TWiG 777 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. Jeff Jarvis is back, paris Martineau is here. We have lots to talk about. At&t says nearly all its mobile customers were hacked in a recent breach, yikes. Goldman Sachs says AI is overhyped, wildly expensive and unreliable. And Sam Altman's got a leaky pool. He's suing. It's all coming up next and a lot more on Twig Podcasts you love.
0:00:31 - Paris Martineau
From people you trust.
0:00:34 - Paris Martineau
This is Twig.
0:00:40 - Leo Laporte
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 777, recorded Wednesday, 7-17-2024,. Victim of affluence. It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is back. We missed you, Jeff. Oh there, he's got his little hat on for typesetting Did you become a line of type operator.
0:01:04 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, that was far too modern, Far far too modern for me. I'll try to find the photo.
0:01:10 - Leo Laporte
We showed the photo last week of you and your ink stain. Oh, you did show that photo. Yeah. Yes, Right Paris.
0:01:19 - Paris Martineau
Yes, now, jeff, you've got to show them what you made. Now I feel like I'm a teacher.
0:01:25 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what you made. Now I feel like I'm a teacher. I will, so I took a picture of it, so I'll put that in the description, what you made, jeff.
0:01:27 - Leo Laporte
Jeff is the? Was the Show, the class? I made an ashtray for Leo. By the way, jeff, I saw that you have outed yourself as to your future career. Is that correct? You mentioned somewhere in public what you're doing next, jeff looks deeply confused.
0:01:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe, I thought, well, I'm going to work with two other universities, but it's not official yet so I can't say.
0:01:53 - Leo Laporte
But you mentioned one of them and I thought, oh, maybe it's. I think it was on Twitter, anyway, forget you Don't go looking for that information? Forget. You heard this.
0:02:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think so.
0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis is the Emeritus Leonard Towne Professor for Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
0:02:21 - Jeff Jarvis
You're going to the Discord as we speak here, capture Discord. I can't forget to put a photo up. It is a picture of the type I set.
0:02:31 - Leo Laporte
The type I set.
0:02:34 - Jeff Jarvis
So that first paragraph there, the type the type.
0:02:38 - Leo Laporte
I set Tips for typesetters. It is a wise so the centaur there. I didn't write this set the time you actually put the cold lead into the thing or is it here's?
0:02:51 - Jeff Jarvis
here's a, here's a uh uh compositor stick and you put the letter in oh this is uh, wow, this is yeah, prelinotype.
0:03:03 - Leo Laporte
So is it cold or hot? Well, it's cold.
0:03:07 - Paris Martineau
It's cold.
0:03:08 - Leo Laporte
Do they melt it down at the end of the day?
0:03:10 - Jeff Jarvis
and start over. No, that's linotype. So that was the point, is you?
0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
had to reuse the type as you went. So at the end of the setting up the thing you have to take it apart and like Legos and you have to clean it.
0:03:25 - Jeff Jarvis
In the old days you would clean it with lye and urine. We didn't have because of osha, um and yes. Then you have to put it back at each, in each spot oh my gosh and figure it out and you have to let it out. You have to put little tiny spaces in to even it out on the line and then we put it in a proof press.
0:03:36 - Leo Laporte
There's video of me writing the proof press this must be the most painstaking and I don't know, fiddly amazing. Yeah, did you enjoy?
0:03:45 - Paris Martineau
this is how long did it take you to set a paragraph? Or your little?
0:03:50 - Jeff Jarvis
well, I, in my lifetime book I have a fat paragraph much longer than that, and I say that it could have taken mark twain two hours to do that. Wow, you'd be paid like three cents an hour. Um, they're paid over how much type they set. So this was all I should. I should. This is the rare book school I went to University of Virginia. They have it all over. They have all kinds of wonderful, amazing courses. Mine was topography, before and after the line of type Two wonderful instructors and I'm there with professors and librarians and like grown-up people, and so it was a lot of fun Very nice, well done Bravo.
0:04:26 - Leo Laporte
I'll take off the silly hat now. And was that hat made of newsprint folded just so? Did they teach you how to do that? Yes, yes.
0:04:32 - Jeff Jarvis
They have a little thing they write on it. Normally there should be a piece of newsprint, but who can find a newspaper anymore? A, b, because the newsprint has shrunk. It probably wouldn't fit on most heads anymore. Newsprint used to be big, it got smaller.
0:04:48 - Leo Laporte
That is Jeff Jarvis.
0:04:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, I've monopolized here before we get to Paris. On the left of your screen.
0:04:55 - Leo Laporte
Paris Martineau, who has not said hot lead or cold lead. In fact, everything she does is in a content management system and it's just a lot of bits. It's true, Live and die by the CMS. It's just a lot of bits.
0:05:05 - Paris Martineau
It's true, live and die by the CMS.
0:05:08 - Leo Laporte
Yep, she is of course.
0:05:10 - Paris Martineau
What CMS?
0:05:10 - Jeff Jarvis
do you use, by the way?
0:05:12 - Paris Martineau
We have our own CMS. At the end of the day, Of course you do. Mm-hmm yeah. Most of the places I've worked has had their own CMS. It's one of the most ridiculous things about our business.
0:05:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like our paragraphs are special. Nobody else can write paragraphs like we write our paragraphs. They're paragraphs.
0:05:30 - Leo Laporte
That was the come on for Medium right was how easy it was to write because of their beautiful CMS. Well, it is true, it is beautiful, Okay.
0:05:42 - Paris Martineau
That one gets a pass. Well, in that case, okay. Do you like the information? Cms, cms, does it have a?
0:05:51 - Leo Laporte
name. Honestly, I don't have to deal with the cms at all. Oh uh, you are my text.
0:05:54 - Paris Martineau
I write in google docs and my editor copies and pastes it in there for me and does it all um. It's fine, though I have to use it sometimes whenever I do like briefings, which is kind of occasionally. If there's a news thing on your beat, you might upload something and it's fine.
0:06:10 - Jeff Jarvis
In the old days you wanted to do it so you could get your story to length in the CMS. But now digitally, who cares what's length, what's length?
0:06:21 - Leo Laporte
Do you count your words, Paris?
0:06:24 - Paris Martineau
Not really no. Count your words. Do you count your words, paris?
0:06:25 - Leo Laporte
not really no they don't, they don't say you need I don't say a 2500 word piece, or we need a thousand word piece. You just you write it.
0:06:34 - Paris Martineau
No, yeah, I mean, I don't really get, yeah, as many words as I need. I mean, sometimes I like look at it because it gives me a. Sometimes when you're writing something you don't have a sense of how long it is. The length of it in your head is warped kind of like a funhouse mirror, either much shorter or longer than it actually is. So I'll use the word count feature for that. But I rarely, if ever, get like give me 1,800 words on X, you know.
0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
The world has really changed. It's amazing. It really is amazing.
0:07:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I always write long. It's my old days. I write long and about 20% long Intentional, and then cut. Yeah, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Have I told you, have I done my Uncle Jeff moment about what it was like to work on a rewriter at a newspaper?
0:07:19 - Paris Martineau
Yes, you have.
0:07:25 - Leo Laporte
And I find it delightful every time you say it. I mean that genuinely, I do. You know what's great about being our age Paris is. I don't remember him ever saying that, so I'd like to hear that story again.
0:07:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually, I never did. Paris just doesn't want to hear it.
0:07:35 - Paris Martineau
No, you did, because you'd have to send it to the different people and then they'd have to run to different places.
0:07:40 - Leo Laporte
That's right, the pneumatic tube and all that they've all heard it before they've heard it jeff.
0:07:46 - Paris Martineau
jeff had a big birthday you get when you have a big birthday.
0:07:51 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, we're not gonna say anything unless you know. You give us permission. But I just wanted to wish you happy birthday. We're happy you were born.
0:07:58 - Jeff Jarvis
What the hell, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm so old, how old am I? I'm sold. I've now applied for my social security.
0:08:07 - Leo Laporte
Ah, that's the big one. Actually I've been trying to decide because I keep seeing things like well, you can do it now. But then I see things that say you should wait until 70 and a half, because that's when you maximize the amount of money you get and you're really kind of screwed because all along you've been paying double as an employer and employee.
0:08:30 - Paris Martineau
Social security won't exist by the time I'm your guys' age. It might not exist by January, to be honest.
0:08:36 - Leo Laporte
So just you know, enjoy it while you got it, jeff.
0:08:39 - Jeff Jarvis
But that wasn't a political statement.
0:08:41 - Leo Laporte
No, nothing's going to happen in January.
0:08:43 - Paris Martineau
That's just, I think, yeah.
0:08:47 - Leo Laporte
AT&t said criminals stole phone records of nearly all their wireless customers all of them whoops. Uh, if you were an at&t customer between may 2022 and oct 31st 2022. Well, bad guys got every phone call and text message. Not the contents, Just the numbers, dates and times.
0:09:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Nor did they get your social security number or any of that Right. They just got the call log.
0:09:18 - Leo Laporte
But, as we have said in the past, the call log can be very, very revealing. It depends on what you've done. Not for you and me probably no, because we're boring as hell uh, calling and texting records.
Oh, and, by the way, if you're an AT&T customer who called a customer on another cell service, that customer's number was also revealed. Um, I don't. Yeah, you're right. I don't know how awful this is. I I guess bad guys have now 110 million known numbers, but they make them up anyway. It's not like they need them. At&t published a website with information for customers about the data incident. They also filed with regulators before the market opened last Friday.
Now Steve Gibson talked a little bit about this, because AT&T said this was because we used a very fast-growing unicorn from a few years ago called Snowflake. In fact, snowflake has been hacked. 35 of its customers, including LendingTree and Ticketmaster, as well as AT&T, I'm sorry, 165 of its customers 165 have been hacked in this Snowflake-related breach. Snowflake said oh, it's not our fault, it's their fault. They didn't have multi-factor authentication. But what Steve pointed out is that means the bad guys must have had the passwords. We're not sure what happened, but it's really bad and I think you can blame Snowflake. At&t would like to for sure. In any event, it's bad news, but not the worst for us as users. The hacking group has members in north america and one american who lives in turkey. According to mandiant, the security firm that discovered the hack, snowflake uh, has 165 customers who they say have been hacked because it's their fault.
0:11:22 - Jeff Jarvis
They didn't use two-factor authentication at&t didn't use two-factor authentication, that seems odd.
0:11:28 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's, that's what they're saying they're saying that at&t the company? Yes, yes, that none of the 165 companies who were hacked used two-factor. If they had, says snowfl, well they wouldn't have been breached. But that also tells you something because you need usually with two-factor, a password. You need two factors a password and then the second factor. So there's more than meets the eye to this story, as Steve Gibson was quick to point out.
0:11:58 - Paris Martineau
What is the original sin here?
0:12:00 - Leo Laporte
No one knows when was there a breach.
0:12:04 - Jeff Jarvis
If you're a corporation, how do you use two-factor Like, hey, Joe, we got to use your cell. I know you're on vacation, but we got to use your cell.
0:12:11 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. You know, let's ask our esteemed audience.
0:12:15 - Paris Martineau
There are a lot of IT professionals, but I'm going to guess it has something to do with executives executives or people who work in engineering it any other department just having a two-factor authentication program for employee logins. But I'm I'd be very surprised if at&t didn't have that. I mean, it seems like a very basic part of having an insurance policy as a modern company from what I understand is requiring your employees to use two-factor.
0:12:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, snowflake did not require companies use two-factor, and I think a lotake did not require companies use two-factor. And I think a lot of times IT departments say we got a good strong password, we don't need a two-factor, because if we'd use two-factor then everybody's got to have the token and it's just too much trouble, or something like that. I don't know. By the way, you might be interested to know that Snowflake no, I'm sorry, it wasn't Snowflake, it was another AT&T tried to get the hacker to delete the stolen customer data, paying him $370,000.
Just delete it. That was a mistake and they originally wanted a million. Uh, they said, well, will you take 370 million thousand? They said, oh yeah, okay, I'll take that. And then of course, didn't work. But uh, then there I think in also in the snowflake attack there was maybe you experienced this a lot of car dealers and repair shops were down for a long time because of a company that did dealer software and dealer management systems. I think they're called.
0:13:57 - Paris Martineau
Is this also the same problem that happened recently to, I think, pharmacy benefit managers that put a lot of pharmacies down for a large period of time because of a hack?
0:14:08 - Leo Laporte
Probably, probably, yeah, so the the company that was a ransomware hack.
Well, this is. This was kind of ransomware too. Global, which makes dealership software that pretty much owns the market, decided to pay $25 million ransom to the hackers 387 Bitcoin sent to a crypto account controlled by hackers. After the payment was made, a week later, cdk said oh good news, we're bringing car dealers back online. This was a big one for car dealers. I remember a lot of. I think my dealer as well. Almost everybody uses a CDK, by the way, owned by private equity uses the CDK Global software, and they were all down. They all had to do all their stuff by hand, which wasn't easy. Selling a car by hand these days not easy.
0:15:16 - Jeff Jarvis
So that was a ransomware attack, not a simple hack.
0:15:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, it all starts with a simple hack, and then what happens later depends on the gang. I guess.
0:15:29 - Jeff Jarvis
For the case of AT&T, at&t wasn't shut down, they just data was copied Right. In the case of the car dealers, data was shut. They were shut down because they were encrypted. They were shut down. That's right. I've asked this before, but I'm old and I forget things, so I can ask it again, please do. I still don't understand how you can't have backup systems that protect you against such a ransomware attack, right?
0:15:53 - Leo Laporte
It's more complicated. I wish it were that simple. I knew you'd say that, but explain it to me because I'm old. Well, I'm not sure either. I mean, that's what I used to always say. Well, they should have a better backup. But sometimes what happens is the ransomware fellas. This is why it's more. It's never just ransomware. So a lot of times the guys get in and then the first thing they do is they steal the customer data as much as they can, because they're going to blackmail you with that. Then they also investigate where the backups are right. Oh, so that the backups get encrypted as well, because you're constantly backing up. So there's a data, or, or they know where they are and they make sure those get encrypted too. So I think it. But that's not to say there aren't good security solutions out there for companies in this situation um, like one hopes the Department of Defense knows how to do this, yeah.
My sense is that what you want is backups that can't be modified, so they can't be encrypted. But I think it's expensive. It's complicated. Steve spends a lot. I really should give Steve credit. I know this is Steve.
This is what he talks about. Yeah, I think was Snowflake being used for backups. It was a cloud service. Maybe they were backing up to Snowflake. Anyway, not a good thing overall. I don't know. I botched this story because I'm not the security guy. I'm just kind of listening to Steve and thinking, wow, you let Steve talk. Wow, this is terrible, terrible news. If you're an AT&T customer, not much to do and honestly I don't think it's at the end of the world If people know who you were calling. I don't know Depends, but you know it would be for you Paris, because the phone numbers of sources might be in that trove. Yeah, that would be a problem. I did not use AT&T at the time.
Your social graph is in there also, yeah, but so what if I had your social graph? What would I do with it, benita?
0:17:58 - Paris Martineau
Sell it to a marketing company or an agent.
0:18:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but that's not like. The harm is minor.
0:18:03 - Paris Martineau
If someone's trying to stalk you, you could sell that to them.
0:18:06 - Leo Laporte
Sure, If you know any sort of bad actors, there are some people who this would be a bad thing for Journalists, women with evil boyfriends, and there are some people who this would be really bad.
0:18:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, spam callers have gotten better at giving you a phone number that you think might be somebody you know. Now they'll be able to do it. Now they'll be able to. The fear is I'm going to call my boss. I'm going to act like I'm Benito calling and saying I sent my. Well, that's kind of what happened.
0:18:37 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly what happened. Somebody impersonated Lisa using her phone number and yeah, there's a good example of how you could use this. If you got a manager at a company and you got all of their direct reports and you could see their phone numbers, you could text them all on a pretext, right Saying in this case, all our employees got texts saying they were from our CEO and I'm in a meeting right now. I want to give Amazon gift cards to all our hosts. Can you buy some? Yeah, let's have it twice. And uh, can you buy some and send them this address? And it's almost credible, because we do, in fact, give Amazon gift cards to employees and stuff, so it's almost credible. In order to do that, they had to know a lot of information.
0:19:25 - Paris Martineau
This is the kind of place they might get it right I just had to walk over to lisa's office and be like hey, uh, was this you but you did that, which is good.
0:19:32 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, benito. There are people who might go oh gosh, you know who's not going to do that of an older person who's somebody of the age of 70 someone who's perhaps just turned 70 and their you know granddaughter.
0:19:47 - Paris Martineau
Grandson asked them for Amazon gift cards over text.
0:19:52 - Leo Laporte
I really worry about my mom and dad and all of our elders. I mean, I guess your elders is a relative term. We're your elders. And you may be worried about us, Paris. I'm worried about you. We worry about them because, yeah, they're particularly susceptible and they can least afford ill afford to lose money to scammers, but they do all the time it happened with my father.
0:20:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, somebody claiming to be, uh, my son called my father and I'm at niagara falls that's the scam it's known for Niagara Falls and you know called him. He called my father Pop-Pop, he called him Grandpa. There are all kinds of signals in there. But you panic, you think your grandchild is in danger and he was headed out to Walmart to send and I think my mother called and we got. They called, just called Tammy and Jeff and make sure Jake's okay. And we called Jake to make sure Jake was okay and Jake was okay. So we could tell him yes, we know he's okay. This is a scam.
