This Week in Google 663, 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. Mike Masnick is here from Tech Dirt. Jeff Jarvis is here. So is Ant Pruitt lots to talk about including Josh Hawley, his Bill of attainder would take away Disney's copyright. Don't think that one's gonna pass we'll also talk about Google IO. There were some things announced, not the watch, particularly, and I'll look at again, Elon Musk and Twitter, and some breaking news. Elon has no idea what he's doing. It's all coming up next on TWIG.
Speaker 2 (00:00:40):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte (00:00:44):
This is TWIG. This Week in Google episode, 663 recorded Wednesday, May 11th, 2022, Bill of Attainder.
Leo Laporte (00:01:00):
This episode of This Week in Google is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer and nature's best medicine. Go to eightsleep.com/twig to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. And 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 Cachefly. Cachefly is giving away a complimentary detailed analysis of your current CDN bill and usage trends. See if you're overpaying 20% or more, learn more at twit.Cachefly.com. It's time for TWIG this Week in Google a show. We cover the latest news from Google turns out. There is a little bit of news from Google. Today was Google IO. Jeff Jarvis joined me and Jason Howell as we covered the IO. Good morning and good afternoon, Jeff Jarvis. How are you today? So you've been in that chair for what? Now? 10 hours, hours and hours. I don't mind. Geez. I don't mind man. That's butt rot. <Laugh>. Jeff is the Leonard tow professor for journalistic innovation at the fabulous Craig Newmark Graduate School of journalism at the city university of New York. And I have something, but I'll talk about that in a moment. Also with us Ant Pruitt from Hands-On Photography, Hello, Ant. Good to see you. Hello, sir. Stacy has the day off today. I'll tell you what
Ant Pruitt (00:02:41):
I gotta tell you. I'm glad that you decided not to sit on that tiny chair today.
Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
Oh, I sat On it for Windows Weekly. The show was a lot shorter as a result. <Laugh> a special saddle on a stick. What's up with Leo today? He's gotta stick up his, oh <laugh> oh, the pain. Stacy's not here, but good news. Mike Masnick is from Tech Dirt. It's great to see Mike Techdirt.com. Now, Mike, you weren't here,ulast week, but,uwe somehow discovered that Jeff Jarvis',uphoto was available on eBay. So I have a great expense purchased. Oh my
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:24):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:03:25):
Oh, my is a good is a very good the 1990 press photo of Jeff Jarvis. I actually got two of them. I don't know.
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:34):
Because the hilarity was just so
Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
This one, you know, I think is marred, cuz your name is circled in ballpoint pen. I think this, they got this from your mom. Did she have an auction of let's see this one. Oh, this is an even better one. This is Jeff and some other guy
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:49):
My nemesis
Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
Entertainment Weekly publisher Mike Klingensmith. Probably a member of the interactive advertising bureau I would guess. Oh
Jeff Jarvis (00:03:59):
Yes, oh yes
Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
It's time for the ritual framing. <Laugh> we thought, we thought you, we thought you weren't gonna be here. So but I have prepared a little
Ant Pruitt (00:04:14):
Need some, some mood music for this
Leo Laporte (00:04:17):
Jeff Strangers in the door.
Jeff Jarvis (00:04:26):
I'm superseding.
Ant Pruitt (00:04:27):
No more MIS Mary Jo Foley.
Leo Laporte (00:04:29):
I put a spell on you. Yeah, it was a, it was a picture of Mary Jo Foley and underneath her some windows guy. So anyway, we're gonna <laugh> I just look okay. I didn't have a frame. I thought, well, you know, we'll borrow Mary Jo's. Here we
Ant Pruitt (00:04:45):
Go. You know, what's funny is the world of algorithms. Yeah. I'm still getting the emails now because I attempted to get one of those images ,
Leo Laporte (00:04:54):
Hey, it's not too late. It's not too late. So
Ant Pruitt (00:04:56):
Every other day he was like, Hey, you interested in this pick of Jeff Jarvis
Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
Cover wide. Let's see how this looks on the on the set. There you go. Right next to Jeff
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:06):
Before and after
Ant Pruitt (00:05:08):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
That, that needs to be there every week. Every week from now on you're exactly right. Mike Masnick.
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:14):
I was young. Once you wanna hear something kind of sent and poignant? What? So I, because of this, I thought what, what is on eBay? So I went on and I searched myself on eBay, which I'd never done. And when I moved my parents out of Florida, I, I gave their books away to the Goodwill. So now the books of mine that I dedicated to my
Leo Laporte (00:05:32):
Parents. Oh no. For sale
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:33):
Audio with, you know, folks
Leo Laporte (00:05:36):
Signed thing signed by Jeff Jarvis. Oh my
Jeff Jarvis (00:05:39):
God. Like they abandoned me.
Leo Laporte (00:05:40):
That's you know, they asked at Google IO, if people Googled their names and surprisingly few raised their hand embarrassed, I guess, but that's a, that's a step beyond to go on eBay and look for eBay.
Ant Pruitt (00:05:54):
Ebay.
Leo Laporte (00:05:55):
Here's 10% off my my 2004 technology Almanac, just $7 and 74 cents. <Laugh> it's so up to date, PC help desk. Only $5. Buy two, get one free <laugh> <laugh> you have ride when you part of a BOGO. Holy cow. Oh my God. Here's my dad's part of wait, go. You are wait minute. I have bragging rights. Cuz as low as my books are, my father's book is a $1.99 so or best offer. So there, there, I gotta go call dad or best offer or best offer. I gotta call dad. Wow. There's actually a lot of crap old. Yeah. A lot of people dumping their books. Oh see there now my dad's other book is $65. Ooh. That's a rarity rarity. Quite a few copies of my father's book on here books, man, this is good. Yeah, this is good. Quite a few. Yeah.
Mike Masnick (00:06:53):
$2 Or best offer. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:06:54):
Here's one, an excellent condition. $2 or best offer. Whenever you give me, I'll take it. My Guide to TiVo is $157 for some reason. Geez. Why don't buy that one? Get the one with CD Rom its only $5. <Laugh> cost less. You get the CD ROM okay. Anyway, enough marathon marathon Merriment, because it's gonna be a depressing show. Mike, when you arrived, you said breaking news, the Texas appeals court, the fifth district has ruled that the Texas social media law can proceed. A lower court had blocked it. That injunction has been lifted. The panel stayed a district court injunction that had paused the law while judges consider an appeal of the lower court's move. The decision was supported, which was supported by only by two unnamed judges, nor did they immediately publish their reasoning. <Laugh> you presume there is any, according to protocol came after a Monday hearing when the jurors appeared to struggle with basic tech concepts, including whether Twitter counts as a website. It was so what Mike, what is the just outta curiosity, the social media law in Texas
Mike Masnick (00:08:12):
It's it has a few different components. And I, I don't think any of them are, are actually constitutional if, if we had a fifth circuit that wasn't crazy where it, it requires some element of transparency in terms of how social media, web websites handle content moderation. They have to publish certain rules. There has to be an appeals process and you have to explain every decision more
Leo Laporte (00:08:38):
Or less. Oh my God.
Mike Masnick (00:08:40):
And if people feel that that, that the explanations are not, you know, up to, you know, whatever level they can complain and the attorney general of Texas can take action against the websites. It it's effectively, you know, trying to restrict the social media website's ability to do any kind of content moderation, especially obviously the kind of the kind of content moderation that the current political class in Texas does not like, which means anyone who supports Donald Trump or Greg Abbott. And so you know, they're basically going to be able to, to Sue different social media platforms and they will do so.
Leo Laporte (00:09:22):
It sounds like the Florida law minus the exemption for Disney
Mike Masnick (00:09:26):
It's it is, it is very similar. There are a few very minor changes that, that doesn't really make a difference that they they're very, very similar laws Florida's law. So both laws went, you know, were passed and both laws were then, you know, there, it was sued to block them. And in both cases, the district court stopped them
Leo Laporte (00:09:44):
Because of the first freaking amendment. Right.
Mike Masnick (00:09:47):
Mainly because of the first amendment. And then there's, there was an appeals hearing for the Florida law about two weeks before the Texas one, but we haven't had the ruling and, and the, the hearing in it's the 11th circuit for the Florida law, the hearing there went really well and the judges seemed to really get it and seemed very, very skeptical of Florida's argument, as opposed to the hearing in Texas where the judges seemed to have absolutely no clue. Just it was all over the map website asking website what's
Leo Laporte (00:10:16):
A website?
Mike Masnick (00:10:17):
Oh my God. Yeah, it was, you know, and, and just all of the comparisons were weird. They didn't understand section two 30. They didn't seem to understand the first amendment. And so then thousand dollar handshakes right there, man, that's all that is thousand dollar handshakes. <Laugh> I mean, and then this, this is two days after the hearing. I mean, they didn't even wait, you know, Florida is still sort of, you know, probably coming up with their, their written opinion on this. Whereas the Texas, they just put out this, this announcement saying that they've lifted the, the injunction and the law goes into effect immediately. And they'll, they'll, you know, give out their opinion at some later date. And so it's, it's gonna be a mess. And if I'm if I were running a social media company right now, I would be talking to my lawyers this very second, trying to figure out if we can still do business in Texas, because I think it's extraordinarily risky to have any users in Texas right now, if you meet the, the qualifications of this particular, well,
Leo Laporte (00:11:12):
Now, now I'm nervous cuz I, we TWiT runs Mastedon instance, twit.social forums would count, right? We run our own forums on discourse twit.community. It does a chat room count. We've got chat rooms. Sure. And we've got users in Texas, so you're not a, you're not giving me legal advice, Mike, but it's, I mean, our lawyers all over the country is telling social networks, don't allow Texas users?
Mike Masnick (00:11:41):
I, it, it it's possible. I, I, I forget the exact details, but I, because there have been so many of these kinds of laws, I forget the exact thresholds. There may be some thresholds in terms of size for the Texas law. I'm sort of pulling it up in the background here. So I don't remember what fresh,
Leo Laporte (00:11:56):
Oh, cause we're small enough. That might not be,
Mike Masnick (00:11:57):
If you're small enough, you might be okay. But, but
Leo Laporte (00:12:00):
Because these are really aimed at Twitter by any Donald Trump really let's be honest.
Mike Masnick (00:12:03):
Yeah. Oh, that that's, that's exactly what it's what's used for. But to be clear, like that doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. Right? I mean, you use
Leo Laporte (00:12:11):
15 million monthly users or more so we're at, okay, we're out of the dark on that one by a, by a hair, by a hair <laugh>
Mike Masnick (00:12:18):
And, but who knows, right? I mean, you know, next, next month you might, you might hit that number, right. You, you don't know and, and you know, but it does also impact the services that you use. You guys use YouTube, you use Twitter, you use Facebook to, to promote stuff. You use discord and all of these services may be impacted by this. And it may actually limit your ability to communicate with people in Texas. For example,
Leo Laporte (00:12:41):
The Texas argument was that social media is a common carrier and they, they, they want social media to carry all content unmoderated. The way a phone company is expected to carry all calls. That means no zero content moderation.
Mike Masnick (00:13:01):
That'll be such
Leo Laporte (00:13:02):
Fun.
Mike Masnick (00:13:03):
It's, you know, the whole common carrier thing really frustrates me <laugh> because, because if, if, if you understand what a common carrier is just by its very name, right? The idea is you are carrying something from point a to point B and you know, historically that might be people or cargo. And then it became, you know, data or voice, but like social media is hosting something perpetually, right? It's not just about getting from point a to point B. And the idea that
Leo Laporte (00:13:29):
It's not ephemeral phone calls,
Mike Masnick (00:13:31):
Right? The idea that you should be forced to leave up content in perpetuity, you know, that that may be harmful or, you know, or, or otherwise problematic or harassing there, there are all sorts of issues with it. And so the, the push to, to declare social media, common carriers is, is really, really bizarre. And it's especially bizarre because the very same people who are, are strongly pushing to declare social media, common carriers, absolutely freaked out and spent years complaining about attempts to make broadband carriers, common carriers, which where there's a much stronger argument. This is the net neutrality debate, right? There's a much stronger argument that a broadband player should be covered by net neutrality, that they should be a common carrier. They are point a to point B you know, isn't it
Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
Hysterical how they don't want ISPs to be common carriers. Yeah. But they do want Twitter to be a common carrier, completely the reversing, the meaning of common carrier in a course.
Mike Masnick (00:14:32):
Yes. It, it, it is, you know, one of them actually makes sense as a common carrier and one of them doesn't and they have it reversed. And, and in fact, I, I forget which bill, because there have been so many of these bills. I don't remember if the Texas bill has this, but some of these bills have explicit language that says this cannot apply to a broadband provider. So you can, you can tell that at and T and Comcast lobbyists went in and said, okay, this is fine. As long as you have this line ki kind of like Disney lobbyist in Florida saying like add in the theme park exemption until, until we've pissed off DeSantis. And then we,
Leo Laporte (00:15:03):
Now they're gonna take it out. Right? Yeah. So let's remove it now, UN it's just, it's just essentially using these laws and these courts to espouse a political point of view, having nothing to do with the reality of the, the oh yeah. Nature of the nature. Well, even political, it's really depressing because it's a
Jeff Jarvis (00:15:22):
Position of victimhood,
Leo Laporte (00:15:23):
But this is what you're seeing. This is what you saw with Roe V. Wade. They couldn't get the legislature, they couldn't get the voters to overturn it. So they went the extra, the judicial route, bypassing legislatures. This is a very, this is a useful route to go to the, the ju you know, go to judges back. Yeah. Yeah. And in this case, this is a law that was obviously passed by the Texas legislature, but it's, you know, obvi I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but I mean, I do think the first amendment says the government shall make no law in Frenching free speech. That's exactly what this is, isn't it? Or
Jeff Jarvis (00:15:58):
No, like, can I ask two questions?
Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (00:16:01):
First I, I, I, I, I, I can't like you, I can't keep all the laws straight. Is this law, like the abortion law that doesn't so much has government step in, but allows citizens to Sue?
Mike Masnick (00:16:13):
If, if I remember correctly and again, like there are different laws, so I don't remember all of them. I think the Texas law only allows users to complain. The only one who can actually enforce it is the attorney general. So the attorney general can then bring suit on behalf of residents of Texas who complain. I, I, I, I think that's what it is. I don't remember the details. And again, a lot of these
Leo Laporte (00:16:34):
Number 20 act relating to censorship of, or certain other interference with digital expression, including expression on social media platforms are through electronic mail messages. <Laugh> okay. What so? Well, you know, and again, email common carrier, little different than social media. The idea is that regardless of the position you state, you should be allowed to say it, which I, you know, I don't disagree with some have said, well, but don't
Jeff Jarvis (00:17:06):
Of think if there's also a right of the company to not have to
Leo Laporte (00:17:09):
Carry things well, and that's why the free speech thing is interesting, not free speech. That's why the free speech thing is interesting. They're saying, well, it's the free speech of the people posting. And, and we're saying, well, yeah, but you can't abridge the right of Twitter or any other company to moderate. That's right.
Mike Masnick (00:17:25):
The, the, the, think about this.
Ant Pruitt (00:17:26):
So email is a common carrier.
Leo Laporte (00:17:29):
Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (00:17:30):
Email is a common carrier considering that somebody manages these servers and stuff the same way they're managing all of our social media cuz I'm sure a vast majority of users aren't like you Mr. Leport hosting your own mail server and things like that. So email is exempt for
Mike Masnick (00:17:46):
Well yeah. I don't know why, what, what the, the email part is. But, but just to clarify, like, it
Leo Laporte (00:17:52):
Sounds like they just threw that end <laugh> you know,
Mike Masnick (00:17:55):
I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure. I'm sure some email provider, you know, required something, but, but the, the, you know, the way to think of it is instead of, you know, we talk about content moderation, just think of editorial discretion because that's what it is. Okay. Right. This is content that you're hosting on your website. You have editorial discretion over it. Free speech is about, you know, your right to speak, which you, you know, you still have your right to speak. It doesn't mean you get to commander, somebody else's property in order to do that. I can't put up political signs in your, in your front yard because that's, it's your property. Right. If I, if I wanna put signs in my front yard, that's fine. If I wanna set up my own website and post stuff, you know, nobody can stop me from doing that, but I can't commander somebody else's website to post. And, and yet this, this law is effectively saying yes, effectively, the state can commandeer private property and force force postings there. And when you think about it, that way, it feels like it goes against everything that, that it's,
Jeff Jarvis (00:18:53):
It's like being forced to put somebody's law. Somebody can put a law sign on my lawn and I have no choice in it. Right.
Mike Masnick (00:18:57):
Right. Because, because you can't discriminate that, like, that's basically the argument saying that, saying that, you know I can't put the sign for the politicians I want in your yard is, you know, is a discrimination issue is, is the,
Jeff Jarvis (00:19:11):
But the larger thing line going on here, sorry. The larger thing going on here is this is this idea of victimhood. It's the whole cancel culture BS that and it's, and it's, and it's, it's right in the Musk, which we'll get to in a few minutes, which is, which we'll also have to give Mike his blood pressure medication when we get to <laugh>. Where, where it's, it's a weird phrasing now is basically anybody can say absolutely anything. And if you restrict that in any way, because you, you, you have standards then, then you're gonna be accused of, of canceling. And then I, the speaker of this obnoxious speech and the victim. And so it's a weird way to turn white people into victims all the time.
Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
<Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (00:19:56):
Yeah. SI
Leo Laporte (00:19:59):
In the future of the car, Elon gave a keynote address in which he talked a little bit more about his plans for Twitter, to which
Jeff Jarvis (00:20:09):
Better off the cuff. I wouldn't you say there, Mike
Mike Masnick (00:20:12):
It's always off the cuff. He, he has no deep understanding of any of this. Everything that he says is off the cuff. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:20:18):
Yep. And should it, we should be, see here's the question. Should we be treating it that way? Or should we take it seriously if it, I mean, he sounds like he's making it up as he goes along, we
Jeff Jarvis (00:20:27):
Should take the threat seriously, but, but his thought he has no serious thought.
Mike Masnick (00:20:31):
Yeah. I mean, he, he has instincts and he's going off of his gut and, and like, you know, to be totally fair, like I understand sort of where he's coming from. And like that instinct is a natural instinct that a lot of people have. And a lot of people who use these services have the, the very same instincts that he has, which is that these services are, you know ways in which people can speak and speak broadly. And the idea that somebody can step in and say that you can't speak has a feeling that it, that feels wrong. And so I understand where he's coming from, but, but you know, anyone who's spent any time sort of looking at an understanding, the nuances and the depth and the different challenges involved in that recognize that it's a lot more complex than that. And, and the thing that really bothers me is his unwillingness to even engage with the nuance and, and complexity involved in all of this. And just to assume that the instinctual first thought that he has on this issue is the correct one even when it contradicts itself. And, and that's part of it, is that so much of what he says actually contradicts himself. And so it's, it's just, the whole thing is extremely bizarre.
