This Week in Google 661, 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWIG this week in Google, Stacy and Ant have the week off, but we've got a great fill in team. Cathy Gellis is here and for the first time ever, I can't believe that Glen Fleishman, Jeff Jarvis, of course, what are we gonna talk about? Elon Musk and Twitter. We'll talk about Google's quarterly results. There were a disappointment to wall street, but should Google be fretting? And a little bit of typesetting nerdery it's all coming up next on TWIG!

Speaker 2 (00:00:31):
Podcasts. You love from people. You trust this is TWiT

Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
This is TWIG. This in Google episode, 661 recorded Wednesday, April 27th, 2022 Oligarchs at the Gate. This episode of This Week in Google is brought to you by Codecademy. Join over 50 million people learning to code with Codecademy and see where coding can take you. Get 15% off your Codecademy pro membership. When you go to Codecademy.com and use the promo code twig, and by OurCrowd, OurCrowd helps accredited investors invest early in pre IPO companies alongside professional venture capitalists. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at ourcrowd.Com/Twig And by Eight Sleep good sleep is the ultimate game changer and nature's best medicine go to eightsleep.com/twig to check out the PodPro cover and save $150 at checkout Eight Sleep currently ships within the us Canada and the UK.

Leo Laporte (00:01:44):
It's time for TWIG this week in Google, which this week will not be about Google in any way, shape or form, as you might imagine, there is another topic on the table. Now Ant Pruitt is out for the week. He's going to watch his kids at a track meet. Stacy is under the weather, so we have some special guests and we're thrilled about it. But first let me introduce one of our stalwarts. The guy who's been here since day one, Mr. Jeff Jarvis, I show up. I just wanna know that I show up. He wants to get rid of me, but he can't. I can't. I'm the bad. Trying's always on this podcast. He is the Leonard tow professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark, Graduate school.

Leo Laporte (00:02:29):
That was a new one. Let's do that again. That was pretty whew. Yeah. Graduate school of journalism city. Oh wow. University of New York. If you were a billionaire, you could have your name sng as well. Thank you very much for being here. Now let's introduce the rest of our panel. I feel like it's a game show. <Laugh> let's meet the rest of our panel. Cathy Gellis is here. She's been here before. She's an author at tech dirt and of course specializes in cyber law at cgcouncil.com. Hi Cathy. Thank you for joining us in short notice. We appreciate it.

Cathy Gellis (00:03:04):
Thanks for having me

Leo Laporte (00:03:05):
So nice to have you and on even shorter. Notice the shorter notice Glenn Fleishman is also here. Glen.Fun. I love that Glen,

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:16):
Easy to spell URL, as opposed to my previous hard to spell ones. Yeah, I was just sitting. I'm always ready to go online apparently. And I just fired up the

Leo Laporte (00:03:23):
Microphone. I can tell you have a real microphone. You're you got the headphones you're set. You of course have heard him on the incomparable. He's been a long time writer for Macworld and man about town. And I think this is nice cuz I wanted, I, I, I know we're gonna be talking about Twitter, but I'd like to get a variety of viewpoints on here. I did ask and he couldn't do, and I wish he could Siva Vaidhyanathan because Siva, who is also a professor of journalism but at across town wrote a piece in Salon or sorry, Slate called. There's no reason or sorry. There is a reason. No smart buyer has. Let's see. There's no reason a smart buyer has not purchased Twitter. <Laugh> there's there's a reason. No smart buy it's too many negatives.

Leo Laporte (00:04:09):
Anyway, there's a reason. No one's bought Twitter so far. He says Elon Musk is gonna lose his shirt. The first thing I wanna say before we get into this heavy conversation, obviously, you know, the news, Elon Musk succeeded <laugh> where all else have failed in buying Twitter for $44 billion. Most of it borrowed against Tesla stock, which immediately caused him to lose a, a significant amount of his personal fortune when Tesla stock plummeted in value, a hundred billion dollars because the market said at all, he's gonna screw this one up. He will not take over Twitter for, until regulatory approval. About six months. Of course there's a lot going on. There is a $1 billion kill fee if either Elon or Twitter backs out of the deal, a significant I think penalty. And it, of course there are a lot of questions about what Elon is gonna do with Twitter. There, there are a number of people, some of them very high profile who have run screaming from the building. <Laugh> there, there are a number of others like me, who just say, well, let's see, but I think there is legitimate cause for concern. One, cause for concern, Cathy is right up your alley, which is the privacy cause for concern, Elon suddenly owns outright. He's taking him private everything that Twitter knows about you and me and everybody else on Twitter.

Cathy Gellis (00:05:34):
Yeah. I mean to some extent that is kind of the setup of how we do our platforms, that in theory, somebody owns stuff. And I mean, but it didn't feel quite as objectionable when it was either owned by a private entity that you chose to do business with anyway, or then a public entity. That's still subject to certain forms of regulatory rules about what they can or can't do. This feels weird.

Leo Laporte (00:05:59):
It's kind of the worst case scenario

Leo Laporte (00:06:02):
Where you give a lot of information to somebody, you know, you read their privacy policy, you say, well, that's okay. It's publicly held. They have to, they can't lie. Okay, I'm gonna trust them. And then they sell it. And every all, all bets are off, right? There is no agreement. There's no privacy agreement between us and Twitter anymore. It's whatever Elon wants to do.

Cathy Gellis (00:06:22):
Well, I thought different things would get sold. Like I always understand that when companies write their privacy policies, they do sort of tend to put, we may sell it and it, but I've always thought of it in terms of sort of end gleaning of data that they've learned about people that they will potentially give to vendors or something like that. And a lot of people object to that. There are concerns, but that seemed like the normal vector of where I'd expect the privacy to go. This is a little bit different because this is he can in theory, see our direct, well, not yet this hasn't happened, but if he all of a sudden steps into the ownership shoes, he can see all the direct, the direct messages that aren't encrypted. He has all the information that otherwise governments tried to subpoena or private parties tried to subpoena. In theory, that's all available to him. And this is a huge problem for Twitter has been very aggressive in litigating the, the privacy of its anonymous speakers and all of a sudden there's a gigantic vector of people. They were hiding from now own the information that would tell them who they are. And that's weird and weird in a really terrible, scary way.

Leo Laporte (00:07:26):
There's also the issue of what Elon has said he will do with Twitter and your your, a colleague at Tech Dirt Mike Masnick wrote that his statements to Chris Anderson at the Ted talk last week demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of what the first amendment <laugh> what the first amendment meant what the algorithm meant. The whole thing is basically a mass of ignorance before I get to Jeff, cuz I, I know Jeff you're, I think you're the one with his hair on fire, but we'll check. I want to ask Glen <laugh> because we, I don't know what you have, unlike everybody else, not posted a thousand articles on this. What is your opinion of the future Twitter going forward under an Elon Musk?

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:14):
I just think it's I, I think it's a potentially devastating move cuz I don't think his interests align with the majority of, of people use the platform. I don't think Twitter really knows what it is. I mean, what is Twitter? Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, you know, it's kind, it's built as a micro blogging service, which is a term that means almost nothing because there's kind of only one micro blogging service that people use to, you know, in any large amount, there are some far right ones that have gotten a little bit of traction, but not a lot compared to it. So it's this unique entity that stands in opposition or, or distinct from Facebook. It has a, they haven't quite ever figured out what to do. That's not just this very narrow set of options. I love constraints. So I think it's done very well with that, but they don't effectively moderate the platform, even though they've put in a lot more safeguards and a lot more they've made a lot more attempts to make it like fair and or fairer for people less abusive and to label political content and try to, you know, keep the commons a little clearer.

Glenn Fleishman (00:09:15):
But it's a, it's a very complicated operation with a, a single line of revenue essentially from advertising and Musk says he doesn't care about the business basics, but then he structured a deal. That's gonna put him on the hook for a lot of personal interest payments and Twitter leveraged for payments it's going to have to make. So it can't just turn off the, I mean he could turn off the revenue pipe or advertisers could flee if it's ruined and it's not a good place to, you know, put your ads for, for cars and credit cards and square space and whoever else up on it. But then he's gotta take money from his personal fortune to, to cover that. So I, I don't think, I don't think he knows what he wants to do with it because his statements are both vague and contradictory, which is the best kind right?

Leo Laporte (00:09:56):
<Laugh> I was, you know, I mean all last week I was saying, oh, Elon doesn't wanna buy Twitter. This is, this is Elon trolling. Elon's not that crazy. The last thing he ever wanted would to do this effect, this could well be just pump and dump. He wants the price to go up so he can make a billion dollars on his investment. Things like that. I was wrong. Elon told Chris Anderson and this was before he got Twitter, but after he offered to buy it I think it's really important for there to be an inclu, quoting him now an inclusive arena for free speech. Twitter has become the defacto town square. So that's how he sees it. So it's really important that people have both the reality and perception they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law. Then he says, as Mike Masnick points out something completely contradictory <laugh> yes. Which is as long as it doesn't break the law, it's free speech, but no spam, which is protected by law. Yeah. As free speech <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (00:10:54):
And people are brought up the fact that, you know, the instant, any, so that's unmoderated in the modern age, the immediate it's

Leo Laporte (00:11:00):
Eight Chan

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:01):
It's you get CS, Sam, you get child sexualized. You

Leo Laporte (00:11:04):
Get four Chan and eight Chan. Yeah. You get garbage, no advertiser would want, no user would want,

Glenn Fleishman (00:11:09):
You have to filter out spam. You have to filter out child pornography and you have to filter out, you know, revenge, porn, you have to filter out huge quantities of things, how to be actively moderated just as a starting point. So you don't violate the law in most countries on the planet.

Leo Laporte (00:11:24):
He also says he wants to open the algorithm. You know, I, you know, it's funny the stuff he said when I on first reading, I'm going yeah. Yeah. Free speech. Yeah. Yeah. Open the algorithm. Yeah. But then after you just consider for a second or you, well, you open the algorithm who takes advantage of that. Spamers they game the system, they know how to get something at the top of the list. Great. You've done. You know, this is exactly why Google does not open its algorithm because otherwise it gets gamed like crazy. That's a very risky thing to do. Mas Nick's point, which I think is very well taken is that Elon saying a lot of things that the original founders of Twitter in all of Silicon valley espoused 15, 20 years ago, but have learned the hard way doesn't work. And so they've learned that to make a, a good space. You have to moderate, you have to have rules. And he MAs saying, Elon's just gonna throw out 15 years of learning, 15 years of, of hard one moderation and start from scratch without any real plan for what to do. All right. I've been, I've been really doing this to drive you crazy. Jeff <laugh>,

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:36):
You know, and

Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
You've been really good about not saying anything. Jeff, Jarvis, what do you think

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:41):
I have? I don't know what I think. I, I, I, I think it's wrong to guess what he is gonna do. Cause we don't know. Cause he doesn't know what he is gonna do. That's obvious. 

Leo Laporte (00:12:50):
Although you might say that that's potentially problematic. Oh yeah, it is. He spent 44 billion on so you know what you're gonna do? I know what his people,

Cathy Gellis (00:12:58):
He found it in the couch cushions. That's fine.

Leo Laporte (00:13:01):
Oh yeah, exactly. I'm gonna buy this ice cream cone. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. We'll we'll we'll cross that bridge when it comes, when we come to it.

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:07):
So, I mean, I saw the, I saw what Twitter's gonna be like last week when I, when I put up my tweet and for 36 hours until they got bored with me and went after, you know, table of Lorenze or somebody else, the Moabites came after me. <Laugh> 

Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
He has his own army of bots human or not.

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:23):
Absolutely. Oh they're they're bots with heartbeats. Yeah. And so it was, it was Andrew Sullivan and Glen Greenwold and Fox news. And they all came after me and they, and they, they, they think they're clever, but they're not. And so it's the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then they, and then squirrel, they go away and they go the next thing. So I, I think I'm trying to look at this as a business story. First. I, I care more about the speech. I care more what's gonna happen, but I'm just trying to, I'm just trying to get my head around that in a few ways. One, the interest rates have to be awful. This is a leveraged buyout, 44 billion. The cash flow is not that great. It's is leveraged against Tesla stock, which is volatile. Twitter is not a great venture to start off with. So I've gotta believe that he won't be screaming about free speech. He'll be screaming about free cash flow to his managers.

Cathy Gellis (00:14:14):
I wanna plus one what Jeff is saying. This is absolutely a corporate law story. It's it's where the interest is. The the release of the, the merger deal is where the really interesting stuff is like, this is one of the things that's been a problem. And I'm sorry, I cut you off. Jeff is in, in this whole space about online speech, we've been just paying all this, a attention oversize attention to free speech, section two 30, blah, blah, blah, and ignoring everything else that happens to shape the space. Including corporate law has been a gigantic voice that shapes things because why is it that companies act the way they do that matters? Like we have whole bodies of law that force companies to act in certain ways or give them certain liberties or take away their discretion. We create incentives and that we wonder why companies act consistent with those incentives. I you're absolutely right. That this is the story. It's always been the story, but it's getting ignored. We never, it's not get the analysis of it.

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:11):
So Cathy, beyond, beyond that, beyond the law piece, which I absolutely agree with, and it's a smart way, you would look at it as I would expect. There's also just the, the business part of Musk. And I've been thinking that through, I got into it with O Malik in Twitter where he was, he was, I don't know, he was defending, he was defending Musk's business intelligence and it made me think, and I thought, okay, so fine, Tesla world's richest man would seem on its face. That he's the most brilliant, most brilliant business man we have, but Leo, you used to own a Tesla and now you own a Mustang and every single car company out there is going to make alternatives is making alternatives to Tesla. I don't think that's a growth stock. One, two bay. ACT's fine. He can make some money, you know, shuttle and back Russians and whoever to space, but that's not a huge business.

Jeff Jarvis (00:15:57):
Three. Nobody wants holes in the ground. Sorry. <laugh> four. Whatever happened to Hyperloop five Starlink. Okay. But the government is what gave him money for, for Ukraine. He's trying to take credit. I don't know that he's so brilliant at this and I will. And I think, but I think he is smart enough to know this. And this is when he is sewing all his owns, this is what he's gonna have the most fun he can possibly have. And, and he is responsible to know one and he is doing what he is doing, but it's disturbing because I was talking to a reporter today from the Christian science monitor. And I said, people built their communities here. So I quote on the show, often Andre Brock Jr, who wrote distributed blackness and his spirit is you're not kicking me off of here. We work to make this place.

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:41):
We're making this ours and Charlotte climber. Who's a brilliant ex evangelical trans activist on Twitter. And she said the same thing. And so what happened here was that must can by the company, but he can't buy the communities. He can try to screw it up, but it's, it's kind of past him now. And I, and I don't know what he's really gonna get out of it in the end, except a bunch of attention, a bunch of fun, a bunch of trolling he's gonna get bored and then it can be sold for pieces to private equity or something else. And just not a happy place. All of this is to say that I wish. And, and I see Dorsey kind of sucking up to Musk and I, and I think it could be cuz I get along and that's fine. But I also think it's because Jack wants blue sky to happen and he doesn't wanna mess that up because that is the only answer I see going forward is speech as protocol, which is what original investor in, in in Twitter, Fred Wilson has been talking about alongside Jack and then we build value added layers on top of that, like wordpress.org.com on cop of.org.

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:48):
So I, I hope there's a functionality to go forward. I looked at Mastodon and there's nothing there. I don't know where else we go. So I think we fight for where we are, hope we survive this era and then rebuild from there and build something better in the future.

Cathy Gellis (00:18:05):
So I don't think you needed me on the show because I just agree with everything that at Jeff send. So

Leo Laporte (00:18:10):
Just

Cathy Gellis (00:18:10):
To turn my thoughts there, but but I, I think that's, that's right. That's the right analysis. One thing I'm missing from the reporting is timescale because every, I mean the headlines were all kind of like as of Monday he owned it and even I was like falling for that. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so quick. And, and then like, I got my like corporate law hat on and stuff and started thinking about like, no, it can't possibly be like that. And so the headlines were bad. And I think the reporting I'd actually like to see some good reporting and maybe it's out there and I haven't seen it, but what is the timescale? What are the things that need to happen? Because I know some of this there's gonna be due diligence. Meanwhile, there's a non disparage clause must appears to be violating like every fall. I don't wanna

Leo Laporte (00:18:50):
Interrupt you, but there is gonna be no due diligence. Actually he wad, they basically waived due diligence, which is, it's buying a house there's rats in the wall and you're like, that's fine. Yeah. So, but, but they so it means that won't, but there'll be the shareholder vote. There's there's shareholders. There's also regulatory Cathy isn't there. So who, who is this? FTC has to, this is FTC. Does the FCC weigh in on this? I don't FCC. What about FCC? By the way, Elon did lose a court case today. The judge ruled that F did he lose it? Yeah. The judge ruled that no, the SCC is right. You were not coerced in this agreement. And this is gonna be interesting. Elon, a Musk when he owns Twitter, we'll still have to, according to the S sec, get lawyers to approve every tweet <laugh>.

Cathy Gellis (00:19:38):
So I think the bottom line is it isn't supposed to work this way. And a question I have that I'd like to see more analysis on is, is did we not have law that adequately anticipated this? Or do we have law that did sort of anticipate this, that isn't executing? Like he, I mean, there's at least little scoff laws that he's ended up with you know, him buying the 10% and not filing the form on time. So there's a number of things that he, that there was law that technically existed that didn't seem to be a barrier or both of some full. And the problem is, is I think the people who under know this and understand this have not been at our discussion table for a while. And I'm really annoyed. I have to dig up my notes from my corporate law class because I thought I was done with all that.

Cathy Gellis (00:20:22):
<Laugh>. And, but I, I think that's where the story is because now we're talking about the question's just gone to, is this an anti-competitive problem? I feel like series. Yes, because in, we only had a couple major platforms and he came with his billions of dollars. And instead of investing in another one, he consumed one that already existed. And in a way that's likely to be deleterious to its further existence. So the, and the question is how legal is that? But that's not the way that when they've been talking about big tech regulation and break up big tech, this wasn't the vector of attack that they were anticipating.

Leo Laporte (00:20:57):
This is Lena con has not written a paper on what happens when a Oli Gar buys Twitter.

Cathy Gellis (00:21:01):
Right. And this is a bigger problem than, than the mergers, I think. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (00:21:05):
Well, I wanna bring China situation too, which is that Milon Musk is heavily beholden to China. And, you know, I never wanna sound like a, some kind of either Chinese conspiracy, conspiracy theorist or anti-Chinese because you know, it's, China's too complicated to summarize in like, you know, a sentence, right? There's no, you need several books or, or a lifetime. But but we know we know what China requires of companies that do business in there. We know how they don't operate by democratic norms or business norms when they think something has to happen, they'll arrest the, the richest person in the country. They'll shut things down. They'll take the most popular actress off the streets and disappear her for months and so forth. So there's no question that China will do whatever's in China's interests. And because Musk is so beholden for manufacturing and other issues in China, Chinese, the, you know, even though Twitter isn't technically allowed in China, what will the effect be given that Chinese diplomats on Twitter are marked as being associated with the Chinese government can be subject to suppression and so forth, or, or fact I, I have huge concerns that his, that there's, you know, Facebook isn't beholden to China.