0:20:56 - Leo Laporte
That's how good it is, and that's the thing.
0:20:58 - Jeff Jarvis
All it takes is a little bit of information that makes it feel good they didn't even have information, because how many numbers do they have to call in Florida until they get somebody who has a grandson Right?
0:21:08 - Leo Laporte
Exactly. You don't have to do that. Well, you want to talk about security? We're in the security now mode From Krebs on Security. Brian Krebs worked a long time at the Washington Post, is now an independent security researcher at krebsonsecuritycom. At least a dozen organizations with domain names at Squarespace they were at Google domains. Remember that Squarespace I might have a few there Bought all the assets. Oh, my daughter does. She's pissed. She said what is this? I hate, I don't want Squarespace as my registrar. So at least a dozen organizations that had been moved to Squarespace saw their websites hacked last week. Squarespace bought all assets of Google Domains a year ago, but many customers still haven't set up their new accounts. Experts say malicious hackers learned they could commandeer any migrated Squarespace accounts that hadn't yet been registered oh crap Merely by supplying an email address tied to an existing domain.
0:22:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Which, in many cases, the domain would be admin at twitcom.
0:22:21 - Leo Laporte
All you need is a domain, I guess. The Squarespace domain hijacks which took place between July 9th and 12th appeared, of course, to have mostly targeted cryptocurrency businesses. In some cases, the attackers were able to redirect the hijacked domains to phishing sites. So it's a complicated hack. So you now control the domain, you redirect it to an identical looking page but it's yours that you control and then you fish credentials to steal cryptocurrency. Squarespace bought 10 million domains.
You can just get a job, people, it's a good job. That's the problem. They make good money. They make money. Yeah, I know.
0:23:03 - Jeff Jarvis
But it's not easy. They work hard for it.
0:23:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh, they earn it if you can say that squarespace bought about 10 million domains from google domains and show uh last year, one year ago, and has been gradually. They've been migrating those domains over to squarespace uh, brian, says I have. Squarespace did not respond to my request for a comment, nor has it issued a statement, but an analysis released by security experts at Metamask and Paradigm find the most likely explanation for what happened is that get this? Squarespace assumed all users migrating from Google domains would select the social login options like continue with Google, continue with Apple, as opposed to the continue with email choice. They never accounted for the possibility a threat actor might sign up for an account using an email associated with a recently migrated domain before the legitimate email holder created the account themselves. That's the loophole. Thus nothing actually stops them from trying to log in with an email. And because it hasn't been migrated there's no password on the account.
Squarespace hasn't even admitted it. Oh boy.
So what did your daughter do? Well, you know she has claimed the domains. But if you know somebody who was migrated I'm trying to remember if I had any Google domains that's the problem. Right, you register those domains and you forget about it, or you don't think about it or you're not in a big hurry. The domains being migrated from Google to Squarespace are known, said the Terrell Monahan, the lead product manager at MetaMask. It's either public or easily discernible info.
Which email addresses have admin of a domain? Oh, I guess yeah, if you just do a lookup, a Whois lookup, and if that email never sets up their account on Squarespace, say because the billing admin left the company five years ago or folks just ignored the email, anyone who enters that email at domain in the Squarespace form now has full access to control the domain. So let's say I had Google domains, I had fancypantscom and if you do a whois on fancypantscom you'll see the technical contact is admin at fancypantscom. If you also note that it was registered at Google Domains, you can assume it was transferred by Google to Squarespace. Simply enough, you just try to log in to fancypantscom and when it says how do you want to log in, you say email admin at fancypantscom.
0:25:47 - Paris Martineau
And uh, bob's your uncle, as they say I immediately went to look up fancypantscom and it auto filled, because we've done this bit before, where you've been talking about a fake domain and you used fancypantscom, yeah, and then we talked about the pants that are arguably fancy. We've. We've been down this road before, absolutely all right, I'll use. Instead I'll use tunictimecom I just think it's very funny. Well, what's funny is? I used to have fancypantscom and apparently yes, I think we discussed this and you do not anymore. Somebody has taken it.
Maybe for a Squarespace hack.
0:26:30 - Leo Laporte
You can't trust anybody these days. Let me just see who owns Tunic Time. I registered these at a point when I thought I might want to have a business selling fancy pants.
0:26:41 - Paris Martineau
What do you consider to be fancy pants?
0:26:45 - Leo Laporte
Ones that fit. It wasn't for me, it was for my ex-wife she's. She had this idea of a business of like floral prints. It was. It was a fleeting notion, it wasn't like we had a business plan and a deck or anything, and then and then and then tunic time. But I tunic time, it was worth 200 million Paris. I've let tunic time lapse.
0:27:09 - Paris Martineau
What was tunic time going to be Tunics?
0:27:13 - Jeff Jarvis
What sort of tunics? Because they were coming back. Paris Tunics were coming back, but then a log came and untucked it and ruined it all.
0:27:21 - Leo Laporte
I can tell you the problem Fancy pants got snapped up as soon as I let it go. But tunic time is still available for only $8.98 if you'd like to buy it.
0:27:32 - Paris Martineau
People aren't clamoring for the time of tunics.
0:27:36 - Leo Laporte
No, anyway, that's exciting. Can you buy a tunic?
0:27:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Look up tunic.
0:27:44 - Paris Martineau
I don't even know, it's just showing blouses, I'd argue are not tunics.
0:27:49 - Leo Laporte
I think of medieval tunics. Yeah, tunics should have like a Nehru collar. All right, all right, wait.
0:27:54 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, I put it in the Discord, oh no.
0:27:57 - Leo Laporte
This is it. This is it. You found some tunics.
0:28:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, it was no business okay this is it. I guarantee you this is the solution. You're right, those are two.
0:28:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm coming to post the exact same sort of photo that's a tunic for all you, uh, larpers, who want to be medieval lords. That's a tunic. It's tunic time. It's tunic time, you see you see, it wasn't a bad idea it could have, it could, it could have been a contender. Paris posted something very similar. You guys really do look alike, don't you Think alike Wow?
0:28:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Google does.
0:28:33 - Paris Martineau
We're all slowly merging into one big brain.
0:28:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know how you feel when it's tunic time. You really want to. By the way, this Viking linen tunic is only $64.90 from GrimFrostcom. Oh boy, holy moly, fast worldwide shipping Supplier to Vikings and Game of Thrones. They actually sell these things to TV shows.
0:29:02 - Jeff Jarvis
But I put up a Tancred tunic for the Crusades. It's heavy off-white 100% cotton tunic With a blood red. Crusader's cross.
0:29:13 - Paris Martineau
On GrimFrostcom you can get Viking jewelry, viking wear, which is like horns and things like that, and gym wear inexplicably.
0:29:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, the Vikings are pretty darn fit, I guess. Yeah, oh yeah, I want to wear this inexplicably Gym.
0:29:27 - Paris Martineau
Well, the Vikings are pretty darn fit.
0:29:28 - Leo Laporte
I guess yeah, oh, yeah, I want to wear this to the gym.
0:29:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh my God, Go to the tank tops, go to the tank tops. I'm telling you.
0:29:34 - Leo Laporte
This site is Tank tops, tank tops.
0:29:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I feel like that's a pop-up, there's something going on.
0:29:40 - Leo Laporte
There's a pop-up. That's not. The site is grayed out. I don't know why.
0:29:45 - Paris Martineau
You can get a tank top that says heathen.
0:29:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what I was looking at, or?
0:29:48 - Paris Martineau
berserker.
0:29:50 - Leo Laporte
Berserker Nice. Where's the pop-up Ulf?
0:29:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Hedden, whatever the hell that means.
0:29:59 - Paris Martineau
Wow, they have a lot of dining products. It just appeared to be. I thought you just used your hands yeah, I do think that that's not super uh so this is, this is a swedish company.
0:30:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I feel like there's a. There's a cookie thing popping up that I can't get, I don't see and it's grayed out until I acknowledge it.
0:30:19 - Paris Martineau
It's very weird they have wood, they sell beard rings, rings for your, your beard.
0:30:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, okay, I got to grow mine, so let me ask you when you're in the dating scene.
0:30:31 - Paris Martineau
Where is this going?
0:30:33 - Leo Laporte
Would you rather date a guy with beard rings or a top knot? Good question I mean.
0:30:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I think top knot is very par for the course in Brooklyn you can't avoid the top knot I'm scared for you, Paris or you can't avoid the man bun.
0:30:46 - Leo Laporte
Or, as some call it, the man bun. You can't avoid it.
0:30:50 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I don't know. I guess, if I'm being honest, I'd say top knot, but I do think that beard rings would be a fun excursion.
0:30:58 - Leo Laporte
I feel like somebody with beard rings also uses beard oil, and that is a bridge too far.
0:31:04 - Paris Martineau
Well, I don't know. If you use beard oil and it makes your beard look good and not oily, that's fine I guess it gives it a gloss, some people have too dry.
0:31:13 - Leo Laporte
Some people have too dry you want to moisten it, that's right I will say uh, maybe a year or so.
0:31:18 - Paris Martineau
I was going to my local coffee shop, which for some reason, is like in the basement apartment of just a brownstone doesn't make sense and I was sitting out there like with my coffee, and next to me were two men deep in conversation about forging armor for themselves you have come to the grim frost coffee shop.
0:31:42 - Leo Laporte
would you like a tunic? All right, let's pause and we will continue so you can digest what you've just heard. Today You're watching this Week in Google. We had a little Google. That was a Google story. This Week in. Grimfrost yeah, this Week in Grimfrost has the show started? Asks B Jones? Yes, I'm afraid.
0:32:05 - Paris Martineau
So this is it has the show started. Ask b jones. Yes, I'm afraid. So this is. It has the show started? Yes, yeah, no, this is.
0:32:11 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the content baby, this is as good as this is typical you gotta admit right.
0:32:16 - Leo Laporte
Yep, now, when we're talking security a lot, you know this. This, actually this snowflake story, really is exactly why you need one passwords extended access management. Our sponsor is one password today. Imagine, if you will, that your company's security is like the quad of a college campus. You know that. You know you got the ring of build brick, beautiful ivy covered brick buildings outside and inside there's a beautiful green, you know field and across it there are nice brick paths going between the buildings. You know that's how you get to class. You go down the brick path. Those are company-owned devices, it approved apps, managed employee identities. It's all orderly, it's all secure.
But then every quadrangle has it the paths that people actually use, the shortcuts. If you're going from one class to another, you're not going to go down that brick path. That'll take you out of your way. You're going to go right across the grass and then, of course, eventually a dirt path gets worn in the grass. Those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps, byod devices, non-employee entities like contractors.
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Available now to companies with Okta coming later this year, you'll be glad to know, jeff Jarvis to Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra. Check it out at 1passwordcom slash twig. That's the number one P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D 1passwordcom slash twig. And of course, this is based on the company that we've been advertising for a long time Collide. Onepassword acquired them a few months ago and they've made a tool that uses the best of both. That's really fantastic, onepasswordcom slash twig. We thank them for their support, their support. Goldman Sachs says AI is overhyped, wildly expensive and unreliable. They have a point. Do you Now? You still do? The AI Insiders show with Jason every.
0:35:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, I think there's a lot going on there, but I also think it is also overhyped.
0:35:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, sachs says and this is in an analyst's paper they say there's little to show for the huge amount of spending on generative ai infrastructure and questions quote whether this large spend will ever pay off in terms of ai benefits and returns. You know this is intense. This is based on a series of interviews with Goldman Sachs, economists, researchers, mit professor and infrastructure experts. And, of course, this is for investors. Should you continue Because the AI is hot right now? If you're looking at NVIDIA up what 700% this year alone. If you're an AI company or you just are a normal company, you spread a little AI on your name, your stock price goes up. The paper questions whether generative AI will ever become the transformative technology that Silicon Valley and large portions of the stock market are currently betting on. But and this is a wonderful piece from 404 Media, one of our favorite places Jason Keebler doing this- we got to get Jason back on Twit, by the way, Benito.
Next time you're looking for somebody he'd be great Doesn't mean you won't make money in it. Goldman says investors may continue to get rich anyway. Oh well, I wish you told me that in the first place. Despite these concerns and constraints, we still see room for the AI theme to run, either because AI starts to deliver on its promise or, more likely, because bubbles take a long time to burst, and they even quote your buddy, ed Zittrain.
0:37:07 - Paris Martineau
Wait, they quote Ed in the. It's a 404 story. 404 quotes Ed. It's not Goldman Sachs. No, Goldman Sachs did not quote Ed.
0:37:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Zittrain.
0:37:17 - Leo Laporte
But Ed did write about it on his newsletter whereisyouredat A week and a half ago. Can you do this in his voice? Do you have Ed's voice in your head? Newsletter whereisyouredat a week and a half ago. Can I do this in his voice? Can you do this in his voice, do you?
0:37:29 - Paris Martineau
have Ed's voice in your head. I don't have a British accent in my head.
0:37:32 - Leo Laporte
Goldman Sachs put out a 31-page report titled Gen AI Too Much Spend. Too Little. Benefit that includes some of the most damning literature on generative AI I've ever seen.
And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble. I've been warning you since March, ed, come on Too early to take a victory lap. Really, now that come on. This report is so significant, he writes, because Goldman Sachs, like any investment bank, does not care about anyone's feelings unless doing so is profitable. Gladly hype anything if it thinks it'll make a buck. In fact, he points out back in May it was all over generative AI showing very positive signs of eventually boosting GDP and productivity. You know the jury's still out on AI. I acknowledge that You've got to go back for reprogramming, leo, you're way out.
I need another walk on the beach with David Sachs. We should mention what's going on with the All In podcast, which apparently is now All-in for Trump they should just call it that and Andreessen Horowitz too, the big venture capital firm, mark Andreessen on their podcast talking to Ben Horowitz. All have decided, including Elon Musk, that, especially now that JD Vance is the vice presidential presumptive nominee. No, he is the nominee, it's official now the nominee.
0:39:08 - Paris Martineau
He is the nominee, it's official.
0:39:10 - Leo Laporte
They love JD Vance because for like five minutes, for a cup of coffee, he worked as a venture capitalist for Peter Thiel, and so they think that Vance is going to be good for them. But a number of people are saying why is Elon Musk saying he's going to spend $45 million a month to support Trump's campaign when Trump is avidly anti-EV? Isn't this bad for Tesla's business?
0:39:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, because Biden didn't invite Musk to the meeting at the White House about EVs? Because Tesla is non-union.
0:39:51 - Leo Laporte
So he's. I mean it doesn't take much to set up Elon.
0:39:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Elon says he's moving.
0:39:56 - Leo Laporte
SpaceX and X out of California because they dared make a law that says schools don't have to notify parents of gender changes on kids in schools. And one of his kids is trans right Gender, One of his kids. Gender pronoun changes, not gender change Gender pronoun.
0:40:16 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they're not changing your child's gender in school.
0:40:19 - Leo Laporte
Paris wants to be they, them.
0:40:22 - Paris Martineau
The school says the school's like all right, whatever. Whatever, I've got 55 of you in one class we don't have to call your parents on that one.
0:40:31 - Leo Laporte
I don't think, but Elon says oh well, I'm getting out of Dodge. I think this, though, is a very strange choice to make, given Trump is very clearly anti-EV, do you think?
0:40:45 - Paris Martineau
this is a very strange choice to make, given Trump is very clearly anti-EV. Do you think this is a very strange choice to make for Elon Musk, given everything he's said and done over the past couple of years? I feel like he's been very vocal about his pivot to right-leaning politics and his interest in the Trump campaign, in both private and public.
0:41:02 - Leo Laporte
He had, it was rumored, started uh supporting the. Uh, what is it? The america pack, the first america pack, um, but but he came out very much, so came out. After trump was uh shot, uh full-blown supporter. On twitter he says that's, that's it, you know. And then now he's giving a lot of money. He denied it briefly, but now he's not denying it anymore.
0:41:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, as our friend Siva Varianathan says, he always says he's going to do a lot of things. Check back and see whether he actually does.
0:41:42 - Leo Laporte
He's not alone. Backers of the America Pack include Palantir, founder joe lonsdale and the winklevi oh no surprise there.
0:41:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, there was a big dinner that that was at sax's house. That's, that's where it happened. That's where it happened. And let's also remember who was at that dinner rupert murdoch interesting what?
0:42:04 - Leo Laporte
why is that important?
0:42:07 - Jeff Jarvis
because rupert murdoch is, to my mind I'm sorry for the political comment here the single most maligned influence in the english-speaking democracy.
0:42:15 - Leo Laporte
Um, he, and the funny thing is everybody who knows him says he's quite courtly, quite gentlemanly, and I think somewhat apolitical, but he certainly cares about his pocketbook he's highly political, is he?
0:42:31 - Jeff Jarvis
it's just a changing. It's a chameleon, right, boss? I mean he, he, um. You know he supported labor in the uk when it was beneficial, yes, um, and the son grudgingly went for labor this time and finally at the last minute. So, yes, he can do that when it's beneficial, but no, he's definitely when?
0:42:50 - Leo Laporte
uh. So it's funny because when it was first reported that musk would be donating 45 million a year to the america pack, uh, he denied it in on a x post with the words fake good news J-N-U-S. Ha-ha A little pun on the word news and news I don't Anyway. Later he said yeah, okay, I am. Unfortunately, in the United States it is possible to donate unlimited amounts of money to PACs, political action committees, in effect donating it to the candidate, but you're not. So there's no limit, as there would be if you were donating it directly.
