TWiG 780 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 weekend. Google Jeff Jarvis is here, paris has the day off, but Father Robert Ballas here, the digital Jesuit joins us. Big story, of course Google losing to the Department of Justice in its antitrust suit. What does this mean? Not just for Google, but for the companies Google pays, like Mozilla and Apple and Samsung. We'll also talk about the lawsuits the many lawsuits of Elon Musk and new products coming along from Google. We'll have the big announcement on Tuesday, but we've got a preview for you today. It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love.

0:00:40 - PC
From people you trust. This is Twig. People you trust this is Twig.

0:00:49 - Leo Laporte
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 780, recorded August 7th 2024. Aggiornamento it's time for Twig this week in Google, the last show, the very last show of all shows in the East Side studio. Jeff Jarvis is not here. He's there. Where are you, Jeff? Philadelphia, right across from City Hall.

0:01:24 - Jeff Jarvis
He is the Emeritus Leonard Tao.

0:01:26 - Leo Laporte
Professor for.

0:01:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Journalistic.

0:01:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of. New.

0:01:30 - Jeff Jarvis
York, did we lose? The Craig music Benito's scrambling hey, Craig, Craig.

0:01:31 - Leo Laporte
Not today, next week. Newmark, I have in the new studio a dedicated Craig Newmark button. I just want you to know. Yeah, I will have that, and I will have a moral panic button as well. Yes, good to have you, jeff. What are you doing in Philly?

0:01:43 - Jeff Jarvis
There's a journalism educators pre-conference kind of fun things I do so I'm here for that. Sounds like fun.

0:01:55 - Leo Laporte
Paris Martineau has been called away to the nation's capital Actual work. We're not sure why she's doing some. She says reporting from Washington DC, so we don't know what that's all about, but that sounds pretty exciting. But good news, father Robert Palliser, the digital Jesuit, is sitting in. We love Robert and it is kind of important that you're here, because you were also here on the very first show we did from the studio.

0:02:19 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Indeed, I am sort of a Twit Studio bookend here, so I'm actually very happy to be back, even though I am coming to you from an extremely hot closet in near las vegas right now oh, you're not in the. You're not in the, in the, in the holy city no, no, I had to come back for black hat defcon. I mean, you know that's geek summer camp leo.

0:02:39 - Leo Laporte
Oh, defcon's coming up. When is that? That starts tomorrow and you go, you've been going. How many years have you been going to defcon?

0:02:47 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
uh, it's. This is defcon 32. I've been to 27 of them, wow, wow all but five.

0:02:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so defcon is the more formal kind of event, and then there's after that the real hacker event, which is black hat.

0:03:04 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Oh, Hat, flip that around. So Black Hat is the professionals. It's the people who actually need to expense things on reports and talk about synergy and such. And then DEVCON is the community. It's burning man with networks and security. Okay, and half the nudity.

0:03:27 - Jeff Jarvis
So, father, I'm thinking that maybe is there a last rites for the studio, is there?

0:03:33 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
some kind of blessing. You know I'm thinking the studio always felt a bit more reincarnational to me, so I think it's going away for now. It will be back, so no, I don't think it needs that. Okay.

0:03:47 - Leo Laporte
I like it. I like it, it's gonna. It's a little hardship for me. We're saying goodbye. This is the last day for our long time studio manager. Uh, jammer b john slanina. Uh, who's? Helping us. He'll be here for a few more days helping us pack stuff up and prepare. The liquidators come in and they go through everything and they decide what can be sold, what can be recycled and what can be trashed, and then they clear the place.

0:04:16 - Jeff Jarvis
They don't charge you for any of that.

0:04:18 - Leo Laporte
No, we get 50% of anything they make from sales.

0:04:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that was my parents' place when we moved into the old house place. I never heard from them again.

0:04:27 - Leo Laporte
Great Well it's a bit of a chore to get rid of all this stuff. There's a lot of stuff in here.

0:04:38 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
You don't realize how much stuff you accumulate when you have a space, it fits, it fits the space.

0:04:44 - Leo Laporte
The law of George Carlin. By the way, father Robert, when you have a space, the space, it just it fits.

It fits the space, george carlin, the law george carlin, and by the way father robert knows about this because he's the one who built the no hole in the old studio. Oops, he had a nest. I did the old. What was the no hole? Because I didn't even I, by the way, I didn't even know it was there until we moved. Yes, it's like discovering a, a rat's nest, in your in your home after you move out what was the no hole.

0:05:10 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Imagine being in a place that is not charging you for the basement because they can't bring it up to standard ceiling was too low. Yeah, the ceiling was too low. And then let's just say, some geeks end up going down there and saying you know what, if we brought in a couple of tables, some computers, a few refrigerators, pinball machines, ping pong table, bean bags, this could actually be a nice place. Who's to know.

0:05:32 - Leo Laporte
There's a little love nest. Brian had a place down there and he came by, by the way, just a couple of days ago.

0:05:39 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I saw that he sent me the photo.

0:05:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, alex came, bylex, gumpel, you know some of the old timers ants here right now. Uh, just just either to say goodbye or to grab stuff I'm not sure which and already got the good haul with the coffee machine yeah, all right, well, there is some news. There's actually quite a bit of news.

there's's Google news, there's X news, there's Intel news. What do you want to start with first? What's the show called? It's the Google show. So we should talk about the fact that, in fact, some have likened this lawsuit to the lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 90s lawsuit against microsoft in the late 90s yep. According to a judge, and this is in the doj's lawsuit against google, on monday, the judge ruled that google did, in fact, illegally monopolize the search market through exclusive deals a win for the government in its first major antitrust case.

0:06:41 - Jeff Jarvis
and a loss for everybody else more than two decades judge.

0:06:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm reading from bloomberg judge amit meta said in washington that the alphabet units 26 billion dollars in payments most of that to apple to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers, effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market. And just in case you didn't know this, google pays Apple last time we checked $20 billion a year to be the default search on iOS, on Safari, not that you can't change it, but it's that valuable.

0:07:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Benedict Evans did an analysis and I think he said because it's 100% margin, it's like 20% of Apple's profit.

0:07:27 - Leo Laporte
It's a huge amount. Apple services now made more money than Mac, ipad and portable stuff like watches combined. 28% of the total revenue for Apple, it's a second only to the iPhone, and a good portion of that probably a quarter of it is from Google.

0:07:48 - Jeff Jarvis
How much money did Google pay to? What really worries me here is Mozilla Firefox. Yeah, firefox, how much was that?

0:07:57 - Leo Laporte
Those are the two groups that Google was paying Samsung. Didn't they pay Samsung? Maybe, yeah, they probably did right?

I think so too yeah, um, let me see what the number was for. Uh, the. The real fear is not so much, in fact I think we have in the rundown. The real fear is not so much for apple. Apple will have. This is this article from jason del rey in fortune. Forget apple.

The biggest loser in google search, in the google search rolling, could be mozilla and it's firefox web browser. Um, five, let's see 510 million of the revenue. The most recent revenue we have is 21, 22, 2022. Of the 593 million in revenue for mozilla, 510 was google paying. That means you know 90, uh, well, you know 80 of the money that mozilla makes comes from that payment, from single payment from google. So now the good, good news, I guess, or the, the, at least it puts it off.

It's going to be a while before anything actually happens here. It is possible that the judge could demand the Justice Department hasn't said yet what remediation it's going to seek, but it could demand separation of the search business from other businesses like Android or Chrome, which would be a big deal breakup, kind of akin to what they did to AT&T in the 80s. Meta's decision focuses solely on Google's liability Ten-week trial in court, nine months thinking about it. Meta has scheduled a hearing for next month to discuss a separate trial on the remedy, so they're going to have to have another trial. So let's see, wait a minute, this took a year just to get this done. Another trial a year and then appeals. Right, this will, I'm sure, go to the Supreme Court. Yeah.

0:10:18 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Antitrust enforces, they could shortcut it. Yeah, antitrust enforces it. The other important thing is to remember that what the court found was that Google had a monopoly in text search, but not in general search, so it really narrows down exactly what they think they need to remember.

0:10:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I didn't know that, I didn't realize that.

0:10:32 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, so they're dividing it. They're saying Google did not have a monopoly over general search, especially when you think of vendors like Amazon and Walmart, which are now using their own form of search engine within their own property. So this is a very specific part of Google's business that the courts are saying that's illegal. It's a significant part and, yes, it does require Google to make a lot of payments to vendors that are making products and services that they want people to search through. But it's not as if this is the entire google empire suddenly under the legal knife.

0:11:04 - Jeff Jarvis
here's another question uh, eu antitrust, uh doctrine is about size and market pressure and so on correct in the us, as we know, antitrust is really about consumer harm. Does this, does this decision change the case law at this level in terms of antitrust doctrine, because it's hard to find consumer harm here. I don't really see any and in terms of the companies, they weren't harmed. They were paid a fortune so it didn't hurt them. Under what basis, I wonder, does this go to the Supreme Court?

0:11:50 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
And did this district court try to change the law? That was my take. I was so surprised by this because of the harm. I mean, for me, every case has always been about harm. You can have a monopoly as long as the courts decide that it's not really hurting the consumer. So when I think of who's being hurt by this, it's not Apple, it's not Mozilla, it's advertisers. Yeah, it's advertisers, that's it. But I mean it's not like they're locked out of the market, it's just Google had a better seat. Now, what this means for the future is, again, they're probably going to have to divorce part of the company so that they're not playing both sides of a search transaction, but for the consumer, I think it's going to lead to a a poorer experience yeah, it's like I don't see how this is better buttons to yeah, to check all the time.

0:12:36 - Jeff Jarvis
That kind of of irritation for the sake of a misplaced principle and we talked about this before. Leo, I think you and I agree about this True monopoly, muscle-wielding power would be. You must take our search engine period. Not we're going to pay you a fortune for it and we're going to negotiate that payment in a fair way. That doesn't seem like the use of monopoly power and as a consumer again, I just prefer Google, I don't want Bing, I don't want DuckDuckGo. Their commercials irritate me. Leo likes to play with all kinds of other search engines because he's weird, but oh, I guess we can't use the word weird anymore in that context.

0:13:23 - Leo Laporte
He's odd, but again I don't know. Well, you could argue that the reason you like Google and you don't like any of the other ones is because Google has sewn up the market. I mean, you know, that isn't really a defense. You're saying there's nothing else, that's good. Well, that's right, because Google is dominant, well, hold on a second there, leo.

0:13:43 - Jeff Jarvis
What do they do? They scrape the web. So does Microsoft, yeah, but they have all the revenue from search ads.

0:13:49 - Leo Laporte
So they have all the money, so they can make a better search engine.

0:13:52 - Jeff Jarvis
But as a consumer, that doesn't affect me. As a consumer, it's what I care.

0:13:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, it might, I mean the Justice Department said it does affect consumer choice. I think it's. You know. You could say, well, golly, you know you shouldn't hold Microsoft's feet to the fire because Edge is or I guess Internet Explorer is the best browser. But that's the point, because they dominate, it's the best browser and in fact, when the Justice Department forced Microsoft to kind of back off on its monopoly and this is, by the way, early 2000s, um google arose. Google came out of that.

Uh, google, yeah, google benefited from that, so I don't know what the options are yet, because there haven't been any options, but I I would.

0:14:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I would argue that, um, and I trust, legislation and enforcement is always behind the times, right, microsoft was at the top, oh my God, we got to do something. And then competition was coming up on its own. Whether Google was made by that decision or Google was winning anyway, I would argue the latter. And right now, all the buzz out there we don't know if it's true or not is that agentic chat, llm search is going to create huge killing competition to Google. So it's at this moment, when Google is supposedly under threat, that the government decides that they're going to cramp down on Google.

0:15:15 - Leo Laporte
That's true. I mean, these things take time and unfortunately, the tech industry moves pretty rapid clip. It doesn't mean, though, that we shouldn't seek some sort of remedy. The Justice Department did present evidence to answer your question that efforts by European regulators to require Google to offer users a choice of search engines led few to switch. So they aren't going to look for that kind of European ballot. According to Bloomberg, they could demand the separation of Alphabet's search business from other products like Android or Chrome. The judge could also stop short of ordering a full breakout and choose to unwind the exclusive search deals. In other words, you can't give Apple $20 billion. You can't give Firefox $20 billion.

0:16:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Apple's going to have a role in that appeal of some sort.

0:16:05 - Leo Laporte
I don't think so. I don't think so. But your Honor, we want that $20 billion. I mean, what are they going to say?

0:16:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what I'm saying.

0:16:14 - Leo Laporte
Another option which now, this is interesting Listen to. This Could be to require Google to license its search index. That's not a bad thing or. Duckduckgo could be better. Could be as good as Google. One of the reasons. I hop around from search engines is Google's gotten worse and worse and worse, and I think you can make a strong case that a lot of the reason it's gotten worse is because it's favored its ad business over its search results.

0:16:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Or the web has gotten worse and worse and worse because it's jammed with crap and we're blaming Google for that.

0:16:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, here's a way to find out. Let's say that I, frankly, I use Kagi. Now, Kagi search and I find the search results useful. No, that's the one I've been using for a while after Neva went out of business. Because why Nobody can compete with Google? Neva didn't go out of business, but they got out of the search business and so they had a bad business model all right, I've been using bing for more than a decade. Yeah, you've always liked one of five people, I think yeah, so why do you prefer bing father robert?

0:17:18 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
well, it was a conscious decision because I I like to fight functional monopolies. So yeah, I.

