TWiG 775 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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Paris Martineau's here, jeff Jarvis is here, I'm here, and Kathy Gellis, our favorite attorney, joins us to explain the good, the bad and the ugly the Supreme Court's final decisions. Earlier this week We'll also talk about the White House Conference for Creators why weren't we invited? And what happens next with the Internet Archive. All of that's coming up as we have a lovely celebratory this Week in Google as we approach the 4th of July. Next Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twig.

This is Twig. This is Twig this week in Google episode 775, recorded Wednesday, july 3rd 2024. Chocolate cream-filled donuts for the soul. It's time for Twig this week. In what was it Twigs, grandpa?

0:01:05 - Paris Martineau
Security with AI, that's the new name this week in Grandpa Security, now with AI. That comes straight to you from a member of our Discord, and that ladies and gentlemen, is the wonderful Paris Martineau from the information?

0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
Hello, Paris, bonsoir, madame.

0:01:26 - Paris Martineau
Bonsoir Leo.

0:01:27 - Leo Laporte
It's nice to have you here. We have international viewers now all over the world who are enjoying Paris maintenant. Oui, oui, oui, oui, maintenant. Paris maintenant Also with us. Ladies and gentlemen, please get ready and say hello to the Leonard Ta professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the. University of New York, Emeritus Soon to be a scholar of typesetting. I think Next week you're going to do what?

0:02:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm going to the Rare Books School, which has wonderful, amazing courses. What I'm going to the rare books school, which has wonderful, amazing courses. And I'm going to West university of Virginia. They have them in various places, but this course is in the university of Virginia, about typography and the impact of industrialization on it. So I'm writing a book about the line of type Hello, that's me Nice. So I'm I'm reading all kinds of let's see. So I'm reading all kinds of let's see. I have homework. I have thinking with type.

0:02:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a great book.

0:02:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the book, nicole Howard's book, do you have?

0:02:30 - Leo Laporte
Stop Stealing Sheep.

0:02:32 - Jeff Jarvis
The Elements- of Typographic Style. Wow, I have some Updike books to have to read. Yeah, I'm doing my homework.

0:02:40 - Leo Laporte
Updike, was he a famous? No, no, Okay, I have a book to read too. Apparently I got in the mail this special delivery from simon and schuster and I'm wondering if it could be anybody. I knows a book. Let's see. No, it's not okay, never mind.

0:03:00 - Paris Martineau
Well, I thought it might be yours well, I got a copy of the web we Weave, which is back behind me.

0:03:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Unfortunately you didn't get it yet with Leo's really wonderful blurb. Thank you, my friend. It was poetic, it's downright poetic.

0:03:14 - Leo Laporte
I got to tell you to get me to write, anything is pulling teeth. I've written many a book and I hate it and I told your editor. I said I'm really I'm better at talking than writing, but for you I had and thank you for saying such kind words coming from you. It was really wonderful. That's high praise. But yeah, I don't. Is it on the? Does it go on the cover? I know there's a digital.

0:03:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, it does. You're the lead blurb on the cover. What?

0:03:43 - Leo Laporte
But what about Paris? She should be the lead blurb.

0:03:47 - Paris Martineau
I haven't blurbed.

0:03:48 - Leo Laporte
You didn't blurb, I just consumed. Okay, well, I blurbed.

0:03:54 - Jeff Jarvis
You and Craig Newmark and John Palfrey, the head of the MacArthur Foundation.

0:03:57 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty darn good. Oh, I'm a good company here. They're going to say who's that Leo guy? What's he doing there Right up top? Uh, your book, the web we weave, comes out october, october. Also sitting here in her purple cap. It's nice to see you, kathy gellis. She was on twitter on sunday, but she asked me. She said you know, the last day of the supreme court's current session is monday and they probably weren't going to announce some stuff then.

0:04:27 - Cathy Gellis
Well, yeah, they might be announcing some things they might be announcing some things. So she said should.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
I come back and give us because you gave us a great analysis on Murti, the social media thing, which really was we kind of at the time on Sunday thought it was kind of a victory, but it sounds like really they're sending it back down to the lower courts more than anything else.

0:04:49 - Cathy Gellis
Or the states right Murti is a victory. It is okay. Yeah, it gets remanded, but that isn't necessarily bad. I wouldn't put it past the Fifth Circuit to screw things up again. But their wings have been clipped, uh these are the.

0:05:07 - Leo Laporte
This was the texas and florida respectively. Oh no, this is the missouri one.

0:05:12 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, so, um yeah so there were two internet related decisions that we were waiting for and waiting, and waiting and waiting, along with basically every supreme court decision that, uh, they had heard for a case they'd heard this year. And we got Murty on Wednesday, last Wednesday, and then, but that's all we got, and we got no decisions on Thursday and we got no decisions on Friday, and so then they may. They added one last day, which was this past Monday, and it seemed likely that we would get the last missing decision that we were waiting for and the other ones that the nation was waiting for. And did we? And how?

0:05:46 - Leo Laporte
there were quite a few there were quite a few, so just to just to catch us up if you didn't listen on sunday murdy versus missouri the missouri, uh, attorney general, um, was they were suing over what?

0:06:03 - Cathy Gellis
people who got kicked off the internet uh well, that's maybe too broad people whose uh speech got moderated off of uh social media platforms sued. And they didn't sue the platforms because arguably um, not arguably section 230 says they can't sue the platforms. Um, section 230 immunizes the platforms for their moderation decisions. But what had been happening is the platforms were moderating consistent with their moderation policies and they were in various discussions with various members of the federal government, particularly in the Biden administration, and you know having discussions of like, hi, we'd like to make a, you know, a vaccine policy, what is good information that we should allow and what's information we shouldn't allow? What is your take on things? And they were consulting the experts within the CDC, for example, to make those determinations, also talking to CISA about disinformation threads and a variety of agencies.

And because those conversations were happening and there was, you know, eventually the Twitter files was revealing that some of the conversations, you know, people in the executive branch had opinions about what was good, bad or otherwise. Since the moderation happened in the shadow of those conversations, although some of the decisions predated those, some of the moderation decisions predated the conversations, the people who got moderated away decided, aha, this is censorship, because the government couldn't censor us directly. We had First Amendment rights. So what they did was they jawboned, and that's the idea that you pressure an intermediary to do the bidding that you can't do yourself. So if I got deleted off of Facebook, I got and Facebook had a conversation with the executive branch, quid pro quo, you know, qed would throw some Latin at it.

This must be the fault of the federal government for having caused this to happen and a whole bunch of people who had gotten moderated away sued. And then the states of Louisiana and Missouri. They sued, both claiming their own rights and that they were somehow being speaking on behalf of their citizens who were affected by these moderation decisions, which was a really frightening view of standing, which, I think, threatened up and the entire First Amendment and they just threw this at the wall. It was a really come. A lot of plaintiffs, a lot of defendants. It was a mess.

And the court basically looked at it and said no way you don't get to plead something that's this messy. You have to be able to draw a much stronger line between the injury you're complaining of, that it was caused, but, you know, potentially caused by the government. The defendants you're alleging have done something wrong and, especially since they were asking for an injunction, that if we give you the injunction, that this is somehow going to provide a remedy for what you're complaining about and actually help your problem. And it was just such a mess. And the and Justice Barrett wrote the decision and said I've looked at your record. It's garbage and go away. Good.

0:09:10 - Leo Laporte
So that's when they got right.

0:09:11 - Cathy Gellis
It's when they got right.

0:09:12 - Leo Laporte
Now we were waiting for the two net choice ones. Those are the Texas and Florida. Those are the Texas and Florida and that did come out, those did come out.

0:09:20 - Cathy Gellis
Monday. Those came out Monday, the day after we did twit, so I wanted you to come back and talk about that. Yes, um. Well, so the supreme court has wrecked our democracy but done a very nice job upholding the first amendment. So, um, for now right right kathy well, it's the one piece that's still standing. And it's the one piece that's still standing with coherence and respect for previous precedent and logical outcomes and really teasing out what would the what would happen if we had alternative results.

0:09:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Before you explain, let me just ask, just so I have context and I know how nervous to be Because it's remanded. You're going to explain all that. Could the lower courts still screw this up, or was the defense such that I should relax a little bit?

0:10:01 - Cathy Gellis
Well, one of the cases is going back to Texas, so you can never sleep easy when it's going back to the texas okay, that's what, but I'm still nervous but I don't think this court has, I think, a majority of this court I think there's at least six votes that would still think that if texas screws it up, they're probably not going to give uh cover for it.

0:10:20 - Jeff Jarvis
So okay, I apologize to have interrupted for that context, but um, with explanation.

0:10:25 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I mean there's.

One of the things that's a little open is that both the Texas law and the Florida law had ended up and joined. But Florida's law had ended up and joined in a much more logical matter because the 11th circuit handled it much more reasonably and, um, the Texas one ended up with an emergency stay from the Supreme court. I think, and one of the things people are kind of wondering, although we're going on the, on the theory that, yes, yes, the, the stay is still in effect, um, because in the wake of this decision, it does not look like the supreme court wants that law to go in effect. I think it believes it's garbage. But that's one of the things that's a little bit open.

But you know, the crux of this decision is that there's a couple of things that come up in it, but one of the big ones is something I mentioned on Twit, which was the idea that platforms have their own First Amendment rights in how they choose to moderate their platforms was something that had not been explicitly articulated by the Supreme Court before. They had articulated in the context of newspapers with the case Miami Herald versus Tornillo. And then the open question was whether that reasoning would apply to to Internet platforms, and there is a ton of language in this decision that says yes, in fact it does that. What?

0:11:47 - Jeff Jarvis
the moderation is moderation is speech moderation is speech mike masnick and tector were you also right?

0:11:53 - Cathy Gellis
says the question at heart of both cases was whether or not the government could compel private websites to host speech those websites didn't wish to host right, so there's a lot and the court said, no, you don't have to right um, but actually now I realize, as I'm my brain is unfurling this uh, that jeff's concerns are a little bit more um, uh, well taken, because the other part of this decision was a majority of the court um had some concerns with the type of challenge that was brought. That NetChoice basically sued and basically said everything about this law is bad and it was defended by the states as saying all or nothing. Our law is great. It was never applied. In terms of specific applications, of how that law would affect different, very specific functions, that specific platform, specific functions. It was sort of one big nothing here is legitimate and the court at oral argument was sort of like but what about this? What about email? What about this, that and the other thing, I think that came out of the blue. I think it really caught everybody by surprise. I mean they granted the cert petition on the basic, the broader questions of whether the First Amendment protected the content moderation decisions.

So the case has been remanded in both instances the Florida and the Texas for go back and sort out the. What does it mean that you didn't bring a facial challenge? Does the challenge need to be brought that way? So it's not quite clear exactly what will happen next. But, on the other hand, every state that wants to impose regulation on a platform is now in a hole, because they're going to try to assert that, yes, yes, we can totally shape platforms and affect how they moderate their systems, but they're going to be doing it in the face of all this law.

All this language written by Kagan saying, yeah, well, there's the First Amendment that's going to you know you're going to have to. It stops you, most likely from being able to do that. Then there's a question in that there's the dissent by alito, thomas and gorsuch, who are basically like, yeah, uh, they're basically saying, yeah, okay, we agree that, um, we agree with the result that this case is going back down to sort out the facial challenge issue, and we point out that all that other lovely language is just dicta and so we are not signing on. Our vote should not be construed as signing on to all that lovely First Amendment protective language. We're only buying this decision for the purpose of we're saying go back and litigate it some more. But there are still what looks like six votes, or at least five votes, that says yeah, we actually kind of endorse that language and I think it's going to be hard for states to defend their attempts to force social media to regulate in any particular, to moderate in any particular way.

0:14:50 - Leo Laporte
In light of all this point, saying that well, the first amendment applies and it's rooted and it's reasoned, and stuff like that so the takeaway really is this hadn't been, we hadn't heard this from the court before, but the court did in fact say yes, the internet is covered by the first amendment, just like a newspaper is covered by the first amendment. You can't force them to publish any.

0:15:11 - Cathy Gellis
We think so. The question that the this, that it's not a dissent, it's actually a concurrence, but the alito gorsuch thomas thing is is whether it is precedent that every court must abide by oh interesting or whether it is just persuasive dicta that who are they kidding? You're going to disagree with any of that analysis.

0:15:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Because they were told to rethink, to go back. They were told to go back with this, with an analysis of the First Amendment. Are the dicta in here sufficient to say this is how you're going to analyze it?

0:15:44 - Cathy Gellis
Well, dicta doesn't count as precedent. So if it's dicta, it isn't precedent. But there's the very open question for what you just said Is it dicta at all, or is it actually part of the precedent? Like, is that actually the holding and the rest is just sort of the procedural instructions? For here's another issue. I think it's really nebulous. Obviously, this is the court.

0:16:03 - Leo Laporte
Does the court say this is precedent and this is dicta, or are you supposed to infer it? How do you know? It's like being married, leo. Yeah.

0:16:11 - Cathy Gellis
I mean it's fine, Even under the heady days when there was a lot more consistency. I'm not entirely sure there were bright line rules, but there were sort of patterns and now we're in Calvin Ball days anyway.

0:16:23 - Leo Laporte
So it isn't clearly understood, were in calvin ball days anyway. So so it isn't under. It isn't clearly understood that okay, and by the way, precedent, I take it carries more weight than precedent is all the other courts you well, it used to well, okay that's the old stare decisis, uh and all the other, all the other courts would be bound to adhere to that decision. They have to it's not merely stare decisis, it is you don't have a choice.

0:16:45 - Cathy Gellis
There's a precedent it is precedent, and it is the articulation of what the law of the land is, and so the courts have to be.

0:16:51 - Leo Laporte
That's why the supreme court has a lot of power right, because in effect, they make law by their decisions.

0:16:57 - Cathy Gellis
Right, and that goes back to marbury versus madison, which is the court construed for itself this power to do that level of interpretation. We've been kind of tooling along for nearly 250 years and kind of getting away with it. But I mean one thing that Kagan's decision had was analysis that was rooted into prior decisions. It was analytically rooted in history and precedent and other cases. However, some of the other decisions that the court we've learned that that's not necessary.

That may have also issued on monday, maybe a lot less tethered, but there are no rules, they can do that right.

0:17:35 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there's I mean who's to make the rule that what we've learned now is the supreme court essentially has no bumpers? There are no. There's nothing to rein them in if they choose.

0:17:47 - Cathy Gellis
Well. So one of the things is so actually going back to it do the other courts in the land have to adhere to what the Supreme Court said? I said the answer is yes. For an awfully long time, for nearly 250 years, the answer has been yes. It is not quite clear what the answer is. Because I don't think that's actually a rule written down.

0:18:07 - Leo Laporte
It's not in law.

0:18:08 - Cathy Gellis
Some of this is norms.

0:18:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:18:10 - Cathy Gellis
Some of this is norms.

0:18:11 - PC
And we know, norms don't seem to apply, and that's the thing that's out the window.

0:18:15 - Cathy Gellis
So you know, the more Roberts wants to make things up, he kind of undoes it. He's got the power to say whatever he wants to say, but at a certain point, in theory, he could be ignored. The problem is is, if he gets ignored, what do we have instead? Then we kind of have a separate form of lawlessness. It is not great if all the different courts can all do different things and not kind of be unified into one coherent law. So there is something useful in the supreme court actually having that sort of power to issue the law for the land. But you kind of want it to be really careful when it does it, so that it's actually usable, sustainable and something that the majority of the country would be able to use and respect.

0:18:54 - Leo Laporte
It strikes me that for 250 years this country has run on norms and we presumed that people would live up to the norms, because it wasn't encoded, it just was accepted.

0:19:06 - Jeff Jarvis
We also thought we had laws, but we were more under common law than we thought.

0:19:10 - Leo Laporte
We didn't realize how much of it was merely norm and how little of it was actually code.

0:19:16 - Cathy Gellis
Or some of it is norm, some of it may actually be prior precedent or some of the prior precedent was set up, as this is the way we're going to do it. It's only the norms that enforce precedents, right, well, if they dump out the precedent, then, um, they're kind of dumping also the things that give the court the legitimacy right.

So, um, I I don't see what the what the long game here is. The long game is not good. This is upending things that keep the system sustainable, um, and I'm just surprised that they were so easily upended.

0:19:46 - Leo Laporte
To be honest, that's all.

0:19:47 - Cathy Gellis
I was. It's the last.

0:19:48 - Leo Laporte
the last seven years have taught us anything, it's that. So how much of what we expect is based on pure expectation and not law?

0:19:58 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, there were a couple of justices that I think had, you know, specific agendas, but that was a couple of votes. I did not expect that. Six is a lot of votes. Six is a lot of votes. Justice Barrett did not join one aspect of the decision which was, I think, using the evidence.

0:20:20 - Leo Laporte
Now you're talking about a different case. I'm talking about a different case which, while it has a lot of impact on us as American citizens, probably isn't germane in a technology context.

0:20:33 - Jeff Jarvis
No, chevron is more germane, chevron is yeah.

0:20:36 - Leo Laporte
But Leo I just put in the— Look, hey, my hair's on fire. It's been on fire ever since.

0:20:41 - Cathy Gellis
Monday Well, the problem is, we've got—.

0:20:42 - Leo Laporte
But I also understand that we have a variety of political points of view. Okay, watching the show and and they also expect that we cover technology and not politics. In fact, I even hear from people all the time who say, look, I get enough politics, it's not. It's not that I want to talk about politics, I just don't. I come here to get away.

0:20:59 - Jeff Jarvis
There's plenty to talk about that is relevant to that, yeah, so we should make it relevant.

0:21:02 - Cathy Gellis
But if I. But the problem is, if I ask the question, what does this mean? All of a sudden I'm a lot less sure what it means.

0:21:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is one of the reasons I really like having you on, kathy, because, unlike so many pundits in the legal profession but because they're pundits, they tend to be very certain about what it all means, and you are very balanced in that and uh, and I appreciate that yeah, and and and don't get me wrong with my comments about the other case aren't really in terms of the result that's all we could say about it.

0:21:33 - Cathy Gellis
The other case, that's what we're going to call it it's not about the result, but the problem is the process, and one of the reasons I'm emphasizing that the the decision I am here to talk about is a good one is it is rooted in precedent, it's cited, it's sourced, and when we look at decisions that we're more uncomfortable with, one of the things is well, how did they get to that result? If they got to that result in a reasoned and rooted way, it's a lot easier to accept and say, okay, this was bad, but okay, we'll keep going. The problem when it's just sort of like thrown out there, the problem is not the result. The problem is the method by which the result is gone to, and yeah, it's a little bit like okay, let's keep talking about the tech, but a lot that we were counting on in our world has just gone upside down, and we might need to roll that into how we think about things.