Glenn Fleishman (00:22:14):
Apple is in a lot of ways. And, and Musk is,

Leo Laporte (00:22:17):
There is a great piece by Pete Sweeney and Reuters breaking views. Elon Musk buys Tesla of pounding Chinese headache. And this is, this is gonna be a really interesting clash because the point Glen. Yeah. yeah, I don't know. I mean, Elon wants to, Elon's building Tesla's in China. Elon wants to stay on the, on the best side of the Chinese communist party. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:50):
Well, it's not just China. It's, it's gonna be countries around the world. Yeah. You have Europe coming after. 'em Already saying, whoa, you think you're not gonna moderate anything? No, we got laws over here. We got SDG. We, we got all this stuff. You're gonna be doing that. And then today he right before airtime, he Elon's latest Deborah and Deborah tweet was I quote for Twitter to deserve public trust. It must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right. And the far left equally

Leo Laporte (00:23:17):
In the us. That might make sense.

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:20):
I would see if it, but then

Leo Laporte (00:23:21):
It's a global country

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:23):
What's politically neutral in Mexico in Nicaragua and Sri Lanka have funny Lon it's a big weird mean world out. The, your simplistic vision is in for a wild time.

Leo Laporte (00:23:32):
Also, Kevin Mark's says upsetness is not a metric to run a company on <laugh> it's also not something you wanna incentivize. Yeah. So let's upset everybody. That's, that's, that's my biggest fear cuz I, I like, I think everybody on this panel think Twitter has some value maybe less than most, but I do think it does have some value and I don't see any way that Elon makes Twitter better in any respect.

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:58):
No good point. Good point. Well said,

Glenn Fleishman (00:23:59):
No, it would, it'd be great if you would, but I'm viewing Twitter right now as if it's like Russia. After the Ukrainian invasion is people are wondering how quickly they can get out of the outta the company. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:24:07):
Well, I have to say we have a 362% spike on our Mastodon instance, not like a hundred people or anything, but it's still, it's still there are I today approved 20, I think 29 new members at twit social because we have, you know, we, this is the login. We do have our own Macedon instance, which I will now log into. And <laugh> apparently not on this machine.

Cathy Gellis (00:24:32):
So I have a whole, this whole story is engendering me with a lot of on we, because for a couple reasons, one is that we just discussed, like Musk is wandering into an area where he's acting like at last, somebody is here to do the big thinking that has been neglected all this time. And it's, I'm sorry. No, these issues are a lot more complex and, and, and hard and a lot of really good, decent, talented, smart people have been thinking about them for quite some time. But quite frankly, his nonsense is very similar to regulatory nonsense. If they walk in and say at last a big thinker is here to solve all the problem. It's like, no, the pro the reason the problems weren't getting solved is partly because they're rather difficult and intractable. And partly because idiots keep showing up and pretending that that less, they are the expert who is coming to the room to solve all the problems. So in some, so this is almost boring to me because it's kind of the same old, same old. And it's like, I don't really like him or anything he promises to do, but it, I see regulations coming outta Congress that are like almost equally as violent and equally ill rooted in any and worse.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:33):
Now you're gonna get worse. Regulations are gonna get worse because of this kind of crap.

Cathy Gellis (00:25:38):
So I am hoping I wanna be mostly so I can get up every morning. I wanna be more optimistic about this and see, this is a chance for opportunity. And I think it does present a few. I think, you know, one of the things rhetorically that kind of makes it interesting is there's been a lot of difficulty in people understanding how platform moderation is really a first amendment protected activity because people don't recognize it when that editorial discretion is in the hands of a company, particularly a PLA platform company. But it's easier to see when it's an individual, because you can see it for yourself. Like, what are the comments you allow on your Facebook post? Obviously, you know, if somebody insults your kid and calls, 'em ugly, you're gonna like delete that. And people would understand intuitively that, of course you have the first amendment, right.

Cathy Gellis (00:26:24):
To make that decision. So we tend to see those decisions as first amendment and been protected when they're manifest in the individual and lose sight of them when they're in the company. So I'm kind of hoping rhetorically to point out that, okay, now it's back in the hands of the individual. This is all on Musk. You can see how he's making these choices. And hopefully that maybe we can see how he would have the right to make the decisions, even though he's going to make them really badly because he's rejecting all this prior knowledge. So I don't know. And then I don't know, I just of, I want new Twitter. I want, I want all the good people and all the good money to flee immediate Lee and go start something new and better and leave him to his flounder, his floundering thing. And I want that to happen as soon as possible, except I am also really intrigued and back to the corporate law thing, I wanna understand this dynamic better because yeah. I want to understand how likely it is and on what timescale that this transaction actually closes. And what will, and let's get the popcorn, because I don't know if it's quite as much of a slam dunk as it's being reported. That's okay. But I don't have the knowledge to he that out the,

Leo Laporte (00:27:28):
The, this deal closes the time. Well, I was gonna ask Cathy that the timeframe I've seen quoted is six months. I think that was the New York times. Yes. Do you think it'll why wouldn't it close? He doesn't own any competing social that works. He,

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:44):
I wanna

Cathy Gellis (00:27:44):
Understand that a little bit better. Oh. And Glen may actually have some answers so,

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:49):
Well, I, so I don't know. I, I have things I can make up is that studied 

Leo Laporte (00:27:54):
Twitter. We don't need your hot tank here.

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:57):
<Laugh> that's what, so lemme give you a cooler take is I'm. I imagine many people listening to this and on this panel read Matt Levine, who is at, at bloom, Berg goes a great free newsletter. And he's great because heap does all the hard work for you, right? And when you pick apart the deal, and also I've been following people on, on Twitter who have picked apart the deals term and, and what the agreement was that was signed. And mosque's, he's not, he's both highly leveraged and not so much. But I see a scenario in which if Tesla shareholders, well, you know, a there weird thing, which is the major shareholders of Tesla. If you look at the 10 biggest ones, there is a strong overlap with the top 10 shareholders of Twitter. It includes, you know, like fidelity and Blackstone and Vanguard, most of which, you know, they're holding the some mutual funds and index funds and so forth, but still, it's kind of weird that the two companies share so many major shareholders that the board clearly solicited their opinion before they went ahead.

Glenn Fleishman (00:28:48):
So these major shareholders who then now own stakes in Tesla that dropped the significant amount because the market as a whole responded so negatively. So one thing that could happen is that Tesla could keep getting hit. They could have some, you know, they've been doing incredibly well. We saw the earnings just was that this week, right? They they've done incredibly well. They've executed extremely well. There's lots of complaints about the cars that get circulation, but if they have a bad quarter in the next two quarters, or the stock continues to fall because people don't have the trust in it. And suddenly he's already got personal guarantees against chunks of his Tesla stock, he'd have to exercise options. The banks could require higher, higher margins. He's putting up 20 something billion of his, you know, quote own money like cash, but he may syndicate some of that. And

Leo Laporte (00:29:33):
There's some big question about yeah. Where that cash comes from. Where's that coming from?

Glenn Fleishman (00:29:37):
Yeah. Yeah. And so he's, and he's guaranteed the way the deal was signed because there's no due diligence. There's very few conditions apparently under which he can back out without having to pay that. Was it about a billion dollars, right.

Leo Laporte (00:29:47):
So I've got Matt Levine's column here. And by the way, his lead is, I guess it's worth saying Elon Musk does not own Twitter. He did not buy Twitter. He did sign an agreement to buy Twitter. That's a big step up. And he probably, probably, he says, we'll own it in, in some amount of time, maybe six months here is the timeline that he he, he talks about. And I think Levine probably knows better, or as well as anybody what's gonna happen.

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:15):
He's been covering this so closely. Yeah, too, because it's a great intersection. You have a company with, you know, with reasonable value or the, the not, you know, Twitter's valuation, we're talking a lot about a company worth under 50 billion or valued at that now where there are multi-trillion dollar companies in the world right now, and Twitter somehow manages because media, people like us are so interested in it. And because we're

Leo Laporte (00:30:36):
Gonna spend all show talking about it, you know, and

Glenn Fleishman (00:30:38):
It's, you know, there's companies that are, are what is it? I can't do the math a 400 times larger that probably get less. Microsoft is very boring compared to Twitter.

Leo Laporte (00:30:46):
Well, for instance, I guess at some point we might spend a minute or two on Google's quarterly report, which came out yesterday. <Laugh> this is this weekend, Google. And what are we talking about? Twitter occupies the imagination. So here's the Levine timeline, Twitter. Most shareholders will have to vote on the deal. Twitter will have to write a proxy statement, explaining the deal, run it by the S E send it to shareholders, give them some time to read it before voting that alone. Those things may take months. Then there are regulatory approvals that they have to get before closing the deal. When the deal closes, he'll have, have to have the money. You don't have to be able to write it, write a check. Right. he doesn't just, cuz he's got those agreements doesn't mean he has the money yet. Okay. so, and, and, and, and as Cathy pointed, someone else come

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:35):
Along at any point in this process and put

Cathy Gellis (00:31:37):
In a higher, I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think they had, I,

Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
Why would anybody, as CIVA says, Twitter's been available for some time <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:48):
If you were Microsoft, would you buy it right now? No. I

Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
Mean, would you no. For the very reasons we're talking about,

Cathy Gellis (00:31:54):
I don't think if I were a sensible institutional investor, I, well, I don't wanna completely throw Twitter completely under the bus cuz I, I think there is value there, but

Leo Laporte (00:32:02):
Yeah, but nobody is

Cathy Gellis (00:32:04):
Investment.

Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
Nobody's figured out how to make money on Twitter.

Cathy Gellis (00:32:06):
But, but I think the people is like, you know, the next oligarch, billionaire who is bored and wants to go toe to toe with the lawn Musk. I mean I could easily see a play there. And there were like weird tweets from Jeff Bezos. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:32:18):
What about Bezos? Like the white Knight who rides in and says, you know what, I can't let this happen. I'm just gonna lay out some of my own cash. And

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:26):
He's been a good Washington post owner,

Leo Laporte (00:32:29):
Actually Washington

Cathy Gellis (00:32:29):
Post owner. Yeah. I mean, I would rather have that billionaire than this billionaire. But

Leo Laporte (00:32:34):
Levine says,

Cathy Gellis (00:32:35):
Can I please live in a world where that's not my choice?

Leo Laporte (00:32:37):
The next thing that will happen is a proxy statement will have to be filed within the next few weeks. Levine says, watch the proxy statement. It will be interesting. One interesting part will be the quote background of the merger section. <Laugh> Describing the history of

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:52):
Negotiation Wellon took out his Doby and then

Leo Laporte (00:32:56):
Probably some mention will be made of various tweets. Probably the lawyers will have to Finese a bit about how Musk characterized his Twitter stake as a passive investment with, I didn't realize he tweeted this April 4th with no intention to change control of the company. Yes mm-hmm <affirmative> and then made a takeover offer saying nine days later, it simply had

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:16):
The, still the case that he made the money by not revealing the

Cathy Gellis (00:33:20):
Doubt. Yeah. I mean, I I'm really uncomfortable with this because we C I mean, whether anybody should be a billionaire is an open question, but it sort of seems like small little technical indiscretions, which exist in the, in the law for reasons be in order to make things fair and give everybody a fair shake. You know, all of a sudden don't count. They don't really apply to you. And I don't know, it's just a form of lawlessness that really makes me, like, I feel like things fall apart when rules don't matter. And it's not that I'm a huge law and order person. I like mercy. I like, I like the certain degree of discretion and some of our laws are just dumb, but I kind of don't think they're all dumb, man. It's sort of nice to know that they help level the playing field because it means every single person sort of has equal protection under the law. And like this isn't if, if all of a sudden like, oh, well, you know, just has so much inertia. We can't really stop it like too big to fail. Like it doesn't feel fair for everybody else. Who's left.

Glenn Fleishman (00:34:19):
Cathy, don't you think this boils down to, I mean, or I shouldn't say it boils down to, but one of the reasons we have so much discomfort with Elon Musk is that he exposes the way in which somebody who is like a Trump who's completely shameless and uninterested in in worrying about what the law is. He's more eager to take action. And then often is able through through money or luck or whatever ever to escape the consequences. So the, the pedo guy lawsuit that turned on some interesting technicalities, but he was able to make that statement and then defend it and then essentially prevail in court in a way that seemed implausible. And if he were a person with more shame, he would never have said it, or he would've settled. If he were a person with less money, he would've been required to settle or maybe not have the representation that would allow him to win. And it feels like the same issue with all the SCC enforcement actions.

Leo Laporte (00:35:09):
That's the lesson of the last five years is that we don't know how to handle somebody. Who's willing to dash norms. We don't we and how much we rely on norms, not laws, not regulations, but norms to get people to behave. And then once people are willing to say, screw the norms,

Jeff Jarvis (00:35:26):
Then, then troops follow behind them to do the same.

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:29):
<Laugh> wow. You know, the law in Finland, if you speed in Finland, your, your traffic fine is proportionate to your earnings. And I thought we need a law like that for, for various kinds of financial and other crimes in America. If, if you had to pay something that actually hurt you in the same way that a traffic find did in Finland, maybe it would change

Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
Behavior. Yeah. 20 million, which is Elon's fine for that tweet. Somebody did the calculation based on his net worth is about the equivalent of a small fry at McDonald's to the rest of this. It, it is a tiny fraction of his income. You mentioned Jeff that unaccountably Jack Dorsey was all in on this Dick Costello, who was the former CEO of Twitter and who quite bruised from his battles. <Laugh> leading that company tweeted two hours ago. Bullying is not leadership. <Laugh> two days ago. He tweeted, shout out to the writer's room in Silicon valley for tonight's wild episode. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (00:36:25):
Kinda like Dick,

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:27):
You know, I think the other thing is I think the board so I, I buy a few shares of company here and there so I can get notices and everything. So I bought a few shares in my, my 401k for Twitter while I, while ago, quite a while ago.

Leo Laporte (00:36:39):
Oh, you're gonna get one of these proxies.

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:41):
Well, that's the thing. That's why I do it. So I, I can get that stuff. And so as a shareholder, the board violated its fiduciary responsibility to me. They should have shopped this thing around. They should have said FA you wanna do a tender offer, go fight for it. Good luck. They should have, they should have fought for

Leo Laporte (00:36:57):
That's. They

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:58):
Just, they just

Leo Laporte (00:36:59):
Came. That's another I am wondering section the proxies, the opinion of Twitter, financial advisors, again, Matt Levine, which will describe the fairness opinion, opinion that Twitter's board got from its bankers concerning the price. He says, I think it was probably not too hard for the banks to reach that conclusion.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:16):
It was 70, it was $69 late last year.

Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
Right? Right. The question was what were the prospects for Twitter? Levine says, I joked yesterday, the bankers would've to tweak the model until it makes a horrible clattering noise and bolts start popping off to get to a 54, 20 valuation for Twitter. So in other words, I don't think they have too much difficulty justifying, accepting the offer. But you're right. They didn't, they didn't do any nobody's doing any.

Cathy Gellis (00:37:46):
I do think it's really quick. Yeah. Yeah, but the problem is I'm

Leo Laporte (00:37:51):
Yeah. They, they said we gonna do a poison pill and then 36 hours later. Okay. We give up <laugh>

Cathy Gellis (00:37:56):
Yeah, no, I mean that narrative doesn't quit. There's a panic in this and you really, the stakes are too high for the speed that everything is happening where matters of huge consequences are all of a sudden, because the problem is, is if this deal fails, either because I don't know, for whatever reason it fails, what have we done? What has just happened? I mean, people's livelihoods are currently like hanging in the balance. People are already shopping resumes because how can they kind of sensibly not? And you know, even if they wanna stay in fight, like what are we gonna see? We are going, he, I almost wonder if that actually is worth the billion dollars to him just to mess up this company. And, and he's, he's vandalized it essentially already where we've already seen depletion and oh my gosh, what a shame. And that really isn't something that should have happened now. I don't know how we all it necessarily, but

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:50):
I'm sorry. Sorry about that. He also Schwarz the concept of free speech. So like,

Leo Laporte (00:38:57):
Like, okay, hold that thought. Hold that thought. Cause we were talking about the, the, the corporate law aspect, but let's talk about some other aspects of governance. We gotta take a break, but it's just a great conversation, Cathy Gillis. Thank you so much for joining us. I know you gotta go in about half an hour, so we're gonna, we're gonna get all the good stuff fin here. Jeff Jarvis. You're stuck with me. Stay here. You can't and vice versa. <Laugh> <laugh> Glen Fleishman. Hey, I wanted to get you on forever. I am looking at the quality of your video. I am looking at the quality of your microphone. I am books, A books. I room reader is giving you five out five, not just for the books. 10 outta 10, not just for the books, but for the black and white photo of people, gazing in awe at what looks like the original iPhone over your left shoulder and the Steve Jobs's time cover. I think. No, no. It's Ted, Ted Turner, Ted Turner appropriate for the CNN. Perfect. I work. I work in

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:49):
His, his mini type library on his shelf behind him over his,

Leo Laporte (00:39:52):
Oh, I see that. Yeahing yeah. Tiny type over there.

Cathy Gellis (00:39:56):
I, I think I, I think I get the better compliment cuz he is willing to put up with me and my crappy wifi and terrible camera.

Leo Laporte (00:40:03):
<Laugh> it's true. It's easy to have easy to have Glen on have to meet the standard. If I, that, although our personal room rate here said points off for the electrical tape, holding your microphone onto the microphone. Stand. We gotta, we gotta work on that. We gotta work on that. Put some green screen on that in disappear. <Laugh> anyway, thrilled to have all three of you. This conversation will continue. Yes, we will get to Google's quarterly report. Maybe

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:30):
Eventually

Leo Laporte (00:40:31):
There will be no change log though. I've gotta have to draw a line here somewhere. There's

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:34):
No change log by the way. Really sucks. So you don't want it folks. There's nothing

Leo Laporte (00:40:40):
Lynn and Cathy probably don't know this, but this used to be a show about Google. And in order to kind of pay lip service to its origin and name, we do every episode, something called the Google change log, which is new stuff from Google and it's gotten worse and worse and worse over the years. And at this point it's just a, it's a litany of, of depressing

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:01):
NUS. I was almost Leo. I was always gonna put in there a story about how Google was, was making it easier to find some commands in docs. And I thought, no, even Leo can't do this.

Leo Laporte (00:41:14):
Even, even I refuse. I do wanna talk about somebody. I'm very happy to, to talk about it. Code academy. These guys are really, really great, a way to learn to code 50 million people or learning at code at code academy. And, and if you wanna change your career, there has never been a better time to become a programmer. There's a huge need, a demand for programmers. And as you probably notice, it's a great job, great starting pay, huge, exciting opportunities all over the country, all over the world. And with code academy, you can learn to code on your own terms. 50 million people already know code academy is the best way to learn to code cuz code academy not only teaches you job ready, coding skills, but also helps you build unique projects. That's important for your portfolio. Companies will judge you on your, you know, your GitHub projects.