0:43:38 - Jeff Jarvis
It can be actually worse, because the candidate has to stand up behind whatever commercials there are and say I endorse this ad. A PAC can do anything.
0:43:46 - Leo Laporte
Right, uh up behind whatever commercials there are and say I endorse this ad. A pack can do anything, right. Uh, the largest known donation of the election so far, 50 million dollars from the great grandson of thomas mellon. But again, it really feels like at least a good chunk of silicon valley has now decided to support trump, even though it's not really clear that he would be good for big technology. Certainly, jd vance has supported lena khan and the ftc in her prosecution of google.
And uh, he too is a movable feast yeah, he's he's anti-tech I think that will change quickly because that was popular well, I wonder, if wonder if Elon promised something right, I mean if Elon got a promise, if Trump promised something to Elon.
0:44:31 - Paris Martineau
Probably, I think there's also just the general perception in the tech industry that Trump is going to make their lives a lot easier. I'm not saying that that's true or not, but I was talking to a kind of leading crypto reporter the other day and I was asking her about the beat and whatnot and she said, yeah, one interesting side effect of covering crypto during this year is like it is very rapidly changed to. The default assumption is that every big figure in crypto I talked to is probably a very ardent Trump supporter, because the cryptocurrency industry, their belief, is that Trump is going to, you know, kind of deregulate.
0:45:14 - Leo Laporte
They do mention that. Yeah, yeah, they all part. Also, one of the hot buttons is is this whole issue of, um uh, taxing unrealized gains. So what does that mean exactly?
0:45:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That's different from the carried interest thing. Right? That is worrisome. I think that if, if the way it was expressed on on radio this morning, and I'm not sure if it means that you made paper gains in your, in your, equity you have to pay tax on that, which is a problem because it can go back down. It's not like you have it in your pocket, right? So that's an issue.
0:45:58 - Leo Laporte
So that is. That is one of the things that the Biden administration is. Have they done it or they proposed it? I think no no, proposed it.
0:46:05 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, they're proposing it.
0:46:07 - Leo Laporte
They'd have to have a hell of a majority of both houses. It'd be hard to get that through Congress but it very much concerns people, especially let's be fair venture capitalists who put money you know lots of money into startups. And if startups go from being worth a hundred million to a billion and have to pay taxes on that 900 million, those are unrealized gains.
0:46:29 - Jeff Jarvis
They don't have the dollars to pay those and they don't have the dollars and B, it could go down to zero in the next year, right as it often does.
0:46:36 - Leo Laporte
I think that's one of the things Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz said is well, this could kill these startups.
0:46:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Carried interest is a different case. The income flowing to the general partner of a private investment firm is treated as capital gains for the purposes of taxation, and private equity and venture capitalists gain tremendously by that and it's a huge tax dodge for them.
0:47:04 - Leo Laporte
So it's two. They got you coming and going Tremendously by that and it's a huge tax badge for that. So it's too it's. It's cut you, they got you coming and going?
0:47:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I know they got us coming and going they got.
0:47:11 - Leo Laporte
They got great benefits. So let's let's not have the taxation on our games and let's get the carried interest deduction. And no wonder. Now I understand why Peter Teal and david sacks and ben horowitz are all supporters of an administration that says oh, don't worry, we're going to take good care of you.
0:47:29 - Jeff Jarvis
That's not any tax you don't like we'll get rid of.
0:47:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah uh, the reason they like jd vance again because he worked. He has some peripheral relationship let's put it that way to silicon with teal.
0:47:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I mean, the argument is that Teal got him nominated as VP.
0:47:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and in fact at that dinner. Here's a picture of the dinner at David Sachs' house. That's David Sachs, president Trump and then David's co-host and bestie on the Olin podcast, chamath Palihapitiya, Pala Hapatia. During the $300,000 person dinner that night at the mansion in San Francisco, mr Trump, seated between Sachs and Pala Hapatia, informally polled the room about who to choose as his running mate, even though Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota another vice president shall hopeful was at that dinner. Mr Sachs, mr Palihapitiya and others all said pick JD Vance. According to two people this is from the New York Times, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange. And guess who got picked? Jd Vance. So I guess the question is is this going to be good for Silicon Valley?
0:48:52 - Paris Martineau
I mean I think it's hard to tell Reid Hoffman doesn't think so, these guys have a history of making wild bets on a lot of things that don't turn out and then having their business work because a small percentage of those many, many, many, many, many bets do work out.
Well, can I point out, Tesla would not be around without the subsidies, the federal subsidies for electric vehicles, subsidies which Trump says immediately he will discontinue subsidies which Trump says immediately he will discontinue, and JD Vance has argued that instead of subsidies for elected vehicles we should be doing subsidies for gas powered vehicles manufactured in the US, specifically.
0:49:35 - Leo Laporte
Who would benefit? Let me just, I'm just wondering who would be to benefit if we, if the government, gave everybody who bought a gas powered vehicle seventy, five hundred bucks.
0:49:45 - Paris Martineau
Well, I think part of it is it's-powered vehicles manufactured in the US.
0:49:50 - Leo Laporte
So it's good for.
0:49:51 - Paris Martineau
American cars.
0:49:54 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's just trying to be contrarian. Right, ev is a woke car, so what's the unwoke car? Right, a Model T, and we're going to go back to that.
0:50:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
0:50:08 - Leo Laporte
Reid Hoffman, who, of course, is Humvee. We're all going to buy Humvees.
0:50:10 - Paris Martineau
I do think that one aspect of this that is often that's underexplored and is conveniently left out by the venture capitalists and people like Elon Musk who are throwing a lot of money or claiming to throw a lot of money behind Trump, is that Trump's impact on immigration will have a serious, serious negative impact on the tech industry, because the tech industry lives and dies on immigrant visas. That is a huge percentage of you know tech workers or people who've come here on their HB1 visa and without that visa, that's going to be a definite problem.
0:50:49 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, I think Paris Trump has said things like well, we need to get the best people Right now. He means that often in racial terms, but I think that he could probably be convinced that stealing China's computer scientists would be a good thing. Where it's going to hurt more, I think, in the long run is student pieces, and that's where we get a lot of talent coming in through universities, and I'll bet that's where he won't budge.
0:51:19 - Paris Martineau
Well, I don't know if Silicon Valley, or at least that part of Silicon Valley, is being short-sighted, or if they've got, if they got something there them oh something I guess worth noting here, which we talked a little bit before the show but I'll re-up, is the information did a survey, a survey of some of our subscribers this week, kind of pegged to the news, just trying to get a sense of because our subscribers are kind of unique and that they're like almost all, like tech workers, vc type people and very smart and very smart and are the sort of people that are able to drop a lot and good looking and they've got great skin and, uh, they naturally light up a room and scientists are a little bit concerned.
Yes, um and about, we had about 2500 responses, uh of it and it was asking who they plan to vote for as president and in that response, 59 said biden, 27 said trump and 10 said rfk, junior.
0:52:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, brain, were the brain worm. Brain worm candidates 10 um four percent, said.
0:52:23 - Paris Martineau
other don't know what they meant by that, but I did think it was kind of an interesting Well, isn't Jill Stein still in?
0:52:29 - Leo Laporte
She's in the race, right? Maybe they're, maybe they're green, I don't know. Or Marianne Williamson, maybe they like Marianne Williamson.
0:52:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Crazy land.
0:52:41 - Leo Laporte
It's just crazy land.
0:52:43 - Paris Martineau
It is an interesting world we're living in the news that's happened even during this podcast is wild.
0:52:51 - Leo Laporte
Eric Schmidt just thought I'd throw some Google content in that. Here's the fastest object ever made by humans. Do you know what it is?
0:53:03 - Jeff Jarvis
there's a joke in there somewhere. It does feel like something.
0:53:06 - Leo Laporte
Do you know what it is? There's a joke in there somewhere. It does feel like something.
0:53:11 - Paris Martineau
Well, it used to be a manhole cover actually what it used to be a manhole cover. Yes.
0:53:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, I mean sort of it was a cover of a nuclear test borehole, so they bored it in A little different, a little different, it's not a manhole nuclear test borehole so they bore it in.
A little different. A little different. It's not a manhole, nobody's going to anyway they they dug a long trench for a nuclear bomb to test it and then they put a cover on it so no one would fall in. So it was like an anti manhole cover. But when they did do the test, the the, the cover was blasted towards space at an estimated 240,000 kilometers, about 150,000 miles per hour Going really fast, but that was what goes up.
Well, I don't know what happened to it. No, at that speed it would just keep going. It's just going to keep. See, without John here, I don't know how to explain this, but I believe that that is much more than escape velocity, and so it would not stop, it would just go right out into space.
0:54:11 - Paris Martineau
It would just keep going where To space.
0:54:13 - Leo Laporte
To space yes.
0:54:15 - Paris Martineau
Wow, hanging out there with a Tesla.
0:54:17 - Leo Laporte
If I launched you at 150,000 miles an hour straight up, you'd go into space too. There's nowhere else to go.
You're not going to come back anyway. It's no longer the fastest. The fastest is now the parker solar probe. Nasa I didn't realize this sent a probe, uh, towards the sun. It's going to make its closest approach next year and will probably, by the way, uh break its record, but now because it's slingshotting around the sun. It has gone 394,736 miles per hour on June 29th 500 times faster than the speed of sound at sea level and it's going to go even faster as it gets closer to the sun. It's going to get right next to the ultra-hot plasma surrounding the sun. Take a lot of measurements. It's been up there for some time. This is its 20th close approach, but close is relative, coming within 7 million kilometers of the sun's surface.
0:55:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Now the fastest. I can't convert that to miles. What is that about? 40 miles? I don't know.
0:55:32 - Leo Laporte
What is that? In freedom? Distance units, I don't know Multiply times 0.8. Okay, you do the math. No, I can't. My brain I know. So it's a really fascinating fact. Thank you very much.
0:55:50 - Paris Martineau
Fascinating, fascinating.
0:55:54 - Leo Laporte
Actually Elon is in a little bit of trouble with the EU over X. They say that X has participated in deceptive practices with the blue check mark. I love the Financial Times picture of Elon Elon. There are so many bad pictures of Elon that every journal in the world has some picture of him looking this. He really looks particularly evil here. He does Like he's up to no good. He's being threatened.
0:56:22 - Paris Martineau
Real shiny head.
0:56:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, we all have shiny heads. I have a shiny head. At least I got a head. He's being threatened with hefty fines by the eu over transparency issues. The the concern of the eu was that by giving people a blue check mark just because they paid, it would give people the wrong impression. Regulators in Brussels said, since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a verified status, it negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content with which they interact. The fine could be huge Up to 6% of the total worldwide revenue of Twitter. Not profit, that wouldn't be much money at all. But the company earned $5.1 billion in 2021. That's the last year. Now that it's private, we don't know. But 6% of that is $300 million or something. That's some chance, some change. Uh, musk says no, that's not what happened. On Friday he he posted on X.
The European commission offered X an illegal secret deal. If we quietly censured speech without telling anyone, they would not find us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not, to which the ever salty terry breton, eu commissioner for the internal market, responded be our guest, elon musk, there has never been and will never be any secret deal with anyone and your mother smells of elderberries. The DSA provides X with the possibility to offer commitments to settle a case. To be extra clear, says Thierry, it is your team who asks the commission to explain the process for settlement and to clarify our concerns. Up to you to decide whether to offer commitments or not. That is how the rule of law procedures work. We will see you in court or not. That was the tweet, or what do you call it Z? What do you call it now? Post Just a tweet.
0:58:44 - Paris Martineau
We've said this a million times, but it's still crazy to me that you buy a company that has a verb and then give it an x tweet and then you get, you get rid of you.
0:58:53 - Jeff Jarvis
X out the verb consider what he names his children. He's off his rocker. I'm sorry, he really is yeah, but, but what gets me is look at this through the next weeks. The Wall Street Journal constantly fluffs him. The fact that he's endorsed Trump was the lead story in the Washington Post. Now, why Sorry the Wall Street Journal, wall Street Journal, murdoch why is it the lead story? Why?
0:59:23 - Leo Laporte
Just watch. They do features on him Because they love him. Most important thing in the world on him. Because they love him. Most important thing in the world, yeah, Because he's the richest man in the world.
0:59:33 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it's probably. The answer is less exciting. I think it's probably because the Wall Street Journal's tech and business reporting is a big boon for it. That's what most of its readers are looking for, and the nexus between tech, business reporting and politics. Plus getting a scoop like that probably would put it up on the front of the. It wasn't even a scoop?
0:59:53 - Leo Laporte
I don't. Here's the thing. I don't know if it's doing what they, what rupert, would like it to do. So let me read the top five headlines right now the front page of the wall street journal jd vance to make debut as Trump's running mate. Vance to lead next generation of MAGA conservatives. Usha Chilukuri. Vance steps into a harsh spotlight. How Trump boosted Racist spotlight, right, go ahead. How Trump boosted his Latino and black support by ignoring party advice. That's the first four. The fifth one tech shares log worst day of 2024. Yeah, hello, musk turbocharges Silicon Valley support for Trump. Yeah, that was the lead story earlier today. Right next to it, real estate meltdown strains even the safest office bonds. Uh-oh, joe Biden tests positive for COVID. Yeah, it's. Oh, that's not good.
1:00:44 - Paris Martineau
And he had just said I think earlier this week that he would consider stepping down if he had a medical incident.
1:00:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you and your conspiracy theories.
1:00:57 - Paris Martineau
There's no conspiracy there.
1:00:58 - Leo Laporte
I'm not saying it's a conspiracy theory.
1:00:59 - Paris Martineau
I'm just saying.
1:00:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's interesting that the two have happened in sequence. It may be convenient for some views.
1:01:05 - Paris Martineau
It may be inconvenient for Joe Biden.
1:01:08 - Leo Laporte
COVID's back, by the way. I mean COVID never went away.
1:01:11 - Paris Martineau
I guess COVID never went away I guess it never did go away.
1:01:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, enough politics, pellet cleansing time. We're going to take a break and come back with more and less political stuff. You are watching I forgot what are you watching this Week in Google with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis?
1:01:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Slurp.
1:01:41 - Leo Laporte
Come on, everybody now Come on, let's just take a little.
1:01:44 - Paris Martineau
If I had a slurp, I would.
1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you always should have a slurp.
1:01:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't Always should have a slurp. Yeah, I messed up.
1:01:50 - Jeff Jarvis
When our daughter was a baby, she used to do that. They'd do the afterwards. Yeah, I messed up. When our daughter was a baby, she used to do that. They'd do the afterwards. Love that, love that it was very cute.
1:01:57 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of getting a slurp, next time you go to Starbucks you could charge up your $100,000 EV. Mercedes-benz is going to install 100 charging hubs at Starbucks locations along California's or actually the West Coast's I-5, 400,000-watt EV charging.
1:02:22 - Jeff Jarvis
What executive drives that road regularly?
1:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I know Well, it goes all the way from Canada to Mexico. I mean, it goes all the way down the West Coast, canada to Mexico. I mean it goes all the way down the West Coast. This is part of Mercedes-Benz's $1 billion plan to build 2,000 new EV charging hubs across the globe, not just in the US. Its first station, complete with swanky waiting area and 400 kilowatt charging speeds, opened in Atlanta last year, but now they're going to do them in starbucks. I like evs, I'm happy to ride them, but that's because I'm a woke liberal son of a bitch. So that's all I can say. Yeah, and now.
1:03:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm glad I could charge uh and charge up your, uh, your body and your car.
1:03:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, get a little shot of something and a little caffeine in you. Yeah, ftc has fired a warning shot, says TechDirt, at companies over right to repair violations. It all boils down to the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. It all boils down to the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. Companies apparently I didn't know this are not allowed to claim that using third-party parts or repair shops violates warranty coverage. And yet many companies do that. In 2022, they took action against Harley-Davidson for saying the use of third-party repair parts and facilities violated motorcycle warranties. They took similar action against Weber Grills and Westinghouse. Now there are eight new companies Four air purifier sellers Ares Health, blue Air, medfly Air and Orancy, a treadmill maker called InMovement and, of more interest to our audience, gaming hardware companies ASRock, zotac and Gigabyte. Ftc says you cannot tell customers that using third-party parts and repair shops will violate your warranty. They're being put on notice. They've got to stop saying that on the box. They have to review their box stickers and promotional warranty materials to make sure they don't imply warranty coverage is conditioned on the use of specific parts or services. So this is informational. Everybody should know this. Yet that's illegal and it has been for some time because, thanks to the Magnuson Moss Okay, oh, we talked about the fact that the Kaspersky lab Right, we talked about the Russian antivirus company, has been banned since beginning.
It began a couple of days ago. No, it's beginning in three days, starting july 20th. Kaspersky, very popular antivirus, been used in the united states since 2005. My colleague, john c dvorak, always recommended kaspersky, I think because he knew the founder, eugene kaspersky, who had worked, had gone to a russian military school and then had worked for the Russian military before starting his anti-fascist or Kaspersky Kaspersky. John, just like Eugene, eugene Kaspersky was, it was one of those guys you know, you meet him at CES and it's a party and drink vodka and stuff. So Kaspersky says they're just going to get out of the United States, they're going to start winding down US operations, eliminate US-based positions as a result of the ban. They had initially said we're going to fight it, but they said, after carefully examining and evaluating the impact of the US legal requirements, we've made this sad and difficult decision as business opportunities in the country are no longer viable. Why?
