. Information, knowledge is wealth, and Yahoo Finance ensures you have the insights, the knowledge, the information to see your wealth in its entirety and to make intelligent decisions. With a community of over 90 million users every month, yahoo Finance's real strength is helping you on your way to financial success. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor yahoofinancecom. Come home to Yahoo Finance. Yes, it's great. The number one financial destination it is yahoofinancecom dot com. Yahoo finance dot com.

I thank them so much for supporting this week in google. You know, every time I hear people say oh, lena khan and the ftc and the fcc, they're ineffective, they can't get anything done, jessica rosenwarcel can't get anything. Every time I fight back because they say we need these guys. This is the last defense against technology that wants to shitify the universe. So this started and I'll give some credit to Motherboard Joseph Cox In 2019, you may remember his article in Motherboard I gave a bounty hunter $300, then he located our phone.

T-mobile, sprint and AT&T are selling access to their customers' location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it. This was five years ago Now. Unfortunately I'm sure it's a complete coincidence the Senate has been so deadlocked they were not able to approve. It was Gigi Son right, the President Biden's pick for the FCC. So the FCC was deadlocked two to two. They couldn't do anything about it until finally the deadlock was broken Not so long ago ago, when a fifth commissioner was confirmed. Democrats had a 3-2 margin. Jessica rosenworcel, the chairman of the fcc, finally got this fine through. The fcc is fining. It just makes me. It just warms the cockles of my heart.

The us mobile carriers have combined nearly 200 million dollars for sharing customers location data without their consent. The fcc says it found carriers sold access to its customers location information to aggregators, who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers. Now the trick the agency says they used is they offloaded their responsibility to get consent to the downstream participants. They said okay, we're going to give you this data, but you got to ask before you use it. Of course they didn't. And even after being made aware of the issue, the FCC says carriers still didn't limit access to the information t-mobile 80 million dollars. Sprints, which has since merged with team, merged with t-mobile 12 million dollars. At&t 57 million dollars. Verizon 47 million dollars. These are actually lower than the initial fines proposed.

At&t spokesperson says the the FCC's action quote lacks both legal and factual merit. It unfairly holds us responsible for another company's violation of our contractual requirements to obtain consent, ignores the immediate steps we took to address that company's failures and, perversely, punishes us for supporting life-saving location services like emergency medical alerts and roadside assistance that the FCC itself previously encouraged. We expect to appeal the order after conducting a legal review. So they're basically saying your Honor, we just shared it with life-saving location services like emergency medical alerts and roadside assistance. We told them you can't use this, you can't sell it on unless you get customer's consent. It's not our problem. Verizon said one bad actor gained unauthorized access to information relating to a very small number of customers.

1:08:39 - Paris Martineau
It's an old program verizon shut down more than half a decade ago, so this is from I do think it's notable to note that the the fines that these companies are complaining about are a fraction of a fraction of what they make. I mean, t-mobile's market cap is $193 billion. It made nearly $80 billion in revenue last year. At&t is much of the same, like $120 billion in revenue last year and $121 billion market cap, and yet they are still complaining as if this is some affront to the sanctity of their businesses you're right now the bad news oh

line 93 no, all right bad news you have an update on this story yes, I do.

1:09:33 - Jeff Jarvis
The fcc just doled out big privacy fines. Oh, it could soon lose that power. Yeah, this is why, because of the new privacy legislation, which is so complex, I don't think anybody's fully figured out whether it's good or bad.

1:09:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, we've been talking about this the last couple of weeks. Why did Maria Cantwell, the senator from Washington, after years of fighting privacy legislation, she should know that she came from real networks. That was, you know, the real player. Remember the real player? She was the ceo over there which we all hated which we all hated and which, by the way got in trouble for selling our information.

yeah, she's no fat, no fan of privacy. We thought, why is she sponsoring a privacy bill? And I knew there was something. One was it overrode all the state privacy bills, including including the very strong California privacy bill, the Illinois privacy bill, and I thought, well, that's one reason. Although you could make the argument, companies don't want to have to do a bunch of patchwork regulation, they'd like one central. So if it's a good national, good federal privacy bill, that's OK with me. Well, but it also strips the FCC of its authority to police potential privacy abuses in the telecom sector. Oh, maria, you didn't change this tiger did not change its spots.

Oh we see, this tiger is still the same old tiger.

1:10:51 - Paris Martineau
We put spots on a tiger yes, we put spots on a tiger and it couldn't get rid of them.

1:10:58 - Leo Laporte
Sarah Collins of Public Knowledge said the FCC is an expert regulator. It understands the intricacies of how data needs to be processed, et cetera, et cetera. They're the ones to enforce this. Congress is not the one to enforce this, because they won't.

1:11:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep, yep, yep I knew it.

1:11:18 - Leo Laporte
This week in nihilism, I knew it.

1:11:22 - Jeff Jarvis
This week in nihilism I knew it.

1:11:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, here's a victory. Okay, depends on your point of view.

1:11:31 - Paris Martineau
You really tried you tried to have a victory and you didn't pass the sentence. You couldn't do it, elon.

1:11:37 - Leo Laporte
Musk went to the Supreme Court and said From your point of view, elon Musk went to the Supreme Court and said your Honor, the SEC should have no right to force me to have a lawyer review my tweets. Your Honor, it's his Twitter sitter case that Bloomberg calls it I love that the justices, the US Supreme Court, without comment, refused to hear his opinion.

1:12:03 - Jeff Jarvis
But with much hilarity, yes, and giggles heard from the court.

1:12:08 - Leo Laporte
This all started, remember, when Elon tweeted back in 2018, before he owned Twitter that he had funding secured to take Tesla private, thereby launching its stock into the stratosphere. He even set a price $420. $420.

1:12:26 - Paris Martineau
A fun number.

1:12:27 - Leo Laporte
And of course that was a nice premium on the existing price, launching his stock and his net worth into the stratosphere. That's what we call pump and dump, anyway. So that's where the SEC said said you know you, you can't do that. And and the consent decree which elon, by the way, he got fined and he agreed to said that you're gonna have to get a lawyer to review your tweets before you post them. Of course he didn't do that. Uh, he resigned as tesla chairman, paid 20 million dollars, but then three years later, he posts a twitter poll saying should I sell 10 of my stock? And I think he said what did he say he was going to do it for hunger relief or something. It was just bs. It was a usual elon bs. Sec sent subpoenas to elon and tesla. He went back to court seeking to void his agreement. Federal appeals court rejected that appeal. Last year he went on to the supreme court who just without comment said yeah, no I'd love to get a look at what his annual legal like fees are his.

1:13:33 - Paris Martineau
I mean they gotta be less than trump's both seem like they probably have the same likelihood of paying yeah, yeah.

1:13:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, the former president's doing all right. Did you see the chunk of change he got from trump social?

1:13:49 - Jeff Jarvis
did they?

1:13:50 - Leo Laporte
oh, they let him dj yeah, um more than a billion dollars, even though uh truth social has lost significant amounts of money. Um he they granted him 1.8 billion dollars in stock but that he can cash now or not well, I I remember that there was this six month hold right after the spec went through, which wasn't very long ago so this is a bonus on top of what he already owned yeah.

1:14:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Whoa.

1:14:25 - Paris Martineau
That's impressive that he was able to keep the stock up for that long after the SPAC went public, because that is rare for.

1:14:29 - Leo Laporte
SPACs. Yeah Well, I think what happened was fans of the president bought the stock. It was in, in effect, a donation and they kept the prices up. So the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social let's go to the Wall Street Journal. When did this come out?

This was updated eight hours ago, said in the securities filing, it had issued 36 million new shares, diluting by the way, just in case you don't understand how the market works your shares if you bought some to give to the former president. The stock closed Tuesday at $49 per share, meaning the bonus had a value of just under $1.8 billion before trading opened this morning. This morning, by the way, the share's down 8% because you can fool some of the people some of the time. You can't fool all the people. You can dilute the rest of the time All of the time. Trump was eligible for the earn-out bonus because the stock stayed above $17.50 for 20 consecutive days. He now owns 114 million shares in the company. His total stake has a market value of $ 5.7 billion.