Want to spread around my personal information. That's the same reason why I fuzz all the data that goes to Google. I've got more than what 60 now 60 node devices spread across the world that are putting information in my name through my Google account. So it never knows how to target me or where I am. But I mean, that's the anarchist to me. I do that out of personal principle, but I did not find any harm from google's functional monopoly. I thought they were able. They were able to do some interesting things there. There is a lot of potential harm, but I didn't see anything in the court case that showed that the prosecutors had proven that any of the potential harm had become actual harm.

0:18:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I agree, let me ask you both a question Just to play out. The scenario and I didn't know. What you said, padre was that it's a limited monopoly. If Google were forced to hive off just that, now that their revenue is beyond, now that it's about the whole ad business, we'll put other antitrust about that to the side, and it's about placement of ads all over the web, and it's about hosting and AI and all kinds of other things. If they were forced, is that part of search still critical to the soul of what Google is, or could they move it aside and not be hurt? Google is, or could they?

0:18:46 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
move it aside and not be pervert. I think it's important enough that they're going to definitely throw some legal horsepower at this because they don't want to get rid of a good thing. For me, the biggest potential harm that actually wasn't really mentioned in any of the court documents that I could find was that in paying a competitor, a potential competitor like Apple not to develop their own search technology because they're getting so much money from Google, that was the real harm. Now, again, I don't think that's actual real harm because I don't think Apple actually wanted to create search engine technology. That's not their thing. And Apple got out of the ad business.

0:19:33 - Leo Laporte
Precisely Apple got out of the ad business. Precisely they got out. And so yeah, the irony is apple has been very clear even if you pay, if you even for nothing, we wouldn't use bing. We, it would never be the default search. We don't think bing is any good. Google probably didn't have to give him 20 billion dollars. They probably would have made google the default search anyway yeah ironically, uh, but maybe the 20 billion was to discourage apple from doing something else. There were time.

There was a time when apple definitely was looking into yeah, it's hard to, but, but there was a time you could point to, a time when apple was trying to do a search engine and and it could very well be that that was the point it would have been back in Steve Jobs' day and Eric Schmidt and Steve did not like each other much, but they did meet from time to time. Schmidt could easily have said look, let's give you some money, don't do a search engine, just keep using Google. And Steve might have said no, okay, fine, we won't do that, so we don't know. You're right. It's hard to prove the negative.

The reaction to the judge's decision is very positive. According to Bloomberg, william Kovachik, who teaches antitrust at Georgia sorry, george Washington Law School, said Meta's decision is reasonable and balanced. Sorry, george Washington Law School said Meta's decision is reasonable and balanced. It's not simply a credulous acceptance of the government's argument. He served on the FTC during the Bush administration. Some of Meta's analysis about advertising markets may raise difficulties for the government, bloomberg writes, as it pursues a second case against Google, but the opinion will likely be helpful for a number of the government's other antitrust cases awaiting trial against Apple, amazon and Meta on how to consider justifications by the companies for their own behavior. Rebecca Allensworth, antitrust professor Vanderbilt Law, says Meta's decision is quote bold in a legally careful way that will do well on appeal and will lay the blueprint for other tech cases going forward.

0:21:28 - Jeff Jarvis
So this is a very important decision Change GDFI trust law when it comes to tech and if you're going to change that antitrust law.

0:21:35 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Number one on that list is Apple. Because Apple has also had a functional monopoly in their space. Yes, but because there's been no harm, no one's gone after them. Well, if you're going to change case law, apple's number one.

0:21:47 - Leo Laporte
Apple wrote a very strong defense and a request for dismissal and we talked about it yesterday on Mac Break Weekly and one of Apple's points was this is not in the Sherman Antitrust Act. We are not a monopoly. You are expanding the definition of antitrust.

And that's not for a court to do, that is for congress to do. I thought it was quite a strong argument. I uh I was very impressed by it. We'll see if the judges, um, this is uh, yeah, we're. We're in interesting times, I think you, I think I I know I'm in I'm have some strange bedfellows when I say this, but I think you could argue that Google has gotten too powerful, that Google, because it dominates 80 or 90 percent of all searches, has become the de facto definition of what the Internet is. If it's not on Google, it doesn't exist. You see, I don't think it's.

0:22:42 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the funny thing to me. It's like the browser war with Microsoft. We didn't care about browsers by the time that got done. I think search is yesterday's battle and I'm not talking about AI here. What I have said is that where Google is vulnerable is having both sides of the advertising transaction. I don't know if I mentioned this on the show, but I got a call from a lawyer whether they wanted me to testify as an expert in a case involving advertising and antitrust. I said well, you've got to know what I've said in public in my book, which is that Google is vulnerable in this. They said, yeah, never mind, we don't want you. Whoops. We thought you'd say something else.

I've always said that it took the government this long to get here and this is a sidelight here. But it's fascinating to me that Reid Hoffman got into all kinds of gruffles because he gave a huge amount of money to Kamala Harris. He's been out there really organizing for it, but the far left went after him because he also criticizes Lita Khan and says that he hopes Lita Khan gets fired. They're trying to accuse him of using his contributions and he's not. And I trust Reid on this, he's honorable about this. But the far left, the progressives of progressives, are very much boosting Lina Khan on all this. And Silicon Valley is saying if you go too far in this antitrust stuff, you're going to cut off secondary markets, you're going to cut off investment, you're going to cut off innovation, you're going to turn into Europe. Beware. And that's where the interesting fight think to be is coming up. But because it comes back to where is the harm to the marketplace and the consumers?

0:24:31 - Leo Laporte
that needs to be the test. You could make a strong case that putting my firefox out of business would actually be legitimately doing harm. Yes, yes to the public.

0:24:40 - Jeff Jarvis
And then that's might be the outcome of this decision huge and it's not just Firefox, it's what else Mozilla does to maintain an open Internet.

0:24:51 - Leo Laporte
But one of the things that we love about Mozilla and Firefox is that it's not Chrome or Chromium, and this is another area where Google is completely dominant. Even if you're not using Google's Chrome, you're probably using a Chromium-based browser like Microsoft's Edge or Brave or Arc or any number of Opera. They're all based on Chromium. So if you include all those, Google must have Safari, Firefox and all the rest is Google. That must be a huge percentage.

0:25:25 - Jeff Jarvis
So if Chrome to you is not open source, it is free right Based on our discussion last week.

0:25:31 - Leo Laporte
So Chromium is the open source part of the Google Chrome. It is open source. It is it's on GitHub, but it's also everybody who works on it is from Google, is from google and um, yeah, you know, I mean the thing is, because it is an open source project, companies like arc and microsoft can make browsers based on an opera free for free is weird and google likes that because in the ai world.

0:26:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Is transformer similar to uh, more similar to cause? Is it open sourced like um chromium, or is it more like bed as Lama? That it's because everybody's building their LLMs on on transformer, right, right.

0:26:21 - Leo Laporte
Well.

0:26:23 - PC
I'm not sure that's a good question. I don't know if the source.

0:26:26 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if the source code is open source, so I don't know if it's traditionally open source. I'll look into that. But the thing is it's based on well-known concepts in the literature. I mean, there are only a handful something like seven papers that define all modern AI, llm, ai architecture, so it's not like it's unknown. Um, let me, let me see what you know. I don't know what the status is that you mentioned earlier.

0:26:53 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
You know you said that you believe that google has too much power, an ungodly amount of power, and I would actually I would agree with that. Google has become an incredibly powerful company, but the question is, what have they been doing with that power? And we are now discussing what they've been doing with that power. They have developed Chrome and Chromium into a wonderful product that other companies are using and developing into their own markets. They're developing LLMs, developing their own AI models, android, android, exactly. So you have to take all of that together.

You can't just say, oh, they've got this monopoly, this functional monopoly in tech search and therefore the company needs to be broken up, because without that, without that power that they've built up, none of those other products would exist. Most of them are not profitable. They would have been shuttered. So the question again is, if you're looking at harm, this is actually reverse harm that Google has been promoting. I'm not a google fan, uh cheerleader. I'm not saying everything that they do is right, but at least from where I sit, they've been one of the most responsible companies with the power that they've amassed in the tech sector. Good point yeah it's hard.

0:28:01 - Leo Laporte
It's a hard, hard issue because you've got to look at 360 you're're right, but you know, the same arguments could have been raised in 1986, when AT&T was being broken up. True, true, we get all the same benefits for scale from Google that we got from AT&T, or I mean Unix.

Well, not just Unix we gave us a national infrastructure that was robust, reliable, very expensive because it was a monopoly, but we got some real benefits out of it. And so it's not enough to say, well, you get benefit out of Google, so don't break them up. You get benefit at AT&T. But there was a case there was, I think, obviously a strong case to be broken up. Now, ironically, they've kind of rehealed and patched up, they've reformed to be broken up.

0:28:44 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Now, ironically they're, they've kind of re-healed and they've reformed yeah uh, but I think but even then make a case that it did open up the market considerably.

0:28:56 - Leo Laporte
I mean, look at the cost of long distance today compared to 1982. Yeah, but?

0:29:01 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
but even back in the 80s, when that case was still ongoing, you could actually see in real time, not just in retrospect, the real harm that was occurring because of the Ma Bell monopoly, the fact that people didn't own the phones that were inside their own house and they couldn't actually work on them without it being illegal. They had to rent and lease their phones.

0:29:21 - Leo Laporte
And Carter phone overturned. That, though before the breakup. So true, but that's the point, true, true. So that's the point. Did they need to be broken up? And I think it's really hard. It's the same thing with the Microsoft DOJ case in the late 90s, early 2000s. Was there a benefit or wasn't there? In both cases, it seems to me there was a benefit, but I'm not an economist.

0:29:45 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I think Jeff's right on this. We're going to know in five years whether or not this is going to be a while.

0:29:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to be a while. It always ends up coming down to emotions, not reason, but in my heart I feel like Google wields too much power Because Google search is so dominant and chrome is so dominant. You know, chrome is basically going to put you block origin out of business by changing the manifest v3 and it's unknown how many chromium adoptees will do the same, but I suspect most will. That changes the whole ad blocker business. They're basically disabled, defeating the best ad blockers. And is it ironic or is it? Is it, is it a smoking gun that they're in the ad business? You see the problem here. Um, I, I really do say that they're doing self-dealing.

They're self-dealing and and that's not out of evilness, but just because that's if you're in the ad business. Ad blockers are an existential threat, so you're going to make sure your products don't support ad blockers. You might make up some bogus excuse that it's for security reasons, but but for whatever reason, you're going to do something that benefits your bottom line what's the paywall?

0:31:01 - Jeff Jarvis
that's exactly what the monopoly is a problem of use. You set the conditions of use. It's your right to do so. The New York Times puts up a paywall. You can't read it unless you pay.

0:31:08 - Leo Laporte
That's the deal, google says you want to see our stuff yeah, we're going to show you ads yeah, wouldn't be a problem if they weren't a monopoly but they're not a monopoly.

0:31:21 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the thing. And also in the ad business, they're getting huge new competition from Amazon. Amazon's ad business is now bigger than all magazines in the world.

0:31:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, if Google is not a monopoly in search and text search advertising. This case will get thrown out.

0:31:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Search is fairly meaningless in the larger picture. Advertising.

0:31:41 - Leo Laporte
there's issues, You're saying it's going to be meaningless. It isn't yet meaningless. People 90 still use google to find something on the internet. Maybe in a year it'll be there.

0:31:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, we have not only ai, we have. We've been on stories about how young people are not using google. They're using tiktok. The trends are away from google on search they're using google.

0:32:04 - Leo Laporte
There there is a trend and you're right that this stuff takes so long that by the time it's done, maybe it didn't make any difference in the long run, I like your remedy.

0:32:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I like the idea of saying that Google has to share the scrape with others. That's what started Common Crawl is. There was a Googler who left the company and said, oh, I don't have access to this anymore. What the hell? He started the Common Crawl is. There was a Googler who left the company and said, oh, I don't have access to this anymore. What the hell? He started the Common Crawl Foundation and 10,000 academic papers are now based on it, and LLMs used it to train their models, which is some controversy on the other end, and that's why I held the event with them. I think, making certain things that Google does free for others, that could be a very good model. It would enable competition.

0:32:46 - Leo Laporte
However, it makes. Then Google's crawl, the only crawl. Well, but this is the needle that the judge has to thread, which is how do we find a remedy that does the least harm and the most good? And maybe the judge seems to be pretty on top of this. Let's see what he proposes as a remedy.

0:33:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Every time you say the judge's name, I think it's Mark Zuckerberg running the case, Meta meta.

0:33:12 - Leo Laporte
It's M-E-H-T-E-A. Yeah, I'll say meta. I'll say meta.

0:33:17 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
So if they're going to stick to the preferred strategy of the soft stick, they could reclassify Google's search division as common carrier. I mean, they can put this back into the net neutrality debate. How would that work, father? So if you separate out their search, the crawl, and you say this is now considered to be a common carrier this operates under the rules of an organization that is operating the lines and the backbones of telecommunications across the world Then that changes how people can access it. It changes what expectations competitors have when they access that resource and it also changes how much the parent company actually has control over how that service is used. It also indemnifies them from how that service is being used. So that is actually a way that Google could come out of this in a better state. Not saying that they wouldn't rather control the whole thing, but if their technology and their service is now seen as common carrier, it puts them in the position of being sort of the elder statesman of the search economy, no matter what happens from here on out.

0:34:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Or is that a gift to every spammer on earth? Because Google can't control or has to be more open about how you can get access to everybody through search, and then search becomes completely useless.

0:34:40 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
And that's where the soft stick comes into play, because once you've reclassified them, it doesn't mean that you have to hold them. It just means that you where the soft stick comes into play, because once you've reclassified them, it doesn't mean that you have to hold them, it just means that you have a bigger stick with which to beat them if they misbehave. So it would be perfectly okay for the FCC to say okay, google, we would like you to do something about X, y and Z, including scammers and spammers. Google does that. They integrate that into the cost of the common service, which then gets passed on to the other corporations that are using that common service.