0:22:25 - Jeff Jarvis
So if you want to feel a little better, I put the last paragraph of the net choice decision into the discord. This is language in there. Who?

0:22:32 - Leo Laporte
wrote the uh? Who wrote the uh decision? Whose writing is this? Because it is.

It's quite good, it's kagan right kagan wrote the uh the majority she says, texas has never been shy and has always been consistent about its interest. The objective is to correct the mix of viewpoints that major platforms present, but a state may not interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance. States and their citizens are, of course, right to want an expressive realm in which the public has access to a wide range of views. I think we can all agree to that. But the way the first amendment achieves that goal is to prevent the government from tilting the debate in a preferred direction, not by licensing the government to stop private actors from speaking as they wish and preferring some views over another. A state cannot prohibit speech to rebalance the speech market. That unadorned interest is not unrelated to the suppression of free expression and Texas may not pursue it consistent with the First Amendment. I think that's nice. It's beautifully written.

0:23:38 - Cathy Gellis
Those are cheery words, yeah, I mean for those of us litigating it, and you know, one of the reasons it's set up, with the plaintiffs NetChoice and CCIA, was to cover a range of political viewpoints, because NetChoice is typically a conservative organization. It was to sort of say this isn't about who you want which horse you want to win in the race. This is about whether the race is constitutionally set up constitutionally set up. And it was really weird to kind of have these laws that just like you'd look at them as a First Amendment advocate and say there's no way, this cannot possibly be something that the First Amendment would tolerate, and just to go through bizarro land where the laws were getting passed and in Texas they were getting upheld, and you know it is nice that basically Kagan wrote a decision that said you're not crazy, this is just as stupid and unconstitutional as you thought it was.

0:24:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you file on this? I did In this case my clients were. What was your primary argument?

0:24:35 - Cathy Gellis
So my clients in this case were the Copia Institute, which is Mike Masnick, and TechDirt. And so he has you know he's wonky and comments about these things, but he also has comments. And you has, you know he's wonky and, uh, comments about these things, but he also has comments. And you know, in theory he's not touched by these laws, but he could be touched by these laws. And if he's not touched by these laws, new laws could be written that would reach him as we are, by the way, internet publisher is like the fact that they're like oh, we're just going after the big guys.

0:25:00 - Leo Laporte
There's no assurance whatsoever in fact, the big guys can defend themselves. It's the little guys you've got to protect.

0:25:05 - Cathy Gellis
And then also like what do you do about Wikimedia, which is a very big little guy, or a very little big guy? So that was one client. I also had Chris Riley, who is a Mastodon admin, because he's sitting there in the crosshairs as a platform operator, and we also had Blue Sky, which is a brand new platform that did not even really exist at the time that this law was passed.

Like the litigation has been going on for years. This was not the. Actually, I wrote a brief in this case at the Supreme Court, but it's not even the first one.

0:25:36 - Leo Laporte
I had another one. This case was aimed at Twitter right, Primarily Twitter and Facebook.

0:25:41 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I'm certain Facebook and yeah, and probably Twitter, because they are the most directly social media-ish Right. And then there's a footnote, either in this or Merchie, where they're like yeah, twitter now has a new name and Facebook now has a new name. We're just going to call them Twitter and Facebook because we're just not going to keep up with the line on the side. It's complicated.

0:26:01 - Jeff Jarvis
That's funny.

0:26:02 - Cathy Gellis
But this had been going on for a long time. So, um, that's funny. So, but this had been going on for a long time, like the florida law was the one when desantis, like disney, there was the theme park exception, which is that these platform rules only apply to platforms that did not have a that's when he liked disney when he liked disney and then, when he got mad at disney, they uh, they amended the law to take out the theme park exemption.

0:26:21 - Leo Laporte
But talk about like gives you a perfect example why states should not be in this business in the speech regulation because they they don't like the speech anymore, so therefore they want to punish the speech.

0:26:30 - Cathy Gellis
I mean they. The first amendment, uh, horror was so obvious, um. And then the texas law um, it, it's structured differently, it does different things, but um, I can't remember exactly. I think at the district court it may have actually been enjoined, but then. But then it ended up in the in the fifth circuit. So the circuit made up the first amendment.

0:26:49 - Leo Laporte
We'll move on from the Supreme court.

0:26:53 - Cathy Gellis
We can try.

0:26:55 - Leo Laporte
I just can't go there. That's all Um. There was at the same time we were. All this attention is being paid to these decisions that came out on Monday a decision from a judge in the Mississippi case. That also is fairly important. The judge blocked the Mississippi law that required age verification on social media.

0:27:17 - Cathy Gellis
Now it's interesting that's not the first time a court has enjoined these age verification laws.

0:27:24 - Leo Laporte
I don't remember what number we're up to, but there's been a couple this was a mississippi law that would have required age verification for everyone and parental consent for teens in order to make accounts on social media sites. So I have to prove that I'm 67 in order to make us.

0:27:40 - Cathy Gellis
I'm gonna count on a social media yourself, so this becomes um, there goes your ability to have anonymous speech. You're going to have a nice data set of very sensitive personal information that needs to be protected.

0:27:53 - Leo Laporte
This was Mississippi House Bill 1126. Net Choice, which is an industry group that represents Meta and Google, also opposed this.

0:28:00 - Cathy Gellis
They were the lead party. They've been quite active in suing. They've sued in California. So the age appropriate design law has been enjoined and that's now up at the Ninth Circuit.

0:28:08 - Leo Laporte
There's no way to do age proof without impeding impinging your privacy?

0:28:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you see line 71 on Texas Supreme court is going to take this up.

0:28:19 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, there's yeah, texas Texas is always a little different. So the porn verification I don't think there's some factors that differentiate, but still it's the whole idea of, I think, a lot of the age verification is essentially. This is regulation that is speaking to platforms. Now what's interesting is these laws are getting enjoined and we're getting enjoined even before this net choice decision at the Supreme Court, because you can kind of look at it and rethink how would the First Amendment apply and realize that there's big problems with it.

0:28:49 - Leo Laporte
Does this mean all basically all 19 states have age verification bills. Are they all dead in the water?

0:28:55 - Cathy Gellis
They have a very significant uphill battle, and so does COSA, which has been good. By I mean some of these also relies on some of these bills are being brought, pushed by Democrats. It also tends to put into question any of the bills because sometimes they're not doing age verification, sometimes they're doing no algorithms, sometimes it's no algorithms for kids, sometimes it's no algorithms for anyone, and this net choice language, written by Kagan, puts those into question.

0:29:22 - Leo Laporte
Very good. Love hearing that puts those into question.

0:29:24 - Cathy Gellis
Very good. So one other thing worth mentioning but we have to sneak back a little bit into the Supreme Court is one of the issues of Section 230 and the cases involving accusations that the platforms were negligently designed and that, if they were negligently designed, Section 230 does not apply.

It has not been going well for the platform so far and I think it's a big problem for Section 230, the First Amendment and the Internet. But there was a cert petition on one of the cases and where 230 was found to have applied and cert was denied. The Supreme Court won't hear that case but Justice Thomas has a three-page screed where he criticizes it. And it has no power, but he's still out there being very annoying.

0:30:13 - Leo Laporte
Just to make people happy. Netchoice is funded by Google, so this is a show about Google.

0:30:19 - Cathy Gellis
just wanted you to know I mean google is a benefactor of these decisions too, yeah google's impacted by all of this very much. We are all impacted, but yes I mean, I think google is not just a part of the trade associations, but in some of these cases, I think, maybe even more directly implicated. But but google, google was google versus gonzalez too. That was the last section, 230 case.

0:30:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so that was a case.

0:30:43 - Cathy Gellis
That was a YouTube case. I mean sitting here as an advocate doing this advocacy in this space. I mean two years before the decision before oral argument in Google versus Garcia, me and my compatriots were sitting there like, okay, we've had wins in the district courts and appellate courts, but oh my gosh, we think we're going to run into a buzzsaw when we get up to the Supreme Court. And we were really, really, really worried and actually I think now we're sort of sitting here like, okay, we've got some tools in our tool belt and we can go out and keep fighting this stuff.

0:31:11 - Leo Laporte
That's good.

0:31:12 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah.

0:31:13 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this week in Google. Yes, we are talking about Google, believe it or not, with Kathy Gellis, who has joined us. She is an attorney practicing particularly in this area. She is at CGCounselcom and, of course, writes for TechDirt and files briefs on behalf of TechDirt's Copia Institute. God's work, god's work. That's Jeff Jarvis who has God's beard actually Not God, but he's not God. Just in case you were worried about that and old as ferris martineau, uh, who is as young as a spring daisy? Uh, she's reporting information.

Uh, thank you for being here. We appreciate it all, right, what is so? I mean, we could you know, is so, uh, tempting to go on and on about this.

0:32:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I hear a little bit about Chevron?

0:32:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because so let's just this so-called Chevron deference comes from a case where Chevron sued was at the EPA, saying you can't tell us what to do, and the court in that case 40 years ago said well, wait a minute, these administrative regulatory agencies can tell you what to do, even if they haven't been told so by Congress. They are presumed to have some expertise. That was all overturned.

0:32:34 - Cathy Gellis
The question is what do you do when there's gaps in ambiguity?

0:32:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they deferred to the agencies in the past.

0:32:41 - Cathy Gellis
Much more deference than now.

0:32:45 - Leo Laporte
there's less so who's going to make the determination now? I've seen it said that the court says well, it's okay, we'll handle it.

0:32:54 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, I think the question there's kind of two things that happen, because actually, to add to the Chevron case is another Monday case where they talked about the statute of limitations where if you don't like an agency decision, how long do you have to challenge it? And they changed the way the statute of limitations is thought of. So instead of being six years after the rule is final, it's now six years after you were affected by the final rule.

0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting.

0:33:19 - Cathy Gellis
So in theory, that becomes infinite. So in theory, that becomes infinite. So that is a separate thing. That is basically targeting agencies and their ability to effectively issue regulations covers everything which sometimes happens because Congress doesn't draft things right, and sometimes happens because the future has continued on and you haven't updated the statute, or the statute was written to be scalable. What can the agencies do? So the agencies, in theory, can still go on their merry way, issuing rules and doing things the way they wanted, but the procedure around challenging them has, it's, made it a lot more open season on what an agency does, which means it's going to be harder for them to do something that we can count on as being final rules that can guide our behaviors and we'll know where our protections are In the courts, kathy.

0:34:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, if I don't like regulation one, two, three and say, ah, chevron throws this open. You made it very vague, you screwed up agency. Do I complain to the agency and tell them they better get their act together, or do I have to go to court to fight the agency? What's the path for striking down regulations, of which I'm sure we're going to see lots?

0:34:36 - Cathy Gellis
um, I think it's basically that you, if the agency does something that you think they're not supposed to have done you, you challenge it in the courts. Now granted, we've also been dealing with a universe where everybody has just been bringing whatever they're unhappy to to a district court in Texas and anyway. So we've kind of already been having open season on the regulatory apparatus anyway.

0:34:58 - Leo Laporte
But this makes it a lot more open season and the reason this applies to tech and the Verge wrote about this is that some of these agencies include the FCC, which, of course, has gone two different ways on net neutrality in the last few years. Maybe somebody else should be deciding in that case. It also applies to the FTC and the FDA and so forth. But the interesting point that you've made and you made it on Twitter on Sunday is it's just not clear what the impact of this is. It doesn't immediately throw out the regulatory bodies.

0:35:39 - Cathy Gellis
I mean I think I'm not going to. Actually I did on Sunday and I shouldn't to. Actually I did on Sunday and I shouldn't. There's a lot of panic and I don't think it's completely misplaced. Plus, some very smart people may be saying things that I'm not saying, but my general reaction to things are look, if you can play this hand that you've just been dealt with good lawyering or a plausibly written and statutory update Okay, then I'm not going to really worry about what this is, what the decision said as much, because there's other things to worry about, but this one is really probably going to push, put some strain back into the system, mostly because we don't know like it's. There's going to be some rigmarole before we even figure out whether maybe we get to a point where it's like okay, we're okay Because, after all, chevron deference is a relatively modern statute of modern concussion I mean Scalia made it.

0:36:27 - Leo Laporte
This was something that, at the time that it was created, the conservatives on the court wanted and the non-conservatives were really unhappy about and this is what the Supreme Court is supposed to moderate is these swings from left to right and a point of view that changes with the wind rooted in reason is why, you know, that kind of insulates us from a little bit well, it does anyway, yeah what about the writing of laws?

0:36:51 - Cathy Gellis
what one impression I have from this is that the burden of specificity becomes much greater legislatively so there is an argument that that's supposed to happen, like the constitutional argument, is not crazy, because the Constitution puts the legislative power in the hands of Congress and if all of a sudden legislation is happening from other branches, that does have a constitutional problem.

0:37:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm not against it.

0:37:17 - Cathy Gellis
The problem is, you know, the Constitution was written before we had the Industrial Revolution, and so the world you're trying to regulate.

Ai well, you know, that's just anything cars, electricity, anything digital um you know, so we're in a much bigger country with much more technology, much more going on, you kind of have to empower the, the regulatory state, in order to govern um. And so the question it is a legitimate constitutional question of, okay, given how we set things up and given the reality, how do you merge these two ideas so that you don't want to overly empower the wrong branch of government to do too much legislation but at the same time, congress obviously empowered these agencies to do something? So you'd also don't want to, like you know, undermine Congress by making it that they tried to empower these agencies but now the agencies can't do what Congress really wanted them to do.

0:38:14 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think the deeper story is that you have to assume that these agencies have real experts who understand deeply what's going on here and who should be relied on to interpret regulations, as opposed to the less expert Congress or courts.

0:38:31 - Cathy Gellis
That too.

0:38:32 - Leo Laporte
Congress would say hey look, we trust that the EPA understands what emissions are dangerous and will regulate accordingly. We can't legislate every detail of that, but now they have a little less power to make those decisions. The irony of this, by the way, it wasn't the EPA, although the EPA was involved. It was Chevron versus the National Resources Defense Council. Chevron won, Chevron won. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Chevron, allowing the Reagan administration's industry friendly EPA to stick with a lax interpretation of the Clean Air Act. Chevron didn't want the Clean Air Act to be so stringent and they won that case. So I don't understand, I guess because the court at that point said no, the EPA knows what it's doing. We should let the EPA decide, Even though nowadays we might say well, they decided in favor of pollution. But see, this is why it's hard to talk about political left and right in this, because it really depends.

0:39:40 - Cathy Gellis
Left and right are taking different preferences as we go through time. You also have the APA, which is a statutory provision that sort of gives some instructions for how the agencies need to conduct themselves and sets forth what happens when they screw up.

0:39:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I understand the point of view that. Well, maybe you don't want, maybe you don't trust Anthony Fauci, maybe you don't want the CDC, don't trust anthony fauci, maybe you don't want the cdc to be making decisions about public health generally just doing whatever.

0:40:10 - Cathy Gellis
There there is a statute that guides them and when they wander off from balances well, you can. I mean that's. That's the other thing. The apa does allow agency actions to be challenged when they screw up, if they're like, for instance, arbitrary and capricious, which I think is one of the standards. So when that happens, yes, you can, yes, you can bring a challenge.

0:40:29 - Leo Laporte
The mostly this is just.

0:40:31 - Cathy Gellis
It's destabilizing a regime we've had for about 40 years it's destabilizing a regime and, like I pointed out with that other decision, it is possibly poking more holes in the apa and that it's not just a pendulum swing, but that the whole terrain has more minefields in it than it used to. So I think people are worried that maybe we're not in a position of, okay, we'll just figure out how to do it the old way. I think people are afraid that even the old way may not be accessible to us.

0:40:56 - Leo Laporte
It's oversimplification, for instance, to say, oh, I'll now know more net neutrality, because it really, really it was only four years ago that the FCC decided that uh, the, the title two did regulate telecommunications companies as common carriers, uh, and now they want to make them, uh, information services, or vice versa. I can never even remember, but in both cases it's kind of the political winds that are deciding that. And one allows net neutrality or allows the FCC to enforce net neutrality, one doesn't.

0:41:31 - Cathy Gellis
Well, to be devil's advocate on some of it. I mean, we're using the Communications Act that, by and large, was written in 1934. And there are some questions about what can the FCC actually do, and you can end up in a position where the policy value you may want to pursue may not really have the statutory basis to empower the agency to do the thing that you really wanted to do to get that policy value, and particularly on net neutrality. That's kind of the situation where we find ourselves where we would like the FCC to. I like natural neutrality. I think it's overall a good value. But there is an open question Can the FCC, what can it actually do to achieve that?

0:42:13 - Leo Laporte
And in an ideal world, wouldn't this all just land in the lap of Congress, because those are the elected representatives of there are representatives.

0:42:22 - Cathy Gellis
They should be the ones making the decision, not an unelected it could be a good thing to go back to congress and say why don't you update the 1934? Statute which they sort of did in 96 a little bit. They've done a little bit since. Um, I think part of the problem is realistically, is that going to happen if we're going to have a congress?

0:42:39 - Leo Laporte
that's going on. It's kind of undemocratic, though, then. Well, since we can't get our democratically elected representatives to get off their ass, let's let these unelected agencies do it, but it was also undemocratic.

0:42:51 - Jeff Jarvis
The agencies were also a place of expertise, as you said before. Yeah, but I'm pointing out that the FCC's expertise in 2019 was very different than the expertise in 2020. But that's Part of the point is that things change, wins change too, but that's why we want Congress to do it, as opposed to the agencies.

0:43:11 - Cathy Gellis
I'm maybe a little bit of a devil's advocate, but this is the creditable argument behind the push to do away with Chevron deference, which is, the executive branch agencies are not we're not constitutionally empowered to do the legislation, so what does it mean if we let them do the legislation anyway? It's a creditable argument. I think the issue and the point that I was leaking into before is we had more guardrails to sort of make it that, depending on how the pendulum swung, it couldn't swing too far in any particular direction. And now I think there's a sense that a lot that we've been counting on is unmoored. So okay, couldn't swing too far in any particular direction. And now I think there's a sense that a lot that we've been counting on is unmoored. So okay, we'll go forth and figure it out. But I think we have a lot more uncertainty about how we will figure it out yeah, and so you.