But you're right, that's paper, right, unless? I think it's possible. I'm not sure, but I got the sense that it's possible perhaps for the board to do something about that. I don't know to do something about that, I don't know. Djt the stock went public in March. With that SPAC has been on a strong run lately, gained more than 50% in the past five days. Closed Tuesday at its highest price since April 2nd. So sometimes you know a stock is worth money, even if the company itself is hemorrhaging money somehow magically.

1:16:25 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think the most important thing to understand about the stock market is it's untethered from reality in mysterious and ineffable ways.

1:16:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think DJT is the ultimate meme stock right.

1:16:40 - Paris Martineau
I mean GameStop is the ultimate meme stock. Right, I mean GameStop is the ultimate meme stock, but DJT is close.

1:16:45 - Leo Laporte
It's right up there, it's right up there. Did you see that the founder of Twilio, jeff Lawson, just bought the?

1:16:52 - Paris Martineau
onion from Go and installed Ben Collins former.

1:16:56 - Leo Laporte
Disinformation reporter extraordinaire. As CEO, I didn't see that.

1:16:57 - Paris Martineau
Congratulations to Ben. Ben Collins is former disinformation reporter, extraordinaire as CEO, yeah.

1:17:00 - Leo Laporte
I didn't see that.

1:17:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Congratulations to Ben. Ben Collins is a brilliant reporter. Fantastic. They didn't know each other and they just tied together and made this happen. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. But is Ben Collins funny? Yeah, ben is funny, yeah, he is, is and he's direct. Do you know um paris? Do you know why? Or when ben left mbc? Because I thought he was getting very frank and I'm surprised, but I'm surprised that he's still there and then he wasn't there I mean, I think it was somewhat recent, I I don't know off the top of my head, but I think this was in the works.

1:17:40 - Leo Laporte
Ben actually was the catalyst for the deal, so Gio introduced Lawson to someone else who had gotten in touch with the company about the Onion Ben Collins, 36, a former NBC reporter. This is from the site called the Information and Daily.

Beast editor who had put together a small group of young media executives interested in taking over the Onion. He was worried that Musk might try to buy the Onion. He apparently did try to buy it 10 years ago. I did not know this. Thank God he didn't get it. Collins said I was worried it could go into the wrong hands and I couldn't imagine this upcoming election without the Onion. So Lawson didn't know Collins but knew of him. They hit it off and of course Lawson provided a missing piece for the plan the filthy lucre, one of my favorite parts about the story, though, is when they first announced that, um, the onion had been sold.

1:18:41 - Paris Martineau
They didn't, uh, give any information. Geo media didn't give any information to the staff about who had bought it. In. This sent kind of reporters everywhere scrambling about trying to figure out who it was. They eventually found the name of the buyer it was this company called global tetrahedron, and then people were like wait, a second. Global tetrahedron is the name of the fictitious corporation the onion has been using in its articles for years, whenever they want to do a bit about an evil company buying something and doing ill and so uh ben and lawson essentially said that they they made this company as a bit to be the parent company of their new version of the onion.

1:19:21 - Leo Laporte
Here's the website which I think really shows.

They get it. Go to the website global-tetrahedoncom. Global Tetrahedon was born of the shadows and is committed to control in all its forms. Committed to the conquest of mortality since its foundation in 1634. Quest of mortality since its foundation in 1634, providing strategic counsel for top human trafficking enterprises, large-scale embezzlement services and covert assassination requests. We are pragmatic, focused, bloodthirsty and fanatical. Our values unrelenting. Our strong talents will rip the flesh from our victims bones in order to feed it to our freshly hatched young temptation. The flesh it glistens, and on and on and on. Global tetrahedron by the number six 14 billion ndas signed, 60 billion hours of labor, exploited, and on and on and on. I can't read the rest of it because it's obscene. So that is uh that is good I hope.

1:20:22 - Paris Martineau
I hope the onion stays, they're bringing back the uh news program that they have um, oh, really the. They're going to be doing video. They're going to be um expanding the subscription service money they are like really revitalizing the company.

1:20:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm really excited about I wanted to bring back print. I'm very, very, very proud that I am in the last print edition of the onion collins would like to resume production of a printed version of the onion.

1:20:50 - Leo Laporte
So that is on the roadmap. Whoa, what did? What did? Uh, what was the? What was you? What, what?

1:20:56 - Jeff Jarvis
it was a newspapers are dying joke. Oh, Ah classic.

1:21:00 - Leo Laporte
I miss the onion. I love the onion.

1:21:03 - Paris Martineau
It's still around.

1:21:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, but somebody told me first of all, I haven't gone there in a while and I certainly haven't seen it memed in a while, right.

1:21:11 - Paris Martineau
Have you guys? Do you guys read a hard drive news?

1:21:15 - Leo Laporte
No. Is that a new onion?

1:21:18 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, hard drive, hard dash drivenet. It's like a um kind of gaming tech focused version of uh yeah. So, for instance, the top article on hard drive right now is anime girl buys lonely nerd body pillow.

1:21:37 - Leo Laporte
Kind of a reverse on the actual truth, so the onion is still doing it. Here's their headline this uh, today, tesla lays off entire team behind brakes, which isn't so far from the truth.

1:21:49 - Jeff Jarvis
They did, in fact, lay off their entire supercharger team, which is weird, and their policy team, oh, and their policy team, policy trouble, yep, yep, that, yep, that's down there. There's a lot of musky news down below, where it belongs.

1:22:03 - Leo Laporte
All right. Well, I'll tell you what. Down below should always be musky, and we're going to go down below as we continue. Here's a tease In just a moment. You're watching this Week in Google with Paris Martineau. From the information, you're working on a big story. You were almost late because you had a big interview, right?

1:22:26 - Paris Martineau
I was. I was in the office today, which I am not normally.

1:22:30 - Leo Laporte
And how was President Biden? He was in Manhattan, Did he you know?

1:22:34 - Paris Martineau
he was a little surprised to be going from Howard Stern to me.

1:22:39 - Leo Laporte
Paris Martineau I don't know why, but I don't know was a little surprised to be going from Howard Stern to me at the information, but I don't know.

1:22:42 - Paris Martineau
I think it could just be sexism, so we're going to really get into that.

1:22:46 - Leo Laporte
in the interview Did he sniff your hair?

1:22:49 - Paris Martineau
He had kind of a hard time finding it, but he eventually got there.

1:22:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh god, we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we shouldn't. And that's Jeff Jarvis, professor Emeritus. I'm shocked, I'm shocked. Did you watch the correspondence dinner? And that's Jeff Jarvis, professor Emeritus. I'm shocked, I'm shocked, shocked. Did you watch?

1:23:04 - Jeff Jarvis
the correspondence dinner. Yes, so I recorded it. And the next morning I fast forwarded through like three hours before I got to anything. Yeah, and then I watched two parts of that Colin Jost. Yeah, the president and Colin Jost. I hate the correspondence dinner. I hate it. Yeah, you know, it made me hate it, but I needed to watch it.

1:23:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's for a good cause, right, but I thought they were both very good.

1:23:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and the New York Times, still snotty about the Howard interview, also went after Jost and said he fell flat, which I think was BS. Did you watch it?

1:23:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah he wasn't. He wasn't hysterical, he was okay. A lot of jokes fell pretty flat. The audience was nervous.

1:23:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a horrible audience.

1:23:46 - Leo Laporte
Can I say they were a little nervous. They didn't want to laugh too hard at some of the jokes. They were afraid somebody was paying attention. Anyway, great to have Jeff and Paris, and I'm so glad you stuck around, even though this show has really gotten terrible. I appreciate your support. Thank you. Don't, don't go away, don't go.

1:24:08 - Paris Martineau
That has to be the saddest outro we've ever done.

1:24:11 - Leo Laporte
It's so sad I just I feel like.

1:24:15 - Paris Martineau
I feel like I'm disappointing people when we, you know, we, we start you gotta put on a front leo, you gotta be like nah, this is great well, I like it.

1:24:25 - Leo Laporte
I'm not saying I don't like it. I mean the reason we're doing is because you you and I and jeff are enjoying ourselves we're having a fun time.

Hopefully other people are having fun too it's just the three of us and our fine sponsors which we are so happy to have here, including Delete Me. This is something you do need. You just heard these companies are selling our information right and left. Data brokers are selling it right and left. You've got to protect yourself. If you ever search for your name online oh my God, look what I found A picture of me oh no, this is the page Delete me.