1:06:13 - Paris Martineau
did it ban Kaspersky software?
1:06:15 - Leo Laporte
Because he's Russian. He's Russian, he's from Moscow and there was always this. Part of this came from the accusation that Kaspersky had something to do with the exfiltration of some NSA spy tools. Do with the exfiltration of some NSA spy tools. A NSA contract worker had brought home these spy tools and it's believed he had Kaspersky's antivirus on his computer, that he was looking at these with that. The antivirus correctly, by the way, identified it as malware and then, as many antivirus programs do, quarantined the NSA spy tools and sent them back to the home office, which was in Moscow.
Okay, kaspersky denied that anyone used his software to search for secret information on customer machines, said that the tools on the NSA workers' machines were detected in the same way. All antivirus software detects files. It deems suspicious and then quarantines or extracts them for analysis, they said. Once Kaspersky discovered that the code its antivirus software detected on the NSA workers' machine were not malicious programs but source code in development by the US government. Eugene Kaspersky says I told the workers delete the code, let's get rid of it, we don't need it. It's possible, however, that it was passed on to the Russians because that code was eventually escaped and, in fact, was used against American citizens in hacking attacks. Bad guys got a hold of it.
1:07:57 - Jeff Jarvis
My guess just guess. Stupid, ignorant. But I'm a podcaster so I can say anything. I want is that Kaspersky was probably okay through the years, but once things got crazy in Russia, it was not a good risk.
1:08:10 - Leo Laporte
Survival, you know, and he had connections to the russian military. A second story, uh, that I'm reading from zetter zero daycom. Second story claimed israeli spies caught russian government hackers using kaspersky software to search customer systems for files containing us. Also, kaspersky denies that. In any event, the Commerce Department initially had told I think this was a couple of years ago, had said, and we reported this you know, you can't use Kaspersky if you work in the government or work with the government. Now they're saying we're going to ban it. Commerce officials say they acted after they were alarmed to discover that US state and local governments and critical infrastructure was using Kaspersky antivirus, so they banned it. I guess I can't complain, asked if officials had evidence. This is a little bit like the TikTok, but you know the thing about TikTok the reason I think it's worth defending is it's used by American creators to make speech.
But also to make a living, and it's really a useful tool. Kaspersky, I mean, there's a lot of it's about security. Yes, it's a little closer to home, right, asked if officials had evidence the Russian government was using Kaspersky software to spy on customers, commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other government officials declined to say. I think it's probably because it's Russian and it's security software. It's maybe a little different than dji and uh tiktok, maybe I don't know.
1:09:58 - Paris Martineau
I don't know but it's not great to have security concerns about your security software right, that's what I'm trying to say.
1:10:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's typically a disqualifying yes, people let that stuff I mean it works at a lower level they let it into their computers. They have access to all sorts of stuff. Okay, I told you there wasn't a lot today. Did I mention?
1:10:20 - Paris Martineau
that You're doing such a good job of selling this show.
1:10:24 - Leo Laporte
I told you the show would be boring today. Wait a minute, let me see. Do we have?
1:10:28 - Paris Martineau
I told you you'd have a bad time listening to us today. I told you.
1:10:31 - Leo Laporte
You shouldn't listen. Google is in talks to buy whiz. Yeah, there's some google news down there. There's a really interesting stories. This is should we do. Uh, well, it's not changelog, it's just a google story. Uh, it's, it would be, according to the new york times, its biggest acquisition ever 23 billion dollars. I'm not, I don't even. Wiz is an enterprise security company.
1:10:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not that familiar with it and fairly new, I think, at least new in its heat.
1:11:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is more than they paid for Motorola Double what they paid for Motorola in 2012. It has not gone through yet, but there is perhaps some antitrust concern. Uh there, regulators under, according to the new york times, always quick to take a shot, regulators under president biden have taken a hard line against acquisitions by all tech giants and corporate consolidation in general, that's lena khan, I assume yeah, her yeah, uh, so there's. There's one that's Lena Khan, I assume. Yeah, her, yeah, so there's one.
1:11:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Google story the next story down I found very interesting. I DMed Vincent Schmalbach.
I have never heard of him, so I don't know much SEO expert, but what he contends in this piece is that Google has changed its default to not indexing everything on the web. What? This is a big story, if it's true. And I mean it makes sense because everybody screams Google's ruined. Well, no, because the web is ruined, because everybody's throwing this junk on. And now, with AI going on and all these fake reviews and all this stuff.
And so he says that they're now engaged in selective indexing. He says, from my experience, important if there Google now seems to operate on a default to not exit basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need, based on again this is him speaking various factors One, extreme content uniqueness. Two, perceived authority. Three, brand recognition Makes sense. And four, temporary indexing and de-indexing. And he says he's seen cases where they'll index something because it's breaking news or something, but soon after will be de-indexed. If this is the case, I DMed Danny Sullivan, but it was not too long before the show when I found this. I haven't heard back to ask you know, is this the case? Because, if so big? Because, on the one hand, it's an effort, I think, to get a more quality view of the web and Google. On the other hand, what if you start something new? How do you say hello, I'm here, can you notice me?
1:13:20 - Leo Laporte
That's going to be tough. This is the problem Google faces. He even calls it an existential crisis. There's a lot of crap, a lot of awful lot of gaming going on of Google, so they need to have some sort of way of beyond page rank. Page rank did it all for a long time. Page rank the basic premise of page rank is a page will rank higher in Google search if it is authoritative, and the way they determine authoritativeness is how many other pages linked to it.
1:13:54 - Jeff Jarvis
But the problem, is with with greater weight given to those themselves.
1:13:58 - Leo Laporte
Have more links right yeah, yeah, it goes all the way down. So if you have an authoritative site linked to you, that's good. I call it google juice, uh, but it's been gamed so much now that I maybe page rank doesn't work that well google. Google says they still use it, but he's saying, yeah, maybe not. What they're looking for is sites that are that have eat expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, which they've said for a while in terms of where they rank things.
1:14:27 - Jeff Jarvis
But if they don't even index things, if you can't find it on Google, that's a big deal.
1:14:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, if something's not indexed on Google, it's in effect not on the net.
1:14:40 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the tree that fell in the forest.
1:14:42 - Leo Laporte
No one can hear it. He says Google has transformed from a comprehensive search engine to something more akin to an exclusive catalog.
1:14:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Which, as a Google user, is not a bad thing.
1:14:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, but no, I believe that's true. I you know, in the old days, no matter what you searched for, there were always, there's always some pages. It seems to me more and more maybe I'm searching for more abstruse content, I don't think so that more and more I'm finding no results for stuff I search for. Yeah, I agree, fancy pants.
1:15:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's hard to find fancy pants that are along your specs.
1:15:20 - Paris Martineau
It is difficult to find fancy pants that are as fancy as you want them.
1:15:24 - Jeff Jarvis
That you wear with a tunic. Fancy pants that go with tunics.
1:15:28 - Paris Martineau
Very hard. Yeah, those would be some fancy pants.
1:15:30 - Leo Laporte
Needless to say, my ex-wife was a natty dresser. She actually really is quite a natty tunic, tops and pants on amazon, you see, this is the problem this is the problem, yeah yeah, we're back on tunics, okay all right, um, yeah, that's interesting I mean, that was interesting story, one guy saying it. Yeah, but it kind of rings true. I hate to say it and it would make sense. And I don't even blame google, because I feel like they're just they're trying to do a good job. It's harder and harder, isn't it?
1:16:05 - Jeff Jarvis
and they know what ai is going to bring to the web and it's going to ruin the web. But the other thing is, if you add now onto this the fact that so on Facebook, the other day I wrote something on my blog and I wrote a paragraph on Facebook and I linked to it on my blog, they took it down. Facebook did. Facebook took it down and I of course, complained I haven't heard from Facebook, I didn't do anything. I whined about it on Facebook. I didn't know anything.
1:16:30 - Leo Laporte
I complained, I whined about it on. Facebook. Why did they take it down they? Didn't just derank the post. The post was removed. Removed.
1:16:35 - Jeff Jarvis
And the first reference I saw had no explanation, no way to appeal. The next one said it was self-promotion, that's all Facebook post is you can't self-promote on Facebook, exactly.
So you know they've brought news down to next to nothing. They're bringing links down, and if you want to start something new now, if you're, let's say, in the news business, you want to start something new. You want to find an audience. You can't do it socially anymore and you can't do it through the web anymore, and it's unclear how you're going to get discovered through AI, if at all, and so it's going to be very difficult, I think, to break into things.
1:17:19 - Paris Martineau
Have you all heard of dead internet theory.
1:17:20 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, what is that?
1:17:22 - Paris Martineau
There was a recent update to this.
1:17:23 - Paris Martineau
That theory of the internet being just bots and AI. At this point there's nothing left. Yeah, people don't make stuff for the web anymore.
1:17:38 - Paris Martineau
What are they? So you're saying they don't do websites. The dead internet theory is an online this is from wikipedia an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to intentionally manipulate the population and minimize organic human activity. I do think that there is a kernel of truth there.
I don't think that's happening but, that's the idea that a significant percentage of a percentage of what you are seeing online increasingly is not posts by people you organically have followed, not posts by people you organically have followed. It is somehow automated or regurgitated links or regurgitated content from years ago. It is that the internet feels less fresh and current maybe that's because we are less fresh well, speak for yourself paris is fresh I'm fresh, I'm hip, I'm young it's an interest, I mean it's.
1:18:37 - Leo Laporte
At this point, all we can say is it's a interesting theory that rings true, but google's not saying and we may not know.
1:18:44 - Paris Martineau
We may never yeah, and I mean, and it's not all dead there's there's some, I think, that it's often used to refer to, like the observable increase in content generated by like chat, gpt or LLMs that you start to see on like Reddit posts where you're like was this written by a real human? Or is this someone just kind of like seeking an LLM to build up karma, or like followers on an account for some purpose? I don't yet know.
1:19:12 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I never think that Maybe I should start. I don't. I feel like when I'm reading Reddit and I guess it depends on are there any subreddits that you think are particularly prone to this?
1:19:28 - Paris Martineau
Off the top of my head, no, but I would assume it's things like the most popular subreddits, like I think you see this a lot with, like when people obviously I don't know whether or not it's true or not, but I think on Reddit people like to call out like perceived bot accounts when you look at their posting history and realize they're just automatically reposting old, like other people's content again and again to get your account up to a high amount of karma so that you could sell it to someone. So I think, like in subreddits like AskReddit or things like that, whatever you'd say is like the top 10, 20 subreddits. That's where you'd see these claims popping up more often.
1:20:10 - Leo Laporte
I also must be following places where that this is. Nobody wants to karma farm on this on the subreddits that I'm on. I guess that's probably the problem here good for you, probably not a problem yeah, gosh, I think I wouldn't. You, don't you think you would recognize? Uh? Oh you know what's a good example of this.
1:20:32 - Paris Martineau
What the things exactly? Because you would recognize it in some ways. You've seen those posts going around that are like a Facebook post of a really wacky image posted with a caption that doesn't really make sense. Do you know what I'm talking about?
1:20:46 - Paris Martineau
No, yes, I know what you're talking about.
1:20:47 - Paris Martineau
Those are the worst about those are the worst. Uh, it's often like a weird hodgepodge of like a person that kind of looks old over a birthday cake that is like made of tires or something that says like it's my 107th birthday, I'm a veteran, make a wish and like or like. All I need is like likes for my birthday.
1:21:08 - Leo Laporte
Um where do you see this? What? What is the goal?
1:21:13 - Paris Martineau
I see people reposting it on yeah, instagram or twitter um let me see facebook it's engagement, farming it's um yeah because if you put something nonsensical, then people will ask like what do you mean or what are you talking?
1:21:29 - Leo Laporte
about. I see that on twitter actually. Yeah, I see that on x, I think so it's an engagement hack, yeah yeah, but and what do they gain? I'm always twitter's full of games that I never understood. Like bots following you, are they hoping you'll interact with?
1:22:04 - Paris Martineau
them or I don't know. I mean, I think it's interesting. Now you don't know, rabbit bot, draw me a picture of a rabbit it would. Now you don't see those fun ones anymore. Now you see, like my twitter, dms from people I don't follow is all bot accounts at a level that I've never experienced in. Today is my 15 year anniversary of being on twitter, unfortunately, in my 15 years on twitter or x. I've never seen this much spam.
1:22:30 - Leo Laporte
How do you know? It's your 15th year? They send you a little cake.
1:22:34 - Paris Martineau
Aw yeah, they send you like a little thing to post Nice. So let me look at my messages right now from Hi. Do you often go online for this, says Donna Bruce follow me and make friend. Hi, gorgeous queen, what if I deposit money to your PayPal? What will you do?
1:22:51 - Jeff Jarvis
with it All this stuff.
1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
I get like three of these a day I get simply high yeah, I get a lot of those, that's all just high yeah, yeah I'm sorry, I was watching a crazy clip on twitter of what? No, it's not, it's just. This is how they get you. This is why it works. This is why it works. You know, I'm I'm trying to work, do my job here, trying to make cogent comments, and I foolishly opened x and I'm going oh all right, you got to describe it now.
1:23:28 - Jeff Jarvis
What, what, what squirreled you?
1:23:31 - Leo Laporte
let me see if I can go back to it. See, see how you react to this. Well, here's a good one. Here's how a backdraft can happen when the house is on fire.
1:23:42 - Paris Martineau
There's lots of firemen from historic vids. Yeah, they put up a lot of that stuff yeah, this is just garbage content. There's some some newsy content Wow, it's all videos I don't have.
1:23:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh man, I don't know that they're going for TikTok baby. This is.
1:23:55 - Paris Martineau
Well, no, it's because you pause on them.
1:23:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, if I just went.
1:23:59 - Paris Martineau
It's your fault.
1:24:02 - Leo Laporte
Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
1:24:04 - Paris Martineau
I wouldn't see any.
1:24:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh I. What's interesting about Twitter is everybody seems to have a different Twitter. No two people on Earth see the same. Twitter or Facebook?
1:24:14 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, that's why the idea that something is trending is ridiculous? Yeah, because the numbers for the most seen thing have tiny numbers. Yeah, there is no math.
1:24:28 - Leo Laporte
It's just stuff. I just see this stuff and I get like here's a guy samurai-ing a watermelon posted by Liberty Axe. It's like BuzzFeed.
1:24:38 - Jeff Jarvis
That's because you looked up axes. No, it's just random. That was Paris this is for you.
1:24:45 - Leo Laporte
Now, if I go to my following feed, it's the people I follow, and so that's well, it's still the same three pictures of Well, that's because he has. Covid One, two, three, four of the same picture.
1:24:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Five it's news, Leo it's news Okay.
1:25:03 - Paris Martineau
Everybody's retweeting the news about the president. That's not that surprising, yeah but that's not helpful.
1:25:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, blame your friends.
1:25:14 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's not helpful. Well, blame your friends.
1:25:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's not x's fault, that is your friend's fault, because this is they all think that they are the only ones who have the news. You know what I like seeing when I go to x right there on the top.
1:25:24 - Leo Laporte
Live on x. We are okay. Admittedly, we're not the number one video. The number one one video is Las Vegas City Council considers LDS Temple Plan. But we are number two. We lose to that yeah. Yeah, apparently 713 people want to know what the Las Vegas City Council is up to.
1:25:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Only 273. You got to watch for a minute. Maybe there's a fist fight. You got to turn it on for a second.
1:25:51 - Leo Laporte
Here we go. This is fascinating.
1:25:53 - Paris Martineau
I don't see any fist fight. Please do not allow anything over 150 feet, not only.
1:26:01 - Jeff Jarvis
She sounds emotional.
1:26:02 - Leo Laporte
She seems very emotional about this.
1:26:04 - Paris Martineau
At 11 pm. Thank you.
1:26:06 - Paris Martineau
I'm entering all of this into the record. Fine, oh man, that is so much emotion for a viewer. Please, please, not after 11 pm.
1:26:16 - Leo Laporte
Now this guy's in a suit. Maybe he is a Mormon.
1:26:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's the pro and con.
1:26:20 - Leo Laporte
So she's the con.
1:26:20 - Paris Martineau
Well, it's a man, so he's going to have a smarter and less emotional opinion.
1:26:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Clearly is what you mean, of course. Clearly, I'm the owner and broker of luxury homes of Las Vegas and personally sell over 100 million of residential real estate every year.
1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I understand now why everybody wants to see this you know what's great though they're now watching this on our stream, so we're going to get the benefit. Yep, you see, we went up. We're now 277 viewers.
1:26:50 - Paris Martineau
And those are all those people who want to hear about the LDS temple. Welcome to this Week in Google Gotcha.
1:26:56 - Leo Laporte
Aha, and you thought you were whatever. I can't even finish the thought. I care so little. So the dead internet in mass media is dying, apparently, according to buzzmachinecom, the death throes. And is that because of the coverage of the presidential election?
1:27:24 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's much bigger than that. But yeah, I'm pissed about it, jeff's mad online. I'm very mad, can?
1:27:31 - Paris Martineau
you believe that?
1:27:32 - Leo Laporte
But not mad enough to avoid quoting the Gutenberg parenthesis. I find every opportunity I can. He is the author, of course of the Gutenberg parenthesis, a fine book available at gutenbergparenthesiscom.