0:43:53 - Leo Laporte
I mean part one of some. One of the things that does happen is that, depending which is the party in power when the when the party in power, uh, when agencies do what the party in power, when the party in power, when agencies do what the party in power wants them to do, they're a good thing. As witnessed, reagan in the EPA lacks air quality rules. Good.

0:44:16 - Cathy Gellis
Well, the party in power gets appointments. I mean they do get some awards to staff a lot of the executive agencies. So that's kind of how we designed it, to say, all right, whichever the people like most they get to. Okay, have a little more power here in this space, um, but sometimes so that pendulum does swing sometimes. But sometimes we set it up where some of the appointments pointedly last into other administrations. I mean there's different ways of trying to get equilibrium so nobody can run away with it.

0:44:42 - Leo Laporte
This is an imperfect system. It has been since.

0:44:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I want to go back to Paris's argument about regulation of bagels.

0:44:52 - Paris Martineau
I do think that's very important.

0:44:54 - Leo Laporte
Should bagels be regulated? No, I think the free market should determine the proper way to bake a bagel. No fruit bagels should not be allowed.

0:45:02 - Jeff Jarvis
What it's like pineapple on pizza. You just shouldn't allow it. It's you're advocating for a nanny state, jeff yes, I am when it comes to bagels, aren't you?

0:45:12 - Cathy Gellis
yes, I am too. I mean, everything I've just said is out the window when it comes to the most scary words in the world are.

0:45:20 - Leo Laporte
I'm from the government and I'm here to regulate your bagels I mean, actually that is probably true, because, um yeah, well okay, nothing like right now we've

0:45:32 - Paris Martineau
got pizza oven regulation in new york and it's resulted in a coal burning pizza oven joint near my office being shut for god knows how long. Really add their coal filter.

0:45:43 - Leo Laporte
This is a huge problem because the traditional way of making bagels and vibe involves uh burning of coal or wood and uh the classic eastern european bagel is uh is threatened by these governmental regulators, these nanny state no, nothing I rescind what I just said.

0:46:05 - Cathy Gellis
No, we should not have government regulation of bagels. We should just administer. We should regulate this visa via social norms. If you're putting pineapple on your bagels, you shall be scorned. You should be ostracized. We should.

0:46:16 - Speaker 2
Yes, you have people, have the first amendment what about a pineapple schmear? What about a?

0:46:19 - Leo Laporte
pineapple schmear. Ugh.

0:46:23 - Jeff Jarvis
No no.

0:46:24 - Paris Martineau
Oh, come on. Imagine the acidity of the pineapple mixing with the baseness of the cream cheese Disgusting, fabulous.

0:46:31 - Jeff Jarvis
What? What about any fruit cream cheese? I'm not wildly in favor.

0:46:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, strawberry schmears, come on, I'm not down for that. If you could put fish in cream cheese, you could put a strawberry in a cream cheese.

0:46:42 - Paris Martineau
Fish and cream cheese just go together.

0:46:44 - Jeff Jarvis
You put the fish on the cream cheese is what you should do.

0:46:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, you could put it in the cream cheese and then it's pink. It is sometimes in there. Often it's a shmear.

0:46:51 - Cathy Gellis
See strawberry cream cheese. Looks too much like Lox cream cheese and I like Lox cream cheese.

0:46:56 - Paris Martineau
I do not like strawberry cream cheese, and this is deceiving customers. This is a consumer protection problem, exactly it's a product liability issue.

0:47:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Harris brought us back to earth.

0:47:07 - Leo Laporte
I think you should be able to have your bagel any way you want it, but I don't think that you should have a bagel that is not boiled than baked. I mean, that really is true, that's true.

0:47:18 - Paris Martineau
What other bagels are people making? Oh?

0:47:20 - Leo Laporte
you know these people at Noah's Bagels and stuff yeah they steam them, I think. Yeah, they're terrible. Oh, california, they're bready, they're bready. You want a bagel to be a sinker? You want it to be so dense and heavy that you walk funny after you eat it.

0:47:34 - Paris Martineau
That's what you want One of the few very New York things that has happened to me I guess many new york things that has happened to me in my friend groups is one of my friends for the last couple years been living over a bagel shop in my neighborhood love it they have really great bagels.

0:47:51 - Cathy Gellis
They know when they're fresh and hot right, paul, he's a big pizza oven guy.

0:47:54 - Paris Martineau
There's a pizza oven place there and he's like paris, it doesn't count as a bagel shop because they don't bake their bagels on premises. And I'm like how do you know that they don't bake their bagels on premises? And I also don't think that discounts it, because there are great bagel sandwiches and we did a month's long stakeout. He was out there every day walking the dog, looking to see if bagels were being delivered. He's like they aren't. I emailed the person who owned it no response. I eventually got the answer. I think through, like some third party, that they bust their bagels in from a bagel shop you know farther down in Brooklyn. That apparently made it.

0:48:30 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, Paris is the new Seinfeld show. I know she and her friends need to be the next show In a related story.

0:48:38 - Leo Laporte
Lisa and I went to a new French restaurant in town, actually in Santa Rosa. That was fantastic. It was amazing, and we often judge the restaurant by the bread. That's the first thing you see and if it's bad, dry, not made on premises.

0:48:52 - Jeff Jarvis
They charge you for it.

0:48:54 - Leo Laporte
Everybody charges you for it now in California.

0:48:56 - Jeff Jarvis
They do Really.

0:48:57 - Leo Laporte
Many do, but these guys didn't.

0:48:59 - Cathy Gellis
That's so Italian.

0:48:59 - Leo Laporte
They put a classic a classic, crusty, unsliced baguette on the table with amazing french butter, and I thought this is good and it was. It was perfect. It was a perfect. I felt like it was in paris and I said this is great. You guys must bake your own bread. They say no, no, no. We go down to grossman's deli and they bake the bagels I mean the baguettes. So you can never be sure you can never be sure.

0:49:25 - Cathy Gellis
I once walked into a dunkin donuts looking for a donut I like because my favorite donut was really hard to find in the boston area, even though you're there's a dunkin donuts like every 20 feet. I really like chocolate cream filled donuts. I grew up eating them and you've gotten rid of so many donuts now however, the place ironically that well, I'll get to the irony.

But so we walked in. There had been some correlation of whether they made the donuts on site or had them delivered with whether they would have it or not. So we walked into a Dunkin' Donuts to ask if they had them and they said no, we don't have them. And just to test out this theory, I said do you make your donuts on site or do you have them delivered? And the guy says I don't know where the donuts come from. Something just so stunning of a guy working in a donut shop who really has no idea where they. Just arrived.

0:50:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you look behind?

0:50:12 - Cathy Gellis
that door that's sitting over there to see if somebody was making donuts or not. So we were kind of stunned and I walked away. But the irony is that I can actually get chocolate cream filled donuts about a mile and a half down the road from here at the Dunkin' Donuts in Petaluma.

0:50:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I can't get a peanut donut anymore. There's no peanut donut.

0:50:28 - Leo Laporte
Apparently. Patrick Delahanty confirms they do have them at the Petaluma Dunkin'.

0:50:33 - Cathy Gellis
Yes, where do you think I'm stopping off after the show?

0:50:37 - Leo Laporte
Patrick says you cannot find chocolate cream filled donuts anywhere on the East Coast, but you can get them in Petaluma.

0:50:47 - Paris Martineau
You can get them in. I rest my case. There's like you know why. I will say yeah, the only dunkin donuts I see regularly is. One of my friends in bushwick lives near a dunkin donuts that is attached to a gas station in the middle of a residential neighborhood, which is very weird in brooklyn to just suddenly have a gas station or dunkin donuts. But I'll check.

0:51:01 - Cathy Gellis
I'll check for them next time I'm there. See, Leo, now you know why I like to come up to do the show.

0:51:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you come for the donuts.

0:51:06 - Cathy Gellis
I come for the donuts.

0:51:08 - Leo Laporte
Stay for the Google, but you come for the donuts. So I think it's because of the free market, because we have other independent donut joints in town and Dunkin' here has got to compete Right. So they've got to compete right, so they got to bring out the best donuts with one end, kenny's. And then there's isn't there a donut place just over here? I think there is. There's a donut place. There's a number of independent donut shops. By the way, every one of them has a bubbling fryer that they dip, squirt donuts into. They make their own. They know where they come from. Believe me, they, they can smell them okay. Well, you're watching this Week in Donuts. Apparently we needed.

0:51:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that was good, we needed that this Week in Baked Goods I like that we all were immediately ready to talk about donuts.

0:51:51 - Paris Martineau
Oh great, yes, you know.

0:51:52 - Leo Laporte
I think this is so okay. You're watching this Week in Google Paris Martin, jeff Jarvis, the wonderful Kathy Gellis and more in a moment. We're back. One of the things I love about this show is whether it's a foreskin or a donut. So I was gone last week and apparently all hell broke out.

0:52:21 - Paris Martineau
Okay, it was only the last five minutes. That's when we're allowed to have a bit of fun around the house.

0:52:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Did Micah survive? Did Micah just want to go hide afterwards?

0:52:30 - Leo Laporte
You know I was mad at him because the show was better without me, and that's not. I'm sorry, that's not allowed.

0:52:37 - Jeff Jarvis
It was all to Paris' credit, so you know where the story came from.

0:52:40 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I saw the original story and we would have done it too. I think I probably bookmarked it.

0:52:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It was on there, the scientists. For those of you who were here last week, used human cells to make a smiling face out of human cells. There's very few kinds like supermarkets. Time to make the donuts. Leo's still back with the donuts.

0:53:06 - Paris Martineau
Time to make the donuts. I made the donuts. I made the donuts Dunkin' Donuts, up to 52 varieties.

0:53:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Look for a chocolate ball. There it is, I see it.

0:53:13 - Leo Laporte
Alright, we were just checking. Continue on.

0:53:17 - Cathy Gellis
We derped this conversation about foreskin too.

0:53:21 - Jeff Jarvis
So the story was fascinating and creepy and weird enough as is, but then whenever you bring up a story about using human cells to make a weird little flesh face whose cells are those and we did some

0:53:35 - Paris Martineau
poking around. We're looking through the little study trying to find whose cells they were, and then, if you watch the recording, there's like a good minute or two where Jeff and Mike are talking about something else and I am silent and that is because I am control effing through the whole thing to be like cells samples. I eventually find what I think is the description of where the cells are from. So I you know it seems to be a place where you can buy cells. I look it up, I just Google the phrase straight into Google. Hey, Google, this is a show about Google. And I come up with the answer and immediately realize the description is very funny. And I give you guys a warning. I'm like listen, it might derail us a bit. Do you want to hear this?

0:54:19 - Leo Laporte
And you're both like no, I totally want to hear it. How can you even tell it? How could you even tell?

0:54:22 - Cathy Gellis
if it's human. We went from the Supreme Court to donuts.

0:54:26 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, it was about robots. See, first of all, you're making a robot, Don't put human skin on it.

0:54:32 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a little too Hamill.

0:54:33 - Leo Laporte
Lecter. For me that's just weird. Metal's fine.

0:54:38 - Cathy Gellis
Right, because that's the only thing that we really wanted to have to make the robot more cuddly.

0:54:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we just wanted to be, by the way if you saw the picture, not cuddly. Not cuddly, your worst nightmare.

0:54:49 - Jeff Jarvis
So then Paris inserts her newsflash to Micah and me and it was beyond belief. It was amazing.

0:55:00 - Leo Laporte
We laughed and laughed and laughed.

0:55:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It was great.

0:55:03 - Leo Laporte
Did you know? This is one year, the one-year anniversary of Threads. July 5th it arrives in the App Store Meta's Threads.

0:55:14 - Paris Martineau
Okay, do you guys use Threads no?

0:55:16 - Leo Laporte
Yes, jeff uses them all, though, to be fair, I use them all, but that doesn't count.

0:55:20 - Paris Martineau
Do you browse Threads?

0:55:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, I do, yes, I do, oh, I don't, and each one is different Threads. User interface for interaction sucks, but there's a lot. The journalists went there, so there's a lot of people I'm interested in who are on threads.

0:55:35 - Leo Laporte
But the problem with threads is the problem with all meta properties. These days, they want to be TikTokiktoks well, and they refuse politics. They want to be tiktok. Now, maybe there are those who say you guys should refuse politics. But look, this is my threads. These are. This is basically a feed of videos. Oh god, mine looks nothing like that well, how many people am I following the wrong people? I don't know. Yeah, I have. I have nothing like this.

0:56:02 - Jeff Jarvis
So your threads is text heavy, oh yeah, yeah, I wish I could show it to you. Yeah, it's all text and it's you know, dave Pell and Shannon Watts and Joanne Reed and Siva Varianathan and Andrew Weissman and Jill Weinbach, oh, I'm not logged in.

0:56:21 - Leo Laporte
That's why you know what I wasn't logged in. That's why you know what I wasn't logged in. So this is the feed you see when you're not Okay.

0:56:27 - Paris Martineau
I am logged in and the first thing it's showing me is a vertical video from TikTok.

0:56:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the problem, I think.

0:56:34 - Paris Martineau
And Instagram's even worse.

0:56:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it is completely different. It's weird. Well, I mean, let me log in here's. Zuck saying Threads now has more than 175 million monthly actives. What a year, Adam Massari. It's hard to believe it's been a year. A huge props to the Fed's team.

0:56:52 - Leo Laporte
That was the story One year in Now. What is actually?

0:56:57 - Paris Martineau
that's a large number, because Well, that's the question, though, and I do remember talking to our Meta and Facebook and Instagram reporters, sylvia Varnum-O'Regan, about this a couple of months ago, when Meta first debuted their first big monthly active threads user, because that phrase immediately caught my eye and I was like, what does a monthly active user mean do? Because if you're scrolling through the actual Instagram app, you may notice that all of a sudden, there's a threads interstitial on there that has some threads posts you can thumb through, but it's in the Instagram app. I was curious does looking at that or pausing on it count me as an active Threads?

user even if I don't open the Threads account Probably. So I think we have to kind of add an asterisk to that monthly active user number.

0:57:55 - Cathy Gellis
I don't think we've ever had good definitions about what those statistics necessarily mean.

0:57:59 - Leo Laporte
As Benny pointed out, Threads is really Instagram. Those are Instagram users who somehow see threads.

0:58:08 - Jeff Jarvis
They all got kind of signed up.

0:58:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I see threads in my Instagram, don't you?

0:58:14 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. And I bet that part of that interaction might count.

0:58:19 - Benito Gonzalez
Hey, this is Benito. Also, Meta has never been honest about their numbers.

0:58:26 - Cathy Gellis
I do like that they were built on a federatable platform, or at least in theory I like that idea. But I'm not entirely sure I like the expectations they had for their service or how people would engage with the service.

0:58:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that was exciting.

0:58:51 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, july 5th. You said july 5th, happy and happy birthday.

0:58:54 - Leo Laporte
Happy birthday, huey lewis. Oh yes, he was born on the 5th, not the 4th. Right the 5th okay yes well as we know, that's really all that matters.

0:59:00 - Cathy Gellis
That's why I'm bringing it up.

0:59:02 - Leo Laporte
Kathy world. There is another meta.

0:59:05 - Cathy Gellis
It's the real world for everybody.

0:59:08 - Jeff Jarvis
How dare I?

0:59:09 - Cathy Gellis
Yes, exactly.

0:59:11 - Leo Laporte
Meta created a Supreme Court for content, says the Washington Post. Then it threatened its funds. We've been talking about the Meta Oversight Board since it created.

0:59:20 - Jeff Jarvis
it Threatened the funds is a little strong board.

0:59:25 - Leo Laporte
Since it created it threatened the funds is a little strong, but uh, according to the washington post last summer, the situation was dire for meta's oversight board. Uh, meta, its sole founder, had privately threatened to pull back support, pushing the board to cut costs or seek new sources of revenue.

0:59:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Because how they spend this much money. I don't know. Well, they tried to argue from the beginning.

0:59:45 - Leo Laporte
They had a belief that they could sell their services as a court for twitter and other social platforms so they tried to find, according to the posts youtube, new clients, including youtube, tiktok, pinterest and a host of other tech companies, without much luck. What did they spend? That's the thing.

1:00:05 - Jeff Jarvis
So they have, I don't know, a dozen members and they get paid, I think, decently for part-time gigs and they have a staff to go through the millions of things and pick the few that they deal with. But it's like $170 million, something like that. How could they have spent this much? That is really astounding. It is so Meta put something like that.

1:00:22 - Paris Martineau
How could they have?

1:00:22 - Leo Laporte
spent this much. That is really astounding. It is so meta put 130 million into an independent trust in 2019 for the board to use for the next six years. Three years later, they had to add another 150 million dollar donation, so it's a total of 200 million dollars.

1:00:37 - Jeff Jarvis
If it were an endowment, what's five percent of 300 million dollars?

1:00:40 - Leo Laporte
yeah, that's a lot of money to spend. It's over millions of a year, right? Um the? So the oversight board was really there to deflect criticism of meta, because meta was going to say, well, no, but we have this independent board of journalists and experts and they're telling us what we should do about this content. Um, has meta been a? Has there been enough volume to justify that?

1:01:07 - Jeff Jarvis
well, well, well. I said there's tons of volume of potential cases, but yeah they don't see that many yeah, they handle and they don't see that many and uh, meta has been, meta has generally gone along with that was my second question, so they have gone along with the recommendations. Oh, yeah, they've done it. They've done it. Now there's wiggle room on various cases.

1:01:28 - Leo Laporte
Well, honestly, Meta wants to go along with it because it deflects criticism from them yes. It's really no, they're doing it.

1:01:38 - Jeff Jarvis
We're not doing it. So the latest decision that I saw was I forget the word. Is it Shaheen? It means martyr in arabic and meta had stopped the word from being used because it was used in so many contexts and they want an easy way to moderate and the oversight board said no, that's not good. And then I agreed and they've changed the policy. He is back. I'll say the word again yeah, yeah.

1:01:57 - Leo Laporte
The board also faced criticism again the washington post from some academics and tech policy analysts that it's slow moving, issuing too few consequential decisions with broad impacts in the industry. The oversight board has acknowledged that its decisions arrive after the 90-day deadline. They miss. They miss deadlines. Um. Last year they pledged to increase their speed, expediting some decisions and offering summary decisions made by a five-member panel without a full vote.

1:02:29 - Paris Martineau
The board completed more than 50 cases in 2023 that's, that's.

1:02:33 - Leo Laporte
That's less than one a week that it's like five people.

1:02:38 - Paris Martineau
How are they consuming that much money?

1:02:41 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, well, it's five people of a subset of the board.