Leo Laporte (00:21:35):
It is weird. And he, you know, the truth is he still may not get it. He's right. Trying to raise more money. A surprising number of people have bought into his, you know, plans for Twitter. He's got, he had to come up with 21 billion, he's raised 7 billion. So far 5.2 billion in equity commitments from 18 investors, plus a rollover of 35 million Twitter shares from Saudi prince LA. We'd been to LA a billion from Larry Ellison
Jeff Jarvis (00:22:04):
Who, by the way, who was going to resist this supposedly and his, that word lasted about 30 seconds.
Leo Laporte (00:22:09):
Yeah. 800 million from Sequoia capital. Again, you'd think, you know, savvy investors. But they're buying Elon's, you know, PowerPoint deck in which he says, well, it's easy. We're just gonna triple revenue. And then we'll go public. The PE
Mike Masnick (00:22:27):
From quad quad,
Leo Laporte (00:22:29):
Quadruple.
Mike Masnick (00:22:30):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:22:30):
700 million from via capital 500 million from Bance 400 million from Andreen Horowitz
Jeff Jarvis (00:22:36):
And recent Horowitz. Well, what's his name? Not, not Andre. The other guy. Horowitz
Mike Masnick (00:22:41):
Ben Hartz.
Jeff Jarvis (00:22:42):
Yeah. Ben Hoz thank you. Just had this ridiculously haggy haggy graphic. However, say it tweet about how brilliant Elon is now. Amazing.
Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
Well, that's what you're buying anywhere. Look, what he's done will give him money for anything he wants. Cuz he's so brilliant. Jack Dorsey, maybe who could have rolled 2.4% in has not, despite the Hey geographic things he said about Elon Musk himself nor has founders fund another big true believer. So there's still some question whether he's gonna, he's gonna get it. Maybe that's one of the reasons he's, he's so fast and loose at a financial time, but
Jeff Jarvis (00:23:19):
He tries to get the price down if he tries to get the price down because the market's, you know, go into hell and, and my few money is telling me to go F you for one that's an excuse for Twitter to back out if they had any, any spine, right?
Leo Laporte (00:23:33):
They would have to pay a 1 billion.
Jeff Jarvis (00:23:36):
No, no, no, no. If he says the opposite, if he says, no, I'm not gonna buy it unless you lower the price. And putter says we're not lowering the price. So then Musk could be the one
Leo Laporte (00:23:44):
Backing out Musk would then have to back out.
Ant Pruitt (00:23:46):
He has a fine or penalty or something.
Leo Laporte (00:23:47):
He has a billion dollar,
Mike Masnick (00:23:48):
Has a billion dollar
Leo Laporte (00:23:49):
Pull out fine fee too. He said at the financial times conference, I do not think, or I'm sorry. I do think it was not correct. Very hard to get these negatives in, in order. I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimate, is that why it was a mistake and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice? Well, no. He was the president of the freaking United States. I think he had a voice. And, and that wasn't the, that wasn't the idea. I really like what was a shiny, who said, look, don't moderate based on content, moderate based on tone.
Ant Pruitt (00:24:29):
Right?
Leo Laporte (00:24:30):
Big difference, but you gotta moderate free. And as you've pointed out Mike, on Tector Elon's points of viewer are contradicting.
Mike Masnick (00:24:42):
Yeah. I mean, you know, he, he says a lot of different things and, and so, you know, he, he keeps talking about free speech as being the most important and not banning people. And then at the, at the same time, he will say that his top priority. And he said this multiple times, including at that conference yesterday, the financial times conference that his top priority is to get rid of spamers and scam bots on the site who have
Leo Laporte (00:25:03):
Every right to speak, cuz they're protected.
Mike Masnick (00:25:06):
Their, their speech is absolutely protected under the first amendment. So if he really supports the first amendment, he wouldn't be doing that. It also says a lot that he thinks that that is the biggest problem, which for, for, for bigger users does appear to be maybe a problem. And certainly there, there are people who,
Leo Laporte (00:25:21):
You know, ah, it's a problem for him.
Mike Masnick (00:25:23):
It's, it's very much problem for him. But like, you know, I, I don't every once in a while I'll see one, but it's really not that big of a deal. But he is
Ant Pruitt (00:25:31):
The biggest problem.
Mike Masnick (00:25:33):
What do I see as the biggest problem? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> Elon Musk and he just like,
Leo Laporte (00:25:38):
<Laugh>
Mike Masnick (00:25:41):
No, I mean,
Ant Pruitt (00:25:41):
I look at this, man. I'm not gonna sit here and, and just all out defend Elon Musk on this, but he's one of the smartest cats on the planet. If he's not one of the smartest dudes on the planet, he knew, he knew how to get a lot of the smartest people on the planet, in the same room to get things done over the last few years. Again, Twitter is a business and if he can figure out a way to help make that business thrive, then more power to him. I'm not sitting here saying he's gonna make Twitter better, but I don't know if he can really make it any worse than what it is.
Leo Laporte (00:26:15):
Oh, he could make it worse. He can, oh, he, he can turn it into and he's not that smart. I disagree with you.
Ant Pruitt (00:26:20):
He's not that smart. He can turn into four Chan. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:26:23):
So if you don't moderate, what do you get? You get four people
Ant Pruitt (00:26:25):
In the same room.
Leo Laporte (00:26:27):
Yeah.
Mike Masnick (00:26:28):
So, so, so, so I, I think, I think there are a few things. One, I think that, you know, to his credit, one of the things that he has shown that he can do really, really well is come up with sort of a big project and get the people together to actually accomplish it. And these are big projects that other people did not think were possible. And that includes like a mass market electric vehicle before anyone else was willing to do it. And the whole like flying to space thing. And those are, those are huge, massive projects that most people thought, thought thought were impossible, but those are very different than speech. And, and what you're dealing with with Twitter is speech, and to be more specific about it, society and the way that people interact with each other. Yeah. And that is a different kind of problem. It is not a problem of building something. It's not a problem of manufacturing. It's not a problem of like, you know, figuring out the physics of anything. It is figuring out people. And if there's one thing that he has shown that he is not good at, it is sort of figuring out people and how they interact with each other.
Leo Laporte (00:27:21):
Yeah. His tweet says that <laugh> yeah. The way is, do you want a Twitter? That's like Elon Musk's Twitter verse. Right. I guess that's okay. It's not something I'd wanna, but then that's the beauty of Twitter. You don't have to follow Elon Musk. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I,
Jeff Jarvis (00:27:38):
I mean, does he take away our tools to moderate? Does he, does he mean you can't block anybody because, because you have to listen to everybody
Leo Laporte (00:27:45):
It's I think he wants to do that. I don't think he wants to.
Jeff Jarvis (00:27:47):
Well, but it just becomes a certain, he has no idea where lines
Leo Laporte (00:27:50):
Are Anne's point of view is when I hear a lot from you know, Elon Musk stands who email us and saying, why don't you have somebody under defend Elon? So I'm glad you said that an there are a couple of possibilities, one you know, what have you done for me lately? Elon has not shown necessarily good business acumen and a number of things, despite the fact that his stock makes him the richest man, he's still working on the stock. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, this whole process has tanked his personal fortune by something like 30 billion as the Tesla stock goes down. So was this a good business move? Well, it remains to be seen, but so far not so not so hard.
Jeff Jarvis (00:28:29):
And every car maker is gonna compete with Tesla. I've said, Tesla's
Leo Laporte (00:28:33):
Van, it's gonna go down through the roof. So unreason reasonably high at this point, he's worth more than any other manufacturer of automobiles.
Jeff Jarvis (00:28:42):
The space business has a couple of customers and it also has new and upcoming competitors. The
Leo Laporte (00:28:47):
Space business I have to, I'm gonna give him more credit for the space business, even than Tesla. Spacex has really shown that you can do this. He did
Jeff Jarvis (00:28:55):
At engineering, he brought the people together, but I'm, I'm not, I'm saying that I don't think he's as smart a businessman as he is. And I was thinking about this today with Google when we get to them you know, they had the easy life of dealing with information, mark Zuckerberg and the Twitter founders had the hard life of dealing with human beings.
Leo Laporte (00:29:12):
Human human beings are tough. Next point. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (00:29:14):
And society and human beings, as Mike said, is, is, is what's tough here. And Elon has no idea clearly how to deal
Leo Laporte (00:29:20):
With human beings. Yeah. And let me ask this Mike, and maybe to Twitter failed in the last 15 years to bring in the smartest people to try to solve this. Have they not? I admittedly it's a hard problem, but have they not done the best they could to solve these issues over the last 15 years?
Mike Masnick (00:29:40):
I, I mean, obviously I, you know, everybody could do better right there, there are ways to do better, but, but I had written an article a few weeks ago where I went through and I looked at, and, and this is in part because people were saying I was, I was being, you know, unfair to, to Elon. And I was interpreting everything he said in the worst possible light. And so I went through everything that he had said about his plans at the time for Twitter mm-hmm <affirmative> and looked at it and said in the best possible light, what does this look like? And then I looked at the things that Twitter is already doing, and that they're already working on, that the current management has, has set in, in motion and almost everything that he said. If you took the sort of best interpretation of it, the sort of most free speech supporting the most open system, the most, you know transparent setup at all, you know, Twitter is working towards all of that, but doing it thoughtfully and actually doing it carefully, it doesn't mean they've done it well to date and or that the eventual you know, things that they're going to roll out will meet that, but they've taken all of these steps in that direction, but very carefully, because one of the things that they've realized is that these things are really tricky.
Mike Masnick (00:30:45):
And if you do it wrong, you can create a much bigger mess than what, what you have today. So, you know, they have these different projects in terms of like algorithmic choice, which has been Jack Dorsey's big thing, like allowing people to choose their own algorithm and allowing third parties to create algorithms that is not working yet, because it's a very difficult problem to solve. And you have to do that very carefully. You have to do that in a way that won't be abused and won't make like the spam and the scamming problems worse, you know, in terms of, you know, freeing stuff up and opening stuff up Twitter funded blue sky, which is now a separate organization that is trying to build out this sort of social media protocol that, that, that Twitter could, could then use, which is sort of what I think Musk might mean when he says opensourcing the algorithm, you know, just purely open sourcing the algorithm and putting it on GitHub, as he keeps saying, like, doesn't do what I think he thinks it would do. And also certainly opens up the system much more to the spamers and scammers that he's so upset about. He
Leo Laporte (00:31:40):
Said yesterday, he wants to put it on GitHub, put the, yeah. What the algorithm on GitHub, which,
Mike Masnick (00:31:45):
Yeah. That's not how it works. Right. How it works. Yeah. And, and, and it's, that's just opening up all sorts of, you know, questionable things like, you know, Twitter, I think is, is trying to be as transparent as, and as open as possible, but they're doing it step by step very carefully because they recognize if they get that wrong and they open up their systems in a way that, you know, leads to a, a vulnerability in the system or other kind of security floor flaw, or opens it up to spamers and scammers and whoever else that's not good. And so when you look at the things, if, if you look at sort of, you know, the best possible version of what he's talking about, and then you look at what Twitter is actually doing, not the sort of fantasy that you'll hear on Fox news about what Twitter is doing. You begin to realize like the company is actually doing some really thoughtful things. And I think, you know you know, ha have really hired some really good people who are taking a, you know, careful moves in this direction. But it is somewhat slow going. And so, you know, maybe if he is able to understand that, that, you know, the things that the company is doing, like that could be good. And I do think
Leo Laporte (00:32:47):
By the way, none of that's algorithmic, <laugh> sure I might point out no, there, what, what's the algorithm he's talking about? What algorithm are you talking about? It's not like Facebook I mean, there's you, if you can follow Twitter chronologically, or you can follow the, you know, their best tweets, I guess that's the algorithm he's talking about, but that's not the most important part of any of this. That's just,
Mike Masnick (00:33:08):
Well, I, there, there, I mean, there is an algorithm in terms of which tweets are recommended to you and which are not. Yeah. And he is concerned about what,
Leo Laporte (00:33:15):
Right.
Mike Masnick (00:33:16):
Yes. Yes. And, and as Jack Dorsey has pointed out, Twitter is the only one of these companies that allows you to turn off the algorithm completely right. And get a purely chronological or reverse chronological feed if you, if you want it. But, but the one thing I will say is that, you know, the, the one thing that I do think is good about this, this move is getting turning Twitter into a private company, again, taking it out of, of you know, out of wall street. Because I think a lot of the problems that we've seen have actually been caused by a few institutional investors that have been really demanding you know, huge revenue growth and huge user growth. And they are pushing the company to, to make these moves in the very short term to hit these quarterly numbers that I think has, you know, caused Twitter to make some, some, you know, dumb decisions along the way. And if you take them out of that quarterly reporting system and let them take a longer term view, I think the company could do some, some really amazing things with it. And so to, you know, that aspect of, of Twitter going private, I think is valuable, but I'm, I'm not sure that that, that will work very well with Elon only with
Leo Laporte (00:34:20):
A better owner.
Mike Masnick (00:34:21):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:34:22):
Yeah. Well, as I said, I'm not
Mike Masnick (00:34:25):
Owner, I mean that, I honestly think that that could be, that could be good. He, but he's not really shown that that's, that's
Leo Laporte (00:34:33):
Part of a skillset style with the Washington post
Mike Masnick (00:34:36):
Just yeah. But, but has he ever shown anything that he's involved in? He seems to be very, very hands on, on about, so, you know, the, the other thing that just go ahead, sorry. I was gonna say the other thing that is worth mentioning that happened this week with, with him was that, you know, when, when it was announced that he was gonna take over you know, some European politicians got very upset and sort of, you know put out this letter that was like dear Elon Musk, we have rules. And, you know, basically saying, oh yeah, we talked about that last week. <Laugh> yeah. But, but on, on Monday that guy, the guy who wrote that letter who's who's the heads like the digital, I forget exactly what his role is, but he's sort of like the digital guy <laugh> in the European parliament, he went to, to Austin, Texas to meet with, with Elon and they filmed this weird video. I mean, it really looks kind of like a hostage video where where he says, you know, I'm glad I was able to explain to you the DSA, which is the digital services act, which is the new, you know, one of the, the big two new laws coming out of Europe regarding
Jeff Jarvis (00:35:37):
Just everything Musk would, should hate everything that he should hate. Everything that he doesn't want, everything being forced to moderate.
Mike Masnick (00:35:43):
Yes. And even more importantly, something that Twitter has actually spent a lot of time, very vocally, very publicly pushing back against and saying, you know, if this law goes into effect in this way, it will negatively impact speech and it will suppress speech. And it is a problem. And here are changes that need to be made. And this guy goes, goes to, to Texas meets with Elon and then films, this video where he says, I'm glad I was able to explain the, the DSA to you. And it sounds like you agree with me now. And Elon stands there and says, yes, we're completely aligned. I agree with everything that you're saying, and I wanna support the DSA, which is like, you know, for him to go out and say, yeah, and, and, and for him to go out and say like, he's supporting free speech, you know, Twitter's been pushing back against this law over and over again, saying this is bad for speech. This will harm speech. And then immediately to have Elon come in, say, he's the free speech guy. And then say, oh yeah, we support this approach, which will require Twitter to take down all sorts of content. You know, legal content is, is the structure that DSA is really, really problematic is, is just bizarre and, and suggests that again, he, he just doesn't understand what's actually happening. He's
Jeff Jarvis (00:36:47):
Not listening. He's not, he's not really, really rockiness, but, but to your point, so somebody an hour ago said, I predicted Elon Musk will eventually ask Jack at Jack to be CEO of Twitter, to which Jack responded 20 minutes ago. Nah, I'll never be CEO
Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
Again. No, I that's. The last thing Jack Dorsey would ever want to do is to work for Elon Musk work
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:06):
For Elon Musk.
Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
Kidding me. <Laugh> Elon really gives the impression much like Donald Trump did of going along with whoever the last person he talked to yeah. Said like, oh, oh yeah, that's a good idea. I'll do that. Oh, oh yeah. Here he is with te what's his name and body
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:22):
Language is hilarious
Speaker 6 (00:37:24):
To explain to you the DSA on new regulation in Europe. And I think that now you understand very well it's pretty well with what you think we should do in a platform. No, I think it's exactly aligned with my thinking. I think I very much agree with it's been a great discussion and I, I really think I agree with everything you said really? Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:37:44):
That's hysterical and that's hysterical. Yeah. I'm gonna pull down everything. The European union wants me to pull down. So Tia, as long as I
Jeff Jarvis (00:37:54):
Put Donald Trump up, then everything is fine.
Leo Laporte (00:37:57):
<Laugh> great meeting. We are very much on the same page tweets Sealon Musk. But
Jeff Jarvis (00:38:02):
What, what this all says is, is where Jack was, right. When he, when he did his confession of, of the problem is that was, it was centralized into a company and it shouldn't have been the Internet's still young. And this teaches us that these human entities, Facebook, Twitter, can't be in this structure. We talked about this last week. We gotta keep talking about it, but it's gonna require some building or some using of things to break out of this, a blue. I still have hope for blue sky. Mike, do you have any hope for blue sky?
Mike Masnick (00:38:30):
Yeah, I, I, I have tremendous hope for blue sky. I, I think, you know, it's, it is slow going, but I, there you, like, there are some really, really smart people there and they're working on, on a really thoughtful approach to this. You know, the real question is whether or not they can actually turn it into something that people will use. I think their approach is, is much smarter than almost any of the other ones that I've seen out there. So I I'm really, really hopeful, you know, the thing was before this we knew that Jack and that Paraag really supported blue sky and that they were very supportive of it. And therefore that suggested that assuming blue sky built what, what was promised that Twitter would adopt it and bring the users. And once you brought the user base, you would have a lot of power to then do a whole bunch of other things. Now with Elon, he has yet to mention blue sky, as far as I can tell some of the stuff he said sounds like he should support it, but it's unclear if he will. And therefore blue sky might be kind of adrift and on its own, and then having to find its own user base, which, which might represent a challenge.
Jeff Jarvis (00:39:28):
And, and my theory is that Jack is being nice to Elon to try to in the favor of blue sky.
