This Week in Google 752 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for twig this week at Google. Jeff Jarvis is here, paris Mark no is here. We'll talk about the end of sports illustrated. Jeff says it's the beginning of the end for all. Old-style media will also talk about the FTC. They're finally telling TurboTax Uh-uh-uh. And why is it humans are so anxious to dig holes everywhere. All that more coming up next on twig Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twig.

00:39
This is twig this week in Google, episode 752, recorded Wednesday, january 24th 2024. The mole man of Hackney this week at Google is brought to you by Collide. When you go through airport security, there's a line where the TSA agents check your ID and there's another line right where a machine scans your bag. Well turns out, something similar happens in enterprise security instead of passengers and luggage, its end users and their devices. These days, most companies are pretty good at that first part, right, identifying the user. They check user identity.

01:18
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02:28
That is the, the smiling laughter of the one and only Paris Martino from the information. Hello Paris, hello, four years here, generally four years at the information. Not enough seniority to go to the party.

02:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Not enough seniority to go to the 10th anniversary gala in San Francisco. You got to be five years to get that golden ticket.

02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am just under the cutoff, I think doing this show should count as like 10 more years, so you know you've to think that whenever I bring that up I get hit with the technically.

03:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's a second job, Paris.

03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, it's not a second job. No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How many Washington Post and New York?

03:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Times, people. People are on. Yes you're just part of their job. Promoting.

03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's right and the networks love it I mean we tell our, we tell our other hosts Get on as many other podcasts as you can, because it promotes us and it brings new audiences, right? Oh well, that's all right.

03:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I agree. Next year You'll get to go to the 11th anniversary party, I'll get to go to the. Yeah, I'm sure we'll be just as wild.

03:41 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But you only get a Shirley Temple when you're there, that's.

03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's Jeff Jarvis, the director of the town I'd center for entrepreneurial journalism at the At the City University of New York, emeritus, not yet. Soon to be, soon to be, soon to be orbited. Hello, jeff, you and Jason did your first episode X. Cathedral of AI inside AI inside.

04:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
we just did this afternoon, so I might like you, leo, I'm doing more than one podcast today, so I'm I don't know how it's exhausting, isn't it? It is, but yeah, it was. It was delightful, it was just great to be back with we. Thank you to you and Lisa for letting us workshop that podcast right here at twit and Now we have it out at AI inside show, although I will point out that we do quite a bit of AI content here as well.

04:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you do is different that we don't do very much of, is you interview People in the field?

04:41 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
exactly that's what's gonna. I think we do a story or two. Generally, we're most times will do interviews. Yeah, so today we have rich screntha, who is the executive director of the Common Crawl Foundation, which is right in the center of the heat right now.

04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so Common Crawl was the group that the New York Times complained about. In fact, got got their stuff off of Common Crawl. Yes, that was how open AI was reading New York Times content, right? Something like that.

05:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
There's a story I put in today, I think from wired, that now 90% of major news organizations have turned off the robots dot text to AI. But the right wing places, the bright parts, are delighted because it leaves it alone for them.

05:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, which this is the problem exactly. In fact, that's kind of what Sam Altman was saying in his defense against the New York Times cases. If you only let AI read non-copyright material, you're not gonna have great AI. This, this wired story, says most top news sites about 40 of them, and this is according to the on an Ontario. What is the name of it? The Ontario research group? Oh, originality AI says that almost all of them block AI web crawlers New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Atlantic Bleacher report. The most widely blocked crawler, open AI's GPT bot. But when the originality AI talked to Other news outlets on the right, like Fox News, the Daily Caller and Brightbot, none of them block. Why do you think that is?

06:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Because they want their stuff to be everywhere and their point of what they're doing is to spread their Gospel, let's say, whereas the point of big old media is to Sell this commodity they think of as content.

06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
John Gillum, who's the founder and CEO of originality AI, says if the entire left leaning side is blocking, you could say come on over here, eat up all of our right-leaning content, yep, yep. But that should be a cause for concern. I mean, I would want my, but this is. I haven't kind of bang in this drama long, and I agree with Sam Altman if you want the AI to be trained on as much as possible and I don't think it well, we'll see. The courts are gonna rule on this, but I don't think it's copyright infringement for them. No, it's not. It's.

07:10 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It is a talk about this, my Senate testimony. They're gonna try to shrink fair use Down to nothing and kill copyright and that's what I think I like that's expanded so much.

07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you were testifying, kathy Gillis was on. Gellis was on this when you were showing my testimony. Yes, and you can show it on your other show. I should show it on your other show.

07:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, show it on your second podcast. Yeah.

07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kathy was saying that really there is a right to read and I had never heard that term before that is a First amendment right and that by limiting the right to read for these bots you might be inhibiting it in general.

07:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, I've kind of updated that in my mind is the right to learn, yeah, and, and that's what it is, because that that is the, the transformative.

08:01 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Act.

08:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Did you read something to have a?

08:04 - Paris Martineau (Host)
right to learn from copyrighted content.

08:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Um, as much as a right as you do to go in the library and get inspired.

08:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I mean the library and I guess like publicly accessible Works is one thing, but do you think they have the right to a bunch? I mean we've had this argument a million times.

08:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Let me turn around paywall content. Let me ask it this way what about from the free web? Because what they're trying to do is to say, even from the free web, you can't use it unless you license it. Do you think they have a right to read the free web?

08:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean yes, but I think that if the Owners of those sites and the creators of those con that content want to say actually no, we want you to pay us for consuming our content, I think they have a right to do that as well.

08:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So can I jump ahead to a story, leo, even though it isn't a democracy and sure what I do, but it's very relevant. So there was a great story that happened just this afternoon where a federal judge ruled against meta and for a company called bright data, about scraping or crawling, and Metta said that bright data, which was bright data was, was scraping public data from Facebook, saying this is stuff people made public and we're gonna scrape it right. And meta said no, you violated our terms of service. The judge said well, but bright data is not a customer of Metta, it didn't sign into Facebook, thus it isn't Subject to your terms of service. It scraped the open and public web. You lose meta, you win bright data.

09:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Then fascinating isn't it?

09:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So the one more there's a, there's a kota here. So it's on the courthouse news service that I saw this and I I tweeted it, of course, all over noxious creation as I do. And then I came back a little while later to send it to a link to a friend, and courthouse news service stuck up a Box interrupting you and saying to read this story, you have to agree to our terms of service. And so they didn't put up a paywall, they put up a to s wall.

10:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I didn't notice that as soon as I clicked yeah is there. Funny, very funny.

10:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So I you know, I think the judge is right, I think that there is a right to do that, and and common crawl doesn't take anything from behind paywalls.

10:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's so interesting so.

10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I like this piece from Esther Dyson and the information today and Just trying to read it, yeah, and I think her point of view is good. Don't fuss about training AI's. She's talking more about the dissent, the worry about disinformation. But train our kids. People are worried about AI taking their jobs, are competing with a myth. Now, this is Esther Dyson is an early venture capitalist. She's the daughter of Freeman Dyson, the famed physicist, very smart, has been covering technology as long as I have with her release 1.0 newsletter. She's really good. She says per people worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans. Yep, humanities, humanities. She says humanity is waking up to the challenges and opportunities. I guess this is a guest Editorial, but yeah, it's an opinion piece.

11:35
God bless, the information I swear you guys are doing are getting better and as as there's more and more crap out there, it also the information is getting better and better and it also convinces me of the value of a paid service. I mean, the information is not cheap. It's 400 bucks to start a year and then there you have pro versions of and you know in conferences. So but but we're paying for good journalism and we get it and I really appreciate that. Paris, tell Jessica that next time you don't get to go to the party.

12:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, yeah by the way if you'd come out for the party, you could have come up to be in the studio Promoted the show.

12:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, do I know I could have been in that chair. I could have taken over twit.

12:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's true, and I wish you had you welcome to do so at any time. Humanity is waking up to the challenges Esther Dyson writes to and opportunities of artificial intelligence. We don't yet understand our role. Oh, I love that.

12:31 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Yeah.

12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amen. People talk about the unexplainable AI when they should be more concerned about the unexplainable humans running the companies that develop the AI. And then she puts up breath. It says hi, sam People worried about AI taking their jobs and taking a troller competing with a myth? It is. It's science fiction. It is. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans, even as they develop better AI. People are still in control. They just need to use that control wisely, ethically and carefully. Amen, I guess is so this I can't wait to.

13:05 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Like I said, you're the manuscript of my new book, so maybe you'll blur it. This is exactly what I say. There is that we have to have people who understand, who study humans, not machines.

13:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

13:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Demote the gigs. Yeah, it's a human network.

13:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, anyway, I'm not, I'm not so afraid of AI, but I am afraid of an AI that is trained only on right wing news media you know what I'm saying? Or AI that's only trained on white faces, or AI, you know an on and on and on. Bias in AI is real.

13:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Or AI that's trained on synthetic content, which scares me too, because who sets the parameters for that?

13:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and then that's where you get a real kind of vicious cycle, because if the AI is trained on garbage and then the AI produces more garbage than trains on, that, yep, just really goes downhill fast.

13:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I've pointed out to you my friend Matthew Kirshenbaum's piece in the Atlantic called the text apocalypse.

14:04 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Great name.

14:05 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Are we heading that way? You think yeah, because he says that we end up with if the machine trains on what the machine produces and it just iterates and iterates and iterates, we end up with a gray goo with no human agency. Yeah, it amplifies the worst of what we have done in the past. What we should be doing, when I talk about this today with with Rich Screna, is the, these, all these publishers are pulling out of these public crawls and AI. What we should be doing instead is saying what's missing. How many voices are missing that ought to be there. It's what Wikipedia does all the time, where they acknowledge the lack of diversity of Wikipedia and they make direct efforts to go out and fix that. We should be doing the same with the web as a whole and encouraging more content and more contributions from different perspectives. But no, the big old guys pull out. Yeah.

15:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right. What about this is sad sports illustrated.

15:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There's so much sad media news that has happened.

15:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a pile on, isn't it? Another reason you should be really glad to be working for a company that has a financial strategy that makes sense. We're seeing this, too, on Twitter. I mean, there's definitely an adpocalypse going on and it's affecting. If it's affecting sports illustrated, you better believe it's affecting us, yeah.

15:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And it feels like it's only just beginning.

15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's you know, and I don't get it, frankly, because the economy's fine. I don't understand what's happened.

15:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Do you think that there? Do you think that there? I've debated whether this is going to happen at some point and this is not going to be a happy speculation. But do you think that they think they don't need to advertise nearly as much anymore? Well, I, you know, have direct relationships.

15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, if you're, if you're. We've been saying this for a long time that companies really should be going to have exactly direct relationships with their customers. Alex Lindsey said 10 years ago he was talking about quick time, that's how long ago this was on the apple that companies should be making their own videos. Llb and RREI should have you know, camping, how to camping videos for people who are, you know, crazy about camping, and everything that's a product that they sell should be clickable. Well, that tent looks good and you can click it and it would show you the tent and draw you to it. And and that was 10 years ago he was saying that's going that should happen. He said that's going to happen. He might be right.

16:40
There is a role of influencers here that I'm not sure I like, because influence is a two way street and if you are an influencer like you're a, you too, I mean, I'm an early influencer, I think, but you have to be really careful. I come from, fortunately, I come from a more traditional journalist background, so I understand the potential conflicts of interest, but there are a lot of influencers who don't, who are influenced by the money and products they're. You should see what my son is showered with, every day, boxes after box after box of cooking gear, because he's a cooking influencer and companies not just cooking gear send him lights and cameras and everything. So it's very hard if you're an influencer and not to be influenced. It's one of the reasons what Taylor Lorenz's book is really about.

17:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, is that kind of corruption? They were corrupted by the internet. They weren't even corrupted by attention, but they were corrupted by the advertisers dollars.

17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, as a result, you know what I do nobody's going to do, but we, we cut ourselves off. I don't talk to PR people, I don't take loaner products. We really kind of bury ourselves far away and, as a result, a lot of companies kind of I don't have a relationship with Apple and they don't really like me, Not because I'm more.

18:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, apple is one of the most controlling. They're notorious, yeah.

18:05 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
But I I'm not mean about Apple, I mean I talk.

18:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Apple, we talk about Apple. I have a, have the number one Apple podcast, you know. But for some reason, Apple is conceived of me as the enemy, and so, because you're not controllable Well, I don't know if that's true, I don't want to, but, but I'm not, I don't want to be influenced by them. And so they've decided well, you mustn't be an influencer, so we don't need to, we don't need to talk to you, and that this is. It's an interesting state of affairs, but I think it does bode poorly for old school media sports illustrated laid off on Friday with a seven minute zoom call, laid off almost all of its staff and then told the rest well, you can have your job for another three months.

18:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's even more complicated because it was a licensed deal when, when time ink was the orphan child and they, and they've sloughed off time on to Benioff who just did layoffs. Today, salesforce and and fortune to a time business, ben and so on. Sports Illustrated went to a marketing company which in turn licensed it to this company.

19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it says Meredith, they're not a spot time Now. Meredith is a at least a magazine company.

19:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, it was but then Meredith was sold.

19:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let me yeah, let's go down the line because okay. So they bought it. And this isn't long ago, 2017, for three billion. Two years later, Meredith sold Sports Illustrated to authentic brands group. Now, what authentic brands group does is license brands. In fact, one of the things they're working on is a Sports Illustrated branded hotel in Michigan. That's their business.

19:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's authenticity.

19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so authentic they don't publish smells like a locker room. Yeah, they don't publish magazines. So they said, well, what look? We don't know anything about this. So we are going to license the Sports Illustrated brand to the arena group, formerly known as the Maven. You might remember, I remember them as the Maven. They own men's journal. They own parade, which used to be like a hundred million circulation. It used to be a massive. Oh yeah, it was in every Sunday news.

20:15 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It was the largest magazine in the country, so the Maven.

20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paris did you know parade? I know parade, I haven't read it, I know. It's hard to imagine the circulation of these magazines because they were inserts in your Sunday paper. I wrote for a different one that had like a hundred, like huge 40 million or something and the ads were incredibly expensive, like 600,000 a page.

20:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, cause you're hitting everybody.