1:02:44 - Leo Laporte
Is five people, the board is larger they have to fly around a lot in private jets maybe I don't know.

1:02:49 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, I think at the time that they were launched there was a little bit more largesse in silicon valley where you had to throw money at smart people, um, to get them. So I think it was being competitive with that environment and there might have been more largesse built into it than they needed to, but it was also probably a much more expensive proposition than people realize.

1:03:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's mainly staff, I think. Paris, I think, and I don't. What I'm understanding is it is a part-time gig. I don't know what the expectation is. It's not even halftime for the members of the board and I think they make low six figures for that. Not a bad gig.

1:03:27 - Cathy Gellis
Not for nothing. It's nothing to sneeze at, but I posted something in the bottom of the rundown of a post I wrote in 2021. I filed a comment for the Copia Institute in one of their cases, but the post talks about some ambivalence in engaging with the Oversight Board, because I think some of the expectations when the board was launched was I'm not sure quite how to phrase it exactly that it would be a little more authoritative, as almost like a form of private law as opposed to a form A Supreme Court for the Facebook.

Yeah, I mean I don't mind if facebook basically facebook has moderation judgment, as we've been discussing earlier in the show, and I don't mind if facebook basically wants to outsource its moderation judgment to this other entity. But the concern a little bit was that that the oversight board would be speaking in some sort of authoritative way that was like the one true way of moderation that might apply to more platforms. And I was also a little worried about what the expectations were. And it came from a comment of, as the oversight board was coming together, people were kind of coming up to me and saying you know, you could get some business if you actually like presented cases in front of the oversight board, and I'm kind of like I don't think that's what I went to law school to do, I mean.

1:04:45 - Leo Laporte
So is part of the problem that they that they wanted it to apply to more than just Facebook.

1:04:49 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, I don't know if, um, if there actually was a problem. I don't know if there's a problem with Facebook, I don't know if there's a problem with the oversight board, but I think there were some expectations surrounding it at launch.

1:04:58 - Leo Laporte
That you said it should be called the Facebook oversight board. Oh, I didn't like that, not just the oversight board.

1:05:04 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I mean I thought that the I don't, I mean Mike's blog has. You know, mike can change his style book however he wants, but I like to call it the Facebook oversight board because I did not like even the way they were self-referencing that the oversight board is the one true way and you know that doesn't even work across platforms, because different platforms have different communities and different needs and expectations. So I don't think it's bad in terms of what it does, but I was worried that people wanted it to or expected or thought it did more or could do more than it actually was. I think it's valuable enough on its face, but, um, but I didn't like those extra things that people, that people were imposing on right right well, apparently it's not all that effective and it's very expensive and, uh, I don't know it's better, I think.

1:05:50 - Leo Laporte
I think I thought this when they announced it it's really just somebody they can scapegoat well, the other thing I've argued too, go ahead no, I mean, I think it does have.

1:06:01 - Cathy Gellis
It's been interesting to sort of play out, because the way we're kind of tuning it out is actually kind of interesting. It can make a difference, but it's also not driving, but it I don't know. I think Facebook also gets criticized for it can help exonerate them, but if they're just going to ignore it anyway, then it's not really offloading, being a lightning rod for them anyway, the real problem is it's an intractable problem there's no way to solve.

1:06:25 - Leo Laporte
Shall we quote?

1:06:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Mike Masnick now.

1:06:27 - Cathy Gellis
We can.

1:06:28 - Jeff Jarvis
The Mike Masnick impossibility theorem is Kathy.

1:06:33 - Cathy Gellis
Content moderation is impossible to do at scale yeah.

1:06:36 - Leo Laporte
Yes, and there's no more scale in Facebook.

1:06:37 - Speaker 2
I'm scared for you there, Kathy Facebook has what is it?

1:06:40 - Leo Laporte
two and a half billion, something like that monthly active users. I mean you can't get a bigger scale than that. And how many different languages 40, 50 languages.

1:06:49 - Cathy Gellis
That is, I think, one of the bigger problems that any platform is facing, because you not only need the language skills, but you also really need to know the subtlety.

1:06:58 - Leo Laporte
It's not enough to know, shahid, you have to know how it's used.

1:07:01 - Cathy Gellis
It's so local, and it's not enough to know, shahid.

1:07:07 - Leo Laporte
You have to know how it's used. It's so local and it's really hard to build teams with that level of expertise. It may be. The real issue is that our notion of social media a kind of an overarching social media, whether it's Twitter or Facebook is really out of date.

1:07:20 - Cathy Gellis
I think it was never right or healthy in the first place. I think it's much more interesting if we think about it in terms of self-publishing and that, you know, these are really like just content management systems for the things that we have to say, but we've imposed on them some expectations of community and enclosure, but also because we ended up on such cloistered platforms which were so self-contained. I think one of the things that's really exciting about all the open protocols is that, you know, jeff shouldn't have to post five times, he should be able to post in one context and we should be able to pull it together depending on what our appetite is. And then we just have different technology. We have reading technologies, we have interchange technologies, we have DM technologies and some sort of way of just tying them together in an easy way. Some sort of way of just tying them together in an easy way. You know my posting 180 characters at a time, or 212, or whatever we're up to. I don't?

1:08:16 - Leo Laporte
I think that's more valuable than Twitter necessarily is. Well, we live in a new world, don't we? And I for one, welcome our new overlords, the supreme court only knew who they were.

1:08:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Buckle up yeah, we got them okay, show of hands.

1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
How many people really want kathy to talk about this decision? They really, they do. We want you to. So when you were here on sunday, that decision had not been made yet are we speaking? The one I took the big the big one, yeah um, I know some of you are saying no, no, that's politics.

1:08:53 - Cathy Gellis
Um, but it, but, you know, is it politics when it which it could conceivably change the landscape entirely the problem of it is yeah, I think that's basically the analysis like, no, I don't want to have the political discussion either, but I also and I I was talking to you when we, before we started the show that I think it was before we started rolling of I went to law school and I think everything I learned has just been rendered obsolete, and that is a very scary thing, not just personally.

1:09:24 - Leo Laporte
Is that because the fundamental tenet of constitutional law in our country, maybe even going back to the Magna Carta, is that no man is above the law?

1:09:32 - Cathy Gellis
That's a fundamental thing.

I'm even thinking just in terms of how things like I was saying, you know, the net choice decision is reasoned and rooted, and then I also pointed out how we're getting those other age.

Those other courts are deciding to enjoin the age verification laws on a First Amendment basis, and they were able to do it without even the net choice case being announced, because they were looking at the same precedent and it was reasoned and rooted. Reasoned and rooted, I think the problem is is there's a lot that's been coming out which has been so. Maybe where I veered off before was trying to focus on the motivations of any of the jurists in terms of what they wrote and how they wrote it. You could have John Roberts who wrote the decision could have been as well intentioned as possible, and I think even if he meant well, he still wrote us something that's going to be incredibly problematic. It's not as reasoned, it's not as rooted and it blows up a lot more that we were counting on to sort of give us some rules of the road by which we can test things when we have actual issues.

1:10:33 - Leo Laporte
Is there any way to go back from that? Come back from this.

1:10:35 - Cathy Gellis
I don't know. You know we're going to be. It's going to be a long, hot summer where we're going to be processing a whole lot. I have to think about it.

1:10:41 - Leo Laporte
Other colleagues I respect have to think about it when would be a good place to go to hear this conversation as it's ongoing. I've heard some people say the subreddit Supreme Court is a good place.

1:10:54 - Cathy Gellis
I'm not familiar with it, but maybe I don't know, this is so fresh. I mean, I'm losing track of time. These decisions came out two days ago yeah um, I haven't fully digested them all myself, so I'm gonna pace myself a little bit. I'm reading some commentators who I normally respect, uh, for instance. So okay, uh, chris guidner uh, he's got an excellent blog um. Steve vladik has another scotUS watching blog. You can start there. They're not necessarily conversations.

1:11:25 - Leo Laporte
Chris Gettner is a law dork, so his sub stack is called Law Dork.

1:11:29 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I've known him. I don't know if we've ever met, but I was an early law blogger and he was an early law blogger, so I kind of know him from the law blogging space.

1:11:37 - Speaker 2
I think we were in law school around the same time.

1:11:45 - Cathy Gellis
These are people who you know. I think they're grappling with this because it's really throwing everything they understood up in the air and they're trying to figure out everything. I thought I know what, I knew what is left, and so a lot of people are assessing it. But basically it's a bit of a red flag where all these people who are like I'm comfortable the Supreme Court, I'm comfortable litigating at the Supreme Court, I'm not not just speaking for me, but all these people, if they're throwing up these comments of, oh my gosh, this is different. Those are important red flags that we need to adhere.

So I think the caution is don't just gloss over it. But there's obviously like also a huge inertia that we don't want to deal with this kind of upheaval. So there's going to, like, even with the Chevron case, we're going to probably try to muddle forward as best we can because we want that result. I don't think we want to upend everything we know about the United States and its rule of law. It's just, if you look at the mechanics and what we can count on, it's not going to be as easy as we thought it was before.

1:12:43 - Jeff Jarvis
There are those who do want to upend the institutions, and my argument has been that conservatives used to conserve institutions, now they want to upend them. Progressives used to want to change institutions. Now they're in the position of how you defend them. Everything is upside down, but part of the aim of some people. Look at Steve Bannon. I don't want to get political, but there definitely is a faction that is institutionally insurrectionist, that wants to destroy the institutions. That's the goal why and so you.

1:13:11 - Leo Laporte
Why do you think? Why do you?

1:13:12 - Cathy Gellis
think I think it is different. I agree with jeff, that is, it's upside down from how it was. But I think things used to be sort of upside down within one center, one center of containment, where nobody really wanted to blow up everything completely, they just wanted to kind of push the bounds of certain things that we accepted.

1:13:29 - Leo Laporte
I've always been a democrat and a liberal, but I also felt like I could talk to conservatives and republicans.

1:13:35 - Cathy Gellis
But what's happening now is not about, it's not conservative, it's radical no, I think, because now I think you're saying like I don't know if I would have said that liberals wanted to blow up the institutions. They wanted to modify them, they wanted to evolve them, but I don't think they wanted to destroy it and I think we recognized that there was a process and yeah, and that we we were in favor of the rule of law and the process I mean, some of this is a scrum for power.

Um, you know a lot of the institutionalization for power, it's a scrum power and a lot of the institutional rules that we had were basically designed to make sure that power would be checked. It is difficult if people are just playing for the power and blowing up the things that prevented them from having too much, because they're going to get it. But then what? Because? Can the United States legal system function if it's just a power play?

1:14:26 - Leo Laporte
legal system function if it's just a power play? Here's a podcast I've heard. I haven't listened to, but I will. I've added it to my list. Uh, from the national constitution center that is apparent that I am told very uh, not only aero day, but but unbiased uh, we, the people with uh jeffrey rosen, so that I, if you like podcasts this, this might be one to listen to.

1:14:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Security. It's security. You can advertise here because it's security.

1:14:51 - Cathy Gellis
Actually, and one of the things I might add to that is there are some people who I think do want to blow stuff up and I think there's some people who don't, but are just not being careful and not realizing how much they are putting at risk. And maybe I would even put that decision in that category where I don't really need to impose a viewpoint on what I thought Roberts was trying to accomplish. It doesn't really matter what I think he was trying to accomplish, but even if he thought he was doing the right thing, that was serving the Constitution, it just the thinking was just too small and it didn't play out what the implications are and he needed to be more careful all right, well, we'll move on from that.

1:15:32 - Leo Laporte
I just I can't have kathy gullis sit here and not get to find out what she, what she thinks about all of that I want to be able to give analysis that's meaningful.

1:15:43 - Cathy Gellis
I want my degree to matter.

1:15:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't blame you. Yeah, completely fair.

1:15:49 - Jeff Jarvis
But you can also practice before the oversight board and be happy.

1:15:52 - Cathy Gellis
That's true. Yeah, it turns out, I had a plan B all along, let's see.

1:16:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, good news President Biden has decided to host a conference for social media creators.

1:16:06 - Cathy Gellis
Oh, and they're threatening to boycott it. I think. Are they really A whole bunch were?

1:16:10 - Leo Laporte
TikTok, oh great and Gaza.

1:16:12 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, fine, go ahead, host it. There's a part of me that wishes I would be invited to it, but I no Well.

1:16:19 - Leo Laporte
You're not a TikTok YouTube star.

1:16:26 - Cathy Gellis
No, but they that you're not a tiktok youtube star, no, you're a creator leo things, and biden is wrong about certain things.

1:16:28 - Leo Laporte
I mean biden banned tiktok, that was not great which is an interesting combination, right, uh? In august, the white house will host the first ever white house creator economy conference. A group of influential social media personalities no, no one I know and industry professionals again, no one I know will be invited to discuss issues like data privacy, fair pay, ai and mental health with senior White House officials. And, of course, what's the best thumbnail to put on your YouTube video? Christian Tom, the director of the White House Office of Digital Strategy, announced the news on stage at VidCon on Friday. You didn't go to VidCon, jeff. You like VidCon, I didn't this year, no.

1:17:08 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, I suppose this has a giant. How do you do fellow kids aspect to it?

1:17:13 - Leo Laporte
Hi fellow kids. Who is boycotting it? That's fascinating.

1:17:21 - Cathy Gellis
There are people unhappy with Gaza.

1:17:25 - Leo Laporte
Because of Palestine.

1:17:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Gaza and TikTok yeah.

1:17:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, it is a little two-faced to say we're going to ban TikTok and oh, by the way, fellow kids, come on over to the White House.

1:17:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that is unfortunate, but yeah, not only that the Democratic National Convention is going to open up media credentials to influencers. I remember I'm old enough to remember when it was a big deal that bloggers got credentials, yeah, and now influencers are going.

1:17:54 - Leo Laporte
I used to be an influencer, you know.

1:17:56 - Cathy Gellis
I used to be someone.

1:17:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I could have been an influencer.

1:18:00 - Leo Laporte
I could have been an influencer, but instead I'm nothing. Let's talk about the Internet Archive. They went before a three-judge panel on Friday to defend their controlled digital lending practices. We talked about this on Sunday, kathy, but I think you can reiterate a little bit. The Internet Archive, which we love, love, founded by Brewster Kahle, archives most of the internet, but it turns out it's also scanning books and during COVID they had an emergency library in which you could borrow books because you couldn't go to your real library well, they always have the library.

1:18:37 - Cathy Gellis
They've had the library for years, um, but they changed the rules they. So the original library which follows follows the protocol called controlled digital lending. I don't know if they refer to it as a protocol, but controlled digital lending is basically okay. The library had a book. They could either hand somebody the physical book to go read or they scanned a copy of it and kept the physical on their shelf but handed somebody the electronic copy to go read, not that it's an aversion that they can't keep.

They have to then bring it back and you could do that one for one, so you could only give out as many electronic copies as you actually had physical books sitting on the shelf. That was their ordinary library, whose name I'm blanking on, but I think it may have been open library or something like that. But then when the pandemic happened and nobody could get to any library ever to get any physical books they're like well, this is a big problem, this is extenuating circumstances. So they did what they called the National Emergency Library, which is they took off that limit so anybody who needed the book could get an electronic copy of the book because they really needed to read it, because kids were in school and needed to learn and we got to give them something. So, but that only lasted a couple of months.

But doing that poked the bear. So the publishers probably didn't like the old school library, the older form of the library they had, and they really hated the National Emergency Library. And so they sued the Internet Archive over both and one, with a really unfortunate and, I think, very confused opinion at the district court that did a fair use analysis. That I think really did not understand how to apply the fair use analysis.

1:20:14 - Leo Laporte
It's been a while since I've read it, so I can't quite tell you exactly what I'm complaining about hashet, harper collins, random House and Wiley said that the Internet Archives Open Library provided a way for libraries to avoid paying e-book licensing fees and that these were substantial forms of income for the publishers.

1:20:34 - Cathy Gellis
So it's true that they're not paying for the electronic form of the books, but they are paying for the real version of the books.

1:20:42 - Leo Laporte
Penguin says e-book licensing is worth 59 million dollars a year to them. Those licensing fees mostly paid by aggregators like overdrive and livy um, and they say that's an important part of our uh, you know our revenue. Yeah but with the with the internet archive. They're not paying us for these books, but they are buying a copy and scanning it so like a library buys a copy yeah, and lends it out yeah so what's really?

1:21:10 - Cathy Gellis
I think there's a really insidious argument that is getting credited by the publishers, which is that they're claiming in certain ways that copyright doesn't give them the right to control a copy. They're almost complaining that they're almost arguing that copyright gives them the right to control a copy. They're almost complaining that they're almost arguing that copyright gives them the right to control a market, that if the e-book market is its own thing capable of producing revenue, that nobody may play in that market, that they were entitled to play in themselves and it should not matter, because the book is still being bought. It's just they're buying the first one. And the fact that the first one got transformed into something electronic, with a lot of extenuating circumstances, that vindicates all the values that First Amendment is supposed to protect. That shouldn't matter.

The fact that, oh, we could have sold you the e-books Well, they're not selling the e-books number one because they're using licensing and you don't end up owning anything, that you get through the e-books anyway, but no, the fact that the Internet Archive was, they had a book that they were allowed to lend, and the fact that they were lending the copy electronically instead of physically. It's really unfathomable that the publishers are saying that the fact that you lent it electronically instead of physically, when it is still the same copy that you bought, is somehow an offense to us uh, maybe it's a rate of right.

1:22:28 - Jeff Jarvis
What's, what's? What's the right called kathy, the right to read, right to uh well, that first. Yes, that we talked about, but no, no, the the, the fact, when I buy something, I can do with it what I want um, oh, um, I don't think you're saying for sale maybe, but um but kind of for sales, a for sale doctrine, isn't it Right? I bought it yeah.

1:22:48 - Cathy Gellis
So one of the things that came up at oral argument is libraries are a little bit different because there's certain statutory protection that explicitly covers libraries and their ability to lend. But there's a. One of the arguments was well, okay, the fact that libraries have the benefit of that statute does not fully exhaust all the protections that libraries would have under the copyright statute.

1:23:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it public and private libraries both?

1:23:12 - Cathy Gellis
I think it's open and the Internet Archive certainly says we are a library in every way.

1:23:16 - Leo Laporte
that being a library matters so in fact what the Internet Archive did. They partnered with libraries, including 13 public libraries, to provide an alternate path for digital lending without paying licensing fees. Instead of arguing as you just did, they decided to take kind of a page in the book that piracy and advocates use that. Well, we didn't really harm your revenues. Advocates used that. Well, we didn't really harm your revenues. Internet Archive said rather than cutting into your e-book licensing revenues, the open library helped promote books and that that practice ended up generating more licensing revenues for publishers in recent years. They argued that overdrive checkouts did not increase when they stopped lending the disputed books.