1:27:48 - Jeff Jarvis
With discount codes, people yes there you go.
1:27:50 - Leo Laporte
It's actually quite a good book. Now when's the new one coming out? The web we weave oh, that's a good one. You're going to be competing against my son, though. I got to warn you. I'm wondering what the latest is on that. I saw the first hardcover copies of the cookbook. He said I only have four, you can't have it. But I looked at it. It was beautiful. We did give it to my dad, who was celebrating his 91st birthday. Oh, that's cool. That's very cool. And Henry, my son, wrote in here. The third generation of Laporte's to publish a book, and so it was kind of cool.
1:28:24 - Jeff Jarvis
My dad has published books. I have published books.
1:28:26 - Leo Laporte
And so now Henry joins the club, the fraternity. What did your dad's dad do? No, his, my dad, his grandfather. I know what did your father's father do, oh, my grandfather's. My grandfather, no, your grandfather, in other words, my father's father? Yes, he was an architect In fact designed. His most famous work was what's the big Catholic church in New York City St Patrick's yeah, St Patrick's. He designed an alcove at St Patrick's, Cool.
1:29:03 - Paris Martineau
Cool, that's cool.
1:29:04 - Leo Laporte
He also was, I think, a frustrated cartoonist. He really wanted to be a cartoonist. His cartoons are very funny, but he ended up being a cartoonist A frustrated cartoonist, is a very good job.
1:29:13 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a very angry person.
1:29:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, his cartoons were really fun.
1:29:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Were the Laports recently on these shores or going way back.
1:29:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, it goes way back 17th century. Yeah, on that side, and on the other side goes even farther back to the Mayflower. No, yes, blue blood, blue blood, blue blood, baby. Yeah, my D-A-R. Yeah, my grandmother was in the Mayflower Society. I am the direct descendant of Gosh. I used to remember his name. Now I can't remember his name. Anyway, he was on the Mayflower Soon.
1:29:50 - Jeff Jarvis
We'll see all the names on the chat. Yeah, they'll find it for you.
1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, actually you know what I could do, that it was Edmund, something. Let's see. Probably there weren't that many people on the Mayflower right who were the signatories of the Mayflower Compact. I'm trying to remember what he did. I'm sure I can find it. Let's see. Oh, there's Miles Standish and John Alden. Edmund Margason no, no, no, no, no. Edmund Freeman Was it Edward Fuller? I think it was Edward.
1:30:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Fuller. Oh no, it's Edward.
1:30:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, edmund, it was Edward Fuller. He arrived with his wife and son Samuel, in company with his brother Samuel. Names were in short supply in those days.
1:30:41 - Paris Martineau
Survived by their son, Samuel Samuel.
1:30:44 - Leo Laporte
Samuel and Edmund is pretty much everybody. And then Samuel joined. Yeah, that's right, he died he was an orphan. They died soon after arrival in the settlement. That's him, yeah, I remember that. But they continued on. He had a kid, so they continued on. He was in the growing group of colony orphans, but they continued on and eventually, generation after generation. I was born.
1:31:12 - Paris Martineau
Do you think he knew when they were pulling up on the Mayflower that one day his progeny would be a podcaster Someday?
1:31:21 - Leo Laporte
your people will become podcasters. What, what is that?
1:31:28 - Paris Martineau
What pods are they casting?
1:31:29 - Leo Laporte
Switchcraft Switchcraft definitely. Google reportedly, according to Engadget, offered EU cloud firms over half a billion dollars to keep fighting against Microsoft. By the way, this is from Lawrence Bonk. It didn't work and the organization entered into a settlement. Actually, the story comes from Bloomberg, so let's give I like to give the original source, so we had Engadget in there, but I'll give it to Bloomberg. Samuel Stolten Bonk just took it from Stolten. Google offered cloud firms 470 million euros to fight Microsoft in a failed attempt to derail their antitrust settlement with Microsoft that freed the US software giant from a potentially costly EU case. Oh, this is the SISB story. Actually, we talked about this on Windows Weekly. Cloud infrastructures services providers in Europe, or SISB, ditched the complaint at the EU's antitrust arm over Microsoft's software licensing processes, even though Alphabet said take some money, keep suing. Wow.
1:32:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, microsoft v Google is a fascinating back and forth. No kidding, screw you no screw you.
1:32:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, google's offer was conditional on sysp maintaining its eu antitrust complaint.
1:32:56 - Jeff Jarvis
this is all out in the open well, microsoft has funded all kinds of of industry organizations to go after google right so it's, it plays both ways and, by the way, a founding member of SysB, amazon Web Services Interesting.
1:33:16 - Leo Laporte
You'd think they would not be happy with Microsoft, particularly. Google has long trailed Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market, although, according to Bloomberg, it's starting to see impressive results. It broke even for the first time last year and in fact even posted a profit of 900 million dollars last quarter. It's viewed as one of the firm's best bet for growth as the core search advertising business matures, though I guess it was worth 470 million euros, that's incredible I can't believe that's out in the public. Wouldn't that be illegal? Maybe it's not. No again.
1:33:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Transport trade associations are for. Wow.
1:34:03 - Paris Martineau
Corporations are people too. They can do whatever they want.
1:34:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess More than we can. Yeah, all right. There's a lot of AI stories here, jeff, that you put in.
1:34:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's see what's actually worthy of talking about.
1:34:17 - Leo Laporte
We already mentioned the OpenAI, arianna Huffington.
1:34:20 - Paris Martineau
I've got one that I want to talk about. It's not in the AI section.
1:34:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh go.
1:34:24 - Paris Martineau
It's that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a $27 million mansion. A 27 million dollar mansion. That's famous to me because when all the opening eye stuff went down, uh information reporters, as well as, later, new york times and wall street journal reporters, camped out outside. Turns out it's a lemon. He's accusing it of with the pool leaking water into the foundation and whatnot.
1:34:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Um so this is a watch, the. Do you watch the video?
1:34:51 - Leo Laporte
The video is amazing. Oh, we should play the audio. Will we get taken down if we play the audio from this?
1:34:56 - Paris Martineau
And in San Francisco it's a guy talking. That sort of space is extremely hard to come by.
1:35:00 - Leo Laporte
This is the guy who represents the company that built it, that sold it to Sam Altman for $27 million.
1:35:11 - Paris Martineau
He's now suing them for millions.
1:35:12 - Jeff Jarvis
It's got a sauna, it's got a steam room, it's got a massage room. The quote-unquote shoddy workmanship has led to the pool leaking a flood of water into the home's lower level last August and the pool is a four-way. What do you call them? Infinity pool, infinity pool, four-way, always, all things legal.
1:35:32 - Paris Martineau
Infinity pool Orderless. Infinity pool Four-way Always. All sides, all things legal team estimates the cost to repair the pool would be upwards of $4 million, and that's not counting the quote. Unconnected bathroom sewer line that dumped raw sewage on the ground.
1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
Numerous leaking irrigation lines and the water intrusion at skylights, among other issues. One of the complaints was that the developer didn't hire qualified contractors and then didn't pay them on time, so they retaliated by filling drainage and sewer pipes with contractor bags and debris. Oh my god, so it couldn't happen to a nicer fella it's a nice house notably has a bat cave leading into the garage. Yeah, I think they showed that in this Troon video they show the bat cave.
1:36:25 - Paris Martineau
It's a wellness cottage on property.
1:36:28 - Jeff Jarvis
That's where the sauna and the steam and and the massage are. Those stones came from the original building in 1906 oh wow, which was probably which was the year of the of the earthquake.
1:36:40 - Leo Laporte
So, god knows, maybe they fell off, I don't know was um, so there was a building there and they tore it down to build I don't know when.
1:36:48 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, well, there has to have been something downtown san francisco I guess there's always something it's at the top of lombard street, oh my god, yeah it's six lots altman last year.
1:37:00 - Paris Martineau
This is from the daily beast. Altman last year told time about another headache with his home that didn't have anything to do with build quality. Quote this coyote moved into my house and scratches on the door outside. Altman told the magazine, which also ran pictures of the wild animal on the Swanky property. It's very cute, but it's very annoying at night.
1:37:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, you know it is the coyote's territory, it's actually a media executive.
1:37:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's okay, ai will take care of all of you. Wow, sam, don't worry, don't worry.
1:37:30 - Paris Martineau
Sam, there are some very dramatic photos of this coyote which I'll put in the chat.
1:37:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh do.
1:37:37 - Paris Martineau
Coyote had a full photo shoot.
1:37:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's quite a beaut. Hello, I'm your coyote. I'll be your coyote for the evening.
1:37:46 - Paris Martineau
Hey, you didn't get a permission to use my material in your large language model.
1:37:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he's sleeping on the couch, aw, oh he's very cute.
1:37:56 - Paris Martineau
He's pretty cute, honestly.
1:37:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and there's a oh. You see, there's the coyote being scared by the roadrunner. So that's what he needed. He needed a roadrunner in the house. Well, you just call animal control Sam and they come and they get the coyote. In fact, it might even be micah sergeant who comes and gets him. He does that kind of thing, you know, he rescues animals, really he does that sort of thing.
He rescues coyotes from billionaires homes well, that, not that sort of thing, but he does rescue animals. He uh, yeah, he's uh, he volunteers for one of our local uh, he loves animals and one of our one of our local, I guess animal rescue societies.
1:38:37 - Jeff Jarvis
God, he's amazing, I know we do that he gets.
1:38:40 - Leo Laporte
He got trained in like how to. He showed me a video of him catching a raccoon. I don't know, am I not supposed to talk about this? Is this private? I don't know, he was. I I'm, I'm impressed. He's a hero. Yeah, that's impressive. It was a. It was a raccoon who'd gotten a stray and he has to put on these gloves and he sits there very oh no, it was an owl, it was a barn owl and he sits there very quietly to the owl, trusts him and he goes yeah and gabs it, he puts it in a bag and he runs off.
Anyway. That's what the video, that's what I saw in the video. It could be there's more to the story. No, he's really. He loves animals. That's really great. We did oh we didn't do this. Come to think of it. We did this on MacBreak Weekly yesterday, but I think you might have something to say about this, jeff. You probably know Taboola Taboola.
1:39:40 - Paris Martineau
Oh, taboola, taboola tabula, oh so tabula is uh, they call them they call it the chum right the chum bucket.
1:39:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, they're the bottom of the stories.
1:39:43 - Jeff Jarvis
That gets you to click, whether you like to or not.
1:39:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, you won't believe these celebrities and how they look today, that kind of thing, um, and apparently they're still. Not only are they still around, they're making big deals. Tabula's revenue as of last year was 1.4 billion dollars.
1:40:04 - Jeff Jarvis
They did a 30-year deal with yahoo 30 listen to that, so the idea that Yahoo's going to be around for 30 years.
1:40:13 - Leo Laporte
And the deal is for native advertising, which is a little scary. That's the ad that looks like an article but it's not, and maybe isn't as well. You know, warning there's warning. Labels aren't as obvious as they ought to be, so now they're doing a deal with apple, just the privacy company.
1:40:36 - Paris Martineau
oh classy I mean that is why does apple need to be doing a deal with taboola?
1:40:44 - Jeff Jarvis
lay down with dogs, man apple's gonna come up with fleas. Uh, apple, apple, apple has always failed at selling ads. Exactly that's why the privacy was a bug, not a feature, and it became something to sell because they always failed at ads. So I guess they want more money and go to Taboola. Adam Sandinola, the head of Taboola, is a very nice guy, but they've encrapified the web.
1:41:09 - Leo Laporte
I forgot, but you showed us this last year. Paris Martineau not only knows what a chum box is, she went as a chum box for Halloween last year.
1:41:18 - Paris Martineau
That's right, and I still argue, I should have won the office Halloween costume, but I did not. I think so. What did win, did you tell us? Oh, I can check.
1:41:27 - Leo Laporte
Hold on. This is so funny, so she has a poster board around her neck on a rope that says news from around the web. And then did you make these up, or were these real?
1:41:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I did. I made some of these up, of course, some of them were real.
1:41:40 - Leo Laporte
You won't believe what the Teletubby's sun baby looks like. Now that's real.
1:41:48 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's a real one. That's the one that inspired and same with Top Gut Doctor. I beg all the Americans to throw out this vegetable. And it's a photo of an avocado screaming. That's also real. The ones that are fake are leading doctor reveals number one reason you're going to hell. And a photo of a shoe being boiled. That I got from a early Jenny. I thing it says old man got ripped fast by doing this one weird trick daily.
1:42:19 - Leo Laporte
That is actually brilliant, anyway, why app you?
1:42:24 - Jeff Jarvis
should have won.
1:42:25 - Leo Laporte
I don't think Apple is going to do that, but they are going to use Tabula sales team to sale, sell advertising for Apple news and Apple Stocks. But this is the thing that scared me and it scared Jason Snell when we read this yesterday from Axios Tabula and, by the way, this is Adam Signola telling Axios this. So, but I mean he's not lying I don't think Tabula will power native advertising placements in Apple News and Apple Stocks, again with the native Interesting. Is there any other way to define? I mean, could it mean something else? Native advertising? It doesn't mean a chum box, right, or does it?
1:43:08 - Paris Martineau
Oh, it can, yeah, okay oh, it can yeah okay, but I mean I, would assume that apple isn't wouldn't have signed this deal to put a chum box in their like stocks news platform people by the way, that's not free, right, right.
1:43:27 - Leo Laporte
Uh, they apparently had an exclusive deal with nb NBC Universal. That didn't go so well, so Tabula's got the deal, along with Yahoo. Yahoo last month announced a deal with grocery giant Kroger to place ads on Yahoo's ads on Kroger's retail media network. What a world. Meanwhile, I'm going hat in hand to our audience saying can you help a podcaster out? Advertising dollars have just gone. We only have one ad on the show today and that ad's selling for a fraction of the cost it used to. But I'm not going to do a deal with Taboola to have an AI. Leo, sell you brain pills. So we're hoping that you might help us out.
Seven dollars a month to join club twit. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get, uh, additional content and I think, with the new twit that we're, as we mentioned, we're closing the studio in a few weeks. We're gonna everybody's going home to work from home. So Benito will be working at his house producing this show and it will be coming out of my house, out of the attic, and we're going to save a lot of money that way. But we really do want to continue to do what we're doing. We'd like to add new shows and I think for that to happen, we've got to get your support.
Go to twittv slash club twit. Sign up, join the club. There's a wonderful group of people. You can hang out with them in the discord and hang out with me and all of our hosts. Uh, as we do more and more stuff in the club, I'm hoping now, having this in the attic, that I can just, you know, toddle upstairs and, uh, you know, do an hour or two, do some soft chew. It'll be fun, uh. So please join us.
1:45:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Twittv slash club twit what's the tackiest advertiser that's ever wanted to advertise on twit, do you?
1:45:20 - Leo Laporte
have a few, you remember um, yeah, no, I don't really remember, because it's it's so quick for me to say yeah, yeah, we're not doing that. We get you know every once in a while somebody wants to sell gold. I always say no to that, or e-cigs. There are a lot of supplements. Oh yeah, I always say no to cryptocurrency Supplement sellers. You know, the truth is, I don't think we get as weird a batch of stuff as broadcast radio, which will take anything.
1:46:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, satellite radio is the worst.
1:46:04 - Leo Laporte
California. Psychics drives me crazy. Yeah, we never had a psychic ask to be on the show.
1:46:10 - Jeff Jarvis
You just have them on the air instead.
1:46:14 - Paris Martineau
That's true Every week. Here we are predicting the future.
1:46:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, you have heard that there is a satanic panic going on on tiktok. You've heard that, have you?
1:46:22 - Paris Martineau
I have heard that there was a uh kind of fun not that tech related article um put out by harps this week. Close enough about the hot new trend of uh tiktok exorcisms um and kind of the exorcism uh, it's their cover story social media is their cover story.
I'll read you a little uh excerpt from here. Um, theirs is spiritual warfare with the algorithm in mind, exorcisms that come with online subscription plans, and tiktok and facebook schematics whose videos carry click worthy titles. Like she was tormented by demonic witchcraft spirits, can demons read our thoughts? And demons leaving people on a zoom call. Check it out. Reflection was because it was partially in all caps. These media ministers live stream and cross post. They produce movies, write how-to books and go on national tours well, I'm not surprised, you know.
1:47:27 - Leo Laporte
I mean, did you ever see gene scott on hebrews? Do you know what I'm talking about, jeff? No, no, so he had a channel. Maybe it was only in the bay area, but I don't think so. I think it was national. Um, he was a tv preacher, but he, as far as I could tell he, didn't do much preaching, he would just sit there in a cowboy hat. Oh yes, dr gene scott's, that ring a bell.
1:47:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I'm afraid people are going to say that he looks like one of us does he look like?
1:47:58 - Leo Laporte
he actually looks like boris johnson more yeah, he does, though, you know.
Anyways, he got older yeah, uh, phd stanford university please yeah, well, maybe he did get a phd in theology from Stanford, but that his main, his main thrust was just sitting there and saying send me money, send me money. Kind of like me in the club twit pitches, basically yeah, yeah, maybe if I got a cowboy hat and a three piece suit, so. But I mean, but where is he going to go? Somebody like that Tick tock, there's not gonna, nobody's gonna watch you on channel 72. Uh, you do it on tiktok, I guess yeah right, oh, look at the pictures.
1:48:41 - Paris Martineau
The demons are gonna be exercised you?
1:48:44 - Leo Laporte
you think he looks like?