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Delete Me will continue to scan and remove your information regularly. That's important because, even though they'll take this information down, these evil data brokers, as soon as they get another bite of information from another source, they'll start putting it back up again. They build up that dossier very quickly, so Delete Me continues to scan and remove information regularly. We're talking addresses, photos, emails, relatives, phone numbers, social media, property values and more. Protect yourself. Reclaim your privacy. Visit joindeletemecom slash twit. Use the code TWIT for 20% off. That's joindeletemecom slash twit. Use the code TWIT for 20% off. It really works. We use it. Thank you, delete Me, for supporting this week in Google. All righty, you said there's a lot of muskiness below the line.

1:27:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, just basically, it's an amusing compilation here. Okay, I'm using compilation here, okay. Because, at the same time that lawsuits test, tesla claim that drivers are solely responsible for crashes. So Tesla's saying, oh, our car drives itself, and if it doesn't, it's your fault.

1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's you know. I'm going to elaborate on that. That is your responsibility. You're driving that car. Keep your hand on the wheel and your eyes on the road.

1:27:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, yeah, but he also oversells this. He oversells it on its own he oversells.

1:27:34 - Leo Laporte
This was important for us to say.

Full self-driving is not fully self-driving, it is assist and he doesn't need to say that no, and I, you know, I have to say I used it all the time and, believe me, uh, I I didn't. Well, no, it's not a nightmare, you just got to pay attention. Here's an example. Here's a dash cam footage from two years ago showing a Tesla driving the wrong way on a highway in Tennessee. But, you understand, the car doesn't know. It sees the lines, it thinks it's a two-way highway. It isn't. It isn't. But that's where a human has to make that, you know but?

1:28:10 - Jeff Jarvis
but also, it's musk is overselling it, yes, and I agree. And shouldn't? This should be regulated. It shouldn't be even possible to do, because it's going to do things like that, right, it's just like llms don't know facts, it doesn't know what side of the road it's supposed to be on. So then the next story is tesla's autopilot linked to more crashes, even after massive recall. And the next story is musk wins china's backing for tesla's driver assistance service.

1:28:37 - Paris Martineau
So there's a real amuse bouche here, a musk bouche.

1:28:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, yeah, I mean look the only thing that is wrong is the assertion that this car drives itself. Now, I understand that there's their marketing, but anybody who's driven?

1:28:52 - Paris Martineau
And the pedals on the Cybertruck.

1:28:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, they use soap, okay, fine, they're a little slippery, but they fixed it. They asked for them back. I would not buy a Tesla again.

1:29:01 - Paris Martineau
They asked for them back. They did a recall, they fixed it.

1:29:09 - Leo Laporte
But I've the last three or four cars I've I've driven have had very similar adas, driver assist systems and even though they don't say you know, bmw's just say full self-driving. And by the way, ford and bmw both, unlike tesla, have a camera behind the wheels looking at you and will really nudge you if you go like, look away from the car. You're expected to hold on to the wheel and I guess actually in a couple of cases with Blue Cruise you don't have to, or the BMW self-driving you don't have to. But you have to keep your eyes on the road and honestly, anybody who's paying attention is going to keep their hands, their sweaty little palms, on the steering wheel. Because it's a computer, it does dumb things.

A car emerges in front of you. It doesn't slow down right away because it doesn't see it right away. Sometimes a car will try to take. You know it's following the lanes, but if the lanes veer off on an off-ramp, sometimes it'll suddenly veer off on the off-ramp. You've got to, you're still responsible for your car and I would assume that Beijing will tell Elon you can't call it whatever the Chinese equivalent is of self-driving. I would hope so. It's interesting State-driven, state-driven.

1:30:23 - Paris Martineau
Chinese officials told Tesla that Beijing has tentatively approved the company's plan to launch its full self-driving software feature in the country.

1:30:32 - Leo Laporte
But that's what the journal's calling it. I don't know what the Chinese government's calling it right? Well, we'll see. You know they have a lot of. They have extra people in China. Actually they don't. Their birth rate's falling. They can't afford to lose anybody. So Elizabeth Spires, writing in the New York Times.

1:30:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Your favorite journal, jeff. Well, they have some very good people. She is one of them. She is a friend and she's great. She was the original gawker.

1:31:01 - Leo Laporte
Ah, that strange piece of metal origami embodies all of Elon Musk's flaws. What is she talking about? Oh, the Cybertruck.

1:31:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I saw one in the wild. It is just ludicrous. I wanted to go to the person driving it and say do you know how foolish you look driving this thing? You'd probably get punched.

1:31:25 - Benito Gonzalez
Have you guys seen that screenshot from the old video game that the car is exactly the same design as the?

1:31:28 - Paris Martineau
Cybertruck yes, I have. It's like a strange looking car.

1:31:32 - Benito Gonzalez
It's not even original.

1:31:34 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't know if it was based on that, but it's just more how odd the Cybertruck looks, that it looks like a janky old video game car.

1:31:43 - Leo Laporte
Though she writes, spires writes. Though it fits the technical definition of a truck, it has a bed. The vehicle looks more like an origami version of an El Camino. That's about right. Yeah, Mr Musk suggests its stainless steel exterior might be bulletproof. Some owners say it rusts. It's not unusual for new car and truck models to have some flaws, but the Cybertruck, which has sold only 4,000 units, was recalled because of, when we talked about it, the accelerator. That's a little sticking problem, just a little bit.

1:32:18 - Paris Martineau
A little problem where the accelerator pedal gets stuck in the thing in front of it and gets stuck all the way pushed down so you can't stop accelerating. You know one of those little problems, Just a wee one.

1:32:28 - Jeff Jarvis
It's your fault.

1:32:28 - Leo Laporte
It's your fault driver for not knowing that and stopping that. We had this problem with the Model X. I mean, look, Lisa would never let me buy another Tesla.

1:32:35 - Paris Martineau
You had a problem where the car wouldn't stop accelerating.

1:32:38 - Leo Laporte
No, and you continued to drive the car. Oh, actually Lisa did have that problem and we called them and they said no, no, you're on a hill. Some owners have gotten an alert that the vehicle may suddenly lose electrical power. Stealing and propulsion most electric vehicles can do that. Uh, you might want to watch your fingers. She writes with the frunk and doors. They don't have industry standard sensors now by frunk he means front trunk.

1:33:06 - Paris Martineau
By the way, in case you don't know what front yeah with the hip kids.

1:33:10 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we, you know the model x. We had had those falcon wing doors that open like like bird's wings and they didn't have sensors on the bottom. So I kept hitting lisa in the head when I would close the doors. So we got to the point where I would have to shout I'm closing the door, stand back. And she hated. She called the car christine after the stephen king evil car thing.

Um, anyway, yeah I read the penultimate paragraph the penultimate paragraph, fancy the cyber truck, is a manifestation of mus Musk's immaturity, both as a person and as a chief executive. It is futuristic in a way that is adolescent and unprincipled. It is reflective of a mentality that says rejecting expertise is appealingly subversive instead of plainly dangerous. It is not yet ready to exist in the adult world. I have to agree with her on that.

1:34:08 - Benito Gonzalez
I found a game. It's called Car Builder, version 2.02.

1:34:12 - Paris Martineau
Oh wow. Oh, that really is it.

1:34:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that's hilarious. Oh, that's exactly the Cybertruck.

1:34:17 - Paris Martineau
When was this from?

1:34:18 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, that's amazing. It's an old game from like the 80s.

1:34:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh Wow, oh little Elon played it yeah probably. Yeah, you know what. But you know that's like a Rosebud moment. Yes, that would be great.

1:34:37 - Leo Laporte
We should make a Citizen Musk movie. It would be a great movie, and that could be the whole thing.

1:34:45 - Jeff Jarvis
He had to remake this car in the game that he could never win.

1:34:49 - Benito Gonzalez
I think the whole thing was like that this design was like the best aerodynamics in the game, so I guess he might believe that it's actually the truth. Yeah right.

1:34:59 - Leo Laporte
You see? You see, all right, I don't want to pile on.