Mike Masnick (00:39:34):
I, I, I hope so. I mean, Jack certainly sort of keeps bringing up blue sky as one of the things that, that he believes in that he supports. You know, so hopefully he can get it through to Elon. That it's a good thing. You know, I, I'm sort of, I'm sort of in this state where like, I don't know if it's good or not, that Elon keeps not mentioning blue sky <laugh>, you know, may, maybe it's better for everyone to yeah. He doesn't know about it, realize yeah. Right. And, and let it, let it go. But the, the fact is like, you know, I think it would be really helpful for blue sky in the long run if Twitter were to adopt it and bring its users along. And then that opens up all sorts of really interesting possibilities, you know, of, of a, of a world where you have social media as this kind of protocol set up, and then you can have all different people building on top of it
Jeff Jarvis (00:40:19):
And then an to your, to your hands off point. Then if Twitter becomes the, everything goes platform where everybody can say anything, which is another way to say the internet than, okay. But then on top with blue sky, Mike can create his, I'm gonna find just the good stuff for you, and I'm gonna get rid of the bad stuff for you. And you pay me for, to do that for you and you then have nice Twitter on top. You know, that's a world I can, I can live with cuz it's basically the internet.
Leo Laporte (00:40:48):
Yeah, I get it. Let's take a break enough Elon for the day. <Laugh> thank goodness. Just remember. I've got Jeff Jarvis by my side. <Laugh> When we come back Google, huh? Google hub, Google IO IO IO. It's off to work. I go, we will talk about Google. Finally. AI will explain jokes to us when we come back. But first end, the pixel book and the non-existent pixel book. It's exciting. It's really exciting cry. It's just gonna be a
Jeff Jarvis (00:41:26):
Cry
Leo Laporte (00:41:27):
Aunt, lot of fun. But first before we do that, I do want to talk a little bit about what a good night's sleep I had last night. Thanks to my eight sleep pod cover the pod pro cover goes over my existing mattress. You can actually get an eight sleep mattress as well. So you can go either way. We got the pod pro cover, cuz we like our mattress goes right over the top and we've had in the past, we've had heating, you know blankets, electric blankets on top. Then we tried one with those O mattress pad. This is, this is like that only like from the 22nd century, the eight sleep pod pro cover heats and cools. It can go as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. And it has a built in sleep doctor with biometric tracking that watches how you're sleeping and adjusts the heat to help you sleep better.
Leo Laporte (00:42:25):
And I can testify. It really, really works more than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep. And temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, too hot, too cold. I'm telling you a great night's sleep is a game changer. It's nature's best medicine. It can reduce the likelihood of serious health issues decrease the risk of heart disease, lower your blood pressure, even reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. And by the way, it's just nice to have a good night's sleep. I've set it up so that it start. I start warm as I get deeper into sleep, it cools down and my sleep is as a result, more deep. And then in the morning around eight o'clock when I want to get up instead of an alarm, I just have the bed start to heat up and I wake up naturally. It's incredible. The temperature of the cover will adjust each side of the bed based on sleep stages, biometrics.
Leo Laporte (00:43:19):
It knows the bedroom temperature, so and reacts intelligently at all. Three factors to create the optimal sleep environment. You wouldn't know I had good night's sleep last night. I have been, I have been on the air since 10, this morning, eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster and reduce sleep interruptions by 40% overall, get a more restful sleep. I love it. With 30% more deep sleep, you just know your mind and body are moving through those restorative sleep stages. You're getting a more restful sleep. You just feel great. I love our eight sleep cover. So does Lisa and she sleeps different than I do so that's fine, but that's why there's two sides to the cover. And so she can have at the temperature she wants, I can have the temperature. I want look at that. I'm just, I always like to do this during the ad.
Leo Laporte (00:44:09):
Look at my sleep fitness from my eight sleep sleep tracker. Can you see that there 96% 90, my heart rate variability 74 milliseconds high is good. My my resting heart rate, 58 beats per minute. Low is good. It's just fantastic. You could set the temperature. I'll turn it on right now. Even though I'm not in the bed, I can turn it on remotely. You could set the temperature anywhere from minus 10 to plus 10, which is very hot. I won't set it that hot. You can also set it initially to have a, a sleep graph. You see, you really want this deep optimizing phase where your temperature goes down. This is why it's not good to sleep hot at night. And I can't wait for a hot summer night where I could actually be like having air conditioning in the bed. That's gonna be really interesting.
Leo Laporte (00:44:59):
Autopilot is great. It's the thing that automatically watches what I'm doing and then makes recommendations watching all of the feedback that it's getting from the room temperature and how I'm sleeping and tossing and turning. It's really kind of brilliant. It is really an amazing technology. Go to eight sleep. E I G HT sleep.com/twig. Check out the pod pro cover. You'll save $150 a checkout eight sleep currently ships within the us Canada and the UK eight sleep.com/twig show up as the best partner, parent, or version of yourself every morning with a great wouldn't you? I mean, wouldn't it just be so lovely. Have a great night's sleep. You can. This thing is amazing. I really, Kevin Rose told me about it. First and then Amy Webb, who was on that show. She tried it. She said, oh man, you gotta get this. And we did.
Leo Laporte (00:45:54):
We put it, we installed about six months ago. I'm glad to be doing ADSS for him now though, cuz I'm a believer eight sleep.com/twig. Thank you so much for your supporter this week in Google. You support us when you use that address though, please do that and you'll get $150 on the pod pro cover $150 off. It's a great deal. Eight sleep.com/twig. So I'm your temperature? What's my current temperature. <Laugh> no, no. What's the temperature you, when you, you like to see, you know, I don't know. Cause they just say plus and minus. So I start on my I start actually I just turned it up just now. I shouldn't <laugh> I normally start. That's not good. Plus turn it down. I go plus four normally and then it goes down to plus two. I actually had it cooler than that and it was a little, I would wake up in the middle of the night.
Leo Laporte (00:46:47):
It'd be a little chilly. So I adjusted it and then this, the auto doc autopilot, the sleep doctor kind of adjusted it. And so this is, it's not, it's not a huge curve. Right? So you manually adjust it. And then I wake up, it's a plus three. I have to say, I like it a little warmer when I get in bit, cuz it could be a little chilly at night. And so I get in and that's just cozy and comfy and I fall asleep right away because of it. It's a really cool technology. I have to say, this is the age and you start dreaming of Elon and then the temperature goes up. Yeah. It goes way up man. Way, way up. Yeah, I like it. It's fun. So I thought this is gonna be easy because, and then I've lost it. Darn it.
Leo Laporte (00:47:26):
I had a cute sketch of all the things that were announced at Google IO and I had just had it open. Let me see if I can find it again. Recently closed windows. Oh rats. I found myself yawning during most of the, I was less. Yeah. And you didn't have to work. So so Jeff and Jason and I had to pay attention. Yeah. You, you lazy sob. We were there working, trying to stay awake through him. Yeah. I have mixed feelings about it. To be honest with you. There were some really, how would you say cool stuff as always, but I also remember from previous Google iOS, a lot of cool stuff announced at Google IO, never materializes. There was less of that kind bit of a track record. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like there was more good stuff you thought there was something worthwhile.
Leo Laporte (00:48:24):
There was just less pie of the sky here. It's I found it. This is from chew key Chan. She did a lovely little sketch. This is gonna help us everything that Google said at the keynote. <Laugh> little, little dirt, little drawing. They talked about Google maps and YouTube. Did they talk about YouTube? Oh yeah. A little bit about YouTube and Google translate. Google assistant. They talked about Lambda, Android 13. They did announce some hardware, but they did it in kind of way that I think disappointed. A lot of people there is gonna be, as we knew a new pixel six a but you won't be able to order it until what, July 21st and then delivered July 28th. And I have to think that's gotta be supply chain issues. $449 looks very nice. Got a lot of the same features. Maybe not the cameras, maybe a little less than the six pro, but you'd expect that they also preempted the, the gossip.
Leo Laporte (00:49:27):
Moners the rumor mill by saying, and by the way, this is what the pixel seven's gonna look at this fall. <Laugh> uni body aluminum looks nice. Yeah. Next generation 10 sort ship. They also mentioned the watch, but they said, because we remember we saw the stolen watch. Rick Olo came out, he was wearing it secretly underneath his, underneath his sleeve, but that's not gonna come out. He didn't say a price. Did they? Leo didn't say a price. Watch no price. And he said next year, no, no. The watch comes out with, with seven. This fall next year is what's slated for the pixel tablet. They really pushed, oh, the tablet. Right. They really wanted to push the tablet on developers, like develop for the tablet, develop for the tablet. So they said we're gonna have a tenor based pixel tablet. Which looked exactly like they had ripped the screen off a nest hub max and, and said here's our tablet. Yeah. Not impressive. Not impressive. We can move through it if you want. Bit by bit soon, our Pacha was the MC it was live shoreline amphitheater as it had been before. COVID have you ever gone to a Google IO? Mike Masick
Mike Masnick (00:50:34):
Yeah. I, I actually went to a bunch way back when it, when it used to be at Moscone. So a lot of fun. Yeah. I, I used to enjoy it. But then like after I probably went three or four years in a row and then, then I started to realize like, I wasn't sure I was actually getting that much out of it. <Laugh> I mean, it's interesting. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:50:53):
It that's exactly the feeling I had today. It was like, what? At the time you're eating it. It's like cotton candy. It's it seems like it's really good. And then you're hungry an hour later. It didn't <laugh> what was the substance of it? It's hard for me to, to pinpoint. Yeah, AI's getting smarter. There's gonna be some stuff translate. They showed some glasses. What'd you think of the glasses, Mike?
Mike Masnick (00:51:18):
I, I, I haven't seen the details. I, it is just like AR glasses. I mean,
Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
So they have a couple of people, like a mother and daughter, the daughter speaks English. The mother can understand English, but can't speak in it. The daughter doesn't speak Mandarin. The mother does so they gave them these. These are like the old man glasses from up the big black <laugh> with big thick temples. Yes. They put 'em on. Now, the thing that was cool is the text. As the mother speaking in Mandarin shows up in a heads up display on the lens as the, so the daughter can read in English what the mother's saying, but that's one way remember they showed something similar with the Google earbuds, right? Where, right. Yep. It was like the Babel fish, or you put it in your ear. And she talks and I she's, I'm hearing in English and I talk and she's hearing it in Mandarin that never did it ever.
Leo Laporte (00:52:14):
I don't think it ever happened. You have to transfer and it's not over here. You put the phone out and it'll do it. I guess the phone does a pretty good job, but they haven't figured out the UI for the rest. So they showed this thing in the, you know, what, three years, four years ago they showed the earbuds still doesn't happen. So I feel like the glasses are similar. It's a really, to me, a good use of augmented reality. The other use that they showed, which they didn't mention glasses, but earlier they showed you could use your phone, take a picture of first. It was a, a candy store and the shelf. And you could see all of the different chocolates by name, by rating. And you could pick the best one with the right parameters to show the vision, the recognition in kind of real time.
Leo Laporte (00:52:59):
And that would be, again, the kind of thing you'd put in glasses. You're looking around, what's the cheapest blue jeans here, and you could see the prices on all of them, things like that, but it's all very blue sky. It's all very well. Someday. You will like the, at the old, at and T commercials. I can continue to go through this. Some statistics, 1.6 billion buildings mapped and Google maps, 60 million kilometers worth of roads. They're gonna be mapping these buildings in such a way that you'll be able to, they showed London kind of zooming in, and it's kind of like a 3d projection generated, not a photo of, you know, Westminster Abbey, or, you know, the house of commons you can kind of, they didn't move around or anything. They just showed it. That was all. But that's their new immersive view someday in maps.
Leo Laporte (00:53:52):
They also wanna do restaurant walkthroughs. They've showed this a hundred times, right? Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, eco-friendly routing, which is in their now, which will say, you know, you could take drive there in 10 minutes, but if you're willing to take 15 minutes, you could walk there and it'd be better for the earth. Nice. YouTube has auto generated chapters. They're using deep minds to do that. They've been doing that all along. They have 8 million videos now with auto generated chapters, they're they hope to have 80 million by the end of the year video transcripts. That's cool in multiple languages. That's really cool. So right now you're gonna caption a video as you're watching it, but they're gonna add translation to that. So I could be watching a, a video and Polish and see it in English. That's kind of neat. They're gonna add Ukrainian to that translation. Soon. Google docs will have it. This is feels like the change log <laugh>. <Laugh> an automatic T R Neil. It's 2025.
Ant Pruitt (00:54:51):
Change
Leo Laporte (00:54:53):
The change log someday. This, this will all happen. I mean, it's just, it's neat. They spent a long time talking about skin tone equity, but again, this is something when the pixel six came out, they made a lot, they did ads. They showed this a lot. They talk about the monk scale of 10 skin shades, but
Ant Pruitt (00:55:09):
They've now
Leo Laporte (00:55:10):
Open the source. They can open source that, which I think is very important. If you go to skin, actually they really goodPage@skintone.google in tone, got Google, which talks about what they're doing. The, the scale, the monk scale. He's a sociologist at Harvard who identified this scale and how Google's going to use this to improve not only their photography, but also to to give you better recommendations in YouTube videos. If you looked up a makeup video in YouTube, for instance, you could get one that matched for your skin tone rather than, you know, some something completely in applicable, all so cool. All, you know, recommended practices in skin tone, ML research. To some degree, I feel like this is greenwash from Google, and I wonder how much people buy it. Cuz I mean don't, we know that Google's business is ads and, and we,
Ant Pruitt (00:56:06):
We know that their, their business is ads, but at least from my perspective, I saw all of this stuff announced today is like sort of status quo. It's like, well, yeah, I expect you to take your existing technology and try to improve it. You know, you, you, this machine learning for this, this machine machine learning for that, I, I that's all they said is yeah, we're, we're working on our current stuff and trying to make it better. Thanks. Just said it in about two hours.
Leo Laporte (00:56:33):
I, I don't wanna be mean on all this, but I just feel like Google hasn't done a whole lot. AI test kitchen was remember last, last year at Google IO where you were talking to the planet Pluto, remember that <laugh> having this weird conversation. They got more of that. <Laugh> with Lambda Lambda two is out now.
Jeff Jarvis (00:56:59):
Look at it this way. Leo Twitter is now on the verge of becoming the destruction of all free speech. Yeah. Facebook is now a laughing stock as to what it was. Yeah. Amazon stock is going down and nobody sure what's gonna happen without a pandemic. Google looks pretty good back to Paris.
Leo Laporte (00:57:15):
<Laugh> yeah. Maybe tech giants lost more than a trillion dollars in value over the last three trading days. If you were wondering why your 401k looks so anemic maybe that's why apple has seen its market capitalization trimmed by over 200 billion since last week, 200 billion. That's one Disney. They lost a whole Disney <laugh> who are the big winners, Campbell soup, general mills Smuckers <laugh> geez, Smuckers.
Jeff Jarvis (00:57:52):
Let's all all sit in our homes, eating jam out of a, out of a jar.
Ant Pruitt (00:57:56):
Clearly
Leo Laporte (00:57:59):
Microsoft lost 189 billion Amazon, 173 billion Tesla. The big loser almost well almost as much as apple, they lost to Disney to 199 billion alphabet, a mere 123 billion. This isn't three days, kids Invidia, 85 billion meta 70 billion. Only reason meta only lost 70 billion is they'd already lost hundreds of billion.
Jeff Jarvis (00:58:22):
They've already so far down there so much money.
Leo Laporte (00:58:26):
The us stock index, the S and P 500 declined 7% since last week, the Invesco NASDAQ 100 ETF off by 10%. I mean, I don't know how much the stock market has to do with, you know, the reality of how tech companies are doing and the products they're making, I guess somewhat has something to do with it. It's just kind of a, a gloomy time for a big tech. Yeah. Google.
Ant Pruitt (00:58:55):
Well, I wanted to go back to the, the keynote for a second. You, you mentioned, and I believe it was in the TWI news coverage. You mentioned Google playing a bit of catch to apple with, with the stuff that they announced today.
Leo Laporte (00:59:10):
It was all catch up to apple. It was all showing features on Android that Apple's done for years,
Ant Pruitt (00:59:15):
But okay. At one point in time, there was a lot of discussions where you say the same thing about
Leo Laporte (00:59:21):
It, always going the other way. No, and I, I mentioned doing, doing
Ant Pruitt (00:59:24):
The same thing in Android for, in
Leo Laporte (00:59:25):
Our coverage. It's good for these companies to cross pollinate. You know, if you've got a good idea. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I'm not saying at Google's stealing it, but it's hard to trumpet, you know? Oh, look, when I when I open the case of my Google pods, the Android phone sees it. Oh, it's a miracle, right?
Ant Pruitt (00:59:45):
Yeah, but that's, that's what I'm saying is, is how much more can these companies do nowadays,
Leo Laporte (00:59:51):
Maybe that's problem.
Ant Pruitt (00:59:52):
Wow. Us it's it's not much that they can do anymore. And if they're trying to play quote, catch up with apple, I don't know if that's a bad thing considering how much apple has in the bank or, well, minus the news you just discussed, but
Leo Laporte (01:00:06):
It's alright. When you're worth
Ant Pruitt (01:00:07):
2 trillion, they can
Leo Laporte (01:00:08):
Couple of hundred billion here or there. No, no big deal. No big. I mean, I just wonder Google, you know, they talk a lot about trust. They had the, their head of trust out there and safety and how we're doing more stuff on device. I, you know, we don't sell good stuff. They made a big thing. I wish I could find that segment where they say, we don't sell your information to third parties, you know? Oh,
Ant Pruitt (01:00:34):
They just collect it. We
Leo Laporte (01:00:35):
Just collect it.
Ant Pruitt (01:00:37):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:00:38):
We don't sell it to anybody.
Ant Pruitt (01:00:40):
Oh, we got you in data. We got it. We're not gonna let anybody else have it.
Leo Laporte (01:00:43):
<Laugh> I wonder how, how persuasive that is to, to everybody. I think most people kind of think of Google as a big you know, advertising and I mean, obviously search, but I think people are pretty savvy now to the fact that when you use Google, you're, you're giving them information about yourself, right?
Ant Pruitt (01:01:01):
Yeah. And a lot of people will argue about the Google collecting so much information on us, but yet at the same time they do like the fact that when they open up maps, they know that, Hey, your job is 20 minutes away and you're gonna be on time today, even though you didn't necessarily say, you're trying to go to work. It just knows that you work at so and so, and it's a work day of the week, you know, they, they know that stuff and sometimes it's convenient
Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
Historically. That's been the problem for Google, right. Remember the Google now and the, the smart cards. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> we were all excited about that. Right. but historically it's been a problem for them to say on the one hand, we know everything you're doing and we're gonna offer you your airplane tickets, the minute you're right at the airport and the other hand, but we don't know everything you're doing and we don't wanna know everything you're doing. It's very it's and that ISN is gonna be important. The more
Mike Masnick (01:01:52):
They can demonstrate that it's happening locally,
Leo Laporte (01:01:54):
They want on device. Yep. Yep.