20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now a lot of people. That parade went into the garbage with the rest of the inserts or the recycling, let's hope. But. But I guess enough people read it and it was just a, it wasn't. It was a very light magazine anyway. They own. They own that. I don't know where what parade is now I don't see it anymore. So they they licensed it Sports Illustrated for 10 years from authentic brands.

21:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Their final issue was December 31st 2023.

21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, this is a, this was a magazine. This is right up there with time and news week, right?

21:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, yeah, and and and the lore. I talked to a writer just last night who started a bunch of magazines, is writing a piece for airmail about this. So he called me and the lore around SI was when it started. It went there's two different versions of the stories, either 11 or 14 years before it made a profit. Because it was so. It was so impossible to imagine a weekly magazine about sports. How could you do this? But it became the writing and the photography and eventually the swimsuit issue.

21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not you know the swimsuits.

21:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What he told me? He told me that the one issue of the swimsuit issue had $35 million in rad revenue. Wow, One issue.

21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the first magazine with the, with circulation over a million to win the national magazine award for general excellence Wanted twice. Started publishing the swimsuit issue in 1964. It's actually been around, or was around, since 1954. It's older than me and it and had some of the best sports writers in the world writing for it.

22:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I mean some really ended fended off other competitors. Espn tried to do a magazine. It didn't work. The national started to remember that it didn't work. Si survived everything except authentic brands.

22:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Frank DeFord Read magazine by Jeff Jarvis. Yeah, you know. Yes, thank you.

22:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Thank you, it is. I write all about this in magazine. A simple little base, little book, almost kind of magazine. It's pocket size.

22:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you may also remember they got in trouble last year, late last year, because they were publishing AI generated articles with made up author names. In fact the CEO was fired because of that. The the January of this year. Three weeks ago, they missed their quarterly licensing payment to authentic brands group, and that's when January 19th, a couple of days ago, authentic brand group terminated the licensing agreement. That's why I mean they can't put, you can't publish a magazine called sports illustrated If you don't have that deal. So arena group said we're just going to lay off the entire staff. It's over.

23:24
God it's stunning so.

23:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Leo, at the bottom of the rundown I put down a post that I wrote this afternoon before coming on the show, in which it's supposed I didn't want to write, but I finally said I think it's time to give up on old media, are we?

23:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
old media just before I read this. No, you're not Okay, I'm feeling like it.

23:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, well, what's interesting is the old newspapers and magazines.

23:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But these, this cycle, which is a normal cycle, which used to be a hundred years cycle, is now getting down to a few years, a decade maybe, and so I do feel in some ways, podcasting is is now seen by a lot of agencies anyway and advertisers as old media and they're looking at the hot new thing which is within the, within the life of magazines, there were cycles.

24:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, but you look at time, time and time.

24:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this was a century.

24:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, yeah 1920s until radio got a hundred years right. Radio got a hundred, but it's got to die into. And I think that magazines could have done what you do, which is have community, and they didn't realize it, they didn't understand it and newspapers could have been different, but they kept on thinking they were in the content business and I've had it. So now the LA Times has huge layoffs this week Time 24 people about a fourth of their union unit.

24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paris you're, I mean you're. You are a young person who decided to make your way as a journalist.

24:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
My first two jobs ended in layoffs in this industry. Do you?

24:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
feel like you're walking on a full time job.

24:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I've. I mean, yeah, this is the only fold. The information is the only full time job I've had in journalism that I haven't gotten laid off from.

25:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Knock wood. We're not going to wood for you at Paris.

25:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Knock on wood, guys.

25:05 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I hope they do well and don't spend too much money on parties. I don't think they can stay in business.

25:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean that's. That's why we didn't get flown out to the party, because we're being true to each other Be be frugal.

25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you want them to be frugal, you want them to.

25:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, I think we do, I, I don't know. I think it's a really difficult time. I know a lot of people my age, older and younger, that have been laid off. They laid off, I mean, with the LA Times layoff. It impacted basically their entire business reporting section. It is so many phenomenal journalists whose livelihoods have just been ripped away from them and you know the LA Times is the only example of this and it's at a certain point. It's like something has to give, because none of these journalists are going to be able to find jobs.

25:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Paris. Did your parents think you were nuts going into this business? Um, I don't think they thought I was nuts.

25:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I thought I was nuts, I thought it wasn't going to work out and I was like I'm going to give it a good five years and I'll go to law school. But it worked out. So I don't know. I think they were a bit skeptical and I don't think I think the second time I got laid off and I called them, they didn't sound that surprised. Uh, it's quite sad.

26:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We asked. We asked where the prior two outlets were.

26:24 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Um when I was at Wired magazine, I was part of a layoffs at Condé Nast during the pandemic.

26:31
And uh, before that I was at the outline of a digital media publication, helmed by Josh Chpulski, that after I got laid off I was part of a round of layoffs that impacted every uh, all the staff writers, um, at the publication. I was kind of lucky at the time because there hadn't been that many big media layoffs and not like the outline was big, but it was notable, I think, among kind of a tech journalist community that they were all gone. So it got a lot of attention that I was laid off and it's kind of how I ended up getting my job at Wired Um. But I feel so bad for all of my peers in this community that I see getting laid off now because it is like every other day there was a new round. You're getting lost in the fray, truly.

27:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and I don't just feel bad for the people who are working journalists, I feel bad for us as consumers of journalism.

27:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Absolutely.

27:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean we're, we're, we're losing. We just lost sports freaking illustrated. Uh, cnet is very shaky. Red Ventures is trying to lay them off. Uh, we're going to lose all of this. They, they, you know Amazon, uh, which uh bought um a DP review photo review site very, very, very good photo review site was going to shut it down. Fortunately, somebody, a a white knight, came along and bought it and kept it alive, but it but it was right on the edge of everything being gone, um, and these are really important sites for people.

28:02
This is valuable stuff. Now, now here, let me ask you because that's what ties into this first story the New York Times is just trying to save its life, right? And they see, oh well, I think you know the.

28:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Wall Street, the New York.

28:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Times is doing fine.

28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're doing fine, as is the Wall Street Journal right, they're more like the information, I think the Wall Street Journal a little, I think, is certainly doing worse than the New York Times.

28:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The Wall Street Journal has a problem because most of their subscribers are old and they're having a very hard time getting anyone under 50 to subscribe. Oh, interesting and also, the subscriptions are based on a print product, which is difficult.

28:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They've had tons of initiatives to get young readers.

28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've had students of mine who've worked on those things and then they get laid off as you know what the New York Times is doing to get young readers is they're buying up games like Whirtle. I mean honestly, I think probably people under 40 think of the New York Times as a great place to play games.

29:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
But are they getting the athletics?

29:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They bought up the athletic. That's where sports illustrated fans will go, is is to the athletic for sports or the ringer. That might be a new media form of what sports illustrated was.

29:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I mean Vox, was that in the original iteration?

29:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in theory. See, I guess it's not being proved out by the Wall Street Journal, but the idea, my idea, was publications like the information of the Wall Street Journal make money for their subscribers. It's worth 175 bucks for the Wall Street Journal or 400 bucks for the information, because the information I get helps me make money, helps me do my job, so it pays for itself. New York Times not so much. Why is it New York Times? How is the New York Times doing so well, so much better even than the journal?

29:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's the biggest brand. It has that that, that brand position. It's been a national paper for a long time, which was which was a strategy that they did, whereas Washington Post wanted to stay local until it was sold to Bezos.

30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How's the post doing? By the way, it's not, it's laid off. Post is doing badly. Yeah, very badly. They just did huge layoffs.

30:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I was well.

30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe in the hundreds and honestly, at the same time as I kind of think it's wonderful to have a patron in the kind of the, the, the Venetian style, you know, a guy with the infinite amount of money who just keep you know it's a toy and he keeps it going. I also think that's not bad, not a good thing for the general polity and and for the independence of the country. Well, that's why Bezos wants it to be sustainable.

30:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He doesn't, he doesn't want to, he doesn't want to have to be the patron, I think it would be good A patron model of the patron actually bought into that and was like, yeah, I'm cool with losing a couple of tens of millions of dollars, Loreen who Loreen Jobs?

30:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steve Jobs no she's.

30:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
She's done layoffs at the Atlantic and says she wants it to be profitable. I was just about to say that because I think that's a good example of a rich person that we all thought was doing this because she loved journalism, wants to be Atlantic to succeed. I think she does believe in those two.

31:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Her Emerson collective has been buying up publications like this.

31:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is why I'm giving up. So next month I'm going to Scranton because their paper just got bought by Alden, the hedge fund, and it's two. We just know it's doomed. So what does the town do? And I'm going to go there and talk to people and see what they think they can do. But most newspaper chains in the US now are controlled by hedge funds. They're not going to invest, they're not going to innovate, they're going to suck a dry of free cash flow.

31:39
Magazine industry as a whole is dying quietly. Linear television the FCC just said we're going to support local news. Well, good, because before they die off, why don't you help it out? Linear TV is going away. Broadcast radio is already bought in this country, not in Europe, but here. Old media is doomed and I spent the last 18 years of my career trying to help new media, old media at the same time, and I think I was wrong. I think I think it pains me to say it pains me to say it, but I think it's no good to throw more good money and effort after bad.

32:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have two questions One why is this happening? And two what is the future? Why start with? Why is this happening?

32:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Advertising.

32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it all advertising?

32:24 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I believe it was an industry that was based on advertising dollars, and when, though, you know, the fickle attention of advertisers shifts from one shiny object to the next and to the next, industry suffered.

32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the only direct experience I have is with Twitter, and for a while we did very well and we were very successful. We were able to grow, and it was all based on advertising, and as advertising dwindles, so do we. You know we're in the same boat as Sports Illustrator or anybody else, so, but I, but I thought there must be other forces. It's just advertising.

32:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I think it's also audience size.

33:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's competition. Audience size has gone down for podcasts. That's right.

33:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Because, because there's competition everywhere and tension is diluted.

33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's somebody started an AI show all of a sudden and now half of our audience has flown.

33:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Benito what did?

33:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you? What did you want to say, Benito Gonzalez, who, by the way, worked at Twitch, which is another company that is on the precipice, not the pretzel the precipice of failure?

33:24 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I also worked at CNET, which is also at the precipice.

33:26 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You know it's your fault, You're the reason you get out of here, Benito Leave.

33:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Everywhere you go. Ron, they figured you out, You've been made.

33:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you devil? Are you the devil in disguise?

33:37 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Well, actually, the reason why I left a lot of these jobs also I mean, some of them are layoffs some of them I left was because, like, like, there were a lot of times where I rang alarm bells about things like the pivot to video and being like hey guys, Facebook isn't going to give you any money for this, Yet you're making, you're forcing us all you are, all these Facebook videos. Yeah, so it's it's the lack of accountability and upper management.

33:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We dodged that bullet. By the way, Everybody told me, oh, Twitch had moved heavily to Facebook once Facebook started. A favorite video.

34:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, I told you that.

34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said I don't want to be dependent on Facebook, and it was turned out to be the right by accident. What a Twitter Twitch go wrong. Benito, do you have any insight into that Twitch?

34:14 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
just has. Well, part of the layoffs of this round right now is that they did they hired like way too many people during the pandemic.

34:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's kind of. That's the big tech excuse. That's why Google is laying off also at Twitch.

34:28 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Like I hate to say it, but there there were a lot of useless jobs there.

34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, anybody who's worked in a big company like Google or Twitch knows there are. There's a whole layer of people who really don't do anything. Yeah, you can get rid of. Yeah, I am here at this company.

34:44 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
That's people who never get fired, by the way, and those are the people who never get laid off, of course not, they're the ones firing people, sadly.

34:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Ok, so I guess of pitchfork being folded and pitchfork Another good example.

34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're talking about another good example Media, and that's what you don't know.

35:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And yeah, announcement I think within the last week or two, pitchfork Contan asked announced that they were laying off most of pitchfork and they were folding the brand into GQ.

35:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the pitchfork was supposed to be kind of the new Rolling Stone right, Rolling Stone for the Internet.

35:18 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Yeah.

35:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But about music and culture.

35:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Paris. I have to a bit something to you. Yes, as one gets older, I found that one's interest in music oddly declines.

35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that sad. You can't hear lyrics, it is. It's so sad I'm not up. I'm not up on what the hip kids are doing. I don't know why, but I have had I tell you it was a number of stages that happened to me that do the quite the opposite.

35:46
The first one was Napster, because I remember when Napster started I had kind of, I was like you, jeff, old and in the way and and I'm not interested in music and and Napster for some reason reignited my interest in music and I think I don't know why, but they normally they say you, you, your musical tastes end at 27. This is it Like. Whatever you like, Johnny.

36:10 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Mitchell man Johnny.

36:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mitchell, but for some reason I've gotten back into. In fact, we just did something yesterday on Mac Break Week. That's been wonderful. Apple added this new feature a feature that has been around for years and other platforms, but Apple just added it. So it's new of allowing you to share your playlists publicly, to create a public playlist with up to 100 people. So I published the QR code on Mac Break Weekly. You had to be an Apple Music subscriber and I've got about 50 people and they've been. Each of them. We said let's suggest one, your one song, the, you know, the one song Does have to be your favorite, just the song, and it's wonderful.

36:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And I've been listening to all this new music Great, I know I'll share with you. It's been really great. What are some of your favorite songs you've discovered?

36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, some of them are funny, are old ones that I've been around. It's called Club Twits shared playlist. I'll put a link in the. There's only room for 32 more people now we're up to 68. But I'll put a link in the club discord. But I think I'm looking forward to hearing the Viagra Boys punk rock. I don't know what that's going to be. But then there's just been a whole. I heard listen to a Nils Lofgren song I'd never heard, called Black Books. It was wonderful. Disturbs You're taking down Not like a plain, it's Disturbs version of the sounds of silence. That's got to be good you can hear it.

37:29
You can hear it. Anyway, it's just. And then we've been talking about Peter Gabriel's new album. This is an example, jeff, of an artist who was big when I was 27. Yeah, but who's got a new album. That's actually his best album ever, in my opinion. So anyway, yeah, it's been really fun. Olivia Dean, I never heard of the.

37:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
What did you put in the app? What I didn't put?

37:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anything in I didn't want to poison it with my weird taste.

37:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
What would you add some Lucy Dacus in there.

37:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, would you see, I love this. So I think it is possible I don't know why, but I feel like it is possible, even at an advanced state advanced stage to kind of rediscover music.

38:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And that is the better way to do it. I would never start editing a weekly today. I would want to start something like that. So it's that C word again. It's community. It's community and collaboration. And Paris, to respond to you, as recline did, a long lamentation based on pitchfork, because he misses a terrible thing already and talked about sports, illustrated and talked about all the others, and his point was that all of the big is fine, the little kind of is OK. If you have a newsletter, it's the middle, that's, that's screwed. And I think that's my point. And what I wrote is that I just simply have not been radical enough, because what we've tried to do is still emulate what we did. We're still trying to create things that are story based, content based rather than service based and community based, and I think we have an eye. I'm known as a radical, a whole, but I haven't really enough.

39:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, oh yeah.

39:06 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But oh really, oh really.

39:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You a radical, they all know.

39:15 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
We're just teasing you.

39:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know kids.

39:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I love you. Go on, I'm self aware, self aware of that, it's just.

39:22 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
I've been radical.

39:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I've been radical enough. We haven't. We we've got to fundamentally rethink and an old journalism of of making a publication and thinking that we control that public dialogue and discourse is outmoded and mass is gone. I keep on screaming about that in my other books I'm going to bring parenthesis and so I'm not. There's a lot of movements around journalism. Right, I helped start one in engagement. I'm in engagement journalism there's. There's cooperative journalism and reparative journalism and constructive journalism and solutions journalism. There's tons of isms now around journalism but they're all trying to, I think, begin to reinvent the field Fundamentally and I'm I'm too old to do it. That's what I hope my students can do. You, paris, maybe you're not too old, maybe you can do it.

40:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Maybe, maybe there will be journalism that will exist in 10 or 20 years.

40:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It can't be ad supported, though, right, I mean, isn't that part of the problem? Well, I think, I think it was also the same.

40:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I think the issue is if it isn't ad supported and everything I mean this is a topic I feel like we've discussed in the show many times Isn't ad supported in? The most sustainable method for journalism is subscription based. That means most people aren't going to be getting quality news Because most you do membership based. But I mean most people do not subscribe to anything or a member of anything, right, most people get their news from social media just passively, but some people.

40:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is the hope. The public media model is. The six to 10 percent of public media listeners, public radio, support it so that it can be free for all. And, by the way, catherine Mayer, former head of Wikimedia Foundation, was just announced as the new CEO of NPR. Yeah, which is? She's great, she's brilliant. She's brilliant after that.

41:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And another news outlet that's had massive layoffs in the past year.

41:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, yes, and she brings a different perspective here from Wikimedia.

41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. Npr is not ad supported. Why did NPR have massive layoffs? Well, they have. They have underwriters Leo.

41:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, it's like ads, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, so that's interesting because NPR is the podcast, the model of straight on ads.

41:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the NPR is more like the model I would like to espouse to, because a lot of NPR support comes from viewers like you, right, or listeners like you. You said what 10 percent, five percent, six to ten. Yeah.

41:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Six to twelve, I think, is the high.

41:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But apparently their model also requires a significant underwriting slash ad support. Oh yeah, and they get government support and philanthropy.

42:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah Well, the government their government support is like a single digit. It's very, and it's mostly to the member stations that will receive like grants.

42:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, exactly, but they get philanthropy too. So it's the three, three links that store.

42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, archer Daniels, midland and companies like that, right, um. So should we do that? Should we also have a seek? We're not a nonprofit. It'd be hard to do that.

42:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, leo, maybe you, maybe you could convert, because maybe you could get your AI friend to go on all these meandering walks to donate to Twit.

42:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that's a good.

42:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Jason Calacanis and Sam Altman.

42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they should really kick in. So I think we've got the community part down pretty well here.

42:50
I really do In fact it's the part of this doing this I love is our community. It's really the only reason I ever did it from day one, the reason we did that. I started to it because I'd left tech TV and I missed hanging out with my tech TV friends and I knew our audience would love hanging out with them too and I wanted to involve them as best I could. We still lack kind of the good. This might be part of the problem. We don't have a lot of ways to engage community. Discord is probably the best we've got so far, but I'd like to see better ways to engage community and so I was.

43:26
I did it because I wanted friends and so I hung out with my buddies and then we record it and we'd, and then other people would listen to it and we had a community. We always had a chat room, at least going, and so really was always about community. And in fact the first three years I really didn't do ads. I thought maybe we could just make this community supported it, but there wasn't a lot of money, there wasn't a lot of infrastructure to support it, so eventually we started doing ads. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe I should have hung on to the belief the community is what really matters. But then you have to get money from them, right?

43:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, you have to do that and that's a, that's a marketing cost, yeah, I mean yeah, there's a whole infrastructure that needs to be built around.

44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We looked at when we started. I was, I was. I looked at being a 501 C3. I did. I didn't know about public benefit corporations but and I might be I would have done that instead. But I looked at the two different ways we could. We end up being an LLC, but I looked at the two different ways we could do that and I was thinking about 501 C3 because then I thought, well, we'd have an educational mission. I just didn't have the confidence that that would fund us. That would have been hard and advertising is well, this is. But what's also hard Is advertising has funded us so well that we've built studio and studios and added staff and built shows and we do a very expensive podcast.

44:46
You could do what we're doing right now on. What is this? What is that stream way, that thing? You were a stream yard, stream yard or on Riverside FM, for you know, 39 bucks a month instead of God. I don't even want to think what the monthly, the chair alone, the chair alone is. Yeah, yeah, we went. We went to restoration hardware and we spent more than a million dollars setting up a studio. This table in front of me is custom built.

45:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You can't, you can't go to a store and get a table that does this and table is slowly rising to overtake me and Jeff, you can't you couldn't, you can't buy this in the store.

45:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to custom make this. So what was I thinking? I thought, oh, that's, I guess, I thought. I guess. I thought, oh, this is a good model and it should sustain us forever. And now the model is sinking, like this table is. Yeah, I don't think you can beat yourself up, though.

45:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Because how could you?

45:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
have known. How could anyone have known? Yeah, how could you know?

45:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know what it was less than 10 years ago.

45:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
People thought that Buzzfeed and Vox and Vice were going to be billion dollar public. That's true.

46:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wasn't alone in my delusion, was I? Yeah? And I realized what the truth is. We've done this for 18 years It'll be 19 in April and it's been, for the most of that, very profitable and successful, and so it wasn't a bad thing. But maybe the time it's at 20 years it's like well, you got 20 years, that's fine, we're done.

46:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Or you convert it to a new life. I mean look at Netflix how it changed three times.

46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hard to pivot. You know, I quit the radio show because I was. They weren't selling ads anymore. They had. I had done it for 19 years and last December, a year ago plus a year and a month ago, I said no, I'm not going to do anymore because they weren't selling enough ads to pay me anymore and I didn't really want to do it for free. So, but that's radio right, and podcasting is kind of following, and so is apparently. So is the magazine business, the newspaper business, all old media, I mean I. That's why, jeff, when I asked, are we old media, I kind of think we are in some ways.

47:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, in a way, the whole internet is old media, because the whole internet is built around the attention economy and so we have to break out of that. I think there are new generations of advertising we can imagine, but we also have to break up. Plus, we're wildly inefficient as an industry. Everybody rewrites everybody else. The original value created out of news organizations is not as much as they think, because their their business needs drive them to write tons of stories around trending topics to get SEO and clicks and likes, and that's, that's the Jane. Stop this crazy thing. Treadmill Is that a reference? You know Paris Jane's crazy thing? No, I don't know.

47:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, I don't know, george.

47:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chetzen Jane, george, chetzen His dog Elroy, no, his boy Elroy. Anyway, you know, you got it. Yeah, he was on that treadmill.

48:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I like the blues. Someday he was on that treadmill, maybe Fred will win.

48:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really like the episode where it crossed over with the Flintstones. Yeah, cause they're really the same show In a different time period. It's otherwise a identical.

48:18 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
No, it's, they're both in the same time period. They are in the same time period. There's there's a weird, strange fan theories about this.

48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I'm really intrigued Is this the matrix? It's a class.

48:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's actually a parable of inequality between the classes.

48:34 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
It is, it is blue collar. Yeah, no, flintstones lived on the ground and the jet since lived up in the sky.

48:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh my God, yeah, it's a final fantasy.

48:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, no, oh, but you know, I've never heard that, oh my God.

48:48 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
So it's like metropolis, right?

48:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is, or what was that movie where Matt Damon has to go up and get the Elysium, elysium? I think we're headed that way, by the way, and right now I'm on the cusp between living on the ground and living in the cloud, and it could go either way. If we can only get you to join club twin so that Leo could buy a meat thermometer, some rocks.

49:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He wants to buy some rocks he wants to live up where he can get a little bit of sunlight every day before the sun. Before the sky closes yeah.

49:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. You know, this was, in a way, always what we have covered since I started covering tech was how tech is changing the world so drastically. This is disruption in a nutshell, and we shouldn't be surprised that it's happening. It's a little weird when you're the one being disrupted.

49:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It took 50 years. Pardon me for this moment. You can all drink now After movable type. Before the things that we think of as books with titles and title pages and paragraph indentations and page numbers came along. It was copying the old first.

49:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First, all they do is make Bibles right. They printed a lot of Bibles and the books and the agents. Yeah.

50:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Humanists and some of the clues has every new mediums. Content is the old medium and we're still in that phase. I think we're trying to aspire to something that was, rather than radically rethinking what it can be. I got a call from French people yesterday.

50:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Just French people.

50:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Someone just brand.

50:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You look at the phone it just is the flag of France Name French Paris Okay.

50:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, Jeff, you don't have to be so coy.

50:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So paid for by the president of France to decide what journalism is going to be in 2050.

50:41 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Oh, yeah, it's fun, it was fun. What did you say?

50:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I said no, sorry John.

50:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I said it's not going to be.

50:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I said I don't know, I can't imagine it. It's not going to be something that we think of now. It's going to be something, do you?

50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
worry about the influence getting back full circle to our first topic of AI on all of this.

51:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Paris.

51:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I think it's an accelerant in some ways. I think, if we go back to the sports illustrated example you'll have when you have companies that see what they are producing as solely content to garner eyeballs on ads.

51:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah.

51:24 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You will have incentives to use AI to create that content for as cheap as possible, that's what really illustrated right before.

51:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the contextualization that matters. If you think what you're doing is serving a community and building a community and being part of a community, that's very different than you're serving content to sell out and you're factoring content Exactly Because the content becomes deprecated. In that case it doesn't matter, as long as you get eyeballs.

51:53 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Content is now fully commodified and it's lost its value as content. That's my theory.

51:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and AI just accelerates. That doesn't it?

52:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah. And so who wants to play in that game at all anymore? No, whereas Paris, you're a service, leo, you're a community and the information is a community.

52:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The information is a community. Really, yeah, that's the strength of the information is the community. In fact, they were very smart at the beginning to make the comments be an important part of every article. And you have such a good community and such smart people. The comments are often as good as the article, which you can't say.

52:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean especially because Anywhere else. Yeah, If you comment on the information, you have to use your subscription full name. Yeah, associated with the subscription. That was brilliant, and that means sometimes you'll look below the article and Mark Zuckerberg has written three paragraphs. That's the story in it of itself.

52:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, so out of habit I started comments at an advanced. We started all the newspaper sites in 95. We had comments galore. Every newspaper, magazine site has gotten rid of comments because communities too expensive. I'm out of the habit, paris, of even looking. I knew that that was there, but I forget and I don't read the comments. And I would love the comments. That's what I want to do and now you've reminded me I just did the whole media.

53:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The best things is, honestly, if you scroll through information articles and you just wait till you find one that has like 30 comments and you know people are popping off down there. It's always very strange takes If you get above like the 20 or 30 mark. Yeah.

53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is where I beg you, please, ladies and gentlemen, to become an official part of our community. Of course everybody listens or watches to any of our shows, is in the community and we love you and we are very grateful to you. But there is a way you can step up that participation and that is to join club. I almost feel like club the club. I wish we hadn't called it a club, Because club sounds kind of clubby. It is really not. It's a community center. It's a place where people who are interested in this stuff can go, can talk, can listen, can watch, can participate.

53:59
It starts at $7 a month. You can pay more if you want. You can have a family plan, a corporate plan, a yearly plan, but the seven bucks a month is the base and I think that's very affordable. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You also get the shows that we don't put out in public. We get ads for us to workshop shows or to take shows that don't have ad support, like iOS today. Put them in the club and have the club members support it. Home theater geeks, hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, the untitled Linux show all are in the club. So that's part of the club benefit. You also, of course, get the discord where you can participate, with some pretty fun people talking about everything we talk about, Not just the shows. By the way, I think people might think it's a place where you chat about the shows.

54:49
It is also a place where you can chat about anything that interests you. We have a very active coding section. There's all sorts of stuff going on, so, if you will, we would love to have your support. It is going to be critical for us going forward. We don't want to be like Sports Illustrated. Frankly, when you see a big enterprise like Sports Illustrated fold and close the stores, it makes you realize we're really damn lucky to have the community. We have to keep us around and we would love to have you part of it. Twittertv, slash club, twitter that's all I hate to beg. We're not going to do pledge nights, although maybe that's how you get to 6 to 10 percent.

55:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Listen, I'll do a pledge night. I'll take the late night hours so you old fogies can sleep. You know you would have loved. It was so much fun.

55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We only did it for two years. Lisa and I were watching the ball drop in New York. We were watching, you know, dick Clark's New Year's Eve this is 10 years ago and it ended at nine, because it was midnight in New York and we're like in California, at nine o'clock we're going what it's over. And I thought, you know, somebody should do a show where it's New Year's Eve every hour. And that's when I foolishly decided to do a 24 hour New Year's Eve program. That started with the very first New Year's.

56:07
Eve I can't remember what was it the Solomon Islands and then we did 24 hours, like 4 am on New Year's Eve, our time, and then we would go to like 2 am New Year's Day and we just did every. And John, to your credit.

56:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Were you on all 24 hours, so great.

56:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And John to his credit.

56:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You specifically. Yeah, I hosted the whole thing. You didn't sleep.

56:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have say, I had to catch it this day from doing that. John, to his credit, did a balloon drop that you could, so it would drop and then you could pull it back up Because we had to do one every hour and then we got the cheapest champagne we could find. So we would pop the cork at midnight and drop the balloons, and then it would go on to the next hour. And the best thing and this is where community really came in is we would then talk via zoom or Skype, I guess at the time, to whatever time zone it was, and they would celebrate with us.

57:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You came out, I came out, I came out. Yeah, second time.

57:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
My pitch is something that a lot of the shows I subscribe to on Patreon do, is they do kind of like stretch goals for like, if you get like 10, 20,000 Patreon subscribers will do something. I say you set a goal, for if you get a certain number of club twit members, we bring back one 24 hour stream. I love that.

57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would do it.

57:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'll sign up for a shift.

57:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, good. You get the late night shift. You can do the trivia. I think it's.

57:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'll do it, I don't know if you know this, paris. Yeah, leo did other things to try. It was raising money for charity. The second time, we did it.

57:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We did it for UNICEF and, by the way, we raised so much money. We built a hospital in Guatemala for him. I think we raised $85,000. Oh, but in order to raise that money, jeff and I had to do some awful things.

57:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, I didn't nearly as much as you, but you you well. First he shaved his head, I shaved Jeff's beard, I shaved my beard off. Leo did with a very bad job.

58:08 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Love that. Okay, let's bring bring back the challenges.

58:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
At the very late night hours. Leo go ahead Leo.

58:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a tattoo, mm-hmm I. So I said what is the tattoo of? I said you can tattoo, you get to, I can't remember. If you donate a certain amount, you get to choose the tattoo. At which point Lisa came screaming out of her mouth she did, she did, she did.

58:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And said no, no, Did someone tattoo the word butts right above the butt?

58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, I ended up being just a the world's smallest twit logo on my behind, but we did it live on the air.

58:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So your butt was live on the air.

58:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Lisa had to go find a tattoo artist at midnight on New Year's Eve and so the only one we found it turned out he was.

58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he was not out, he didn't drink Cause, otherwise they were all going to be drunk Ideally yeah.

59:02
And he. He did not want to come and do it in the middle of the night, but he, he did. We offered him a ton of money and when he found out it was for charity, he gave all the money to UNICEF, which was really sweet. So that's where, to me, that was amazing. And Jeff came, and Steve Gibson came, many of our hosts came out for it. My son, jake, was alone. Jake was there. Everybody who worked at twit put together a segment. We learned how to tap dance. I played a chess match simultaneous with five people. I mean, it was just all bunch of stuff. It was great. It was great.

59:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know if it was good entertainment. We got to bring some of these things back. I think this sounds so entertaining.

59:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know. I feel like this would be a great Well, that is community membership building tool. Dan Stark posted a picture of his eight year old son and, by the way, his son is now in college, celebrating New Year's Eve with us the champagne bottle. I think that's really great. He's now in college, so this was 2015. This was eight years ago.

59:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know. You got to show the photo below that in which you're going full. Alex Jones, this one, just, it just looks like you.

01:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I shaved my head.

01:00:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's giving Alex Jones.

01:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does have that.

01:00:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Alex Jones. Look, lisa was not happy about that either. She was bad she was mad.

01:00:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know why? Cause I was. We were getting married that month Married.

01:00:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And I forgot That'll do it.

01:00:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That I was bald for all my wedding photos.

01:00:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You look like an egg yeah.

01:00:33 - This Week in Space (Announcement)
That's the other thing. I learned this shape of the shape of my head is not good.

01:00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good I have hair. Let's just put it that way.

01:00:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's not good. You do look like Mark Andre Son yeah.

01:00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I love, I do love our community. I really do, and I and I want to keep doing this. And it makes me so sad when I see sports illustrated at the pitchfork. You know Gimlet media, so many of these outlets just see.

01:00:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But on the other, hand, in a way, god bless Mark Benioff for buying Time Magazine, but on the other hand, why Benioff? Why? Who needs Time Magazine? It's outmoded. Holding on to you could have, you could have put that money toward and you're an entrepreneur. You could have thought entrepreneurially about journalism and supported all kinds of things here in New Jersey. The New Jersey News Commons at Montclair State, which I helped state start, I'm proud to say, 10 years ago, has 400 some members, organizations and individuals who are doing journalism here in New Jersey locally. Lion the lion has about 400 members who are doing local across the country, inn for nonprofit news and other 400 members. That's what we have to start supporting. Today, the 19th created a new network across all. I don't know about two, three dozen sites where they're gonna be able to share news with each other. That's the way to think.

01:01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What I'm afraid of is that a lot of at least in the interim a lot of companies will turn to AI-generated content and really link bait. And you see it, with the 24-hour news channels, They've been going down this road for years and they're really now just playing really hard to their constituencies and they're not doing a good job of covering news. Meanwhile, the networks have long ago cut the cord on what was at the time just kind of pro bono. They never made enough money in news, but they knew they had to do it. They've been cutting that, cutting back, cutting back, and so all you have now in television news, whether it's on your locals. I couldn't believe.

01:02:37
I watched NBC Nightly News the other day. It was like hard copy. It was like Jerry, I haven't watched Nages. Oh my God. They had some. The guy who was doing it had this kind of an ounce of voice and they had flash. And then it was like this is happening here. This is happening, and if you watched it your heart rate would go up, your blood pressure would go up. But they know that's sticky, that you're gonna watch, that, that's gonna work. And so the perverse incentive of trying to survive in this age without doing the right thing. The community thing is, it just gets it goes downhill really fast, yeah, and that's I mean, that's not good for us, that's not good for our society, society, no, it's not. And it's not just the US, it's happening all over the world, and so I kind of fear for the future.

01:03:27 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Chaos will come first, before we invent that which is new, we try to aspire to the old.

01:03:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The beginning of a villain model. Jeff, I know.

01:03:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Chaos will come first, no, but yeah, you're right.

01:03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I guess you know I was saying we're seeing the disruption that we always knew would come with technology and the internet, but that's chaos.

01:03:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I've been telling people for 20 years now in newspapers you must pick a date which print is unsustainable, and if you are not sustainable digitally by that date, then you're dead. And that's been true over and over and over again. And in Ezra Klein's lamentation he included the fact that the Alabama papers for advance are out of print as one of the bad signs and I said no, that's a good sign that they've survived past print, they turned off the press and they're serving an audience and they're being innovative. And that's what we want to do is get past the old. If you go to Europe, the proportion of digital revenue and a lot of these newspapers is still in single digits. Eft, they're in deep shirt.

01:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny, because it used to be that you would watch Walter Cronkite or Huntley Brinkley, not because they told you what you wanted to hear right.

01:04:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, it would be because they were the only thing you could watch.

01:04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, exactly that was your choice. That was all you could watch.

01:04:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And if you were black or Latino or LGBTQ or Native. It was not the way it was for you, right?

01:05:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It was a bit vast of a business, yeah for most people it was not the way it was.

01:05:05 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Yeah, Tonight the terrifying moments aboard an Alaska Airlines flight. After a hole blows open in the cabin at 17,000 feet. The FAA.

01:05:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Um, um, um, um, um um. Listen to the music Um um.

01:05:18 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I feel like. I'm. This is like to me it's like TMZ.

01:05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A nightmare. Yeah, sucked out.

01:05:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, it's because, again, the thing they're optimizing for is to keep you watching till the ads.

01:05:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, this is.

01:05:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is doom-scrolling folks, this is not doom-scrolling. They invented doom-scrolling. Yeah, it's network news like I remember it. It's very snappy, fast edits.

01:05:40 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
So they're pushing into the northeast of snow and ice, triggering a series of crashes.

01:05:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crashes. If it bleeds, it leads.

01:05:47 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
This used to be the local news that would do this, so the major cities get their first significant snow in nearly two years.

01:05:52 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Well, we don't have local news anymore. That's part of the problem, yeah. Yeah, defense Secretary's health scare kept secrets.

01:05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like this is Do you feel your blood pressure going up? Yep, yep. This is the network, this is the freaking network news. Yeah, oh yeah. No, it's Borked, borked, and now they're going to take us down because I dared, I dared show it. That was commentary, fair use, fair use.

01:06:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You're not going to believe it Spoke over almost all of it. It's the Mystery Science Theater 3000.

01:06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, that's damn right.

01:06:27 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We're just as funny they want to kill. Fair use too. Here's some good news we're going to pay for everything.

01:06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For people who end up on Instagram late at night spending money. Ha ha ha. Who could that? Be, Instagram has new nighttime nudges, or should I say nudges, aimed at reducing teams' time on the app you want to get, but old men, stay as long as you like. Time for a break. It's getting late. Consider closing Instagram for the night. Tiktok does this right after a few yeah, a few thousand swipes.

01:07:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They'll be like you've been scrolling for far too long.

01:07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Please touch grass, and they do it like there's an influencer, like a TikTok person saying, hey, I noticed You've been staying up like, but Paris like me, and that actually makes me want to scroll more. It's like screw you, I'm going to flip up immediately and go on. Do you stop?

01:07:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I can't really remember the last time I've seen that, but I don't think that's ever swayed me. I think when I get told something I must rebel against it.

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I imagine, and we're not even teenagers, I imagine teenagers seeing this. Hey, it's getting late. Consider closing Instagram for the night.

01:07:42 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
You're not my mom, you think that's actually what they want.

01:07:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, Of course they want you to keep going. They don't want you to stop.

01:07:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, they just want to have something there so that when people say oh you're enabling teenagers' worst behaviors. You'll be like. No, we told them to take a break?

01:07:57 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
No, we're not. Maybe do they know that we all will say screw you when we see that We'll just go in.

01:08:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, of course they know. They've got the data.

01:08:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Because if it really made I mean, this is all speculation If it really made a drastic difference in the time users were spending on the app, they wouldn't do it Because they have to optimize for daily active user minutes.

01:08:19 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
If they give us less money, please right.

01:08:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, please take away our money, make it harder for us to be advertisers.

01:08:27 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It also telegraphs. You love us, don't you Right? You're a super fan.

01:08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right, you're part of the club. Amazon is finally bowing to pressure and they are going to stop letting your local police request doorbell video. For a long time, ring without a warrant would just pay. They didn't give the police departments a footage. They'd ask you if it's OK. The program allowed law enforcement to seek footage from users on a voluntary basis. Now police and fire departments will have to seek a warrant to request footage from users or at least show the company evidence of an ongoing emergency. We've got a hostage situation across the street. We see there's a doorbell camera. Can you give us that video?

01:09:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
By the way, I'm in the market now. What do you recommend, Leo, for home security?

01:09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like a doorbell cam. I really, by the way, a doorbell if the one camera you should get is a doorbell cam. Even in an apartment. I think a doorbell cam is a great thing.

01:09:36 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What about other security cameras and motion detectors?

01:09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My experience I had all the nests. I have a hello to the abort, which is the Google doorbell camera. I had a ring before that. I think they're both very similar. There are some less expensive choices from Yuffie and Wise and others, and I think it's fine. A doorbell camera is useful. You can see who's at the door. If it works with Amazon's Echo or your Google Home Assistant, it'll say I can't hear the doorbell ring, but I can. But when somebody rings our doorbell, the Google assistant someone's at the front door Shouts.

01:10:10
What Don't miss that. It's very loud and it's everywhere in the house. Supposedly and I don't know why I've never got this working is supposed to know who's at the front door and if it's somebody like Lisa's trying to get in and would do that, but it doesn't ever do that, it just says someone, I don't know. There's someone at the front door, so that's useful. Also, if you get packages dropped off, it'll show that. It'll show, and one time somebody drove over a mailbox and I had a video of that too.

01:10:43
So, that's useful, but I also put cameras around the house and outside and it just made me paranoid and it never showed anything. But it made me check it and stuff. And our brother-in-law is really bad. My brother-in-law is like, even when he's visiting he's looking at his phone all the time to see if there's anybody at his house. So I think it just, I don't think it's, that's a disease. It's a disease. I don't think it sets up the right mental state If you're getting a lot of incursions into your, not just the neighborhood yeah, the neighborhood we are, yeah, you might be. Get the doorbell camera. I think a doorbell camera is easy to install. I like the hello. In theory, the hello is supposed to identify people, but you know, I All right.

01:11:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
thank you for that advice. I'm sorry your porch is where people will go.

01:11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're worried about, you know, are the deer eating my dog food on the back porch. John, how many cameras do you have here? Hand me your iPad, I could show people. So, john, do you think this is a good idea? Jammer B, he likes he can always look and see what's going on in his neighborhood.

01:11:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wow, anything ever happened.

01:11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, what happened Couple of times? Teenagers, oh well, say no more. Oh oh, they were doing dash ding and dash, or dong and dash ding, dong and dash.

01:12:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, they were ringing your doorbell and running away. That's never happened before. He has video.

01:12:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I know who you are.

01:12:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Young sir.

01:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Liz shared it with the next door College now.

01:12:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Must be hard to be a kid these days.

01:12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is another reason why you shouldn't subscribe to next door or that other one. What's the other one Neighborhood? Because it just makes you nuts. Yeah, there's a guy walking around.

01:12:35 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Aim for citizen yeah.

01:12:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And he's an African-American and it's just terrible. It's just, it's the most racist, horrible stuff.

01:12:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You're right, yep.

01:12:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you really wanted to know if somebody was doing the ding, dong and dash, what is it called? You must know Paris, you're a young person.

01:12:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Doorbell that sounds like doorbell. This right Be your ding dong and dash.

01:13:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Ding dash, the new product from Doorbell Ding dash doorbell.

01:13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good. We ring you. We don't bring you food. We just ring your doorbell and run away.

01:13:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We just bring your doorbell, take an unflattering photo of you and run away it's all you get Doorbell dash.

01:13:14 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Ding dong and dash.

01:13:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I just I think it makes people paranoid.

01:13:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you know. But if you live in an area where there's a lot of porch thieves, package thieves, that would be good. No, not, you know. I think there's also this deterrent effect of having because people know now what a ring doorbell looks like and having that on your front door, even if you don't look it up, people think, well, I'm on camera, I'm not going to, you know, do anything.

01:13:38 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Does that do anything for porch pirates?