1:24:02 - Cathy Gellis
In the lawsuit, the court did not buy that argument and that's why they had to take 500,000 books offline I mean, I think one of the arguments that um internet archive uh, went back to over and over again at the oral argument of the appeal is that, um, you know, the financial harm is really overstated. But also, I know I've bought books that I read via the internet archive, like this is kind of how things work normally.

1:24:30 - Leo Laporte
Judges in the original exposure didn't buy this argument, so I'm surprised that they're continuing to pursue it.

1:24:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Copyright.

1:24:35 - Cathy Gellis
The data show that clearly that exposure leads to sales yeah, the um, oh, and they were complaining that because the internet archive had a link, link to buy now and got grants that it was commercial. The problem is is copyright is is a complicated statute that ends up every time you run. The fair use analysis ends up getting kind of twisted and things get confused. People end up confusing like the fourth factor on commerciality I think that's the fourth factor but they take all these factors and they get so imbued in figuring out the fourth factor that it ends up subsuming the entire analysis of whether fair use applied.

One of the reasons I'm so disappointed with that, going back to the Supreme Court, the Warhol decision, was it did not mention the First Amendment. And fair use is partly how you get copyright to comport with the First Amendment, because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law and that includes copyright law. You cannot make copyright law if it conflicts with the first amendment. And one of the ways and this is stuff that justice breyer has written about, one of the ways you keep copyright law consistent with the first amendment is you have fair use because it protects and encourages discourse.

1:25:44 - Leo Laporte
Um, and to have written warhol a fair use decision and never mention the first amendment, I think, was um well, that's my point is that instead they're focusing on economic impact instead of saying you know, we have, there's a, there's a fair use here. There is a petition on changeorg to let readers read an open letter to the publishers in Hachette versus Internet Archive, and one of the points they make, which I think is maybe more compelling I don't know if it would be for a court is that those books provide access to books to lower income families, people with disabilities who can't make it to a library, rural communities that increasingly don't have libraries, and there'll be GTQ plus people who may be afraid to check out a book.

1:26:30 - Cathy Gellis
Since this litigation, exponentially more books have been banned, like at the time that the lawsuit was filed, we hadn't really lit that up, but since it's been filed, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been banned, which I think really drives home the fair use point. And there was a really I I heard one argument in passing and I wasn't fully focused on the publishers at oral argument, but one of the arguments in passing was like they were so focused on. Copyright essentially gives us the entitlement to incentivize us to keep creating things. And all these amici kept talking about the public interest. But it's not about the public interest. It's about us being incentivized in order to produce works for society's benefit. So it was like no, it's not about the public interest, it's about us for the public interest.

1:27:22 - Leo Laporte
Ashley Belanger, writing in Ars Technica, said judges appeared. This is, in the appeal, primarily focused on understanding how their Internet Archive's digital lending potentially hurts publishers' profits, rather than how publishers' costly e-books licensing potentially harms readers. But at the same time, you're right. I think this is a misreading of what copyright is all about.

1:27:46 - Cathy Gellis
But, but, but honestly well, but that's, our courts are there to protect property, not you know right I mean, we did just get a very nice first amendment decision out of the supreme court so no they do protect the the public interest, but it's not a question of whether the ebook, like we're that case.

I'm not sure that that article caught it quite right, because the internet archive wasn't doing what it was doing because the ebook licenses are so exploitative. It was doing it because it's a thing it's allowed to do. It had a book and it lent it. It just happened to have lent it in a way that could be usable, because what have you vindicated as a library if you've got all the books and they're stuck on your shelves and people can't get there? That people being able to physically access the copy really shouldn't be something that copyright, uh, requires.

1:28:33 - Leo Laporte
It's not even in the statute well, the judges decided not to uh make a decision oh, they wouldn't have no, and so we're not going to know how this uh shakes out until early fall. This is a story that keeps going.

1:28:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know when I testified before the US Senate. At one point, blumenthal scolds me and says you're going to expand fair use so much there's no copyright. It's the opposite they're going to expand copyright so much there's no fair use. That's their goal.

And I attended virtually the SHARP conference, which is the Book Historian Walks Conference.

It's now in England, where I wish I were Not that I'd rather be here with you, but it's wonky for me and there was a really interesting presentation from a professor in London who said that the fear is in all the fight over AI now that open culture is going to be hurt badly because there's going to be this backlash. There is this backlash pushing copyright up so much more in so many more ways that we're going to find that AI is going to be just fed by the junk that you can get and open culture gets shut down more and more and more, and I think that's one of the risks we have in this whole discussion. Big bad tech companies are doing things, or nice guys in Internet Archive are doing things, and big old media companies, whether they're book companies and Heshet is my publisher and newspapers certainly are trying to extend copyright and diminish fair use. And it's a constant fight and Hollywood tries to do it. It's a constant fight to try to keep some measure of openness in our culture.

1:30:16 - Cathy Gellis
If Hachette is your publisher and you can decline to answer this question, but are they in the position to sue on your behalf If your book was scanned in the Internet archive? Could they?

1:30:25 - Jeff Jarvis
well, my desire is to give the internet archive a copy of my book you hold the copyright, though not his shed I do, but I've licensed it to them, so I don't know.

1:30:38 - Leo Laporte
Kathy, you're hello counselor, you tell me, I don't know I have to look at your contract and to do that, I think Kathy needs some chocolate filled donuts but it's just sort of we talked about this on twit like these are just.

1:30:52 - Cathy Gellis
These platforms are deciding the rules of the road for everybody. They're deciding the markets. They're deciding how how much we want to accommodate, like they're deciding for all authors, not just you, not just their authors, but it's going to decide it for every author because I hope you mean publisher.

1:31:07 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not just the platforms, they're deciding.

1:31:11 - Cathy Gellis
They every author that they claim to be standing in for, they're doing it for them and they're doing it for um every other author, because if you obliterate the internet archive, then nobody gets to be there corinne mcsherry from the electronic frontier foundation was arguing on behalf of the internet archive.

1:31:29 - Leo Laporte
Uh noted that fair use is designed to ensure that copyright actually serves the public interest, not publishers interest I'm not sure she did the oral argument. I think it was joe gratz gratz was, but she let's see, uh, yeah, they were, but she may be.

They were both in council for the yeah, lawyers representing ia, joseph c gratz from law firm mars and forester and corinne mcsherry from the eff uh both confirmed judges were highly engaged by ia's defense, so that's a good sign yeah, yeah, but I was worried that one of the judges was having a harder time getting her head around what cdl actually did than some of the others yeah, that's interesting.

We will wait and of course, this isn't the end of it. No matter how it goes, it probably will continue on to the supreme court. I don't think hushette or the iaIA is going to give up?

1:32:22 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

1:32:24 - Leo Laporte
What would the Supreme Court do?

1:32:29 - Cathy Gellis
I don't know, but I mean I would write a brief.

1:32:31 - Leo Laporte
One does not know.

1:32:33 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I'll tell you, I was upset that they didn't seem to take on board the amicus brief I wrote in the Warhol and I basically repurposed what I wrote in Morehall for the Internet Archive case which was pointing out that what I was just talking about, that the First Amendment and fair use have to be able to get along and that copyright law needs to be interpreted both consistent with the First Amendment and also consistent with the Progress Clause of if you accidentally doing something that is going to choke progress, you have done copyright wrong and in a way that the Constitution wouldn't allow.

1:33:05 - Leo Laporte
Here we are halfway through the show, more than halfway through, and we haven't even mentioned it. Halfway, more than halfway, yeah.

1:33:13 - Jeff Jarvis
You should have seen.

1:33:14 - Leo Laporte
Paris' look Well, okay, we got a little more, there's a little more. It's only an hour and a half in Paris. Are you craving a bagel with pineapple?

1:33:23 - Paris Martineau
uh, schmear, nobody is nobody is nobody is no one in the face of humanity.

1:33:30 - Leo Laporte
This week in AI coming up next you're watching this week in Google. Uh, ai stories. You put in a couple. I think this looks like a Jeff Jarvis, given that you're going to a, a font class next week.

1:33:44 - Jeff Jarvis
No, you put this in last week and that's why I carried it over. Oh, I put this in, yes.

1:33:49 - Leo Laporte
I asked Micah whether this was his and he said I don't know what this is A true type font, which is also an AI large language model and inference engine. What, yeah, I did put this in.

1:34:09 - Jeff Jarvis
What is it? It's a font, but because of the way that some font carriers can deal with with ligatures and put you know fi and fl and so on and so forth, it has a software in it that can do other things. So this, this smart character, embedded Llama into a font. So when you type in the font, the font will do generative AI things If you go to six minutes in Wait.

1:34:33 - Paris Martineau
what does that mean?

1:34:34 - Leo Laporte
the font will do generative AI, so he's writing, so here I'll turn it on, because this is the guy who created it, it's not, it's, it's called.

Llama, it's wonky as hell. It's wonky as hell, it's wonky. But really the thing you need to understand is that fonts, truetype fonts, but most fonts are actually little programs and TrueType fonts can actually call WebAssembly, and so he's actually in the font code. He's written a call. If you type certain things, it will call AI and then replace what you've typed with something else Watch. So he's now choosing his llama font.

1:35:12 - Cathy Gellis
Okay, I wasn't hallucinating when you said llamas were involved, because I'm still trying to get my Large language model this is.

1:35:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Meta's open source. It's not open source.

1:35:21 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, but it's open.

1:35:23 - PC
So you can use it, so we can start using this one, we can say once upon a time.

1:35:29 - Leo Laporte
So he's writing once upon a time. Actually, I'm going to skip a little bit ahead in this.

1:35:34 - PC
No, of course not. This is Lama's hand. He reads books by the end of the day.

1:35:38 - Jeff Jarvis
So it just changed it on him as he typed.

1:35:44 - PC
Yeah, just changed it on him as he typed yeah, so mess up the magic word and everything will go back to the way, it was just a moment ago, so, and so that's great wait.

1:35:49 - Paris Martineau
You see that he had abracadabra, so as if you type specific words, it changes the font as you're typing it no, it doesn't change the font it writes more the word, so watch.

1:35:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he's writing once upon a time here. Let's go back here. Once upon a time, dot dot dot. We need to have his explanation.

1:36:09 - PC
So the idea here is that we don't have to. This is an intelligent font, right, so all you need to do is you need to yell at the computer.

One downside of artificial intelligence is, it becomes sentient very quickly, and the only way to control it is to yell at it. So that's what we do. We say once upon a time we give it a lot of buffering space, so we put in a lot of exclamation marks, and the reason we do this is so that it doesn't crash like it did just a moment ago, and then, sooner or later, the computer will start.

It's going to replace those exclamation marks with actual AI writing Through the little virtual machine that comes with HarvPass. And in our particular case, what the WASM does is that whenever we put in another exclamation mark, it will generate text based on what we wrote before, but now it's.

1:37:03 - Jeff Jarvis
The font is writing yes, our little story here.

1:37:06 - Leo Laporte
Every time he types an exclamation mark.

1:37:08 - Jeff Jarvis
This is a little unclear, again I'm watching Paris' face in the Zoom trying to calculate this.

1:37:14 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, I didn't get it until he just got to the end part there, I know.

1:37:18 - Leo Laporte
He's extremely. You can read more about it at fugleadgithubio.

1:37:26 - Paris Martineau
I did find it very charming the way he said idea, idea, yeah.

1:37:31 - Cathy Gellis
I gave him accommodation because I don't think it sounded like he had an accent.

1:37:34 - Jeff Jarvis
I think he's Swedish. He does have an accent.

1:37:36 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, he's got an accent. It's really cute.

1:37:40 - Jeff Jarvis
So, Leo, there's a professor I admire greatly who was my reviewer on good book at university of maryland and he wrote a great essay in the atlantic called the text apocalypse, about how ai is going to lead all text to become gray goo and and I sent because I know that he's he's really into printing and book history, this stuff. So I sent him this a week ago and it so happens he was giving a presentation at the sharp book history conference stuff. So I sent him this a week ago and it so happens he was giving a presentation at the sharp book history conference today and he changed his entire presentation to write about just this uh and how fascinating llama ttf.

1:38:14 - Leo Laporte
Wow, yes yes, oh he says what if downloading ebook meant not just downloading a textory, but downloading an entire content farm, the mere act of turning the pages spawning shadow versions of the text, individualized and customized to targeted preferences, populating platforms the original reader will never see. Now, grey Goo sounds pretty negative, but this sounds kind of cool. Is he bullish on AI or not?

1:38:47 - Jeff Jarvis
He's too smart to be bullish or not's a professor, he's an actual academic. Okay, he's gonna, you know, he's gonna say things like a thought of type, as whitman understood, is pure potentiality.

1:38:54 - Paris Martineau
That's matthew yeah, that seems right, yeah, right, but he's fascinated by the implications.

1:39:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Matthew's the guy who wrote a book that I think you've read and love, which is the History of Word Processing. Yes, track Changes, track Changes. Yes, a brilliant, wonderful, delightful book. And then Matthew is fascinated by the archives of a writer's process and what goes into making text and how that it now disappears online. But what is the meaning of text in society? He's an english professor, um, but he does it from a technology standpoint, uh, so, uh. So he he was fascinated by this and uh well speaking of word processing and track changes.

1:39:39 - Leo Laporte
One of the subjects of that, of course, was word perfect. Uh, and a name that people who have been around as long as I have will recognize. One of the creators of WordPerfect, bruce Bastian, passed away this week at the age of 76. He was an alumnus of Brigham Young, pioneered WordPerfect. Later he would become an advocate for the LBGTQ Plus community pioneered WordPerfect. Later we become an advocate for the LBGTQ plus community. As people know, wordperfect was headquartered in Utah. Passed away surrounded by his four sons, his husband, friends and other family members. So Bruce Bastian, who really was very important in the early days of word processing.

1:40:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought I'd mention that. And in LGBTQ. In the early days of word processing, I thought I'd mention that. And an LGBTQ. As it turns out, which is great Were you a WordPress or WordStar, so I used WordStar in the early days In fact, because WordStar came out of Northern California.

1:40:36 - Leo Laporte
I knew some of the people involved in that and I still in my fingers have Control-KS and all of that, all of the WordStar commands. For some reason they're just still in there. But then when WordPerfect came out on the Mac oddly enough I hated WordPerfect on a PC but they actually made the best word processor on the Mac for a brief shining moment and I became a strong advocate of WordPerfect on the Mac. But it didn't last.

1:41:03 - Cathy Gellis
WordPerfect held on longer than I think some other longer in the legal space than I think in some other spaces.

1:41:10 - PC
That's true, yes, but I don't think it's still really hanging on there.

1:41:14 - Cathy Gellis
There's a couple of holdouts. Like some old school lawyers who are like I, can be more efficient typing this way.

1:41:19 - Leo Laporte
You know why? Because WordPerfect's keystrokes were based on the Wang word processor, which was very popular in law offices, and so a lot of legal secretaries and paralegals already had been using the Wang to write pleadings. When WordPerfect came out I remember going to law offices and they had, because WordPerfect also had macros they had really automated a lot of their operations in WordPerfect. Wordperfect's still around at wordperfectcom Looks kind of downmarket I'm not sure I'd recommend it. They were eaten alive, as were most of the other word processors, by a Microsoft office.

1:41:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I was very loyal to WordStar for a long time. Yeah, it's a habit. You learn the keyboard Because, don't forget, my original Osborne had no cursor keys, right?

1:42:09 - Leo Laporte
that's right yeah so you needed no, you needed control k and left, right and all of that stuff.

1:42:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's all control keys, I remember that yeah, um I'm purchasing a copy of track changes oh, you should read it.

1:42:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, you'll love it.

1:42:23 - Leo Laporte
It's really good yeah, it's really really good and it talks about all the the battles we should, we should have matthew on at some point. Uh, deal, let's do it, let's absolutely do it. Word star was published by a micro pro, um, I think, out of sausalito, out of, uh, your neck of the woods sausalito tends to birth a bunch of interesting businesses who then outgrow the office space.

1:42:46 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, yeah, that's a good problem to have seymour.

1:42:49 - Leo Laporte
seymour Rubinstein, who was well-known in this area, was an early employee at MSI and he founded MicroPro in September 1978, hired a programmer who wrote WordMaster and then he had learned about IBM. Xerox and Wang's standalone word processors, added features to WordMaster support for CPM and renamed it word star started selling it in June 1979 for get this $495. And that and that didn't include the manual. It was additional $40 for the manual.

1:43:29 - Speaker 2
Well and here's here's the thing. Oh, when you could actually get a manual.

1:43:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah exactly On my Osborne I had two 5-inch disk drives. It came with WordStar. One was the data drive, the other one you had to install CPM. You had to run CPM, take it out, put in a WordStar disk to get the commands available then, and then for certain things you'd have to put in a different word star disk because it was not on that disk. It was amazing to do this and we did it. I wrote a book on it.

1:44:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I yeah. Track changes. Read the. Read the book if you want to learn the history of all of this. Speaking of microsoft, microsoft's man in charge of ai, he's actually a CEO of AI. Mustafa Suleiman says you know all that stuff on the internet, that's fair use, that's freeware and it's okay for AI to snarf it all up.

1:44:27 - Cathy Gellis
He gets to Jeff's point about the backlash, because he's he's. There's some grains of truth in what he's saying, but he's saying it packaged up with such arrogance.

1:44:38 - Leo Laporte
This is what you were talking about, with right to read, though, really.

1:44:41 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I mean there's a point where he has a point to a degree, but he's saying something beyond that point and saying it with a tremendous amount of arrogance, where people are like, well, if that's how it works, I don't share those values.

1:44:53 - Leo Laporte
It's almost designed to piss people off.

1:44:55 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I really don't think that's advisable. His legal position has not necessarily been ascertained by any courts. He should be kind of right, or at least for the points that I've been arguing, but we need a court to actually say so. He doesn't have enough in his hand that he can afford to be this arrogant, and don't poke the bear.

1:45:15 - Leo Laporte
He definitely poked the bear. He was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival and he said quote this is Suleiman's quote With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding. I don't know if that's the understanding. If I take the copy that the verge publishes of an article and republish it over my name on my site, that's not considered what is business insider?

1:45:49 - Jeff Jarvis
what is business insider? Uh, it does that all the time right. What, what are we? What are we? So we?