Leo Laporte (00:42:07):
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Leo Laporte (00:42:59):
It's such an amazing thing. And it powers most of us who like to code has powered us ever since. So you'll get that magic moment where you hit the submit button and it goes, yeah, and it does what you said it to. Oh, it's incredible. You'll be learning at your own pace in an area that want, in fact, one of the best things about code academy before you even start, they have a programming personality quiz, not, not math questions, not technical questions, but more about you. The stuff that makes you excited, the stuff you enjoy doing. I took it. It said you should take our computer science, you know, track. Lisa, my wife did it. She's our, she's our C CEO and CFO and longtime numbers person. They said you should learn statistics and R cuz you really know your numbers. They, they nailed it.

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
So do do at least do that. Go to code academy.com, use a promo code twig, take the personality quiz. So you'll get that tailored career advice and course recommendations just to see, you know, do they think you'd be good at what, what, what, what is your passion? You can ch choose everything from building basic websites to writing the next great AI. No matter your what your experience level, you'll be writing real working code in minutes, Python, HTML and CSS SQL JavaScript. They, I think they just added a, a swift track. So you're really learning real languages that people are using at work right now. It's an interactive platform. So there's never a dull moment. It's so much fun work at your own pace. I think you really wanna check this out. And if you've got a young person in your family, somebody who has some interest in technology, people are always asking me, you know, I've got a bright 12 year old.

Leo Laporte (00:44:41):
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Jeff Jarvis (00:46:03):
Not, I think it's male

Cathy Gellis (00:46:04):
One.

Leo Laporte (00:46:05):
It's male ego. It's

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:06):
Male legal. Its primarily the reason

Leo Laporte (00:46:07):
I, so when Jeff S was competing with Scott MCNA to have the tallest yacht, that was cool. Okay. That was fine. But now it's like, who can have the rocket to the moon who can have the Washington post he can have.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:21):
Yeah. He also likes to cause trouble. He likes to have attention. He likes all that. I mean I, but, but what I was saying before, before the break is that by the way, imagine right now mark Zuckerberg sitting back saying, you thought you didn't like me. You got Take

Leo Laporte (00:46:37):
Me back. This is that

Cathy Gellis (00:46:38):
I nearly tweeted something on Monday. Like congratulations to mark Zuckerberg for no longer being the Mo to tested platform CEO.

Leo Laporte (00:46:45):
Oh wow. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:46):
It's and in fact, I think there's a, there's an opportunity, but you're gonna make crazy here, but we'll be the first time I think there an opportunity for Facebook and others read it and others to come along and say what he's doing to free speech. We don't agree with this is what free speech means to us. This is what quality speech means.

Leo Laporte (00:47:09):
Well, well

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:09):
There's an

Leo Laporte (00:47:10):
Opportunity. The political right in the us is celebrating this. They see him as, as a hero, Sean,

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:15):
Because they wanna attack everybody and not be stopped for doing

Leo Laporte (00:47:17):
So. Sean Han's Twitter account made its triumph and return to Twitter, pretending that it has anything to do with Elon and not deleting the tweet that got them in trouble in the first place. Yes. so the conservatives say this is victory. Is it a victory for them? Remember Elon Musk, somebody tweeted, Elon must stood six hours to shake Barack Obama's hand. <Laugh> he likes power. He wants me to run power. It's just power. It's not about, it's not about politic.

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:42):
It's the way the wind's blowing is, you know, the Republican party could be back in charge of two of the houses, both houses of the Congress after the midterms. And if that were to happen, he would be positioning himself really well. If he UNB all the band right wing and far right people.

Cathy Gellis (00:47:57):
Oh my gosh. When does this deal close Vivi the next election

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:02):
Before November, October, November

Leo Laporte (00:48:05):
Now I don't think so. It's not that Elon's political, but he is a business, right? So is he trying to do what's good for his business? Other businesses? We

Cathy Gellis (00:48:13):
Don't, we don't think he's necessarily the evidence that he's actually good at stuff is actually really slim. And we, we, when I think one of the problems we have with like American mythology is like, oh, well, if the person has a lot of money, they must have somehow it in a way. And that's repeatedly shown to be a fallacy. And I think it's, you know, here's a very large exhibit a that that isn't necessarily true. But at a certain point, when you have resources, you have gravitational pull for other resources because you have power and people wanna be in the orbit of that power and money has interest in compounding and stuff. Like there's this certain point where you have escape velocity, where if you've managed to fail your way up, you're gonna keep going up because the physics don't allow you to get clipped very effectively.

Leo Laporte (00:49:00):
By the way, I wanna apologize.

Cathy Gellis (00:49:01):
I confused. That's all that you can say for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:49:04):
I wanna apologize. I confuse Sean Hannity with Tucker Carlson. Oh, I don't know why it's Tucker. You would do. That's Tucker Carlson. Who's back not Sean. He go ahead. I'm sorry, Cathy. I'm just, I, I, I wanna make sure that gets corrected as quickly as possible. This is, this is the animated gift that somebody, a Tucker Carlson fan posted <laugh> in response to Tucker's we're back. Okay, there you

Cathy Gellis (00:49:28):
Go. Well, no, I think we just have to evaluate things more carefully and like everybody take a deep breath and take a look and let's understand what is the reality before us, which is, you know, I, we give I'm sure there's things he can do competently. So I can't completely say he's a doorknob, but like you, you, we may be presuming too much, especially when he's obviously wrong in terms of his how we articulates speech, which no, that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works. So even crediting the business decisions, isn't necessarily the thing that we need to do, especially given that sometimes the things he does on the business thing is cheap, like with all the S E troubles. So I, I think we shouldn't just overly credit it, but at the same time, not necessarily under S to make him either because even if he accidentally falls into more and more power, more and more resources such as the reality that we're dealing with

Leo Laporte (00:50:21):
Han had this thought Han who of course we've quoted a couple of times a former CEO of Reddit has a new tweet thread today, which he talks a little bit about this, this whole issue and, and how difficult it is to do this kind of moderation and specifically talks about free speech. Everyone knows this because quote, we will defeat spambots is actually a containment of free speech. Spambots are expressing someone's view. He also says, it's not what you say. It's how you say it. Here's another misconception. People often make perfectly reasonable person a holds and expresses viewpoint X. Okay. Crazier, volatile person also holds and expresses viewpoint X quite loudly. B gets banned a then believes that viewpoint X is being censored. It's not the case. It's how you say it. Not what you say is that accurate? Is that the right way to moderate a platform like this? And can Elon do something like this? Is that means by free speech? No,

Cathy Gellis (00:51:30):
I, I don't think this is a fully fleshed out coherent view of free speech because it's not well tethered to what we already know about free speech. So you could make some arguments to say undercurrent first amendment law in America. I think X, Y, and Z doesn't make sense. Here's why, and here's how it should be different. And you could, I don't know if I'd agree, but you could probably intelligently make a cogen argument for why or how things should be different. That's not what he's doing. He's sort of like stomping his feet and denying that gravity exists. Like it's not new, he's not the new expert to just all of a sudden show up and say at last, I will think about the things that everybody has just been neglecting all these years. It's not how it works. It's not how any of this works. And oh my gosh, in this space, all, all around regulators, billionaires, everybody just stop, stop and take stock and figure out things work grown. And we, because if we're not careful, we're gonna break stuff and we're gonna be really sad when it's all broken and gone.

Glenn Fleishman (00:52:29):
Cathy, I was just prompted by something you said earlier, just a moment ago, which was, I think there might be a, a lies to reality ratio that determines how rich you can get. And so if your ratio is too high, you were Theranos and Elizabeth I'm blanking at her last name, Holmes

Leo Laporte (00:52:47):
Holmes.

Glenn Fleishman (00:52:47):
Thank you. So she had show her reach, exceeded her grasp by too much. It's not totally implausible what Theo could have done. You know, it seems like it might be beyond current capabilities and you have Steve jobs, right? Whose lies to reality ratios sometimes got bigger or smaller, but executed and Elon Musk, somewhere in there, he has audacious things that he says that are, that are easily not a backed by verifiable information. So they're not necessarily lies, but exaggeration that have helped him AMAs these fortunes. And he's always willing to push up against that line as far as possible, but then deliver enough. So I, I kind of think that he doesn't have that same thing going with Twitter that he did with Tesla, like Tesla, arguably pushed the world closer to electric cards faster because Elon is willing to disregard environmental regulation and workplace regulation work hours you know, S E C rule like there's a whole litany of things.

Glenn Fleishman (00:53:44):
Was these allegations of racial discrimination in his plants. There's all kinds of things that he disregarded in order to push this technology further and get us electric cars faster. So you can say, well, it's reasonable. He's the richest person in the world because he has pushed the entire economy of the world closer to electric cars, but we had to deal with all this stuff. And on the Twitter side, it's like, well, it's all abuse. Like, what is it that he's gonna do? That's gonna push the world to a better place in spite of all the abuse he causes and inspires. I don't see what it is.

Cathy Gellis (00:54:14):
Yeah. I don't see a value add. I mean, to your first point, I might also say what you were like, is there a ratio? And I might say, can we control that ratio for gender? Because I'm not entirely sure the standards are quite the same. There may be certain things of like, I don't know, really like Jeff was saying, or he basically said as much like it's boys with toys and like, oh, well, you know, boys will be boys and stuff like that. And they're, well, of course, you know, we can't help himself. So, you know, he's gonna, you know, infringe a few work rules, environmental rules, like that's just who he is. I mean, cuz we did that with Donald Trump for four years as well. Oh, that's how he is. And, and our tolerance for the intolerable, I think may need some tweaking mm-hmm <affirmative> and it's not to say that we should have law that is overly punitive or no mercy or anything like that.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:02):
But I think this idea of too big to fail too big to punish who big to, you know, hold to the same standards that everybody else is is something that I think we that's something that, you know, if regulators would like to pay attention to is I think we've got some really big structural problems with how we organize our society and our law reflects it or issue Twitter is Twitter is the Canary that's tweeting away the warning of what is going on that this is happening is sort of like, hang on. I think we have problems because he could be doing this to Twitter, but he could be doing this to in a whole bunch of other contexts. And none of them would be good. But I think because it's interfacing with speech and expression and the ability for our community to hold itself together and talk to itself, talk to each other that there's this particular kind of, that will come out of essentially what's recklessness and you know, the recklessness Nate may hurt him, but the rest of us are going down with him. And that's a problem because he can absorb the fall much better than the rest of us can.

Leo Laporte (00:56:01):
Derek Thompson writes in the Atlantic that Elon could actually be good for Twitter. Unlike the Bo he actually uses Twitter <laugh> and actually likes Twitter, Atlantic hot take <laugh>, which makes him a candidate to fix it. No,

Cathy Gellis (00:56:18):
No, no, no. For a couple of reasons. And one of the things that I wanna praise Twitter for at least historically is Twitter has been unique and at its best moments, one of the reasons that it tended to grow and improve was because it was very responsive to its users. And I think one of my favorite things that I don't think I'm making up, I don't think it's apocryphal is even the way we do the ads being hyperlinked and the, and the hashtags turning into hyperlinks was I think, think a Google engineering, essentially looking at the, the Lexi psychological behavior of its users and saying, oh, this seems to be how people address it. Twitter engine, each

Leo Laporte (00:56:51):
Other. Yes.

Cathy Gellis (00:56:52):
Yeah. And they recognize that that's what people were doing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:55):
Christmas added the hashtag and, and then Twitter said, oh yeah, that's a good idea.

Cathy Gellis (00:57:00):
Yeah. And the, and to build a hyperlinks, it, like, it looked at what the users were doing and built responsive design to what the users were doing. And that's Twitter at its best. That's any platform at its best. When you look at your user community care and you build the tools that they need. And so he doesn't because yes, he's a user and yes, he has his own personal, this, that, or the other thing. But he certainly doesn't have an endemic view of, of like what most of the lived experience would be of any other Twitter user, other than the other billionaires. Like it's so exceptional. He can't walk in anybody else's shoes and he is not interested in understanding who else is in any other user's

Leo Laporte (00:57:36):
Shoes. So am I alone on the panel in saying, I'm gonna wait and see and give him the benefit of that and maybe it'll get better or is that just not possible? Jeff? You don't seem like, yeah. You're alone. <Laugh> <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (00:57:49):
Yeah. Your mask on buddy.

Leo Laporte (00:57:51):
Oh, I do have a vest amount instance. My very own, so

Cathy Gellis (00:57:54):
Yeah. I will tell myself whatever lie I need to, to sleep at night, but I'm not entirely sure than the light of day. I think I have a tremendous sense of optimism of a Twitter of a must trolled Twitter, except to the extent that it might somehow manage to be a catalyst for leave him to his crumbling empire. And the rest of us will go build something good.

Jeff Jarvis (00:58:15):
Breaking views, just put up a piece. I, I just put on the rundown bottom of the very long Twitter section that says they, he don't, they don't think he's gonna buy it

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:24):
Really. I would, he's gonna willing to pay a billion dollars to walk away.

Cathy Gellis (00:58:28):
I'm not sure willing, but he may be stuck with it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:30):
But I mean, not Levine argues that actually he can't walk away. Like he can't just pay a billion dollars that the Twitter board could go to him and shake him down with the

Leo Laporte (00:58:37):
Deal. So you made the deal cuz it's a personal contract. It could

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:40):
Force

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
Him to says it could cost him as much as 21 billion, his personal stake in it. Which, I mean, I know Elon has 270 billion theoretically, well,

Glenn Fleishman (00:58:49):
Less today, less,

Leo Laporte (00:58:51):
Little less today. <Laugh> but I don't think he has 21 billion hanging around in the closet. So why, so they say Elon mess. This is Laurens Sylvia Silva, Loughlin, and Gina Sean writing at on writer's probably won't buy Twitter. 

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:07):
I love the, the, the anecdote at the beginning

Leo Laporte (00:59:09):
There four years ago, Elon Musk vowed to set up a peanut brittle company. <Laugh> this is not a joke. Just remember this to take on Warren Buffet's iconic us confection or seize candies. Then he changed his mind. It wouldn't be surprising if Musks deal to buy Twitter went the same way.

Cathy Gellis (00:59:29):
I, I, I don't. I mean, this is why I go back to the corporate law because you need a path for failure. You can't just decide it, but there's something about this that just smells so iffy. Cuz we can see the IFF all over the place. So this is not how business typically got done in any respect.

Leo Laporte (00:59:43):
There are paths for failure. If there's a mass Exodus and suddenly Twitter, you know, is falling apart. That that won't give him. Cause for withdrawing. Yeah. Twitter could withdraw because there is a non-disparagement clause in their agreement. And clearly which he's already violated is already violated that. So there are ways out and a big million is not the end of the world for Elon. It might be for Twitter.

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:07):
Twitter has earnings coming out shortly too. And so some people have suspected the earnings may be terrible, which would give him an option to get out.

Leo Laporte (01:00:14):
So maybe Elon has been trolling us all along knows that these earnings are gonna suck.

Cathy Gellis (01:00:19):
Well, I don't think this, this is an miscellaneous people have noticed and they thought that some people have thought that that's why the board actually took the deal because they thought that the earnings were gonna deflate the stock price. And this might be better. I think, I mean, it's hard to say what should happen. There's just, this is just such a crazy deal that maybe it was the right move, but such a borderline right move that it's hard to say. And every thing is changing under our feet immediately. I mean devaluing the company.

Leo Laporte (01:00:46):
Other, the other thing that's telling is the actual stock price of Twitter because in theory, if Elon's gonna pay <laugh> right 54 20 for it, the share price should come close to 54 20, anything less as a profit it's right now at 48 64, it's dropped a 2% today, which tells you that that's the stock market saying. Yeah, we don't think it's gonna happen if they did, they'd be buying at

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:09):
Least we're gonna hedge the bet. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:01:12):
What happens to per agro agro? A first of all, I hope he's gone cuz I can't say his name. Agro wall. No, that's a terrible reason in Prague. A nice guy. I'm sorry. What happens to per though? He just became the CEO of Twitter. He's gotta be gone. Right? Well

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:30):
They, they all have change of change of ownership, clauses in their

Leo Laporte (01:01:32):
Contracts. Oh yeah. He has, I think a huge parachute, several

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:35):
Vijaya got who's brilliant. Who's the head of safety and, and law. Musk set loose his dogs on her. It's just awful. So they're just waiting until they can cash out and

Cathy Gellis (01:01:45):
They're all actually I'm I am wondering to what extent down the tree, those change in ownership clauses may actually be other people people's packages

Leo Laporte (01:01:53):
AER wall's golden parachute is 39 million Jack Dorsey. Not can, could based on his 2.2% of Twitter make 978 million. No wonder he's happy. Could it be rats, deserting, a sinking ship going? Yeah. Elon, come on. It was awfully quick. They changed their tune very fast.

Cathy Gellis (01:02:14):
I'm wondering if very, very, very smart people on the Twitter side actually do know what's going on. I do not think that if, if I were to put sort of who, I think there's more smart people on the, well, this is mathematically true. There's more smart people on the Twitter side than there are on the Elon Musk side. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:02:31):
Just by sheer numbers, numbers alone just

Cathy Gellis (01:02:33):
By sheer numbers. But I think I meant that as more of a compliment that I think Twitter may have more smart, the right smart people who may be wise enough to try to guide this more carefully. And I don't think that care is necessarily on the Musk side, but I don't wanna underestimate him either.

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
It does. Well honestly look like a terrible business decision on Elon's part. Oh

Glenn Fleishman (01:02:52):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Unless, I mean, I would say, does he have a incredible plan, but it, he he's never given any instance of that. There was a great book a few years ago called the accidental zillionaire about Paul Allen. Yeah. That came out at exactly the wrong time. I, I know the author a little bit and is a great book, but it came out exactly when all of Paul Allen's foresight paid off. So up until that point, you can make the argument that's right. Everything he'd done had been happenstance and the time me and then suddenly everything, cuz he was so far ahead of everybody else with so many ideas and then they all paid off. And then, and then for the next, I think 15 years after the book came out, it was like, oh no, this guy is a genius. But in 2002 he didn't look quite so bright. And I'm like, does that happen to Elon Musk? Do we think this guy became the richest person in the world because he had a few good ideas and he'd work people to death and then this magical thing happened and then rest of his life were like, oh no, no that makes sense. It makes sense. He made all this money. I, I don't feel it like or the

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:49):
Opposite or he's already, he's already so made the contract with, with the devil Dr. Faust is here. Yeah. Has gotten what he is gonna get.

Leo Laporte (01:04:01):
It's kind of a shame. And I think we'll see this, I'd say this, looking back on it, that something that had such promises, Twitter and, and really was so important for quite a while in the national Zeist should end this way.

Cathy Gellis (01:04:18):
So I wanna make sure that I'm very, very, very sad for this platform that I think a lot of really dedicated people have been very genuinely working, very hard to build into something cool. But my concern is that we don't survive the loss of it because we've so hobbled the ecosystem that we can't get something else that's new. Yeah. From these ashes, we have to get something better. We need to get more better. And I think my, my closing comments was to repeat. What I was saying is take a deep breath. People keep breaking things. They don't understand. This is Alon Musk breaking the quality of his own investment. This is regulators who keep trying to misunderstand the problems and propose solutions and everybody needs to stop and take a deep breath. That's regulators in Washington, that's regulators in the state. I point to Minnesota's currently trying to move something really.