01:13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it does.

01:13:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
What are they going to do? What are you going to do if you see someone on your camera taking?

01:13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a packet. Well, all of these things have microphones and speakers, so you could say huh, I mean, would that stop them?

01:13:56 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They could just take the package and ding dong and dash.

01:13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What, Sorry what.

01:14:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think your mic is in your mouth, sir. Could you say that again?

01:14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Could you speak more clearly Now? Ring on their website has, like I mean, this was one of the when we used to do the Ring ads before Amazon bottom, we would all have great fun showing all the videos people would upload of you know all kinds of things, and a lot of times that you do it does work. When you're like somebody's trying to steal your car and you say I'm calling the police right now, they go oh wow, that's interesting. I'm just learned something, see. This is why I love our community. This is from the Club Twit Discord. There's apparently something called Knock Knock Ginger. It's on Wikipedia, also known as-.

01:14:47
This is what red-haired people do it Ding dong, ditch and Ring and Run. It's a prank or game dating back to the 19th century England, or possibly the earlier Cornish, I just imagine. John, like like as an old Englishman raising his fist it was in Cornwall the traditional holiday of Nick and Ann night. By the way, the annotation on Wikipedia here says dubious discuss, which I've never seen, by the way, in all my years on Wikipedia Dubious discuss.

01:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The game is played by Click on dubious.

01:15:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to see what's dubious.

01:15:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, no, you gotta click on discuss.

01:15:28 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Dubious takes it as something else. It's a disputed statement. It says unless I'm missing something.

01:15:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There's no reason for the title of this article to be capitalized. It's simply a children's game or tradition. You can compare it to the rest of the articles.

01:15:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my the.

01:15:42 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Petentree. I love Wikipedia the.

01:15:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Petentree, have you ever? Are you a Wikipedia editor?

01:15:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I feel like you would be no but I think I'm afraid to start because I think it could be a compulsion. I think so. And I don't probably need that in my life.

01:15:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who is the person I'm only dimly remembering this who edited thousands and thousands of articles just to replace one grammatical error?

01:16:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, I know who you're talking about it's like. It's like a specific wording. They prefer the other one and they've changed every instance of it in Wikipedia history. The depths of Wikipedia. Writer Annie I'm forgetting the last name is written about it.

01:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The guy edited 50,000 Wikipedia articles to fix a grammar error. That's not even an error His name is Andrew McMillan. Oh, no, wait a minute. This is a long read from Medium by Andrew McMillan, talking about one man's quest to rid Wikipedia of exactly one grammatical mistake. He didn't like it that people would use the word comprise instead of contains, compose, compose.

01:16:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Compose.

01:16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Composed of Composed of he. Yeah, he doesn't want. He eliminates uses of comprise as a synonym for compose. 50,000 edits, and that's what you're talking about, Ryan.

01:17:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Henderson.

01:17:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:17:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I believe it's his name.

01:17:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
A fun date to be sure.

01:17:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you know how many articles on Wikipedia they misused the word comprise? I could tell you. So knock, knock ginger, or knock down ginger or knocky door ginger, used in parts of Southern England. In fact. Here's an English poem found in the childhood in poetry collection Ginger ginger broke a window, hit the window, crack. The baker came out to give him a clout and landed on his back.

01:17:46 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Thank you very much. What fun.

01:17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's please don't, what fun, don't send us letters, an article felt like bullying. Do you feel bullied?

01:17:54 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Benino feels bullied Not me personally, but I'm sure gingers feel bullied.

01:17:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe it was only to redheaded people that they would do that. I don't know.

01:18:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The Brits have something about redheaded people. Yeah, I don't know what it is. It's weird.

01:18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love gingers, but you can see what Prince Harry felt bad, if that's the case. I mean he was an aggressively ginger person. Do you remember LO?

01:18:18
Barely LO, I think you're too young for it. I kick started this. So back in the day in 2014, when you were eight years old, there was a Kickstarter for a Facebook replacement that would never, ever sell your information. The manifesto on the homepage said your social network, facebook, is owned by advertisers. Every post you share, every friend you make, every link you follow I'll be watching oh no, that's the police Is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that's bought and sold. We believe there's a better way A social network where you're not the product. I joined it. In fact, I think I paid, put into the Kickstarter for it. When was the last time you posted on it? Oh, just like 2014 plus one, yeah.

01:19:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Can you log in?

01:19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, you can't anymore because and this is from Waxylinks, the wonderful Andy Bio, who's been covering the internet since we were all toddlers Ello, very early on, realized well, if you don't have advertisers, you don't have revenue. And this stuff costs money. Andy, back in 2014, one month after it opened, dug through SEC filings to find out they had half a million dollars in seed funding from a venture capital firm. Nobody mentioned the funding, including Ello. When Andy wrote about it, ello got pretty darn paved about the whole thing. Later they sold Ello to a company that let's see, they were, by the way, they were Sonic Brands. Yeah, they were a public. Yeah, practically no, actually it's very close, they were a public benefit corporation. They raised another five and a half million dollars with Techstars and Foundry Group, which took a board seat. You know, if they're getting this kind of venture capital, there's gonna be intense pressure for them to To scale, to scale right. So eventually they did sell. Let me see. I'm reading through Andy's very detailed probably unnecessarily detailed article about this. They raised funds, raised a lot of money, continued to do it. They called themselves the creators network. They got a lot of artists, designers, musicians posting there, putting their portfolios there putting their journals there.

01:21:00
Five months later, in March 2018, they were sold to a company called Talent House, a Los Angeles-based company whose primary business was running design contests for brands in which independent artists competed against each other for a cash prize, and, of course, the brand got the design right. They didn't tell anybody that they were sold to Talent House. They never notified anybody, but all of a sudden they started promoting design contests from our friends at Talent House. Anyway, the long and tattered tale. But this year LO just took the servers down. They didn't warn people, they didn't do anything. If you go to LOco right now, you'll get an error, a Heroku error, which upsets a lot of people. People said years of writing down the drain. I uploaded my artwork there. I love the site because it focused on art. It was really messed up. There was no warning to allow us to download our content.

01:22:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
God.

01:22:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Again, it's so funny.

01:22:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Their promotion of Talent House was post like check out a dope opportunity from our friends at Talent House design city and spot Bired bottle bags for a limited edition of absolute vodka. Learn more.

01:22:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, it's too bad, it's gone.

01:22:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sad that it's gone, but it just shows you, even with the best of intentions, that you know you're, we're gonna, you're not the product, you know you're the pro, you got it. Somebody's got to pay for the server.

01:22:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yep.

01:22:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, good news the FTC has finally spanked a turbo tax. Yeah, hallelujah. You may have seen the ads. They've been running ads as recently as last week saying you know, a third of the of everybody can use our free tax service.

01:22:59
FTC says eh, you can't push software as free if it ain't really free. Sorry, intuit, the consumer protection watch dogs. Investigation into how Intuit promoted its tax prep software as being a free product, part of a years long deceptive advertising campaign, including ads shown during the Super Bowl. But millions of Americans could not, and I know because I tried, used turbo tax to file their taxes for free. Over the years I would go through the whole pro. I did it for my mom. We had a lot of people who were like I'm going through the whole pro. I did it for my mom. We have, you know, a tax account for the company and me, but for my mom I was doing her taxes and it would always say free. And then you get the end of it. I said, oh, did you want to file these? That'll be $60. Oh, and you oh, you want to state, oh, that's another $30.

01:23:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That'll be extra yeah.

01:23:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time. How do you do your taxes?

01:23:56 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Paris, I have a person that I use ever since, I think, my last round of layoffs, because it was during the pandemic, and then I had a an employment for a while. I knew my taxes were going to be a complicated. That year I got a accountant and I realized, you know, he's pretty cheap.

01:24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a hundred 200 bucks each time and my taxes are simple, but it's worth it, isn't it better?

01:24:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's worth it. I just sent him one email and then I do not think about my tax.

01:24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right how about you, Jeff.

01:24:29 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I used to do my friends' taxes. When I worked at the examiner I couldn't stand that people were getting ripped off. They were stupid. And A I did friends' taxes and B I then developed a spreadsheet in the very earliest days to do the forms, and so I would do multiple friends' taxes.

01:24:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh my God that is very old, so do you do your own taxes to this day.

01:24:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Same way, I don't pay bills to this day because my wife won't let me. Does your wife do the taxes? No, no, no, we have an accountant.

01:25:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, there's something wrong when you have to hire an accountant to file your taxes. I think we're one of the very few countries in the world where you have to do that.

01:25:10 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Yeah, everywhere else, they just tell you how much you need to pay, yeah.

01:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In most countries they send you a postcard saying we think you owe this much, okay, and you say you're like all right, I mean, maybe we don't want that, but I think that we've made our tax codes so complicated as an option. I think we do.

01:25:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think we do want that, unless you're incredibly wealthy and you maximize your wealth by taking advantage of loopholes in the tax code, in which case you wouldn't want that.

01:25:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How is it for our friends in Canada, a chocolate milk mini sip? I know he's Canadian. How is it up there? Do you? Does the government tell you what you owe and you just pay it, or do you have to do the same kind of rigmarole we do in the US? By the way, for a long time companies like TurboTax would go to Congress and say don't let the IRS do this for free. I mean, the main reason you can't do this with the IRS for free is because Congress didn't do anything about it and TurboTax would hide the free stuff or lie to you outright. But there is, if you make less than $79,000, a free file, an IRS free file, and it'll guide you through it. You can also get all the forms and do it yourself, and the IRS is currently piloting in some states a entirely free system that I think eventually they'll put online. But really, the real issue was companies like Intuit were lobbying like crazy to keep this you know, nice fat thing they had.

01:26:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The states are wildly complicated. I used to have. We were finally sold out by cousins because there was multiple cousins. We inherited the piece of property farmland in Colorado. It wasn't being farmed, it was getting, you know, federal payoffs. It was like $30 a year the tax cost because you had to. You had to put all of your entire income in to then say, oh no, a little bit of it's from Colorado, and then it's just. It's just. It's torture, yeah, torture.

01:27:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, In Brazil you do it on your phone, says sirio barber in our club.

01:27:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
God, what a concept.

01:27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but you know this. I mean you can't assume that somebody can either afford an account or has a personal computer and can do it themselves. It feels like, you know, in Canada this is our Canadian friend the government knows based on forms sent by the companies, which is the same here, if you're a government knows how much tax we pay not enough.

01:27:34 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
They tell they know they pay more later.

01:27:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They're very aware.

01:27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway it's. I don't want to make this be the show about how everything sucks. What's good news around here? An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million cryptocurrency scam.

01:27:59 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He released a video and I've got a super cut of it linked in the show notes. Molly White explaining that the reason why he did this cryptocurrency scheme is the Lord told him to sell cryptocurrency with no clear exit and then spend some of the proceeds on a home remodel.

01:28:16 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
That was the Lord exchange commission, were basically selling millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency that is deemed worthless by the state. Now the reason that they're seeing that it's worthless is because there is no exit for people who have bought, launch an exchange. The exchange technology failed, things went downhill and from that point forward.

01:28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But he has a very nice home with a beautiful view of the lake. I must say he's gonna show her.

01:28:40 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
My charges are that Caitlin and I pocketed $1.3 million, and I just want to come out and say that those charges are true.

01:28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's well, there you go. Oh, we really need to see, I think.

01:28:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Listen, you got a hand to them.

01:28:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're true. Hey, I'm a preacher, I can't lie. Tick tock, tunnel girl, not alone.

01:29:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
She got a. Jeff brought this to my attention this week. The tick tock tunnel girl got the New York Times treatment recently in this week's edition of this Week. In Tunnels they go through a bunch of different famous tunnelers.

01:29:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love this term hobby tunneling.

01:29:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You know I mean. What else are you going to be doing? In your spare time Dig a tunnel.

01:29:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a little free time. Let me see what's under the house.

01:29:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There was an international media frenzy in 2015, when a tunnel over 33 feet long was found in the north of Toronto with tools, empty bottles and food containers inside. What? Is it?

01:29:53 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Eventually confessed.

01:29:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He was a 22 year old construction worker. They said it was just something I always wanted to do. He said so said.

01:30:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Elon.

01:30:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Musk. Here's a 30. I just want to dig tunnels.

01:30:06 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Maybe it is Maybe this is a large tunnel.

01:30:09 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I think this is a human thing, like I think people just like digging tunnels.

01:30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Benito, have you ever done a tunnel? Where's your tunnel?

01:30:14 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I'm sure you've all gone to the beach and tried to dig the biggest.

01:30:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, you want to dig down.

01:30:19 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I've done deep holes. That's an extension of that?

01:30:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess a hole eventually turns into a tunnel. What dogs do? A 33 foot long tunnel found underneath Toronto in 2015. Nicely built too, by the way.

01:30:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I mean, if we're in Berlin at the wall, I absolutely get it. I'm fascinated by those stories, by the way.

01:30:38 - Paris Martineau (Host)
An East London man. The British press called the moment of hackney spent 40 years digging a tunnel network under his house before the local government obtained a court order in 2006 to stop the digging.

01:30:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He looks like the whole man of hackney.

01:30:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He looks really happy.

01:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He looks, you know. So this is some sort of what we're made built into our subconscious need that occasionally just emerges Descended for bands.

01:31:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He says quote tunneling is something that should be talked about without panicking. He's got a point.

01:31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The fifth. In the 1800s, the fifth Duke of Portland, william John Cavendish, scott Bentonick, built 2.75 miles of tunnels and an underground ballroom on his property, wellbeck Abbey, near Sheffield.

01:31:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, and a similar but somewhat different note. Do you guys know about the Chicago rat hole?

01:31:38 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
No, you know about this Benito knows, he knows everything.

01:31:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Listen, benito, understand. I've put a link to the first story.

01:31:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It is art. It's a rat shaped hole in Chicago that became a local landmark recently. Imagine the shape of a rat splattered on the ground. That was the shape of the hole and it people kept. It was like a pilgrimage site. People would come there, you know, pay their respects to the rat. It had a Google Maps location. It was all the rage until last week someone filled the rat hole. Oh no, but then residents took action. It was plugged with plaster concrete and then residents braved the bitter cold to dig the rat hole out. This New York Times article begins with where have you gone? Chicago rat hole, oh it's not that big though.