1:35:04 - Paris Martineau
Also in the last week, there were significant layoffs at Tesla. They laid off around like 500 employees at least, and two senior Tesla executives ended up departing after their departments were dissolved. One of those departments well, the executives were the senior director of the company's supercharger group and the head of new products. And it's really interesting, my colleague, uh becky peterson, reported today just as we, uh were literally recording this podcast that the executives in charge of the supercharger team had reassured the team no, nothing's going on, there's going to be no cuts. Um, just days before all the cuts came. So it seems like it was completely out of left field yeah, they didn't know either.

1:35:54 - Leo Laporte
That happens a lot. Your job is safe. Two days later you're fired. 500 people were overseeing the supercharger network.

1:36:04 - Paris Martineau
I could see cutting that to a hundred, but he fired everybody it's interesting he had made the uh supercharge executive um his direct report elon did just two weeks before he fired her. Huh you're safe?

1:36:21 - Jeff Jarvis
no, you're not uh, so um.

1:36:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is um, uh, so um, yeah, this is um. Rebecca tanucci, who was also fired. The thing is, this was the single smartest thing I think that elon did with the tesla, because the number one concern to you to this day, people have about electric vehicles is what, what, how do I charge it? And, uh, and. And.

The current charging infrastructure in the united states is not very good. It's terrible, with the exception of the superchargers, and Elon knew in fact, it was part of his original mission statement that in order for an electric vehicle to sell well, you had to have an infrastructure to support it. You had to have chargers everywhere. So he did that. He built those, and that's one of the reasons Tesla succeeded so well. It's one of the reasons I bought one. I waited to buy one until there was a supercharger in Petaluma. Now it turned out. I learned, and most people do learn, that you charge at home and so you don't really need a supercharger unless you're going on a long trip, but then then you do need it. Uh, but it was. It was the crown jewel, so much so that it was only a few months ago that all the other electric car manufacturers decided to use the supercharger standard and Elon said, yeah, you can use our superchargers. This was a huge success for him.

1:37:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Your Tesla charger at home and battery at home. Were you able to use that on your Mustang and on Lisa's electric?

1:37:44 - Leo Laporte
car, so it isn't a Tesla charger. So you know what? Know, I'm gonna do a public service announcement right here, right now can you do the voice?

1:37:53 - Paris Martineau
I don't know what is the voice I don't know like a public, uh, you know like a public psa pretend that I'm a. Uh, one of those slides you're wearing a full like beige suit it's kind of like a faded uh film and you spin around in your cozy chair and you're like, hey, folks today I'm here to talk to you about can we have a conversation about home charging?

1:38:15 - Leo Laporte
there's two kinds of fun.

1:38:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's more like it. That's more like you're selling us uh life insurance.

1:38:22 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I like it, though have you considered a reverse mortgage.

1:38:25 - Leo Laporte
You know you can get the equity in your home and never have to move out. So you can if you plug it into your regular socket, your 120-volt socket. That's what they call level one charging. The problem is it will take several days to charge up your battery. You can do that, in fact. Chevy bolts come with a level one charger.

It's a plug. You plug it into the wall but it's useless because it's so slow. In order to charge an electric vehicle in a reasonable amount of time, you have to send it a lot of watts. And the fast chargers it's Tesla super chargers and the Electrify America chargers send many, many volts. You know we're talking, I think, 135 kilovolts of power to the car. So they can charge it up to 80% in about 20 minutes to 30 minutes. At home you don't have to really send so much voltage because you're going to probably have it overnight, right? You're going to get home, you're going to plug it in, you're going to have dinner and go to bed and wake up in the morning You'll be full. So that's called level two charger. Level two charger is uh on a 220 circuit, but it's the same plug as your dryer plug. It's that big uh nema 1540 dryer plug. You probably have one in your house somewhere, jeff or an rv. A lot of people have it for rvs, yeah we, we grown-ups, have those things.

1:39:47 - Jeff Jarvis
We have 220. Yeah, so you have these big dryer plugs.

1:39:51 - Leo Laporte
But in the basement of your building, the dryers, if they're electric, will be plugged into something like that.

1:39:58 - Paris Martineau
Oh, yeah, there's dryers in my building. Yeah, you don't have dryers in your building, you have to go to a laundromat. I have a lot of laundry facility. Oh to a laundromat, like an animal.

1:40:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh my god I've got to do drop off even there's not a long. Oh yeah, anyway, continue. Wash and fold, baby. I, my life changed when I discovered the wash and fold, but anyway, that's another, it's life, it is life changing. It is amazing. And damn the expense I'm doing it, but anyway, the uh.

So we had an electrician come in and put those big RV 1540s in, and then you're yeah, there's a picture of it in the in the discord. Then your, you have in your car comes with something, usually that you can plug into that. If not, you can buy something that will plug into that and then you're plug into your car. So when I pull up, I just I literally plug my car in to something that is plugged into that NEMA 1540 and it charges it up at a level two charge, which means that it takes a few hours. It would take overnight to fill it up from zero, but you're never at zero. Usually it's 20, 30, 40 miles worth of range. That's just a couple hours. So that's the way to do it. You very rarely need these superchargers.

Nevertheless, it was brilliant marketing because it reassured people oh great, I can go on a road trip because otherwise, you know, with a car you say well, I'll just stop at the gas station In Providence when I was charging. There are 15 gas stations for every electric charger. Wait, you got an electric rental car. Yeah, that was living. Wow, I loved that, that was great. I had a kia, um, but the rental car people. You know how when you get a rental car, you have three choices of fuel you can have fill it up and do you have to return it charged? Yeah, you have to return it. 70 or higher. You have to return it 70% or higher? Yeah, isn't that hysterical.

1:41:51 - Paris Martineau
That's kind of crazy.

1:41:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So before I came back to Logan, to Boston's airport, from Providence, I had to find the one, and there is only one in Providence Electrify America charger. That was a scene, because it turns out, these Electrify Americaica. This is part of the problem. This was, uh, part of the settlement. Volkswagen in dieselgate, remember. They got dinged because they were cheating on diesel emission tests. The car would say, oh, I'm on one of those diamometers, I'm gonna, I'm gonna really be low emission. But in real world they were horrible polluters. So they got caught. It was called diesel gate and, among many fines they had to pay, they agreed to spend billions of dollars putting electrical infrastructure in the united states with something called electrify america. But the problem with it is that these, these chargers are never maintained. They often don't work.

And here's something I learned in the rain in providence, rhode island. I got out of my car and there's a charger and it has, like a gas station, two things and I thought, oh well, one of them's in use, that means I can use the other one. Turns out, only one of them can be used at a time. No, no, there's no sign. It's weird. You didn't figure it out, trial and error. Well, I'll tell you. I figured out.

I plugged mine in and the other people's went and then they came running back saying what happened. I said I plugged in my car. They said, oh yeah, you didn't know. You can only do one at a time. I felt really bad. They were very nice. I apologize. There is. There was a hand printed like my hi, my name is sticker on one of them that said one at a time, but all the rest you had to know that. And then there's this jostling to use it, because there's only four in the whole state of Rhode Island and so everybody's kind of you know waiting and like zipping in to get in here.

1:43:44 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what worries me is that you're going to get into a knife fight.

1:43:49 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no. The good news is, at least for now, people who drive EVs are all pretty nice, so I actually met some very nice people, had some wonderful conversations.

1:43:57 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, tesla drivers are right up there with BMW drivers as jerks.

1:44:01 - Leo Laporte
Hey, I'm a BMW driver and I used to drive a Tesla and I hate Howard Stern. So now, what do you say? So yeah, you are, I drive with my BMW window rolled down and I shout as I'm going I hate you, Howard Stern, I hate you. Anyway, this is a big problem in the United States.

1:44:23 - Paris Martineau
One day he'll hear you.

1:44:24 - Leo Laporte
And it's bizarre.

1:44:25 - Paris Martineau
Howard Stern, a big problem in the United.

1:44:27 - Leo Laporte
States, he'll hear you and it's bizarre, a big problem in the united states. It's bizarre that elon would fire the crown jewel of tesla's. I don't. I think he is a little self-destructive, can I?

1:44:40 - Benito Gonzalez
uh, yeah, can I be frank?