Mike Masnick (01:01:58):
And, and, and also, I mean, honestly, the more, really useful it is in, in some ways it becomes less creepy. The, the creepy aspect is when it's not, not quite right when it's a little off, you're just like, Ooh, I, I don't really like that. You know, when it, when it just flows naturally, I think a lot, a lot of the privacy concerns start to, to fade away.
Leo Laporte (01:02:18):
Depends you think are creepy. I think there are a lot of people who think Google knows I'm at the airport and is offering me my ticket. They think that's creepy, even though you, and I know how it happened and think it's a good thing. I still think there people
Mike Masnick (01:02:31):
Kind of go, I mean, the other, the other aspect, and I think this is one of the things that they're working on is just making a lot of that more transparent to you. I think part of the, the creepiness is if you don't know how it happened, right. And how they have the access to that, you don't have that's good control
Leo Laporte (01:02:44):
Over
Mike Masnick (01:02:44):
It. Yeah. Right. So if you had more control over it and you saw, this is the information that Google has, this is what they're going to do with it. You know, then I think people and the ability to say like, actually, I don't want you to have that information. I'm, I'm gonna delete that. Yeah. You know, I, I think that would make people a lot more comfortable. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:03:00):
Do you want us to do this? Do you want us and put them in control?
Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
When did they,
Ant Pruitt (01:03:06):
I also appreciate the popup today from every time I logged in that was mentioning to FA and, and basically trying to shove it down my throat, Hey, get tofa and get to
Leo Laporte (01:03:17):
FA they showed, they showed that. They said what did they, they said that number, but significant number of people have, have started to use two FA since they forced it on us. <Laugh> but 150 million new, two, two factor users, 150 million new two factor users this year, because they're requiring it now, which is fine. It's a good thing.
Ant Pruitt (01:03:37):
That's great. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:03:40):
They did say there is gonna be a new button when you see an ad or you can go into your Google account and see it the results about me page, which will show you what Google knows about you and allow you to delete it and tailor it. I think that's good. Yes. If yeah,
Mike Masnick (01:03:59):
Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, I think that's, I think it's, it's a great idea. I mean, depends on exactly how it's implemented. And I think, you know, when they've attempted to do things like that before you end up seeing this page with so much information that it's effective for useless, like, I, I, I went through what, you know, one of these things, like what Google is using to tailor adds to me once, and it showed all of this information about like car dealerships in Texas. And I was like, I, I have no idea how or why, and you could just scroll on for days and days and, and, and not be really clear on it. So if it, if it's providing that information in a, in an interface that is useful and, and usable and understandable, then yeah. I, I actually think that's a great idea.
Jeff Jarvis (01:04:35):
The other thing that shows is the computers aren't that smart. They don't know that much about you they're, they don't do it very well.
Ant Pruitt (01:04:41):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:04:41):
Yes. Yeah. They, I, I don't know when they added this, but they pointed out that now in search, and this has been here for a while, I guess I just never noticed there's three dots next to every search result. And you can click that three dots and find out more about the result you know, more or less depending on, on what the result is. But I think that, you know, that's, that's kind of cool. Yeah,
Mike Masnick (01:05:10):
It's been there for a while,
Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
I guess. So. And I just, I never noticed it, but they,
Jeff Jarvis (01:05:15):
Facebook did similarly with, with trying to show you sources. Yeah. And, and, and the presumption is, you know, this is part of the media literacy stick. If we tell people more about the sources, I'll understand. I don't know that that's necessarily true, but what the hell let's
Leo Laporte (01:05:26):
Try? Well, it just shows you how much you can look at a search result and not see the three dots. Cuz I, I never knew, I never knew I could do that. Well,
Mike Masnick (01:05:35):
Well the three dots were there for a while, but they served a different purpose I think. And so they, they sort of changed that.
Leo Laporte (01:05:41):
I dunno how long was a few months ago. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Masnick (01:05:44):
So, so you might have had blindness to it from before, right? I think before it was just for like, if you wanted to see like a cashed version,
Leo Laporte (01:05:51):
Maybe that was it of the page. Yeah. Yeah. So somebody saying was added, the extra information was added a few years ago. So I, you know, but it's funny cuz they never mentioned it before as far as I, as far as I could tell. But it still
Ant Pruitt (01:06:04):
Says beta on it
Leo Laporte (01:06:05):
Too. Yeah. Well that's Google, isn't it? It's
Jeff Jarvis (01:06:08):
Kind of a princess spaghetti sauce thing. It's in there.
Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
It's in there. Oh yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:06:12):
We tell people about
Leo Laporte (01:06:13):
This it's anyway, we tell you everything and yeah, I don't, you know, I used to be a very ProGo. I always knew that they were an ad company and that they had my information, but I used to feel like of, of all the companies, they respect my my information and they're more secure than pretty much anybody. And, and I don't know over time I've gotten less Sangin about what Google knows and a little more concerned about it. And I feel like that that is, I'm not alone in that becoming more concerned about that. Maybe it's cuz I'm hanging around with you too often. Jeff Jarvis. I love you though. <Laugh> so I wouldn't have an autograph picture if I didn't <laugh>
Ant Pruitt (01:06:57):
Ask the show thumbnail
Leo Laporte (01:06:58):
Right now we saw sissy shall come out and glare at her next nest hub max. And and it knew it was looking and it answered her queries without her saying, Hey, you know who? And everybody goes, Ooh, that's nice. I can just look and talk. Except that already my nest hub is always talking to the TV, to the wall, to the random, just all the time. I don't know is, is it just me? But all the time it's going and the blue, like it's listening for something and it never. All
Ant Pruitt (01:07:31):
Right. So Mr. Laport, is that a nest hardware problem or is that a software problem?
Leo Laporte (01:07:36):
I don't know. It's not a hardware problem. I think it's do you not have, do you have a, do you have any Google assistant voice recognition? No sir. You don't see? You don't know about it. No sir. Jeff, you do.
Jeff Jarvis (01:07:48):
Yeah. I hardly use it,
Leo Laporte (01:07:50):
But it's you hear it going off from time to time, right?
Jeff Jarvis (01:07:53):
More. My phone goes off than the, than the inter system. Yeah. The thing
Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
Mine goes off all the time. Anyway, now you can look at your nest hub max, cuz it's got a camera. It's a little disconcerting. When I walk in the kitchen, my desktop max goes hi. Hi, good morning. <Laugh> you
Jeff Jarvis (01:08:11):
Been so lonely all night. Did you sleep well? What was your
Leo Laporte (01:08:13):
Temperature? It is a fine balance. Really? Between these things becoming sentient. You don't want them to be sentient, but at Google I understandably is trying to see where the lines are. Right. That they can be useful without creeping people out. She was like leaning over and glaring at it. I think that might be something you, you actually have to do is like <laugh> I'm talking to you, Jeff. I'm talking to you. <Laugh> I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. Oh, and that's ambient computing stuff that Mrs. Higginbotham used to talk about. Yes, right? Yes. Yes. g.com/uh AI test kitchen is the place to go. It is not live for me. It's not much there now. No. And I think it's gonna be a while before it's live for most people it's of says we're gonna slowly roll this out, but you can at least get some idea of what the features will be.
Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
I'm trying to go in there. AI test kitchen. Did I spell it right? Let's try it again. There we go. A place to improve AI technology together. That's not at all dystopian. AI test kitchen is an app where people can experience and give feedback at some of Google. So the idea is you go in here and you could talk to Lambda. There are three demos. Imagine it, you name a place Lambda will offer paths to explore your imagination. This is kind of like having a conversation with Pluto. Yeah. It's kind of dumb. Yeah. And then there's list it, name a goal or topic and see how much Lambda can break it down into multiple lists of subtasks. So the exam example that gave on stage is I wanna start a veggie garden that gives you a few choices of things you should work on.
Leo Laporte (01:10:10):
He, you know, wait a minute now, okay. The presenter is doing this right straight out of the can demo on the webpage and, and says, oh, I never got that tip before. Oh you mean this tip on the webpage that comes up every single time. You mean that tip <laugh> okay. Now I feel like he might have been misrepresenting the case. And then apparently you can talk about dogs, but if you try to change the subject, it'll change it back to dogs. And you know, I'm honestly, this is not far beyond Eliza, right? <Laugh> yes. That's what I was thinking. We're going back, back in time. It's Eliza. Yeah, I got this in my EAX that's how old this is. <Laugh> so I don't know. I'm I'm turning into a cynic, I guess it did say that they could explain jokes to you, which seems like the worst idea. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (01:11:14):
I don't think you, I don't think you're turning into a cynic. I think it's just, you have lived through a lot of pretty cool innovation
Leo Laporte (01:11:22):
Over your life. It's slowing down decades. It's slowing
Ant Pruitt (01:11:24):
Down now. It's like sort of plateaued,
Leo Laporte (01:11:27):
You know, I'm disappointed. I cause Google, I, it used to be very, very exciting. It used to be like, oh, I can't wait to see what Google's come up with next. I think some of it is slowing it down. And some of it is, we're getting a little more cynical about the things Google's promising. Cause we know that maybe no,
Jeff Jarvis (01:11:44):
Here's here's my, my bigger theory, which is that we hit a point where the technology does become boring. Yeah. And what matters is not what the technology does, but what we do with it. And that's the exciting story. Okay. You know, I've, I've said this, this show before, it's part of my book coming up, but it took 150 years before Svante has decided to use this thing to invent the modern novel. And it was far more exciting than the, well, first you put the type in and then you do this and you know, I was boring by that.
Leo Laporte (01:12:15):
Why
Jeff Jarvis (01:12:15):
You becoming boring is probably a very good thing.
Leo Laporte (01:12:18):
I'm trying to find the results about you Paige. Cause I think that's kind of cool, but I don't, I don't is that not live yet? I mean, I'm seeing the shots from you. The what? This is the take control of results about you that we was talking about earlier.
Ant Pruitt (01:12:33):
Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
Okay. I haven't yet figured out how to get that to happen on my phone. Yeah. We just want flying cars, Gumby saying that in the chatroom. That's all. Where's my flying cars. That's all I want. All right. Let's take another break. And then we will, if we said everything there is to say, I mean, there's, you know, Google, Google gave a little elbow through a little elbow at apple talking about RCS, their rich communication system and how there is 500 million active users. But still nothing from, you know, the other guys, which is obviously apple. I Apple's never gonna support RCS in messages. I don't think
Jeff Jarvis (01:13:19):
They complained. Go ahead, ed.
Ant Pruitt (01:13:22):
They didn't put a price up for the watch. Did they? I don't recall.
Leo Laporte (01:13:26):
Nope. Nope, no. Watch price. Not much about the watch. Really? no more than we learned. We just
Ant Pruitt (01:13:32):
Kept showing it every 15 minutes. The
Leo Laporte (01:13:34):
Guy who left it in the bar. Yeah. Jeff, what did you wanna say? So
Jeff Jarvis (01:13:39):
I usually complain about, of course they don't have a new Chromebook, which makes me cry and an aunt Louisiana, and then that's that. But they also didn't talk about Chrome OS at all, which I
Leo Laporte (01:13:49):
Found that was the weirdest thing that they left that out. You, you mentioned that during the event or at the end of it, they didn't, they didn't it's like it didn't exist. No. You only have two hours. There's lots of things to talk about, I guess. It does seem like that. And then you mention Fu
Jeff Jarvis (01:14:09):
We should talk rather talk about Chrome or
Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
Dogs. I would've taken Chrome. Yeah. You know maybe there wasn't much to say,
Ant Pruitt (01:14:16):
Well, even in the code labs and pathways here on the, on the IO site, there's only one lab for Chrome OS. Everything else has multiples.
Leo Laporte (01:14:26):
You know, if you were a developer <affirmative> would you be saying, oh gosh, I gotta start developing for these Google platforms. I don't think so. I don't think there's much of a call
Ant Pruitt (01:14:40):
Would they would, I would assume they're saying they wanna develop for mobile, but not necessarily Android.
Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
Yeah. Well that means iPhone, right? It means iOS mm-hmm <affirmative>
Ant Pruitt (01:14:52):
Cause everything is in the Palm of our hands.
Leo Laporte (01:14:54):
Yeah. All
Ant Pruitt (01:14:59):
Right. Any developers in the IRC thoughts?
Leo Laporte (01:15:02):
<Laugh>
Mike Masnick (01:15:03):
Yeah. I mean, there, there, there used to be the time when we would have people develop just for the web and it would work on any platform.
Leo Laporte (01:15:09):
Oh yeah. Oh
Mike Masnick (01:15:10):
Yeah. Back in the old days.
Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
<Laugh> well, they did. Okay. So they didn't mention this. I'd probably mentioned it, the developer's keynote, but they did have a Google IO pinball game developed in flutter, which works. It's actually really cool. Works in in your browser. Do you want, you wanna see it? Have you played it guys at all? This is, this is flutter. So which means this cross platform works in any browser. I'm using it here in Firefox. Let's select an Android and we will play a little pinball. I'm gonna pull the, pull the ball back. There we go. Oh, did. Oh, that was, oh, that was my anemic. This is pretty amazing for a oh whoa. Fireball. Oh, fire's out.
Ant Pruitt (01:16:06):
It looks pretty good.
Leo Laporte (01:16:07):
It's pretty amazing for, you know, a, a web web based technology. Well, that was, it was pathetic. Oh my God. Is
Ant Pruitt (01:16:21):
This blame it on flood or not yours? This
Leo Laporte (01:16:22):
Is so boring. <Laugh> <laugh> I like the carpeting <laugh> oh yeah. The carpeting matches the character. Oh, I want to get that fireball again. Oh, oh, oh, okay. That, oh, too bad. All right. In the, in the browser. That's cool. You still, how fast one of the other games could you go? No, no, it's all just a, if it's <laugh> false advertising, you can only play the one game UI problem. Yeah. But it's a, that's a web development tool that they did not mention. <Laugh> but maybe, maybe they mentioned in the developer keynote note. <Laugh> all right. Let me take a little break. We can have more to talk about. It's great to have Mike Masick here. Let's find some stuff. We can get Mike all head up about something.
Jeff Jarvis (01:17:09):
Oh, not gonna
Leo Laporte (01:17:10):
Be hard. Something to get. So getting angry about yeah. Something, something that's pissing off. Mike. Masick coming up. I
Jeff Jarvis (01:17:17):
Got a whole, I just saw a whole new one. EU is a whole structure about, about grooming and how you have to filter all content for grooming.
Leo Laporte (01:17:25):
Oh yeah. Spreading too. Out of your messages. Yeah. So if you run a messaging platform, you've gotta look for CSAM and grooming messages. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:17:37):
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Jeff Jarvis (01:21:33):
Look at the rest of the rundown is what you're saying.
Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
<Laugh> yeah, well there's more look, oh my God. There's page after page, whole lot more. Let's talk about this this new EU. What is your sense, Mike, of the direction that EU is, is taking? Is this a threat to big tech in the us? I mean, some things like GDPR have been, I think beneficial. Yes.
Mike Masnick (01:21:59):
No, I don't, I don't think I would say that actually really. In fact, I I'll have an article up, I think tomorrow I, I have to put the finishing touches on it about how GDPR is now actually being abused often by Russian oligarchs in order to silence reporters. And so, oh my God. They're, they're now claiming that if a reporter is collecting information on a Russian oligarch for the purpose of reporting that if they claim that the information is inaccurate, it's the same thing as if Google had inaccurate information about you and therefore they Sue you. Oh my God. So there have been a number of these cases that it's like li
Jeff Jarvis (01:22:34):
Libel tourism now becomes GDPR tourism. Wow.
Mike Masnick (01:22:37):
It is, it is worse than, than the libel tourism part. So I think there, there are some, some really, really serious concerns with it. And I think, you know, the other thing too is, you know, I, I think that, and I would argue this is true of most of the European regulations that, that have been put in place and that will be put in place. Is that unlike the us that a lot of the politicians there are taking <laugh>, I'm gonna choose my words carefully here, a more thoughtful approach. But the end result I think is, is really, really problematic. And, and with the GDPR I think we're seeing that very clearly. That's you know, that's the one that's now been in effect for a few years now where it's actually, it hasn't hurt Google or Facebook and it's, it's really helped them, but it's destroyed a lot, a lot of the smaller competition.
Mike Masnick (01:23:27):
Yep. And there was there, there have been a few different research reports that have all come out within the last few months. There was an N B E R report that came out a few months ago that just got a bunch of attention this week, even though it actually came out a few months ago that showed that the number of apps that were available dropped tremendously. The they, they had a, a way of calculating sort of innovation and they basically said innovation declined. And also that the main beneficiary of the GDPR was Google. So basically a bunch of other smaller companies had a lot of problems and, and Google was helped. There was another study that effectively said the same thing, but we're looking at sales and profits and basically said, for everybody else, sales and profits went down for Google and Facebook, they went up.
Mike Masnick (01:24:16):
And so, you know, so you can argue about like, you know, and, and I think to some extent, the European approach, even as they talked about sort of like reigning in big tech they, they, in some ways prefer that, right? Because if there's just Google and Facebook to, to regulate and deal with, that's easier than having to regulate a hundred or a thousand different companies doing a hundred or a thousand different things. And so they might prefer this sort of, oh, well, we just have to, you know, send in regulators to yell at, at, and find regularly fine Google and Facebook rather than having to deal with the small competitors. But from a, from an innovation standpoint, as we just discussed, it kind of feels like, you know, Google is, is sort of reaching that stage of life where they're not so much the, the innovators coming out with the next big thing.
Mike Masnick (01:25:02):
And if we're killing off all of the new startups, that that might be more innovative. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, I don't think that's very good. And so, so that's, that's my big concern about, you know, I don't think they're as fun. The laws, I don't think are as fundamentally ridiculous as like, you know, Texas's social media law or whatever. But I, I don't think that they've been successful and I think they've created a lot of problems. And I think that they'll be, you know, it'll take us a long time to sort of walk through and realize just how much innovation they've, they've actually really stifled. I'm,
Leo Laporte (01:25:33):
It's a little disappointing to me because I do feel like what we don't want is the, is, is big companies, regular self-regulating, cause they don't, they're gonna, they're going to op opt optimize for profit and, you know, that's their job. So it's up to government regulators or, you know, ineffective proxy for society to, to keep these guys in line. So I'm very disappointed if this, I, I think, well, intentioned and somewhat thoughtful effort has had such unfortunate dire unintended consequences is a little disappointing.