01:32:33 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
It's just lonely eyes.

01:32:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little size?

01:32:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It is the size of a rat.

01:32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People would put pennies in it. Little plastic rats rat.

01:32:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There you go, it is interesting.

01:32:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Move from this rat selfies at line 100.

01:32:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Listen, that's what I was thinking. It's the perfect transition.

01:32:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a rat hole. We used to have a song for that. Actually, why is it we like mice but we don't like rats?

01:33:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, the ones you're going to see at line 100 are very cute Our rodent selfies we should be into this.

01:33:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A photographer trained two rats to take photographs of themselves. They liked it so much they didn't want to stop they said you have a moral panic, you humans, you humans.

01:33:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You humans.

01:33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You drink, you drink, you dig the holes. We're going to take selfies. We're going to trade jobs.

01:33:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Look how cute the rats are.

01:33:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are, they are pretty cute they are. Look, they're having so much fun doing.

01:33:29 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't know. I think they're fun. Your cat's not going to like that as a neighbor.

01:33:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you used to have a rat when you were a kid? Look at this. They actually have to go up.

01:33:37 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Yeah, you feel like it's a skinner box.

01:33:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a skinner box.

01:33:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, you think I'm the sort of person that would have a rat as a child yeah. Florida.

01:33:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It didn't happen. I could see you going to school with a rat on your shoulder, on a little gold chain.

01:33:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, like a little, like a little parakeet, or it's a very good.

01:33:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's a golf pet. That's a good thing, I think.

01:34:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, it would be pretty good, I feel like I didn't have a rat.

01:34:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're kind of like I would have loved to have a rat. Our Wednesday is what you are.

01:34:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wow, thank you guys. Yeah, I think I'm trying to be. I got to learn how to braid my hair.

01:34:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And dance. Do that dance? A skinner box? But it's not. But they don't feed them, they just so they're trying to.

01:34:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, they gave him some sugar and then he's trying to. Basically this is trying to insist that this is we are all rats making our selfies. It's a bit of moral pettiness.

01:34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just, yeah, exactly. And to put this under the science.

01:34:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Really the rats ended up. Essentially, they sent up this box wherever. Whenever the rat would press the button to take the photo, it would get sugar, water and uh well, of course, the rats going to push something. The rat doesn't know anything about the picture After a certain point they stopped going for the treat and just kept pressing the button and smiling for the camera, and I think that's beautiful Good for the rats. They look great.

01:34:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but the guy who did it said honestly, I don't think they understood it.

01:34:59 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, there's no way they understood. Why did he go to all the trouble? He's a photographer. Because he wants it in New York times? Yeah.

01:35:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it worked. He began to ponder the point of picture taking in the modern world. That's just an art project. It shouldn't be under science, it should be under art.

01:35:15 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, I agree. Have you seen Disney's elegant solution to VR's movement problems? Yes, and.

01:35:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, you know what, oh, I did the first thing. I thought maybe this is in a bad idea.

01:35:25
So one of the issues with VR and Apple's facing this with a vision pro, in fact, most notably when they brought in a bunch of famous celebrities and influencers to try on the vision pro in the last few weeks, they had them sitting down, they they. It was like well, you really don't want to move around because you might walk in a wall or trip over a coffee table or something. So so this has always been the issue of a real virtual reality is you can't and you know, I've had the ocular, various forms of the Oculus, and, and they have different ways of walking around and many games. You point at the ground like a laser pointer and then you click a button and you go to that point, but they don't have a good way of moving around. Well, disney may have solved this. This is a floor, I guess is the best way to describe it. I don't know how to describe it. It doesn't look like it's moving.

01:36:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It is like a, a textured floor that, I guess, is moving when you walk, but you stay in the same spot.

01:36:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's like you're walking on ball bearings that move around as you need to move in a different direction.

01:36:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Additionally, of course, the computer or the game is attached to this floor, so it knows you're moving, so you can move without you have to go to the end of this video to see him.

01:36:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's a very long video.

01:36:40 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Basically a bunch of track balls on the ground right.

01:36:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it doesn't look like it is actually. I don't know what it is, it's some sort of thing. Anyway, this is an imaginary. You really look. You know, one of the biggest problems with VR is you look like a dork. I'm sorry.

01:36:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, they're making very tiny steps.

01:37:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, but here's the question Is this the new treadmill?

01:37:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, oh look, there's a box just moving around.

01:37:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, that's pretty fun.

01:37:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a little Apple box.

01:37:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So it can feed back to the. Thing.

01:37:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, you got to wonder that, like what the hell is going on here.

01:37:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He's just sitting on a chair that's been being whipped around.

01:37:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's a little dangerous.

01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, I feel like they cut out of the parts where they fell and cut their head, but okay.

01:37:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We can almost do this. Anyway, it's a. You know it's an experiment. They also don't say how much it would cost or whether they're even never going to make one. And but it's a, it's a good idea, you're going to need something like that, yeah, you know, make your whole living room that way, and then if somebody don't like the cage.

01:37:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You just roll down the floor, yeah, and the rats just keep walking all the time and that's died right up to upgraded science and science dentrokarangcom that has so much. Thank my squirming mooring to those mini ExpressPersons to make it come up.

01:38:02
And this is a huge mess in here. Okay, okay奇葦 in here. Edlan in here again. You know, it seems to be Diego Guнако. New fact that the overseas getting a big guy that is a pretty big今天 drive from out to California. Yeah, that's an incredible. We see that big guy. More people are able to create content than ever before, but people are able to make money doing so. Really More people have access to a wider diversity of creative content. So he goes through. He did this 10 years ago or some years ago. And then he goes through and changed the categories because it used to be, you know, books. Well, now there's all kinds of things that are about reading. So he made it listening, watching, reading, playing, and went through the numbers in each industry and says they're all doing well. And at the internet and, by the way around, news he does say. I don't think we forget this all the time because of the whining that happens. Internet public. According to, to, to census data, internet publishing jobs more than replace the jobs lost in newspapers and periodicals.

01:39:01
So, mike, this is the opposite of what we've just been saying. We want to speak. Good news yeah. So Mike has this long report. At the end he says these technologies are not at odds with creativity. They are great enablers of creativity and creative industries.

01:39:18 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
I would agree with that. I would agree with that Simple statement, yeah.

01:39:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah.

01:39:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, we always said that that's. That's the cool thing about YouTube. Anybody can make a video and post it in a way that everybody in the world could see. Anybody can make a podcast pretty cheap, these days.

01:39:35 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
YouTube algorithm has something to say about that.

01:39:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is, yeah, this is the problem. There are these gatekeepers which Mike doesn't really consider ultimately gatekeepers.

01:39:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Have you guys ever had Mike on the show?

01:39:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh many times you want him out. Oh yeah, let's get him on.

01:39:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We haven't had him on in a while. Let's get him on Mike's brilliant. He's the best.

01:39:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's the best we love, mike. Yeah, I'm going to have to read this. Is this the ideas in abundance? Is that what this is? Is that what it's called?

01:40:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, no, go to the link that I gave you, because I don't think he has a homepage yet.

01:40:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm at the Copia Institute. He wrote a post with a PDF.

01:40:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's a long PDF, by the way, mike, just one little thing, so I print it out so I can underline things. Yep, and the problem is when people use fonts that look good online and you don't do more than 600 DPI the fonts are just all yeah, and there should be printable versions, especially if you make a PDF. Just a thought.

01:40:43 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Yeah, yeah.

01:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where'd you put the link, Jeff? What line number. I'm trying to find it.

01:40:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
If you search the word Mike in there, In 98. Or no, it's Maznik, sorry, yeah, 98.

01:40:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Copiais is the website. It is a PDF. It's got pretty pictures. The sky is rising. It does, it's well done. Well, the number of people listening is going up, global recorded music revenue going up. Yeah, but that's the big five record companies. Yeah, no, it's not.

01:41:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's the big five record companies. It's also Spotify and the number If you will page the phone Spotify pays 80% of its income to the big five record labels.

01:41:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Global theatrical home video revenue. Global digital publishing market, women All of this is is not where games released on steam yeah.

01:41:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, this is the graphic. I think, yeah, I think there'll be more.

01:41:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There'll be more inside the word.

01:41:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, a lot more. It's a big long PDF. Yes, of course there will be.

01:41:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does seem like it's contrary to what we were just saying, though, doesn't it?

01:41:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, that's because we forget about all these new.

01:41:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Well, I mean, I think, if we're talking in like aggregate, if you're looking from a million miles away, yes, there is more money in a media than ever before.

01:42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're all consuming more content. We're more people consuming things before.

01:42:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's partially because we are able to track people's consumption of things in a way that we are not able to before. That's a good point.

01:42:13 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
That's a good point too. There's also an extra billion people here since last 10 years ago.

01:42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Right, there's more people.

01:42:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The internet is an incredible distribution medium right, the like, largest or even some of the smallest media organizations that we know and love are doing well.

01:42:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Well, employment is up in the newspapers, in periodicals, in books.

01:42:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, but I'm curious how is like this is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Yes, I'm curious what that is specifically tracking. The categorization Full-time employment. Are we talking about people who say they're employed in any way in news or media? Because you know that could be a lot of freelancers. It could be a lot of people who maybe publish one thing a year.

01:42:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at podcast listenership as a percent of US adults. It's now almost more than 60% of US adults listen to a podcast, at least ever, ever. I think ever is not that Ever is once I mean more than 40% in the past months, more than 30% in the past week. Yeah, but that's about right. But the problem for us is there. That doesn't mean they listen to us. There's a lot more podcasts to listen to Remember, a scripted TV series in the US is way up 600 as of last year that's going to come down.

01:43:35
Yeah, yeah, we have. We've passed the era of peak TV, have we not? Oh yeah.

01:43:41 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I think it's reinvented again. I think again it's trying to aspire to something that existed. And you know, I find most TV now depressing. Netflix just depresses the hell out of me.

01:43:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I watched a show called the Curse. Have you seen this on Amazon Prime?

01:43:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, is there anything Fielder's likes? Oh, it's supposed to be very cringe humor right, it's extremely cringe. I can't deal with that. I get too stressed out when I watch. Yes, cringy stuff.

01:44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I binged it. I've got a really good TV recommendation.

01:44:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's my pick of the week.

01:44:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good Save it, save it, save it. In fact, let's take a little break. It's a good time to do that. You're watching this week in Google Paris Mark no of the information. Do you have the strings, the wires, the pictures on the wall? Are you working on the big next thing?

01:44:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I've got my two previous murder boards. One of them is on the floor, one of them I haven't taken down yet, but I do have a new binder. I'm starting the files for the next thing.

01:44:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's great.

01:44:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I also, much like Jeff, like to print things out.

01:44:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
A binder full of tips.

01:44:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
A binder full of women and tips.

01:44:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I've got whiteboards. I have a whole pile of whiteboards.

01:44:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to get a whiteboard. I want to get a whiteboard. I don't know where I would put it.

01:44:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Whiteboards are great, I feel like that would be really useful. You can get one that you can put on a wall and you can cut to a size you want it.

01:45:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, I love.

01:45:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's kind of movable.

01:45:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
A wallpaper whiteboard?

01:45:04 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes that's right. Or you can even get a whiteboard, can't you? Yes, you can I? Mean yeah, but that's not as good, it's not as good.

01:45:10 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The wallpaper is the greatest.

01:45:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's like vinyl and you stick it to the wall.

01:45:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Can you imagine what Paris could do with that, if we're magnetic? Too, you could put strings and things, yeah.

01:45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I literally have zero wall space in my office at home. It's like all got stuff on it.

01:45:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Problematic. Got to clear some space for you to write more things.

01:45:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was thinking I just like maybe I could have a pull down whiteboard. No, that doesn't work.

01:45:38 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Be good.

01:45:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also here, jeff Jarvis, as you know, deorbiting as the Leonard Tau Professor for Journalistic Innovation. But you have some plans, do you not?

01:45:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I do, indeed. I cleared up my office and it's empty now.

01:45:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw that it was so sad he used to do, you know this is before your time, but he used to do the show from his office sometimes and CUNY was so cheap that they had a timer on the light and he would be sitting there doing the show and the lights would go off. I'm alive.

01:46:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm alive, I'm here, I'm here.

01:46:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember that that was a good old days.

01:46:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:46:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And you were lighting just as yellow?

01:46:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, it was no because they shot a TV show on our floor. It was never part of a crime show, it never aired. But when they put the lights in, they put the lights in for TV, they replaced our fluorescence. Oh, I said to the nice guy, I said, can you leave him? He did oh, nice, and so it was very nice Was there only murders in the university?

01:46:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that the?

01:46:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The probably. Yes, I'm like that. I have to tell you that I have my light of type keyboard here at home.

01:46:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's right, you used to have a bunch of nice. You got to bring some of those souvenirs. No, no, I don't know what to do with it.

01:46:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I can't get anybody to take it. It's like 150 pounds Literally.

01:47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a world. There's a former world champion chess player who has a bad habit of stealing pawns and he's been caught many times on camera at tournaments just taking a pawn from the chess set and put in his fucking walking off and then, when people get used to that, he said it's not illegal. Mind your own business. Okay, Jeff's website, Gutenberg parenthesis I'm not. I'm not. I'm not asserting that you might have stolen any line of types or type writers.

01:47:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I pay for it, but I just put it in the, I put it in the discord. There it is. Oh nice, my beloved, and you're trying to sell it. No, I'm trying to give it away. I was going to give it to. There was a professor at the university of Illinois who wanted it, because he teaches at Juan Schwird Lou and different production techniques and stuff, and so I looked into oh, it's now a setting. Now, there it is. It's beautiful, isn't it cool? And it's solid, so so to ship that would have cost $1,100. Does it?

01:48:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
work.

01:48:06 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, no, because it has to be associated with a huge looks like he could use a good power washing. Well, you don't want to ruin the that's the the cool.

01:48:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This is why you're not getting the keyboard.

01:48:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want it. It looks filthy.

01:48:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Can you, can you bring up a picture of a line of types so you can show it?

01:48:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's just the keyboard that would then attach to the giant.

01:48:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, yeah. I love it. It's, it's large, it's huge.