1:44:41 - Leo Laporte
yeah, it just doesn't make sense. He said tes, tesla still plans. He tweeted this or X'd it on Shitter, his website. He said Tesla still plans. I say that not SH, but X. Tesla still plans to grow the supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations. But, elon, you just fired the entire team. How are you planning to do it? You're going to do that yourself. I don't understand. I just don't get it. I hope one day Elon tweets superchargers have malls and cafes so I can x while charging my cyber truck. Oh no, that's an elon musk parody. Never mind.

1:45:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Never mind, he didn't respond to anything I can sit there and watch it rust, yes, and then cut off a finger here he is in china showing his chinese overlords.

1:45:50 - Leo Laporte
What a great, so awful dancer he is he does dance like a dad he says oh my, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, as dads we object also, I don't wear t-shirts over long-sleeve button-down shirts. I just want you to know. Wow, he didn't stop, he's still dancing. He's like he's Elon Musk, the dancing machine. She says please take the microphone please. He actually took his jacket off and threw it to her so he could do more dancing. Read the room, elon. Look at this woman on the right.

1:46:31 - Benito Gonzalez
She doesn't know what to make of it. They're laughing at you, elon. Yeah, look at this.

1:46:33 - Leo Laporte
Look at this. He's going to throw her his jacket.

1:46:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, like a strip tease.

1:46:39 - Paris Martineau
Everyone's clapping over there to the left.

1:46:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, they're paid to. They're paid to. Do you think North Korea?

1:46:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay.

1:46:51 - Paris Martineau
Oh boy, it keeps going.

1:46:53 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't end Much like this show Okay.

1:47:01 - Paris Martineau
Remember when you were like I've got a hard out at the beginning of this. I do 17 years ago.

1:47:06 - Leo Laporte
We're going to stop soon. Supreme Court has declined to. This is interesting to block the texas pornography age verification provisions. Scary, the challenge was that challenge made by the free speech coalition, which is, to be fair, a pornography industry trade group. The challenge said that the 2023 texas law violates the first amendment because before you can use their platforms, their pornography platforms, everybody not just kids, but everybody has to submit personal information, age verification. And, of course, we've said this many times that's the problem with these systems that, yeah, it limits children's access, but it means your, your privacy, is completely gone.

1:47:57 - Jeff Jarvis
And, of course, there's a master list of everybody who wants to watch porn and of course, that's exactly what the people who pass these laws want.

1:48:03 - Leo Laporte
They don't want. They want porn to be illegal. They know they can't do that, so this is the next best thing. Supreme court has refused yesterday to block, on free speech grounds, that provision.

1:48:13 - Paris Martineau
So they turned away, did they just refuse to hear it? Yeah, is that what happened?

1:48:17 - Leo Laporte
yep, they did not grant certiorari yeah, more cause for nihilism maybe that's the problem is that because I feel obligated in this show to cover the actual news, what's really going on.

1:48:34 - Paris Martineau
It's just hard to be happy yeah, it is until you realize that um the ai overlords are coming, everything is meaningless. We are just brains in the vats of our own bodies. Interpreting signals and everything around us, from podcasts to familial relationships, to language, is just something humanity made up to distract ourselves from our coming death.

1:49:03 - Leo Laporte
Are you more of a matrix or a Nick Bostrom on this simulation hypothesis which, on the scale, are machines keeping us alive as batteries? As in the matrix no no.

1:49:15 - Paris Martineau
I don't think so I like to think. I think that we're just brains in the vats of our own bodies.

1:49:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's true.

1:49:21 - Paris Martineau
Where you know. It's just a description of what is happening.

1:49:25 - Leo Laporte
It's not any grand simulation theory.

1:49:27 - Paris Martineau
No, no, I like just a description of what is happening.

1:49:30 - Leo Laporte
It's not any grand simulation theory, no, no, I like to think nothing crazy going on. I like to think that actually, uh, this is some sort of one might say torture, one might say challenge that I set for myself 67 years ago and I said all right, I'm gonna, you're gonna get born and you're gonna go through this thing and that at some point you're going to be a pie.

At some point I will die and then I'll wake up and go boy, that was crappy. Let's not do that again. Can we play a different game today? Oh leo, that's so sad uh no, I, I'm very happy in my way. There is a um. Who was it? Was it Heidegger? Some German philosopher said that gave a challenge.

1:50:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Ask ChatGBT. Yeah, no, ask Gemini.

1:50:18 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how to ask. The premise is what is your question? They said this I think it was Heidegger, or it might have been vick and scott wichtenstein, or might have been nietzsche, I don't know said would you, if given the option, want to relive your life, but but you don't get to change anything. Do it exactly as it. Repeat it exactly as it was, but only this time with the awareness. Would you do that?

1:50:43 - Paris Martineau
I think that's nietzsche's eternal recurrence.

1:50:46 - Leo Laporte
It is Very good.

1:50:50 - Jeff Jarvis
She's better than ChatGPT Nietzsche.

1:50:51 - PC
she exactly writes a minute on AI.

1:50:57 - Jeff Jarvis
He proposed it in his book the Gay Science it's my favorite the Friedrich Wissenschaft in 1881. The question is eternal recurrence and goes like this If you knew that you would have to relive your life exactly as it is, with all its sufferings and joys, would you still live it? So what's your answers?

1:51:15 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I think that I would prefer that rather than something that terrifies me existentially is the idea of like being put back as like a child, with all the knowledge I have now, but things being different because of the knowledge I have and decisions I make, because I'm happy with where my life is now and I know that I would somehow screw it up it's very funny that you brought this up.

Uh, leo, because I have the longest running tab I have on my phone. That I've had my phone since november and have yet to fully read is the new yorker article about nietzsche's eternal return no kidding wow no kidding it's, it's on here I would absolutely live my life to 27.

1:51:58 - Benito Gonzalez
That's the thing. She's only 27.

1:52:00 - Leo Laporte
See, that's the thing, that's the test you're gonna have there's. You're gonna have some ups and downs and you may not want to go through those ups and downs again, you know I would listen.

1:52:12 - Paris Martineau
I'm not saying it would be good, I'm just saying it'd be better than uh the alternative than the alternative of, I guess, not having lived at all or having to do it all over again with strange, potentially different or better results. That terrifies me more.

1:52:27 - Leo Laporte
This has been part of his philosophy. I've been thinking about this for years and I'm not sure where I come down on this Lately. I think I would like to do it again, but for a while I was thinking no, that would be painful. This is in. Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well. I believe In. Ecce Homo, he says. I now wish to relate the history of Zarathustra. The fundamental idea of the work, the eternal recurrence, the highest formula of a yes saying to life that can ever be attained, was first conceived in the month of 1881. I made a note of the idea on a sheet of paper with the postscript 6,000 feet beyond man and time. I don't know what that means. I think I would live it again. How about you about this show?

1:53:18 - Jeff Jarvis
you never know we have a little detour to nichi yeah, I want to read this new yorker article now.

1:53:21 - Paris Martineau
That's good I'll put it in the chat.

1:53:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you I came across it subscription paris uh, not the new yorker.

1:53:32 - Paris Martineau
No, I need to. I've subscribed to many other magazines I frankly need to renew my subscription to the new yorker.

1:53:37 - Leo Laporte
It's gonna be the thing that pushes me. I have subscribed to the new yorker my whole life practically. And you know what, when I went, uh, to my mom to visit my mom and her, all her new yorkers, were there on the side table. The pile of guilt no, it was only three or four. I brought them over to her and she was very happy to get them. Burke says. Burke, I think, says he doesn't want to go through this life again. He says you're just torturing yourself and this is all in caps by even considering that you could actually live another, earlier lifetime. No, no, not an earlier lifetime, this life was a later lifetime over, and over and over again.

Live the life you have now.

1:54:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Again is what we're talking about yes, that inspire groundhog day is there I guess maybe groundhog day.

1:54:24 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I guess maybe I'm gonna just google groundhog day nietzsche and see ask chat gbt.

1:54:32 - Leo Laporte
This is the kind of thing, though, that a chat would not be helpful with. This is a. These are deep, deep, uh questions adventures in film.

1:54:42 - Paris Martineau
Theoryorg says, groundhog day is not in all caps a depiction of nietzsche's eternal recurrence. It cannot be. And bill murray better hope not, oh you know why?