0:35:07 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's a, there's a first amendment issue then.

0:35:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can't have the government be telling Google how to do its business. You'd have to make them into some sort of quasi public interest corporation as opposed to a private enterprise, and imagine trying to do that.

0:35:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Not just the U? S, then, but imagine how. Europe would go bananas with that. That's true.

0:35:26 - Leo Laporte
I think it's very likely that this will not, in the long run, change anything. Yes, yeah, whether it should or not is another question, but I mean, I think it should Never mind. But well, it's going to be years and I think it's. I'd be very shocked if any material change in how Google does business.

0:35:45 - Jeff Jarvis
The stock market was reacting to everything else in the world, but I don't think it reacted to the case per se.

0:35:50 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
You know who this really hurts Apple. I mean, they got paid $20 billion to put Google under devices. I bet Apple wishes that Google had paid them $20 billion to not do Vision Pro.

0:36:02 - Leo Laporte
So I mean billion dollars to to not do vision pro. So I mean, apple uh said in the trial it did not think it was worth the time and effort to try to build its search engine like unlike maps. Remember, apple did make a concerted effort to replace google on the iphone in almost every respect except search right. Even google chrome on the iphone isn't really chrome. It's's WebKit, it's Apple Safari with a Chrome surface.

0:36:26 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
What phone do you use, Patrick?

0:36:33 - Leo Laporte
I have a Pixel 8 Pro.

0:36:36 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I'm sitting here with two Android users, so you've gone with LaVita Google when it comes to your phone, so I spread it out. So my phone is Android, my laptop is Windows and Linux, my servers are Linux and Microsoft Server, and then a lot of my infrastructure stuff is Linux slash Mac.

0:36:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I've got a question for you I've been meaning to ask for a long time Curious, having just left a university. We had all kinds of university rules that we had to go through all kinds of hoops to be able to use google. This versus not, not getting stuck with microsoft teams. There's all kinds of corporate stuff. What's the corporate? It pardon me, religion in the vatican when it comes to what platforms you can use or what freedom you have to choose the ones you want to?

0:37:25 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
choose. Yeah, there's no freedom. You're using Windows Really, yeah.

0:37:30 - Leo Laporte
Really. Oh, I'm so sorry. Is there a curia for IT? I mean, is there?

0:37:37 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
We have our own, so we have our own IT shop and we have Mac users and they are told that they're switching over to Windows just because we want the enterprise management features. And no, we did not get hit by CrowdStruck, because we looked at CrowdStrike several years ago and we said no way, absolutely no way. Are you on a committee that decides all this? I think that goes into the parts that I can't talk about. We can't talk about the inner workings, right, right, right, sorry uh, but now I'm really intrigued.

0:38:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, now I really want to know. You know that's it. You know I it's funny I've been working with robert for 20 years or something, 15 years. I never thought to ask that. I didn't realize that. So there are specific.

0:38:26 - Jeff Jarvis
It's an organization. It's an enterprise.

0:38:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, it's like any enterprise. No, not just any enterprise. Leo, the Catholic Church is the largest enterprise network on the planet. What People forget that we are the largest IT organization on the planet? What by far.

No one's even close. What, how? What? By far no one's even close. What, how can the largest in terms geographically largest? No, no, in terms of no's. In terms of users, in terms of seats, in terms of services, in terms of expenses, we are the largest on? Bigger than the us government. Bigger than the us government. Do you get a discount? Yes, you, you buy, buy three million and get one for yourself.

0:39:08 - Leo Laporte
I can't I had no idea. This is amazing and I am fascinated uh with how this is managed because I have to say, I can't think of a breach uh of the catholic church's servers ever right?

0:39:25 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Well, that's because the really important stuff is on paper. Oh, with quills.

0:39:32 - Leo Laporte
That will do it. That will do it.

0:39:34 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Good luck on breaching that.

0:39:35 - Leo Laporte
No, it's very secure. I mean, I had never thought about that. I know that, wow. Okay, we won't probe further, but we've, I, we've suddenly opened. You opened an interesting can of worms there, that's really that's a great feature story.

0:39:50 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I hadn't really thought about that you know if, for the changing of twit, we could start this week in, uh, the vatican? I mean that could be part of yeah, I will do that with you.

0:39:59 - Leo Laporte
I think it'd be fascinating. We get all the conspiracy theorists together. It'd be so much fun.

0:40:06 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Pope Francis will be coming over to the house sometime in December, so I mean, I don't know, let's sit down.

0:40:11 - Leo Laporte
I would very much like to be there by then. I plan to be doing the shows from the Vatican anytime soon. I've got your room already set up, leo, so you're all good, just come on over. Thank you, just a simple bed, a crucifix, a little window. That's all I need Good internet access, a prayer mat and, of course, fiber internet. By the way, how is the internet in the house there?

0:40:34 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Leo, my office has two 10 gig fiber connections from two different carriers, by the way.

0:40:40 - Leo Laporte
Well you are the largest we just learned IT enterprise in the world.

0:40:47 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
That's really true. It's really true. It's really true. It's actually bigger well, it seems like lots of yeah, uh no I don't know I don't know.

0:40:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know is that because?

0:41:03 - Leo Laporte
I know it's 2 000 years old, but that's but technology is only a decade.

0:41:07 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Is that because every diocese has its own network and they're all inter-networked and I mean okay, so the society, the jesuits that's my order, we're just one out of many in the church. And just imagine, in just the united states we've 56 universities, we've got over 130 high schools, we've got more than 70 retreat centers, we've got hundreds of parishes and schools. So that's just in the US. That's a massive IT infrastructure. Now multiply that by the world. That's us. That's what we do.

0:41:41 - Leo Laporte
And this happened fairly quickly, right? I mean, this is all brand new, obviously, and this happened fairly quickly, right?

0:41:47 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I mean, this is all brand new, obviously. So I wrote a paper back in 1996 on the integration of modern communications technology into church infrastructure, and it was about the changeover between what we saw as sort of frivolous which would be IT it coming into the age of communications, and since then, in that 25, 30 years or so, uh, the changeover has been almost complete.

0:42:12 - Jeff Jarvis
so yeah, what a great history that would be to write no kidding I.

0:42:16 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why. I just assumed well, the church is medieval and it doesn't deal with that. It deals with important issues of the soul, not. Yeah, uh, gigabits and uh wow well, we're working on backing up the soul, we're just having a storage problem I know, I mean, look, I know you very well and I know how, how technically literary you are, but uh, I just it didn't, it didn't. I didn't realize that the church would, of course, be equally wired. Can you say? Is there any AI research going on inside the church?

0:42:52 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Okay, this is one of those things that probably has not reached your ears yet, but the Catholic Church is probably one of the most advanced organizations in terms of looking at the ramifications of AI. We actually have a division in the Vatican that does this. We have one of the preeminent experts is a friend, I think. No, dominican is a Dominican priest. So, yeah, we're in it. Can we get that person on a show? Yes, absolutely. I have his contact information. I think he just did a show for us, for America, which is our magazine slash online presence out of New York.

0:43:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Fascinating, fascinating. So, leo, you used to go to NAB and NAB, as you know, had evangelical broadcasters. Yes, like crazy, huge so, would you say, in terms of you and your father doing amazing video and broadcasting things for the Vatican. Who led that? Who was ahead first?

0:43:52 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
things for the vatican would. Who led that? Who was ahead first? Okay, so I did a few of nab's events with that group nice people, nice people but most of their focus was on what we would consider broadcast tv radio tv right yeah, stream old tv.

Okay. Precisely by the time they started really getting into that, we had already moved past that. We weren't looking at broadcast, we were looking at well, how do we control the information that's flowing between our organizations? The 60s by the time we hit the 90s and the 2000s, it was all about okay, what's next? We're going past broadcast, we're going past televangelism, we're going past radio programs with religious themes. We now want to see what else is there, what more is there? And the Catholic Church was doing that back in the 90s.

0:44:40 - Leo Laporte
Wow, and it's not. I mean look, the Vatican's website is not the most 21st century thing I've ever seen.

0:44:51 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It hasn't changed since the 90s.

0:44:52 - Leo Laporte
Leo it looks like it hasn't, but that's not really so. It sounds like your IT operation isn't necessarily about public facing stuff.

0:45:04 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Correct, correct, correct. Anything that I remember. When I first got to Rome in 2018, there was a big story about how the Vatican servers had been breached. That, really, I mean. Yes, we talked about it, we remedied it, I gave a couple of tips on how we avoid things like this in the future, but when they heard breach, no one was concerned because the public facing internet we don't really care about. It's annoying to have to fix it, but that's not the data that we're actually working with.

0:45:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm just glad that the drop shadow lives on the Vatican website. That's all I get.

0:45:39 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Actually, if you want, Leo, I can. I can ask them to add the under construction.

0:45:51 - Leo Laporte
Would you please in there like an email box somewhere, because earth is still under construction. That's right. That's right, it is, it's true. It literally is um, wow, I, you know this is. I don't know why. I've never thought to ask you about this. Thank you, jeff, for broaching the subject, because I had never thought to ask you about this.

0:46:01 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Robert, I had no idea well, you know, jeff and I have never done a show together yeah, I'm taking you, I've been taking you for granted all that's right, we were going to once. Then something happened. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:46:12 - Leo Laporte
So we've never been on the same show at the same time well, good, and maybe you and jason can get, uh, get the ai guy on ai inside, because I think that would be a fascinating well, I think you've got to get a Security Now.

0:46:25 - Jeff Jarvis
episode about the Vatican and security Amazing.

0:46:28 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
What. I can do is I can ask him if he will come to our place and be in our studio so his audio and video is taken care of.

0:46:37 - Leo Laporte
Make it easy for him. That'd be great. Well, I do have to pause here. I wish I didn't. This is really interesting stuff. Forget here. I wish I didn't. This is really interesting stuff. Yeah, forget Google.

0:46:47 - Jeff Jarvis
I want to know more about that. Hey Leo, you thought Google was too powerful, Wow.

0:46:54 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, we actually had AI way back in the 50s. We just ended up hiding it.

0:46:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think so. That was the 50s 50s yeah. That's right. Wow, You're watching this Week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is here and a special guest filling in for Paris Martineau this week the wonderful Father Robert Balasio. So glad you're here. The digital Jesuit, who has an app too, by the way.

0:47:20 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Now is this the first app the church has done, or no? Again, that would be really hard. It's the first app that the Jesuits have done. Okay, again, that would be really hard. It's the first app that the Jesuits have done. Okay, and we predate the Vatican app.

0:47:31 - Leo Laporte
But I'm sure there's some other groups out there that have put out apps before. Right, I mean, there's no. So what is the name of your app?

0:47:35 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It's called the Jesuit pilgrimage app, and it was. It was okay, Let me cards on the table. It was created after a night of grappa and some people said, hey, wouldn't it be cool if it's? And it was sort of a bet and we put it together and there it is it's. It's a way for people to visit the sites and the sounds that Ignatius, who was our founder, went through as he founded the society of Jesus. So you've got some three, 60 panoramas, you've got images of the different churches and locations that he went to, narrations and I think we're up to 12 or 13 different languages of the story and the ability to sort of follow you. So if you use this app in Rome, it would actually direct you from location to location to location and then tell you this is what's interesting about this oh, I have to do that next time I'm in Rome.

And if you did download the app, one or two of the voices might sound familiar. Nice.

0:48:26 - Leo Laporte
That's super cool. That's super cool. Is this considered a. Skunk Works project in the church, or is this mainstream? I mean, is this more of it feels more like it's a kind of like a Skunk Works thing?

0:48:37 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, so we. Because it is such a large organization, the church proper, the vatican city, moves at a predictable rate yes, predictable rate, there you go we can move much more quickly because we're a smaller organization within the organization and we have people who are much more tech savvy I mean the, the jesuits that I work with. We're all. We all grew up with technology, so we never have to explain what we're doing. We just do it, right, right.

0:49:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Very cool. So I've got to tell you that I went to the rare book school at University of Virginia a few years ago and I learned how to set type by hand. Guess who runs that? A Jesuit, no kidding, yeah.

0:49:21 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
No kidding.

0:49:21 - Leo Laporte
Well.

0:49:21 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Jeff, if you like rare books, when you come to the Vatican and you stay at our house, the archives is attached to our house, oh man.

0:49:31 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, let's both go visit. We'll both stay there. It'll be great fun. Wow, A little trip to the Vatican, to the Holy See. We are going to take a break. Come back with more. There is a lot more to talk about. Not only is Google in court, x is in court as well. Uh, we'll, we'll. We'll have that story as such as it is in the first word from our sponsor, experts exchange.

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0:54:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I ask Robert one more question on the Vatican and AI? Yeah, please. This is fascinating. What was the reaction to the wonderful photo of the Holy Father in the puffy white jacket? The Balenciaga jacket.

0:54:59 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Okay, Again, to not get in trouble, I will just say that there's a person who I spoke with specifically about that and he laughed. He thought it was funny.

0:55:09 - Leo Laporte
Did he laugh in Italian or Spanish? That's the question. Don't put him on the spot. And you thought it was funny? Did he laugh in Italian or Spanish? That's the question. Don't put him on the spot. That's awesome. That's awesome. It is Honestly. You get the feeling and maybe it's because I know you so well, robert, but you get the feeling that there's intelligence, there's goodwill, there's good things happening in an ancient, ancient church and that's very encouraging.