1:48:45 - Paris Martineau
speaking of uh well, no he does look like a cross between you and Jeff, aged up and sent back and forth.
1:48:53 - Leo Laporte
This is towards the end. This is what he looked like.
1:49:00 - Paris Martineau
That's you guys.
1:49:01 - Leo Laporte
But the great thing is he was always on, like he was on 24-7. So if you were a little stoned and it was late at night, you just turn that on and let it run and he'd get upset for no reason and start yelling at people he does. I'd never do that.
1:49:19 - Paris Martineau
Wait, how did he afford the airtime?
1:49:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, he would ask for donations.
1:49:23 - Paris Martineau
He asked for donations yeah, people fall for these sort of scams.
1:49:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean I don't know why you would donate to him he does. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean I I don't know why you would donate to him.
1:49:35 - Paris Martineau
He does. He have you guys heard of he looks like a cross miracle spring. Oh yeah, peter popoff of course, yes, yes, another classic scammer another class. I was just about to the ad was playing in a like city md urgent care a couple months ago here and I googled it and I was like wait a second, this has been going on for how many decades. It's a man whose whole shtick is that he'll sell you spring water that'll cause miracles to wait, it says no, do not ingest the miracle spring water.
1:50:05 - Leo Laporte
So you can request it, but don't ingest it, okay, uh? So what are you supposed to do with it? You're just supposed to look at it.
1:50:14 - Paris Martineau
Here's a thing from truthinadvertisingorg. Within a couple weeks the water arrived in the mail along with a long letter from Popoff in which she prophesied a sudden release of money. Somewhere between $1,900 and $19,000 was headed our way. All we had to do was use the water as directed. One other thing send exactly 19 why? Because one is the number of the father and nine is the number of new birth. It's a really interesting, a little takedown. The truth in advertising does. It kept me entertained. My entire emergency room, or, uh, urgent care room, wait. Basically, it kind of goes back and forth with this person sending increasingly elaborate letters and little gifts and trinkets to anybody who replies to the um, miracle spring water, ad.
1:51:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, until they get you so I have just sent two pictures into the discord, but I accidentally sent them both to my wife, who's probably going to come in and put me in the old folks home for what I'm sending her. What?
1:51:13 - Leo Laporte
are you doing so? You're okay, though. You were in urgent care, everything's all right. You just stubbed your toe or something.
1:51:19 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, no, I just had a cold that had been going on for a while.
1:51:23 - Jeff Jarvis
So I have an urgent care story for you from Brooklyn. Ooh, because, as you already know, I put newspapers in my kitchen cabinets. I didn't cook. Every few years I would decide, no, I've got to learn to cook. And I inherited some pots and pans from my grandmother.
I decided I was going to make asparagus like asparagus. But I didn't have a regular asparagus pot. I just did a pot. So I put the water in and I kind of steamed the asparagus in the pot you were going to boil Okay, steam, but the handle was loose on it and as I took it off, all the boiling water fell on my stocking feet. Oh, not good, and this is so it hurt. It hurt. And so this is before the days of Lyft and Uber. And I tried to call a cab and it was a very short way to the hospital in Brooklyn, couldn't get it. I finally called a car service. They wouldn't take me. Then I said, okay, for 20 bucks. We did. Finally somebody took me. So I get to the ER room in deep Brooklyn and there's gunshot wounds around me. There's everything else around me and the doctor said they wanted to put a badge on me that said victim of affluence.
1:52:29 - Paris Martineau
What did me in was asparagus the last time you ever cooked, it was that they looked at you and they're like who did this to you?
1:52:38 - Jeff Jarvis
and you're like asparagus, oh they should have said victim of asparagus yes, that too yes so, so, so they're.
1:52:44 - Leo Laporte
They're asking you what, what happened? And you said well, I, I spilled some hot water on my toes. Yes, yes, yes. I was making asparagus, he got a gunshot wound.
1:52:54 - Leo Laporte
He's got an ax coming out of the back of his head, but you, you got some hot water on your toes.
1:53:00 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I just want to make sure you understand exactly.
1:53:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I had to stay out of work for a week. I couldn't get to the office. Wow, that's very much like Michael.
1:53:07 - Leo Laporte
Scott and the infamous breakfast sandwich incident.
1:53:11 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I don't remember that one.
1:53:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he burnt his foot on the Ken Norton the Foreman.
1:53:16 - Paris Martineau
Grill.
1:53:19 - Leo Laporte
George Foreman Grill.
1:53:20 - Jeff Jarvis
I didn't know that.
1:53:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, he so. Michael Scott of the Office likes to wake up to the smell of cooking bacon. So he'd keep a George Foreman Grill in his bedroom Because I don't have a butler, I have to do it myself. It is one of the funniest, one of many very, very good office episodes kenya's biggest protest, by the way. I wanted to ask you this.
So this is from a really good site called rest of world at rest they're just great, they do global sophie schmidt global tech stories, and I was thinking about the very good investigative reporting lately from pro publica and and I think there are. You know, I'm giving money now to the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Financial Times and I think there may be places I should better spend my journalistic dollars and I'm wondering if you guys have recommendations. I'm happy to the information, is money well spent?
1:54:26 - Paris Martineau
And I guess I kind of what sort of news are you looking?
1:54:29 - Leo Laporte
for? Well, I'm just thinking I want to. Propublica is an example, and so is the rest of the world, where I feel like I want to support these kind of great grassroots journalistic efforts where they really do. I want investigative journalism. I feel like we really need, at this point, an independent fourth estate that is going to look into corruption. You know, speak truth to power. Um who?
1:54:56 - Paris Martineau
is that those are good the 19th is a really good one okay, what is that I like? The information's incubator for media oh, you're kidding, it's 19th.
1:55:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I didn't know that.
1:55:11 - Jeff Jarvis
19th, 19th news, yeah, so it's for women and news, um, um, that's a good, I like uh talking points. Memo for political tpm is great.
1:55:22 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it's not exclusively like investigative stuff, but 404 media, which we've talked about a little bit love and I am a member there.
1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
I think that's a really good one, yeah. Yeah, I think it's important, since we do see journalism is uh struggling to support independent journalism I couldn't agree more.
1:55:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's I'm. I'm about I'm in the middle of writing a post um saying burn down the house with the old ones, yeah.
1:55:53 - Leo Laporte
As are you. I know I'm very disappointed with the New York Times. You know, and I watched the interview with Joe Biden that what's his name did.
1:56:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Lester Holt.
1:56:09 - Leo Laporte
Lester Holt. That peeved me. It peeved me too, but it really peeved me at end because biden said maybe next time we can talk about issues and things that make a difference to the american people instead of gossip. And uh, yeah, I think that we don't. I understand commercial news entities that have to focus on revenue and are going to want to do it. It's always sensationalism. That's why this exorcist on TikTok doesn't surprise me, because sensationalism breeds sensationalism. You get your senses get dulled and you need something more extreme and even more extreme, and even more extreme. And that's what's happening in mainstream media. I saw it happen on AM radio. It was really the demise of radio, I think, is they started chasing audience with increasingly sensationalistic hosts. And I see the same thing happening to what we had in the past kind of considered prestige media like the networks and the big newspapers.
1:57:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm very proud of the capture I just put up on Discord. I happened to get.
1:57:14 - Leo Laporte
What's with?
1:57:15 - Jeff Jarvis
you guys, lester Holt, come on.
1:57:18 - Leo Laporte
Said Biden to Holt, yeah, although he's wearing a little bit too much man tan on this one.
1:57:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, it's my TV Okay.
1:57:26 - Paris Martineau
Is that your tiny little tabletop TV?
1:57:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It is, it is. It is the crappy. Only one HDMI. It looks like Trump.
1:57:35 - Leo Laporte
I know it looks like an Oompa Loompa, yeah, there's something going on, okay, but that's just the TV. All right, that's my TV. What is it with you guys? Anyway, after all, turn off vivid mode, says Anthony Nielsen. All right, all right, um, all right, all right. Kenya's biggest protest, this is. So this is what. Back to that, back to the rest of the world, uh, which is another great one of them I really do want to support, especially because we don't get much global coverage anymore.
1:58:03 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, right, exactly, we get horse race coverage of the election, and that's it'd be wonderful I would kill if we could interview sophie schmidt on the show she's the publisher.
1:58:12 - Leo Laporte
She's the founder. Kenya's biggest protest in recent history played out on a walkie-talkie app, zello. More than 40,000 Kenyans have downloaded Zello since protests began. Wow, this is what you've always said, jeff is that social media gives people voices. People can organize and get something done through it.
1:58:36 - Jeff Jarvis
And because the technology was hard to shut down. Last night I spoke at an event was held by NOS. Remember Rabble and Noster used to do scuttlebutt. Now he's doing Noster. Oh yeah, and he started a new thing. And there was a journalist, a very, very smart journalist, next to me who was talking about how to get social media and journalism in authoritarian countries and to get around, and we've got to go back to a distributed world. I'm ashamed of myself that I threw my discourse into Twitter so it could be taken over and you stayed loyal to Mastodon and Activity Pub that whole time.
1:59:11 - Leo Laporte
God bless you which we still run our Mastodon instances at twitsocial. It's free, open to all. If you are a listener, and I think that's worked really well, both on the forums, which are twitcommunity, and the Mastodon, which is twitsocial. Because if you don't say, oh yeah, I saw you talk about this on Twig, or I listen to Twit or you know Leo7. If you don't say that I don't add you, and that you know leo said, if you don't say that I don't, I don't add you, and that, I think, really has made it a very good local uh mastodon instance. You know the, the, the content on the local timeline has. It's really good, including people like glenn fleishman, uh, and of course, uh, you're on mastodon. You're not on uh on twitter social, but uh, you're on mastodon as well. That's good, it's really good. I like it. It's a little slower. Yes, okay, zello.
2:00:07 - Jeff Jarvis
The last one. The only AI story that I would have mentioned is 77. It's real quick. The OpenAI is, according to andre caparthi yeah no, well, oh, that one, that was a different one. Oh, you can do that one.
2:00:25 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's line 77. What would you like to talk? What did I say?
2:00:28 - Jeff Jarvis
level 72 but pick your, take your choice you got two you pick.
2:00:31 - Leo Laporte
Let's look at the open ai agi progress report. Uh, this is from benedict ev, who actually is a very good blogger, writes about this stuff. This is all very well as a thought experiment, but is there any a priori reason why we know that these are the steps in the order? Bloomberg says open AI imagines our AI future.
2:00:53 - Jeff Jarvis
So they're saying that they're level one, which is chatbots true. Level two is reasoners human level, problem solving and they say, oh, strawberry, their new thing is going to be there, okay. Level three is agents, by which time you better trust the thing to go out and act on autonomously. Level four is innovators ai that can aid in invention, wow. And level five is organizations ai can do the work of an organization. It it all strikes me as a bit of BS.
2:01:19 - Paris Martineau
I feel like there's a lot lot of things happening between those steps. Exactly. What is it? Chat bots. And then what? The second step?
2:01:28 - Jeff Jarvis
is Reason Reason.
2:01:30 - Paris Martineau
Okay, how are we going from a chat bot that gets every like six thing wrong to reasoning?
2:01:35 - Jeff Jarvis
That has no sense of meaning Human level problem solving, exactly, exactly.
2:01:40 - Paris Martineau
And they think it's a linear path too.
2:01:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, right, right, right. So I just thought that was interesting. They keep fooling themselves. Well, agi is around the corner, we're almost there. And then when it is, oh boy, you know, we'll be living on Uranus before you know it. Uranus before you know it, uranus.
2:02:01 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry you shouldn't let me near social media. Here's Mark's love on threads Kamala, right now You're just watching videos again.
2:02:12 - Paris Martineau
Leo, I thought you were laughing at Jeff saying Uranus.
2:02:15 - Leo Laporte
This is a clip from Veep, where Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as the vice president, with her team, is running as fast as she can to get, probably, to the Oval Office because the president has COVID. So anyway, I don't know. I'm easily amused. This is squirrel. This is the thing you got to understand. Human, especially male, perception is drawn to motion. So when there's motion.
2:02:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's a boy and a few other things. Girls, you get some motion in front of me. I'm like what's that? I don't know what you do.
2:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Are you drawn to motion? I can't speak for you, I can only speak for me. So if you see something yeah, it's probably true for you too, if something at the corner of your eye, because that could be a cheetah waiting in the bush to jump out and grab you. So you're attuned to that If the thing doesn't move.
2:03:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That's why cats sit very, very still before they jump on their prey, because then the prey doesn't see them because they're just sitting there. So New York Times pitch pot, which I love. I wanted to try to say this before other people say it seriously, but it is probably too late already. Biden is faking COVID as a pretext to step aside.
2:03:24 - Paris Martineau
Okay, we're not here for conspiracy theories, come on.
2:03:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's a joke. Oh is it? Oh it's a pitch pot.
2:03:33 - Leo Laporte
Pitch pot is saying that other people are going to say this.
2:03:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what the New York Times are going to say I've heard You've got to understand irony. Yes, it's hard these days.
2:03:41 - Paris Martineau
It's hard.
2:03:42 - Leo Laporte
New York Times pitch bot at Doug J Balloon. Is that him?
2:03:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh look, that's him he has a nice ear bandage.
2:03:52 - Leo Laporte
I think we should all wear ear bandages from now on. Too soon, that's too soon. That's too soon, clearly too soon. Uh, oh yeah. So these are all ironic. Joe biden has covet. Here's why that's bad news for joe biden. I get it. I get it now. New york times branch pot. Whether it's democrat kamala harris encouraging women to support pro-choice legislation or Republican JD Vance encouraging women to remain in violent marriages, both parties VP candidates have strong messages for women. Whoa, whoa.
2:04:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's my plan. Here's my plan. Biden adds two extra seats to the supreme court, appoints both himself and kamala harris, and then democrats can have a truly open convention pitchbot.
2:04:46 - Leo Laporte
Pitchbot is in a fertile, fertile era.
2:04:49 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I mean so much insane political news has happened in the last week.
2:04:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It is I do not envy being a political reporter right now or ever sorry, one more, one more times have been tough in this new jersey town since they closed the old bribe-taking factory. So when senator bob menendez offered a workaround gold bars they finally had something to cheer about. But now the woke mob wants to take all that away.
2:05:14 - Paris Martineau
I hate when the woke mob stops oh, that mob stops senators from being corrupt.
2:05:19 - Leo Laporte
They'll do that every time.
2:05:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sorry, I lied one more. The Dow keeps closing at record highs, so why does it feel like it keeps closing at record lows? He's brilliant, he's a math professor, I think Is he, he is.
2:05:35 - Leo Laporte
That's all one guy writing it. That's good. Yeah, he's at.
2:05:38 - Jeff Jarvis
University. He's at Rochester and he's I think that's where he is Somewhere up there in cold country. But a feature was done on him without his real name by one of the papers. But he's the Tom Lehrer of our age. You know, I don't know his real name, but he's great. Oh, doug balloon is not his real name uh, no, I know, you never know doug jay, you never know, you never know uh, what was he smoking that day when he started this, and I'll call it doug jay balloon and he's a math professor.
2:06:11 - Leo Laporte
That's that. That makes it even better like that. Yeah, uh, from the verge, sam. Actually we got some phone news. Let's take a break and then we come back. We'll talk about the new Pixel, the Pixel 9, and Samsung's new AI tool on the Galaxy Z, fold 6. You're watching this Week in Google with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis Good to have you here. This is from Allison Johnson reviewing the new tool, the image generating AI tool. You draw a simple sketch and it turns it into an image. She says the tool is ridiculous, fun and slightly worrying. Here's one An orange cat.
2:06:56 - Paris Martineau
Really big cat.
2:06:57 - Leo Laporte
Really big orange cat, a truck. This is on the Z Fold 6, which is kind of cool. So she took this picture on the left, or just this whole picture. She took a picture of some poppies in a shipyard she obviously lives in San Francisco and drew a very crude bumblebee on it, to which the AI responded with very crude bumblebee on it, to which the ai responded with a perfect bumblebee. In fact, you wouldn't probably know that that's a fake, I would guess yeah, no obvious giveaways bumblebee yeah, because you know that's, because it's on a real picture, right, and bumblebees don't have fingers.
2:07:37 - Paris Martineau
There's a lot of tricks going on there. There's also some motion blur.
2:07:40 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that ghostly pirate ship is fake yeah.
2:07:43 - Leo Laporte
From Olympic Sculpture Park. That's pretty good. This is fun, though there's nothing wrong with this right.
2:07:53 - Paris Martineau
She drew a giant green plastic bear, but it's very easy to see where you can take this the wrong way.
2:08:01 - Leo Laporte
Right put a top hat on a hair. How about that? Well done. I wish every one of these had the original I do too yeah, it'd be fun to see what she's not good packaging sketched image is available in the galaxy z fold 6 and the z flip.
They haven't said whether they'll make it available on other Galaxy phones, but that is pretty typical of Samsung. They've also committed to bringing AI features to 200 million phones this year alone. I'm going to have to break out my Flip 5, see if I can do it. It looks like a lot of fun, and we have seen leaks now of the new google phones, thanks to the french fcc. Uh, the I'm sorry, no, this is the nCC, the Taiwanese FCC. Apparently, they have revealing photos they are pretty revealing of the Pixel 9 Pro, the Pixel 9 Pro XL and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
2:09:09 - Jeff Jarvis
I think I might have to do it. My battery's going low.