Jeff Jarvis (01:26:09):
It's not all well intended though.
Leo Laporte (01:26:11):
Well, it's, I think much of it's a mix. Yeah. I think much of it is mix.
Mike Masnick (01:26:16):
I think, I think, I think it's a mix of, you have people who are certainly well intended, but maybe not very well informed. And then you have people who are not so well intended and you know, you know, part of it is to me, but that's
Leo Laporte (01:26:27):
Politics. Right? Sure. That's all laws if you really paid attention.
Mike Masnick (01:26:31):
Yeah. But, but, but there's, there's a question of how much of these laws are really driven out of like trying to make the world a better place and to, to do the things that you talked about, like not, not allow companies to, to, you know, be completely autonomous in terms of what they're doing and how much of it is driven by spite. And I think that a fair amount of the regulatory, you know, focus is about spite. We don't like these companies. Yeah. We don't like what they're doing. Therefore, we must punish them. Well, that's
Leo Laporte (01:26:55):
A lot of it is just make a better system. A lot of it's prompted by competitors, lodging complaints against these big companies. Sure. Right. That's what stimulates a lot of these investigations and ultimately the laws. Well, what's the solution then if we can't <laugh>, if we can't expect a legislative solution and we can't expect companies to self regulate sounds like we're outta luck.
Mike Masnick (01:27:16):
Well, I, I, I don't think so actually. I mean, I, I, I think there are a number of things that we can do and I'm, I'm sort of halfway through writing a paper, listing all of them out. So I'm not, I'm not, not gonna go through the, my entire paper right now, but like, you know, I, I think that the reality is, is having more competition, having, you know, smaller competitors that, that can come up and say, like, you don't trust Google, you don't trust Facebook. You don't trust these companies like here are alternatives and allow there to be like real competition that, that drives.
Leo Laporte (01:27:48):
So instead of telling companies how to run their business, instead prevent companies from using acquisitions to shut down competitors, prevent companies from merging to form behemoths encourage competition
Jeff Jarvis (01:28:04):
With your data about your impact, allow researchers to be able to see that. I think that's the da Keller. And that Nate personally just testified before I think it was the Senate Mike, I think, yeah. I think, I think there's a movement toward transparency to research is the most sane next step that I've, I, I, I too endorse
Mike Masnick (01:28:24):
It's, but it's actually tricky. And in fact, like the bills that are on tap right now that it was not technically testifying about those bills, but, but it really was because those are the only bills that are being considered right now. I think also do have a lot of problematic language. Yes. Right. I mean, and this is what, what it gets to is like a lot of this stuff is, is really, really nuanced and really, really specific and, and poor language even in well, meaning thoughtful bills can still be really problematic. And that's what we have a lot of. And, you know, part of that is like, it is really difficult to understand all of these different moving parts and how they, how they play together, but also, you know, part of it's that these things all interact and, and, you know, one of the biggest things, and I, I sort of got at this in terms of the, you know, what was happening with the GDPR is, you know, if you're talking about speech, if you're talking about privacy, if you're talking about transparency and then you're also talking about competition.
Mike Masnick (01:29:13):
Those things are often not, not very well aligned. Right. You know, you can put all these rules onto social media platforms, but again, like the biggest companies are going to be able to handle that. And, and therefore you're, you're decreasing competition as you're apparently like, you know, putting in place all these rules to, to deal with these things. And so, you know, looking at all of that combined and figuring out, like how do we do this in a way that actually does increase competition and increase innovation without letting companies just, you know, run wild with all of our data. And, and it's a really, it's a, it's a really difficult needle to thread because you know, those things work at cross purposes with each other E especially if you're not careful. And I don't see anyone who's being really careful about it,
Leo Laporte (01:29:55):
It's possible. The mistake GDPR made was just being too sweeping. Maybe it would be better to do this a little more piece mail, a little more thoughtfully, also in a way that it could be refined improved or that's key turned off. If it doesn't, if it doesn't produce a results you expect
Mike Masnick (01:30:13):
Well, that, well, that's always the issue with any law. Right. I mean, it, it's sort of the opposite of way, like innovation works, right. Innovation is this process of iteration, try something, right. You know, get it out there, see what happens and, and be ready to continually iterate laws are never like that. Right. I mean, laws are like, we have this problem, here's the solution we're gonna pass the bell. And then like, we wipe our hands of it. And, and like, you know, maybe 25 years later we'll look back and be like, boy, that was a disaster. <Laugh>, you know, no, nobody wants to, to, to do that. You know, I I've, I've argued for a long time. I think it would be great if we had this sort of iterative approach to, to law making. But you know, that also creates problems, right? Because like, you know, companies and people are relying on the laws and if they're constantly changing, that's not great either. So, you know, I, I don't know that there's a perfect solution here, but, you know, I do think that, that there should be a little bit more humility in recognizing that, you know, some of these laws have, have really serious impact and, and we should be willing to look at that.
Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
Where's your paper gonna be Mike, when
Mike Masnick (01:31:08):
You, when you finish it? I'm not sure. <Laugh>, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm working on the paper. It's, it's, it's part of a, a grant that we got from, from Knight foundation. And so it's, it's almost done and we'll, we will release it somehow somewhere. Can't wait to see it.
Leo Laporte (01:31:26):
Ah, it's very depressing. So then there's this new regulation again, proposed, I think part of the problem is the EU has such a Byzantine method of proposing approving and then enacting legislation that it it's kind of hard to follow it. It has to be, as I understand it, once it's proposed, then it has to be approved. Then it has to be approved individual nations. Is that right? They have to, they have to enact it enact individually in individually. So this is at the status of being proposed. But it would require chat apps like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger to selectively scan users, private messages for child sexual abuse material and grooming behavior. This is what we were talking about earlier. More
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:15):
Panic, get it ready, get it ready, hand more
Leo Laporte (01:32:17):
Panic. Yeah. privacy ex listen to what Matthew Green says, and we really trust Matthew Green. <Laugh> this document is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen. It describes the most sophisticated mass surveillance machinery ever deployed outside of China and the USSR, not an exaggeration digital advocacy,
Jeff Jarvis (01:32:43):
But it's all, but who, who could be for child pornography. Right. So anything can fit under that then. And, and you, and you have the worst of both worlds. Oh, you can say anything you want. Oh, except child pornography. So we're gonna watch everything you say so we can stop you from saying the things we don't want you to say and go get ya. It's it's, it's it's pardon me for a Gutenberg moment here. But every time there's a new mechanism that allows more people to speak than were heard before the old incumbent institutions react against it. Try to control, try to have panic and fear partly outta their self-interest partly just outta moral panic. And, and eventually we figure it out. But in the meantime, there's gonna be a lot of destruction of a lot of the kind of good innovation Mike was just talking about.
Leo Laporte (01:33:26):
Ugh,
Jeff Jarvis (01:33:30):
SI
Leo Laporte (01:33:31):
SI <laugh> the regulation established a number of new obligations for online service providers, app stores, hosting companies, any provider of interpersonal communications. <Laugh> oh, this, yeah. But again, this is a proposed law. These things seem to sneak in after the proposals. Is there a comment period? Is there any way people can weigh in?
Mike Masnick (01:34:01):
Well, part of the issue with this is that there, there was some commenting beforehand in which a lot of people, a lot of very smart people explained to the people pushing this bill, that it was, you know, literally impossible to, to do what they wanted. Yeah. And they, they just didn't care. You know, it's, it's, it's similar in, in a lot of ways though, in this case, worse, I, I said earlier that the European approach tended to be more thoughtful than the us approach in this case, I would say not so much, but this is very similar to the earn act in the us, but I think much, much worse in terms of, you know, how much of a wrecking ball it's taking to, to encryption and, and private communications. Yeah. You know, how, how, you know, this will go through quite a long process before it ever gets anywhere, if it gets anywhere. And so I would imagine that it would improve, but it is starting from such a bad starting point that I don't see how you could do anything along O O of this nature and, and not have it be absolutely terrible and, and, and extremely dangerous.
Leo Laporte (01:35:03):
Oh, well, Hmm. So what should we do? <Laugh> I mean, we don't even have any, we don't, we're not even there constituency. I mean, we can't, we just have to sit back and watch, I guess.
Mike Masnick (01:35:13):
I mean, speaking up does help. Right. And, and, and, you know, people, and so that more people are aware whether or not, you know, we, our say matters directly to European politicians, perhaps not though I have in the past testified before the European parliament, but like the, you know, getting people who are in the EU to speak up and say, this is, this would be a, a disaster. And, and we cannot have this happen. And, and honestly, you know, and this was true of the earn act in the us and, and others where, you know, for all the talk of how this is necessary for the children, and you have all of the moral panic associated with that, the reality is that this would make most children much less safe, right. If they cannot have secure communications, if they cannot have secure places where they can feel comfortable talking without feeling like they're being surveilled at every moment, that will do a lot, you know, a lot more harm to most children than, than, you know, than this bill suggests they need to protect children. So I, I, I think, you know, people need to understand that how much damage this kind of thing actually does to, to children rather than protect
Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
Them. Yeah. meanwhile, I'm, I'm looking at Stacy's article on Stacy on IOT. We'll ask her about it. Of course. When she comes back, I think in two weeks we need laws and regulations on data use and privacy she's talking of course about the story that we saw that a company safe graft was selling information about visits to planned parenthood vice bought you know, week's worth of information about who had visited planned parenthood for 160 bucks. Of course, safe craft said, oh, that was a mistake. We won't do that ever again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> they
Mike Masnick (01:36:57):
Actually, they didn't say it was a mistake.
Leo Laporte (01:36:59):
They got caught. They
Mike Masnick (01:37:00):
Did say they did say they wouldn't do it again, but then they actually defended it, you know, in the process, like it was really obnoxious. If you find the blog post that safe craft put up, you know, they basically said, you know, this is actually good. This is useful data for researchers and, and you know, sure anyone might abuse it, but you know, this had really good purposes, but because people are so mad about it, we're not
Leo Laporte (01:37:21):
Gonna, yeah, we won't do that, but there's plenty other data brokers who I'm sure would be glad to pick up the slack,
Jeff Jarvis (01:37:26):
But the problem always is it's, it's the, it's the use over the gathering? The, no, the, the having knowledge is one matter how you use it is the, is the matter. And the problem is it's now in the hands of noxious authoritarian, people who want to use it against women.
Leo Laporte (01:37:39):
Yeah. She also C the fact that the CDC spent nearly half a million dollars buying location data on millions of Americans from another data broker to see if people were following COVID curfews, tracking neighbor to neighbor visits stuff like that. Again, you could see the benefit, but it's also the fact that this information is available. And so easy to acquire is very disappointing. But again, calling for laws and regulations on data use, and privacy makes sense until you see what a mess has been made by the EU and the us in attempting to regulate tech.
Mike Masnick (01:38:21):
Cause it's too early. And, and it's, it's not just that it's it's that this is a lot more complex than people make it out to be. Yes. And, and again, like people, people get so focused on one aspect of it. And, and we're going through that right now in California, where we have this law, the CCPA and, and there was just a hearing about it. And, and my colleague, Kathy ES, who you've had on, on your show recently a few times, she said to say, hello. She, she just testified last week before the, the new California privacy regulatory board, I forget they it's, there's, there's an acronym for it. As they're sort of trying to figure out what to do. And the point that she made was like, you can't look at privacy in a vacuum, you have to realize that it impacts other things, including free speech.
Mike Masnick (01:39:05):
And, and you know, that the example I gave with the GDPR and the Russian oligarchs, you know, silencing reporters by claiming that it's, you know, it's a, it's a privacy issue that they're collecting data for reporting purposes. You know, that's a problem. And, and we're pretty concerned about some of the, the plans that California has put forth, that it would impact speech at the same time. And so how do you balance those two competing interests? How do you balance this idea that, you know, and I shouldn't even say balance because you're not supposed to balance free speech. You're not supposed to balance the first amendment, but how do you look at those issues and say, how can we protect our privacy, but also not use a privacy law to silence speech at the same time? Is
Leo Laporte (01:39:44):
It problematic that the EU does not effect we're the only country, one of the few countries anyway, that has a first amendment. We, you can't claim first amendment protections in the EU.
Mike Masnick (01:39:54):
They do have freedom of expression. You know, the human rights law within the EU is supposed to protect freedom of expression. It, it is a lot more than with balance balancing other factors though. And, and it does have, there, there are balancing tests, the, the EU human rights approach involves balancing different rights. And you know, that leads to some, some bizarre things, you know, there was also just recently, you know, speaking of bad European laws, you know, a few years ago the EU passed this copyright directive, which among other things had what is now article 17, which is for copyright filters. So, and, and basically telling all of the countries in the EU that they need to pass laws, requiring anyone who is hosting copyright covered material, which is basically anyone that they have to put in place, some sort of filtering tool to, to, to make sure that it's not uploading copyrighted stuff.
Mike Masnick (01:40:48):
The law at the same time also said, but you have to make sure that it's not blocking stuff that shouldn't be taken down. And, and so Poland went to the court of the European court of justice to say, like this interferes with human rights. And so the court of justice came out with this ruling two weeks ago. That is completely useless. It basically says, instead of saying like, oh, you know, the, the copyright directive violates human rights. It says, you know, as long as the, the filters do not take down speech that shouldn't be taken down, then it's okay, which is useless, right. Because you know, any, any filter is going to misdiagnose things and is going to take down some speech that shouldn't be taken down. And yet, so now, like everybody is struggling with this. All the different countries are trying to implement it.
Mike Masnick (01:41:32):
Some of them don't care about legal speech. I mean, it seems like France in particular was just like, ah, you know, we have to stop any, any kind of infringement. If we happen to take down memes and, and parody, whatever, like, we don't care about that. But other countries are like, well, we're trying to balance these two interests. And the court is now saying like, you have to get that right. If, if you get it wrong and you're taking down protected speech you know, then, then it violates the, or the human rights charter, whatever is, is the basis. And so like understanding that these, these rights, you know, conflict and how do you manage that is really difficult. And it feels like nobody wants to sort of come in and look at that holistically and sort of recognize how these different things intersect with each other.
Mike Masnick (01:42:16):
Instead they just push a very narrow focus. Like, I, I agree in general, like privacy is really important and, and we have this free for all right now, and I think that's bad and I think that's dangerous, but, you know, I worry about every privacy law that, that everybody tries to pass because I, I, I, you know, I'm not sure it helps, you know, it's certainly not gonna help if all we're doing is having to click through a, a cookie banner to say like, okay, I agree, right. That doesn't solve anything. So like, you know, it would be really nice if we could just take a step back and actually look at all of this stuff holistically and say, what, what kind of world do we actually want and why are we not there? And how can we get there? But that doesn't seem like what anyone is doing.
Jeff Jarvis (01:42:53):
No, Leo, I put a, I put in, in the chat, I put a paper in that. I, I quote
Leo Laporte (01:42:57):
I have it
Jeff Jarvis (01:42:58):
In the book I'm writing. Yes. by James doer from 1998,
Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
The information age and the printing press. Right? So from corporation,
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:08):
Yes. But this was 1998. And, and what he argues is that countries that tried to control the printing press were farther behind just in their general development than those that did not, that it's early is my argument. And that also that it's going to be filled with unintended consequences. So what he argues is the sooner you get to those unintended consequences and then start figuring them out the better. So he says, this is Rand, but he says, pull back from regulation so you can get to them. And then you deal with the actual impact rather than, but
Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
How do you know what the unintended consequences are until you try legislating?
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:41):
No, no, no. It's the unintended consequences of the net.
Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
Oh. Of the net.
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:45):
Don't legislate, let it go.
Leo Laporte (01:43:46):
There's figure out what works for, here's the problem with that. At some point, these companies get so big that it's impossible to do anything about them. Isn't that the risk and we may already be there.
Jeff Jarvis (01:43:57):
Yeah. Ster is just a monster. Don't you think?
Leo Laporte (01:43:59):
No, but I let's talk about Facebook and go. You think, I mean, honestly,
Jeff Jarvis (01:44:03):
Facebook's on the way
Leo Laporte (01:44:03):
Down. Okay. Twitter's about
Jeff Jarvis (01:44:05):
To be bought by a, by a, who's gonna buy a guy who's gonna ruin
Leo Laporte (01:44:07):
It. Okay. Okay. So they're just gonna burn out and yeah. And we won't have to worry about that anymore,
Jeff Jarvis (01:44:14):
Then something else comes along
Leo Laporte (01:44:14):
Something else. Okay.
Mike Masnick (01:44:16):
I mean, that, that is the, the, his, that is the history of the technology world, right? I mean, yeah, that, that's why I, I keep saying the most important thing is clearing the way for new innovators and making sure that we can actually have, you know, new entrances that will be innovative and that can build a better service that people are feeling, feeling more and more uncomfortable with with these large, you know,
Leo Laporte (01:44:36):
But there is a network effect that makes it hard regardless of led of legislation.
Jeff Jarvis (01:44:41):
Regulation makes that worse in every case. That's what was Mike's point before is that Google?
Leo Laporte (01:44:46):
I understand this is regulatory capture. We've talked about this before. These companies wanna pull up the ladder after themselves, but
Jeff Jarvis (01:44:54):
Even at first they don't want the regulation, but then when they realize it's inevitable, then they say, yeah, we can take it
Leo Laporte (01:45:00):
All win. Yeah. We could take it. Okay. Well that's what I'm saying. They've already gotten to that point. <Laugh> I, I mean,
Jeff Jarvis (01:45:07):
You have Facebook advertising, please regulate us. But the other thing, the other thing is more insidious than this. And I heard what's his name? The founder, the, the planet here CEO, and, and now you're here at Elon must say the same thing. Part of this shtick about if it's legal, we allow it is saying, we'll make no judgments. We're not gonna go to anything. You tell us what to do. We'll do that. We're taking no responsibility for anything, right?
Mike Masnick (01:45:31):
No responsibility.
Jeff Jarvis (01:45:32):
That's insidious.
Leo Laporte (01:45:34):
You can't Sue us. <Laugh>
Jeff Jarvis (01:45:36):
Yeah. And you can't blame us. So go, go make a law. It's fine.
Mike Masnick (01:45:41):
I mean, that, that was what mark Zuckerberg had said as well was, you know, when he was getting called to Congress every two months, you know, that's at one point he came out with, with like, you know, a, a, a, a statement that was effectively, like you tell us, like, I basically, I'm throwing up my hands. You don't want me to be the Arbor of truth. Fine. You tell me what, what I need to take up to leave up and what I need to take down, which of course has, you know, serious first amendment implications.