0:55:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't want to get political, but I just want to say my views are pretty obvious, but the joy I'm seeing right now in American politics and the joy that I hear from the Vatican, we just need more of that kind of joy in the world.

0:55:53 - Leo Laporte
it's, it's um, we do, it's a little grim. It's a little grim out there, yeah, yeah, we actually have a name for it, it's we call it a giornamento.

0:56:02 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
This is. This is the same thing that happened at the start of the vatican, too, where the, the holy father, said look open the doors, open the windows. It's time to air it out. It's time for us to actually look at what it is that we want. Let's not snipe about the, the issues of the past. Let's look to the potential of the future. So anyone who does that I, I'm on board, I, we need that right now.

0:56:24 - Leo Laporte
We're so beating beaten up, but jordan should be the title of the show. It means bringing it up to date, it means updating, it means being open to the future. A-g-g like buongiorno, a-g-g-i-o-r-n-a-m-e-n-t-o I would have gotten that so wrong.

0:56:41 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, Today aggiornamento, updated, yeah Well then you have to say it with your hands.

0:56:58 - Leo Laporte
Aggiornamento hands all right moving, uh, moving right along, uh. So you may remember, almost a year ago, elon musk telling advertisers to go f themselves, go f yourselves, he said. Now he's saying, hey, they did, we're going to sue them.

Well put, Well done. How dare they? X has decided and you know it's an interesting case that the advertisers colluded using an advertising group called Garm not to advertise on X. And X has gone to what looks like a friendly judge in North Texas suing over the boycott. He says there's an advertiser boycott, it's collusion, and they filed in federal court against the World Federation of Advertisers. There's an advertiser boycott, it's collusion, and they filed in federal court against the World Federation of Advertisers and Member Companies, some big ones Unilever, Mars, CVS and Orsted, which I think is pretty good, so they're going to be forced to advertise on X.

0:58:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's going to work well.

0:58:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah. Garm, which is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, is a brand safety organization. You know, and I understand, advertisers don't want to put their ads next to content. You know there are clauses in every contract we do with advertisers saying you know you're not going to put us next to content that's hate speech or violent or sexual or things like that. We don't have a problem with that because we don't have any of that on our network. There's plenty of that on X, however, and GARM apparently advised its member groups not to advertise there because it's unsafe. They helped coordinate a pause in advertising after elon bought what was then twitter in late 2022. Elon says now it's war. Various experts most experts I've read say yeah, there's no merit here, but there are a few people point out that collusion is illegal. You know, know. You can't collude. Companies that compete normally compete with each other can't get together and decide on what prices should be. That's an antitrust violation. X says this is an antitrust matter. They've colluded against us.

0:59:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's the paradox, though, is that I'm reading in Adweek that, because of this ad, buyers are now more cautious than ever to get anywhere near X, so he's going to lose yet more advertising because of this.

0:59:43 - Leo Laporte
And God bless.

0:59:46 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
But I mean he's basically cornered the market on advertising dropship products from China. So I mean I think it's a win-win.

0:59:54 - Leo Laporte
Linda Iaccarino, ceo of x, alleged in an open letter yesterday to advertisers hey, advertisers, garm's behavior is a stain on a great industry and cannot be allowed to continue. I mean, on the face of it, you feel like, well, an advertiser has the the right not to advertise on a platform if they feel like it's not a good place for them to be. Cbs can't say you have to buy NASCAR, you have to. If an advertiser doesn't want to, they don't have to. So there's no merit in that. There's perhaps some merit in the notion that there was collusion, actually, leo tech advertisers.

1:00:33 - Jeff Jarvis
you have to buy ads on Twitch you must buy ads on Twitch yeah. Yeah.

1:00:40 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I mean, when I saw the open letter and then when I watched Jacarina do her thing on Twitter, I kept waiting. I'm like, okay, so what's the knife here? What do you have? What do you have that proves that there was collusion or coercion? That would be illegal. And they just keep dancing around that. They just say, well, these companies, they got together and they decided not to do business with us. And I'm thinking, okay, I mean, yeah, you could make that case, but that's not illegal. Nothing that you're alleging is illegal. Which is weird that they would actually file a lawsuit over something that is so, so laughable. It makes me think that they actually have something. They're just not showing us that's what.

1:01:21 - Leo Laporte
That's what elon does. He sued, uh, the center for countering digital hate, uh, and the judge threw it out. He has sued mania matters for definition, after they released a report that says x has misrepresented the amount of hate speech users encounter on the platform. That lawsuit is still scheduled for trial, but I can't imagine the trial will go on for very long. I thought the judge might throw this out, except that they've drawn a judge who is, in fact, a Tesla investor, so maybe not.

1:01:57 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I mean, if he's a Tesla investor, he may not be friendly to Elon right now.

1:02:01 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point. That's a good point. I just don't see the end game here. Leo, I don't see what the strategy?

1:02:09 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
is. It's not like he's fundraising off of the rage.

1:02:12 - Jeff Jarvis
He's just generating rage for rage's sake. He has a spleen. He doesn't have a strategy.

1:02:17 - Leo Laporte
That's true, yeah, it's just these billionaires. Nobody says no to them. They seem to act on grievance more than anything else, so we'll see what happens. Uh, here there is perhaps some merit to it, I don't know and it may be that they get a the. The judge will be friendly to elon because of you know, his uh financial interests.

1:02:44 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I, I don't know the only thing that would that would make the case is if they found communications between Unilever and a client saying if you continue to advertise on Twitter on X, we're going to drop you here, here and here.

1:03:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there you go. I mean, that would be bad.

1:03:05 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
But they're not alleging that, they're just saying no, they talked, okay, okay.

1:03:09 - Leo Laporte
It's also said that if they did go to trial, that the video of Elon saying F off to advertisers might show up, which I would imagine would be persuasive to a jury, if there is a jury in this. So we shall see. The company expects to earn $2 billion in advertising revenue this year. That's less than half of what it earned in 2021. So it's, you know, it's definitely uh, hurting, not that elon, can you know, can't afford it, but uh, but just elon's not paying for it out of pocket, so he's taking the.

1:03:45 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
That's true. That's the banks, these poor banks, yeah, right. So at this rate, by 2029, the, the service on the debt, will be more than the total revenue of twitter of x. Wow.

1:03:58 - Jeff Jarvis
So which is why I was thinking. I was thinking it's just the other day, uh, it's time to restart rumors that somebody wants to buy twitter. Yeah, because, because it's it's he's obviously losing money on it, but who would buy it the way?

1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
also joining him in this lawsuit, the far-right video competitor to YouTube Rumble.

1:04:19 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Rumble is going to buy Twitter.

1:04:20 - Leo Laporte
Which is, by the way, also not getting a whole lot of advertising right now, for obvious reasons. You can't blame Mars for not advertising on X, even if Elon wants to live on mars. Yeah, pardon me.

1:04:37 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Who wants to advertise in a place that's going to poison your brand? That's right, that's. That's not. What advertising is he right now? Elon seems to be stuck in this. This idea that you spend your money to make ideological statements and advertisers don't care about ideological statements right, they care about the brand.

1:04:54 - Leo Laporte
So they're playing two different games shortly after the show last week we found out don lemon is suing elon. I don't know if don's gonna have much of a case here. You may remember, don lemon is the cnn anchor who made a deal with x to host all of his videos. They were going to pay $1.5 million a year to produce videos for Lemon, to produce videos exclusively onX and also give him a share of the ad revenue. Elon agreed to be Don Lemon's first guest on the show, but the interview collapsed as Lemon asked him about his drug use and politics. Shortly thereafter, elon texted him saying there's no deal. Lemon says I didn't sign a contract. Oops, mr Musk told me during a phone call. There was no need to quote fill out paperwork. Oops Reassured Don Lemon that X would financially support the show, even if we don't like the views you espouse.

But without the contract he's going to have a problem. The agreement is a contract so maybe yeah, but if it's purely verbal, it might be hard to prove it right, yeah.

1:06:05 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I mean, I just want to know, what did Don Lemon see in Elon that made him think, no, I don't need a written contract.

1:06:11 - Leo Laporte
You don't need paper. Wow. Apparently, in the lawsuit, lemon says he was pressured to announce the deal and go to an event with Linda Iaccarino at CES. X told him the deal would be withdrawn if he didn't attend. That should be the first warning, don. This was all in an attempt for x to get content, uh, to stream. We are, by the way, now streaming on x. How do you, how do we feel about that? I don't, are we. Are we okay with that? We have let me see, right now, people watching us on xcom yeah, that's what I think.

1:06:51 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It costs them more money to stream. Oh, that's right, we're hurting them so good point.

1:06:56 - Leo Laporte
We're doing this to hurt you. No, uh, we, we are one of the things we're doing now as part of we lose the studio but we gain seven new streams. Uh, I remember when we first started streaming, it was hard to find somebody who would stream for free. We had BitGravity at first. Then IBM bought them and started to charge Justin.

We had Justin, and then there was Ustream. Justin became Twitch. Right now we are on Discord for our club members, we're on X, we're on YouTube, we're on Twitchtv slash Twit. We're on youtube, we're on uh twitchtv slash twit. We're on facebook, we're on linkedin and we're on kick. That's seven different places. You can watch us stream our shows live. I think that's cool.

I had some misgivings about x. I'm not a huge fan, but you know you, you want to be where your viewers are, whatever's convenient for them, right, and because not a lot fan. But you know you, you want to be where your viewers are, whatever's convenient for them, right. And because not a lot of people are streaming content, we're almost always featured on the front page of x, so that's good. I I don't have a deal with don lemon or with elon, so, um, I guess we just move on. Uh, let's see. Are you you willing to pay $42.99 a month to watch sports, disney, fox and Warner Brothers? Discovery's sports streamer, venu V-E-N-U no E, will be launching soon at $43 a month, right around the NFL season, which is a month away. Is Ant still there? Ant loved the idea. I think Ant loved the idea. We talked about it yesterday on Mac Break Weekly, jason Snell. What it is is people who really want to watch a lot of sports. I guess Sports in lieu of anything else, like full-time sports all the time.

1:08:57 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Sports does seem expensive, but I, I mean, I like sports. I'm not gonna pay a monthly subscription just to watch sports uh, yeah maybe different if I'm still into the nfl and I. I couldn't get that in italy.

1:09:12 - Leo Laporte
I don't know with the, with the holy father, pay 43 bucks a month for the premier league I would not, because we get that in italy for free, so okay just actually one of the things I love about sports in italy is I can always find a channel that is just broadcasting the sport.

1:09:29 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
There's no commentary.

1:09:30 - Leo Laporte
There's no, no that's a good love. I love that. That is fantastic. I like that. I like that. By the way, there are 462 people watching us on YouTube. I think YouTube's probably the largest.

1:09:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you getting that number from YouTube or from YouTube From? Youtube Does that want to say views?

1:09:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, somebody said this Benito said we should be dubious.

1:09:54 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
dubious of the x number, because that's he thinks everybody who is tuned in ever to the stream I think anybody who passes by the stream on their feed, even you know, like the pivot to video on facebook, that thing youtube goes up and down, so I have a feeling it's an actual account.

1:10:12 - Leo Laporte
It says 454 people are watching now on YouTube. That's pretty good.

1:10:19 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
That's a larger number than we normally get, so I'm very pleased actually, leo, you need to add your content to Disney, because they just became profitable did they really they did.

1:10:31 - Leo Laporte
Disney Plus is making money. It's now making money. That's one of the few. I mean, you got netflix and everybody else, so good. I think that's great. Hey, speaking of x, did you see that our good friend mike masnick is joining the blue sky board? So great. All around, all right, blue sky. I think if anything is uh poised to replace twitter, it might be blue sky I, I like it.

1:10:59 - Jeff Jarvis
The problem is, journalists are on threads. I wish they would come up for blue sky, blue sky's great.

1:11:04 - Leo Laporte
The threads, unfortunately, is owned by meta. Blue sky is not. Blue sky was the blue sky research project funded by jack dorsey when he was running twitter to create a federated uh social network, and I think a lot of the features of blue sky work very well. The lists seem very popular. Um, a lot of a lot of good people on there.

1:11:30 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
When I eventually give up on on twitter. I am going to go over to blue sky, so I have sort of that's my, my twit. That's my twit army account. But yeah, twitter is becoming less and less useful.

1:11:42 - Leo Laporte
I and I'm almost at that point where I'm where the the negatives outweigh the positives yeah, I love mastodon, but you're right, there's not the mass of traffic, the number of people that we were used to. There's nothing like Twitter anymore.

1:11:57 - Jeff Jarvis
unfortunately, that's the unfortunate thing I'm still up on all of them.

1:12:03 - Leo Laporte
Where do you get the most engagement?

1:12:06 - Jeff Jarvis
It varies. It's really interesting. There's no pattern I can find. Oh, tech stories are more here, more there. It's just something catches on Time of the day. I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is read through the newspapers and I text stuff, just copy it and put it on all four and it varies across the map. Well, the thing I found about Mastodon is because there's no retweeting, you only have immediate discussion or not. About Mastodon is because there's no retweeting, you only have immediate discussion or not. It'll go away immediately, Whereas on the others you can see some residual because it'll come back up at somebody's conversation later and it'll get recommended to someone.

1:12:45 - Leo Laporte
There's a virality to Twitter that doesn't exist elsewhere.

1:12:50 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I still get decent engagement on Twitter. A couple of thousand is the starting point, but anytime I tweet politics which I do, because now that I'm in the Vatican and now that I'm in Rome, I don't worry about the blowback but the last couple I did were up in the millions, tens of millions Wow, and you're right. I'm still getting retweets from political posts I put up tens of millions Wow, and you're right. I'm still getting retweets from political posts I put up a month ago Wow, and it just feeds on itself and unfortunately, that does not yet exist on any of the other platforms I'm exploring. Yes, yes.