1:45:54 - Paris Martineau
read well, it doesn't copy and publish it. They do neither does the ai?

1:45:59 - Cathy Gellis
I mean fair use can, reads it and learns from it fair use can cover copying and and publishing I mean we were talking about we've talked about google books. We can talk about the internal archive. There are contexts for copying and republishing can still be fair use. But the way he's approaching it is we can copy everything and republish it and that any additional context is irrelevant is not actually a correct statement of the law. I think he can read it, he can scan it, I think he can have train up his AI and I think that is probably something that the law does and should protect, but he it's almost like he got a briefing from his lawyer, misunderstood it and is now parroting it back.

Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like, Well if his own intelligence is garbling everything, what is his artificial intelligence going to do?

1:46:43 - Leo Laporte
He goes on to say there's a separate category where a website or a publisher, a news organization, has explicitly said do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that people can find the content. That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts. He's not even.

1:47:00 - Cathy Gellis
He's not even acknowledging that robotstxt if I'm hit, if I'm in-house counsel for microsoft, I might be like oh crap, just shut up, dude, because like this is all going to be produced in the litigation and it ain't going to look good.

1:47:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean even the president of Microsoft is used to be, as used to be, the company's counsel. So his boss, brad Smith, yeah this is.

1:47:22 - Cathy Gellis
I mean I make this point sometimes when I do CLEs for other lawyers that like there's a lot that the law does let you do and probably should let you do, but you know you got to kind of care about how people are going to react to it, because otherwise, like, the law gives you this freedom now but if you make people unhappy and they have no recourse, they're going to go to their government and ask for a law that's going to give them the recourse and that's not going to be good, Kathy, if I say I mean robotstxt is a norm, there's no legal basis for robotstxt and following it.

1:47:55 - Jeff Jarvis
If I say I've got a company here, I'm not going to follow robotstxt. It's out there for free. I'm going to read it, I'm going to learn from it. I'm not going to quote it, so you can't accuse me of but even if I did try to argue what fair use is right. There's no law, Right. It would be difficult to say that flouting robotstxt who cares? If I don't choose to follow it, I don't follow it.

1:48:17 - Cathy Gellis
Gratuitously making people unhappy is not a good business strategy, and it's not a good legal strategy, either because even if statutes in the Constitution might back you up. It's going to be really messy and really expensive to even get to that point.

1:48:37 - Leo Laporte
And people will start changing statutes. That's why the lawyer at microsoft is holding his head. Yes, that's why brad is holding his head. The folks at hugging face who do uh, their own ais and use a lot of ai models have a ai leaderboard which they test. They say they use a lot of energy and a lot of power to test a variety of AI models.

We burned 300 H100s that's one of the very expensive NVIDIA GPUs to rerun new evaluations. They said we had to make our leaderboard steep again so they have even more challenging tests to see which LLM is smart, and so they have. Or smartest they now have the new LLM is smart, and so they have. Or smartest, they now have the new LLM Leaderboard. 2. They give them a massive multitask language understanding test, a Google-proof Q&A benchmark. They have a multi-step soft reasoning and on and on and on. And drumroll please, because the results are in. And here, according to Hugging Face, is the grading New leaderboard for the ranking of all the different AIs, and the number one AI is out of China, quinn and Quinn2 beating Microsoft, meta, google.

1:49:52 - Jeff Jarvis
What are they be measured against? Yeah, how are they? Determining it size matters, macho. No, no, no, no, they actually have it to work I just talked a little bit about the various tasks.

1:50:04 - Leo Laporte
They, uh, they give it. So they have six benchmarks. Benchmarks MMLU Pro is a refined version Models with 10 choices, requires reasoning on more questions, etc. They ask them to do stuff, reason stuff. The Google Proof Q&A Benchmark extremely hard knowledge data set questions designed by domain experts in their fields. Questions designed by domain experts in their fields, phd levels in biology, physics, chemistry, etc. Designed to be hard to answer by laypersons but relatively easy for experts. They do multi-step soft reasoning. Hugging Face writes it's a very fun new data set made of algorithmically generated complex problems of about 1,000 words in length. The problems are either murder mysteries, object placement questions or team allocation optimizations. They have to combine reasoning and very long-range context parsing Few models. Few models score better than random performance. On that one, there's a math test. Do you want to try some of these? On that one, there's a math test. Do you want to try some of these?

1:51:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Sure, I bet you could do it.

1:51:15 - Paris Martineau
I refuse to do math live on air.

1:51:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I was told there would be no math. You'll never be president then.

1:51:22 - Leo Laporte
But I think it's interesting that it's the Chinese models that do very, very well in this. The front runner of the new leaderboard is Alibaba's LLM, which takes first, third and tenth place. Also showing up Llama, meta's LLM and a handful of smaller open-source projects that managed to outperform the pack. Chatbeat GPT doesn't show up in the top ten. Hmm.

Hmm, oh, wait a minute. That's because, oh sorry, that's not because they were not smart. They Wait a minute. That's because oh sorry, that's not because they were not smart, they weren't tested. Hugging Face's leaderboard does not test closed source models to ensure reproducibility of results. So we don't know how ChatGPT would do on this or any of the other closed models, but Quinn does well. I only bring that up because we've talked kind of theoretically about, well, imagine, what the Chinese are doing. Well, now we know, and they're absolutely competing.

1:52:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Going along with it. Nobody has left China, so only kind of one view is that opens up more development in China Right.

1:52:23 - Leo Laporte
We mentioned Suleiman's take. That hey, it's on the web, it's free for anybody's use. That hey, it's on the web, it's free for anybody's use. Apparently, Perplexity AI believes this to the nines. Oh, absolutely.

They are trying to create a Google search competitor. I use it, it's quite good. It's not trying to create a search engine. It wants to create an answer engine, but according to the Verge, they're doing it by basically sucking the brains out of legitimate sources. The Verge writes let me get the author's name, since I'm sucking her brains out. Elizabeth Lopato says that means perplexity is basically a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources. Perplexity dodges publications' paywalls. Forbes found this out in order to provide a summary of an investigation the publication did of eric schmidt's drone company.

1:53:19 - Jeff Jarvis
uh, they, just, they just uh, travel the web so if you look at well, but but this is my so I wrote a post about this on medium with a really ugly pyramid on it, about the the um, what I call the new pyramid of discoverability, and how we get found through AI. If you go to the top story on Perplexity Discover right now it's Phil Schiller joining OpenAI's board. It's sources and quotes and links to the sources. The first one is the Verge, then Bloomberg, then MacRumors, then 9to5Mac, who are all writing the same story. We are all rewriting each other all the time, unless you're a reporter like Paris who uniquely finds foreskin news for our show. That's reporting. Derek Completely fresh.

That's reporting. Well, how do? You feel about it, paris?

1:54:08 - Leo Laporte
if perplexity extracts the content of your hard work and publishes it in such a way that you don't have to. They don't have to go to the information to read it.

1:54:19 - Cathy Gellis
Many of them can't because it's $400 a year to read something Perplexity cited though, so there is a chance with that AI that it actually will go to your work.

1:54:30 - Paris Martineau
Perplexity's citations are like, they're like a tiny number in the corner, it is barely even a link out. I would argue, and I do think, that the journalists' complaints about perplexity chewing up and spitting out their work without clearly citing it, at least when I think those criticisms hold value. I think that at least when Jeff think those criticisms hold value. I think that at least when, jeff, I think you've compared this to like a business insider aggregation model, at least when actual people are aggregating stories they write out like according to the information and so does.

1:55:07 - Leo Laporte
So does um perplexity, they do too so let me go to the Discover feed here. This is the story you were talking about.

1:55:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Apple deserves to observe on opening the ice board, which is a press release. According to Bloomberg's recent report by Mark Gurman.

1:55:23 - Leo Laporte
By the way, gurman, this is a rumor. This is not confirmed, so Gurman is using his sources. So this really does deserve a lot of credit. Goes to mark german, even though, as you point out, the verge and everybody else just did the same thing the verge did to bloomberg.

1:55:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, what they're accusing perplexity of doing, saying much the same thing.

1:55:43 - Leo Laporte
They do have a link to bloom.

1:55:45 - Paris Martineau
It's interesting though it seems like, because I had looked into this. When a couple of weeks ago, I think, we talked also on the show, there was a big, big brouhaha with Forbes accusing Perplexity of stealing their exclusive information and posting it without any citation, any notable citation on it, and at the time I think even on the show, we went through and the citations were not like according to publication. The citations were not like according to publication. It was a tiny like subscript one that if you moused over it would take you to the website. I think that maybe because they've been called out and they're doing it in a bit more, traditional way, which is better.

1:56:22 - Jeff Jarvis
If you open it up, Leo, on your phone, open up that story on perplexity.

1:56:28 - Leo Laporte
Do I have to do it on my phone, or can I do it on the computer? I think, you can do it on the computer.

1:56:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, then it has a box for bloomberg and a blocks for the verge. And then if you go down to the first paragraph I talk about it, then it says four sources. You click on that and it has headline and first two lines from stories with links to them. Right, it links more generously than business insider ever did yeah, uh, it also quotes quotes OpenAI's own press release.

1:56:53 - Leo Laporte
So apparently it is no longer a rumor. Let me just see if that's in the press release. No, it's not. That's pretty interesting. So it quotes a press release. It doesn't in fact mention this, the press release. Oh, no wonder the press release is from March, did you?

1:57:08 - Cathy Gellis
play with perplexity the last time I was on Twig. Possibly, we tested didn't you play with perplexity the last time I was on twig and possibly tested with huey lewis? Uh, searching and it rendered something that I kind of thought yeah, that was the search part.

1:57:20 - Jeff Jarvis
This is more like google news this is different product.

1:57:22 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, but we can. Yeah, the search is how probably most people see it. I don't know about you, but I don't click discover links right? I mean when you go to perplexing on ai, you get the home page where you can type in that query. You know how old is huey or whatever. Uh, there is a link to discover, but I I.

1:57:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I actually check to discover every day they do a good. It's a. It's a good slick packaging of a half dozen stories with links to the sources, oh, oh look at this China's brain computer interface plans.

1:57:53 - Leo Laporte
See yeah.

1:57:54 - Cathy Gellis
What could go wrong?

1:57:55 - Leo Laporte
What could possibly go wrong?

1:57:56 - Cathy Gellis
What could go wrong?

1:57:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it reminds me of the old campaign. Was it Dumb Ways to Die? Do you remember that Paris?

1:58:06 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, do I remember Dumb Ways to Die A earworm?

I think about that sometimes when I make choices about what I'm gonna do, or you know where I'm gonna go, is if, like, I met my end here, how lame would the obituary be well, I I don't know if I've talked about this in the show me and my friends have a game we play sometimes whenever we're drinking, which is uh, what would be the silliest vehicle to be hit by, hit and killed by? And this was started by someone we know, who's fine, by the way. She got hit by a dump truck and we're like, oh, that's a pretty funny thing to get hit by. I mean if you had to be like.

1:58:44 - Cathy Gellis
Paris Dive Wienermobile is top of that.

1:58:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Mitzvah truck is also up there what's a?

1:58:52 - Paris Martineau
Mitzvah truck.

1:58:55 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a New York Post truck.

1:58:57 - Paris Martineau
Oh, a New York Post truck.

1:58:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Because then they won't even cover the story. Yeah.

1:59:02 - Paris Martineau
They could say something like I was thinking, a Red Bull, one of those Red Bull cars.

1:59:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, the Zugflug.

1:59:09 - Cathy Gellis
They're small, they wouldn't, hurt too much am I the only one of us who has been hit by a vehicle oh, have you. Yeah, I've been a vehicle it wasn't silly, it was, uh, I think.

1:59:19 - Leo Laporte
No, it's definitely not christina warren was hit by a bus in seattle after she moved there from years of never being hit in manhattan.

1:59:26 - Cathy Gellis
What did you get hit by I think it was a burgundy sedan and I I don't remember much. I was on my way to school I mean, this was a long time ago and, um, it was coasting down the hill, it was early morning, it was a dark car, I didn't see it, I didn't hear it and I had proceeded into the intersection on my bike and that was a mistake.

1:59:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, all right now here is a mitzvah tank conquering new york city. This is what you're talking about getting hit by yes a mitzvah tank is a vehicle used by the orthodox jewish community.

2:00:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, to kind of as an outrage to convert, to bring jews back into the fold and because I say I look jewish so do you get the question where they ask are you Jewish?

2:00:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, absolutely Every time, and if you say yes, what do they do?

2:00:17 - Jeff Jarvis
They try to get you into the.

2:00:18 - Paris Martineau
They're like are you close to God? Like, and they, you know, try to. So I think the funniest vehicle to be hit by is a tandem bicycle, ideally a three person tandem bicycle. Because a three-person tandem bicycle? Because the first person isn't in control of it and they're like, oh, but then the second person is like, ah, and they can't control it, and by the time it comes to the third person, they're just resigned.

2:00:44 - Cathy Gellis
I haven't seen three-person tandem bicycles.

2:00:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Certainly not in Manhattan.

2:00:48 - Paris Martineau
No, no they definitely are not a common thing.

2:00:52 - Jeff Jarvis
That's something you see on.

2:00:53 - Leo Laporte
Martha's Vineyard, perhaps my favorite thing is to go down to Venice Beach and rent one of those Venice Beach Surrey bicycles you can ride around. A family of four can ride around.

2:01:05 - Paris Martineau
Speaking of Richard Scarry, the Apple car. That could be a good one.

2:01:08 - Leo Laporte
There you go, there you go. Were we speaking of Richard Scarry.

2:01:15 - Cathy Gellis
Yes, car. That could be a good one. There you go, there you go, were we speaking of Richard.

2:01:15 - Benito Gonzalez
Scarry, yes I think that he might have invented a three-person tandem Popemobile. Might be funny too, the Popemobile.

2:01:19 - Cathy Gellis
Popemobile which looks a lot like the Apple car in Richard Scarry.

2:01:21 - Leo Laporte
It does.

2:01:22 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, infringement, infringement. The Popemobile was infringing Richard Scarry.

2:01:30 - Paris Martineau
It's a fun little game.

2:01:31 - Leo Laporte
It is a fun game. You got me thinking. I mean, it's morbid.

2:01:35 - Paris Martineau
But you know, there are a lot of fun little vehicles out there.

2:01:38 - Leo Laporte
You froze me solid with that.

2:01:43 - Paris Martineau
We're just trapped in thought.

2:01:45 - Leo Laporte
Here's some depressing news behind the paywall. But I do pay for the Financial Times so I can read it. Oh, except we haven't done that.

2:01:52 - Paris Martineau
You can read those salmon-colored blog sheets. It's another story, that's been everywhere.

2:01:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Everybody's rewritten the story, so you don't have to pay for it, Jeff stop hating news.

2:01:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. What do you have against news? You don't like news. Is that it you?

2:02:02 - Paris Martineau
lose one California Senate thing and you're on a rampage.

2:02:07 - Leo Laporte
The story actually comes from Google's own admissions Right. They publish every year an environmental report. On their environmental report, which came out yesterday, they said greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% almost by half in the last five years. Why? Due to the expansion of data centers for artificial intelligence systems a 48 increase from its 2019 baseline, 13 since last year. This highlights the challenge of reducing admissions and may even make it difficult to reach our 2030 commitment to net zero.

2:02:56 - Jeff Jarvis
So stop making such damn big models, concentrate more. I think there's other stuff in here. I think this notion of scale is not going to work.

2:03:06 - Leo Laporte
Chief Sustainability Officer, kate Brandt who must have a terrible job these days says we do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal. Yeah, we're going to go down, but not now. This is about as bad as you get.

2:03:22 - Paris Martineau
We'll all go down together Quite grim.

2:03:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we'll go down when you all go down.

2:03:26 - Benito Gonzalez
I bet you they're going to make their revenue targets though.

2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh yeah. The revenue targets are also continuing to rise with no plans to capitalism is neutral.

2:03:36 - Cathy Gellis
The beatings will continue until morale improves yeah.

2:03:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor said this week that they talked about the AI scaling myths and Bill Gates said he said maybe we got two more leaps here from scale, but scale's not going to be what is going to get us farther. I think we're going to see a diminishment of these huge models and the huge efforts We'll see. I don't know enough to know well.

2:04:04 - Leo Laporte
Well, bill Gates, also quoted in the Financial Times, says let's not go overboard on worries about AI energy use.

2:04:14 - Cathy Gellis
Let's not bicker and argue about ai energy use.

2:04:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, bickering, argue about. But you know why he says that. He says because it's going to help us in a boon in green, green, green, green, green donuts, green and chocolate cream. I could use one right now. He says, uh, he's been a prolific investor in companies developing sustainable energy and carbon reduction technologies. He says ai is going to pay a green premium because the tech companies are the people willing to pay the premium and to help bootstrap green energy capacity. So don't worry about all of that, it's gonna just and maybe he's right, you know he's, he's, he's, he may be right.

2:04:56 - Cathy Gellis
He also probably deserves to be mocked because I think he's he may turn out to be right, but it doesn't feel like his positions are predicated on enough of an understanding.

2:05:06 - Benito Gonzalez
It's a little bit wing in a prayer it's also not what they're trying to do right now. That's not what they're doing. It's kind of like saying what they're trying to do right now.

2:05:11 - Paris Martineau
That's not what they're doing. That's kind of like saying that's not what they're trying to do. No, all that sewage on the beach, they're going after the big bucks stuff.

2:05:15 - Leo Laporte
That's just going to encourage more people to come up with sewage treatment facilities, so don't worry about all the sewage on the beach.

2:05:22 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I think his point is a little bit different, but it might be more of a cudgel. He's basically saying that, okay, we need to pay, for we have the cash, we need the alternatives, so we are more likely to unite the cash with the alternatives, which the alternatives need. He's probably not wrong, but only if those companies are sort of forced to apply their cash to the alternatives, either because it will save them a lot of money or because they're going to have to because some regulation is going to require it, or the market requires it let let's just take a look at some of the things that the world is burning all that energy for to create ai.

2:06:01 - Leo Laporte
Here's an example of ai gymnastics. Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy trigger warning this is freaky, oh boy this is really freaky.

2:06:11 - Paris Martineau
Oh no, oh no, she's just gone.

2:06:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep, four legs. You can do amazing things if you have four legs and nothing else.

2:06:22 - Paris Martineau
Guys, I haven't been able to get a straw in Brooklyn in years, and this is what it's all going for.

2:06:29 - Leo Laporte
You're saving the whales while we're generating bizarre AI gymnastics videos. Oh my God, Isn't that freaky.