Leo Laporte (01:46:03):
Well, it's also disingenuous cuz he, I mean, sure. Oh
Mike Masnick (01:46:06):
Yeah, absolutely. But, but like, you know, what else is he supposed to say at some point? Right?
Leo Laporte (01:46:11):
That's what I would've said in his shoes. Exactly what I've said. Fine. You tell me, I don't know.
Jeff Jarvis (01:46:16):
I'll follow the law.
Leo Laporte (01:46:17):
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (01:46:19):
And, and if, if you don't like it, well then they pass a law. Don't blame me. Well, that's not the way to build a society of, of caring decent people.
Mike Masnick (01:46:28):
Yeah. And, and that's why, again, sort of going back to like Twitter and Elon and what I talked about before, like, you know, the fact is like with the DSA in the EU, you know, Twitter has been a, a really active participant in talking to EU politicians and explaining why the DSA is currently formatted would, would have tremendous, you know, speech suppression. And, and so like having actual fundamental principles that you believe in that, then you go and you fight a, around the world for, you know, laws that are causing trouble for it. You know, that's what it means to be committed to free speech saying, as Elon has said that like, we're just gonna take whatever the government tells us to do. You know, that's not being committed to free speech. That's getting pushed around by, by any government in, in the world. And, and I think that's, that's a real problem.
Leo Laporte (01:47:10):
It is true that we don't talk about Facebook anymore. Do we? <Laugh> yeah. It's like, who cares? It was destroying how world oh yeah. Remember them and happy.
Mike Masnick (01:47:21):
I was gonna say, how happy do you think mark Zuckerberg is about all of the, the must Twitter stuff over the last few months, he just gets to sit back and laugh and it's none of this is his problem. You guys miss
Leo Laporte (01:47:30):
Me. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Masnick (01:47:32):
And I'm sure I am sure that that recruiters at Facebook are, are calling up every single person who works at Twitter right now.
Leo Laporte (01:47:39):
Oh, problem is Facebook stock is, is no better than Twitter stock at this point. So maybe worse.
Ant Pruitt (01:47:45):
And they still have their own issues with the way they treat some of their staff, especially with the, like what the content moderators,
Leo Laporte (01:47:54):
We should go public. Then we could offer them an upside. We could hire a hundred great engineers. <Laugh> I don't know. We, I don't know what we'd have 'em do, but you know, <laugh> I got some stock options for you. You're gonna love yeah. Why you're still sitting on those useless Facebook options. They're useless. You say, why are people still blaming Facebook for Australia's terrible news linking tax law? This was Facebook and Google, right? That Rupert Murdoch wanted to take down. Yeah. But
Jeff Jarvis (01:48:29):
It was Facebook that, that, that acted, well, I can say it better than I can.
Mike Masnick (01:48:33):
Yeah. I mean, this was, it was based on an article in the wall street journal, which I didn't note, and I should have, of course the wall street journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch who is kind of at the center of all this. But, but you know, this was, you know, last year Australia had been working this, this law for a long time, which was, they admitted like politicians in Australia literally admitted that Rupert Murdoch came to them with this law. Oh my God. To pass this law. Yeah. And they did. And it basically forces Google and Facebook and just Google and Facebook to pay media properties, you know, mostly Rupert Murdoch, well, and nine west are the two sort of big. So,
Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
So Facebook just blocks news sharing in Australia. Like
Mike Masnick (01:49:09):
So, well, they, they did, they did for like, you know, basically just as the law was about to go into effect, both Google and Facebook had said that they would block news sharing in Australia in response to this law going into effect. Then just like on the Eve of it going into effect, Facebook actually did start, start blocking it, Google didn't, Google caved. And so that they would, they would just start paying and, and people went crazy about it. And then like there was a slight change to the law in response to that. And a week later Facebook reinstated it. And so this, this wall street journal article
Leo Laporte (01:49:40):
Facebook went through, here's the headline Facebook deliberately caused havoc in Australia to influence new law. Whistleblowers say, <laugh> well,
Mike Masnick (01:49:50):
Dare they. And so I, I, I, I read that article and I kept looking for where's this smoking gun from the whistleblower about like causing havoc. And, you know, what, what you found in the article is they talk about in, you know, a whole bunch of early paragraphs about how they didn't just block news. They also blocked some government and some nonprofit websites. And so like, okay, that's bad in theory. But I, I kept waiting and you know, the, the, the headline of the article and the subhead of the article implies that that was all done on purpose by Facebook execs. And it takes until paragraph 55. It's a very long article.
Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
<Laugh>
Mike Masnick (01:50:25):
It's, it's in paragraph 55 where they finally say cheating me. I counted. I counted twice because I, I, I counted 55. And I was like, is that really 55? And I went back and I counted the second time in the middle. And, and it is literally the 55th paragraph where they say Facebook executives realized. And like, they, the, the reporters at the wall street journal had this, they realized that this was a mistake that they had blocked too many sites. And they, they said, we have to fix this. That's in paragraph 55 after they spent all this time talking about how Facebook deliberately tried to block stuff. And they bring in all these things where you're like, you know, as I'm reading, I'm like, this is exactly what, you know, if you're in a position where the law says, if you allow any links to news, you're going to have to pay.
Mike Masnick (01:51:09):
Then, you know, any lawyer in the world is going to say, you block everything that might be considered news. Don't make a mistake. If you make one mistake, you're screwed and you're going to have to pay up. So of course, they're going to block everything. And so like, that's basically the smoking gun was they had lawyer, the, the legal team and the policy team told them we need to be inclusive in who we block, which is what the law tells them to do. Right. You know, if you don't want the law to apply to you, which is what Facebook was saying, then you have to block everything. And then as soon as they realized it was a mistake, basically people at Facebook tried to, you know, walk through and figure out which sites they over blocked and to fix it, which is exactly what you should expect. And the problem is the way the law is written, not the way Facebook acted. And so like the, the, the whole article was really, really annoying. And, you know, it got a bunch of attention last week because everybody loves, you know, these stories about Facebook being evil and Facebook might be evil, but in this case, it doesn't appear that they were pretty.
Jeff Jarvis (01:52:03):
And, and when you, when you hear me talk about, about Murdoch and, and I include in that the wall street journal, there is an agenda to media's coverage of the internet. And I'm not saying that this particular reporter, you know, got a call from Rupert saying this and that, but it was not hard to sell this story with het.
Leo Laporte (01:52:19):
Didn't yeah. He
Jeff Jarvis (01:52:19):
Didn't, you didn't need to. No. Yeah. And, and, and we never in media see the acknowledgement of the conflict of interest of, oh, we hate these guys and think they stole all our money and we want more money from them. And it's, it's a pier movement in which media have a conflict of interest that is never, ever acknowledged.
Mike Masnick (01:52:36):
Yeah. Yeah. It, it's pretty funny. And it's, it's a real problem.
Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
And I'm sure they figure if by paragraph 55, you've already made your, oh, you're called conclusions. You're not reading this, but, but
Jeff Jarvis (01:52:46):
Princess spaghetti sauce it's in down.
Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
<Laugh> it's in down, it's in there. We put it in. There
Jeff Jarvis (01:52:52):
Was that actually the sponsor, Robert, I can't remember whether it was princess spaghetti sauce, but everybody's too young to know that commercial anyway. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:52:58):
I thought that was Prego. So there is a might be, there is a, I was thinking Prego too. So I don't know. That's
Jeff Jarvis (01:53:05):
Why I bet it is Prego.
Leo Laporte (01:53:06):
I's Prego Prego. It is Prego. Very good. Which is the worst bottled spaghetti sauce. If you eat Prego, it's stop.
Jeff Jarvis (01:53:13):
Everything's still
Leo Laporte (01:53:14):
Bad. Stop it's in there. That's why it's bad. Prego was the spaghetti sauce you used in college when you had college out of the jar. Exactly. Well sweet. Why heat it up? The spaghetti's hot. Just put it on top. That's right. <Laugh> wait. You were there too. You remember? I remember very, very well <laugh> Respect.
Jeff Jarvis (01:53:36):
Well, speaking of pasta
Leo Laporte (01:53:37):
Here is what? Cacho Peppe lady. What is she
Jeff Jarvis (01:53:41):
Became famous for
Leo Laporte (01:53:42):
This? All right. I'm gonna play a little TikTok video here.
Speaker 7 (01:53:46):
Everyone must try this. Cut. Cho pasta sauce from trader
Leo Laporte (01:53:50):
Do. That's why what's wrong with that? She said it cut. Cho. No,
Jeff Jarvis (01:53:53):
Everybody loves the way she said
Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
It. Appreciate it's cut. Cho PPE. Cut
Jeff Jarvis (01:53:56):
Your PPE.
Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
Yeah. Apparently that went viral. Apparently. Yeah. She, now people are shouting at her. <Laugh> saying say, God, baby. <Laugh> she said her exaggerated accent. It was just part of her Italian America background. What are you talking here? Didn't mind the teasing, especially from actual Italians who told her? She's saying it incorrectly. Apparently this is like I, yeah. Tick. Fuck. It's amazing. It's amazing. Wow. Dad went viral
Speaker 8 (01:54:29):
Thought I was like 17. Didn't born in the pig.
Leo Laporte (01:54:37):
Okay. Byebye. She's
Jeff Jarvis (01:54:38):
A little top.
Leo Laporte (01:54:39):
Yeah. Unbelievable. You wanna be on an elevator with her? Contact tech creators. Yeah. Yeah. I'm 26. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I won't the first talk from space is just as you wanted me to play this as well. No, I
Jeff Jarvis (01:54:54):
Didn't care. I just put it in there cuz
Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
<Laugh> great. Okay. I'm gonna skip that then. <Laugh> I thought you might be interested.
Jeff Jarvis (01:55:01):
It's gotta be you like space stuff here. You can listen to a black hole that's down on the other.
Leo Laporte (01:55:05):
That's kind of interesting. Yeah. The sound of black hole makes, except it's not really the sound of black hole makes cause in space. No one can heal you scream. So it's just what it might make if it were not in space. Which of course, because it's a black hole. It will be because it'll suck all the air in and then we'll be in space. Ohio bill will ban Facebook and Twitter from censoring users. So it's now Florida, Texas, and Ohio. There are more, there are more. Yeah. Oh yeah. Unbelievable. What I don't. I, I don't why, how do you not Mike? <Laugh> you, you face this day in, day out this drumbeat of bull crap. How do you not just despair and throw up your hands and go. I give up
Mike Masnick (01:55:57):
<Laugh> I am an eternal optimist. I, I still believe that that, you know, people will come to their senses eventually. I don't know what, what, what, why? All evidence is to the contrary.
Leo Laporte (01:56:09):
I could pretty much guarantee you. No, one's coming to their senses ever.
Jeff Jarvis (01:56:13):
Oh, it's a century from now. They will, but that's the problem. We're all
Leo Laporte (01:56:16):
Gonna be gone. Wait, do you mean a century from now? What? They'll wake up and say, that's what it takes. This mess we made of everything. Well,
Jeff Jarvis (01:56:22):
The index of forbidden books lasted until 19 90, 19 66, I think.
Leo Laporte (01:56:26):
Yeah.
Mike Masnick (01:56:26):
I mean, yes. Yes. 50 years after I'm dead. Somebody will say, you know what? That Mike Masick. He was right.
Leo Laporte (01:56:32):
<Laugh> you dream on <laugh>. Alright. Alright. If you, if you say, so you want to hear the sound of a black hole, New York from the New York times in a part of an effort to Sonify the cosmos reach researchers who converted the pressure waves from a black hole into an audio, something, this is the stupidest <laugh>,
Jeff Jarvis (01:57:07):
It's so much fun to meet
Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
Here. Sound waves of the per Peries galaxy cluster were resynthesize. In other words, completely made up after boosting their frequency, quadrillions of times scaling them 57 to 58. Octas above their true pitch and turning. So
Ant Pruitt (01:57:25):
In other words, they couldn't hear it and said, they're gonna,
Leo Laporte (01:57:27):
You couldn't hear it if you wanted to it's it's yeah, you did this to annoy me. Didn't you? I do. I's
Jeff Jarvis (01:57:37):
Fun. Well, you annoy me. I annoy you.
Leo Laporte (01:57:39):
It's only fair sound of the Percys galaxy. And then they put like a radar thing. We're gonna make it to where you can a radar thing on it. So it looks like some, you know, it's scientific. So that's science. You can't, you can't deny it. It's science, man.
Ant Pruitt (01:57:55):
I wonder what Mr. Rod Powell and tart Mallick think of this on this
Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
Weekend. Oh, we'll find out you think of that. Every, what is it Friday? They do that Fridays. I'll have to ask them Friday, this in space with the TV slash T w I S clubhouse. You know, we use them as the as the whipping horse, the stalking horse for sites, nobody talks about anymore. Whatever happened. Ha ha ha. Well, they just they've just been, they just did a sea round and have now worth $4 billion. That's what happened. Ha ha ha. Another round of financing from Andreen Horowitz. <Laugh> participation in DST, global tiger. Global. And in live gee they raised quite a bit. What did, what did they get? What did they get? I don't know what they got. You know, this is annoying, cuz all they say in tech crunch is their valuation is 4 billion, but they didn't say how much it's pretty good. How much money they actually got out of that. You know?
Ant Pruitt (01:58:56):
So, you know, I don't hear as much chatter about clubhouse, but there are a couple photographers that I talk to fairly regularly and they still do their little events really pretty, you know like every
Leo Laporte (01:59:09):
Do people show up.
Ant Pruitt (01:59:11):
Yeah. Apparently they keep doing
Leo Laporte (01:59:12):
Them. Yeah.
Ant Pruitt (01:59:14):
I uninstall that. I, I don't, I haven't heard a word I'm participate in it, but some of the photographers that I talk to, they still go in every week hosting, whatever they're hosting or they participated in one, that's hosted by somebody else. Like the, you know, it's just a community based kind of thing. So I mean, it may not be the talk of the town like this catch you a peppy, tick the talk. But apparently there's still being used.
Leo Laporte (01:59:41):
Yeah. Everyone I know who used clubhouses now switched over to Twitter spaces equally worthless, but okay, fine. By the way. So Jack hoop, speaking of which Jack, where was it? Here is this? Yeah, I have it is this Jack's sick. So Jack was trying to be on spaces. Look what happened here. He goes, can't seem to load or join the space. I'm most to host now it's it's blank. If Jack can't figure out how to do it, by the way, maybe part of the problem is it's got the old name of his company square maybe. Well that's still the brand. It's it's still square. It's not block, but the brand I saw commercial. Yeah. So is he the square head or the block head? Well, both boss. So it's blockhead.
Ant Pruitt (02:00:23):
He's boss ask Lucy.
Leo Laporte (02:00:25):
He's both. We'll try to do it another time. Then he says, somebody says, what's what you get for killing fleets. <Laugh> <laugh> to which he replies. Karma's a B a
Ant Pruitt (02:00:38):
Plate.
Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
Wow. <laugh> that's a hot thread. Have you, so have you used B real? No, I saw that and I was so tempted to download it. Then I forgot. And <laugh> so no it's a new social app. It's boring. According to the New York times and the New York times is on it. By the way, it's boring in a good way. Once a day at an unpredictable time, be real notifies its users. They have two minutes to post a pair of pictures. The pictures are from both cameras. So the front and the back. So if you're in a messed up room or whatever, that's what they're gonna get. Oh,
Ant Pruitt (02:01:19):
Somebody's really boring.
Leo Laporte (02:01:20):
This, you should do this ant. Yeah, it it's gotten some attention lately. Yeah. It's it's French. They're based in Paris. So I guess it's pronounced Kabe read founded in 2020. It's been around for two years by April of this year. Oh 7.4 million installs. According to Apptopia. I have, I think, I remember seeing this when it came out raised about 30 million adventure funding last year. You know why? Because Bitcoin's been down <laugh> so they had to find somewhere else to put their money. I'm
Jeff Jarvis (02:01:57):
Seeing some, some stories right now. Wondering whether, whether Coinbase is gonna go bankrupt.
Leo Laporte (02:02:01):
Well they're not, but they had to put in their filing because it's a requirement of the S C what would happen if they went bankrupt? So Coinbase is an exchange, a Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency exchange where a lot of people store, and this would be the mistake you'd be making store their crypto there using custodial wallet. You should have a wallet you own, because
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:26):
Like you could forget like yours. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:02:28):
Yeah. Well at least I have it
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:32):
Have is a, is a relative verb there.
Leo Laporte (02:02:34):
All I have to do is sit down and remember the password and by the way, there's not
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:38):
Hypnosis.
Leo Laporte (02:02:40):
It'll come back to me. It's not a big deal, but really the,
Jeff Jarvis (02:02:43):
Especially now just the value is way down,
Leo Laporte (02:02:46):
Honestly. Yeah. It's down to $28,000. It's lost a sign. You like more than half of its value over the last six months or something. That's bad. Yeah. It's it's but that's fine. That's why I have met Bitcoin. If I had remembered the password, I wouldn't have any, I would've sold it when it was five bucks and said, Hey, I'm rich. I got 80 bucks. But instead I have it now that's all that matters. And I'm gonna have it for a long time. But if you gave so point being, if you used a custodial wallet anywhere, that's problem, number one, custodial wallets have been stolen in the past. If you had a custodial wallet with Mac Cox, bye by Bitcoin. But problem number two in their S E C filing Coinbase pointed out. If we, if we were to go bankrupt, you would then be one of our creditors <laugh> and, and probably at a pretty, pretty low on the list low. So in other words, if they go bankrupt, good luck getting your Bitcoin out of them. This is the thing is if, if,
Mike Masnick (02:03:51):
If they were to go bankrupt, it would probably be because Bitcoin is worth so little that,
Leo Laporte (02:03:55):
That you, you wouldnt care. They'd be fine with it. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (02:03:59):
But Ethereum, Mike Ethereum is the future.
Leo Laporte (02:04:01):
They say, we're not gonna go bankrupt. That's not the, we we're required to state what would happen, which is probably a good thing to know. Yeah. Moral of that story is don't put all your coins in any custodial wallet. If you wanna sell coins, transfer them over, sell 'em get the money or you wanna buy other stuff to what's
Jeff Jarvis (02:04:20):
A wallet that he, a mortal human being can actually do.