1:54:52 - Leo Laporte
because he changes it every time and gets better and better he refines it, and that was one of the primary pillars of all this is you can't change it. You're going to live the same exact life as danny rubin.

1:55:05 - Paris Martineau
He's going through the wheel danny rubin, who wrote groundhog day, said the question that inspired the script was if a person could live forever. If a person was immortal, how would they change over time? And that is the antithesis of eternal recurrence.

1:55:20 - Leo Laporte
Ah, okay, let's. Oh, I want to do one more happy story. I'll have to end with a happy story. Do you know bruce parents? By any chance, jeff, you're old enough to remember bruce, maybe he was one of the creators of, uh uh, the use group news net. Use net news groups. I met him, um, uh, I think, at an event at john perry barlows and we were talking about self-driving vehicles. He was very this is years ago very up on self-driving vehicles. Um, he is a very interesting fellow article today in the, or actually two last week in the register.

You know, I'm sorry it was yesterday I've done two impossible things, he says, although of course I wasn't the only one behind them. The first was getting the world to buy into open source who? He was a huge open source advocate. The second was convincing the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, and the governments of most countries worldwide to give up the Morse code test for ham radio licenses. Bruce, I owe you one because I would never become a ham if I had to do da-da-da-da dot dot. I didn't know. It was no longer a reminder. No, yeah, it makes it a lot easier. Trust me, I loved that. That was the only reason I could do it. His third gambit, according to Thomas Claiborne writing in the Register, perhaps more correctly characterized as improbable is to develop a license that mitigates the consequences of open source software development. So, as you know, much of our infrastructure in the world teeters on a tiny little sliver of open source software, maintained by some guy in Nebraska who gets no money and no credit for doing that.

1:57:05 - Paris Martineau
As depicted in that XKCD.

1:57:07 - Leo Laporte
XKCD very, very good. You recognize that. Um, what's happened, of course and we've we've learned this again and again is that these guys have retired, lost interest. Malicious actors have, in some cases, taken over. We just saw that recently.

Um, so what he wants to do is create what's called the post-open zero-cost license. That, in effect, is a paid license to support open-source developers so they get paid when their work gets used by large corporations. Right now, large corporations frequently free-ride on open-source developers, or just doing it for fun or just doing it because it's interesting, and there's a lot of software out there that's like that. He wants a license, kind of like compulsory licenses for music, so that people get paid. Companies making more than $5 million a year using open software using this new license will be required to pay 1% of their revenue back to the administrative organization, which will be like ASCAP, bmi, and then will distribute it to the maintainers.

I love this idea and, considering all the amazing things Bruce Perrins has done, I hope that he has some success with this one. He's been working on it for a while, bruce. You know what I'll see if we can get Bruce on the show. He's a very cool, very interesting and kind of quirky guy. He's one of the early pioneers, kind of like Barlow, the early pioneers of all of this. We miss Barlow, we do. Let's take a little time out and then, when we come back, we can wrap this up with your picks of the week. How about that, paris Martin? What do you say to that?

Let's do it, let's do it. The break today is to ask you, our fabulous audience, to join the best darn club in the world. If you want to talk about niches, eternal return or the original news, or tech news, or the original design of the cyber truck as seen in a game, a video game, or any kind of any kind of nerdy stuff comic books, beer we've got a place for you. It's our club Twit. Now. Almost 15,000 strong people who well, okay, I was being a little optimistic almost 12,000 strong people who love what we do, want to support it with their $7 a month, who get ad-free versions of all the shows, who get additional content, like the TwitPlus feed. We put some great stuff on the TwitPlus feed, like this time we had the escape box. That was a lot of fun. We've got some coming up too.

You also get access to the Discord where you could chat with other club members. It is, I mean, look, it's rare that you find a place where there are people like you, who like to talk about the stuff you like to talk about, who are there day and night from all over the world. That's what Club Twit is. So, yeah, ostensibly, the seven bucks goes to support our mission here and create new shows and all of that, but you're also getting access to a really great group of people and it's only seven bucks a month. Twittv slash Club Twit. We thank you so much for your support. We love our club members we really do and we are planning more events for you, so don't worry, thank you for your support and if you're not a member, twittv slash club twit. Thank you.

2:00:37 - Paris Martineau
Hey, and if 5% of you guys subscribe to Club Twit, then Leo would have no reason to be really depressed anymore.

2:00:44 - Leo Laporte
That's really kind of true, actually, cheer me up. Join the really depressed anymore. That's really kind of true. Actually, cheer me up. Join the club. Um, it's sort of true. Uh, advertising is is really a tough way to go and uh, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And, um, actually, this morning, go ahead. It's harder on my wife because she's the one who's selling the ads, but I have to go home to her and I feel I feel sad. I want to make it a little easier on her. Yeah, we have less than 2%. We only need 5%. We have about 750,000 people listen every month. If 15,000 of you joined, we'd be great. We would. We would be able to make new shows, we'd be able to stay in the studio. We keep the lights on. Everything would be great. So help us out.

2:01:35 - Paris Martineau
Really people please, people please please, I think of you.

2:01:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I I um keynoted a an ad conference this morning after my yesterday wow, uh, big conference week for you, jeff, and you did another podcast today. Yeah, I don't, I rushed home to do so. I stayed in new york for two days because I was like a tourist in new York.

2:01:44 - Paris Martineau
Wow, where'd you?

2:01:46 - Jeff Jarvis
stay In a loft.

2:01:48 - Leo Laporte
Hey, lisa and I are coming to New York in September.

2:01:50 - Paris Martineau
Oh, yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah, we're going on vacation. Can we do it in person? Oh no, you're going on vacation, oh no.

2:01:57 - Leo Laporte
No, no, lisa's already said we're going to have a meetup in New York City in September, so keep the month clear, and I hope that I will. We can go to dinner with you guys and hang out and you can join us in the meetup. I know there are lots of people in new york would like to meet you guys. Mary jo foley will come. We'll get a bunch of our regulars, uh, out there. Uh, we've done this before and it's really fun yeah, so say, stay tuned for dates and information.

But uh, I've got the clearance from the boss to have a meetup in new york. I'm not sure exactly on the dates, but I guess I could look here. Let me tell you in a second Roughly when it would be. I could tell you the week it would be so you can save the date like a wedding. Yes, we'll put this in here.

2:02:38 - Paris Martineau
That's great. You should send a fancy card.

2:02:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, save the date. Let's see, it's in my travel notebook, upcoming travel. We are going to be in New York. We're leaving on the 9th, so it'll be the first week, probably the 5th through the 9th, something like that, probably right after Labor Day. Oh, you're leaving town. Okay, all right. Yeah, we're going on a cruise from New York to Montreal on an autumn leaves tour. Oh yeah, cute, so that the boat leaves September 9th.

2:03:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So it'll have to be so. Do you fly back from Montreal or do you come back to?

2:03:18 - Leo Laporte
New York. Yeah, and we're going to be in Montreal for a little bit, maybe. I said let's do a meetup in Montreal. She said no, no, so we'll at least do that's vacation. Yeah, that's what she said We'll at least do. So we're sailing on a Monday and Labor Day is the third, so it'll probably be the fourth, fifth or sixth, maybe the seventh, possibly the eighth One of those days. So you're in my calendar, lisa, first week of September, and all the rest of you too. Keep that clear, we Keep that clear.

2:03:51 - Jeff Jarvis
We'll be in Manhattan. We'll try to go to the new Rattlin' Home or somewhere fun we can all hang out. Well, I think, given the current budgeting, I think I have a good cheap burrito place we can go to.

2:03:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that might be a better idea.

2:04:02 - Paris Martineau
Paris, your pick of the week. So a couple weeks ago, when we talked about the release of Sora, the AI generative video tool, one of the they, during the kind of announcement of it, had a lot of different kind of video. Producers and studios make cute little demonstration videos using Sora's tools.

2:04:29 - Leo Laporte
One of the videos- going around was this short film called Airhead, which I think we talked about briefly.

2:04:31 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, the balloon thing About like a boy with a balloon head, it was pretty cool, right. It has like the balloon guy like biking and walking around in like a Rive voiceover. There was this cool scene where, like he talked about how one of the hardest things about being a guy with a balloon head was like windy days and it had a video of his head like flying away and it was all made by jenny.