1:13:23 - Jeff Jarvis
The other thing, father, is the thing that I've said this on the show before but there's communities.

It's easy for me as an individual to move somewhere else. It's not easy to move a community, and I held a Black Twitter summit earlier this year and I really saw that lesson then is that something has been built there by a community and you can't just replicate that, and the other platforms were not terribly hospitable to that community. And I also know that some of the people who I care about a lot in Black Twitter, starting with Andre Brock Jr, who wrote the book on Black Twitter, distributed Blackness he said why do we have to give it up? It's white flight is going on and communities that don't have another place to go are still there. So I I think that matters and I think we've got there's an argument too that says we got to fight for that turf until the end yeah, no, it's hard to fight, though, when the owner of the turf is a turf yeah, yeah I agree, but I just I've gotten extremely liberal with the block I, I have my community.

1:14:33 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I have the people that I am engaging with and if someone's going to come in and try to start a war, no, immediately block, done, done. And I didn't use to do that, but that's, that's the reality of Twitter, now the only way yeah.

1:14:45 - Leo Laporte
And I have to admit I guess because of who I'm following and so forth I don't see a lot of the bad crap that everybody else complains about on Twitter, so I don't know. It's more about the owner than it is about actually the content on there. However, I'm glad to see Masnick is going to be joining the blue sky board. As you remember, mike is the guy who wrote an open letter to Elon Musk when he took over twitter about speed running the moderation curve and unfortunately I guess elon didn't read it because he literally followed every single step in the in the moderation curve that mike was warning him about.

1:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Um, mike's brilliant at this. There's nobody better at understanding the limitations of moderation and what the issues are, and and nobody more honest about about how corporations should act, and so I'm. It's an act of generosity and responsibility to the social web.

1:15:38 - Leo Laporte
So thank you, mike he also wrote the paper that might have inspired blue sky right protocols, not platforms. And uh the knight. First amendment institute at columb it and uh he said that.

1:15:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Jack says that he was inspired by it. Yeah, yeah.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Anecdotally at least. Uh, Jack's, uh, inspiration for blue sky was that paper, so it's great that he's there, Um, and if anybody does things to make blue sky, uh, a better place it will be Mike Masnick.

1:16:13 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, yeah, yeah, congratulations, mike, mike, mike is he good. Blue Sky Swag. Take your friends here.

1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
We'll get Mike on as soon as we can. He's now even more busy than ever.

1:16:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's the thing he is the world's busiest.

1:16:25 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this Week in Google. Paris has the week off. I hope she'll be back next week if she's on assignment in Washington DC, but Jeff Jarvis is here and filling in for Paris, the wonderful Father Robert Balassaire, the digital Jesuit, and it is our officially last show. You know it's funny, the first show in a new studio is always a big deal.

1:16:50 - Jeff Jarvis
You're going to scare people. It's the last show. Last show in this new studio is always a big deal. You're going to scare people. It's the last show.

1:16:52 - Leo Laporte
Last show in this studio. Thank you, father Robert was here for the very first show in this studio. Did you ride the trolley over and everything?

1:17:02 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I did. I have the video of me riding the trolley over, yeah.

1:17:06 - Leo Laporte
So we make a big deal. We open a new studio. You know we had a ribbon cutting. In fact, I just saw in the lobby the giant scissors that we bought, which were never used again. I don't know, Should we do that for the attic? Open the attic studio with the giant scissors? You were the cat, we rented them. When we opened the brick house, we rented giant scissors, and when we moved here we thought well, I guess if we're going to keep using them, we ought to buy a pair. Where?

1:17:32 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
do you have a pair of?

1:17:33 - Leo Laporte
giant scissors. Where does?

1:17:35 - Jeff Jarvis
that happen.

1:17:36 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. The giant scissors store, where else I don't know.

1:17:42 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know where we got them, but we have them. Somebody has a warehouse sitting there saying I don't know why people aren't coming and renting my scissors very often.

1:17:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, and as you pointed out, robert, when you have a lot of space, you accumulate weird stuff, and you know there's so much especially, and I feel weird getting just walking away from it too. That's the other thing. It's a little disconcerting.

1:18:01 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
This is all stuff we bought although leo it, it can't be worse than what was down in the no hole. Uh, when you were still doing the the giz whiz, because you had such strange gadgets down there where you're looking at going, what, what even was this? You had some sort of scooter that you would have to like lean back and forth.

1:18:21 - Leo Laporte
I think burke almost killed himself twice trying that thing when we first moved into the brick house, the, the basement was empty. As you said, the ceiling was too low for code so they couldn't rent it. But we had it, we had access to it. It was completely empty. So we used to do races of all kinds around the basement. As long as you didn't run into one of the pillars or hit your head on the low ceiling, you were good. That was a lot of fun. So we always have a celebration moving in, but usually the celebration moving in goes along with the celebration of moving out. But this time there's no transition like that. We're just going to kind of walk away. Are the giant scissors gone? Somebody took them.

1:19:03 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
The vultures, Leo the vultures. Somebody already took the giant scissors.

1:19:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know there's a problem here. The sword and the scissors are gone.

1:19:09 - Leo Laporte
The sword and the scissors are gone sword and the scissors are gone, but the but this massive giant wire. Why don't we have this for? I saw burke use that to open a lunch once, so it's a bolt cutter yeah, I don't know why we need this 28 pound bolt cutter, but we got one that's but leo, this is what you've done.

1:19:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I mean, when you went from g4 oh sorry tech tv when it was still good. When you went from G4, oh sorry tech TV when it was still good. When you went and then you started doing podcasting, you started doing Twit. You know, back when? What was it, cranky? Before it was called Twit, you had a name.

1:19:43 - Leo Laporte
The Revenge of the Screensavers that's right which we were told we couldn't use by the owners, Comcast and you transformed the industry.

1:19:52 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
You went from needing millions of dollars of studio work and a ridiculously large crew to doing something efficiently and small. And then you changed that again when you moved into the Eastside Studios. Now you're changing it again. You're just this is normal, this is normal, thank you.

1:20:06 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, robert. Now we know why you're such a useful counselor for those in grief. I appreciate it. Thank you, uh, uh, yeah, anyway, our last time in this beautiful, uh east side studio, which we've been in for eight years. Uh, we still have two more years lease, but uh, I don't. I think we were going to try to get out of the lease, if not, at least we don't have to pay for the power and the insurance and all that stuff, so it should save some money. So we're doing that to save for the power and the insurance and all that stuff. So it should save some money. So we're doing that to save money. That's why we're doing it. That's why we're doing it.

All right, I wanted to ask the journalists and since Paris isn't here, that means you, jeff about this article in the New York Intelligencer. Everybody is mad at Bloomberg because it broke its embargo. Because it broke its embargo, you remember, in the prisoner swap there were briefings for the press, but they were told in the briefings. You know, until the prisoners are out of Russia and in American hands. Please say nothing about this.

1:21:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I was shocked when this occurred, because it was obvious. I don't know what time Bloomberg broke this 7.41 am that morning.

1:21:33 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't until after 11 am that the Wall Street Journal that reporters on the tarmac said okay, they're on American soil, go they were from a distance they couldn't even be at the tarmac, but they wanted to make sure that the prisoners were effectively swapped and were no longer in Russian hands before they published. This is important.

Bloomberg for some reason did not, and not only that, but a Bloomberg editor 10 minutes later posted on X. It's one of the greatest honors of my career to have helped break this news. I love my job and my colleagues.

1:22:07 - Jeff Jarvis
So two things about this. One, it was not News Corp's embargo, it was the White House's embargo. Yes, it was the federal government's embargo. They're the ones who were getting people out. Joe Biden was doing this with Olaf Scholz and it was their story and their concern.

And then Bloomberg, properly, John Micklethwaite, who's now the editor at Bloomberg, formerly of the Economist, did as he should have an investigation. The main report, the byline reporter, was fired. She then wrote back a response saying well, but I worked with the editor and I didn't do this. And a lot of people came to her defense oh you're, you're no, and I, I I think that she was wrong. She knew the conditions of it. She in her, in her non mea culpa, mea culpa, she said I didn't break the embargo. We worked very carefully on this. But she's not the only one. The editor who was involved, one, the editor who was involved. The two of them should go. This is wrong and they put people's lives at risk. They put the whole deal at risk for their own ego of a scoop. Scoops are of no value in this world. They last with the speed of a click. Uh, it was, it was.

1:23:27 - Leo Laporte
I was appalled, so wrong and, and honestly I think, jennifer Jacobs, who's the reporter, one of the two reporters who was, of course, the intelligence service says left Bloomberg, but you say she was fired. It sounds like she might have been scapegoated. She said she had worked hand in hand with her editors to adhere to editorial standards and guidelines. At no time did I do anything that was knowingly inconsistent with the administration's embargo. That's put anyone involved at risk.

She said reporters don't have the final say over when a story is published or with what headline.

1:24:00 - Jeff Jarvis
She's not taking responsibility. I think it's all the more proper that she's gone because she didn't take responsibility there.

1:24:06 - Leo Laporte
But what if she wrote the story thinking it would be held until 11 am?

1:24:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That doesn't say so. But she said she worked with the editors, which is to say that she knew what the editors were doing and so she knew the conditions of the embargo, and then the editor who went and bragged about it.

1:24:26 - Leo Laporte
I think it's right to the extent that that person should also go. He was demoted, but not fired yeah.

1:24:33 - Jeff Jarvis
That's how she paid a worse price than he did.

1:24:37 - Leo Laporte
I worry that and I hope that they do a real investigation. I worry that she was scapegoated, that she wrote the story but she didn't release it. There's somebody higher up who says, okay, publish it Right.

1:24:49 - Jeff Jarvis
We need to know who knew that there was an embargo, who knew the conditions. What was their process for doing that? Clearly it's sensitive. Clearly and Bloomberg has had people who've been in this jeopardy before. Every news organization, international news organization has. It's not about the public's right to know. There was no right to know in this case because the story wasn't the story until they were safely in America. That's right. That's right.

1:25:13 - Leo Laporte
I don't think there's anybody in the public who thinks it's a good idea to get that story out before they're safe. No, that jeopardizes the whole thing.

1:25:25 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, I want to ask I mean, having covered stories like this before what's going to be the blowback for Bloomberg? Do they not get invited to the next big brouhaha that the White House throws, or do they go on the naughty list?

1:25:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I think there's a good chance they will. Yeah, I think that's part of the reason they had this investigation to say we know we screwed up, we did wrong. Biggleswaite is writing letters to every one of the hostages personally apologizing Good.

1:25:53 - Leo Laporte
I worry that, bloomberg. There's something going on at bloomberg. Remember they had that scoop on the super micro motherboard that never was corroborated, that it had been somewhere along the supply chain and introduced spy hardware had been introduced into it and it it was never corroborated. Remember this, robert? Robert, I know you do, yeah, and they never apologized. They stood by it. I worry that the editorial standards of Bloomberg are, I don't know, non-existent slipping. I worry.

I don't know if two stories is a trend or not. I use them a lot. That's when I pay a lot of money to use them. But, all right, you don't do a terminal. No, no, no, no, but it's still. It's very hundreds of dollars. Yeah, yeah, you access it. Uh, speaking of news, canadian news engagement is down significantly one year after meta's ban. Remember, meta decided they weren't going to publish news anymore after they were told well, if you do, you've got to share some revenue with news organizations. Well, it turns out that Canadians' total engagement with news content on social media has been reduced by 43%, and local news outlets, many of which rely on Facebook, have especially been hit hard. 30% of them are now inactive on social media.

1:27:17 - Jeff Jarvis
And the other issue here a guy who runs one company that's very successful there Local News he said it's going to be a lot harder to start a new brand. Right, because how do you find people? You find them on social.

1:27:29 - Leo Laporte
Apparently, only 22% of Canadians even know that there's a ban in place. However, uh, canadians are seeing less news online 11 million fewer daily views on facebook and instagram.

1:27:44 - Jeff Jarvis
So I'm not sure organizing an update for independent media next month, uh, to do an update on the legislation that's occurred across the US, and I'm also going to, I hope, have updates on the aftermath of this in Canada and Australia.

1:27:58 - Leo Laporte
Where do we stand in California? I know you came to Sacramento to testify against this.

1:28:02 - Jeff Jarvis
There are two bills, one past the Assembly, the other past the Senate. Each is sitting in the quiet of the summer recess. Google has an offer on the table for $30 million and the promise to try to get other tech companies involved and unused tax credits, and so now there is negotiation going on, I hope in ways that I don't know.

1:28:33 - Leo Laporte
You're watching this Week in Google, jeff Jarvis, father Robert Ballas, here in a rare appearance. Great to have you. Jeff is in beautiful Philadelphia today, the seat, the heart, the birthplace of America, at the lovely.

1:28:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Notary Hotel.

1:28:50 - Leo Laporte
Nice, thank you for doing this.

1:28:54 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Oh, that's nice, you know the hotel, know the hotel. Oh, wow, I do know the hotel.

1:28:57 - Leo Laporte
Google had an ad. Maybe you saw it, the. The ad's title was dear sydney, in which a father a loving, doting father notices that his daughter is a big fan of Olympic track star Sidney McLaughlin-Leveroni. Instead of encouraging her to write to Sidney with a real letter, he delegates Gemini to write the letter for her. The ad got airplayed during NBC's coverage of the Olympics this week. You might have seen it, as well as on ECNBC in USA. Google has got a lot of heat for this and has now pulled the ad from the networks. It was an ad produced in-house Dear Gemini, help my daughter write a letter.