Leo Laporte (02:04:22):
There's lots of B wallet. You hold on your computer or on your phone or with meta mask is a popular. Yeah. I use the, I use the, the, basically the reference design from the Bitcoin foundation, their original Bitcoin wallet. It's perfectly good. John says Elum, but anyway, if you, if you hold your own wallet, then you don't have to worry. If you let somebody else hold your wallet and they, and they lose it. Yeah. They're, they're, they're the hardware wallets now as well. That's right. So that's right. Yeah. I think there's plenty of ways to do that. People who are serious start to get a, all a wallet is, is a number by the way. It's just your, it's just a random phrase, your long account number, which I, you know, you know, anyway, I protected with a random phrase.
Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
<Laugh> nice random mistake. Yeah. You wanna buy the house where Facebook was created. This is the beautiful San Jose mansion for the first time since it's construction construction, nearly 25 years ago, it is for sale. What it's in what mountain view? Where is it? Is Silicon valley somewhere? Losal, Altos never been up for only ever been up for rent since 2004, six bedrooms, four and a half baths. Students love it. 19 year old, mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz rented it along with 24 year old Sean Parker. That's where they were when they when they, when they created, well, the Facebook took off, I guess they created at Harvard how much mm-hmm now? How much would you pay? It's like, what was, you said, what was the square footage again? Oh, it's big. It's like it's just six bedrooms or something.
Leo Laporte (02:06:09):
Oh, six bedrooms. Yeah. Six bedrooms, four and a half baths. I don't see the square footage asking price 5.3 million. Oh, I was gonna say seven. No, here is from the land lady. The first deposit check written by mark Zuckerberg for the lease of the house. Their rent was 5,500 a month. So he gave him, he gave her two months rent. Nice handwriting, mark <laugh> but she's got the autograph. I noticed she still has the check. That's good. Look at that. There's a beautiful sun room at Casa, Dave Facebook. <Laugh> wow. It's actually a pretty big house for Los Altos and that's an expensive area. 3000 square feet. You can get the whole crew in there. Ain't yeah. Yeah. It'd be good. You could put the pods in wouldn't wouldn't have much anything else in there, but we'd be in there. Well mean, well, maybe they'd leave the sign that says cat, you know, or is that eat might be eat. I don't know. I can't tell. Welcome to pound town. <Laugh> somehow I don't think there was a lot of that going on, to be honest with you. Look at that beautiful, beautiful home. Oh man. There's the shower. Yeah. Where mark Zuckerberg. Bathed and first discover shower shoes. That's good. There's a gazebo Outback. That's fancy fancy house. Los Alto's a very nice area.
Jeff Jarvis (02:07:39):
And the movie, there was a swimming pool. Doesn't look like there's
Leo Laporte (02:07:41):
Actually one. Oh yeah. You're right. So much for the movie. See, I told you that movie was full of it. Meta has its own retail store. I might have to make, we would have to do a field trip, aunt, you and me, the meta retail store just opened in Berlingame California. What would you buy? If you went to the meta retail store,
Ant Pruitt (02:08:06):
What would sir, we can take much better field trips. You know that right?
Leo Laporte (02:08:09):
They have, what would they have? There it is. That's what they have. They have some portals, they have the quest and you can go in there and play supernatural on the quest while people stare at you.
Ant Pruitt (02:08:24):
People love the portal though, right?
Leo Laporte (02:08:30):
Portals. Yeah. I mean, if you don't mind Facebook, the
Ant Pruitt (02:08:32):
Grandparents.
Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
Yeah. Yeah. The grandparents like it. I had, I bought the original portal and really never found any use for it. So I let Burke take it apart, which means it's no longer functioning.
Ant Pruitt (02:08:41):
Yeah. It's gone. It's gone.
Leo Laporte (02:08:43):
It's gone. Anything else? I will let, I will let you an and Mike, Masick our great guest and Jeff Jarvis said, tell me, is there anything else that you want to talk about from this long list? I'm not gonna do the change log. We, we did the change log. Oh, that's fine. We saw, I
Jeff Jarvis (02:09:01):
Think Facebook is now. Facebook is saying they're gonna not give as much money to news publishers cuz screw it. We don't need 'em and
Leo Laporte (02:09:07):
We're oh, I'm sorry. Does that affect you? No, no,
Jeff Jarvis (02:09:13):
No. Okay.
Ant Pruitt (02:09:15):
Where was, what was the story? I saw something about,
Leo Laporte (02:09:17):
Go ahead. An and then Mike,
Ant Pruitt (02:09:20):
It, I'm trying to find that. I remember seeing a headline about TikTok taking over surpassing YouTube or, or
Leo Laporte (02:09:27):
Yeah, that was up there or YouTube. It is pass it, but you know, that's that's yeah, it's gonna corn. E-Marketer here's the graph TikTok users will spend more time this year on TikTok than YouTubers will spend on YouTube. And the black is the rabbit hole. The black is TikTok net ad revenues, which are now or predicted to be $11 billion in 20, 24 currently five point, well expected to be 5.96. So not, not, you know, some somewhere it's a little bit less than podcasts. Not, no, <laugh> no, not at all. Not at all. What's the red percent change percent of digital ad spending. They got like 3.5% of total digital ad spend digital ad spend is on the on the up and up.
Ant Pruitt (02:10:25):
Well, I mean, people spend a lot of time on TikTok because it's 60 seconds or less. Yeah. It's quick YouTubers. The, the prominent YouTubers are doing their videos a lot more work most of the time at 10 minutes, a clip a lot more. More. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:10:40):
Mike, what was your pick?
Mike Masnick (02:10:42):
I, I was going to, to point out the Josh Holly copyright bill.
Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
All right, Mr. Holly has decided that if Disney is gonna be woke and you know, that's the worst insult Josh, Holly can give anybody, then they don't deserve this, you know, long copyright. So he's, this is a, you call it a laughably stupid copyright term reduction bill where's Sonny bono when he, when we need him
Mike Masnick (02:11:13):
<Laugh> yeah, yeah. So this, this is the thing where it's like, you know, I, I've probably spent two and a half decades fighting against long copyright and, and nobody has ever introduced a bill to shorten copyright until now. And it has to be done by Josh Holly for the worst, most ridiculous reasons. <Laugh> in the most impossible way. It is very much a, a monkey paw kind of situation where, you know, I, I, I probably would've supported almost anyone coming up with, with a law that would reduce copyright back to 56 years, which is what, what he's doing, but he has done it in a way that is so clearly and ridiculously unconstitutional would never stand up to any kinda scrutiny.
Leo Laporte (02:11:54):
But he probably knows that, right. He's he's actually, oh yeah. All Evans of the contrary, a very smart, well educated guy.
Mike Masnick (02:12:01):
He he's an extremely well educated guy and is, you know, and, and literally calls himself a constitutional scholar. Yeah. You know, he clerked for, for the Supreme court, you know, he knows that this is not how any of this works. And it's clear that, you know, the bill, he has no intention of the bill actually passing. No, he just needs to sort of play
Leo Laporte (02:12:18):
It's good for the base bad base. He's plucking, plucking the strings. But,
Mike Masnick (02:12:22):
But it's, it's so frustrating that I had to spend all this time sort of explaining why this bill, that conceptually, I would love to see a bill that actually well,
Leo Laporte (02:12:30):
For years, you and I, and everybody else have been bemoaning the copy because every time Mickey mouse's copyright comes up for expiration and it, for years, it was sunny bono who would do do this. They would extend the term of copyright to protect Disney's assets, including most importantly, Mickey mouse. And that, that would just happen like clockwork every, every 18 years or something. What is the, what is the current copyright term?
Mike Masnick (02:12:58):
So it, well, it <laugh> that that's not so easy to say, but what I will say is that Mickey mouse will, will the original Mickey mouse, which is the Steamboat Willy version of Mickey mouse will go into the public domain. January 1st, 20, 24. We are less than two years away
Leo Laporte (02:13:13):
From unless sunny bono comes back from the dead and extends it.
Mike Masnick (02:13:18):
There, there is, there appears to be very little appetite. Oh, good. You know, the one thing I am thankful for is finally that nobody seems to be even Disney seems to have given up on the idea yeah. Of continuing to extend,
Leo Laporte (02:13:29):
They got star wars and Marvel. They don't need Mickey mouse anymore.
Mike Masnick (02:13:33):
They they're, they're in, in good shape with
Leo Laporte (02:13:35):
The wait, wait till the Luke, you know, Luke Skywalker copyright starts to come up for duke <laugh>
Mike Masnick (02:13:41):
There is a lot of time for
Leo Laporte (02:13:42):
That. Yeah. So it which it would, the original term was 14 years with 14 years renewable in 1831, it went to 28, 28 mm-hmm <affirmative> it's like, what is it? 56. It it's very, does it vary on the kind of work? Is that the problem with same?
Mike Masnick (02:14:01):
No. the, the issue right now is that that older works are sort of under different rules than the newer works because we had the, the 1976 copyright act, which went into effect in 1978 and sort of changed the rules. And, and then there's like a whole bunch of issues with kind of different types of works. But effectively right now we're at what is it? Life, life plus 70. The Is what current copyright that's
Leo Laporte (02:14:24):
Absurd. Yes. It's absurd. Yes
Mike Masnick (02:14:27):
It is. And, and, you know, what's, what's more absurd honestly, than, than the, the term is the fact that it used to be again until 1978, that in order to get copyright, you had to register it. And so most people didn't register their, their works at all. Right, right. And so those works were, were not covered by copyright. And then in 19 with 1976 hack, we changed it so that everything is effectively, automatically given a copyright. So we went from an opt in system to not even an opt out because you, you actually cannot opt out the, the thing, the works get copyright. You can, you can issue a waiver or a, you know, creative comments, license, which is effectively a waiver of your copyright rights. And, and that is bizarre. And we went from a, a time where, you know, right before that it was 56 years, it was 28 and 28 and you had to renew.
Mike Masnick (02:15:14):
And, and I think I put in the article that, you know, if you look at, you know, most people didn't review, almost nobody reviewed the only people who did review were the motion picture industry, which is like the, the main industry that Holly targets, you know, the retroactive nature of Holly's bill only applies to companies in the motion picture industry <laugh>. And, and only if they're only if their market cap is above $150 billion and they have a Florida amusement park. Yeah. So it, it basically, you know, I think it only, I was trying to figure out who it impacted, and I think it only impacts Disney and possibly NBC universal. And that's it. <Laugh>. And so it's, it is God
Leo Laporte (02:15:55):
I'm kind of rooting for this law, but as you say, it is blatantly unconstitutional because, and here's your term of the weak kids. You cannot pass a law. That's targeting a specific individual that is called a bill of a Tainer. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. A bill exactly of a Tainer is your term of the week for this week. And is unco. It's actually a violation of the constitution article one, section nine clause three, no bill of entertainer or ex post facto law shall be passed. It's kind of ex expos facto too. Right. Kind got two strikes against it. <Laugh> yeah. Yes. Well, is it retroactive?
Mike Masnick (02:16:36):
Yeah. It, the retroactive ex expos facto is a little bit different than retroactive.
Leo Laporte (02:16:41):
Oh, okay.
Mike Masnick (02:16:42):
The ex expos facto is basically saying something that, that you, that was lawful when you did it becomes unlawful. Right. And then, and then they can go back. So there is a retroactive aspect to it, but I don't know if, if removing copyright would've
Leo Laporte (02:16:54):
Copyright breaking the law. It's not, there's no law that broke here.
Mike Masnick (02:16:58):
The issue. Well I mean, that gets tricky too. I mean, there is the, the takings issue also, which is that the, the fifth amendment prevents takings and people have long argued that if you were to, to take away a copyright,
Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
You've taken it, then the,
Mike Masnick (02:17:12):
Yeah, you're taking it. You're taking private property and therefore the government would have to compensate you for that. Yeah. I, I, there are actually arguments against that, but that's getting really deep in the weights that we don't, we don't
Leo Laporte (02:17:23):
Need Josh, Holly doesn't care. He knows no one is gonna vote for it. All it takes is a call from NBC universal and they're gonna go, well, screw that. And he just, but he's, he got the press release and he got the article. What he really wanted the article detector. That's what he really wanted. And he got it. Congratulations, Josh. Holly, you got Mike Masick to write about you. Well done. <Laugh> Jeff, did you have any last
Jeff Jarvis (02:17:47):
Yes, I do. Yes I do. Because last week, thanks to Glen Fleishman and me, you got some magnificent collectible art right there on the table. And I wanna follow up this week with another fine opportunity for more art. If you go to my pick, which is line 1 92, I just saw this cuz I, cuz I was, you know, I go to Twitter when I'm not supposed to. And I found the taco bell still life.
Leo Laporte (02:18:13):
It's so beautiful.
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:15):
A taco bell still life. You could get a, a signed copy
Leo Laporte (02:18:19):
Of that. That's so beautiful
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:21):
For a mirror of $60.
Leo Laporte (02:18:23):
Oh, that's not bad. What get to
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:24):
Me is framing.
Leo Laporte (02:18:26):
How would you call this taco bell? Is it, I don't see taco bell. There's a crunch wrap
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:31):
Taco.
Leo Laporte (02:18:31):
There's some nacho cheese sauce. There's yeah. There's the crispy things. And look at this drink a fine green drink of some sort. Who's the say he also
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:41):
Hass if you prefer
Leo Laporte (02:18:43):
Do taco of your
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:44):
No, no, that's the true. That's the, that's the double taco. I think only taco bell
Leo Laporte (02:18:48):
Has. How do we know it's taco bell? The
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:50):
Logo on the drink cap drink is definitely taco bell.
Leo Laporte (02:18:54):
That's taco bell all the time. You know, really? He recognizes, he spent a lot of time here. Now the,
Jeff Jarvis (02:18:58):
The big Mac is quite a piece of art as well. You might prefer
Leo Laporte (02:19:01):
Does Noah barrier also do that? Oh yes.
Jeff Jarvis (02:19:04):
Go back to go, go to the
Leo Laporte (02:19:06):
He's. One of the great artists of our time. There you go conference there. I was
Jeff Jarvis (02:19:10):
Right below.
Leo Laporte (02:19:11):
Except every time I saw it I'd want a big Mac. There's a Chipotle bur. So this guy, by the way, just want you to know he does have an MFA. It says so on his website and
Jeff Jarvis (02:19:21):
He also does MFTs. He's an MFA of
Leo Laporte (02:19:23):
MF MFA. Oh, get an MFT from there's MF.
Jeff Jarvis (02:19:27):
The back in cheese. I'm not so crazy about
Leo Laporte (02:19:28):
That broken egg. I like his art actually. Yeah, it is McDonald's and trader bark bouquet in, in, in oil, 12 by nine. These are big. These are nice big prints. Look up. You got yeah. Yeah. These are beautiful sun flash.
Jeff Jarvis (02:19:42):
Well, those are the, those are the oil, which you can't get anywhere. They're all sold. But if you go to the
Leo Laporte (02:19:47):
Side, prince, you, you clay print of it. Oh, you get a print. We should get a fun Fey cupcake for Ms. Higginbotham Higgin, the queen of funfetti. Wow. Popcorn and M and Ms. Onion. I like this guy. You know what? Yeah. He's I would buy this if I, and this shows what an idiot I am. I would invest in this fine art. I
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:08):
Would, yeah. I get the oil on
Leo Laporte (02:20:10):
Too. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:11):
The drama of whiskey
Leo Laporte (02:20:13):
Drama whiskey, a wee, a whiskey. Will you like it? What is that? Somebody. No, that's not it. Where is it? I'm going down. It's there. If you
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:21):
Go go the, oh No, there's another one. Where are there's a couple on there. Oh, there. So go to sign. Print
Leo Laporte (02:20:28):
Guy likes his black as brown liquor, right? Oh my God go.
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:31):
The up there you stairs down. There you go. There. That's the
Leo Laporte (02:20:33):
One. Ooh. It's good stuff. That is the amp Pruitt sold. Yep. This guy sells a lot of his work actually.
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:39):
Yeah. He also has that FFT create my own,
Leo Laporte (02:20:42):
I guess would want an NFT of this?
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:46):
I don't know.
Leo Laporte (02:20:47):
I can't. I just give him, I guess if you like a guy, give him some money, but
Jeff Jarvis (02:20:51):
So if the, if the floor price of an NFT, like the let's see here, the gummy bears. No, lemme see the, the, the no, let's lost
Leo Laporte (02:21:00):
NFT. Open C
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:01):
There's jelly beans. Let's see. It's 3.33.
Leo Laporte (02:21:05):
Does that mean painting?
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:06):
Actual human that's
Leo Laporte (02:21:08):
3.3, three E. I don't know what that is.
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:11):
So that's worth about 25 cents now.
Leo Laporte (02:21:13):
No, it's worth doing that. Oh, I like the gummy bears that the, yeah, the bids are low on this. This is a really good opportunity here to get yourself a nothing, something
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:22):
You can't frame.
Leo Laporte (02:21:23):
<Laugh> I own that. You know,
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:26):
You, I own that cinnamon roll right there. Somewhere,
Leo Laporte (02:21:31):
Somewhere.
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:32):
You can, you can add it to your wallet and then lose the password. <Laugh> perfect.
Leo Laporte (02:21:38):
I wonder if not knowing the password, I could add things to the wallet and just they'd be really safe.
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:45):
<Laugh> cause they don't exist anyway. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
It'd be really safe in there. It's a good idea. It's
Jeff Jarvis (02:21:52):
A good idea. That
Leo Laporte (02:21:54):
Grilled cheese looks good enough to eat, but you can't cuz it's an NFT. I'm gonna take a break and then we are gonna wrap things up with picks of the week.
Jeff Jarvis (02:22:03):
Oh, I thought those are the picks of the week. Oh, sorry. All right.
Leo Laporte (02:22:06):
I have not. I have not wrapped things up.
Jeff Jarvis (02:22:09):
I see that's right. Okay. This
Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
Is my pick. Get off
Jeff Jarvis (02:22:12):
On Twitter and pay attention is to jar.
Leo Laporte (02:22:14):
<Laugh> our show today brought to you literally by cash fly our content delivery network. How do we know cash fly is amazing. I've been using 'em for more than 10 years. They solved a big problem. When we first started doing podcasts, so many people were downloading them. It was impractical to have it from the website. We couldn't afford that. It was too slow. Matt Levine from cash fly called me. He said, Hey, put it on cash fly. We've got 50 points of presence. All of the world, everybody downloading your audio. And now video is gonna be getting it from a server near them. It's gonna be fast, reliable. And I have to say, I can vouch for it. It has been. Now you can deliver your video, live, stream it with cash, fly, making your content infinitely. Scalable. You can live in hours, not days with sub one second latency.