Cathy Gellis (01:05:08):
This is going to make a mess. Don't do it. Everybody. Europe stop and let's have Europe name it. We need to be more careful because this whole pretense that at last we are the smart people who are going to come and take care of everything is not smart because it ignores the smart people who have already been there and working very hard at things. And I think we need to listen to who's in the space and who's paying attention and these are hard, complex problems and issues, and also really exciting things that provide value you to everybody, humanity, democracy, speech, communication. This isn't gonna be solved overnight, not with simple legislation, not with a weird takeover thing. Like we need to, we need to be careful because this is really important stuff that an awful lot of people lives, livelihoods are all depending on. So be

Leo Laporte (01:05:55):
Careful also Cathy, with that. Thank you. Perfect. Malory address. Yes. Cuz we're gonna cause you, you made us promise to let you go now and we will, but I really glad you could join us. On short notice, Cathy Gilles offer tell you Glen, this goes on for five hours. Did we? Oh yeah. Glen. I've got my supplies stock in. I've got the emergency supplies to my right. I hope you have a kind bar or two. Thank thank you, Cathy. Really a pleasure having you and we'll have you on real soon CG council.com, C U N SEL. Brilliant, Cathy. Thank you. Thanks. Right.

Cathy Gellis (01:06:24):
Thanks

Leo Laporte (01:06:25):
For having me Cathy. Yeah, bye. It, it does raise an interesting issue. We're gonna take a break. When you come back there may not be much Twitter left for Elon to takeover because what is Twitter, but a bunch of talented engineers who are relying on their stock options for compensation and that compensation may have just been undermined completely. But we'll talk about that when we come back, Lynn Fleishman, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Glad to have you. His new URL G double n.fun. <Laugh> it's double good go there. <Laugh> and and of course Jeff Jarvis, I don't know what you're doing here, but you're here anyway. Buzz machine, you're stuck. You're stuck. <Laugh> I'm just teasing Dodge machine.buzz, machine.com. You and Glen, if you want, while I'm doing this ad can talk about Gutenberg and, and type and, and stuff like that.

Leo Laporte (01:07:18):
Cause I know you both share or a passion for that. Our show today brought to you by our crowd. If you, you know, if you're sitting and watching all of this and wondering, you know, yeah, I'm, I've got money in savings, I've got money in the stock market. But I think I'd like to, I think I'd like, why are, how do I get in on the fun the venture capitalists are having? That's what our crowd is all about. Our crowd is a group of venture capitalists. Who've decided to make what they see their so-called deal flow available to you as an accredited investor, all around the world. Tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors. Our crowd analyzes those companies across the global, and this is important. Private market selecting. Those are the greatest growth potential then brings them to you. Why private?

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These are companies that haven't yet gone public. They are not well known. They haven't had an exit yet. This is getting in at the very beginning in some of the most exciting technologies out there right now from personalized medicine to robotics, to cyber security, where companies spend $150 billion annually on cyber security. These are very much growth areas and aircraft is smart. They're going out and identifying innovators so you can invest when the growth potential is the greatest early outra is the fastest growing venture capital investment community. There accredited investors have already invested over a billion dollars in growing tech companies. 21 of the portfolio companies are already unicorns. Many of a, our crowds members have benefited from over 50 exits IPOs or sales of portfolio companies. Now, obviously this is not for everyone. First of all, you have to be an accredited investor. What that means will depend on what country you're in.

Leo Laporte (01:09:07):
So what I want you to do is go to our crowd.com/twig. When you tell it what country they'll say, what the rules are, what your net worth has to be. Things like that that's different in every country. But if you are an accredited investor, you can join at no cost. You can join the, our crowd platform, which is great fun because you get to learn about all these interesting companies. If you see something you want to invest in, you can participate in single company deals for as little as $10,000. Our crowd also has funds. If you want, if you don't wanna do the, you know, the due diligence you just want to get in on the fund minimum investment for the funds is $50,000. So you do have to have at least $10,000, you must be an accredited investor. The terms though will vary on depending on what country you're in.

Leo Laporte (01:09:53):
So just go and, and input the country@ourcrowd.com slash twig. I'll give you an example of one of the companies right now you can invest in it's called Soter S O T E R O. They have developed and patented. I might add a new approach to data protection that eliminates the gaps of traditional methods securing any data asset. And it doesn't, it can be OnPrem in the cloud. And right now, Soter is being trusted by one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. So this is a really inside look at something that is potentially, could be huge, but that's the excitement of our crowd explore Satter's potential. Before you invest, obviously at O U R C R O w D our crowd dot slash twig. It's free to join by the way O U R C R O wd.com/twig. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community, our crowd.com/twig. We thank of so much for their support of this week in Google, which is somewhat a little bit about Google sometimes. You're on Twitter, right? Glen, you use Twitter regularly. I know you do. I see your, I follow you. That's where I got to.

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:06):
Yeah, I used to, I it's a, I guess I say Jeff and I I've said this to you privately. It's such a pleasure because I grew up reading you in TV guide and there's always something, I mean, I don't want to age you, but it was, oh

Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
Boy.

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:17):
It's, it's like seeing a character come to life

Leo Laporte (01:11:20):
There. I say that every week. Yes.

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:22):
He's a real person. He's a real person.

Leo Laporte (01:11:25):
I feel the same way, Glen. I grew up reading him in the, well, I grew up we're the same age, but I read him in the examiner when he was here in San Francisco for years, and I'm very familiar with the byline. And so it was a real thrill when when he started working here. So I it's,

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:37):
I tried to explain to my kids, you know, there's a thing called TV guide and we used to get TV listings and you'd look, you'd pour over them on, on the couch circle things you'd plug in your VCR plus number. It was really important.

Leo Laporte (01:11:48):
And it had the easiest crossword in of any major publication <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:53):
That don't wanna make you feel like, yeah, I used Twitter. I used to get RAs using Twitter, cuz I used it almost like my own personal message board back when it was younger. And I just, I just was on it way too much. And post, it was kind of always there in the background. And at some point, you know, when you exceed 500,000 tweets, one must reevaluate one's life. So I deleted a lot of old tweets. I just deleted most of my history point after politics got too complicated to leave once

Leo Laporte (01:12:17):
I did the

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:18):
Online. Yeah. A lot of people I know have self deleting tweets, which is great. They like I think Marco Armit has a your creative of overcast and other fine products. He has, I believe a thing that just goes through and like after maybe a few days deletes all the tweets older that if you,

Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
What a good idea, actually,

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:35):
It's kind of neat.

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
The AEM. It

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:37):
It's, it's my memory. I have to go back. I know, I, I know I linked to that. I know I talked about that and I used Twitter advanced search all the time to just find stuff. I can't remember cause

Leo Laporte (01:12:45):
I'm old. Well, and in fact, I think I know about you Glen, because of your prolific tweeting, I'm sure. That's, I'm sure that's where I first became aware of you so

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:54):
Well, it was on, there was a point you remember when Twitter was fun, that was before right. Wing politics. And I mean, I don't want to, this is, listen, I try not to be too biased in anything I say, but it's that it was that there was a particular kind of mode on Twitter or mood on Twitter and that it wasn't that there's anything specifically wrong with people who have right. Of center beliefs, but there was a specific trench of people on the right and particularly far, right. And even, you know, alt and Nazi, right. Who invaded Twitter and made it kind of unusable through abuse and other stuff. And so it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like I don't know, it wasn't like a George will Republican. Who's not a Republican anymore. Right. He's not even registered as much. It was a very specific attempt and that was game, or it was attested with gamer gate years ago and then rolled out with the Trump campaign and now became the dominant way that Twitter gets used in political battles and, and other things. And so there was that time when it was fun and you'd meet people and be like, Hey, I made friendships. You'd go to conferences, you'd know a hundred people when you came to a, I don't

Leo Laporte (01:13:51):
Think that ended in 2016. I feel like it ended earlier than that. Absolutely.

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:55):
Yeah. I, 24, 14, 20 13, maybe it's been a while, but if you're on

Leo Laporte (01:13:58):
And honestly it wasn't rising tide. It's not the content of tweets that ever bother me. It's the, the, just as, as Han says the delivery, it's how they say it. Yeah. Not behavior what they say it's behavior. Yeah. and, and for many years, I mean, I, I got on Twitter first in 2006, qui it briefly because I was concerned about name confusion. And then I think it was, I Justine said, no, you have to be on Twitter. So I rejoined an April, 2007. And I don't think I have a half a million tweets, but was very active in the early days. How many do

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:36):
I have? Oh God,

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
I would, but I've deleted. I've deleted all up to a few years ago.

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:41):
It's, it's dangerous if you find out how many you've made, but you know, Jeff's on,

Leo Laporte (01:14:45):
Even as we do the show, which is much to my, yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:49):
You know, it's the foundation of my, and so many other people. People's independent careers too, as I'm a freelance journalist. And I became a type and print historian, you know, kind of through the back door, by, by tweeting a lot and meeting other people. I have a <laugh> I've developed a, a group of a fellow fishing autos of this kind of paper plate that was used to cast metal plates before off set printing called flying. And I mean, we find the most obscure subgroups and we talk about, I wanted

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:16):
To go to one of Glen's events and it was sold out already. I couldn't this event for God sake

Leo Laporte (01:15:22):
Flying event sold out. I'll do

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:24):
Flying events.

Leo Laporte (01:15:24):
Wow.

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:25):
Yeah. It's but it's great.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:27):
Glen, I wanna show you this. I wanna show you this. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:30):
There's a book about Gutenberg. No, no. It's a popup popup. It's a Goberg

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:35):
Popup is a card.

Leo Laporte (01:15:36):
It pops up a printing press. Did somebody send you that? Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:40):
I bought it from the this was from the museum of print in HARO, mass. Nice,

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:46):
Great institution. I I've never been there. Great.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:49):
Oh, you'd you'd you'd fell there. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:51):
I would just have to move in just

Leo Laporte (01:15:53):
Down the road from mark Twain's line type in Hartford, Connecticut that's

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:57):
That's mark, mark Twain, James on

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:59):
One trip.

Leo Laporte (01:16:00):
<Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:01):
Mark Twain who funded the the machine that bankrupted him the type thing machine that bankrupted hard

Leo Laporte (01:16:06):
To believe, but there is other Elon Musk news hard to believe, but it may explain why brokenhearted he's buying Twitter in the trial, the, the libel trial between Amber, her and Johnny DEP, Amber herd said she never really loved Elon Musk and was filling space with him following Johnny DEP breakup. Oh, pulling

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:30):
All of the heart. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:16:31):
I never loved you Elon. I'm

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:33):
Buying Twitter. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:16:36):
So now we know, I think now we know exactly what happened. 

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:42):
Oh God, he's just a

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:43):
Incredible, that trial is too much. We know too much about too many people <laugh>. Yeah, exactly. Which is what Twitter's about. So

Leo Laporte (01:16:50):
Yeah. Yeah. What, okay. Just so maybe we, it's probably not time to eulogize Twitter or maybe it is no, not what are some of your favorite Twitter tropes or Twitter moments or you know, things that happened on Twitter. Remember when people used to instead of doing a Google search, they'd do a, a, what do they call it? A Twitter search or a Twitter? A, a crowd

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:14):
Mind. Yeah. What was that called? That

Leo Laporte (01:17:16):
Fun

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:17):
Hive,

Leo Laporte (01:17:17):
Mind, hive, mind or something. And they would, they would say on Twitter. Well, what do you think? And you'd get hundreds of tweets about a subject. Those were always fun. I think things started to go downhill when people are doing long threads, maybe 280 characters, even brilliant ones. Wasn't a great idea. Brilliant

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:33):
Ones. No, I, I, I was against two 80 at first, but no, I think that that's wrong. And I liked it. I mean, I, I met Glen because I got into all my Gutenberg stuff and there's this guy who was doing this amazing stuff around Gutenberg and it was purely in Twitter. We took a, he also sh it was because of him. I, I saw that he was in, of course in in the Gutenberg Bible, we ended up taking it together virtually. It was great. I have my Gutenberg, my, my book history walks Twitter list is my happy place. When all this goes to be too much lists, I go there.

Leo Laporte (01:18:04):
There's another thing that Twitter doesn't really bring to the foreground, but is one of the most powerful, interesting things. I know that I follow your I follow during the COVID pandemic, your COVID experts list. Jeff. That was really a great thing to have. People don't use lists all that much, but that was another nice feature of early, early Twitter. We, I remember

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:30):
Always go back to his you know, the drill account, the that D R I L, which is this guy. I think he finally admitted who he was, but it's, it's this whole he, it just does these amazing, strange tweets that are incredibly zeitgeisty and funny, and yet impossible to explain, even in context. And there's one, many years ago, I'm not owned. I'm not owned. I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob. And some days that's the only thing that's, it's just, it's just all of what people are doing, right. It's just 20, 20 11. It just summarizes so much of discourse people all saying, you know, especially people just, they start shouting louder and louder. I didn't, I'm correct. I'm not wrong. It doesn't matter that you have tapes that show me saying I'm lying as they shrink into a corn cob.

Leo Laporte (01:19:21):
Actually that's a good point. One of the things Elon says is everybody will have to have be authenticated, use their real names. Oh yeah. One of the best things about Twitter is the parody accounts, the fake ounce the weird York

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:33):
Times news bot is the, is the best of the time. It is. It is you follow that. I hope.

Leo Laporte (01:19:37):
Yeah. brilliant. And the times is on it. Is that, is that that word? No,

Jeff Jarvis (01:19:42):
No, no. This's a D one. No, this, this is Doug J balloon. The, the NY times news bot <laugh>. And, and so it's, it's, it's, it's inside his head. I presume it say his, he calls himself Doug, but made up name where he comes up with the headlines that he's sure the times is going to do. <Laugh> sometimes he tweets an actual times headline and it's like, is this the onion? Is this news spot it's oh, no. The times really didn't do that. And

Leo Laporte (01:20:06):
There is also, I've just found, searching for that a account called impressions of the times that creates, uses an AI to create illustrations from times headlines. Ooh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:17):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:20:18):
Pretty. Isn't that interesting? <Laugh> when Squaw worship sunken Russian disinformation faces a test was the inspiration for this really what a beautiful work of art kind of lovely. Yeah. Impressions of the times that's a new account. We, early on, we we wanted, we tried a novel I think it was called novel one 40, where you could only write a 40, 140 characters of the novel. And we had a bunch of people, each writing between succession. The novel never got very far, but it was kind of interesting.

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:52):
I thought Twitter would be used more for fiction at times we saw I've seen examples of it. And one thing I was hoping is that people would play games on Twitter. These are the things that, so, so Twitter has left all this lowing hanging fruit. Why not, not gameify Twitter, but not, I mean, you could have scripted events or even improv events happening among accounts. That would be incredibly fun to observe in a sort of special space or timeline. When you lose your cat, you know, you, you post, Hey, I lost my cat and people in Timbuktu are retweeting it. Yeah. Not helpful. I appreciate the sentiment, but why not have regional local Twitter sections instead? They're like, well, club clubhouse, obviously a great idea. Let's make Twitter spaces and do audio on a text oriented medium. That's been very successful. So I just feel like there's a, it's not that there's a PO of ideas.

Glenn Fleishman (01:21:38):
I just don't feel like they push in the right direction. So one part of me is like, all right, in the best complexion, even though I don't think Musk anything, he said indicates trust in this direction, in the, the best way it could be. What if he did bring in a bunch of new ideas or brought in a really interesting, challenging staff that just totally shook things up and they kept the best of Twitter and tweaked it and added stuff we actually liked. I mean, it's not in feasible, it's unlikely, but there's so much room for those kinds of things to happen.

Leo Laporte (01:22:08):
Actually, he may have to, to do that because I don't know how much of the current Twitter team is likely to be around when he walks in the door. 

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:17):
You were asking about that earlier is that if you have options with strike prices and so forth, you, you join because you hope there was an upside. And if the upside is exactly fi $54 and 20 cents, there are things they can do to keep employees where they even though it's a privately held company, they can use different valuations. So there's more to sweeten it. But if you joined in the last couple of years, you might have no opportunity to have it upside. So why would you stay? You just have your, you know, keep your options. You have, your options would be redeemed or, or whatever. If they weren't doing

Leo Laporte (01:22:46):
Stock, it's one of the reasons Silicon valley companies go public is so that they have a liquid market for options that they can then hire employees with private companies. I've been screwed by private stock and private companies. It's a very, you know, there's a, there's a long and oh yeah. Sorted. Oh yeah. Sorted tail there. If it's not a public company, forget it. Right. It's not a real option. So there's, that's a good reason to stay public. And that's the,

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:11):
I had Phantom equity yeah. In entertainment, weekly in advanced local. And

Leo Laporte (01:23:16):
I had Phantom equity in tech TV. <Laugh> yeah. Fondly

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:22):
Stop arch years away.

Leo Laporte (01:23:26):
I almost had Fanm equity and seen it, but that, that didn't materialize. So nevermind. Speaking of CNET, what the hell <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:37):
Glen right here is an expert in typography. I want to get his view of the typographical artistry of this logo.

Leo Laporte (01:23:44):
So yesterday a number of people were shocked when they went to cnet.com. Let me refresh the page. So you get the full effect and what is the typeface here that they're using? It's a kind of archaic looking, Glen, you might, you might recognize this. There's a sense there menu bar, but the, but the headline I'm sort of weird

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:08):
Ify tool. The fonts called Sentinel. I have an IFD two called what's that font. And I click on a, that was fast. Font is tells you what the fonts is. Sentinel

Leo Laporte (01:24:14):
Huh?

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:14):
Monument. Yeah. Monument grotesque is the the finding, not protect money. And then yeah, Sentinel. These are probably gonna be opensource fonts. Yeah. It's a little bit old fashioned. It has horrible quotation marks though. Don't you think I make straight curves

Leo Laporte (01:24:33):
Slightly. That's like

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:34):
When you

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:34):
Forget to use the right quotation marks. Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:36):
Yeah, yeah. But it's tilted, it's like an inch mark or a foot mark rather don't get your inch in foot marks together. Or the, or the stone hinge, you order will be the wrong

Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
Size. And there's some very odd, <laugh> like, look at TV, look at the the

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:50):
Turning

Leo Laporte (01:24:50):
There is turning. There is very strange.

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:53):
It's I don't know. You know, there's a trend that every tech site in a lot of other sites move from intricate designs that maybe were overdesigned to, it's just white. It's just some black texts on a white background. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:25:04):
Yeah, once you get past

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:05):
Hard to differentiate, once

Leo Laporte (01:25:06):
You get past the the, the Sentinel, you get a very bland kind of Sansa for the rest of it. So I made a

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:13):
Lot of money doing this redesign.

Leo Laporte (01:25:15):
It's a big redesign. Wow. Look at that.