1:29:50 - Jeff Jarvis
All right. So I've got another Vatican question for Father Robert. In my world in journalism and my other world of education, obviously there's a lot of talk about using LLMs, yes, and the fear that it'll be used for stories when it shouldn't, and so on and so forth, and students and all this, and students and all this. Has there been guidance to clergy on the use of LLMs for homilies and such?

1:30:18 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yes, actually, and this is one of those instances where it fits right into the old guidelines. So the old guidelines is we priests have always had what we call homily helps, which have been previous homilies that have done really well, that have followed certain themes that we might want to explore. So the use of an llm is basically just another homily help. So it should never be just that. If you can't just take a homily help and give it as if it's your own, same thing you cannot take something that a llm has created and use it as your own.

1:30:51 - Leo Laporte
It should be something that you use to get ideas that you develop into a homily do you have a jingle like homily helper helps your homily make a great meal, anything like that, because I feel like you ought to.

1:31:05 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
You're missing I think, I think I want a partnership with google where I write a rousing homily about uh, oh, I don't know the arrival of aliens on earth and I turn to their llm to to capture the moment, the spiritual impact, you know.

1:31:22 - Jeff Jarvis
But you're absolutely right. I, I, um, I was an advisor for a while to uh, the christian century magazine, and one of the most popular features in it is the lectionary help. I had a minister once who never wanted when the web came along, never wanted to put his sermons online, saying that he was afraid people would steal them. And then I thought about it and I thought maybe that's what he's doing. He doesn't want to be exposed.

1:31:54 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Oh wow's. Here's the problem, um I I have conservatively given maybe 30 000 homilies over the course of my life yeah, it's multiple.

1:32:04 - Leo Laporte
So every time you conduct a mass do you have to do a homily? Is it part of the mass?

1:32:08 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
uh, in our community, when it's just us, we do not for a weekday mass, we do, but every other time, yeah, there's absolutely a homily and I have you've done that many I've put, I've done so many, but the problem is you run out the common wisdom is.

1:32:23 - Leo Laporte
A priest has maybe four homilies and then over, and over and over yeah, that's so, that's true everybody. I only have one show that I've ever done it's this show. It's always the same show that's normal, that's human.

1:32:38 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
People don't have that, you know, and I only have one funeral homily. I really do.

1:32:43 - Jeff Jarvis
There's only so many ways you can do that, so so what my sister does a prayer for a funeral, where she gets the details of someone's life from their family and it's brilliant, from their family and it's brilliant and it's, and it's tears every time. She's a minister, she's a ministry minister and um, yeah, you, you fit it into what?

1:33:00 - Leo Laporte
works absolutely so. That's in movies. You always see that. I didn't know jeff, but those who did tell me he was a wonderful man no, I like that kind of thing.

1:33:11 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I did the futurama, the Futurama version. The Futurama version is, I didn't know, jeff, but I feel completely comfortable speaking to his closest friends and family about the most intimate details of his life.

1:33:22 - Leo Laporte
So what is your? Tell me your funeral homily secrets father.

1:33:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Okay, so the funeral homily secrets actually starts way before the homily actually starts. You need to look at the people who are showing up to the funeral and identify. Are we going to have a problem here? Is there anyone arriving? Angry. Is there anyone who's? Arriving. That looks like they need to speak, or is overly distraught, because you actually do have to change the homily based on whether or not it's going to trigger somebody.

1:33:50 - Leo Laporte
It's a very emotional time.

1:33:52 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It's interesting, it's not just sadness.

1:33:54 - Leo Laporte
The emotions can be very wide ranging.

1:33:57 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
The very first homily I ever gave for a funeral was a funeral. It was a very rapid one. It had to happen really quickly. It was down near Milpitas and we show up. Everyone is just solemn. I don't know any of the details. I was not given a sheet on the deceased and so I'm doing a generic homily and in the middle of it the brother stands up and I'm thinking, okay, he wants to say a few things about his brother and he says my brother died of AIDS. He's going to hell. I'm like, okay, okay. So how do you?

1:34:30 - Leo Laporte
respond to that. I'm like okay, okay, yeah, rat cheese is the jerk timber, yeah, so how do you respond to that?

1:34:35 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Well then, I turned on my LLM and it gave me a rousing homily. What did the AI say?

1:34:41 - Leo Laporte
That's a tough one because, yeah, you've got to serve everybody involved. Yep, yep, and yeah, there's a lot of upset there.

1:34:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, yeah, there's a lot of upset there. I went to a funeral once where the kids did not realize that they saw somebody sign into the sheet with their last name. They said well, who's this? Oh, I was your father's first wife. What. Those kinds of things come out all the time at funerals.

1:35:11 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I can beat that In Los Angeles. Um, so not me, not me, but another one of my brother, my jesuit brothers very first funeral he's ever done. And if you've ever been to blessed sacrament in hollywood, it's. It's a very interesting place, uh, filled with very interesting people. But he there, he's in the sacristy, he's preparing, he's vesting up, and someone comes in and says Father, I have to tell you something. You should know this before we start the mass Half of the people in the congregation knew the deceased as Jeff and the other half knew him as Letitia. Wow. And so he gets out and it's like down the middle black suits, white shirts and fabulous dress, colorful, yeah. And that was his very first one as a priest, his very first funeral. How do you know?

1:36:10 - Leo Laporte
When no one knows this will go down in history. Yeah, wow, that's uh, that's amazing cool. But did you see, by the way, we were talking about x, I forgot to mention uh elon's moving out of san francisco? The, that's right, the old twitter building that was there forever? He's he kind of. He kind of uh tore off parts of the sign bit by bit, turned Twitter into something else by taking out the W, then put a giant X on the roof, to the complaints of neighbors and ultimately, the city he's made him take it down Is he going to pay the?

rent before he leaves.

1:36:44 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I don't even know.

1:36:46 - Leo Laporte
Has he paid the rent? I don't know he was in trouble for not paying it for some time, yeah, for a long time he said they don't care because it was already all but abandoned Is he going to leave the sink there that he brought in on his first day? No one knows.

1:37:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, remember he did the auction. He sold off tons of stuff.

1:37:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I know, I wanted to buy some stuff.

1:37:07 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I actually thought about going there because there were some like bread makers. There were some really interesting Nice stuff, coffee machines.

1:37:16 - Leo Laporte
So Elon was taking a little victory lap just the other day, as he does, saying everybody thought Twitter was going to fall apart. It was going to be gone by now. Are we gone? No, we're doing better than ever. I think he was making fun of the Guardian for saying it's going to be bad news for Twitter. To his credit, it's still running. It works. It's actually working just fine.

1:37:40 - Jeff Jarvis
I was among those who thought it was going to just fall apart. Nobody was running it.

1:37:44 - Leo Laporte
I thought if you fire half the team, can it survive? And maybe he was right, maybe that half wasn't doing much, I don't know except that half was dealing with safety issues and sales. But other than that, yeah, they shut down servers. He shut down. He said what does this do? We don't need it. Took it off and caused problems, but he survived. So, anyway, they're moving, not out of California, even though he announced that he was going to move out of California because, I don't know, he's upset about something.

1:38:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, it was woke.

1:38:18 - Leo Laporte
No, no, it was because the schools. There was a rule in schools that the teachers did not have to tell parents if their child decided to use a different pronoun.

1:38:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It was because of his terrible behavior.

1:38:29 - Leo Laporte
And he didn't like that because he has a transgender. It was because of his terrible behavior and he didn't like that. Yeah, because he has a transgender. Is his child transgender or just questioning, I don't know, but anyway, non-binary.

1:38:41 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, she's transgender.

1:38:43 - Leo Laporte
She's trans. So, yeah, he doesn't like that. He disowned the person and now he's leaving California, except he's not. He's moving the whole Twitter operation to San Jose, so I guess they've got a building down there.

1:38:56 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I mean Apple did that too. Apple and Cisco. There's a big group down there. It's still considered the Silicon Valley. It's still there.

1:39:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, it is. It's more Silicon Valley than San Francisco.

1:39:07 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
And I love San Francisco. I lived in San Francisco for many, many years, but it is a mess right now.

1:39:11 - Leo Laporte
It is an absolute mess.

1:39:13 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I'll admit that.

1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
It's a victim of the fentanyl crisis. That is very clear. It's unfortunate.

1:39:20 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I was just down there last year in Soma and I was just walking three blocks down to the Metreon Theater.

1:39:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a bad area.

1:39:31 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I passed at least a dozen people who were in the middle of a fentanyl hit, and that's.

1:39:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's really sad. Yeah, it's a really terrible.

1:39:41 - Jeff Jarvis
COVID and downtown. Think about cities that don't have mixed use areas. The business areas are falling apart. Midtown, manhattan, a lot of it's sad.

1:39:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, get ready, because if you use Google Assistant, gemini Intelligence is coming to you. A major upgrade to Nest smart speakers and displays, nest cameras, a powerful AI infusion. This is Jennifer Patterson-Tui writing for the Verge. Of course she's a regular uh with micah on the tech news weekly. While splashy chat bots may get all the attention generative, ai has the potential to make the smart home simpler and more accessible. Amazon we already have talked about this is going to offer it looks like an upsell to amazon's echo to make it smarter. Now google is promising that and, by the way, we're going to be doing the fall hardware event. Is it Wednesday or Tuesday morning, right, jeff? You're going to join me at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. So we thought it might just be the Pixel 9, but I think maybe there's going to be a lot more to announce, including updates to the Google Home stuff, the Nest stuff and the Chromecast.

And that new Chromecast We'll talk about that in a second too.

1:40:57 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, Did they dream that there might be a new Chromebook from Google, since mine sucks. No, there will never be a new Chromebook from.

1:41:04 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Google? I don't think so. I think they're done, they're done.

1:41:07 - Leo Laporte
I can almost promise you.

1:41:08 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
They just wanted to prime the market, and the market is plenty primed. Yeah, they don't need it.

1:41:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, are you using the Acer now?

1:41:16 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I'm using the red Samsung, which I know is a little bit old Did.

1:41:21 - Leo Laporte
I freeze here. Yeah, your Samsung decided to use it. It wasn't going to let you say whatever that was. You wanted to say the fan never shuts up. Oh. I hate that, that that's probably why you're freezing too. Yeah, so uh. Google home will now have a camera intelligence feature that will generate descriptive captions for video footage from nest cameras. You're watching a man walk up your drive. He's wearing a mask and carrying a crowbar.

1:41:54 - Jeff Jarvis
He could be your Uncle Joe. It could be Uncle Joe or a murderer. Do not trust us, because we're only in LLM and we don't know what truth is.

1:42:03 - Leo Laporte
There will be a natural language input for creating smart home routines, a smarter aka Gabby, your assistant for smart speakers in this place, and an all-new voice, but most of these features will be paywalled behind a Nest Aware subscription, which is pretty expensive, as I remember.

Oh come on $8 a month, $80 a year. That's the base model. It'll launch first in Google's public preview beta program, so if you're in that program you can expect to get that, and then more users will get it next year. And then this is the new Google Smart Home Hub, aka the TV Streamer 4K. It is a matter controller, a thread border router and a TV streamer and that's going to be coming out. I think it's $100, as I remember, which is more than the old Chromecast you can buy an old Chromecast now, but they're making no more.

1:43:01 - Jeff Jarvis
So if you want it for the old time's sake, buy it now. And while the technology behind Chromecast persists, the name, it looks like, is gone, so that's the end of the line for a crowd he hates investing in brands and not throwing it away.

1:43:14 - Leo Laporte
No, yes, continuity bad, and a new Nest Learning thermostat. So there may be a lot of things to talk about on Tuesday. Good, good. Here's an example, by the way A person unloading groceries from the car. The caption is a young person in casual clothing standing next to a parked black suv. They're carrying grocery bags, the car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful uh, it's a black suv they're carrying weapons run, so they've traded like a faulkner.

1:43:52 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Ai is that? It's a stream of conscience.

1:43:54 - Leo Laporte
The area appears peaceful. That's hysterical at that. You want to hear the? Uh, let's see, here's the new voice. I play it for you here hey, google Is Pluto a planet.

1:44:09 - AI
Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. It was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

1:44:14 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't sound that different, but I like it. It's a little more human, it's got a little vocal fry. International Astronomical.

1:44:20 - AI
Union. This is because Pluto doesn't meet all the criteria to be a planet, which includes having a clear orbital.

1:44:26 - Leo Laporte
Even a little lisp, a little fetching little lisp. Anyway, even a little lisp a little fetching little lisp.

1:44:31 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Anyway, you know, they should get the voice actress who does Cortana in the Halo series to be a Google voice.

1:44:37 - Leo Laporte
Did Microsoft use her for Cortana? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, she had a sexy voice. Yeah, and I don't know if this is a selling point, but the new thermostat says a pixel. Watch on your wall, really, you think, you think that's there's a new nest learning thermostat, a new google tv streamer and gemini intelligence is coming no, that's actually that's, I think. Is that uh ms too? He?

1:45:04 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I don't know I want any other way. I want to nest thermostat on my, on my wrist. Yeah, I think that's the way that would be good I'm getting, it's getting hot every day you're hot.

1:45:17 - Leo Laporte
Google also had a big android update. I'm on a samsung phone, so I'm back in june. That's not good news because there were 46 vulnerabilities patched in august, including a zero day, which google says is may be under limited targeted exploitation cve 2024, 369 or 71.

1:45:43 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a use after free weakness in the colonel's network route management, you know I'm old enough to remember when we had to worry about actually updating our phones. It's so nice now they update themselves.