2:06:37 - Paris Martineau
She's all legs. Yeah.

2:06:41 - Cathy Gellis
And still not as good as Simone Biles.

2:06:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, apparently this is in a way the ultimate Turing test for AI. At least, that's what Cheshire Cat says.

2:06:51 - Cathy Gellis
I didn't see closely. How many fingers did that monstrosity have?

2:06:55 - Leo Laporte
AI doesn't actually understand the human body and its motion, so it's just taking the existing data.

2:07:00 - Cathy Gellis
It doesn't seem to understand basic physics.

2:07:03 - Benito Gonzalez
I think that's more a consequence of the broadcasting of gymnastics. It's like super fast sport. So how is any AI going to parse that?

2:07:10 - Leo Laporte
Right AI has no sense.

2:07:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Of it has no reality.

2:07:14 - Benito Gonzalez
That's why it can't parse that Like how is it going to parse something that's that fast?

2:07:18 - Cathy Gellis
Because it actually should have been able to read something about the physics of gymnastics and look at the human body and look at the bar and being able to do some calculations on when the body is in motion predict where it's going to end up next.

2:07:30 - Benito Gonzalez
But it doesn't have the idea of a body or a bar.

2:07:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not doing any of that. Well then, it's not very intelligent, then is it?

2:07:36 - Cathy Gellis
No, it's not.

2:07:38 - Jeff Jarvis
That's why AGI is BS, because it doesn't have a reality. We test reality constantly from being babies. We're constantly testing this. It can't.

2:07:49 - Leo Laporte
You're not wrong. Rodney brooks, who is a robotics pioneer from mit, says people are vastly overestimating generative ai oh uh, hello, hello, hello.

2:08:00 - Jeff Jarvis
It's time for leo to get another walk on the beach. He's losing his program, I'm losing yeah, he is now a big hook comes off stage left and pulls you back into the he.

2:08:12 - Leo Laporte
He actually keeps a scorecard on his website, which is rodneybrookscom, of his AI and robotics predictions, so this guy puts his money where his mouth is. I think it's pretty good, whether he's correct or not. In 2017, he said the hubris about the oncoming of self-driving cars was at a similar level of hubris as we were last year about chat GPT being a step towards AGI. He says he was pretty close in most of his predictions actually Did a pretty good job. So you know that's good he's bringing the receipts. Predictions actually Did a pretty good job, so you know that's good.

He's bringing the receipts. Yeah, honesty, you put a lot of stuff in this AI segment here.

2:08:59 - Paris Martineau
AI stealing bits. Do you just copy it from the AI podcast, Jeff?

2:09:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I actually do it here first and copy it over there. But yeah, I figure about it as well.

2:09:08 - Paris Martineau
What you know what. I'm glad that we're first in your heart.

2:09:10 - Leo Laporte
Jeff is the perplexity AI of podcasting is what he is. Yes, yes, I'm the scissors editor. Tech industry wants to lock up nuclear power for AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, they want to buy nuclear power directly from the plants. Just suck it right up. That's what Bill Gates is talking about. There you go. That's going to make it all better. Open AI has built an AI to critique AI. It's called Critic GPT and it's intended to help identify hallucinations. We need to stop burning the planet for this stuff.

This is what we're burning the planet for kids.

2:09:51 - Paris Martineau
Give me back my straws if we're going to do this. My straws shouldn't be dissolving in my coffee on a day-to-day basis, just don't use straws. Okay, give me those. Have you tried to have an?

2:10:03 - Cathy Gellis
iced coffee with one of those lids.

2:10:05 - Paris Martineau
That is just like it's like a sippy cup lid. I'm an adult, give me a straw.

2:10:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Have you tried the metal straws?

2:10:12 - Paris Martineau
Okay, I have but one you've got to clean those regularly and two I've seen stories of people falling with them and they go to your brain and you die, oh Jesus.

2:10:22 - Leo Laporte
What, oh Jesus, did they? Show Were they hit by a mitzvah tank first. No.

2:10:28 - Cathy Gellis
It's just metal versus human flesh, so most of them now, like I have a couple that I use at home on like for home straw use I don't use them traveling around and they have rubber tips now and some of them have extra rubber because I think they realize that metal and skull are not really a good thing.

2:10:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I just put she's right, she's right. I put it in the discord. No, don't look it up.

2:10:52 - Paris Martineau
It's going to. Oh, you cushion. Well, I just put she's right, she's right, I put it in the discord, it's gonna. Oh, you put it in the discord, great, yeah, it's awful, it's metal straws safe?

2:10:58 - Jeff Jarvis
why some experts say no? From sprudge coffee?

2:11:02 - Leo Laporte
oh well, that's a source, that's sprudgecom I'm telling you he's the perplexity AI of podcasting. Here's Jeff's article in TechTurt. Nice job, Jeff. How to save the news. I guess you must have an in with Kathy here. There's still hope that.

2:11:21 - Jeff Jarvis
California's. No, maznik's going up. It's funny. Maznik says he's on vacation all week. He still publishes 100 pieces. That's amazing, but this was 101. That he didn't have time for pieces, that's amazing, but this was 101 that he didn't have time for. So he was like can I use yours? I said sure, I'm honored.

2:11:33 - Leo Laporte
He also linked to the footage, which is now on YouTube, of your testimony before the California Assembly.

2:11:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, last week, Micah and Paris were nice enough to play my testimony oh good, unlike the time that I was in the Senate when you didn't, I don't have to, they've done it already.

2:11:50 - Cathy Gellis
Many vacations were ruined by certain Supreme Court decisions on Monday.

2:11:56 - Leo Laporte
That vacations have been planned. Oh my God, Ay, ay, ay, ay ay. Okay, there's so many damn stories in here, Jeff, Just pick some, okay.

2:12:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Tim Wu is out of control. How is Tim Wu out of control? How is tim woo out of control? So tim ru wrote a? Uh new york times op-ed uh, saying that the first amendment is out of control. He's been doing this since 2017, when he asked whether the first amendment is obsolete. He hates the tech companies so much he's willing to throw out our rights to enable regulating them.

2:12:31 - Leo Laporte
Tim who is a law professor columbia? Wrote the uh the what is? What is the name of that book that he wrote? I don't remember anyway. Uh, the activation switch, or whatever yeah, um.

2:12:41 - Cathy Gellis
So, speaking of mike masnick, he's written a post that I think is called. Tim woo is out of control that's the one, that's.

2:12:48 - Leo Laporte
That's we got that's what we're talking about um and uh. He also served in the biden white house, did he not? I? Believe he did, yep he did um.

2:13:00 - Cathy Gellis
I didn't realize he'd become such a rabid anti-tech guy he's also been teaming up, I think, with zephyr teach out and um. They've been pushing for some ideas that are just. These are not good ideas.

2:13:15 - Leo Laporte
They're not sustainable and, carried to their logical conclusion, will hurt people. As an example from February, texas is right the tech giants need to be regulated, darn it?

2:13:22 - Cathy Gellis
Yeah, I don't think taking the side of a very politicized position designed to really put its thumb on the scales of what expression can be out there is the best call.

2:13:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Twitter alternative Mastodon is now adding a byline feature, which I think is very nice. The bylines go beyond the typical at username references.

2:13:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It'll make it all the easier for perplexity to steal the stuff.

2:13:57 - Leo Laporte
No, I think it's good Anything that makes Mastodon more popular to journalists. You said you went to threads because that's where the journalists are. Let's get them off of threads, shall we?

2:14:07 - Cathy Gellis
I agree, let's get them off Twitter.

2:14:08 - Leo Laporte
I'd rather have them go to threads. We're on Twitter right now, by the way. Did you know that? I know, is that okay with you?

2:14:15 - Cathy Gellis
You know, I guess yes, but I actually did feel kind of squeaky about it.

2:14:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, me too. But then I went to Xcom and I noticed hey look, all of you we love you, Give to the club, Join the damn club.

2:14:26 - Paris Martineau
It's hard, don't just watch it here.

2:14:36 - Leo Laporte
You know, I haven't been on Twitter since Elon bought it and then I found out we could stream on Twitter and because there are such a dearth of live streams on Twitter, we would probably be on the top and it would drive a whole lot of content and a whole bunch of new people discovering us. And, uh, like super trucker hello, super trucker jay, and uh, so I'm really thrilled. What the hell, I don't care, I got no, uh, I got, I got.

2:15:05 - Cathy Gellis
I got no scruples you administer a mastodon instance I do so now that people know about it, they know they have some options yes, twitsocial, everybody get on over there.

2:15:17 - Leo Laporte
Uh, that's what my um, that's also what my uh. Twitter all the discourse and none of the baggage yeah, my twitter, well, no, I wish it were all the discourse. That's the problem, the bat.

2:15:26 - Paris Martineau
You're right, none of the baggage, but also some of the discourse and none of the baggage I mean discourse in sort of a lowercase d sense, not a uppercase d I'm very actually I'm very proud of twitsocial.

2:15:38 - Leo Laporte
It's become a very lovely, quiet but lovely place that's good to hang out.

2:15:44 - Paris Martineau
It's fairly. Some of the discourse, none of the retweets yeah, no, retweeting not allowed or I guess quote tweeting yeah, and I think there's.

2:15:56 - Cathy Gellis
Uh, I think there's, I do think that's a mistake, though that's actually one of the reasons I think I ended up preferring blue sky to mastodon even though conceptually I kind of like mastodon more because I realized that not being able to quote tweet really was affecting my ability to interact with what I was reading and I know they did that on purpose, because a lot of the interactions were so negative but it prevented positive or neutral ones too, and, um, it was a little less fun. I was getting frustrated, yeah one weird story here.

2:16:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, one amazon bricked its Business Robots Less than a year after launch. Oh, Astro's dead.

2:16:33 - Paris Martineau
Are those the dogs?

2:16:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we hardly knew you. No, it was the robot that had a periscope neck. It would wander around on your floor and then it had a little camera that would go up on a periscope and look around.

2:16:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sad. So they killed it, so it wasn't too good for the brand. Yeah, they're off a full refund $23,4999, plus a $300 credit, but it's bricked Sorry no, what a shame.

2:16:58 - Cathy Gellis
That's really sad. They should have just covered it with human skin.

2:17:02 - Paris Martineau
They should have just covered it with human skin.

2:17:07 - Leo Laporte
If I had any foreskin, never mind. Oh, so it's not merely that they're not going to sell it anymore. If you bought one, no, it's brick they're not going to work.

2:17:17 - Paris Martineau
They're giving you a refund, asking you to send it back so they can recycle it.

2:17:21 - Leo Laporte
That's how dead it is Wow, by the way, this story first from GeekWire. So thank you, geekwire.

2:17:34 - Jeff Jarvis
And then, as Paris has, her tunnels.

2:17:35 - Paris Martineau
I think we have a new series for us here, which is this Week in Human Cells. Okay, yeah.

2:17:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Line number 107.

2:17:42 - Paris Martineau
We're not supposed to talk about line numbers, Jeff. We can't let them behind the curtain.

2:17:47 - Leo Laporte
This is from future no Neoscope, no Futurism, futurismcom. And I've been quoting them a lot lately. In fact, I got a nice note from their editor-in-chief, so we should get.

2:17:58 - Paris Martineau
Hey, let's have John on here, do?

2:18:00 - Leo Laporte
you know them.

2:18:02 - Paris Martineau
John Christian. I think he's either their executive editor or editor-in-chief. He and I work together at the Outline.

2:18:08 - Leo Laporte
All right, oh, cool together at the outline.

all right, cool, all right, there we go, you know a team of chinese researchers has stuck a tiny organoid made from human stem cells in the body of a tiny robot, resulting in a frankensteinian creation that can learn how to complete certain tasks. What tasks are those, you might ask? Well, well, good news. The South China Morning Post reports. By hooking the brain tissue to a neural interface, it allows it to pass on instructions to the humanoid robot body. This is actually the story we were talking about earlier, where the Chinese were getting human-computer interfaces. I think that's different, isn't it? Is it? This is the world's first open-source on a chip intelligent, complex information interaction system. The pink blobs oh, we're back to that again. What is it with robotics, researchers, after all? The pink blobs of what appear to be brain matter on the pictures are simply mock-ups, so don't be afraid.

It's got a brain on a petri dish and it's plugged into it. That's. Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Oh, it's disgusting.

2:19:28 - Cathy Gellis
I'm pretty sure I saw an image like that mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in one of their movies.

2:19:33 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, Okay, thank you for sharing that with us. It looks like the inside of a dumpling.

2:19:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're welcome. You know, every culture has a dumpling.

2:19:42 - Cathy Gellis
But they don't put it on a robot.

2:19:45 - Leo Laporte
You know that, while we have 932 people watching us on Twitter or X. Let me just check real quickly, but the last time I checked, it's probably two right now there were two people watching us. You're right On Facebook.

2:20:01 - Paris Martineau
Wow, Hello Facebook, Hello.

2:20:03 - Leo Laporte
Facebook.

2:20:04 - Paris Martineau
One of my favorite dumb facts is that Redbox was bought and is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul. Yes.

2:20:17 - Leo Laporte
Which I think is just a pairing that breaks my brain every time I think about it. Is it the same as the book Chicken Soup for the Soul?

2:20:19 - Paris Martineau
Yes, Chicken Soup for the Soul. The company owns Redbox and bought them during a meme stock bump for Redbox and apparently is having severe issues with its current ownership.

2:20:30 - Leo Laporte
They're dead.

2:20:31 - Paris Martineau
They have become a $1 billion debt fiasco. According to Sherwood News' analysis of their various financials, it's in part because Redbox owes like millions of dollars of unpaid licensing fees. Universal Studios sued Redbox earlier this year saying it hadn't made a payment for any of the content and licenses since summer 2022.

2:20:59 - Leo Laporte
So hard time to be a purveyor of, I guess, dvds and christian tearjerker novels so I I read chicken soup for the soul, I thought was okay, yeah, um, that was back in the early 90s. Apparently they took the money made and invested it into an interesting pastiche, shall we say, of products ranging from education, tv, film and video to pet food. So, although it kind of makes sense that you would buy chicken soup for the sole grain-free food for your dog, I guess.

2:21:41 - Paris Martineau
I guess At least it's a food.

2:21:44 - Cathy Gellis
Should you feed your dog chicken soup, that's like.

2:21:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Rudy Giuliani, coffee Makes no sense.

2:21:50 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, they think that that name has some cachet or something.

2:21:53 - Cathy Gellis
I guess Giuliani is disbarred though.

2:21:56 - Leo Laporte
Apparently they own Crackle. I didn't know that. Yes, they also own the Landmark Studio Group and Popcorn Flicks and Screen Media, and truly they've just been snapping up dying media properties with all that money. Now it's killing them, and Redbox turns out to be the one that's going to put them out of their misery.

2:22:17 - Cathy Gellis
Wow, of all those names, that's the only one I'd heard of.

2:22:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So Redbox had a very interesting business. They would put these red boxes outside of convenience stores and bodegas and you could get a small selection of DVDs and you'd rent them in a small selection of dvds and you rent them in a vending machine, you bring it back, but uh, apparently it wasn't exactly a big money maker hey, uh, on the subject of all the old movies and stuff you guys like to talk about, chicken soup currently owns the north american rights to a majority of the Laurel and Hardy films, most of the Our Gang Library, which is a series of shorts produced in the early 1900s.

2:23:00 - Cathy Gellis
Of course you do.

2:23:01 - Paris Martineau
Interesting, it makes me wonder and the majority of the Hal Roach.

2:23:04 - Leo Laporte
Library. Oh, these are great. I grew up on this stuff.

2:23:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, Chicken Soup for the Soul.

2:23:10 - Leo Laporte
I guess you could here they are the the original little rascals uh that's, uh, that's spanky. And then they had the uh the token black kids stymie spanky that's spanky. Uh, I don't know who this ugly critter is, but you know what's interesting about this? The people, these people, they're all dead now yeah, that makes sense yeah, do you ever, is that? More, all right, well, when I watch this stuff I think, oh yeah, they're all dead. They were kids.

2:23:43 - Paris Martineau
Well, you're clearly you're clearly, uh, being targeted for those thoughts, because the promoted video on the right side of that screen is how all the kids and little rascals died. I don't know if you guys noticed that, but that was the top clearly aimed at me yeah, wow it knows that that's what you want, oh my god about their death.

2:24:06 - Leo Laporte
What's scarier is watching, you know, tv shows from the 70s and even the 80s and realizing that to some extent, same situation oh yeah, now so interestingly, because I could play this youtube video of our gang, but then I would get sued by chicken soup for the soul choose your plane.

2:24:26 - Cathy Gellis
They need the money, they need the money. I wouldn't do it. They need the money, they need the money.

2:24:30 - Jeff Jarvis
They need the money, I wouldn't do it, nope.

2:24:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh I know, Alfalfa, Actually is that stuff yeah.

2:24:37 - Cathy Gellis
Alfalfa.

2:24:37 - Leo Laporte
What is the?

2:24:38 - Cathy Gellis
copyright on that, because some of that stuff is so old.

2:24:40 - Leo Laporte
It's pre-copyright, but I guess, so how could they own it?

2:24:47 - Jeff Jarvis
No I mean that's 1909 copyright.

2:24:49 - Leo Laporte
But the question is is the term no, no, no, this is after. This is still in copyright. Well, but I thought stuff from 1927 has gone out of copyright.

2:24:54 - Cathy Gellis
Oh well, okay, so Public Domain did a pop out, so I was curious whether it was pre that year or not.

2:25:00 - Leo Laporte
This is from, you know, 1920. Wouldn't that be Public Domain? Is there some way that Chicken Soup of the Soul could like re -copyright it? The?

2:25:10 - Cathy Gellis
Chicken Soup of the Soul could like re-copyright it.

2:25:11 - Leo Laporte
The attempts have been made.

2:25:12 - Cathy Gellis
It's not supposed to succeed, but actually they bought a library that may be essentially becoming less of an asset over time, which is kind of how it's supposed to work.

2:25:22 - Leo Laporte
Should I play this and see what happens?

2:25:26 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm not giving legal advice on that topic.

2:25:30 - Leo Laporte
I'm taking it to the Supreme Court. Kathy has an early flight. Oh okay, let's quickly get out of here. Google Keep.

2:25:38 - Paris Martineau
She's got to get those donuts quick. It's time for the change log.

2:25:41 - Leo Laporte
Play the thing, the Google change log it's going to be a short one.

2:25:46 - Jeff Jarvis
This won't take long. There's nothing here. I put it in. Two of them are duplicates.