2:04:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I like awesome, right, except for it wasn't there was this great interview by fx guide that I mean.

2:04:55 - Paris Martineau
Yes, they're the stuff that is. The base components of this video were generated by sora, but they had to do a lot of post-production to fix all of the mistakes. Um it's very lifelike.

2:05:11 - Leo Laporte
I find it hard to believe that these, the guy on the bicycle, like these, I mean, look too real, it's interesting.

2:05:18 - Paris Martineau
So I mean, if you scroll down in this, they've got some example, uh, screenshots, not that that's the behind the scenes video.

Scroll down further like um, there's a lot of different um, that is one of them I put a face in the balloon a lot of creepy different things that happened where they were trying to get certain shots and they would here I'll read from it for airhead, the scenes were made by generating multiple clips to an approximate script, but there was no explicit way to have the actual yellow balloon head the same from shot to shot. Sometimes, when the team prompted for a yellow balloon, it wouldn't even be yellow. Other times it had a face embedded in it or a face seemingly drawn on the front of balloons. The balloon, as many balloons, have strings. Often the airhead character named sunny, the balloon guy, would have a string down the front of the character's shirt.

Sometimes, you know, like the classic scene that I think at least stuck with me from the video, which was the balloon head being blown away in the wind, it couldn't even get that right. The actual thing that sora generated was a dude with a normal head and a red balloon nearby, so they had to erase the head and post and add a yellow balloon there. So I mean, I think it just show goes to show.

2:06:34 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not fully up to snuff yet and the thing that I find frustrating, are you telling me it's not agi paris?

2:06:41 - Paris Martineau
it's not going to take over our lives and destroy the world I mean, I think the thing is it should be fine to just say like this isn't at full agi, whatever that means capacity. Yet it is an interesting novel tool, but there's no reason to overhype it to where people get disappointed when they learn about what's under the hood it, may you know, tesla's my attitude towards this is it may never be, but isn't this great that humans can work with a machine?

2:07:09 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I mean, I think the most valuable use of AI is in conjunction with a human, so I don't think there's anything to apologize for. I do wish they'd say it up front.

2:07:19 - Benito Gonzalez
That's not what they're trying to sell you, though, leo, I know.

2:07:22 - Leo Laporte
They're trying to sell you that it could do it without any human intervention. But you know what?

2:07:34 - Paris Martineau
Does anybody really want that? Yes, they want that. Who's a? Yeah, no, I mean hollywood, the people, yeah, the people who are potentially interested in buying it. There is this narrative around that, oh, we're months or a year or two away from you being able to just type in uh, make a little cute three minute video about a guy who has a balloon head, and this is what comes up. And the truth is we're very, very far away from that. It requires human writers, it requires human editors, it requires a lot of post-production work and help and coddling, and that's fine, but it means that this is just another tool, that it is not the end-all, be-all for all these industries.

2:08:09 - Benito Gonzalez
I mean, the real thing is that ai can't make changes.

2:08:12 - Leo Laporte
It's like it gives you a thing and that's it like right, you can't tell it, then you have to go back and do it over the human has to do that he says, uh, that for a minute and a half of footage.

That's how long the film is, not very long. They generated he'd hundreds of generations at 10 to 20 seconds apiece. My math is bad but I would guess probably 300 to 1 in terms of the amount of source material to what ended up in the final. I could have shot that faster than that, probably Absolutely.

2:08:39 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's just a dude walking around with a balloon.

2:08:47 - Leo Laporte
Here's to me the difference between this and CGI. So you could look at the first use of CGI, which was in Jurassic Park and that dinosaur, huh, the abyss Okay, the abyss with the head. But if you could look at that and say, well, that's cool and that's interesting, yeah, james Cameron didn't think it would be possible. I think I can't remember the story. It's in that Disney Plus documentary say, well, that's cool and that's interesting. Yeah, james cameron didn't think it'd be possible. I think I can't remember the story. It's in that disney plus documentary. It's a really good documentary about, uh, lucas film. But anyway, uh, you could look at and say, well, it's going to get better and better and at some point it's gonna be good enough to fool people. But that's different. That's cgi.

I don't know that there's a guarantee that AI will ever cross that last couple of percent to be fully self-driving, fully sentient, fully able to make a movie in one pass without a lot of human fixing. I don't think it's a similar kind of technology. I don't think it's a linear thing. I think the last bit is very, very hard and a lot of things with computers doing that last bit that humans find easy is very hard for them. So, but I don't think that's a bad thing, I think that's a good thing, hey, jeff we got him.

2:09:55 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we did, oh you sneaky.

2:09:57 - Leo Laporte
We finally beat it out of him.

2:09:58 - Paris Martineau
You sneaky, you broke his spirit, yeah.

2:10:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, us and the.

2:10:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Supreme Court.

2:10:08 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I don't know the supreme court, I don't know, I don't know. I I'm very excited about what ai can do. I don't think it's going to replace humans. I mean that should reassure everybody, but that doesn't mean it won't. Won't be pretty amazing?

2:10:20 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I'm sure there's going to be an amazing use of this. I'm sure that, like parts of the creation of this video will be like way easier in a year, especially two to five years. But I think it doesn't do anybody. It does everybody a disservice to overhype the capability.

2:10:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, absolutely that's the thing I'm hearing a lot, especially when you use it to try to scare people. One matter, but you know to sell. Use it to sell people, but to scare them so you can sell them, which is what the doers do, right I mean, it reminds me of that.

2:10:50 - Paris Martineau
What was it? The google gemini demo that we were all? Oh yeah, there's a good example and then it was like oh no, this is actually. There were prompts that took a lot of trial and error to get right, and then we added the voiceover. It's just like just show us your actual work and let us be impressed by it's an amazing innovation show us what you're doing instead of selling us a dream.

2:11:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That's right gutenberg started trying to print three colors at the same time and gave up drink guys.

2:11:19 - Leo Laporte
We hit gutenberg right there in the end, boy we saved it, that's a really pulled the fire irons out of the fire at the last possible minute so I was worried we'd go without I did try to sell the book off in the conference yesterday.

2:11:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So, um, I can cure everything you have, though, with lunabot, lunabot, so in in my pick, if I may, should I jump into my pick? Yes, yes, so we probably did. This story probably made fun of it of a professor who put his kid in a helmet with a GoPro on it to try to understand how kids learn, to teach AI how to learn, and it sounded like it was ridiculous, but it wasn't. It's a professor at NYU whose darling daughter, luna. Wasn't that a great name for a baby, though? Luna, I love that, it's a good name.

Once an hour a week, they do this and they want to learn how she's learning, and so there's this paragraph in here that I love. Where is it here? Where she's eating? And babooga, she said, pointing a round figure at the berries, a bunch of blueberries. So babooga. Dr Kwan gave her the rest and Dr Lake looked at the empty bowl amused that's like $10, he said A light on the camera blinked right. So there's that process of how does Luna learn the word blueberry. And, if you won't mind, leo, if you go to the next line in the rundown, there's a great video from not long back ago, of Jan LeCun talking about how about AI as a four-year-old? It's not long. We didn't check our sound beforehand, did we what?

2:12:58 - PC
a child sees through vision, and try to put a number on how much information a four-year-old child has seen during his or her life, and it's about 20 megabytes per second going through the optical nerve for 16,000 wake hours in the first four years of life and 3,600 seconds per hour.

You do the calculation and that's 10 to the 15 bytes. So what that tells you is that a four-year-old child has seen 50 times more information than the biggest LLMs that we have, and the four-year-old child is way smarter than the biggest LLMs that we have. The amount of knowledge that's accumulated is apparently smaller because it's in a different form, but in fact, a four-year-old child has learned an enormous amount of knowledge about how the world works, and we can do this with LLMs today, and so we're missing some essential science and new architectures to take advantage of sensory input that future AI systems would be capable of taking advantage of, and this will require a few scientific and technological breakthroughs, which may happen in the next year, three years, five years, ten years, we don't know. It's hard. I want to make sure I understand.

2:14:21 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of interesting. Was that this year's World Economic Forum? Yeah?

2:14:24 - Jeff Jarvis
it was.

2:14:25 - Leo Laporte
But how long is it going to get before we do ingest 50 times more? We're growing rapidly. I don't know if that's the goal actually.