1:45:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but this is why you want, probably, if you care, a pixel, because it's going to be up to date, the august update and my, like I said, my samsung's back in june, happily going, you know, I'm fine. What about it? Nothing, nothing more here. So this there are some serious issues that are being patched. Earlier this year, google patched another zero day. Uh, that was in the wild, so this is not even, uh, the first at least they patch it right, make sure you uh, yeah, keep your phone up to date.

Do you have a choice? I don't know, it's just the way it is.

1:46:34 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I think I still have six years left on my 8 Pro. It's seven years right. They guarantee seven years.

1:46:39 - Leo Laporte
The new ones are seven. Yeah, in fact, samsung, I got the Flip 6, and it says seven years. There you go, so that's good. Yeah, vers.

1:46:48 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
So that's good, versus my OnePlus, which was, I think, two After two, they abandoned it, yeah, for a long time the godmother of AI says California's well-intended AI bill will harm the US ecosystem.

1:47:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Faye, faye Leach is right.

1:47:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Faye, Faye Leach, yeah, she says yeah. This SB 1047, a well-meaning piece of legislation, will have significant unintended consequences, not just for California, but for the entire country. It's not yet law, but if passed into law, it will harm our budding AI ecosystem, especially the parts of it that are already disadvantaged compared to today's tech giants, the public sector, academia and little tech. It will unnecessarily penalize developers, stifle the open source community and hamstring academic AI research, all while failing to address the very real issues it was authored to save Exactly.

1:47:46 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the problem of thinking that you can make the machine responsible for everything that anyone could ever do with it. And it goes back to if I may go back to rare book school for a moment. As I've said on the show before, it's like telling Gutenberg okay, but don't ever let this guy, luther, ever get near this thing.

1:48:06 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Hey wait a minute.

1:48:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah wait a minute, yeah. And so the same problem here is that is, the reflex is to try to regulate the technology, the technologists, when it's the use of it, uh, where that's that's going to occur, and it's well intentioned, maybe, but it's just naive as hell. That's not going to solve anything. It's. It's only going to hurt the ecosystem. She's right.

1:48:29 - Leo Laporte
One of the things she doesn't like is a kill switch mechanism. She says all models over a certain threshold must in in this bill, must include a kill switch by which the program could be shut down at any time. This completely comes from too many sci-fi movies, yeah, yeah someone has watched too much.

1:48:47 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Person of interest. Yeah, there's yeah there was an entire episode dedicated to that oh, you gotta have a kill switch.

1:48:53 - Leo Laporte
What about robocop? Uh, she says, if developers are concerned, the programs they download and build on will be deleted. They'll be much more hesitant to write code and collaborate. The kill switch will devastate the open source community. Uh, it will cripple public sector and academic AI research. Anyway, it does. And she says most alarmingly, this bill does not address the potential harms of AI advancement, including bias and deep fakes. Yes, yes.

1:49:24 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Robert you were going to say On Twit, we often talked about the vulnerability of LLMs to poisoning the well. That's the thing that they actually should be dealing with, not open source. Open source, by its very nature, is not going to suffer from what we consider the worst case scenario, which is you have a poisoned well that you don't know is poisoned An open source LLM. You're going to know it's poison because you can see how it's working. So I really don't. When I looked at this, I was happy at first because I thought, oh good, they're taking this seriously. They're actually going to look at some legislation to make sure that this is shepherded properly. And then I looked at the bill. It was so disappointing.

1:50:04 - Jeff Jarvis
And the White House, by the way, recently said that they don't see any reason to regulate open source, which is a good thing. What fascinates me, father, is I want to have somebody write a book for this. I might be editing a book series on this kind of stuff, and it fascinates me to look at this as the amoral machine. Not immoral, it's amoral. It doesn't think, it doesn't know, it doesn't have any intent. There's not immoral, it's amoral. It doesn't think, it doesn't know, it doesn't have any intent. There's nothing about it. And with all the anthropomorphization that goes on, I don't think people have gotten their heads around that. It is a machine that's among us that someone can make do anything. Right, it's a sociopath versus psychopath.

1:50:49 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Oh, say more. Yeah, well, I mean. So a sociopath just doesn't have the ability to see anything beyond what his own directives are. It's not that he's an evil person, it's not that he wants to do bad things, it's just that he sees no restriction against doing those if it will forward his aim Versus. A psychopath is someone we would consider is just there to cause chaos. He actually wants to cause pain, to cause suffering, so they think it's psychopathic. It's sociopathic. In other words, as long as we tell it to want the things that it should want, it's never going to do anything that is beyond our control or beyond scope.

1:51:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Thank you. Meanwhile, an AI dentist has performed its first procedure.

1:51:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Meanwhile, an AI dentist has performed its first procedure Get ready for the video, because those of you on video you're going to squirm Is it safe?

1:51:37 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Is it safe? Why do we always refer back to that movie? Well, because it made an impact.

1:51:45 - Leo Laporte
What movie was that? It was Marathon man.

1:51:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Marathon man and the torturer using dental tools, so it's not good so if you go to the company site there, you'll see a video, uh, where it's basically like a 3d robot, I mean 3d printer, in reverse. You got a plug in your mouth and it's it's drilling it down. Um, it's in there, leo, I forget where yeah, this picture I'll show.

1:52:13 - Leo Laporte
But should I show the video? I don't know for sure do I get to wear the glasses? That's all content. Warning, content, warning, content. Warning dental procedures ahead. All right, here we go. This is the uh. Is the uh? Should I leave the sound off? Yeah, so is this a robot doing this? Yeah, it's a. Yeah, I don't know. That's enough. I don't want to see anymore I don't.

1:52:40 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a little too near your pink skin yeah, um, so, is it, is it it's?

1:52:47 - Leo Laporte
oh god, no God, no, that looks painful. Yeah, that's what it's doing.

1:52:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sorry you got to show it. No, I'm not.

1:52:55 - Leo Laporte
That's editorial discretion here. Do not like, do not like. Is this the one that raised $30 million from Mark Zuckerberg's dad?

1:53:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, not all the money from him, but he invested in it.

1:53:10 - Leo Laporte
Yes, cause he is a dentist. Oh, he's a dentist. Oh, he's a dentist, yeah, okay, and he has a little money now. Yeah, mark, cut him a check, maybe I don't know. Okay.

1:53:24 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I can see the remake. Click here if it is safe.

1:53:30 - Leo Laporte
Is it safe Without Zuckerberg money? Limited private funding is available for elections. This is from the Washington Post.

1:53:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Four years ago, his Chan Zuckerberg Foundation gave a lot of money to help run local $332 million. And what you say, that we shouldn't need any private money to run elections. But hello, that's where we are now and they've stopped doing that because it was meant to be kind of a temporary thing, COVID and all that. But now more than ever, local governments need the help they don't have it.

1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
That is, on the face of it, a real problem in a democracy where you're not providing the funds needed for elections you have to rely on the private sector and the you know the the kindness of strangers to have elections.

1:54:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That's crazy he has to buy his gold chains now. You know so priorities.

1:54:41 - Leo Laporte
Um zuckerberg said he made a one-time donation to the center in 2020 because of the pandemic, which fueled a spike in costs for election officials. The problem is, yeah, we don't have to buy ppe anymore, I guess, but you still have still expensive. There are critical funding gaps. Whose responsibility is that? The states? You know states and counties, yeah, and counties. Running elections across the us costs two to five billion dollars a year. Congress allocated 55 million for elections this year.

There's a gap uh state and local government unfunded mandate yeah yeah, that's, you have to have elections, but you figure out how to pay for it. Maybe we uh, I don't know maybe you go to chipotle and you say we'd like to put a voting booth in Chipotle and you have to buy a burrito bowl in order to vote, or something like that. There's got to be a public-private handshake here somewhere.

1:55:38 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
When. I was still living in. San Francisco. I was volunteering every year to the polling station, to the polls. Good, but they are required to give you a check for your time there. But the unspoken agreement between the people who were volunteering all the time is you don't cash the check, because if you cash the check you're going to bankrupt the organization.

1:56:00 - Leo Laporte
That's wow. You have on the ground knowledge, so they give you a check. It's probably not a big check.

1:56:06 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It's not a big check, but I mean you add them all up, you still shouldn't cash it.

1:56:08 - Leo Laporte
It's too a big check, but I mean you add them all up, you still shouldn't cash it. It's too much. 5,000 communities are eligible for grants. Most of them have fewer than 5,000 residents of voting age, so there will be grants available from the Center for Tech and Civic Life. This is wrong. This is wrong. Should we have to be begging for?

1:56:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
donations for our elections. This is wrong Right, right, right.

1:56:29 - Leo Laporte
That's what's wrong here. This is wrong. This is wrong. Should we have to be begging for donations for our elections?

1:56:31 - Jeff Jarvis
This is wrong. Right, right Right. That's what's wrong here, but there's all kinds of bad stuff happening now, and so what we need is Justice Department investigations of bad stuff that's happening, but that's not the story.

1:56:47 - Leo Laporte
I have to give a little credit to Justice, justice, neil gorsuch, for even knowing this story. He has a book coming out this week called overruled the human toll of too much law. One of the examples he uses is aaron schwartz, who of course you probably remember one of the authors of rss, a really brilliant young man who was prosecuted kind of mercilessly by the federal government using the Computer Fraud Act.

1:57:17 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
He you know his crime was downloading journals from we paid for, we paid for, we paid for the research scientific journals and making them public.

1:57:30 - Leo Laporte
Of course, they were owned by a company and he downloaded them. He had an account as a student, but he downloaded them illegally and distributed them. So yeah, he committed a crime. He ended up taking his own life because he faced the decades in prison under the Computer Fraud Act for downloading too many research papers while on a college campus that had an unlimited subscription MIT.

1:57:57 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
We've got that tomfoolery going on. Right now there's a bill in Congress that would allow private corporations to own the text of laws, because they're already submitting them to their representative to turn into bills. They wrote them, so they say it's kind of an admission turn into bills. Yeah, they wrote them.

1:58:10 - Leo Laporte
So they said well, we wrote them. It's kind of an admission, isn't it? Yeah, we wrote them, so they're ours, yeah, anyway, thank you, neil Gorsuch, for remembering that tragic story of Aaron Schwartz. Amazon is pushing fast delivery into rural areas. They want to challenge the post office. I can order something from Amazon now and get it the same day.

1:58:38 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
And I'm not exactly in a big city, I can get it within 30 minutes. Leo, 30 minutes, that's crazy. There's an Amazon fulfillment center down the street.

1:58:45 - Leo Laporte
Wow, e-commerce giant expanded this is Wall Street Journal Expanding to remote areas after years of fine tuning its delivery systems in more dense areas so that everyone in america can get stuff within minutes. Uh, this, of course, because they don't want to pay money to ups, usps or fedex for deliveries. They want to do their own with contract deliveries. Amazon. The journal says Amazon isn't trying to deliver itself to 100% of the customers in the US, but it is targeting 90%.

1:59:20 - Jeff Jarvis
And then the post office has the last 10 most expensive places to get stuff delivered Right.

1:59:25 - Leo Laporte
If it's real expensive, we'll let the government do it. Amazon says it now delivers more than two-thirds of its own packages in America. Wow, the US Postal Service has been raising rates and reducing pickups in some areas to compel shippers to use more of the Postal Service's network. The USPS has said it wants to modify contracts to end discounts to shippers dropping off parcels at delivery units, just for the difficult final mile. Amazon, yeah, um, yeah, interesting, very interesting article. Uh, getting getting toilet paper to eli minnesota and this has an impact on media.

2:00:10 - Jeff Jarvis
To this extent, the post office's business went away in first class mail it went away in because nobody writes letters anymore. It went away in huge numbers of packages, even though there's more packages out there now. Amazon's delivering them. So the business they have left is junk mail, which competes with newspapers.

2:00:30 - Leo Laporte
Actually, the Postal Service is, in some cases, in the junk mail business. I made the mistake of filing a change of address form because we're closing the studio, so we wanted to have the mail delivered to all of your house. Well then, we have a post office, but now I'm getting I'm getting mail that says official federal mail, government mail from the US Postal Service, inside coupons. Yeah, oh, you're moving. Maybe you'd like to buy something from you know, u-haul. It's coupons. I'm getting junk mail from the us postal service.

2:01:04 - AI
Well, they gotta make money somehow I guess I wish it didn't say.

2:01:08 - Leo Laporte
I wish it didn't say on the front official US Postal Service mail open immediately. It's just coupons. Do you want to talk about Caesar raps? No, I think you must have put this in.

2:01:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I did, but it's a dumb story, so never mind. Why is this simple rap hot? Because TikTok talked about it and it's just about morality. But that's enough.

2:01:31 - Leo Laporte
Now you know the truth, I think this might be a good time, two hours in, to wrap this show up with a final break and then your picks of the week, and then every one of you watching will get to pick one item from the studio to take home from our studio audience. You all get something. Uh, you're watching this week in google episode 780 coming to you. Uh, the last show coming to you live from the east side studio in petaluma, california. Let us, uh, I I don't know if they we told you about you know about the picks. I'm sure, father ro Robert, do you have something you want to pick?

2:02:14 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I'm going to Pass, but I reserve the right to come back, because I'm thinking of one right now.

2:02:19 - Leo Laporte
I thought you might Be interested in the tulip. Did you see the tulip computer? You do your share Of projects, right? I do. Let me find this. I think I put it in the rundown, but I, I, you know I don't, I don't see it anymore. Let's go look at my, uh, my bookmarks. I, I, I picked this out specifically for you. It's a creative computer, affordable, portable focus device and it does two things music, writing and coding. That's three things. It's a little, a little python.

Portable computer touchscreen and music synthesizer I know all built in it ships with an amY synthesizer. It's completely open source. It's as cheap as possible $59. Okay, that's easy.