2:09:12 - Leo Laporte
What we have heard and again, these are rumors. They haven't been announced yet, although this is really a pretty good rumor because it comes from a national agency that's regulating these things what we have heard is that the Pixel 9 Pro not the Fold, but the regular will have all the same, will have the same normal camera, but with a new telephoto camera. It's really, though, the computational photography that Pixels do that make the pixel images so amazing. The display crease seems somewhat reduced on the Fold, also, slimmer top and bottom bezels than the original Pixel Fold. I am not huge on folding phones. I've had them. I have both the Galaxy Fold and the Galaxy Flip. I like the Flip because it's small, but I ended up using a regular phone. I just maybe maybe it's just me, but the form factor does not ultimately win. So pixel pixel event I think google has announced the event, have they not? Next month?
2:10:15 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, they did. We talked about a few weeks ago.
2:10:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I think it's coming up because they're beating apple this time yeah, sure, in their dreams, take that apple. Yeah, we're gonna announce it first, anyway, um, google announces surprise pixel line hardware event in aug. Let me get the date for you. August 13th Made by Google. Event on the 13th.
2:10:45 - Jeff Jarvis
We're in New York or California. I'm pretty sure it's in California because it's at 10 am Pacific.
2:10:51 - Leo Laporte
It looks like it's at Google in Mountain View, yeah, so I guess we better be covering that. What day of the week is that?
2:11:06 - Paris Martineau
Tuesday.
2:11:06 - Leo Laporte
It's a Tuesday, so we could. I don't know if we do iOS today, that week or the week or the other week. Well, we'll look into it. Remind me, Benito. Maybe Jeff you'd like to join me august 13th, yeah what's the? Date again august 13th. August 13th 10 am.
2:11:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I've already added my calendar just because I'm that much of a oh I think we'd already discussed this, I'm just did.
2:11:28 - Leo Laporte
We, paris, you're welcome to too, if you like to talk about pixel phones I probably am going to have to work, to be honest honest.
I know you got to wash your hair, I know. Anyway, we will find out if this leak is real, but I think it is, given that it's coming from the Taiwanese FCC. Four models 9, 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL and 9 Pro Fold. This is the Pixel 8 XL Pro. It looks similar, but there's some design changes. It'll be interesting. And that's your google change log. No, I have a change log. Let's do a change log. Play the trumpets. The google change log. Some cool things coming to youtube music, music, sound search rolling out. These are this is official. It's also testing ai generated conversational radio.
2:12:24 - Jeff Jarvis
You'll have to be a us premium subscriber all right listening to jason calacanis for an hour, so the hum to search is very cool.
2:12:35 - Leo Laporte
So you hum to search. You can query it by humming, Like what's the song? Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Do you think it might be able to do that? I don't know. Is it available? Let's see. Some users had it in May before the feature was rolled back for some reason.
Probably because they realized most users are too bad at maintaining pitch Tap the magnifying glass icon on the top right of YouTube music to access a waveform button. No, I mustn't have it. That would be cool, though, where you could actually hum to it. And then, oh, I really want to try this Search. Do you see a wave? I don't see a waveform anywhere.
2:13:26 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't either no.
2:13:31 - Leo Laporte
Maybe if I yeah, yeah, yeah, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da. It just searched that many da's it searched it came up with I'm blue, da-boo-dee, da-boo-da, da-boo-dee, da-boo-da.
2:13:50 - Paris Martineau
Da-boo-dee, da-boo-da, did it come up with a Queen song.
2:14:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't even know what's the police song. Yeah, I came up with that. And gypsy woman, she's homeless and the beatles oh bloody well, that's pretty good okay yeah, but it's not what it's supposed to be doing. I know, but I don't have it yet. You're supposed to get a waveform uh, that sound search rolling out to youtube Music for Android and iOS starting now. They also confirmed that they are testing AI-generated conversational radio. Now, this isn't what you thought it was.
No no, no, you generate a radio music station by describing what you want to hear.
2:14:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, okay.
2:14:40 - Leo Laporte
We'll see how that is. That also, I don't have it yet on my phone, but uh, here here, uh, here is an example from nine to five, google ask for music any way you like. He said play queer hip-hop beats, and that's what he got. Okay, okay, so that's. Uh, that's coming to youtube music. Do you? Does anybody use you? I do, because when you pay for youtube premium, you get the music for free.
So, yes, that's why I use youtube music yeah for all of your music no, I also have apple music and amazon prime music and, uh, some other music.
2:15:18 - Paris Martineau
Do you have Spotify? I don't have.
2:15:19 - Leo Laporte
Spotify. No, because I'm not a hip person like you.
2:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, we don't like Spotify.
2:15:24 - Paris Martineau
It ruined the podcast In this house. We hate Spotify.
2:15:28 - Leo Laporte
Are you a Spotify fan?
2:15:30 - Paris Martineau
I have Spotify. All the youngs love Spotify.
2:15:34 - Leo Laporte
It's your culture, it's your people.
2:15:35 - Paris Martineau
That's. The problem is that Spotify is the worst, but people love it.
2:15:39 - Leo Laporte
I don't even know if it's the worst I always like to discover. Tuesday was good, it's not great, is it? It's not good.
2:15:45 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I don't know what's wrong with it. Why is it bad? Is it the interface.
2:15:49 - Paris Martineau
It's just an extension of the music industry.
2:15:51 - Paris Martineau
They're always trying podcasts or audiobooks and I don't want to listen to either of those on spotify. I keep my podcasts and music separately.
2:15:58 - Leo Laporte
Don't put my podcasts in my music.
2:16:00 - Paris Martineau
I agree youtube's doing the same be disgusting. I mean, I it's just. It's not a phenomenal app experience. I don't think there's anything that stands out to me as uniquely bad about it, but it's not an app where I'm like, wow, this is a delight to use they don't pay their artists. It's like all the the labels.
2:16:16 - Paris Martineau
There's a bunch of AI music. It's very corporate. There's a lot of really bad things.
2:16:19 - Jeff Jarvis
They ruin podcasting. All you need to know.
2:16:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh, control music with your. Oh no, that's Amazon. Okay, google is ending an experiment that lets you annotate search results to Google Notes. Now, this was only an experiment. It didn't last very long, it didn't.
It didn't last very long. It didn't. It didn't even last a year. The idea was you could add your own notes to search results, which is, I think, a good idea. You have to opt into it. It's part of the search labs. If you did, you could see and add annotations featuring text and image, so would you see other people's annotations. Yeah to links to search results. Yeah.
2:16:59 - Jeff Jarvis
There were some early things on the web like that way back my child, but the problem was looking for the best place for spam.
2:17:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that's probably it. It was gamed right um yeah, twitter had those community notes didn't, as x, taken down.
The community notes I think, that's a really important way to handle disinformation. Personally, I agree, and there are good people, like molly white from last week, who put their time in to actually annotate stuff and say, yeah, but here's the facts, or whatever. In fact we um, I think that happened to us yesterday. Steve gibson found a tiktok. He thought was really funny. A couple of british guys neighbor comes up to the ring doorbell and says, uh, my wi-fi doesn't work anymore. He said what do you mean? He said you put a password on it? No, it's my wi-fi, yeah, but it's going through my house. It was funny, it was cute. Steve tweeted it and then, uh, I think immediately community notes said no, that's, those are two actors, it's staged. They do this all the time, which was great.
That was very useful to get rid of disinformation right Took some of the fun out of it, though. Gemini on Android just got more useful, according to Android Police. On the lock screen, you can now use Gemini, the Google AI-powered assistant, on the lock screen. You can now use Gemini, the Google AI-powered assistant, on the lock screen. It can now help you to general questions even when your phone is locked. Okay, you know, Gemini is pretty good Right now. I think my favorite is Claude by Anthropic, the sonnet, the newest Claude, but Gemini is good. In fact, I signed up for that when they started using it. Well, we did duplicate one story, so that's it for the Google changelog. There were only three stories. There you go Now. You've heard it all. This ain't what it used to be. Changelog ain't what it used to be. Change log ain't what it used to be. Is there anything we missed? I think I got a lot of the stories in I think you got.
2:19:04 - Jeff Jarvis
You got it pretty much in wow, yeah, it's all in there.
2:19:07 - Leo Laporte
Feller open ai illegally. This is from the washington post barred staff from airing safety risks. This is from some whistleblowers who asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to probe the company's allegedly restrictive nondisclosure agreements. People have criticized those nondisclosure agreements before. Sam Altman, in fact, was so embarrassed he said, oh, we don't do that. And then it came out they do do that. Yeah, you do, yeah, you do. Seven-page letter sent to the SEC obtained by the Washington Post, openai made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation. Can you even do that?
2:19:50 - Paris Martineau
I don't think you can do that you can waive your federal rights.
2:19:54 - Leo Laporte
Staff was also required to get prior consent for the company if they wanted to disclose information to federal authorities. Again, the fbi comes a knocking. You ought to get talking. Don't go ask sam, he's busy. He's got uh sewage in his pool he's got a lot of things on his mind open ai did not create coyotes coyotes.
He's got coyotes open. Ai did not create exemptions in its employee non-disparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the sec. If you were to tell the sec about any security violations, that would be a violation of your done disparaging. You're disparaging us. Okay, you cannot you. This is just blatantly you can't do this. You can't do this. You can't do this. These overly broad agreements the Post says violated longstanding federal laws and regulations meant to protect whistleblowers. Of course you just can't do that. We'll see if the SEC does anything.
And Mistral, which is the French open AI, has released Codestral Mamba, which is designed for code generation. The reason I put this in the rundown is just I think it's interesting to see that there are some. There's more knobs you can turn on LLMs. There are things you can do. So Mistral has two new entries one, a large language model that is math-based and one that is for code generation. They want to improve the efficiency of the transformer architecture by simplifying and I don't know, I think, what this means, but this is what it says by simplifying its attention mechanisms, mamba-based models, unlike more common transformer-based ones, could have faster inference times and longer contexts. In fact, this context is 256,000 tokens, that's twice that of OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0. Twice that of OpenAI's chat GPT-4.0. And a bigger context means you can look at a larger group of documents or of information and incorporate that into your answer.
It seems to make a big difference. Code Estrella Mamba You'll be able to use it through Hugging Face.
2:22:16 - Paris Martineau
It's an open sourcesource Apache 2 license. So good, I will say. Mamba vs Transformer does sound like it should be an action movie.
2:22:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it does, and, according to Proof News, this seems like this would be another place to kind of invest in. They're doing investigative journalism. They analyzed a database used by many companies, created by a luther ai uh called. Uh well, it's like, has a funny name like the pipe, um, the pile, I'm sorry, the the pile, the pile. The pile contains material from a lot of creators YouTube creators, but also the European Parliament, english Wikipedia and, weirdly, a trove of Enron Corporation employee emails released as part of a federal investigation some years ago. Investigation some years ago. Uh, the pile was originally created.
So, with the, with, I think, the good intentions of, of letting ais train on information, but not just from big companies, but anybody subtitle they use. One of the things they did to create the pile, which is a pile of text, is uh, take subtitles from 173 000 youtube videos, 48 000 channels, and this data was used by nvidia, by anthropic and by apple to train their ai. This, the data set, called youtube subtitles, contains video transcripts from con academy, mit, harvard, the wall street journal, npr, the bbc, the late show with stephen colbert last week, tonight with john oliver, and contains video transcripts from Khan Academy, mit, harvard, the Wall Street Journal, npr, the BBC, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert Last Week, tonight with John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Apparently Jimmy Fallon's not worth the energy Just going to leave the.
That's a good judgment, actually, yes, Proof News also found material from YouTube megastars like Mr Beast, marques Brownlee and Jack Septiceye. Found material from youtube mega stars like mr beast, marquez brownlee and jack septic eye. Now, now help me out here, benito, because I've never heard of what does jack septic I do?
2:24:26 - Paris Martineau
I don't know that one.
2:24:27 - Leo Laporte
He says I play video games, but I also make other content like try not to laugh. Oh he's a pewdiepie wannabe uh-. They learned from this. Well, he's got 30 million subscribers. Jeez Louise. What are we doing wrong?
2:24:47 - Paris Martineau
here, letting anybody publish anything.
2:24:52 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I should play more Elden Ring, obviously. So Proof News created a tool to search for creators in the YouTube AI training data set so you can find out who's in there if you are in there. They didn't ask permission for anybody. Dave Wiskus, who's CEO of Nebula, which is a streaming service partially owned by its creators Our own, renee Ritchie, was on nebula for some time. Dave whiskus says it's theft. It's theft, it's disrespectful, especially since studios may use generative ai to replace as many of the artists along the way as they can. Will this be used to exploit and harm artists?
2:25:32 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, absolutely, whiskus says you put it out there in public people well, that's the debate.
2:25:38 - Leo Laporte
They watched it that's what the president of microsoft's ai, uh suleiman, said. Hey, it's on the internet. Uh, that means it's public domain. It's not public domain obviously can still be copyrighted. But he said everybody has a right to read it, including our ais. You put it out in public I agree agree.
2:25:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris does not. I agree. Okay, why not?
2:26:03 - Leo Laporte
Why not?
2:26:04 - Jeff Jarvis
You're worn down, I'm worn down. Let's get our picks of the week.
2:26:10 - Leo Laporte
I don't even know how long it's been, because John wasn't here to start the timer. As far as I know, we've been doing this for hours.
2:26:15 - Jeff Jarvis
We started at 540 my time. It's now 807 my time, so it may feel like three hours, but it's not.
2:26:21 - Leo Laporte
It's not. So this would be a good time to take a break when we come back. Your pics of the week. You're watching this week in google with the wonderful but tired paris martineau. From the information, it's okay. It's okay.
2:26:34 - Paris Martineau
You just close your eyes not president trump did it at the convention. I'll fall asleep briefly. You can fall asleep, it's okay, briefly, in the middle of the ad break.
2:26:42 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis also here. What Hello. Okay.
2:26:50 - Paris Martineau
Who is that? What's going on? That yellow man, what can?
2:26:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I do with the camera. Why does it do this?
2:26:55 - Leo Laporte
I just I don't know, I don't know, jeff, no one understands it.
2:26:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I need John to come do a house call, oh it, just it changed briefly there. Well, I did that.
2:27:03 - Leo Laporte
I did that it wasn't magic, so I in the new studio, to avoid the sallowness of the complexion. I will have many lights and good cameras.
2:27:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I and good cameras. I don't know. We'll see if I can avoid it. How many square feet is the new studio versus the old?
2:27:21 - Leo Laporte
It's as big as this tabletop, oh, it's bigger than the first. I don't know if you remember. So in 2004, when I started doing the radio show, I did it from my house for like a month, because it was so, because it was like you'd get out of bed and you'd go okay, I'm going to do a radio show. It was too. There was no, I'm going, I'm going in, I'm going to do a radio show. So we decided to rent a little tiny, really tiny, probably, 10 by 10 room, 100 square foot room, in the top of an old bed and breakfast and I did the show from there and it was much better, just because I was getting up, getting dressed, going somewhere to do a show.
And then, slowly, as we expanded, we took over the whole cottage and when that became too small, we built the Brickhouse studio. That was 15,000 square feet or something. It was huge and very nice. And then we were forced out of there because the owners sold the building. So we took everything and moved here to the East side studio. We've been here for eight years, uh, but it's time, I think. But how?
2:28:25 - Jeff Jarvis
many square feet was the cottage studio versus your final studio?
2:28:29 - Leo Laporte
This one that we're going to, the attic the new attic the new attic is a 400 square feet compared to 100. But it's not all devoted to the studio. I got a little TV there.
2:28:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I got to ask another question, given what you just said. Are you going to get dressed?
2:28:48 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I promise Pants, I promise.
2:28:52 - Leo Laporte
I promise I'm always going to get dressed. Anthony Nielsen, who's going to be one of the people who's helping me with the studio, says your camera's always fighting the color balance of the window's daylight with the warm lights of the inside. You've got two different colors.
2:29:08 - Paris Martineau
It's also the changing light, and the light changes, it gets golden.
2:29:11 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, but more lights would overpower whatever you get from the window.
2:29:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you'd have to cover the windows, I added lights. You shouldn't need to cover the windows though.
2:29:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's all right. Let me show you what this looks like though.
2:29:30 - Leo Laporte
It's a huge window you need blackout.
2:29:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Now you're getting nothing All the way up there. Yeah, all the way over there.
2:29:36 - Leo Laporte
That's nice for you, but crappy for TV.
2:29:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah exactly, there's a light. There's a light.
2:29:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, that's pretty good. It's done pretty well. I don't know what to do.
2:29:46 - Paris Martineau
We're going to seal off the windows in my you have to basically beat the sunlight with unnatural light, and that's really hard.
2:29:53 - Leo Laporte
I want, if anybody who's listening knows, or maybe you guys know so there are two small here. I'll show you. There are two small windows behind me that will be. I don't think they'll be on camera, but we're going to have wider shots that allow you to see more of the studio. But I'll show you in this shot. It's these two windows up here, little square windows I want to get. You don't want to get stained glass, fake stained glass applique.
2:30:23 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I've got a recommend.
2:30:25 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think I just got mine from Amazon, but I have stained glass appliques on my yeah window in my bathroom and it looks lovely what I'd really like to do is have the have a stained glass with the twit logo in it.
2:30:35 - Paris Martineau
Oh, yeah, that's so cute.