2:25:52 - Leo Laporte
I think we did this last week, 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate. That's old. We did that one, didn't we Including Cantonese.

2:26:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Are we and Tomazite?

2:26:04 - Paris Martineau
No, you weren't here last week. You weren't here.

2:26:06 - Leo Laporte
You deserted us. Many of these languages are from Africa, so that's pretty cool, pretty amazing.

2:26:14 - Jeff Jarvis
AI made it possible to do that.

2:26:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think this is cool because I think Google Keep is a pretty darn good note-taking app. It now lets you have multiple accounts side-by-side in split screen, so you can have your wife's shopping list and yours and you can copy stuff over how old is that keyboard.

2:26:30 - Jeff Jarvis
in that picture it looks like something I used on an A-text no those keyboards are in now.

2:26:36 - Paris Martineau
They're hip. Now, people love that kind of stuff. They're hip.

2:26:38 - Leo Laporte
That's probably an $800 keyboard.

2:26:40 - Paris Martineau
People like the keyboards that go clicky-clack you know See.

2:26:46 - Leo Laporte
Hey they're better keyboards. They're much better. We like these.

2:26:49 - Cathy Gellis
There's a lot of buttons on that keyboard.

2:26:50 - Leo Laporte
There's a lot of buttons. That's it. That's the Google Change Log. Play it, you heard?

2:26:56 - Cathy Gellis
it.

2:26:58 - Leo Laporte
You know what's next. After the Change Log, the picks of the week are coming up. Next You're watching this Week in Google with Paris Martineau, jeff Jarvis and a wonderful special guest, kathy Gellis, to explain the. Supreme Court hey. Kathy, let's continue on with Paris's pick of the week.

2:27:24 - Paris Martineau
My pick of the week is the New York City Department of Transportation's Instagram account, which is just delightful. Look at the first pinned video there. It's an interview with an asphalt guy. You've got to turn the sound on.

2:27:37 - Leo Laporte
All right, he's dot. I have spin on the vest, you know some people call me Spin Mike oh.

2:27:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I love this accent.

2:27:45 - Cathy Gellis
I have a 84. No really.

2:27:47 - Jeff Jarvis
That's that Brooklyn thing. You know what I'm saying?

2:27:49 - Paris Martineau
Mechanic slash labor here we kind of just repair anything and everything that needs to be repaired in this place.

2:27:56 - Leo Laporte
You understand?

2:27:57 - Paris Martineau
It's just a cute little slice of life about all these guys who work in the New York DOT. It's adorable.

2:28:03 - Leo Laporte
Here's Frank. The next one is a. He's a blacksmith who makes street signs.

2:28:09 - Paris Martineau
It's just showing all the different workers in the dot.

2:28:12 - Leo Laporte
You might need to turn the yeah, beyonce is going to come after me next and their uh star signs.

2:28:18 - Paris Martineau
It's just, it's great, it's. I'd really recommend it. They show you how they make all of the new york city signs here I love the sign the sign shop is my favorite place in the world.

2:28:34 - Leo Laporte
This is so cool yeah.

2:28:36 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's lovely. I love the New York City various departments' social media. The New York City Ferry has a great account. I've always been a big fan of the New York.

City Department of Sanitation, which I think is one of my favorite accounts, and yeah, I don't know, it was just great discovery. The New York City Department of Sanitation, which I think is one of my favorite accounts, and yeah, I don't know, it was just very delightful and I came across it today, so I thought I'd share it with all of you In New York City.

2:28:58 - Leo Laporte
They don't call them garbage men, they call them sanitation workers.

2:29:02 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and that you know they're a union group. I think the wait list to even apply to be a sanitation worker is like years long because it's like it's six figures.

2:29:16 - Leo Laporte
It's really good. Yep, yeah. Well, there you go. You gave me another reason to go back to instagram. The new york department of transportation, nyc underscore dot. I love those accents, you know it's. I'm sad that regional accents are fading away, aren't they Not in New York?

2:29:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you helped kill them and you made the model to be this voice from nowhere yeah okay, wait, you want a good example?

2:29:40 - Paris Martineau
Scroll down. It's like four or five. Down to the right there's a guy wearing a yellow vest and it says POV you're trying to interview the asphalt plant mechanic.

2:29:50 - Leo Laporte
Okay, let's talk to him here. Pov you're trying to interview the asphalt plant mechanic Okay, let's talk to him here. Let's see.

2:29:52 - Jeff Jarvis
People know what that means, but it's just recycled material, that's all it is.

2:29:57 - Paris Martineau
He goes to his phone's going off, he picks it up what do you want you banana?

2:30:01 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm on lunch.

2:30:01 - Leo Laporte
This guy's making pictures of me over here. I'm going to be on like Fox 5 or something. I just think that's so cute.

2:30:13 - Cathy Gellis
Good for him. It's like Tony Soprano. You know it's also the accents of my family. They're not quite this, but it's.

2:30:18 - Leo Laporte
New York-ish. You have a little New York in there.

2:30:22 - Cathy Gellis
I mean, I'm from Bergen County, New Jersey, but I think it's not particularly, but it's not as overt.

2:30:28 - Jeff Jarvis
We round up to New York, I round up to New.

2:30:31 - Leo Laporte
York, but I have relatives, my family's, from Leonia, you know.

2:30:35 - Cathy Gellis
Oh, your family.

2:30:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, my dad is from Did you have an accent as a kid, leo? No, and I grew up in the place where the worst accent in the world Rhode Island, rhode Island, yeah, but I must have avoided it somehow, yeah.

2:30:47 - Cathy Gellis
My dad's Bronx.

2:30:48 - Leo Laporte
so I love it.

2:30:49 - Cathy Gellis
I wish I had an accent, my stepmom is Brooklyn and I had some cousins visit me. I'm not quite sure which New York it is, but they were visiting, and it's not just the accent, but it's also what you say. So like they left.

2:31:02 - Leo Laporte
What do you want, you banana?

2:31:04 - Cathy Gellis
They left and I had to call them and you know my cousin's like so what did we forget? Yeah right, Forget about it.

2:31:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I like my favorite line from what was the Billy Crystal, where he's a psychiatrist and he's treating a Analyze this, analyze this. My favorite line from Analyze this is guy's leaving. There's a mafioso guy leaving the psychiatrist. His guard is there. The guard says get me, get me, get me a. What's a sandwich. Get his guard is there. The guard says get me, get me. Uh, get me a. What's a sandwich. Give me a sandwich. What's a diet sandwich? Anybody say he calls it a sandwich. What's a diet sandwich? And the guy says half a sandwich. And I just love that, apparently, sandwich. There's a whole story about sandwich. Did you know that?

I don't know it's not a mispronunciation. Oh, now I'm trying to remember.

2:31:50 - Paris Martineau
I just recently saw that always razz the hell out of one of our friends who grew up like on long island or something, but whenever he has no accent whatsoever. But if he picks up the phone to call a pizza, order in the thickest new york accent he's got a pizza voice.

2:32:09 - Cathy Gellis
My, my mom was brooklyn, but not a very strong brooklyn, and she retired to boston and her ups driver thought she sounded like she was from the sopranos oh, I love it.

2:32:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, uh. Here's an article. I wanted a sandwich, but I asked for a sandwich. Instead, she's cut. She's from catalan in spain, but she's also a language and phonetics nerd and she cannot pronounce sandwich. She can only say sandwich.

2:32:37 - Cathy Gellis
But it's interesting, the Sopranos, because now I'm blanking on the name, the guy who played Tony Soprano. James Gandolfini. James Gandolfini. He grew up a town or two away from me, where it's not a very profound accent, and he had to do, I think, voice coaching in order to play the character with that accent, because it was not native to him.

2:33:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, can I play this? Can I play this? I want to play this. Go ahead, go ahead. Let's live it up. Let's live it up. How did you get out?

2:33:10 - Benito Gonzalez
This is getting blown. This is going to get pulled down.

2:33:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, darn it Can't do anything around here because of stupid copyright.

2:33:20 - Cathy Gellis
Well, yeah, and fair use is supposed to sort of make that kind of thing okay Fair use is, as you know, a defense, and I don't have the money to defend myself.

2:33:27 - Benito Gonzalez
And it's also like YouTube. They're like very pro, they pull everything out.

2:33:33 - Leo Laporte
Let's do Kathy. She has a good pick of the week this week. It is not a Huey Newton in the news.

2:33:40 - Cathy Gellis
Huey Lewis and the news.

2:33:41 - Leo Laporte
Huey Newton and the Chicago 7 News.

2:33:43 - Cathy Gellis
No, Huey Lewis and the.

2:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Newton.

2:33:47 - Paris Martineau
Guys, Huey Lewis and the news. It should not be hard.

2:33:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm just giving you a hard time. What's your pick of the week, dear Kathy?

2:33:58 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I'd given Benito a picture. But then I realized, as we were talking and people talking about, we don't want to do math on the show I was realizing that math came up this week. Um, there was a a clip from somebody who I think is an eric abrams supporter was bragging about how she got a five on the calculus ap exam. Yeah and um, I'm a little dismissive of this because I also got a five on the calculus ap exam. So allow me to brag.

No but I, but they actually had a really, really, really good teacher. But one of the things the teacher said is when we were finishing the class at the end of the year, she wanted us to write letters to the incoming class, following us to kind of tell them what to expect and doing things in my own idiom. Instead of writing a letter, I wrote a poem.

2:34:47 - Leo Laporte
The Calculus Advice Poem.

2:34:49 - Cathy Gellis
This is not my website. I had it on my own website, but my website is broken. I have not sung it, but I can recite it.

2:34:55 - Leo Laporte
I can actually take it and make a song out of it on Suno while you read it. So you read it.

2:35:02 - Cathy Gellis
I don't know if I want AI to give me a song and I'm going to get an AI song while you read it.

I could do my own songs, but this one doesn't have one. But and I wrote it with my friend Amanda, and this is not our website, just because my website is currently unwell so I couldn't link to that. But it turns out it got released enough into the ether that other people posted it on their site. So when I wanted to point it out, here we are. So, to whom it may concern, if it is calculus that you will learn, take heed of our advice. We hope it will suffice. First, some things you need to know. Well, if you don't well, we told you so Know your algebra very well, or your life will be a living hell.

Absolute values may look silly, tis true, but unless you know them, you won't have a clue. Geometry will come back to haunt. You Know it, or else this class will daunt you, class will daunt. You Know about functions in relation to sets. A good thing to know for blondes and brunettes, a silly rhyme. But what else is new? Now? Here's more you'll need to review. Do not think it asinine tangent, cotangent and cosine, and do not dismiss it as incidental.

When you study a transcendental, and if you don't remember log and lin, oh, what trouble you'll be in. And though derivatives may seem quite grim, if you don't know them you'll be out on a limb L-I-M. Be prepared to understand integrals, calculating area within intervals. Later in the year you'll learn the rest of what you should know for the AP test. And now, as we are nearing the end, there's one less thing we will recommend. When concepts become a little muddy, it's good to study with a learning buddy. This is all we have to say. We hope you have a nice day. The poorly written in this poem is no lie from Kathy and Amanda. Good luck and goodbye.

2:36:34 - Leo Laporte
So Amanda was a friend of yours.

2:36:35 - Cathy Gellis
Amanda remains a friend of mine.

2:36:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh, nice, and it's on her blog.

2:36:39 - Cathy Gellis
No, I have no idea whose website this is.

2:36:42 - Leo Laporte
It's on some random person's.

2:36:43 - Cathy Gellis
It's on precalculusexsetwordpresscom, it's on a couple of websites, websites, although the only one that's annoying me is somebody posted it to Scribd and they posted it where the last line is truncated, so you don't have the Kathy and Amanda anymore.

2:36:57 - Leo Laporte
And now a musical rendition of your beautiful poem.

2:37:02 - Cathy Gellis
I don't know if I want to encourage this.

2:37:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're not playing my audio. Wow, they've made it masculine.

2:37:25 - Benito Gonzalez
I think it's pretty good then you won't have a clue. Geometry will come back to haunt. You Know it, or else this class will daunt you.

2:37:35 - Leo Laporte
I think that's pretty good. Yeah, I'll give it to you. There is an alternate version.

2:37:40 - Cathy Gellis
Slightly. I'm trying to figure out what genre it is and it kind of sounds like a 1930s musical. Yeah, who would be concerned if it is calculus?

2:37:50 - Paris Martineau
that you will. No, no, I like the first one. Oh, I don't like this one. No, no no.

2:37:52 - Leo Laporte
The first one was We'll save that one Thumbs up. Thank you, suno, and I will immediately copy this and put it in our Discord so you all can listen at your leisure.

2:38:07 - Cathy Gellis
Mr Jeff.

2:38:07 - Leo Laporte
Jarvis, do you have a number, a pick?

2:38:10 - Jeff Jarvis
anything I'm going to do a book recommendation. Yes, I'm going to do a book recommendation. Yes, I'm listening to this. I've almost done this book called the Material, which is a novel about a master's of fine arts program for comedians, for stand-up comedians. Oh, that's funny. It is funny, that's hysterical. It's really well written and what strikes me as I'm reading it is I'm replacing comedian with journalist, and it works throughout. They have bits. We have hot takes yeah, we have bits too.

We have bits too, right. They want laughter, we want applause and clicks and links and all that, and I could go on and on and on, and I probably will in a post, but it's very good, so I thought I would just recommend that tonight I have a friend who has a master's degree in um narrative writing who uh, used her stand-up comedy routines in to get her master's.

2:39:07 - Leo Laporte
So it's not made up.

2:39:08 - Jeff Jarvis
This is you, could I I taught a brief course in comedy and journalism. Oh well, there you go?

2:39:14 - Paris Martineau
Really, I couldn't tell, sorry.

2:39:19 - Leo Laporte
That wasn't a laugh, that was a spit take.

2:39:22 - Paris Martineau
Very different. You'd learn that if you did the comedy MFA.

2:39:27 - Leo Laporte
Do you want to do it? You have many links. We could do some more.

2:39:30 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's fine. Okay, that's all. Let's wrap it up. Then I ordered the Chinese food. Get the.

2:39:35 - Leo Laporte
Chinese food. I want to thank Kathy Gellis for making the trip up here. We really appreciate her brilliance, her expertise in her calculus poems. And thank you, you're welcome, really nice to see you. You didn't expect the math you didn't expect the math Twice in a few days. No, I didn't know, you were a calculus nerd.

2:39:51 - Paris Martineau
Never expect the math.

2:39:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Never, but once I know it, I'm not the least bit surprised you would get a five.

2:40:02 - Leo Laporte
Do you?

2:40:02 - Cathy Gellis
think that lawyers is that left brain, whatever that is. I mean, the thing notorious about lawyers is it's a profession you choose because you don't have to do math.

2:40:09 - Leo Laporte
So I would not expect that most lawyers are good at math. I would say most musicians are good at math, but I don't know if most musicians are good at law.

2:40:20 - Cathy Gellis
I mean law is good for people who like systems.

2:40:23 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of right-brained I think.

2:40:24 - Cathy Gellis
Well, I mean, but law is also not one thing. Different practices pull different skills. Like writing is really important, but not all lawyers are good at that. Procedures are good. Some people are good at the negotiating, Some people are good at the business. It takes all kinds.

2:40:39 - Leo Laporte
According to Harrington, the right-brained lawyer is the lawyer of the future, so just remember that. I have all the brain. You have left and right together. Wow, like a Chinese robot she's got.

2:40:52 - Cathy Gellis
I've got skin Skin in the game.

2:40:56 - Paris Martineau
Skin and two sides of a brain.

2:40:57 - Leo Laporte
How did you not name last week's show? Skin in the Game is what I want to know.

2:41:02 - Paris Martineau
Because Michael was like I'm not touching that.

2:41:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, no he was Okay, jeff Jarvis, wait a minute, let me read it Someday. This will be the last time I'll read it, but not today he is the no because he's emeritus forever yeah, that's my sad story. He is the director emeritus of the Townite Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of.

Journalism at the City University of New York. Wouldn't you like to be a have an Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York? Wouldn't you like to have an endowed chair at the Huey Lewis Graduate School of Rock and Roll? Wouldn't that be a great thing to have, kathy?

Yes, yes of course that would be very cool. That is Paris Martineau, theinformationcom. If you want to read her stuff, if you have a tip, her signal is Martineau.01. And she is open to all and sundry tips, so to speak, not the tips from last week, more like.

2:42:06 - Paris Martineau
Hey, come on guys. We're like scoops.

2:42:10 - Leo Laporte
We're like scoops.

2:42:11 - Cathy Gellis
Guys, Louisiana is going to pass an age verification bill for watching twit.

2:42:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, we don't want that. Thank you all for being here, and thanks especially to our club members. If you're not a member, we have a goal, believe it or not. My goals, my, my, my goals are easy. They're simple. I would just like to get one in 10 people, one percent, well, 10%. One in 10 people who listen to the show to join the club. Right now, it's Be the 10%, be the 10%, the 10%, the few, the proud, the brave, the 10%. Right now, it's less than 2%, one in 20. I want to make it better than that. So, please, if you're not a member of Club Twit, it's only $7 a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get extra content, of course, access to our wonderful Discord where a great community awaits you. If you're not a member, twittv slash club twit. If you are, my deepest thanks because you're making it possible for us to continue. You might have noticed there were no ads in this program to continue.

2:43:15 - Paris Martineau
You might have noticed there were no ads in this program and uh, that for just 22 cents a day? Yes, you can save this.

2:43:19 - Leo Laporte
Yes, save this journalist. It's not too late. Uh, twittv, slash club, twit we, we like doing this. We'd like to keep doing it with your help. We can uh. We do the show every uh wednesday about 2 pm, pacific, 5 pm eastern time, 2100 utc. You can watch us do it live now on not just youtube, youtubecom slash twitch, slash live. But uh, today and I think going forward, we'll be on facebook xcom twitch kick discord. What else am I missing? Kick Discord. What else Am I missing anything? Anyway, everywhere, drive-in movies near you, drive-in movies. Just make sure you, you know it's great if you want to watch live the little screen at the gas station.

Yeah, you know that was the weirdest experience of my life was I was filling up the tank and I saw Patrick Norton, my old co-host on Tech TV, on the screen. I thought what the hell is that? Anyway, so they do have podcasts on there, believe it or not? Please, please come back. And if you want to listen to the show at your own pace sometimes people listen at double speed, for instance, or in the middle of the night you can download a copy from their website, twittv slash twig. You can, of course, subscribe to the YouTube channel twittv slash thisweekinggoogle, and the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast program and you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google Im Kuchen.