2:03:18 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I'm definitely going with that.

2:03:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I thought this was kind of cool. I wanted to give it a little plug. Tulipcomputer, if you're interested in getting a Tulip, I don't know. It doesn't come with that beautiful keyboard, I'm sure, but uh, it comes with a synthesizer. It comes with 1040 by 600, seven inch touchscreen, fully programmable in python, runs at 30 frames per second, support for png sprites, scrolling background shapes uh, you can do your ui and lGL. It's not an operating system, it's not Linux, it's not Windows, it's Tulip and stereo out, and I guess Python is the whole thing.

2:03:59 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I've got it up here. That looks like a really fun game. And it comes with its own music.

2:04:08 - Leo Laporte
That's the Tulip. That's the Tulip Keyboard, not included.

2:04:12 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
You're watching Floyd Steinberg's YouTube channel, I'm sort of saving myself for what I might see tomorrow when I get to DEF CON. I'm really in security mode right now. I'd love to find some penetration testing tools. The Flipper Zero was a good start, but I hear there's some more interesting.

2:04:26 - Leo Laporte
You still have the Flipper right. I gave you my flipper. Have you hacked the hell out of it? Oh gosh yes.

2:04:38 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
This device can now open up every garage door on this street. Who should have told you it went to a good?

2:04:44 - Leo Laporte
home. I'm really glad. I'm really glad. That's awesome. Actually, we should have talked more about DEF, CON and Black Hat. What are you expecting to see? In the past, they've done some interesting things, one of which really made a big difference. They had the voting machine city right where people got to hack on voting machines and, as a result, voting machine integrity is now encoded in the law.

2:05:07 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It has improved and last year we did a fantastic village that was we were trying to poison ai's, uh, poison llm, that's right. I remember that. Yeah and uh it. I think the first, the first confirmable case was like 15 minutes. It only took 15 minutes for us to break this thing.

So, uh, that's going to come back and actually I do want to spend much more time there because, uh, there are some interesting tools that have come out that are much better at poisoning wells in the wild. So last year it was more or less a very closed environment, so it was easier to get to, but now we have methods of poisoning some of the more popular LLMs that are actually being in use today. That's got me interested. I think that's actually going to be a big story.

2:05:53 - Leo Laporte
The other thing is probably going to be so they'll do that AI Promptac Village again this year. Oh gosh.

2:05:58 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It was so much fun. We have to do that again.

2:06:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what else. Any other villages we should look for?

2:06:05 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
The Red Team, so the Red Team Village. They've got a whole new suite of tools that well as the name might imply, are good for Red Team If you are the person who's trying to penetrate a network. It's accessible to people who are just starting out, even those who are in the script kiddies stage, but the tool that they put together is awesome.

Come on, you script kiddies, come on down, yeah, come on, you script kiddies, come on down, yeah. I mean they've gotten remarkably good at taking advancements in security protocols and turning them in on themselves.

2:06:38 - Leo Laporte
So there's a couple of thoughts there and they've got some pretty good patches too if you want to get the Red Team Village patch, I've got it on my screen right here.

2:06:44 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Well, you know who the Red Team patch comes from. Right, it's. The devil Is this a trick question.

2:06:56 - Leo Laporte
Did you do this?

2:07:00 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I'm getting a little award tomorrow because it's Spartan Leet is from Red Team and that's me.

2:07:06 - Leo Laporte
Wow, wait a minute. You designed this patch, what?

2:07:10 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
No, no, no. So we were coming up with ways of promoting the red team.

2:07:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the idea for the patch, the idea for the patch and what we're going to call it and how we can promote it. Let's make this your pick. Red Team Village patch.

2:07:23 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, actually. Yes, let's do that. If you're in Las Vegas, go to DEF CON, Go to the Red Team Village. I'll be in there.

2:07:30 - Leo Laporte
August 8th through 11th and if you go to redteamvillagesquaresite you can check out the coin and the patch at the online store. But hurry, because sales end tonight at midnight Pacific time and then you have to pick it up at the RTV at DEF CON and you meet father robert there at the red team. That's the best part.

2:07:52 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, I have created 30 challenge coins that are based on ciphers that are from the archives they're gonna.

2:08:00 - Leo Laporte
So how do we do we just go up to you and say I challenge thee no, no, no, no, I they are actually.

2:08:05 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I will not have them on my person. I could give people clues, but they are hidden in certain locations around las vegas, not just defcon. We do this. This is the fun stuff. This is summer camp leo it's geeks, I love it.

2:08:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've got to go. I've got to go sometime with you to defcon. I mean you'd be the perfect person to go with yeah, next year.

2:08:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, let's play, I'll show you everything.

2:08:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I want to go with a real guide.

2:08:32 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
That would be so much fun I mean, it could be after your year in rome, right?

2:08:37 - Leo Laporte
yeah, yeah, we should just get married, robert, and just leave it at that. Let's, it's a, it's a bro, broham, broham brothers senior priest.

2:08:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the senior cruise. Oh, that's right, the silver foxes yes on the freighters thank you, robert.

2:09:03 - Leo Laporte
So nice to have you. I really glad you could fill in today and I do look forward to seeing you have a great time at black hat and defcon.

2:09:09 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
That's going to be a lot of fun, thank you that's going to be wonderful.

2:09:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh, jeff jarvis pick of the week, I'll do a pool site of the day um publicwork I like the name what does it do? If you go there? It is a search engine for public uh domain images of all sorts from three or four sources. Oh, Always good to have. If you go to I think it's the upper right it'll tell you where they're from. On the question mark and then you can search for something.

2:09:40 - Leo Laporte
It's an infest scroll. There's an eye there. Oh there, okay, so it's from 100,000 copyright free images from the Met, the New York Public Library and other sources, and they're all public domain.

2:09:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Father Robert, give it a search, something appropriate.

2:09:59 - Leo Laporte
Let's see we should search for pictures of.

2:10:03 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Satan. I got the wrong address. Okay, hold on.

2:10:05 - Leo Laporte
Publicwork there you go. Let's see how it's doing Pictures, pictures. Oh, you can use this next homily. Wow, here he is smoking a cigarette. Oh no, he's smoking a human, never mind. Uh, wow, that's fun, I'm sorry, I put the tenth on.

2:10:25 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Oh my goodness, that is fantastic, uh, pope really there are a lot of pictures, and why the 10th? All of the pictures oh you, I'll leave that as an easter egg for the audience. They can look that up and find out why that's historically significant he has uh different looks depending on the this is whoa. That is way more than I thought would exist, yeah there are a lot.

2:10:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It's quite amazing. Now, was he? Was he a controversial?

2:10:52 - Leo Laporte
pope, is that why? Uh, there's these. I don't want to spoil the easter egg, okay. Okay, we'll leave that as a exercise for the reason are these all?

2:11:01 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
these are all in the common domain. Yeah, public domain. That's the beauty of it. You can this oh.

2:11:07 - Leo Laporte
All the tweets that come out of this.

2:11:09 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Oh that's mine Rocket ship.

2:11:11 - Leo Laporte
Publicwork. See, this would be so useful and of course the public domain is expanding. A lot of this stuff is older stuff, right because of that.

2:11:19 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
But wow, that's really cool. Consider my organization. The older stuff is much better.

2:11:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:11:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Where are you going to go? I give credit to Ben Evans One of his interesting things of the week.

2:11:33 - Leo Laporte
Wow, no kidding, publicwork. That is one of the other mark for sure.

2:11:39 - Jeff Jarvis
The other tip of the week is I just want to tip my hat to Jammer B for all the geeky help he has given me over the years. Thank you, thank you, thank you, john.

2:11:48 - Leo Laporte
Love you, jammer B. I appreciate all you've done. You're gonna make him cry, you make me cry. We do love you, john. John, have a great second uh retirement I'll get lessons from you about how to retire he's gonna pack his entire home on his top of his car and drive up north. He has uh, he has been such an amazing inspiration for this all the studios, all three studios.

Without him, none of this would exist such a great partner and such a good friend, jammer Bees, and you know I don't think we're going to hear a lot of from him. I've asked him to come on to join us. He doesn't want to do that. He's done. He's moving on.

2:12:33 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
It's his way. It is he's very private yeah. I have one other thing.

2:12:43 - Leo Laporte
I have a thing for me Before we go.

2:12:48 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Since this is our last day in the office and everything, I will show you that I made it to the front of Google Maps for our office.

2:12:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, it drove by while you were there coming to work.

2:13:01 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I saw it coming. I saw it coming, so I went outside.

2:13:04 - Leo Laporte
That was not so long ago, because that's when we had the hornet infestation.

2:13:08 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Yeah, june, it was in June, so you were putting your life in danger to be out there. Fantastic, that's dedication.

2:13:15 - Leo Laporte
That sawhorse there says don't walk here, there's wasps. Right here A nest. Wow, good for you, that's forever Congratulations.

2:13:27 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
Four years or whatever, until the truck comes back. A Google map legacy. Thank you, benita.

2:13:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, for the next four years or whatever, until the truck comes back, go it out again. A Google map legacy. Thank you, benito Gonzalez, who will continue to be our technical director and producer for this show and this week, in tech, he is going to be doing it from his house from now on. Right now he's just down the hall. We're practicing. All of our editors Kevin King, benito, anthony Nielsen, ashley, uh will be working extra hard to keep the stuff going. Uh, they'll be the central point where everybody will, you know, call into and they'll be running the shows from their houses.

I will be up in my attic, jeff will be wherever jeff is, and and everybody else and so forth. So it's going to be a bit of a change. I don't think it should sound any different at all and it will look just slightly different. That's all. But we do want to keep doing what we're doing and we do hope you will join the club so you can help us do that Twittv slash club twit, that's the place to go If you want to know what's happening. We will, of course, always post there Long. Of course, always post there. Long live Jammer B. I agree To a long and prosperous retirement. Do you have a homily, a retirement homily, father Robert, it goes something along the lines of don't fall and break your hip.

He's already had the hip replaced, so he's good on that. It's titanium now. Thank you to everybody who watches the show we do this week on Google in Google. Every Wednesday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm, eastern, 2100 UTC, we will the good Lord willing, the cricks don't rise.

2:15:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Be doing it again this time next week, but from a new locale, and Tuesday we'll be doing the Google thing.

2:15:14 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yes, 10 am pacific for the google announcement. Um, I guess that's it. Is there anything we need to do to decommission the studio? Is there, should we? Should we take down anything, should we didn't?

2:15:23 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
you have a button you had a button that you pressed and it officially started the studio I remember that.

2:15:29 - Leo Laporte
In fact, somewhere, john, do we have that video uh of uh taking the brick house live, because that was pretty cool. Who made that?

2:15:39 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
or you could dance on the table again.

2:15:42 - Leo Laporte
Twittv no this table is gonna go uh to uh either. There's a bidding war right now between alex lindsey and Jason Snell. One of them wants it. Special Twitter TV slash specials Number 87. Is in the last three minutes. This is when we we debuted the brand new studio. This was a two studios ago actually, and we gave you a little tour. There's Colleen, there's Lisa Skypezilla, and right after this I am actually entering the studio and there was a big button. We're going to say, hey, we lost signal, so that signal is going to go out, but stay there, keep watching it. There's Dick DiBartolo behind me. Turn on the streams here in the new stream Large studio audience. This is when we were in our heyday. I think All right, all right, are we?

ready, there's a doctor that has followed us around. So what we're going to do is we're going to, for the last time, stream from the cottage. We're going to flip the switch. Streamasaurus will. There's the clock that lived with us for so long.

Oh, I missed that place I should actually let Colleen do that, do the honors, and then we will flip the switch here and turn on our new Stream-O-Matic and you'll be seeing the view from these cameras. So let's do a countdown. Five, four, three, two, one. Goodbye, Twin College. We'll see you at the break house.

2:17:19 - PC
There is nothing wrong with your Twit. Do not attempt to close this browser. We are controlling the stream, we control the video, we control the audio. You are about to participate in a new online adventure. You are about to experience the sights and sounds of the new Twit Studio. Please stand by. Five, four, three, two, one, four three, two, one.

2:17:54 - Leo Laporte
There was actually a handover going on at this point, right, oh really, they were rushing, they were rushing around. Yeah, there was actually a two-minute interval where we disconnected the old stuff and connected it.

2:18:12 - Jeff Jarvis
And there we go they cut out the and Leo shorted out his first computer there, it's Patrick Norton, and we opened the studio.

2:18:18 - Leo Laporte
That studio was truly an amazing thing. It was.

2:18:22 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
If the landlords hadn't been greedy.

2:18:25 - Leo Laporte
So and so We'd still be there, probably. Yeah, the new people bought it. They're in prison now. By the way, you didn't know that, right, Robert? Yep, it was a Ponzi scheme, as it turned out, and somewhere there's a video Do you know where it is of the trolley moving from there. We don't know where it is, but we have a video of the trolley moving from that studio to this studio.

2:18:48 - Fr. Robert Ballecer
I think we were using the Ustream trolley moving.

2:18:51 - Leo Laporte
I think we were using that, the u-stream. We were using a u-stream back. Yeah, it got better and better.

Yeah, there will be no uh procession from this studio to the new studio, because the new studio is in my house and I don't really want to have a procession going to my house. But uh, thank you everybody for being such great supporters. Thank you, jeff. You've been around since before the beginning, and same with you, robert, we. I'm glad I could end it with people I know so well who've been with us for so long. Thanks to Patrick Delahanty, who's here he flew out for the occasion our engineer. It's been an amazing time in eight years in this studio, but I think we have many more years ahead of us. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google. Bye-bye, everybody.