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:17):
A grotesque, by the way is just a a Sansa font. It's

Leo Laporte (01:25:21):
A,

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:21):
It's The old, old term for it Gothic. It used to be called also go, not the fancy kind is also called like so

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:28):
Glen, when I, when I started entertainment weekly I we had a, we had a logo that was controversial cause it was, it was TWI tilted and they didn't like it. Da, da, da. So the bosses came after us fixed this and you gotta do this, you gotta do that. So I go after the design director, by the way, we had design problems, but he said this, the font was grotesque. I said, well, can you find is not protest

Leo Laporte (01:25:49):
<Laugh> how about this black letter? You like that

Jeff Jarvis (01:25:53):
We're doing

Glenn Fleishman (01:25:55):
Hallo derived from is it accidents? Grotesque is the, the is like the, the predecesor. So what is,

Leo Laporte (01:26:01):
What is the entymology of grotesque? That's very strange.

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:04):
Oh, it's one of these German. It's, it's one of those German things. It's there's a German deviation of it. Cause it doesn't mean grotesque as we speak it. It's it's, it's a specific thing that became applied to like a what's the thing like a not burlesque you talk about something the over 

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:24):
Roco. No burro.

Glenn Fleishman (01:26:26):
Yeah, no Barro bar, right. It's kind of like grotesque is just a combination word that comes from that. So it's but it sounds, it, it meant more like interesting and fantastic. And so it was a different when the, when sheriffs were everything than a grotesque was a different was used for display face, same thing, like a Gothic like Franklin the Franklin Gothic typeface is a classic saner from before San Sarahs were designed like VEA VEA kind of ushered in a new way of designing typefaces without Sarah's. So yeah, you can get these hilarious names for typefaces.

Leo Laporte (01:27:00):
So it was originally G R O T E S K. Yeah. not the, the traditional grotesque.

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:06):
You did you know that there was a typographer, a type designer who was Hitler's prisoner?

Leo Laporte (01:27:11):
No,

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:12):
I don't know about this at all.

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:13):
You don't oh, goody. Oh, like Glen. So, so you know, you've seen the Gutenberg tight, which is, which is Gothic and not in our sense, Gothic is oddly we over here call that VEA. But Gothic there is, is that stuff looks like goth cathedral, right? And it's what the German publications all used. And there was actually a debate in the German parliament about what the official font of Germany should be and back and forth and, and, and fact one <affirmative> and Hitler liked it for a while. But then he decided that it shouldn't be because all the lands they were conquering, couldn't read it. And so they decided it was a Jewish font.

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:59):
Oh Lord. Be wild

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:00):
Famously. There was a guy named Jan Chi hold on the I'm gonna mispronounce his name.

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:06):
That's exactly. You wrote pronounce it exactly correctly, though.

Leo Laporte (01:28:09):
Good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:10):
Who pronounced wrote a book called the new typography in which he called for a single typeface without or ornamentation? No sheriffs, no nothing. And he condemned the German fr fracture that it was the exclusive character of that, and this was a dangerous view. And so he said that that his views would've died anyway. But a few years after his book, Hitler came, he was accused of creating Urman typography and art. And so they arrested him for his font and he got a passport out to leave Germany and became the designer of penguin. <Affirmative>

Leo Laporte (01:28:47):
Well, I damned

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:48):
I can tell you, so UR was so associated with German. This is a quote I I'd learned a few years ago. Oon Bismark, the, you know, the oh, what was he, you know, he's the chancellor of Germany, HEOR 19th century president up to yeah, president. Sorry. And he said, he said, can I, if I can speak some Germans BCHA Buka in Laia B lazy, which is, I don't read German books in Latin letters. He was

Leo Laporte (01:29:09):
Send them back.

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:10):
Wow. If someone sent him a, someone,

Leo Laporte (01:29:13):
So was everything, something in factor?

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:15):
Yeah, it was impossible to, it's a very difficult, I used to read someone. I took German classes. You get a, that was printed in, in book. Oh, it's

Leo Laporte (01:29:22):
Hard. Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:22):
It's so hard. It's K. And the L look it's, it was hard for the, I believe I read a statistic. I think it was people who read fr tour, read it 40% more slowly than reading the same text in Latin alphabet.

Leo Laporte (01:29:33):
It does fit the pronunciation of German though. Yes. Really Very nicely. I always, I think if I look at that, see, now I'm, I'm becoming literate. I always look at this and say, well, it's like Gothic or something, but fror is very,

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:45):
It's.

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):
It's

Glenn Fleishman (01:29:46):
Also called Gothic, but it's yeah. It's UR was a very specific face. Yeah. It's got a there's a, there's a typeface designer who designed a this guy named be told VPA who designed Albertas, which is a face. Once you see it, you will see it everywhere. It was used in the prisoner 1960s prisoner TV series. It's just ubiquitous for having a certain kind of mm-hmm <affirmative>, it feels like a unique appearance, but it is everywhere. And Volpe was Jewish and he had to leave over, you know, sort of over typeface design also in the thirties, because he was no longer allowed to work, even though he had he had just developed in fact, a very nice fr face and then went to England, was sponsored to go. There was sent to Australia by boat during the war, through UBO infested waters with other German nationals, even though he had a flee Germany, then they brought him back and lived the long happy life and made a lot of very nice book coverage

Leo Laporte (01:30:40):
I shall be using Alberta's from now on. It's wonderful. All of my, all of my printing. And that's a great, instead of the quick brown Fox, I'm gonna start saying waltz bad Nim for quick jigs VX.

Glenn Fleishman (01:30:52):
That's great. That's

Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
Good. Do you, you know, do you spend a lot of money, Glen on fonts and typeface digital fonts?

Glenn Fleishman (01:31:01):
I don't. I have I,

Leo Laporte (01:31:03):
You could,

Glenn Fleishman (01:31:04):
You could, yeah. You could blow a fortune on them, which is great too. Cuz the market for them is smaller. There's some great stories too, is the person who developed the typeface. You think of as the Harry Potter typeface that's used on merchandise it's guy a rich Keer of P 22. He's not allowed to disclose the term. So if you ask him, he can't talk about it, but was it Warner brothers owned it at the time they licensed the font for certain usage. Then they stuck it on merchandise without having the license for it. So I expect there are a lot of zeros behind whatever number that was settled for. Wow. It was right when Harry Potter was incredibly popular. So if you you'll see a face, you'll be like, oh, that's that face? That's that Harry Potter face. And it's because of that popularization. But I, I own a bunch of P 22 fonts own some Monotype fonts, but I bought a lot of tight faces a long time ago. Yeah, it's not that one. There's one it's on like merchandises and bags and things. It's kind of the book sometimes you'll Seetu on Harry Potter. Huh? Sorry. I don't mean to devolve into the no,

Leo Laporte (01:32:02):
No, no, no, no. And I've got one more question warn we could, we could do, I, I, we could do the, I mean I'm so sick of Twitter. I'm much rather talk about this. <Laugh> I, we will get to the Google da Google a quarterly results in just a second. But I, I want ask you the, so there are a lot of free fonts for instance, this Albert is being offered for free on coons.com. Are those not as good as, you know, the fonts that you might get from well known foundries that cost hundreds of dollars.

Glenn Fleishman (01:32:28):
Yes. Yeah, because in the United States specifically, and in certain other countries in the world, you can't copyright the appearance of a typeface. You could UN only copyright the underlying

Glenn Fleishman (01:32:39):
Code that makes up the typeface. So someone can't copy your post script or open type code and produce it. But after some lawsuits, I wanna say in the nineties about it it became clear that you could essentially re outline typefaces and then release them. So when you buy, but the, the key thing is there's all the curing and special tweet and it goes into a font. They can't take that cuz that's software. So the makers of duplicate fonts some of them are adaptations that are perfectly good fonts in their own. Right. And you can go to Google fonts and there's a group called is it isle it's there's a group that is supports lesser used typefaces or lesser used scripts that are used for typefaces. So native American languages and languages in, in Asia and other countries where they have developed really high quality type faces which often include Latin characters and characters in these languages that aren't otherwise supported and give them away for free. So you can go and find super high quality free numbers, phenomenal what's available. Oh my,

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
Where would I find that? Because I, I am a font nerd, but I don't wanna, I've spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fonts for no good reason. And I would like good quality fonts, you know, most most go most Linux and Mac distributions offer a lot of fonts for free for download the nerd fonts and so forth. They, I collect programming fonts, mono type fonts. Where can I go to get good fonts <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:05):
For free out on the name of this group? Well, I mean, Google fonts is a great source and if you, if you literally search on I wish I could remember the name of this. I compiled a list at one point but there are places that will list. If you can find a place that lists Google fonts and some other foundries you'll find lists of typefaces that are freely licensable, but designed, you know, in house essentially interesting or designers contribute. And they're often licensed for, you know, unlimited use or sometimes for non-commercial purposes. But yeah, if you find Alberta's in most places, that's a, a copied version and and it won't have the quality of it. And actually a friend of mine fell, I became friends with because he did the new version of Alberta's for Monotype at, at Tosio Maari. He developed a kind of revival version of Alberta's that is fantastic and comes in Greek and rush SOIC and has a little picture of its designer. Verto Volpe is one of the characters.

Leo Laporte (01:35:01):
It's very, oh, that's cool. You have a

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:02):
You're drawing a favorite body type font.

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:06):
Oh gosh. I'm a, I am a big fan of minion. I've used a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
I like minion too. That's an Adobe 

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:11):
Yeah. That's from the eighties is Roger slim designed that and it just an amazingly versatile typeface. I use a lot of I use Bebo sometimes again, that's a, that's a font that dates back to the dates back to the classic narrow. Tamaki politically the a book printed in the 14 hundreds about dreams. So there's a lot of, yeah, a lot of tape like that. There's a great story. You know, about how this in I got to meet him when I was in London. He figured out that well the 1910s, this person who was slowly losing his mind had had a falling out with with he was a printer. He had a falling out with his business partner and the business partner agreed to let the printer keep the tight faces and the punches from which they were made until some sort and period of time, I think until his death or something like that. And so the guy is losing his mind slowly, starts dumping all of the type into the thas, carries pounds of it in his pocket, beautiful

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:07):
Font ever, the doves Bible font.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:10):
Oh, it's incredible.

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:11):
It is magnificent. Thomas Cobbin Sanderson.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:15):
Yes. Cobb Sanderson. And you can read his journals and you can see how the man it's really sad. He's working with lead. Maybe he was having lead poisoning. I don't know. And then when it's all done, he triumph fully announces that he dumped it all. Well. Well, so this fellow Robert Green says, well, what if I could figure out where it was? And he pinpoints where he thinks it is and he finds type. And then he hires the divers from the city of London and eye. And they retrieve I dunno, hundred odd pieces. I've been to his home and held some of the dove type in my hand. And it's what a wonderful story. Now the funny part is I have found two, maybe three other stories in which type has been thrown in a pit of, in a bit of peak or as a, in despair into a body of water.

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:58):
I not eat people. They are,

Leo Laporte (01:37:01):
Huh? Maybe it's the lead. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:03):
I have a book I wanna write called the lead heave in the lake. I think something as bad as

Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
That.

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:07):
<Laugh> I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:09):
You know, if you look up dove Bible, you'll see what I think is the most gorgeous part.

Leo Laporte (01:37:13):
Well, there's a good, and I'm showing it right now, a good BBC news story on the whole recovery of the fonts and the, of the type and all events you

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:24):
Can buy. Robert has a modern rendition. He has spent so much time looking at the work of the dove press.

Jeff Jarvis (01:37:30):
And this is, this is, tell me, run here. This is derived from what is my favorite base font, which is Jansen

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:37):
That's right. So it's a type, oh my,

Leo Laporte (01:37:40):
We have, we have fallen this hole here.

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:44):
Sorry, this, this is what happens.

Leo Laporte (01:37:46):
You love

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:47):
It side of you. I love it up here with hype

Leo Laporte (01:37:49):
It's it's it's a very nerdy, but it's fascinating by the way, if you go to glen.fund, what is that fun? Because that is a nice, you've chosen a nice type face for your 

Glenn Fleishman (01:37:58):
What if I now you have to try, I think it's now, and of course the one type face, I don't know is the one that's on my own site.

Leo Laporte (01:38:05):
The one you chose

Glenn Fleishman (01:38:07):
It is I have to load it and use my tool. It's

Leo Laporte (01:38:10):
It's a very grotesque font.

Glenn Fleishman (01:38:12):
It's EO sand. It's a, it's a modern typeface that comes in lots of weights. And that's the other way you can do it too, is if you have an Adobe, this is gonna sound like an ad. It is not an ad. It's not an ad. If you have an Adobe creative cloud subscription, they include what we use former service. They bought, I have all of

Leo Laporte (01:38:29):
Those type

Glenn Fleishman (01:38:29):
Kit. Yeah. And with type kit, you get a li included. You can use tons of including as web fonts. Many of them are available. So I have it linked to a bunch of sites. I is

Leo Laporte (01:38:39):
The asterisks here at dingbat, or is it an act actual asterisk?

Glenn Fleishman (01:38:43):
It's a Unicode character. So it's a rendition in OSA sands of an eight pointed star. And the funny part is one mobile. It's a totally different character. Oh, you wanna talk about Unicode now? I, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:38:56):
Yuko.

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:58):
Well,

Glenn Fleishman (01:38:58):
Let's 

Leo Laporte (01:38:59):
You know, this is the greatest thing about being a nerd is, or a geek is it doesn't matter what the topic is. If we can dive deep and get some passion, it's fascinating. And I love, I love going down that rabbit hole so much, so much fun. There's such

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:13):
Great characters in, in the fought world. It's, you'd be, you'd be surprised that that story Glen just told us my very favorite is gotta

Leo Laporte (01:39:21):
The, the only, I never, Glen, I know you study this formally. You, you, you know, you are actually a designer and you've, and you've, you've actually, you says in your webpage, the last person ever app apprent as a type setter in the world,

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:34):
I, I may be exaggerated, but pretty close feels

Leo Laporte (01:39:36):
Like

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:37):
Last generation.

Leo Laporte (01:39:38):
At least the only thing I know as in it's a wonderful book, I've recommended many, many times is stop stealing sheep.

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:44):
Oh yeah. Eric Speakman. Yeah. Yeah. He, I was just funny. I just was exchanging tweets with him on on the Twitter machine. It's why, part of why I know him is because of Twitter fantastic designer, typeface designer. Very interesting guy out a giant book. If you look behind me. Oh, it's too low below. It's a book called what is it? Hello? I am Eric. And it's about, it's written about him. Very interesting cat.

Leo Laporte (01:40:07):
I like this book so much. Apparently I've purchased it twice. According to Amazon. I don't know why <laugh> maybe that was as a gift. I don't know, that's

Glenn Fleishman (01:40:14):
Good. He's been Eric developed this way of doing what he calls digital letter press is. He uses a, a modern machine that makes plates from digital files in a very particular way. He had to spend 60,000 euros to modify an off the shelf device. And then he can print on a, an on a letter press on a, a automated, like motorized sort of one of the last modern letter presses these very high quality books. So he's done a, you know, relatively small series, but I have a few of them and they, they are absolutely letter press. They feel like it, but they're this interesting hybrid between old and new and I mean, that's still has the

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:49):
Bite fun,

Glenn Fleishman (01:40:50):
Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's the bite. It's very black ink cuz letter press ink is often much blacker than the you use with offset because of the way it applies to paper. And anyway, it's the intersection between that old and new that I think is the most fun is there's a lot of stuff that's, you know, VR and AR is totally new in it's its own beast, but where you can hit physical and digital things together. I just think 2d printing and 3d 3d cutting and 3d print, that kind of

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
Thing. Somebody in our IRC chat has discovered the Unicode for the eight pointed star and put it in our IRC chat.

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:21):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:41:23):
If you had a client that does Unicode, it really looks good. It's nice.

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:26):
I had to look it up myself. Warning is iOS. It looks like a weird it's a little weird. It's a like a little star instead of this beautiful thing. Desktop browser.

Leo Laporte (01:41:36):
It's really nice. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:41:37):
Yeah. Unicode, every, every platform, a new a new experience, what charact

Leo Laporte (01:41:42):
Might

Jeff Jarvis (01:41:42):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
Google did not have a very good quarter. It's interesting. We were talking on windows weekly about Microsoft, which had an excellent quarter and on, and you know, lots to celebrate until Paul mentioned, but by the way, with Google's terrible quarter, their revenue far exceeded the total revenue of Microsoft, their revenue in advertising alone. So you have that puts it a little bit in perspective. The it's Google said maybe the war, I don't know, but digital ad sales down quite a bit, YouTube was

Jeff Jarvis (01:42:17):
Hurting badly. And so there may be TikTok

Leo Laporte (01:42:20):
Maybe from TikTok YouTube ad revenue, which the analysts had thought would increase 25% only increased 14%. See, this is the problem with this. It's a miss, but it's not a drop

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:31):
It's it's a lot. It's yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:42:33):
It's still it's

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:35):
Apples. When apples stuck in the do not track me, it could

Leo Laporte (01:42:39):
Be code. It could be part

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:41):
Of that too. Although I think YouTube suffers less than that because they feed people, their

Leo Laporte (01:42:44):
Person. So first parties, in fact benefit from Apple's ATT mm-hmm <affirmative> because ATT means you can't track. People's a third party. Google doesn't need to Google. That's

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:55):
Totally true guard. The

Leo Laporte (01:42:56):
First party, they're the first party for everything you do. Although I thought it was interesting after all the time we've talked, we had Richard Gris on to talk about Google amp, Jeff you know, I was not a big fan. Jeff tried to explain why it was a good thing. Google's amp seems to be now it's losing ground it's over. Yeah. Yeah. Which is surprise.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:17):
Well, cuz, cause you know, and, and, and, and fine, you can complain about I was there when, when it was first discussed with the newspaper industry and the news industry, and one of the Google executives who was there, not Richard just said, you guys are never gonna trust us to do this. Yeah, you need

Leo Laporte (01:43:31):
That's what happened,

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:32):
But you're not gonna trust doing that's and that's what happened. And they tried to make an open source, but it never fully, but the truth underlying was still the case. Media companies effed up the web miserably through all kinds of crap. That's true editorially. Plus the ad departments and the technology departments, just, just, just horrible, slow, miserable, rotten irritating pages. So there was a need for an amp. It just, that wasn't the Messiah to be had, I

Leo Laporte (01:43:57):
Guess. And, and I think that generally people had the attitude, oh, it's just a land grab from Google. And it doesn't

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:03):
Really wasn't cuz it wasn't that's the thing. People assume Google was these land grabs. They got plenty of lamb, right? Like they don't need dues. They don't need to happen. They got, they got plenty of land, but didn't

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:14):
Matter. It's all the problem for Google. I think it didn't solve enough of a problem for everybody else or the way

Leo Laporte (01:44:18):
They implemented. Well, and that was the real problem was yeah. The newspapers weren't seeing the revenue it was hiding who was looking at their stuff. Google was getting all that information, not the newspapers YouTube advertising revenues, 6.8, 7 billion wall Street's mad. Cuz they thought it would be more sounds like it's quarter. Yeah, yeah. Per quarter. Yeah. That's important to say per quarter.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:41):
And they were fools to have bought it for what was it? 1.6 billion.

Leo Laporte (01:44:44):
Yeah. Yeah. No it's definitely generating for them they've started, they've announced they're gonna start putting ads on YouTube. What do they call it? The shorts, the, the, their, their competition with TikTok.