01:48:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's wonderful, I love it, I love it. You have the whole thing. That's just the keyboard, oh, just the keyboard.

01:48:34 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You could buy a whole line of types, but my wife would really kill me.

01:48:38 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I already got so much space in this office, the Mark Twain of our, of our.

01:48:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh my God, these things are huge Holy Magolly here from Wikipedia.

01:48:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Where did you?

01:48:50 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
get it from.

01:48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is a picture of an actual.

01:48:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
here's funny thing Paris, some guy in eBay and he didn't know what it was, so we called it steampunk decor.

01:48:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
How did you find that on eBay?

01:49:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't know Some of all you may knew.

01:49:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You may knew that that was you.

01:49:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is my next book. This is what I'm working on. I'm going to write a history of that, because that was the machine that made mass media possible. Wow, wow. It's a wonderful story. When was it first used? On 1890?.

01:49:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This isn't the thing Mark Twain invested in.

01:49:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He invested in a competitor and it bankrupted, yeah, literally bankrupted.

01:49:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But he thought it was going to be intelligent. He thought it was AI right?

01:49:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, it was, it was. Every time a machine does something we think is impossible, we think of things it's part of the mind of the leader of this. And so the page now haunts poor Mark Twain in the basement of his home and museum.

01:49:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He lost his, his, his work.

01:49:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's huge, it's amazing. So the line of type. Just just a moment here. This is my new gluten. The line of type is fascinating because everybody tried to set type with one letter of character since Gutenberg, right, and they tried to replace that task because we always see the future of the analog of the past. But Audmar Murgenthaler realized that he wasn't going to do that. What he did was he, that's Frank.

01:50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not Audmar.

01:50:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's Frank. That's Frank, but Frank. Before Frank, there was a picture of Audmar.

01:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's Frank. He actually apparently knows how to operate. This is a YouTube. He apparently knows how to operate one of these suckers and for and I am in I National Museum of Industrial History and I and you know what I'm saying.

01:50:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
If you, if you're into this line of type the film is a wonderful documentary about all of this.

01:50:42
So there was the turn of the last century that these became widely replaced that, which is which is one letter at a time, and now instead it's molds. And the molds, like you hit the better B and down comes a mold. Then you hit the letter A and down comes the mold. So that's what that? And they come into that spot there and then the whole line moves over and gets shot full of lead, wow, and the molten comes out. Molten lead, I might add, but it's quick, quick. Well, this is the same formula that we think Gutenberg used lead and timonny, and and tin, and then the, the, the matrices, the molds go back up to the top where teeth on them show them the right slot to go down. So it replaced a bunch of it replaced having to make the font. It replaced setting it by hand. It replaced having to put it back.

01:51:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is what they call hot lead type setting. This is hot type, yep, hot type and it made it more that much quicker to produce a newspaper and somebody who could operate this machine could produce a newspaper in enough time that you'd have one every night.

01:51:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, the problem was before you had to have a whole room filled with typesetters people to do it and you couldn't have enough, so you couldn't never get late news At the end of the life of the typesetters online. It's a wonderful part of the story. There were typesetters who were called the Swifts, who turned hand typesetting into a spectator sport. People would come out and watch people set type and they were celebrities.

01:52:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So here's the trailer, the original Swifty.

01:52:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the trailer from the movie Lino type that you can watch on YouTube. I guess right when is the movie? Oh, Lino type the film. Oh, it's at linotypefilmcom.

01:52:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's it. Yeah, doug made that. He's great and he's he's good friends with Glenn Fleischman. I bet he is.

01:52:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet he is so. When did the linotype stop getting used? So it started in the 1890s.

01:52:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Good question. Good question. Doug Wilson by the way, I should say Doug's full name made the movies Wonderful guy, Doug and Glenn, and Marchin and I all went to the printing museum together and did a talk. It stopped being used first when there was cold type, which is to say photographic, that you shine through a plastic thing onto photographic film and then cut that up. And then came PostScript which replaced it all.

01:53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the individual typesetters doing it in a room. But this is so much of an improvement that's fascinating. It's such a wonderful thing.

01:53:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, if you're ever in Boston I'm serious, go to that was that was. That was the guy who started the museum right there at the end. Go to the Museum of Printing in Haverhill Mass and it's just wonderful. So here's a.

01:53:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's an image from the New York Times back in the day, of all of the line of type operators Good Lord sitting in a room, so when? So this is back in the day, like the front page, where a reporter is calling the story. Somebody would type it out and then they would call for a copy. Well, let me tell you and run it downstairs to the line of type no. No.

01:54:00 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You know, no, no. So what would happen is so I did that. I was a rewrite man Sorry for the sexist language and we would write on half sheet of paper and I would write the lead, and then I would pull out a typewriter and scream copy and somebody one year younger than me would come around to get it and be multiple carbon copies, carbon paper.

01:54:18
Something was playing later, of course, and then I know, then it would go to the copy, would go to each editor and then they would start to get a couple of paragraphs together and then they would put in a pneumatic tube and set it downstairs and if you were on deadline they would cut it up so that multiple typesetters and multiple line of types could set parts of it, so it could make it by deadline to go in the page. And while I was still writing the 10th paragraph, they were setting the first paragraph downstairs.

01:54:45 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Wow, and I'm going to guess you had to write.

01:54:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You had to write, you had to remember, you couldn't, couldn't edit, you can't edit. It's done. It's not paragraphs. Go on, it's being set.

01:54:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I did not imagine.

01:54:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
When did you first start using?

01:54:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
computers in work.

01:55:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
In I myself very bad. This is where we bring up.

01:55:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
John Slanina's famous picture of rolling all the. Was it you, John, that you have the pictures rolling all the the machines out of the newsroom?

01:55:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah. So 1973, paris 73. The first, the first system went into the Chicago Tribune and I was. I'd survived from a paper called Chicago Today that had no tomorrow, and I was the kid I was. I was 20 years old and still in college and I was playing with these computers next to our desks. Everybody else treated them like the apes in 2001. I don't know what this is Right. I'm playing with it. So I trained the entire newsroom on how to use them when they came in. This is a cursor. You have to put the cursor where you want to do something. And no, don't hit return at the end of the line. Trust me, just keep typing, there's no bell, no.

01:55:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's how I got. I am going to guess though that a reporter who worked in that in earlier environment the line of type environment had a sense of urgency and importance. Oh, yes, right, and you felt like what you were doing was there's such a big part of a manufacturing process thing and it's like this is I'm doing something important here and it's urgent, and I think you kind of lose that when you just type it on a computer.

01:56:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, really, when you're doing a, podcast about rat selfies, yeah, yeah.

01:56:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there must have been. I mean, and I think of the front page, where there was this sense of this is a. You know, this is a big deal, what we're doing here we defined ourselves by our process.

01:56:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah Right, there were people whose full time job was to write capture. It was it.

01:56:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, jeff Jarvis, paris Martin, well, that is, by the way.

01:56:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, that was our signing off.

01:56:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, no, no, that's, that's that's my next book.

01:56:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I look forward to it. Do you have a title for it? A hot type, hot type. Oh wow, I gave you the title just then the hot type. Hot type. We will be back with our picks of the week in just a bit. John's got to wait a minute before we do the. John's got his. So this was where this was a KALX, which is a radio station LA. He's rolling out the typewriters, oh, because then they're going to the. Oh, that's John, by the way.

01:57:26
Jammer B and in all his glory rolling out little tiny computers and they're bringing in, probably basis or something like that, the new star. That's what we used to. There was basis and there was news star. There were the two different things.

01:57:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wow.

01:57:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at this.

01:57:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Where did the typewriters end up?

01:57:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, this is a staged photo, because it was they'd already been moved out long ago. Yeah, you had to go get them so that the photographer could get his shot Right. Yeah, but it looked the same back then. Oh, smiling and not smiling. So they had. So the editor would have the choice to decide whether you were happy, don't look happy if we're taking out our past.

01:58:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, isn't?

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that a story Look reverent. I love that, John. These are great. I remember you.

01:58:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
These are so good, isn't that?

01:58:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
fun. You're working with a bunch of old people, your grandparents. It's nice of them to let you be on the show. Paris, I think that's.

01:58:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It really is. Thanks, guys. I'm glad you guys can still hear me. What I'm glad that you can still hear me, leo, leo, remember where you are, who am.

01:58:34 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
I.

01:58:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You touch C taste, feel, you know what I haven't done. I should do before we break. Is the Google change lock. You ready? Press the button the Google change log. This is the dopiest Google change lock ever. Yeah, it is Starting February 22nd, that's a month from now. You can no longer use Google groups to post to Usenet, if you.

01:59:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
If you're still doing that If you're still.

01:59:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't even know Google groups existed still, or you I?

01:59:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
don't even know. Usenet was still around.

01:59:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I subscribe to Usenet. I don't know why, but I actually do. Yeah, I do. This is from S Alexander Reed. For all six people who care, google is sundowning its Usenet services. Usenet is not bad and, of course, there's a lot of historic stuff there. Also, google is using AI to organize and customize your Chrome browser. This is new in Chrome 121. Experimental generative AI techniques available in Chrome and for Mac and Windows. The first is a tab organizer which enhances tab groups by using Chrome to suggest and create tab groups based on currently open tabs. It'll even suggest names and emojis so it'll be easier to find. To use it, right click a tab and select Organize Similar Tabs. You might use this. I can see you guys using this. You probably have a lot of tabs open right.

02:00:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Second, I have so many tabs I have to close them before I do this show, so do you use Chrome? Yeah, I do. I need to stop using Chrome.

02:00:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's one of my many plans Update your Chrome and then right click a tab.

02:00:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Because Chrome is stopping.

02:00:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know.

02:00:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Chrome is. I know we talk what's on top Use. Firefox they're stopping. I know I need to go to Firefox. I do like the feature they have now where you can right click a tab and then say Close All Tabs to the right, because sometimes you have too many tabs to close them.

02:00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, you can't reach them. They're also teensy.

02:00:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, they're tiny, tiny, tiny. That's when I know I've got to serve my window.

02:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There'll be more in that dropdown. There's also a generative AI wallpaper feature on Android 14 and Pixel 8 devices. They're adding this to the Chrome browser. You can generate custom color themes based on your subject, mood, visual style and color. Finally, google introduced a new AI power tool that activates when you right click on any text box on the internet. You'll get a pop-up that says help me write, and then you type a few words Help me, help me, help me write and you will be writing.

02:01:19 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I mean, that's what you want, I guess, if you want Chrome to be even more of a resource hog, I guess.

02:01:24 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, yeah. If you just need Chrome to be taking up more of your memory, here's the solution for you.

02:01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. Google Photos is rolling out a I think this might be even AI as well an auto-grouping stacks on Android, so you can. So Photo Stacks came in November. Now you can organize similar photos that were taken together within a short time frame. Google will automatically group them so you get one image, because nowadays a lot of phones you got this burst mode, or you just I always take 15 pictures at the same time.

02:02:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, that's what you need to do. If someone hands you your phone to take photos, you got to take them 10 to 20.

02:02:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's so funny when somebody takes one picture and gives you back the phone.

02:02:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's like dude. You were that good at that one photo. You weren't.

02:02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So now you can get the stacked photos in your Google Photos activated today, and that's the Google Change Log.

02:02:29 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
See, you might think that was five stories. In the last one it was just two stories. Just felt like it.

02:02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just felt like it and actually thank you to ScooterX. There is the regular Google Change Log and now there's the ScooterX Google Change Log ScooterX Enhanced he is our AI, in effect. We will take a break. When we come back, we will do your picks of the week as we wrap up this edition of this Week in Google and, by the way, your pick could be a story that Leo ignored, but you really think it's important if you want. There are so many stories in there, I couldn't do more. Let's kick off some picks here with Ms Paris Martino. So.

02:03:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I've been watching. I normally don't watch that much TV, but I've recently been captivated by the Traders, a new reality competition show on Peacock. It is phenomenal. It is hosted by Alan Cummings and he dresses like a Bond super villain.

02:03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He relishes this role. He is he relishes.

02:03:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He is like a spooky master of a spooky castle in this show and basically the game is mafia or werewolf. You have a group of Basically you've got a group of people in this castle. A couple of them are traitors, which means they basically, like mafia or werewolf rules, have the ability to every night kill off one of the other faithful contestants and every week on the show the faithful contestants have to try and guess who's the traitor and vote them off. Much like in the actual game werewolf people are really bad at it. But the thing I love about this is the contestants for this show are insane. It is all celebrities from other reality shows, like the Challenger Survivor. They even got a bachelor on there, as well as the former speaker of the House of UK Parliament.

02:04:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So it's just Order Order.

02:04:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Literally that guy.

02:04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oh, my god, oh, I'd like to watch that.

02:04:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's very funny. It's such an interesting mix of people and I really love Alan Cummings in it.

02:04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always loved Alan Cummings. He's a real outfit.

02:04:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He's really wonderful and his accent is so surprising when he's himself yeah, he's got a small sculpted accent.

02:04:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And he's just leaning into the drama the entire time. It's really a fun watch, Peacock which, by the way, had a.

02:05:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You subscribe to Peacock.

02:05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do, I do, I subscribe I don't think I actually subscribed to Peacock. I watch it.

02:05:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
If you're Peacock, you're not listening to this. I watch it.

02:05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You look through the window of your neighbor's house, the.

02:05:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Bachelor podcast that I told you guys before that breaks down as a sport on their Patreon. One of the guys will do kind of a mystery science theater 3,000 thing where he does commentary of other reality shows. So I watch it through that.

02:05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds like more fun than actually watching the show.

02:05:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's really fun Because every time we'll pause and talk about it. I really, I really recommend it. Game of Roses.

02:05:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's called Game of Roses.

02:05:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah.

02:05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the Peacock is so cheap, you should probably just subscribe. But I mean, I'm sure I just that's the thing.

02:05:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I like the commentary. I don't need to subscribe to another platform.

02:05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's get your pick right.

02:05:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It isn't traders, it's Game of Roses, I mean it is Game of Roses Clues Corner does the traders specifically?

02:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm being honest. And in order to see that you have to be a Patreon subscriber, right, because that's behind there.

02:06:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You do.

02:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:06:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's. You know you could pay. You could wait till the traders is over, pay $10 once, then watch all of them and unsubscribe. That's how I do some patrons sometimes and I say it's honestly, well worth it. This is a guy who the hosts of this show they both previously. That is how I watch the traders, right here, a screen within a screen, with a tiny screen next to it. But this guy the hosts both are like former TV producers and writers.

02:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they know what's going on here.

02:06:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And they've coached number of players through the Bachelor and Love Is Blind and other games. So it's kind of about the producerial aspects of it.

02:06:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, I love it. You know what? It's only $10 to do this Patreon and you get everything right if you join.

02:07:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I would just you know, I think a good way to try out Patreons is you pay $10, watch a bunch of episodes and then decide whether you want to stay for another month.

02:07:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I may actually, I think right now.

02:07:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's a good way to watch it. Honestly, His commentary is very funny.

02:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I tried to watch traders and by itself it wasn't quite enough, but I think with the commentary it's good, because really that's the only way to watch any reality show is with friends who will mock it mercilessly as you're watching.

02:07:35 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, and part of his take on it that I find really interesting is he thinks that this is the start of kind of a third wave of reality TV. Specifically, that this new wave is taking is where other reality shows exist to create celebrities to be feeders into new reality shows. There are a lot of shows like this, like traders, that exist only to take people from other reality competitions.

02:08:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The reality are a bonus.

02:08:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Perfect match on Netflix.

02:08:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, it really is eating itself. Yeah, yeah. Why not? Because reality shows create crap celebrities I mean like D-list celebrities out of the people on the shows.

02:08:18 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
But there's a gem every once in a while. Emma Stone came from there, emma.

02:08:22 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Stone, and so that's the thing is. Wait a minute. Whoa, really Wait, wait wait, wait, whoa.

02:08:26 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I think so yeah.

02:08:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't think so. I don't believe that.

02:08:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
From a reality show.

02:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I'd be so she was long before.

02:08:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The curse. Emma Stone wounded us in a super bad, easy A.

02:08:42 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And the amazing Spider-Man. She was competing on reality TV.

02:08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, wow, never doubt. We got to remember this, never doubt.

02:08:50 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Benito, never doubt Benito.

02:08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He knows this stuff, sheesh Wow.

02:08:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Do you have any clips of it, of her there in the reality show?

02:09:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute, let me find the show she was on. She says as a freshman she dropped out of Xavier College Preparatory in all-girl Catholic high school to become an actress, prepared a PowerPoint presentation for her parents titled Project Hollywood, to convince them to let her move to California to pursue an acting career. She moved with her mother to an apartment in Los Angeles. I went up for every single show on the Disney Channel in addition to play the daughter on every single sitcom. I ended up getting none. So she went to high school and worked at a dog treat bakery. She made her television debut as Laurie Partridge in the VH1 Talent Competition Reality Show. In search of the new Partridge family, which was an unsold pilot. Never got made. Then she was on Lucky Louie Louis CK's show. She auditioned as a star, so she was briefly briefly yeah.

02:09:58
I mean, I think that still counts. Yeah Well, she's about to get her first Oscar, I think, for this new movie Poor Things.

02:10:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah.

02:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't seen it, but I'm looking forward to it. All right, so.

02:10:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm going to Patreon.

02:10:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh gosh, I closed the tab. What's the name of it again?

02:10:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Game of Roses.

02:10:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to Patreon Game of Roses. Ok, so I can watch the Traders the way it was meant to be watched.

02:10:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
With a man smoking a little weed and giving commentary. Oh, no, really Is he high while he's doing this no, there's one episode where he's a little high, but that's OK.

02:10:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It really is the only way we watch. Our shameful watch is a horrible, horrible show on Bravo called Below Deck.

02:10:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's about yachting and it's all true I think some people from Below Deck might be on the Traders, is that?

02:10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, Kate is on it. She was one of the stews Chief Stews on Below Deck.

02:10:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
She's on the Traders.

02:10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Apparently she's a horrible person.

02:10:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, that's the thing that is interesting about this is everybody on the show was like the top person from their reality show, so they're all awful and are way too full of themselves and they're all fucking a castle together and not able to trust one another.

02:11:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love it. It's delightful. There you go, and I'm going to sign up right now for my Patreon. Mr Jeff Jarvis, what's your number?

02:11:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't know you mentioned. By the way, have you ever watched Graham Norton on TikTok? I see him.

02:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clips from his shows a lot Clips all over. He's the greatest. He's a talk show host in Great Britain who gets the best guests and then they all sit on a couch next to each other and tell stories and it's wild. Yeah, I've seen a lot of his stuff. He's just brilliant. It's just the best. Yeah, I don't know why he's never been shown here to be.

02:11:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He's on AMC Plus Like who's going to do. Amc, this what.

02:11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the funniest thing in the curse. They're trying to put together an HGTV reality show and Emma Stone's on it, by the way and they do the whole thing. 10 episodes, 10 hours of this, and at the end of it it's not on HGTV TV, it's on HGTV Go. They're so disappointed that it's just some streaming thing that nobody's ever going to watch. Anyway, what is your show? You could do that if you want, but if you want something, no, no, no.

02:12:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I was going to complain about Ted having on Ackman and Barry Weiss and other people, but I don't know.

02:12:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting. He's a Pershing Square Capital. Barry Weiss is kind of the what's happened to journalism, sad to say.

02:12:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And Andrew Yang.

02:12:41 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Well, he was a presidential candidate All the people you made.

02:12:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know if we should be considering that Ted is some bastion of ideas.

02:12:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, well, wait a minute, isn't it? Though? Those Ted talks are great. I mean, I guess that's their whole thing is quote unquote ideas but it's the ideas economy.

02:12:58 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's like four people who are quote unquote big thinkers and by which they mean you can give really good like sound bites.

02:13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've seen the fake Ted talk right? Have you seen that?

02:13:11 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Oh yes, this is brilliant oh this is brilliant.

02:13:15 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Here we go Walk on stage, walk on stage, walk on stage, walk on stage. I am a thought leader. You know that I'm a thought leader because I'm wearing a blazer, I have glasses and I've just done this with my hands.

02:13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's making a steeple.

02:13:33 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
I'll now walk over to my laptop. By doing so, I'm demonstrating to you that, as a thought leader, I understand technology and that there will be slides, because everybody knows that a presentation seems more legitimate than it actually is if there are slides.

02:13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Slides is thought.

02:13:53 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
Not to the center of the stage, and give you some unremarkable context about how I became a thought leader. If it's okay with you, I'd like to pace while telling you this story In 2000.

02:14:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It goes on and on. It's very funny. Highly recommended is from comedy. It says well, there you go.

02:14:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's from comedy.

02:14:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I just put up in the discord my Ted X talk. Oh, you've got. I'm going to sell off the opening will piss off John, but yeah, let's see Wow.

02:14:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You are dressed in the exact way that he was. No.

02:14:31 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't this is not no. His eye. Wait a minute, wait a minute, I have the other thought leaders still talking.

02:14:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's still the joke.

02:14:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I was like wow, Too many thought leaders.

02:14:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Tell the difference Real Jeff or you got to get the very beginning.

02:14:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very, very beginning is the part that's going to annoy John. All right, here we go. Ted X and why he does this is.

02:15:06 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
That's all you need to show.

02:15:07 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
As J.

02:15:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
All right, all right, no more than I do. I didn't get invited back.

02:15:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are a good at not getting invited back, aren't you? Yeah?

02:15:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, I don't. I'm not going to Davos anymore.

02:15:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Was it hard to not curse in the halls of the Senate?

02:15:27 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Um, yes, actually yes.

02:15:29 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
I wanted to say you're all for a shirt.

02:15:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I got one little thing.

02:15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You start your Senate opening remarks with that line. That would have been good.

02:15:37 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, yeah, I'm going to I got the rotation when I testified at the FCC some years ago, I did get in Baba Buie.

02:15:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, that's huge.

02:15:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Isn't it, isn't it that?

02:15:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
is, that is and what was their reaction?

02:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did they understand what they were seeing? Yeah, they left.

02:15:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, so the Herman Miller power boxes Explain this to me. I love Herman Miller.

02:15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Herman Miller Got to say that up front. Don't be this. I love their chairs. I love their what.

02:16:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So I'm sitting down.

02:16:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So this is so you can carry your power with you, because I guess plugging in. None of us has plugs. I don't get it.

02:16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, apparently there's some places an office environment where you need it.

02:16:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They don't want to, they don't want to have to put plugs in anywhere. Actually, I might do all around a, I don't know, a, you know, eight pound battery it must be heavy.

02:16:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
How many there's got to be a cheaper way.

02:16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can work for a thousand dollars. Every battery could power multiple electronic devices simultaneously and would, paired with the power tray. Power tray, sold separately, can power large devices, including monitors. You know, it's like you might as well bring a generator with you.

02:16:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It looks like a lunchbox.

02:16:54 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
This is for, though, like I can imagine, using this at CF.

02:16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I want the specs.

02:17:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I thought you said using this at.

02:17:02 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
C, not CES, but I guess CES would also work you know because I used to work out of the trailers over there where you work for you know, like, and instead of bringing a whole giant generator, you can just have one of these on your desk Just have a little power box 800 pounds that power box costs $200.

02:17:15 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh, that's not bad.

02:17:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's not bad, I'd take it Large.

02:17:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How many milliamp hours are I keep clicking the specs button but I don't ever get any actual information. See the details. Okay, that's the details. Dimensions.

02:17:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Materials Dimensions.

02:17:33 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Try to buy one. They'll tell you then.

02:17:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah.

02:17:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I just thought it was kind of dumb.

02:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Herman Miller's pretty dumb. It's not the usual lovely design that Herman Miller is known for.

02:17:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I want it in cartel red.

02:17:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You can get a nice cart for it.

02:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it comes with a truck. What doesn't come with it Probably sold separately. No, you know.

02:17:57 - Paris Martineau (Host)
but yeah, that, uh, whatever it is USM.

02:18:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, you know, leo, if you hadn't bought any Herman Miller, you'd still be rich.

02:18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, I know Herman Miller is expensive. This is intended for we work Adam. Attention, adam Newman. We've got a product just for your we work spaces. Ladies and gentlemen, we have concluded. The pain is over. You can resume your normal activity. We are done for the day with this week in Google, starring Jeff Jarvis, the Leonard Tao professor for journalistic innovation, I knew, oh, we can't get him to shut up.

02:18:39
Yes, as usual. Anyway, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the city university of New York deorbiting soon. What is the? What is the timeline for that? You're going to do this till the fall.

02:18:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Basically, I'm not. What is this? Basically, I think, oh, I think I'm actually. Now I'll leave.

02:18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On leave as a stamp, this on the grass.

02:18:57 - Leo's Laptop Audio (Other)
This is the old car.

02:18:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This doesn't even say emeritus on it this is oh, wait a minute. I believe and then I'm emeritus when you have the you have when you have a new card. You should shred the old car. Actually, now I have two. You know what I'm going to do. I'm going to autograph this in dry erase marker and send it to you, jeff. So you have a copy, or you could, you could sell it on eBay for the go to the show.

02:19:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's true. I could go towards our 24 hour live stream.

02:19:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly Paris. I you know what. Let's do it, let's do it. I'm I'm here for it. You could do. You could have a ski ball demonstration.

02:19:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's true. You could do some trivia, jeff, you'll be very proud. At trivia this week I won our team four whole points because there was a question about the origins of a word and the answer was magazine. Um, it was about the Arabic origins of the word magazine and I was like I know this one, wow, oh.

02:19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've read from make America Magazine Again yeah, it does yeah. Okay, um, that's Paris Mark. No, she is a prestigious writer for the information, where she does investigative journalism. If you have a good tip for two six, seven, seven, nine, seven, eight, six, six, five, is your signal number Two six, seven, seven, nine, seven, eight, six, six, five?

02:20:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Thank you, paris. Eight six five five, actually, eight six five five, yes.

02:20:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eight six, seven, seven, eight five.

02:20:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Three, oh nine, Johnny, Johnny.

02:20:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Johnny Paris, I got your number. We do twig every Wednesday 11, no, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern time, 2200 UTC. When we start the show and before we end it, we stream it to a live to YouTube at youtubecom slash twit, so you can watch us do it live. And if you're doing that, you really should just join the club, because then you can chat with us live in our club twit discord. Twittv slash club twit. I do invite you, by the way, to go take the survey. We want to get everybody in here. That's the best way we have of knowing who you are, what you're interested in. Also, when our advertisers ask, we can say things like yeah, we have a few, a few women listening, yeah.

02:21:12
If you're out there let Leo know, please, please.

02:21:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
There's a woman within 20 miles of this podcast play To be survey 24, we especially ask the ladies to fill it out.

02:21:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll help, that'll really help. No, I'm kidding, let's see what else. The fact you can get the show at the website twittv slash twig. There's a youtube channel dedicated this week in Google. Best thing to do is subscribe and your favorite podcast client. That way, you'll get it automatically as soon as it's done. Thank you, we now have two women in our discord. That's exciting. That's really exciting, huge.

02:21:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Really big. The club goes stronger by the day.

02:21:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we're doing all right. It is a male dominated audience, I think. But you know what we can do the survey for, so we can find that out.

02:22:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We have one of your new sponsors is Hems. Is it?

02:22:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oh, how did you know?

02:22:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
that helps, I got the email we get an email every time there's a new sponsor. Robin Hood is also one of them.

02:22:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robin Hood I saw.

02:22:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And because we've mentioned them, we have to say they're a sponsor.

02:22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anytime we mention a sponsor, we like to tell you they're a sponsor so that you don't think that we are getting paid to mention them. But since we usually mention them in a negative light, it really is kind of silly to do that, but okay.

02:22:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Thank you. Well, that was positive. Sometimes we have a male audience. It was as smart advertising, smart Hems, they know where to come Hems.

02:22:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, jeff Jarvis, thank you, paris Martino, thanks to all of you who watch and to those of you who do not. We will see you next time on this week in Google. Bye.

02:22:50 - This Week in Space (Announcement)
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief of Ad Astra magazine, and each week I joined with my co-host to bring you, this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the final frontier. We talked to NASA, chief space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and TV. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So, whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars rocket, join us on this week in space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.