2:30:36 - Leo Laporte
That might be asking too much, I don't know.
2:30:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, don't do a stained glass, yeah, just do plastic.
2:30:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, it won't be real stained glass. You can get someone to do that. We'd make a little church. The old question.
2:30:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, when we come to Petaluma, can we come to the studio or no One of you can?
2:30:54 - Leo Laporte
you can bring Jake, we can never be in the same room twits gonna change as a result we sometimes have live twits, but yeah, no, there will never be more than I shouldn't say never. Maybe they'll be a little on team, it might be. I mean, it's big enough I could do a round table there. I guess I'd have to get some more cameras or something.
2:31:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know, it's changing you'll learn, you'll figure it out.
2:31:20 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, uh, paris martineau pick of the week uh, my pick of the week is a story I've been following for quite some time, which is, um the decline of aussie media. Carlos watson, the founder of Aussie media, was found guilty of fraud this week and faces up to 37 years of prison. If you recall, this is a media company. That kind of the downfall started. What was it a couple of years ago when Ben Smith, for the times uh, reported on uh very evident fraud happening? Basically, um, let me see and find what was ozy, what was ozzy's thing.
2:32:09 - Leo Laporte
What were they trying to do?
2:32:11 - Jeff Jarvis
it was a website, it was a podcast, it was a digital media company, it was black media and it had many fans, but not in all cases.
2:32:21 - Paris Martineau
But not as many as they claimed there were.
2:32:24 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the issue.
2:32:24 - Paris Martineau
There was a 2021 fundraising call during which, I believe, the CFO of Aussie Media misled Goldman Sachs executives by impersonating a YouTube executive. He literally pretended to be the guy on the phone and then got caught later and a huge investigation has come of this, because that's kind of blatant fraud. He, I believe, was found guilty of fraud in an earlier case and Watson, the founder of it, who from the beginning has been like oh, I had nothing to do with this. Ozzy is great, it's a huge, booming media company with lots of fans and active readers was found guilty of fraud for both, I believe, this incident and then also kind of overestimating other things.
2:33:15 - Leo Laporte
Ozzy, why is it diverse? Overestimating other things, OZY-wise a diverse.
2:33:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Remember Katty Kay quit BBC to go be on OZY and then suddenly arrived there and was oops, and she went knocking on the BBC's door and said can I come back?
2:33:25 - Leo Laporte
They say it's a diverse, global and forward-looking media and entertainment company focused on the new and the next. I don't know why I've never heard of this.
2:33:34 - Paris Martineau
Well, that's the problem well, many people hadn't heard of it, but they told people that it was, you know, the next big thing oh, it had, it had. But I said fans I mean dumb investors prosecutors presented the jury with evidence showing that watson had sent emails to investors claiming aussie made 12 million in 2017, while aussie's tax return for that year listed less than 7 million in gross sales so I could have done this.
2:34:00 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, I am a youtube executive and I think twit is the best thing that ever happened to youtube a million views, thank you, bye um, because we actually had more than 7 million revenue at our peak. So this was yeah, I see they only have 3.99,. They have 4,000 subscribers. It was never big 267 videos. So what is the fraud?
2:34:28 - Paris Martineau
though it was to investors specifically, was um that I believe, uh, they had said that in this call they were representing two goldman sachs employees. As um youtube, uh, a youtube exec saying that they were discussing a 600 million dollar takeover of aussie.
2:34:53 - Leo Laporte
Um they almost made it wasn't happening. This is the fake it till you make it thing. And I think there are a lot of people in the world think that's okay, you know, and there's a fine line between believing in yourself and saying, yeah, we're going to be big, or you know, we've got some great dreams, and then actually pretending that you're big if you're not. They had, they had a bunch of podcasts. I, if you're not, they had, they had a bunch of podcasts. I mean, they were doing kind of what we do, except not, uh, not about tech, obviously, in fact about quite a variety of things. Um, they had ozzy fest, the ozzy genius awards. Here's uh, ozzy on pbs. Wow, the late show with CBS. Wow, the Late Show with Colbert.
2:35:36 - Paris Martineau
There was a Zoom video conference on February 2nd I think in either 2020 or 2021, where Ozzy arranged between the Goldman Sachs Asset Management Division, which was looking to invest $40 million in Ozzy, and YouTube employees, and it was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals. He was running late, apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he was having trouble logging into Zoom, and suggested the meeting be moved to a conference call. Everyone switched to a conference call. Then Alex Piper was like oh, goldman Sachs bankers, ozzy's a great success on YouTube. It's racked up all these views and ad dollars.
Carlos Watson is a great leader. He's fantastic, as this is from the New York Times story. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered. After the meeting, someone on Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr Piper, not through the Gmail address that was provided to participants before the meeting, but through Mr Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken to her before. Someone else, it seems, had been playing the part of Mr Piper on that call.
2:36:52 - Leo Laporte
In fact, it turned out to be Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ozzy. In fact, it turned out to be Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ozzy Yep. He's a voice changer.
2:37:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he then pleaded guilty. Ah, so I didn't know that Sundar Pichai testified. Yes, because they had claimed that he had offered to buy the company for hundreds of millions of dollars.
2:37:14 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yes and Pichai was like no, we didn't.
2:37:19 - Jeff Jarvis
That's pretty much all the testimony.
2:37:19 - Paris Martineau
This has just been a story that I've been following since the beginning because the founders' claims online were incredibly aggressive. Like I am being framed, this is a hit job and they kept digging in farther and farther into his own lies and it is really great to see justice be served and yep and found guilty uh jail time to name your company what's the punishment?
well, he could get up to 37 years, but it's a white color crime case, so it probably won't be that. It is kind of wild, though, to name your company ozzy in reference to ozzy mandias a poem and tale about the hubris of man like and then have it conclude in such a way.
2:38:05 - Leo Laporte
Gaze on these wonders. The jury deliberated for three days after an eight week trial. He was accused of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. Many of the government's witnesses revealed new details about deception at the company. Watson knew the company was failing, said the prosecutor, but he was determined to turn Ozzie and himself into the next big thing. Well.
I can't really say I blame him, but obviously you can go too far in that. Fake it till you make it. There's fake it till you make it. There's fake it till you make it theranos and there's fake it till you make it. You know, I don't know, mark zuckerberg everything.
2:38:43 - Paris Martineau
I mean it seems, yeah, it is kind of an interesting example of, yeah, another one of these going awry.
2:38:52 - Leo Laporte
It seems like but they have big events. I mean mean I'm seeing. You know they had a Manhattan. Every year they would have the Aussie Fest in comedy, music and talks in Manhattan. It looks like a big deal. It's pretty fancy.
2:39:12 - Paris Martineau
I am forgetting the specific details of this so I could be doing the wrong, but I recall a story coming out at the time when this was all. I can't find it in Google search because now everything's about how he just got convicted of fraud, but there were details at the time showing that, like how they got the events was through a similar, obviously much smaller scale kind of seemingly fraudulent activity, like maybe saying you have this many subscribers, but they were actually like newsletter, like readers or something like that I think you know.
2:39:38 - Leo Laporte
sad to say, I think this happens in podcasting a lot and it kind of hurts us because we, you know, we tell the truth in our numbers and forever, from the day one, there were companies like ours who really tried to find out what the numbers were, and there were companies who said we got a million listeners, you know, and uh, we're all lumped together. And so I I think that the podcast numbers are one of the reasons podcasting struggles is because the numbers are not widely believed and there's been many attempts to fix that. Well, I guess I'm kind of sad to hear this, but at the same time, he was pretty obnoxious.
2:40:15 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's the thing is like as a fellow human never happy to hear of a fellow human potentially going away for years but the thing that I think made this quite exceptional is he was incredibly obnoxious online about this, like to a point of like tweet thread after tweet tweet thread being like I am being framed. Here's this and this At some point he had had is. There is a Instagram account I'm forgetting the name of that was started up during the trial. That was something like Carlos Watson is innocent. This Instagram account is not maintained by Carlos Watson, but it's maintained by one of his supporters and every single day would post stuff about how innocent he is. I'm like all right, sure man? Yeah, this is totally maintained by someone else other than you.
2:41:19 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you why I mean look, I don't. I mean fraud is fraud, and you know. But I'm a little sympathetic because we live in a culture where some people really get away with this, that there are people who will lie their way through I don't know presidential debate and not get called on it.
Huge will lie their way through I don't know presidential debate and not get called on it. And I can see how somebody might say, hey, the culture says I should fake it till I make it. I and I. And the more vigorously I deny it, the more likely people will believe me. Uh, it's a little different when a white guy does it than when a black guy does it. Maybe, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, the white guy's getting away with it. That's all I could say. Yeah, um, so I understand. I feel I'll feel a little bit bad for somebody who might think you know, uh, gosh, why not? Why not me?
2:42:10 - Paris Martineau
don't defraud I mean, I think honestly, probably the answer is, um, that somehow the world's most juicy anecdote got out to someone who tipped off Ben Smith, then the media columnist at the New York Times about it, and regardless of race, if you hear about a prominent anything exec that has raised how many hundred millions of dollars impersonating a youtube executive, that's a pretty bad one sax bankers that is that's a pretty bad one like dollar sign.
2:42:43 - Leo Laporte
Eyes is the wrong word because journalists aren't thinking about in terms of money, but that is like, like my heart starts beating faster, thinking there is a well known former president who posed uh as somebody else's to, to reporters all the time Uh-huh, and would call the reporters and tell them how wonderful this fellow was. There's recordings of it. It's blatant. Okay, I can see it's in the air. That's all I'm saying, jeff. Pick of the week.
2:43:21 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, let's just have a little light one here.
2:43:24 - Leo Laporte
You're going to have a hard time beating my butcher block design tool from last week.
2:43:30 - Paris Martineau
That's all I can say. It's true, it was a pretty good one.
2:43:33 - Leo Laporte
Boy, I didn't know how well it was going to go over. Frankly, I thought you'd laugh at me.
2:43:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Go ahead jeff um a drone that conquers everest wow, it flew all the way up everest.
2:43:47 - Leo Laporte
Did it need oxygen? They?
2:43:48 - Jeff Jarvis
say dji global a breathtaking video of a mavic 3 flying over mount everest on weibo it does look fake, doesn't it?
2:44:00 - Paris Martineau
it does, maybe it is is it supposed to be hard for a drone to fly well the air is pretty thin air is thin and you're
2:44:09 - Leo Laporte
far away from your for drones radio yeah you don't get as much lift with thin air? I guess I don't know. I don't think about this lift with thin air. I guess I don't know anything about this stuff. 3,500 meters from base camp to the summit of the highest mountain in the world. Yeah, dji drones can go 3,500 meters. I think this is a DJI Mavic 3 Pro.
2:44:29 - Paris Martineau
But not in the US right. Dji is the one that's banned.
2:44:33 - Leo Laporte
Not, yet there is a proposal that they be banned. That is beautiful, I mean. If it's real, that's so cool. You can see there's some trekkers. Oh, this is sped up, notice, that's interesting. So the drone doesn't go quite that fast. My pick of the week is from planet Earth to planet Sol, or whatever it is that's the sun. This is a. From planet earth to planet sol, or whatever it is that's a sun. This is a current planet the planets todaycom. It's exactly where the planets are right now where's the tesla?
2:45:11 - Paris Martineau
yeah, where is the tesla? That's another one there is a live payment. There is a live update uh I pointed this out on Twit the other day.
2:45:19 - Leo Laporte
Didn't we talk about it yeah?
2:45:21 - Paris Martineau
Tesla Roadster or something.
2:45:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, where's the manhole cover?
2:45:26 - Leo Laporte
Here is where in space is Tesla Roadster and that's its live position right now. That's great.
2:45:36 - Paris Martineau
We got to combine these two maps, so they go together, yeah that's planet soul okay, you got me, you got me.
2:45:50 - Leo Laporte
Ladies, gentlemen, uh, on that note. Uh, I think we should wrap Gentlemen on that note. I think we should wrap this one up. Thank you, paris Martineau, theinformationcom. She's working a big story and if you know anything about it, tip her, go to the signal in Martineau.01 and say everything you're saying. Paris is absolutely right on. I have the deets.
2:46:20 - Paris Martineau
But don't do it on your work phone. Not your work phone, ideally no, no if you want to be safe, don't do this.
2:46:25 - Leo Laporte
Yes, it's not her fault if you get busted. I hear that, uh, carlos is is an honest man and and I'm gonna call it a tip into you, all right, thank.
2:46:36 - Paris Martineau
Thank you, yes, framed. They're appealing, so I don't know.
2:46:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean it's not over, it ain't over till it's over Well it never, is it ain't over till the fake YouTube guy sings. That is the director of the former emeritus director of the Townite Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Craig Newmark Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is flesh colored, so whatever you did, fixed it. Yeah, you look good. You look tanned, rested, ready to run.
2:47:12 - Jeff Jarvis
It's that time of day where it just drives it crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:47:17 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jeff. It's good to have you back. I miss you when you're not here.
2:47:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Same here. I miss you guys.
2:47:24 - Leo Laporte
And I am so happy that you celebrated another journey around the sun.
2:47:29 - Paris Martineau
Much like the Tesla.
2:47:30 - Leo Laporte
Roadster. Much like the Roadster. Thank you, Paris Martineau. Great to see you. We will be. Think of a game we could play online. You could teach me.
2:47:42 - Paris Martineau
All right, I will. Okay, I'm thinking on that.
2:47:46 - Leo Laporte
Something, yeah, we got to do that. I think that'd be a lot of fun.
2:47:48 - Paris Martineau
The new gaming corner.
2:47:50 - Leo Laporte
Gaming corner. It's going to be Paris's gaming corner. We could do a Fun with Paris. Fun with Paris corner. We could do a fun with paris. Fun with paris. We'll always have paris. How about that? Thank you for joining us. We'll always have twig this week in google as long as you join the club. Tv slash club twit uh, we do the show every wednesday, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We are now live everywhere that streams video, including YouTube, twitch, kik, linkedin, facebook, xcom. Just search for Twit on any of those platforms and you'll find our live stream, so you can watch us as we do the show. After the fact, though, of course, you can listen or or watch at your leisure. We make audio and video available on demand at twittv slash twig. That's the website. There's also a youtube channel devoted to this week in google, where we have 48 million followers now, which I'm really thrilled about, and, if you doubt me, I've got sundar pichai on the other line to tell you the truth. It's true.
Yep, that's him right there he said it, it's true.
2:49:02 - Paris Martineau
Leo is so right. He's my favorite podcast host. Thank you.
2:49:07 - Paris Martineau
Thank you, Sundar Pichai.
2:49:11 - Leo Laporte
You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Just look for this Week in Google, thanks to our producer, benito Gonzalez. Appreciate your work. Our studio manager, jammer B, who's going to be retiring in about three weeks, so we'll have to have a little retirement. No, what? No studio, no studio manager. But the story of Jammer B is great because he retired from Cal State, los angeles, 14 years ago. He literally he retired. He has a pension moved up next to the cottage just so he could help out. And eventually lisa's amazing jeffrey, he's a police. I said eventually we gotta hire this guy for something. Uh, his first job was fetching me my salads. He still has slippers Salad slinger.
He was a salad slinger but he of course rose to the exalted position of studio manager. He's been wonderful, like all our team. I just love them all and I'm going to miss just hanging out with them here. But John has very happily said okay, it's time to retire again. Fifteen years after his first retirement, he's going to move up to the Pacific Northwest by his sister. He's very excited about it. Yeah, he's very happy about it he's such a great guy. Yeah, and we'll probably settle him.
2:50:29 - Paris Martineau
He's a character.
2:50:30 - Paris Martineau
Jeremy.
2:50:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah he's wonderful, he's the conscience of the show. He's the guy who yells if you swear, in fact. Bonita, let real. Yeah, he's, he's the conscience of the show. He's the guy who yells if you swear, in fact.
2:50:46 - Paris Martineau
But you know, let's not forget, we got to record hey, oh yeah and I'll have a hey button that I can use. Very important jammer bees laugh whenever it comes from in the back being picked up by the leo mike. He's our best audience.
2:50:55 - Leo Laporte
I know I agree, he's not here today.
2:50:56 - Paris Martineau
It's so charming.
2:50:58 - Leo Laporte
I miss having him around already. And Burke McQuinn, who we are going to keep on. He's our studio fixer-upper and we will need him because, god knows, there's a lot of fixing up. Things to break, yeah, a lot of things to break. Leo will be breaking things. Thanks also to our executive producer and my dear wife, lisa laporte, who keeps this the wheels, all four wheels on almost all the time. And thanks to you, ty, our marketing director. And here's a little, a couple of little ties. Oh, what are their names? King and theo. Hey guys, king and Theo, hey guys. Aw, you've never been here, have you? You wanted to see it before we shut it down, didn't you? Yeah, do you want to say hi to Paris? And Jeff, come on, you can come over if you want to. You don't have to. If you want to be on camera. They are the cutest I've ever seen. Oh, look at that. Come on, come on over here and then wave, wave at the nice people Hi, move over a little more. There you go.
2:52:03 - Paris Martineau
Yay, you guys are so tall, you're taller than.
2:52:07 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, grandpa Jeff, you know he's 70 and you're almost as tall as he is, so that's pretty good, I'm shrinking. That's huge. That's uh. These are the kids of ty, our great marketing director. Hey, thanks everybody for joining us. We'll see you next time. Everybody wave goodbye on this week in google.