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:56):
Oh, what's that new thing.

Leo Laporte (01:44:57):
Yes. Their TikTok. I don't get that out yet. And it, and it confirms, I think with some of what you just said, which is TikTok must be hurting them a little bit ad growth revenue slowing, but not shrinking. You Google told shareholders, YouTube shorts is doing great. Don't worry about TikTok. It's not all about TikTok. Let's see. That was a, a headline from a tech crunch. Ruth poor at the CFO said the slower rate of growth is more a reflection of last year. Unprecedented gains. That may be true too. I mean even Netflix, which had a terrible quarter, but that was coming off of a gigantic growth through pandemic. Maybe that's the, maybe that's the thing. Ad revenue in 2021, Q1 had increased 49% on YouTube.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:52):
That's

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:52):
People, reality is now competing with YouTube is you do

Leo Laporte (01:45:57):
Real things,

Glenn Fleishman (01:45:58):
Go into concert halls. We can go out and see people. So, yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:46:01):
Right, right. That

Leo Laporte (01:46:02):
Too competition from reality hurts YouTube revenues. That's a good headline. That's

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:07):
I, I hardly used YouTube. I felt like for general viewing before the pandemic and now I feel like it's kind of or stop that we put on the agenda. Partly cuz we watch a lot of UK TV shows that are available through it. But also it just it has gotten to know us maybe a little too well, although my 15 year and you're an year old and I joke all the time, we're watching something last night and the ads that threw up were like, I don't need that medication. We're not investing in that. We don't buy car like that. They, and we're like, oh this is good. Youtube completely doesn't know who we are. Like, whatever they're doing for personalization, they've gotten us. Totally.

Leo Laporte (01:46:41):
You know what I find interesting though, Glen, that's exactly the same ads I get. Get on CNN. So

Glenn Fleishman (01:46:46):
Oh, interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:46:47):
It's the same advertisers. It's big pharma. It's automotive. Ah, and actually in a way that's a real story because for a long time digital and I know this from podcasting was looked down upon by brand advertisers. They said, oh no, you can't do brand advertising on digital scale. Yeah. At scale. Yeah. 

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:06):
So by the way back to your point though, about YouTube, there there's a, a paper that just came out from colleagues at at CUNY, by the way. And, and others that debunks, the, the, the, the YouTube rabbit hole argument and says that the worst stuff is, is viewed little by few people. And they come to it, not from the algorithm, they come to it from outside links. Oh, it's just a serving platform for the, for the far right. Which is interesting too.

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
Yeah. I don't know. <Laugh> I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:41):
Little research facts.

Leo Laporte (01:47:43):
Oh yeah. That's I know. Is that facts? Is that facts? I don't know. It's

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:48):
Researchers.

Leo Laporte (01:47:48):
Okay. You must be true. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:51):
Other than us.

Leo Laporte (01:47:52):
Well, it's better. Yeah. I mean, my empirical research is Google's best known for bikini rich content, but that's just me.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:00):
Well, that's your problem on,

Glenn Fleishman (01:48:01):
I never see any of that. I don't know what

Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
You're watching, man, please.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:03):
Oh, Hey, by the way, by the way, this is, I'm serious about this. So the last week people have been talking about there's porn on Twitter. I have never seen any porn on Twitter. Does it think IM Presbyterian

Leo Laporte (01:48:16):
Still? You just have to look for it. They don't stop it. They don't stop it. So you have to that's actually the, that, there's a really good example of why Twitter works. You follow who you wanna follow.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:28):
I've never seen an inch, a bear flesh on Twitter.

Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
Well, I'll send you a list.

Jeff Jarvis (01:48:34):
No,

Leo Laporte (01:48:35):
<Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:48:37):
It only comes up in if you search for certain things. And I think long is one of them, by the way, you'll get a lot of pornography <laugh> Seems like innocuous terms and then long means something in the Tagalog. I think, because I see it come up in posts from people from the Philippines and I'm like, I don't know what flying means, but it's not what I think. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:48:54):
And that's an interest, you know, Elon says free speech, right? Well, pornography is protected by free speech. Spam is protected by free speech. A lot of things that Elon may not want on his platform are protected by free speech. So it's a very do know Tumblr got rid of the porn Because

Glenn Fleishman (01:49:15):
Kill

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:15):
Heard it immensely kill. Cause it wasn't killed it porn. It was alternative creation. That's the problem that was interpreted as

Leo Laporte (01:49:22):
Porn. Well, I mean, it was, there were, you know, you could go and find naked pictures of people. I mean, if that's what, Hmm. I don't know. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:49:30):
It's a, if you, if you look at where the workers go, you can see what's going on with the platform because they're the least tolerated people that's right on the planet. Yes, that's right. And so when a platform you know, so it's, you'd think they might start with Nazis and fascists and people who wanna overthrow governments and, and commit violence, but they usually start with sex workers and trans people and people who lack a strong political voice in the country in which they're in which they live. And you know, so that's, again, sex workers are always the Canary, the cold it's like, we have to stop this problem. So we're going to ban sex workers and that will fix our platform and hurt

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:05):
The sex workers every time that's.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:08):
So the

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:08):
Back end of the arms of, of pimps and make their lives worse. Mm-Hmm

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:12):
<Affirmative> so like the back page thing, like all these things that are they're ostensibly, they're all about their puritanism, as opposed to providing, if they're, you know, if to provide other opportunities, people, if you wanna do things, you don't, you don't ban 'em from a platform in order to protect them, but it tells us what else is coming on a platform, because it's always first the weakest people with the least voice and the, and who will defend them the least, and then upwards from there.

Leo Laporte (01:50:33):
Well, is it Congress now looking at essentially a return of SA Fest. I'm trying to remember what the yeah, I think

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:40):
It's always simmering there because it's very easy to sell your constituents that you're doing something. If you tell them you're banning people from something you, yeah. I mean, this is why all there's been all the cries of pedophilia and grooming and so forth is it's a very emotional appeal and you know, and

Leo Laporte (01:50:55):
Who's who's for that. Nobody's for that.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:57):
Yeah, he's right. It's a very easy I'm I'm not a, you know, you know, if you're old enough as we are, and you remember the Satanism panic of the eighties this is a replay of that just at his incredibly magnified scale, but it's exactly the same playbook and exactly is ridiculous.

Leo Laporte (01:51:11):
It was a, it was, it was daycare, right. They, everybody thought that. Yeah, yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:51:15):
Yeah. People they're eating babies and I'm like, show, where are the babies who are missing? Yeah. Where are the babies who are

Leo Laporte (01:51:19):
Babies? Exactly. Yeah. This is,

Glenn Fleishman (01:51:21):
You know, I, I did this piece for boy boy a few years ago because people were throwing around a number about human trafficking. And if you dig into the numbers, they said, there's X, hundreds of thousands of children go missing a year. When you look at the numbers, missing can be as little as four hours. It can be that somebody didn't come home at the time expected and was reported briefly. And when you dig down to it, there are something like under 200 incidents a year in which a child goes missing because a stranger's involved. It's almost always people they know, almost always close family members often occur custodial dispute, or they got lost, stayed at school long or a parent didn't realize they were out. And so we have this incredible national panic, you know, Laura, SNAs been a great voice on that. And she's I think libertarian, maybe in focus, but she she's a very interesting person, always loved her NPR commentary. I mean, she's been a great voice for the, and she did that TV series. I mean, the reality about how do you get parents to understand the actual risk instead of these risks that poke up. But it's so easy. So primal to say, my child could get hurt. There are 600,000 children go missing each year, footnote. Well really it's only, you know, 200 or something. Right. And you listen to that top number and you keep your children indoor. But

Leo Laporte (01:52:28):
Look at the long term consequences. Kids don't play outside anymore. Cuz there's stranger danger. You know, I saw some kids playing outside the other day. I was stunned. We used,

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:38):
We give our kids a, we give our kids a Bo a box of broken glass, just like my parents gave me. Yeah. And we put 'em in the back seat and drive around. I don't know what you're.

Leo Laporte (01:52:46):
And what about the razor blades and the apples on Halloween night? I gotta ask you, that's

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:50):
My favorite. That's my favorite

Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
<Laugh> my

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:52):
Parents would go to parties and we would, my sister and I would sleep in the back of the station wagon unlock, parked out front while they drank and then drove home after she bar.

Leo Laporte (01:53:02):
And there were no seat belts.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:04):
Oh, they were driving with, they were driving with a drink and one in and a cigarette at the other and using their elbows to steer with Came out. We're fine. Yeah. We survived. Oh no. It's yeah, there is the, the balance. I, unfortunately I live in Seattle, which you think of as a pretty calm city and we didn't let our kids play out side much because we were near we're in kind of a fairly residential part of Seattle and the streets are too dangerous for, from cars. We

Leo Laporte (01:53:28):
Honestly, that's the biggest for me, the biggest threat to humanity is it's cars for so many reasons is cars for

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:35):
So many. Yeah. We're safer in the street. We would let our kids run free. If the, if the roads of people didn't drive, you know, in our, our 25 mile hour of

Leo Laporte (01:53:42):
Were very 60 excited in San Francisco. And Jeff, I know you Joe JFK Boulevard through golden gate park, unbelievably in a very controversial vote. They just voted to close it to automotive traffic forever.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:55):
Oh my gosh. That's fantastic. Huge. Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:53:59):
And it was extremely controversial. It leads all the way through, you know, golden gate park.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:04):
Incredible.

Leo Laporte (01:54:05):
It will make the a park a hundred times better for roller skaters, bicyclists, pedestrian,

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:10):
10 times the people out there, they

Leo Laporte (01:54:12):
Will.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:13):
We have a long stretch in Seattle lake Washington Boulevard that they close in the summer at certain points for biking only days. And during the pandemic, they put on all these safe streets where they closed off city streets, except for local residents and, you know, put bumps in so forth. And they've been doing incredible traffic calming. And I just think, you know, it, it hasn't because of the reduced traffic volume we have, which may be forever. Maybe we D I mean, not it, won't not that it won't ever go back up, but

Leo Laporte (01:54:38):
Well, that's what happened. We all saw how great it was in pandemic. <Laugh> right.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:42):
Right. If 25% of workers are now working from home one to five days a week,

Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
That way yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:54:48):
You don't need as much. Maybe we'll become the Netherlands.

Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
Yeah. Oh, wouldn't that be nice. Oh man. I wanna ride my bike everywhere. I really do. And it's too dangerous. I'm too scared to, I just don't dare.

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:59):
You have driven it to your,

Leo Laporte (01:55:00):
To the studio. I used to ride a work until I saw a ghost bike on the bridge that I cross over every time a guy squished. Oh it was broad daylight a driver. I can't believe elderly driver who was on meds veered over crushed the guy on the bridge. There's very little bike path there. So it is a very dangerous crossing point. I saw that ghost bike. I said, and I haven't ridden my bike since, oh, I'm sorry. It breaks my heart. I love it. Sad. I is my hope that in my, I know I only have a few years left, but in my lifetime, we might be able to, we're rooted for you rid of personal car ownership so I can ride my bike when I am 90. I am hoping I am praying. Google says, says the pixel phone is pixel six is the fastest selling pixel ever, which is faint pricing bunch. <Laugh> they also said that, and this is probably a more interest and maybe to help the stock price they are going to do a 70 billion buy of alphabet stock. Ooh.

Jeff Jarvis (01:56:04):
Before or after they split

Leo Laporte (01:56:07):
Let me see. They didn't say when they were gonna do it. So is the, did the split happen?

Jeff Jarvis (01:56:12):
Oh, maybe it did already.

Leo Laporte (01:56:13):
I

Glenn Fleishman (01:56:14):
Hate buybacks. Buybacks are the worst. The worst thing I agree.

Leo Laporte (01:56:17):
Well, shareholders like it because it increases their value, but it does kind of excuse you are the real value of a, of a company with

Jeff Jarvis (01:56:25):
Antitrust going after them. What can they buy? They're not gonna get 'em in trouble.

Leo Laporte (01:56:28):
Yes. Apple has done very well with its stock. I mean, look at apple stock because they have a huge trove of cash and they've got nothing better to do with it. So they buy back there shares 70 billion alphabet purchased more of its own stock than any other public company last year. So up for apple. So it was apple Google, or I'm sorry, alphabet. And then meta, I

Jeff Jarvis (01:56:48):
Agree with clan, those resources could build, they could build that next Twitter. They could, they could, they could give us back. We,

Leo Laporte (01:56:55):
But why is it? Okay, so it's bad because you should put it into R and D. Is that why it's bad? Yeah. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:00):
It's not, it's not productive. It does, it does reward shareholders, but you could do, you know, you do a special dividend if you wanted to reward shareholders. Instead of trying to, I mean, they're always playing games with stock price because even though stock price, you know, if, if apple stock were a thousand dollars a share, it shouldn't be the stock shouldn't go up. If there's a stock split and it does. Right. That's the weird part of, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:22):
Shareholders still have that. Yeah. The stock market's not rash necessarily.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:25):
So that's part of it. So they, so that's part of it as well as they want to increase. They'd like to tweak their you know, tweak their numbers by having less outstanding share fewer outstanding shares.

Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
Facebook shares also spiked on better than expected quarterly earnings the stock nobody

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:43):
Expected anything from Facebook.

Leo Laporte (01:57:45):
It was gonna be awful. Yeah. Look at that. Look at that. The in day jump 18% in extended trading today.

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:52):
Jesus,

Leo Laporte (01:57:53):
Jesus earning top estimates, Jesus revenue disappointing though. Again, this is beating. The all you gotta do is beat the analysts estimates in your, and everybody's happy earnings per show 2 72 versus $2 and 56 cents active revenue, 27.91 billion versus 28.2 daily active users. 1.9, 6 billion

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:14):
Almost there, almost

Leo Laporte (01:58:15):
There. So close to two monthly active users, 2.9, 4 billion ARPU, which everybody talks about now, ARPU, which is the average rep per user $9 and 54 cents, which also beat the street. So good news for meta. I'm having a hard time calling an alphabet and meta.

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:38):
Yeah, I am too.

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
Just

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:40):
Kidding. You don't wanna call a square block now or something

Leo Laporte (01:58:42):
Block and of course Jack's title is blockhead block. <Laugh> I am the blockhead, the head of block.

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:52):
We'd like to give us something to talk about. The, the issue with meta, I think, as it always is, is that they make their, their RPO is a great number to look at. If you dig it out, a dig to the regional numbers, they make a lot of money from people in north America, a bit of money from people in Europe and a lot of nothing. I mean, very, very little from people in the rest of the world. And they don't seem to have been able to improve that over time. It remains kind of in that division. So their growth has to come from markets that are smaller and more fully established. And you know, that's gonna be their long term problem, especially as they have this, you know, the negative pressure against advertising against how they're governed Cheryl Sandberg against Cheryl Sandberg personally, I think against Zuckerberg, unlike Twitter, Facebook has classes of shares though. You know, so Zuckerberg can never, he

Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
Never lose his

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:41):
Of Facebook. Twitter has no classes of share. I looked this up when Musk was talking about, I

Leo Laporte (01:59:46):
Did its so funny that you said that I did this

Glenn Fleishman (01:59:48):
Well, most they did not build the company that way they built in one. I think, I think classes of shares for publicly held companies without very specific rules should be not within the regulations because then it doesn't give shareholders a way to influence or change, you know, direction of a company ever. It feels like

Leo Laporte (02:00:04):
It's, we're gonna give you, we're gonna give you some shares in the company. We're not asking for your opinion though. Yeah. We, we just want, you know, you can participate in our success, but don't tell us what to do.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:13):
Your votes are worth one 10th of ours or 20th, but

Leo Laporte (02:00:16):
Google does that too. Alphabet did that as well. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:19):
Yeah. It's a good strategy for the founders. That's

Leo Laporte (02:00:21):
Who does it? It's great. When we met last one week ago, we were saying, oh boy, it's too bad about CNN plus well boy, the next day it closed almost as fast. It almost went down as fast as quibi maybe faster. Actually I think it's a very it's it's somebody said it was eight scares. It was very quick. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:45):
Feel really bad for them because I

Leo Laporte (02:00:47):
Do too. You know,

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:48):
I don't, I don't have, it's like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of media sites and media companies and everything that, you know, I might have be of negative about like, do I want them to succeed? Do I think CNN I'm pretty neutral about it. I think they do good reporting. They're interesting. And they hired interesting people, a lot of people or careers, I'm moving, I'm changing jobs. That's

Leo Laporte (02:01:06):
Where I feel bad.

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:07):
And then it's like, not as a corporate and then it's, but, but you understand the time I kept reading the timeline, like how did this happen? It's like, oh, because they were, they were actually unlike an Elon Musk, allegedly, they were completely scrupulous about not talking during the period before the merger closed. When they weren't supposed to, to talk about significant business stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:01:26):
They didn't gun jumping oddly enough <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:30):
And they didn't, they did, they did the right thing and everyone involved in it did the right thing. And for CNN, they should have launched that service before the merger because they'd invested in it. And it was a smart, long term move that they couldn't predict, but

Leo Laporte (02:01:43):
Discovery didn't want 'em to do it. Discovery. Couldn't tell them that. But the minute discovery comes in, looks at the financials. They said, okay, now you're closing it. Yeah. it's very, it's very sad for the, the personnel involved. CNN's trying to find a place for a lot of them. I'm sure Chris Wallace will land on his feet. I'm not exactly crying for him.

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:05):
Think he'll have a

Leo Laporte (02:02:06):
Problem. No, but a lot of producer journalists. Yeah, yeah. A lot of producers, a lot of talent. And I, I think also when you looked at CNN plus and saw that there was no live news was like, well, why would I want that? I mean, as just purely as a customer.

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:25):
Yeah. There wasn't a lot there, but I guess they, you know, but they, they promoted it so much and hadn't built out a, a service. I mean, honestly, isn't that the Fox news plus or whatever they call it, it's pretty thin too. There's only a few original shows

Leo Laporte (02:02:38):
Either.

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:39):
I've not, I've not been a subscription. I've read about people have subscribed to test it out. But a lot of the news services seem to be kind of thin. And I don't know who their audience, well,

Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
They we've talked about this. Of course they don't wanna offend the MSOs, the cable operators where their bread and butter. So they cannot, you know cannibalize the real product even though streaming is the future. And they know it. So they're kind of, it's, it's kind of what planning a flag. It's putting a bookmark. It's also, we'll

Jeff Jarvis (02:03:07):
Be here. Pay wall fetishes though. It's also, everybody's gonna have a pay wall and sorry, not all of you are worth the

Leo Laporte (02:03:12):
Pay wall. I think discovery actually is correct in saying, look, we're gonna have HBO, max, it's gonna be everything because people don't want five different stream services. I agree. We're gonna make one that does it all. And you know, I think they'll put live news on HBO, max. I betcha. And that'll be something you'll want plus all the other stuff, which sounds great. Somebody who is a big winner, oddly enough, somebody you all know very well. Christina Warren <laugh> NPR story story. Nprs story about Christina. She collects swag from companies that have fallen that have failed there. She is in a movie pass t-shirt there it is. The CNN plus pop socket here is she's also in a t-shirt from, you might not recognize it. That's the fire. So good on you, Christina. Big story. I love this story story PR.