2:14:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I talked about this with Jason on AI Inside, where the child has a sense of the example I used with Jason was a hand can't go through a wall. A child learns that early on. I hit the wall, the wall stops my hand. Ai hasn't learned that right. Ai has crazy things happen because it has no sense of reality, none whatsoever. And I don't know that we'll ever get to the point that it will be able to learn those kinds of lessons in reality. And why is that our goal? To make it be like us. The machine should do what the machine does really well, even if that's a bunch of different general tasks. But to make us the goal is hubris of our species. Oh, of course the machine wants to be like us. It needs to be like us. No, it doesn't Right.

2:15:24 - Benito Gonzalez
It's going to be totally different and much better than us on a bunch of things.

2:15:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it's a silly comparison, it'll be complimentary, because it doesn't learn even the same way as a four year old does. So it's not. It's not. It's really an apples to oranges comparison.

2:15:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's part of what Lacuna was working on. And this way you prof is, they do want to see what it would be like to teach it as a four year old, rather than right by sucking up all the content in the world as a four-year-old rather than by sucking up all the content in the world Right.

2:15:48 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Hawkins. For a long time he's a neuroscientist, but he was also the founder of Palm, and his company, Numenta, was designed to create chips that would act more like the human brain. The human brain is much slower than a computer, but it's massively parallel, and so he is trying to create these Numenta chips that are massively parallel so that the process can be more like the human process well isn't.

2:16:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Isn't that exactly what what nvidia shows with their racks and racks and racks and racks of machines?

2:16:19 - Paris Martineau
that it's not even with the tiny but powerful chip.

2:16:21 - Leo Laporte
It's not even close well, that's the goal. I'm saying yeah, uh, and I don't know. I think numenta might have pivoted, because I'm looking now at their website and it looks just like NVIDIA. It's the same kind of scale. It's where the money is. Yeah, it's not doing the parallel stuff that he was really interested in. That might have failed, I don't know.

2:16:43 - Benito Gonzalez
And human brain runs on 20 watts.

2:16:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's just a completely different machine.

2:16:47 - Paris Martineau
We're very efficient.

2:16:49 - Leo Laporte
It's a very different kind of machine, but it's incredibly slow. The passage of information through the brain is much slower than electronics much and it gets slower, doesn't it?

2:16:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it does, Jeff. Yes it does. Can I also just plug my op-ed in? Editor and publisher? Yes, and God bless them for running things that are critical of their industry. A guy named Mike Blinder is wonderful. So this is my screed against so much of the legislation going on in an attempt to save news. There's a new one that's not even in here in California.

2:17:24 - Paris Martineau
I love the headline on this Is history repeating itself? I have concerns.

2:17:32 - Jeff Jarvis
The problem is that legislators are listening to the legacy industry's lobbyists rather than the communities affected by the decline of their newspapers, say I.

2:17:39 - Leo Laporte
They always have. Of course, incumbents always get the attention. They're the ones making the contributions. The good news is, for some reason, somehow, time and time again, the young upstarts always end up winning. It just takes a little longer because the incumbents put up roadblocks. It happens in science too. You know, the scientists who know how everything works are always slow to recognize the new sciences, but eventually they take hold. So I think that's just normal. And you know, unfortunately we old folks are really a part of what's in the way.

If you wanted to have a little supercomputer in your house. I just wanted to tell you that the GSA is selling the former supercomputer government supercomputer called the Cheyenne and it's really quite a deal. This thing is massive. Oh my God, it's huge 14 units weighing 1,500 pounds each. Those are the e-cells. The e-racks are 28 units, the racks all water-cooled. 4,032 dual socket units. 8,064 processors. Dual socket units, 8,064 processors. 18-core processors running at 2.3 gigahertz base frequencies. How?

old is it Not that old? It's DDR4 memory. It's not that old. But I'll tell you what you can get it for $100,000, the current bid you have to pick it up.

2:19:04 - Paris Martineau
Does it include delivery? That was the question too, Delivery not included?

2:19:07 - Benito Gonzalez
It actually does not, and you've got to pick it up and put it on a truck yourself.

2:19:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well you know, maybe it costs you the same amount to ship it that it costs to buy it. The system is supplied with previously used PGW coolant about 10 gallons per e-sail, and it's in current condition. It's not perfect. I wonder how long it was in service need to see it play doom it could play doom.

It could play doom in the lights on the front of the computer. I guarantee you you'll have to go to cheyenne, wyoming, at the n car wyoming supercomputer center. It's just off i-80, on exit 357 from i-25. Take the i-80 west exit, then take exit 357. Bring your wife, your checkbook and your pink slip, if you want to get the sloss and cut off the cyan supercomputer.

This is great. I mean I don't. I don't know where I found this, but yeah, you can get your very own cheyenne supercomputer and the it's cheap right Now. Maybe there's only two days left in the bidding. Maybe somebody's going to snipe it at the very end and it'll end up going for a lot more. But it closes May 3rd at 6.11 pm Central Time. 18 bidders so far. You can actually see the bidding history and everything. What was the original it?

2:20:24 - Jeff Jarvis
started at $24,000.

2:20:30 - Leo Laporte
It's going up though, last guy raised the bid 85 dollars.

2:20:36 - Jeff Jarvis
85 dollars, that's very funny that's the bid he probably did it as a joke and he's going to be stuck with it now oh, wouldn't that be funny.

2:20:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you don't want to win this, just doing a hundred thousand dollar purchase bid as a joke. That's pretty good.

2:20:49 - Leo Laporte
Ladies and gentlemen, you can breathe a sigh of relief. This show is almost over, but I do thank you for putting up with us for the last couple of hours. Paris Martineau is really great. Read her stuff at the Information. She can't tell us what she's working on, but if you have a toop or a skip, I mean a skeep or a toop but if you have a tube, a tupper, a skip I mean a skeeper, a tube I mean a scoop or a tip, if you have a skip or a tube, reach out to me.

My signal is martino, zero one martino zero one on the old signal. Uh, just the same signal, by the way, used by jeff bezos and his executives to keep the ftc at bay. Right, same good, same good technology. Uh, jeff jarvis is still, according to this, right here, the director of the townite center for entrepreneurial journalism at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york, emeritus somewhere. I don't know where to stick the emeritus somewhere.

2:21:43 - Paris Martineau
There's an emeritus somewhere there I think you should choose a different place every time. I think it's kind of funny.

2:21:50 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, jeff, you're going to do any more conferences this week, or are you done now? No, I'm tired. I bet you are, that's a lot of work.

2:21:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Moderating straight whole day is hard.

2:22:02 - Paris Martineau
Murder Very good and he was on mic duty. Any time somebody moved that mic more than a couple inches away from their face. He was up there, he was ready, we've trained he was like my mic is flopping, all your mic's flopping all around on this podcast. But you were prepared.

2:22:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, hey hey, what are you?

2:22:22 - Leo Laporte
saying he's good. He's good, his mic technique. Do technique is excellent. Did you tighten it? He did, he tightened it. Look at that, that spider is holding on tight.

2:22:31 - Benito Gonzalez
Thank you for joining us.

2:22:32 - Leo Laporte
A special thanks to our club members. We really appreciate your help, your support and your participation. This community exists because of you, so thank you very much. I mean that with all honesty. Thanks also to those who merely listen, but you could kick in a little money if you wanted to. It wouldn't be so bad. We do appreciate both of you. We do this show every Wednesday right about 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, that's 2100 UTC. Watch us live on YouTube YouTubecom, slash twit. All of our shows are live. If you want to get notifications when we go live, smash the bell. Just smash that bell.

2:23:12 - Paris Martineau
Tap that bell.

2:23:13 - Leo Laporte
Tap the bell, do whatever it is. Do the thing.

2:23:17 - Paris Martineau
Like and subscribe.

2:23:18 - Leo Laporte
Like and subscribe that's the way to say it. After the show is over, we put edited copies of it up on the website twittv. There's also a YouTube channel with the video and you can subscribe to either audio or video in your favorite podcast client. That way, you get it automatically the minute it is available. I will be back Sunday for Ask the Tech Guys and Twit and I will see you then. Thank you Jeff, thank you Paris, thanks everybody. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google. 
 

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