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:08):
This is, look, if you know how to sell a story. I don't know if she called up or they called, they saw posts, probably saw her tweets, but it's if you're there at the right moment, you're like I collect CNN swag. They're like, was she plus swag? They're like, oh, that's a

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
Great, perfect timing. Yeah. But

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:21):
You wish she doesn't have, she doesn't have her white whale is Theno. She needs Theno gear. So anybody listening, if

Leo Laporte (02:04:27):
You can help this crazy, get a Theno mug or yeah. A cozy anything let's let's help it. A ball point in. She said, I hope someday I'll be able to get something. Whether it's like a mug, I would even take a pen, you know, like a ballpoint pen. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:43):
Oh my gosh. I've got just off, off camera here. I have a a Q cat. Actually I have two.

Leo Laporte (02:04:49):
Oh, I have a few of those too. Yeah, I got one. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:51):
Yeah. They're like old mouse droppings. Unfortunately they really, and I've got a NAS bag tag tag, which was, was a a wifi device that was supposed to indicate the mood of other people you'd plug it in. It would, and its ears would move. It's very strange. It looked like a rabbit

Leo Laporte (02:05:05):
Strange. Oh, oh Lord.

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:06):
A product that I have the

Jeff Jarvis (02:05:07):
News cube, which was using the vertical blanking interval to send a news into your PC.

Leo Laporte (02:05:14):
Wow. Wow. That's pretty. Wow. let's see. I think we can wrap it up, but is there, but there are about a 3000 stories in this tier that we didn't do, but I mean, we had a big thing to talk about. Google rose out a new cookie cookie rejection banner in Europe clearly fed up as most of us all are with, with this geez Louise. So now they did a redesign after years of pressure from data protection watchdogs, the new banner will basically say no, don't screw it all. Turn off all cookies. Is

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:55):
It a big, screw it button on the middle of the, is it saying

Leo Laporte (02:05:58):
Soon, anybody visiting search and YouTube in Europe while signed out or in cogni mode, we'll see a new cookie consent choice. It'll start in France and then be extended to the rest of the EU as well as UK and Switzerland. Man, I've seen, we're starting to see, like in fact we have passive aggressive cookie ban saying things like what I saw on the other days. Oh, it's hysterical. Something like, yeah, we have cookies. What about it? <Laugh> <laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:28):
You want a piece of me?

Leo Laporte (02:06:30):
Yeah. Come and get me. Okay. And then you have to press okay. Right. That's all you have to do.

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:35):
I, I noticed that ad blockers are failing because on a lot of, they used to say disable your ad blocker and continue. There's a button on the bottom. It's a little bit of a dark pattern. And it says, continue without ad blocker and you click continue without ad blocker. And it just goes to the site. And I only, you know, I try to use it sparingly because I support, I want sites that are ad supported to make money from me. I turn, turn it on on sites, my browser crashes or their auto playing video. And I try really try to customize it. I try not to be. Yeah. So I only do it an extremist. And and the one I have will let ads through that are good ads that aren't like trying to do stuff to me. So when that comes up, I'm like, come on. I wanna give you, I wanna give you my eyeballs. <Laugh> okay. My eyeballs don't turn. 'em Outta my face, please.

Leo Laporte (02:07:19):
This is a story I actually haven't done yet, but I, I feel safe doing it with you guys. Jeff Jarvis Glenn Fleishman. It's great to have you both. There's a lot of lot going on in this piece. Oh

Glenn Fleishman (02:07:32):
Man.

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
<Laugh> so the wall street journal has a piece saying MEA there, arch enemies. Cheryl Sandberg pressured the daily mail. Another Murdoc product. Right? Am I right? Actually, no, no, no,

Jeff Jarvis (02:07:45):
No, no, no, no. Another Murdock,

Leo Laporte (02:07:46):
Another Murdock competitor. Okay. To drop the reporting on Bobby Kodak. Who's the CEO of act, vision blizzard act vision. And I guess she was dating Kodak at the time. Yes. So part of a campaign to persuade the tabloid to she an article exposing KOD, of course, who is right now in a lot of hot water over harassment at act vision in 2016 and 29 team. See, this is why I didn't wanna do this story cuz it's but it's true. It's true. Right. But is it a hit piece from Murdoch? I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:22):
Yeah. You can't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean all the play, all the characters here, particularly the media players. I mean

Leo Laporte (02:08:26):
Everybody's entangled. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:29):
Yeah. You have fleas. You got fleas on them. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:08:31):
So there you go. I've read the story. You can read it if you wanna know more, but this is really important. Now in this media landscape, you have to look at it and say, well, it's the journal it's owned by Murdoch who has what? That's too bad that we have to do that. Now I would, this is why us buying Twitter. I don't want Bezos to own the post. I love it. That these people are patrons of good journalism. I don't want them to run the, a shop though. Somehow. Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:57):
The, the, the infamous Washington Washington post, the infamous wall street journal editorial page is all gungho on. Guess who buying Twitter?

Leo Laporte (02:09:08):
They like the idea.

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:09):
They love it. They love it. Of course they do.

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:11):
Ah, but you know what? The ultimate, this is, I don't wanna go back to mosque. You know, the ultimate thing would be, he buys Twitter. The deal good goes through. And then he says, <laugh>, I'm not bringing any of you back at all. You all suck. And, and oh, it would be the best troll for him to, just to not, it would be reenable those folks to come.

Leo Laporte (02:09:28):
I think the chances of that are as close to zero as possible.

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:31):
No, there's zero. There's zero, but boy, it would be a Great's convince

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:34):
Dreaming. Let the man dream dream.

Leo Laporte (02:09:36):
I'm Glen.

Glenn Fleishman (02:09:38):
We'll do a Twitter poll cause 

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:39):
He's in a metaverse let him be there. It's okay. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:09:45):
I think we have done everything we need to do. Any, I wanna talk more about typefaces to be honest with you, but I don't think the audience will tolerate of a bit more of that, but what, you know what here's proposal, we will have Glen back very, very soon. You're just great Glen. Oh, thank you. Pleasure to, have you ever been on any of our shows?

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:06):
I, you know, now you, this is gonna be the funniest question you ever asked, and I'm gonna need to run a clip of this for the incomparable, because I was on, we do a game show at the incomparable and at every two weeks, and it's a different thing. We, we do some class to games and like trivial pursuit things and things like, but not family feud. And there's a game that Lex Friedman, who now works for Amazon, by the way, in the podcast division he came up with a game called friendly competition and it's people, he asked them to do things. So we have to do some tasks beforehand. And then it's just a silly game and we are sort of competing for meeting his inscrutable rules. And one of the rounds I'm gonna, I'm gonna slip cuz the episode isn't out yet was called hashtag Lenning, which is what people call me whenever I name drop some of the people I know <laugh> and he said, one of the questions was so the round, which podcast has Glen been on and there were points off for non uniqueness and someone put TWI and I said, they said, have you ever been on this weekend tech?

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:01):
And I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't know. And they're like, you, you don't, you know, I'm like, I think I've been asked this. I haven't been well set up for video before. I'll be honest. This is the first video podcast event I've been on. Cause I'm finally set with lighting.

Leo Laporte (02:11:15):
Woohoo. Oh you look, the image is like I said, 10 outta 10 on the room reel.

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:20):
I'll get the, I'll get the duct tape fixed. But anyway, so it was literally a question. What you just asked me was literally a question and we had to research it during the show. You didn't know. And I, and I think what's happened is I think I've been asked to be on thank you on, on multiple occasions over the years. And I think I've been, oh, I'm not really set up with video yet. So I finally am. And that's why Jeff said, Hey, and I said,

Leo Laporte (02:11:39):
I was thrilled because I thought you had something against me. So

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:43):
No, no. I thought you guys might be like, oh, he keeps saying no. Why does he keep saying no, he must hate us.

Leo Laporte (02:11:48):
No, I just don't have, I have actually I think you were on when Jason hosted. No for me. No. Okay.

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:57):
I think I've been mentioned, mentioned,

Leo Laporte (02:11:59):
But not

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:00):
Be transcripts. Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:12:01):
Your transcript.

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:02):
My name is I've been taking, my name has been taken. What's the opposite of vein. I

Leo Laporte (02:12:06):
Dunno. Wait a minute. You are in fact in the in the transcripts here. Not Glen Fleishman. Roy, a piece on boy, boy, sweet Jason. That's right. That's right. Wow. That's

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:18):
What's confusing. And in my mind too, I, I haven't been on that many different podcasts. I used to be on, I used to have a regular gig on local radio station and so forth. And I do a lot of incomparable stuff and was the host of the Mac world podcast for a few years several years ago. And anyway, it is just funny that I'm like, all right, now I've officially I, you two have encountered the same problem. I have officially done so many things in my life that are different. I can't remember all the things I did or if I did something. Oh, absolutely. Be an obvious question. Have you been on this in tech?

Leo Laporte (02:12:45):
Well, you think I would know. So the fact that I asked you is exactly the same problem. None, neither of us know

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:51):
10,000 chefs. I'm not sure

Leo Laporte (02:12:54):
Nobody remembers, but glad I, I am deeply sincere. You're gonna be back and back as often as you will do it because you're fantastic.

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:03):
Pleasure. Let me come back and talk about USBC cables. That's my latest book is about

Leo Laporte (02:13:07):
My God.

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:08):
We're sorting out cables.

Leo Laporte (02:13:09):
We just spent a half an hour talking about it on a Mac break weekly. Oh my God. It's because it's a nightmare.

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:15):
You know, I read at the Mac 9 1, 1 column for Mac world. And so I get user, it's the best thing to write because in this world I can't cure cancer. I'm I'm not a medical researcher. I'm not a, a, I can't help people directly with their, with their bodies or disease or maybe fighting war. Those aren't my, my specialties. But I can answer questions about max and iPhones. So I get these emails, people, I can't do someone. I have an ex-boyfriend who's looking at stuff on my phone Uhhuh and I'll write back. I'm like, here is an answer. And they're like, thank you. I'm like, oh my God, I made somebody's life a tiny bit better, but cables, people write in more about, oh yeah. Cables and ports and standards. Anything else? I a whole nightmare for the the take control book series, a whole book about cables. If you can believe that. So

Leo Laporte (02:13:59):
We we were talking about yesterday, it's a nightmare Benson, Leon, who is the Google engineer who was doing all of the checks on all of these cables, right. He's actually on our TWI social Macedon instant. And I was, I was a little starstruck. I said, oh, Benson Knows

Glenn Fleishman (02:14:16):
More about the standard.

Leo Laporte (02:14:17):
He knows a lot about this stuff. He, this is what is part of his job at Google. So and he had the machinery to test these things.

Glenn Fleishman (02:14:25):
That's the hard part. Yeah. That's where people are like, I have a cable. I don't know what it does. How do I tell it? I'm like, how do you plug it in? You gotta plug and see what doesn't work. And which is not a, doesn't feel modern.

Leo Laporte (02:14:34):
It came up because we were showing the apple has $159 Thunderbolt, four cable. And we were showing the, the tear down of it and it's got huge. It's got eight chips in it. It's huge. It's this hugely sophisticated device earning its price. And so we were started talking about, well, what do you get for a thunder four cable compared to that?

Glenn Fleishman (02:14:54):
And oh, we can get a good one now. It's if, can I mention a brand name? Yeah. I'm not sponsored by them. It's otherworld computing makes now A's see if I can.

Leo Laporte (02:15:02):
I mentioned that one. It's like 40 bucks.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:04):
Yeah. It's yeah, they have like it's 27 for a really short one up to 59. I wanna see, I

Leo Laporte (02:15:08):
Trust O WC 26.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:10):
Yeah. I bought a lot stuff from them. I have a pile of the, because I was trying to sort that out, but yeah, it's, it's if you get a Thunderbolt for USB four cable, you can be in good shape, but it's funny. Well, that's

Leo Laporte (02:15:20):
What we concluded is that from now on just buy Thunderbolt four cables. Cause they're

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:24):
Gonna do it. It's another, they're affordable, rather affordable. And why not?

Leo Laporte (02:15:26):
Yeah. All right. Let's take a little break. And Glen, we have a tradition at the end of the show pick of the week. Just something, anything can be a tight, could be a story,

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:33):
Or it could be, it could be something in, in your, in your collection

Leo Laporte (02:15:35):
There too. Yeah. Something, anything you want a book, whatever you want a TV show, you like a podcast. You'd like to be on whatever, whatever you want a ranch. Before we do that though, I do wanna talk about the hu biggest change in sleep technology I have ever experienced. We talk a lot about sleep. Mike, a Sergeant did a podcast about sleep for a long time. He subscribes to the journal of sleep pathology or whatever and is very interested in sleep. And I've been talking to him about this. Kevin Rose was the guy who turned me onto it. It's called eight sleep. Amy Webb got it. When she was on with Kevin Rose, she said, Leo, you have to get this. You can get it as a mattress or what we did at home. We got the pod pro cover. We got about six months ago.

Leo Laporte (02:16:20):
In fact, Jeff remembers the story of me putting it on wrong. There is a very good video. I has to add on the eight sleep site. If I had watched it, I would've been able to put it on right now. What does this do? It is not a heating pad. It is a heating and cooling. It's not even a pad, a heating and cooling cover that can go as low as 55 degrees, which is pretty chilly on a hot night. I can't wait to a hot summer night and try that to, to 110 degrees, which is definitely hot, a heating pad, hot and anywhere in between. Here's the thing it's connected to sensors. It does biometric tracking. It knows the temperature of the room and it will adjust the temperature of your bed as you sleep. And it will continue to adjust it, to give you the best night's sleep you ever had.

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
And I could promise it really works. I have never slept better than, than with the eight sleep. I need not say, I think sleep is the holy grail for all of us. It is nature's gentle nurse. It is a, it is, it is the ultimate game changer in, in, in your life. Yet 30% of Americans struggle with sleep and 10 temperature's. One of the main reasons why ever wake up sweaty at night, that's the worst or freezing cold. Our bodies are designed biologically to go to bed. When it's warm, you know, you put the fire out, get in bed. It slowly cools off during the night until the morning. And that is what we backed. And yet we live in such climate control circumstances. We don't actually experience that. So the eight sleep does that and you can set it. Lisa sets it a little higher than I do.

Leo Laporte (02:17:58):
By the way, if you get, you know, one for a double bed or we have a king, there are two sides. So Lisa gets her settings completely independent of my settings. Dynamic, cooling and heating with biometric track can go on any mattress. It watches your sleep and it gets you into a deep sleep and then gets you out of it. In fact, I have it set to warm up when I have to wake up in the morning. It's the best alarm I've ever had. No sound, nothing. It's very quiet. I just, I feel warm and I go I'm okay. I'm ready. Eight sleep users fall asleep. 32% asked to reduce sleep interruptions by 40% and get overall more restful sleep. Imagine 30% more deep sleep. What could you do with that? You just would feel a lot better throughout the day. I will vouch for this because we've been using it for six months and I'll tell you what, I'm never stopping.

Leo Laporte (02:18:49):
I'm never not gonna use this. Go to eight sleep. E I G H T S L E E p.com/twig. Check out the pod pro cover. You'll save $150 at checkout if you go to that special address. So please do that. They also then know that you saw it here and that helps us a lot. Eight sleep EIG, G HT eight, sleep.com/twig. I, to as part of this ad and I have not done this yet today, check my sleep score just to see. And it's down a little bit. It's down a little bit. It's 92% sleep fitness, but I have to tell you somebody who's lived the last 10 years at 60 and 70%, that is awfully good. And you could see the temperatures. It has a lot of information in here. Heart rate variability, you have complete control with the app on your Tenile.

Leo Laporte (02:19:38):
So I could turn the bed on. Now, if I wanted to get in and get warm and you could see how it cycles through the temperatures from 10:00 PM my time until wake up time around 8:00 AM. Yes, I like a lot of sleep. 92% sleep. Let me tell you something. It feels really good. It feels really good. In fact, last time I showed this last time I did the ad. It was 99%, which I have never in my life ever had before. I, I can't recommend it more highly. The pod, a cover go to eight sleep.com/twig save 150 dollars@checkouteightsleepcurrentlyshipswithintheuscanadaandtheukeights… slash twig. Speaking of Amy Webb, we wanted to have her on the show because we knew aunt wouldn't be here this week. She said, unfortunately, she was doing us stern school alumni event tonight. Couldn't be here. She will be SU here soon because I have got to hear what she thinks about all of this. I think increasingly the sense I get is the billionaires are outta control <laugh> and, and it's time really as a country to think about. And maybe that as a world to think about, do we need these agar?

Jeff Jarvis (02:20:48):
I still like Glen Finland, the Finland Flashman Flashman Finland trip.

Leo Laporte (02:20:53):
What's that tell

Glenn Fleishman (02:20:54):
About that, but oh, you get, you get your driving if you, if you have a driving fr for

Leo Laporte (02:21:00):
Actually movie. Oh, that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Percentage of your yeah, yeah, yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:03):
So if Jeff Bezos jaywalk in Seattle you'd have to pay a billion dollars. <Laugh> good deal.

Leo Laporte (02:21:08):
Yes. Now jaywalk, we have to understand was invented by the car industry to penalized pedestrians. I'm

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:14):
Sorry. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:21:15):
So we will not give him a fine for jaywalk. That's not right.

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:17):
That is some good history. I think that's,

Leo Laporte (02:21:19):
That's great.

Glenn Fleishman (02:21:20):
That's great. Just watch who framed Roger rabbit for more information about the demise of cars.

Leo Laporte (02:21:26):
I get all my history from Roger rabbit. Yeah, that's good. No, actually I have been following a sub Reddit. I, I am pro propagandized by Reddit, but I think in a beneficial way, anti work has taught me how many awful bosses there are in the world. <Laugh>, there's a slash R slash I can't say it on a polite company F cars that really makes a strong case for getting rid of private car ownership. We need obviously trucks. We need you know, conveyances, but but private car ownership is not, it's not good for this world nor are oligarchs. Glen, do you have a pick for us?

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:04):
Yeah, this is this is a site I read every day. It's called web three is going just great. I

Leo Laporte (02:22:10):
Love this

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:11):
Site. <Laugh> I figured you would know this and it, I don't know why, like, okay, so there are positive joys in this world. There's things that we celebrate because they, we love them. We see a picture of a puppy. We see Ukrainian people rebuilding their cities already after the Russian forces have moved on incredible things that bring us joy in different ways. Then there's SHA Andre. And we've been talking about of German. This episode, <laugh> there's shot for you. Is that guilty joy. You have a joy at this fortune. My German teacher in college said SHA Andre is when you see someone, your enemy wearing a bowler hat, the enemy wearing the bowler hats, the best part crossing in the street, their bowler hat flies off and is crushed by a passing car shot Feel then is shot Andre. So, so for my, so for my ironic

Leo Laporte (02:22:55):
Hat is the best part of them. Yes,

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:57):
That's right. So if I wanna go like lay back and just, you know, relax in a pool of shot, Andre, I go to web three is going to spread because every day I, now I wanna distinguish, I feel bad for the people who are being built by cryptocurrency scammers and NFT scammers, because the most of the coverage is how this or that coin drop or NFT or new cryptocurrency or whatever, how it's gone belly up and how all the money is gone. All the crypto was drained out or there was a bug and everyone's money was stolen. And I feel terrible for the people who got scammed into this. Yes. You know, some of them are wealthy. A lot of

Leo Laporte (02:23:36):
People, I don't mind if Bitcoin bros get scammed, in fact, yeah. A little shred of there, but they're a lot, but the only, but the whole purpose of their emotion is to get normal people, to sink money into it so they can get out.

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:50):
Yeah. So I think this, this cadence of a blowing CAOU that Molly does where it's just like At the funeral, you know, it's like, it's the, it's the performance that tells you, you can't believe in this stuff because here is a drumbeat of everything, the billions of dollars that are being stolen all the time. So I, I love this site in a perverse way. And Molly is also a great on on Twitter. I think she's, she's, she's Molly, zero X FFF, which is a great HEID decimal programming joke on Twitter. And she's just a terrific person. Your

Leo Laporte (02:24:24):
White or white

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:25):
Last name is white. Molly

Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
White.

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:27):
And she,

Leo Laporte (02:24:29):
Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:30):
That's a clever, Oh, that I didn't catch that.

Leo Laporte (02:24:34):
Oh, you didn't know an XF? No about, oh, that's a great, that's the hex of her last name. Oh my

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:41):
Gosh. That's

Leo Laporte (02:24:42):
Perfect.

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:43):
But she like David, Gerard's another person who who is extremely expert in the top. They would like crypto currency or cryptography based financial stuff to become a reality in some fashion. They're not opposed to it. They're, they're painted often by people or hypesters that they hate this stuff. They don't, they actually love it. They understand it incredibly well. They just hate what's happening right now. And they're willing to poke holes in it instead of promoting it. And anyway, so 

Leo Laporte (02:25:09):
I knew it was, I knew, I knew the trouble was a foot when my daughter asked how she could invest in do coin. That's when I knew there was a problem, by the way, Molly. Brilliant. She has a thing that I think should be on many websites. It's the Grif meter in the lower right hand corner. You can, it starts at zero. And as you scroll through the losses rolled up by Bitcoin people. The meter goes up <laugh> as the money goes out, this

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:38):
Ladies gentle, this is the F company dot

Leo Laporte (02:25:43):
I agree

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:45):
Company. 3.0 yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:25:46):
Oh my gosh. No, it totally, I love the eight bit Grif meter in the lower right hand corner for that reason alone, web three is great. That's a very, very good pick. I love this. I like it. Jeff. Thank you, Glen. Jeff always gives us a number of the week, your number this week, Mr.

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:03):
I, I was, I liked the fact that Reddit, I mean, you know, YouTube gives away money to people to make stuff. And we know that, and we know how that works, but Reddit has just created a $1 million fund to just fund users' best ideas in that Reddity way, which is what we need to do. We need to be encouraging and supporting the good stuff and, and good voice and good creativity. And, and so I just wanna give him a shout out for that.

Leo Laporte (02:26:26):
Yeah. You know, increasingly Reddit has become my social network that and discord, which I'm in love with our club. TWI discord is a great place to hang. I like our forums. We use discourse for our forums. That's the twi.community forums. And I have to say, I am now gonna really spend a lot more time on Mastodon because one of the, where,

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:48):
Where do you, which one? I,

Leo Laporte (02:26:50):
Ours, we have one, three people. We have one Jeff,

Jeff Jarvis (02:26:53):
Yours

Leo Laporte (02:26:55):
Social. The reason, the, one of, one of many reasons that Amon is great is Elon Musk could never buy it. Yes. There's thousands of independent servers, which are all federated together. Jeff, when you, when you join twi.social, I guess this is becoming my pick when you <laugh>, when you join. Good. When you, yeah. Well, I'll show you a couple of things about Mastodon. First of all, we don't call 'em tweets. We call 'em toots. So that's very important. Okay. You're you're tooting. And instead of 280 characters, you actually have 500 characters. There are some really nice standards. For instance, you see this toot has a sensitive comment, a content banner on it. It is anytime you think an image might offend you, you just press that sensitive content. It's

Jeff Jarvis (02:27:39):
Not baking. What could it

Leo Laporte (02:27:40):
Be? Well, you right? Some people don't wanna, some people don't see pictures of bread. Oh, that's obscene makes me hungry. Makes me hungry. So you can write your, yeah, you can write your content warning here, watch out glutens, you know, or whatever it is. <Laugh> on your picture of bread. I like that feature. When you're, when you're tooting, you're, you're tooting to local Masson instance, but you're also tuning to anybody who is federated and wants to follow you. So your name is qualified. So my name on Twitter, social is at Leo. My global name though, is at Leo at, you could show this at Leo, at TWI, at TWI social over here. And so you can follow anybody. If you know what instance they're on. There also is a search function. So you can quickly find one instance they're on. We can

Jeff Jarvis (02:28:36):
Find out who from Twitter, all by Twitter, friends are here.

Leo Laporte (02:28:39):
Well, more and more people are going in in there. Yeah, that's what we need, which I think is I think maybe is a good sign. It has all the benefits of Twitter, except it's just not as many people in there. And it tends to be somewhat geeky. You should look though, and there is a long list of MAED on servers. You may not want join ours. You may say, well, I want to hang out with a bunch of type nerds. And there may, well, I'll be a type nerd Mastodon server because

Glenn Fleishman (02:29:04):
Oh, seven of us. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:05):
<Laugh> well be because it's fed, it's easy to start a server. Oh, my server only has maybe a few hundred, maybe a, I think it's actually a thousand people on it now. I don't, you can also, as a server, not federate with servers, you don't like, so gab is UN Mastadon as well, but I don't iterate with them. So I don't see anything from gab and they don't see anything from TWI social. There are a number of directories of Macedon servers, but if you don't have a particular preference then I would suggest you join twi.social, but the point is you can do that anywhere. You know, you can follow anybody anywhere from any server. So you're never really limited I think it has everything that good about Twitter except for the community. Unfortunately. 

Glenn Fleishman (02:29:51):
Yeah, I think we're gonna see a lot of retreating into discords and slacks and discourse and, and mask it on instances. It'll but, you know, actually the it's almost like we're retreating into caves, waiting for the flood to be over something, the weather to change. Oh,

Speaker 6 (02:30:07):
There's a dove on the horizon

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:10):
Nearby. That's right. Where's the,

Leo Laporte (02:30:12):
And outta the arc,

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:14):
If we could get the, and then someone could build something

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:17):
Request.

Leo Laporte (02:30:17):
Pardon me? We'll see. Oh yeah. So I approve them. That's the other thing Good as a moderator? One of the things I do is I I approve them and it's not so much cuz I want to keep Donald Trump off my Masto on. But because there are a lot there's spamers all right. So and I can always tell, because when you join, I ask you to say something <laugh> about why you wanna join. And when people say, I wish to share news about my fine company I do not. In fact, let you join.

Jeff Jarvis (02:30:51):
I said, Leo told me

Leo Laporte (02:30:52):
To, yes, I see that. So,

Glenn Fleishman (02:30:54):
You know, one of the things the XO XO conference that is I think on Hayes right now because of the you know, pandemic they think in the first year they sold tickets to general public and they knew they were gonna be oversubscribed. They asked everyone who wanted to buy a ticket. There was like a question which was, tell us something you made recently. And they said later, this basically filter out all the marketing people. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:31:13):
That's brilliant

Glenn Fleishman (02:31:14):
Because the marketing, it wasn't that they're not creative things, but they, their orientation wasn't such, they could fill that question out in a way that, or, or at all. And so it deter it also when you call it event hugs and kisses, XO, XO tends to turn people off and wanna

Leo Laporte (02:31:28):
Come and talk. It's a wonderful event. And I think that's probably one of the reasons. Great. When on the, as you notice, it looks a lot like tweak deck Jeff on the right. You can follow the local timeline, which is twi.social, or you could follow the federated timeline, which is a timeline of all the people on all the,

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:45):
Did you, as the boss choose what to federate with.

Leo Laporte (02:31:47):
The default is federate with everybody. And then there are a few there's really only two. Then you eliminate some, yeah. There's only two I've eliminated. Now

Jeff Jarvis (02:31:54):
I get it. Now I

Leo Laporte (02:31:55):
Understand. In fact, here's something in German. So I was gonna say, you know, must

Glenn Fleishman (02:31:59):
Effect has secured digital courage. Oh, I see. It's a site called the must effect is a secured digital courage, social weather profile and custom. It's going, if you want to profile, you're gonna have to pay one Euro a month. I think it's

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:14):
Nexus ma be Goza of Deut Bren.

Glenn Fleishman (02:32:17):
Yeah, that's right. It'll be terrible. Be pretty, not the 

Leo Laporte (02:32:24):
I seem to have lost control of the language of this show, which is the first, this is actually a first for my you

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:30):
Grotesque Uber Grotes BR

Leo Laporte (02:32:33):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:36):
Just let us E like,

Leo Laporte (02:32:37):
We'd love to have you twi.social. It is, you know, if you, for Twitter, it's not Twitter, but honestly there's nothing to keep it from being Twitter.

Jeff Jarvis (02:32:44):
Yeah, exactly. That's the, for pieces. What got

Leo Laporte (02:32:46):
Me, if, if all the people who say we want a community on black Twitter created a MAs on instance, that could be it. Where, where people aren't happy with it is you're not broadcasting to this vast audience, which is frankly, with the Ben benefit of this from, from my point is, well,

Glenn Fleishman (02:33:02):
You know, it's why I like Instagram. I mean, Instagram and Macon actually have things in common in a weird way, which is that Instagram. It's not a, it's not a walled garden or a closed garden, but I don't have to see much on Instagram, beyond my, just what do you call my chart? And it's great. I see babies and dogs and art and people,

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):
My wife loves in Instagram. I can't do it because every now it used to be every 10th post. Now it's much more, seems much more frequent. There's an ad. Yes. For something that I'm going to buy. And I, yeah, the,

Glenn Fleishman (02:33:33):
Oh, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:33:34):
<Laugh> I don't wanna buy it.

Glenn Fleishman (02:33:36):
They want me to buy a lot of quick drying epoxy and oh, woodwork equipment, which I, I don't know why

Leo Laporte (02:33:43):
Somehow they've decided you're a woodworker.

Glenn Fleishman (02:33:45):
That's I'll take, be press

Leo Laporte (02:33:46):
That's next. If they offer Berg,

Jeff Jarvis (02:33:49):
I'm gotta make a Goberg press.

Glenn Fleishman (02:33:50):
I know it. I'm working. I'm working with a woodworker. We're making some type related furniture. Watch, watch, watch glen.fun for more

Leo Laporte (02:33:57):
Type related furniture. I've find out

Glenn Fleishman (02:34:00):
More funny idea. I no photos yet.

Leo Laporte (02:34:02):
I would like to sit in a G chair, please.

Glenn Fleishman (02:34:05):
Exactly. Oh, on H the L chair is very painful and you can lie down on it. At least you took

Leo Laporte (02:34:11):
<Laugh> the pick of the week besides trip that social, please come on by. I, I will be stepping, well, you're

Jeff Jarvis (02:34:17):
Not gonna do this one. Are you? You're not gonna do this one.

Leo Laporte (02:34:19):
I am gonna do this one. One of

Jeff Jarvis (02:34:20):
It. Oh, no. One of the rundown.

Leo Laporte (02:34:23):
Yeah. It's internet spring, cleaning time. How to delete Instagram, Facebook and all your other accounts. <Laugh> from Mozilla, just in case

Jeff Jarvis (02:34:32):
Panic.

Leo Laporte (02:34:32):
It's the Firefox blog just in case wanted to get out of these. I hate this. Snapchat had to delete Twitter, had to delete Google and Amazon had to delete Venmo, TikTok and Spotify.

Glenn Fleishman (02:34:46):
You know, I got

Jeff Jarvis (02:34:48):
Sucks.

Glenn Fleishman (02:34:49):
The verge, the verge posted a article saying how to delete Twitter. And I thought Elon Musk had responded saying, I'll just go ahead and your account for you. And I thought, oh man, this guy's petty. And I was totally suckered. It was completely a fake account's

Leo Laporte (02:35:03):
Hysterical.

Glenn Fleishman (02:35:04):
Oh, you got me? Yeah. Just felt like something you do.

Leo Laporte (02:35:07):
Do you think Elon will have a button in his house? Well, he doesn't have a house. Sure. But just like delete new Kim from space, new Kim from

Glenn Fleishman (02:35:16):
His car where he sleeps at Tesla. On

Leo Laporte (02:35:18):
His cot. Yeah. Okay. So where, okay. Before we wrap, where does Elon sleep? If he doesn't have a house and he, and he's definitely not sleeping on the factory floor anymore. Think

Glenn Fleishman (02:35:28):
He just sleeps in super highend hotels that we don't know about. Cause the super rich know about those. That's

Leo Laporte (02:35:33):
That's exactly what it is. Right?

Glenn Fleishman (02:35:34):
Hotels

Leo Laporte (02:35:35):
In the pool house of his favorite oligarch friends.

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:38):
Does he have a yacht? He borrows.

Leo Laporte (02:35:40):
Yeah. I don't have a house. He says, oh, I bet he has a few places to stay. He's got lots of houses. I think he has somewhere to say he

Glenn Fleishman (02:35:46):
Has eight children, but he doesn't have a house. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:35:48):
Yeah. Yeah. Notice that children notice that those children elsewhere.

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:54):
I Walter Verizons, you know his writing, his BI

Leo Laporte (02:35:56):
Yeah. I saw Walter's tweet

Jeff Jarvis (02:35:58):
And Walter's already in geography over

Leo Laporte (02:36:01):
It. Absolutely. Yeah. You know what? If you're writing somebody's biography, it would behoove you not to tweet on Twitter about how great your subject is. He said sales books, Eaton just bought Twitter and look at this it's 10:00 PM. And he's over its SpaceX. Having a meeting about valve design. What a man, I can't wait to write his biography. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:36:23):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:36:24):
Ugh. I didn't know he was writing his biography. I but in that makes perfect sense. Now I get it. He's the guy who did Steve jobs and Einstein I

Glenn Fleishman (02:36:32):
Of Twitter. We need peeps, but that's P E P Y S peeps.

Leo Laporte (02:36:36):
Samuel. That's the Samuels. Yes. So Samuel flavored peeps, Glen Fleishman, G L E N N. Dot fun. Thank you. Wow. True words. What a blast have you on? You will be back. It's

Glenn Fleishman (02:36:50):
Fun to be on. Thank you. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (02:36:53):
I, I hope we haven't bored you. I just I'm thrilled to have you. This

Glenn Fleishman (02:36:56):
Was a great time. Nice to

Leo Laporte (02:36:57):
Great time. Smart. We need more typesetting nerds on, on our, on all of our shows,

Glenn Fleishman (02:37:02):
This in type

Leo Laporte (02:37:03):
<Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:04):
We know we can do last century in type. That'd be our show. So

Glenn Fleishman (02:37:06):
This can grotesque.

Leo Laporte (02:37:08):
So this in grotesque. Awesome. There you go. I'm gonna rename this show. It's the same initials. It'd be great. Be perfect. Somebody said Elon's living in a van down by the river. <Laugh> <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:21):
For me.

Leo Laporte (02:37:21):
Thank you. Chat room. Thank you, Jeff. Jarvis. Wait a minute. I have the card here somewhere.

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:26):
No, the ritual just play the song. Don't don't do the thing. Just play the song. That's all. Oh, I

Speaker 7 (02:37:30):
Got it. Look it,

Glenn Fleishman (02:37:32):
Jeff.

Leo Laporte (02:37:33):
We laminated this. Jesus. We laminated this so that we wouldn't lose it. So I better do it. He is the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the

Speaker 8 (02:37:43):
Craig

Leo Laporte (02:37:45):
Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York. Why? I haven't memorized that. So

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:50):
You had a new one before, right?

Leo Laporte (02:37:52):
I think we just up Cutt it. So it sounded like a, oh,

Jeff Jarvis (02:37:54):
Was that one as oh,

Leo Laporte (02:37:55):
Okay. Yeah. I don't. We could, anybody wants to submit yeah, please. Theoral version.

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:02):
I got a whole Jingo on, on, on, on, on Pete Dominic's show. So I mean a whole long jingle. So

Glenn Fleishman (02:38:08):
You can really I'd like one like the, the floating crap game song from guys and dolls. I'd like to hear that version. <Laugh> the oldest establi permanent Glen morning. Jeff Jarvis in New York. <Laugh>

Speaker 8 (02:38:18):
Keep it. Glen, stay cool. Glen. He's got a Fleshman in his pocket. He's cool. Glen

Leo Laporte (02:38:26):
Fun.

Jeff Jarvis (02:38:26):
Glen, Glen fun.

Leo Laporte (02:38:27):
<Laugh> thank you, Glen. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you to Cathy Gellis. It was great to have her I think it was an important show. We want really to do a good show about this. I don't know if we've resolved anything. I think it's gonna be fun to watch that's for sure. As Elon Musk takes over Twitter, we do this week in Google, every Wednesday about 2:00 PM, Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2200, sorry, 2100 U UTC. If you wanna watch live, you can is a live stream, audio or video@livedottwi.tv. People are watching live off often like to chat live with other people watching at the same time, we've got a couple places you could do that. The community run IRC channel@ircdottwi.tv, always, always fun. There's also a great discord. Honestly. I think in many ways, discord is a social network that could easily replace Twitter.

Leo Laporte (02:39:24):
If you're a member of club TWI, you can get into ours, you do have to be a member, $7 a month. There are other benefits add free versions of all of our shows, access to the discord, which is, you know, has conversations about all kinds of things, including some special shows like to AC Higginbotham's book club, that's coming up next month, she's doing Neil Stevenson's termination shock. That should be a lot of fun. Tomorrow we're doing behind the scenes people at twit. We're gonna interview one of our editors, John Ashley. That's 9:00 AM Pacific tomorrow with Micah Sergeant Scott Wilkinson next week for Syco de Mayo father, Robert Alice there the week following those are fireside chats with some of our many hosts. Jeff, you did a great one. All of those show up on the TWI plus feed really tried it also available to all members, twit TV slash club TWI.

Leo Laporte (02:40:10):
It really, you know, it helps us out. I know you hear our shows and you say, oh, you've got lots of ads. We do, but ad sales are very Rocky ad. The numbers are down as are the dollars. So having a subscriber base really helps us continue to do what we wanna do and launch new shows in effect. We launched this week in space, thank to our club, TWI members who helped us do that. And we have another show we're working on. I think you're gonna be very excited about that. You'll be launching in the next few weeks in club TWI. So if you're not a member, twi.tv/club, TWI PAC NW. Thank you. Welcome. He just joined today. It's great to have you there. That's about it. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time on this weekend, Google bye-bye,

Speaker 9 (02:40:54):
Don't miss all about Android. Every week. We talk about the latest news hardware apps, and now all the developer goodness, happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell also joined by Ron Richards, Florence ion, and our newest co-host on the panel. When to Dow who brings her developer chops, really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform. We love so much join us every Tuesday, all about Android on twit TV.