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Mike Masnick (02:25:38):
Yeah, I, I was actually debating cuz I have a few things, but I'll come. You could
Leo Laporte (02:25:41):
Do all of them. I'm not, I'm fine. We're not in a hurry.
Mike Masnick (02:25:45):
<Laugh> all right. Well I I'll see, but I, I, I have something that, that I, I I have unfortunately probably for my wallet gone deep into the, the world of mechanical keyboards
Leo Laporte (02:25:57):
Recently. Oh yeah, baby. Oh,
Mike Masnick (02:26:00):
Bless your heart. <Laugh> and, and I was, I was asking people on Twitter for, for some thoughts and advice and in particular, on, on the difficulty of learning to use an ortho linear keyboard, which is where instead of staggered like a regular keyboard, all the keys are straight up and down. Oh. And amazingly and wonderfully someone on Twitter said that they had one that they could, they had never learned to use and said that they would send it to me. Nice free of charge. And so I got it. And, and about a week ago I started learning and I'll hold it up here how to use this, this
Leo Laporte (02:26:38):
H
Mike Masnick (02:26:39):
Keyboard. And it is the most amazing thing. I, I love this thing. I, I, I, I can, can't
Leo Laporte (02:26:46):
Quite makes it ortho linear. It's not the swoopy doopy thing. It's that's ergonomic.
Mike Masnick (02:26:51):
I just, that the, the the keys are like one on top of each other directly. If you look at your keyboard, they're, they're slightly, there's
Leo Laporte (02:26:59):
Stagger. They're staggered. Yeah. They're di they're in diagonals. So these, so they're straight up and down. It's like a grid, right.
Mike Masnick (02:27:07):
And so they say, that's, that's actually better for your fingers and it is more ergonomic, but, but there is a learning curve. And though it, it, it was actually much quicker than I expected. Like I heard people said it took them like two months of regular usage to get back up to their former typing speed. And for me it was, it was three days of 30 minutes a day that I just sat there. Wow. Like just type, you know, I was doing typing tests for 30 minutes and, and literally, I, I had a lot of trouble with the letter C and the letter B, and then, you know, I was always getting like the, the keys next to it. And then somewhere on that third
Leo Laporte (02:27:44):
Day, it's so weird. Cuz it's just slightly off, right? Yes. So it's, if, if you're doing, you'd probably learn the Devor act layout faster <laugh> than you would learn ortho linear because it's close, but no cigar is that it?
Mike Masnick (02:27:56):
Yeah. But, but once yeah, but once you get it, it, it clicked. And I tried yesterday then to go back to my old, regular staggered keyboard and, and at first I was then pressing the wrong buttons on that one. This one is particularly weird because it's also, it's a, it's a tiny keyboard. So like the there's no number row. And, and you have to learn to use like layers. Yeah. And like the shift key is down on the bottom instead of over on the side. Oh.
Mike Masnick (02:28:22):
And, and so
Leo Laporte (02:28:23):
Are you a touch typist?
Mike Masnick (02:28:25):
I, yeah, I am. I am. And so it, but you know, I'm, I'm almost there, I'm almost as good with it and it feels so much nicer to use. Like it's, it's hard to explain
Leo Laporte (02:28:35):
That. That's interesting,
Mike Masnick (02:28:36):
But I, I am now kind of obsessed with it. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:28:40):
Wow. So there is a website ol kb.com where they sell ortho linear keyboards from plank. There, there are a bunch, there are many. Well, who makes that one?
Mike Masnick (02:28:54):
This one, this one is keyboard
Leo Laporte (02:28:58):
Search up
Mike Masnick (02:28:59):
Keyboard keyboard with an IO at the
Leo Laporte (02:29:02):
Endio a keyboard for serious. Wait a minute. I want the wooden one. Look at that Walnut.
Mike Masnick (02:29:09):
I have that, that fancy wooden one.
Leo Laporte (02:29:10):
That's pretty. Huh? So there's that's the one you got the Atreus
Mike Masnick (02:29:14):
That's the Atrius is the one that I got.
Leo Laporte (02:29:17):
Huh? So maybe I'll try it. I that's interesting.
Mike Masnick (02:29:22):
There, there is a learning curve. Yeah. If, if you want me to, to walk you through the learning curve, <laugh> I've done the research. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:29:30):
You have, you have tips for people who are learning this.
Mike Masnick (02:29:33):
I mean, there's, there's so much and you, you,
Leo Laporte (02:29:35):
Is there a Mavis beacon for ortho, ortho, linear keyboard. <Laugh>
Mike Masnick (02:29:40):
Different people have different, different recommendations. Honestly, but like if, if you open up my YouTube right now, it's like all keyboard, like mechanical keyboard. That's
Leo Laporte (02:29:50):
That's great. You have gone down some rabbit hole of, of do there. That's amazing. Very deep. Very deep. Yeah. How interesting. I, I had never heard of these and I like keyboards. I'm very interesting keyboards. Do you, I mean, that's the one you got, cuz some guy gave it to you.
Mike Masnick (02:30:07):
Some someone sent it to me, but I'm, I'm the one I'm really looking at is one called the moon Lander. So if you do a search on moon Lander keyboard, you'll see, this is like the ultimate. This is like people, lots of people. This is like their dream keyboard. But it is, it is an ortho linear keyboard. It's also a split keyboard. It it's also a bunch of other things, but that that's like the ultimate team
Leo Laporte (02:30:31):
Keyboard. What the, what <laugh> oh my, we almost made it in one tweet. Oh my what the, what, what? That I didn't buy something. Yeah. Yeah. I almost made it through and you didn't buy something. Yeah. Came close. He was gonna buy. I thought, I thought I'd taco bell print there. I, yeah, no, but now I'm thinking I want whatever the hell this is, this looks like it's alive. Dude. Look at that. What the, what? Well, but for those of us who spent a lot of time typing, my problem is if I did that, then a laptop would be impossible. Right. I mean, cuz then you're going back and forth.
Mike Masnick (02:31:05):
So, so this, this is, this was my concern. This is why I raised it on Twitter. Yeah. Was, was how difficult is, is to go back and forth. Yeah. Because if I learn this, am I going to forget? And so people told me no, like people, some people, it depends on who you talk to. Some people say it does become difficult to go back, back and forth. And that's why like I've been going back and forth each day. <Laugh> just to see if I can, if I can keep it. And then, you know, the thing is honestly like with, with, with, with the, this, the Atreus the tiny one that I have, it's so small. I kind of feel like I could still like, just bring it with my laptop if I
Leo Laporte (02:31:38):
Go anywhere. What kind of switches on the Atreus <laugh> so, so let's get into switches. Now my friend, here you go.
Mike Masnick (02:31:48):
How much switch,
Leo Laporte (02:31:49):
Just know we get these charges. These aren't horribly expensive. I mean 365 bucks. Right. You know, I actually bought a old IBM Omni key north star you know, buckling, keyboard keyboard, cuz I remember that nice feeling. And that was about that expensive. It was a refurbished model. So that's not out of, out of the it's
Mike Masnick (02:32:13):
It's not crazy. You can spend a lot more on keep,
Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
Do you like clicky or not?
Mike Masnick (02:32:18):
I, I, I am not a fan of, of clicky, but, but people who love clicky love clicky.
Leo Laporte (02:32:22):
Yes. What made you want to explore this Mike?
Mike Masnick (02:32:26):
So <laugh> so what's what started is I I sort of have spent a lot of time trying to optimize my, my travel situation and my ability to, to work on from anywhere. And, and like with a portable screen and different stands and all sorts of stuff. And the one thing that I sort of felt held back by was the keyboard. So I was, I was a, I have, I have a travel ergonomic keyboard that is not a mechanical. That is not a ortho linear. And so I was looking for something better and to see if there was something better than, than the one that I had before. And, and that just sent me down this path, this dangerous, dangerous
Leo Laporte (02:33:04):
Path. Oh, it's such a dangerous path. Yeah. He said travel
Mike Masnick (02:33:07):
And I thought he
Leo Laporte (02:33:08):
Meant key travel. Yeah.
Mike Masnick (02:33:11):
Sorry. Sorry. I mean, there is, there is a, that is a whole debate as well.
Leo Laporte (02:33:15):
<Laugh> oh, I know. It's <laugh>
Mike Masnick (02:33:18):
Once you start going deep on like the different kinds of switches and how much force and where the activation is and
Leo Laporte (02:33:25):
Yeah, dude.
Mike Masnick (02:33:26):
Yeah. I, I, I have, I have now watched like 20 minute videos that are just people pressing, pressing different key switches.
Leo Laporte (02:33:33):
<Laugh> oh my God. So have you started to get sleep again? Oh my God. So are you saving up? Well, I have, I actually have
Mike Masnick (02:33:44):
Where sitting here. I have a yeah, I am actually, but I have a, a
Leo Laporte (02:33:48):
A, oh yeah, this is just a cherry will send you this. Yeah, yeah. We have one of those. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Masnick (02:33:51):
So you can, you can test. So did you
Leo Laporte (02:33:53):
Go with the cherries or those people are now saying, oh no cherry that's no,
Mike Masnick (02:33:57):
No, no. So I, I, the ones, the ones on this keyboard are the kale, kale,
Leo Laporte (02:34:01):
Kale. Everybody's saying Kale's the thing to do now.
Mike Masnick (02:34:04):
The kale ones are pretty good.
Leo Laporte (02:34:05):
It's kale. What kind of Kas? Just outta curiosity.
Mike Masnick (02:34:08):
These are, these are box Browns. Okay. So it's a, it's a tactile, the box is protected so that I could spill food and
Leo Laporte (02:34:16):
Not have food. Nice. But, and then when you go to your laptop, you don't feel a disadvantaged. You don't get weird.
Mike Masnick (02:34:24):
I mean, again, I just got this a week ago, so I haven't, I haven't really done that much with it, but again, like it's so small, like I really feel like I could, I could just pack it with the laptop.
Leo Laporte (02:34:32):
Just take it, just hook it up. Yeah. Use it everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. <laugh> okay. You know what that means Jeff Jarvis's number is next. Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis (02:34:45):
Well, I was gonna do something. I was gonna tell you that El Salvador was going to go bankrupt because of Bitcoin. But instead,
Leo Laporte (02:34:50):
By the way, yeah, they tied their, they made their currency. The Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. And now they're expected to default because it's dropped so far in price. That's terrible. Terrible news.
Jeff Jarvis (02:35:03):
Okay. So I just put up a story. I think this is the case. I think it might be from Glen Fleishman on Twitter. I just, I just put it in the chat. I think this guy's writing a book about keyboard history.
Leo Laporte (02:35:16):
How too geek the Cordy keyboard is Tech's biggest unsolved mystery by Ben, Jay Edwards. Hmm. Or Ben. Interesting. Yeah. You know, once you start becoming a keyboard geek, it really is a bottomless pit of despair.
Mike Masnick (02:35:34):
Oh I'm I'm I'm, I'm scared. I'm through the looking
Leo Laporte (02:35:37):
Glass. Yeah. You're through the looking glass. You are buddy boy. <Laugh> Jeff Jarvis's lobby at his school, the wonderful town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark graduate school of journalism at the city, university of New York has a collection of typewriters under glass. They're
Jeff Jarvis (02:35:53):
Quite
Leo Laporte (02:35:53):
Amazing. Yeah. Yes. Quite beautiful.
Jeff Jarvis (02:35:55):
My favorite is named the Bing. That's where Microsoft runs its entire search engine
Leo Laporte (02:36:00):
Out of there. I see you have a machine that goes Bing so well. Okay. So that's one, but what else?
Jeff Jarvis (02:36:06):
I said I'm done. I'm
Leo Laporte (02:36:07):
Done. You're done. I got it. We did the taco bell still life.
Jeff Jarvis (02:36:11):
I did taco bell. I did El Salvador and I did the keyboard
Leo Laporte (02:36:14):
History guy. Perfect. Perfect. Aunt Pruitt pick of the week
Ant Pruitt (02:36:21):
For me is don't give up, saw this story yesterday or day before and is track and field related. But I love it. Little kids running track and there was an unfortunate event. If you click on it, there was a video, it was an unfortunate event, but the finish was outstanding. So
Leo Laporte (02:36:40):
She starts, the race, loses her shoe at the starting line, runs back, puts it on, then runs as fast as she can run her little legs pumping, going fast, fast, fast <laugh> and ends up winning the race. Yeah. That's kinda like Kentucky Derby.
Jeff Jarvis (02:36:57):
That's a Kentucky Derby. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:36:58):
Yeah. Wow. Here she comes. Come on girl. And
Ant Pruitt (02:37:03):
You could do, and it's funny to hear her parents and or family in the background just sort of rooting her on and they were like, wait a minute, she's gonna win this thing.
Leo Laporte (02:37:10):
That's hysterical. Geez. That's never ever give up
Ant Pruitt (02:37:16):
And it wasn't even close.
Leo Laporte (02:37:21):
Oh, go girl. <Laugh> wow. That is really, really cute. That is such a
Ant Pruitt (02:37:26):
Great story. That was great. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:37:29):
Up. That was great.
Ant Pruitt (02:37:30):
And I wanted to say congratulations to the squad and family. The hard heads they won their four by 100 meter relay last week. What
Leo Laporte (02:37:42):
The hell aspect ratio was this? What are you using
Ant Pruitt (02:37:46):
That was that? No, that was from someone's phone. So, oh,
Leo Laporte (02:37:49):
Some weird phone. Yeah. It looks like a Polaroid. Okay. <Laugh>
Ant Pruitt (02:37:55):
Okay. But they won last week. They decent times still not,
Leo Laporte (02:37:59):
This is a relay race, huh? Nice.
Ant Pruitt (02:38:01):
Yep. But they got the championship probably 100 qualified for the next meet.
Leo Laporte (02:38:05):
Nice.
Ant Pruitt (02:38:06):
And then hard head. This hardhead at dang
Leo Laporte (02:38:09):
Right here with the, with the the headband there. Yeah. Well look at him. Go he's fast. He just opened that whole thing up, man. He's just not even close. He could have lost his shoe. Yeah. He still would've won. <Laugh> he? Holy
Ant Pruitt (02:38:23):
He and Lil weirdo. They had, that was the NBL lead championships last week and little weirdo. She qualified for the high hurdles. She got 10th place and qualified for the next meet, but she just learned how to do it. Right.
Leo Laporte (02:38:37):
You just taught her how to do it.
Ant Pruitt (02:38:39):
Yep. And she's she's in, she's in, in for a tough one. <Laugh> for sure. But I'm just so happy for her and proud.
Leo Laporte (02:38:46):
So she'sed by the boys. Is she like, oh, if they can do it, I can do it.
Ant Pruitt (02:38:52):
She's her own. Trust me. She's her own.
Leo Laporte (02:38:55):
Does she run track?
Ant Pruitt (02:38:56):
I wanna do something. I'm gonna do it. Nice. No, she just said I'll try it out. Cuz it looks interesting. Nice. That was pretty much it. Wow. And then shout out to the hard head cuz he is now back to back league champion in the hundred meter dash and got a nice feature in the local newspaper
Leo Laporte (02:39:12):
Democrats. That is a beautiful picture. That's great. Eric Castro. I love
Ant Pruitt (02:39:16):
That picture. Mr. Eric Castro shot
Leo Laporte (02:39:18):
That nice
Ant Pruitt (02:39:19):
Shot. He's a local that
Leo Laporte (02:39:21):
Ft of that.
Ant Pruitt (02:39:23):
If you look at there's one on there, I think it's slide number five or number six. You guys might find it interesting or maybe our listeners will no,
Leo Laporte (02:39:36):
That one <laugh>.
Ant Pruitt (02:39:38):
Now
Leo Laporte (02:39:38):
If you
Ant Pruitt (02:39:39):
Read, read the caption. Well describe it and read the caption
Leo Laporte (02:39:42):
All year. I've been worrying about personal records. So I had to write this on my hands at Jacob Pru at 16 or Rancho kata sophomore after winning the boys 100 meter race, it says have fun. I love it. <Laugh>
Ant Pruitt (02:39:57):
Yeah. He wrote that in Palm this hand and I, and I said on Twitter, it, I can't take credit for that because that's
Leo Laporte (02:40:04):
Not what you ever said for two days in your whole life <laugh>
Ant Pruitt (02:40:07):
Well, I mean, but, but, but like two days before that I, I, I had to jump down his throat about his performance and track and his effort and stuff. Cuz he was playing what I call mind checkers.
Leo Laporte (02:40:19):
He was having too much
Ant Pruitt (02:40:20):
Fun sort of, you know, and I was like, dude, you, you you're better than this. And I know you're better than this. And I expect you to continue to be better than this. So I had to do the proverbial foot in the ass is what I said. And he bounced back and went not tough, but
Leo Laporte (02:40:34):
You're tough, man. We're harder. We're hard on those boys. You're tough. It's demo demand,
Ant Pruitt (02:40:40):
Demand for him.
Leo Laporte (02:40:41):
Yeah. That's nice. Well I guess he did have fun breaking the record. That's great. Well thank you everybody. Thank you so much, Mike Masick tech dirt.com. Mike Mike has a great podcast there too. Make sure you listen to that indeed. He is, you know, well, and
Jeff Jarvis (02:41:00):
Not only that do what I do and belong to tech, dirt support Mike, he got rid of all his tracking. He got rid of all the ad stuff, support tech dirty. It is the most important voice out there for digital
Leo Laporte (02:41:12):
Sanity. Boy, I couldn't agree more. Indeed. Absolutely.
Ant Pruitt (02:41:16):
Also send him some Ambien too, so he can sleep at night and stop looking at
Leo Laporte (02:41:20):
Keyboards. It's those loud keyboard clicks keeping him up all night. It's very soothing. It's it's a form of meditation tick. I think my wife would throw me
Ant Pruitt (02:41:31):
Man. Get help, sir. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:41:33):
<Laugh> thank you so great. Always great to have you on Mike. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me guys and, and you know, you're on every week, cuz we're always talking about articles from Tector we're quoting you all, but yes,
Ant Pruitt (02:41:43):
Pretty much
Leo Laporte (02:41:44):
Really, really rock. Appreciate all you do. Thank you, aunt Pruitt, hands on photography. Who's coming up.
Ant Pruitt (02:41:52):
No guest this week. This is just a discussion that I get a lot from people regarding some of their hardware for photo editing and video editing. Nice. So I'm gonna dive into that, but I still wanna call back to last week's episode episode 1 27 I believe is with yeah. Mr. Tell Lloyd the 49ers team photographer is just was
Leo Laporte (02:42:12):
Episode
Ant Pruitt (02:42:13):
Really inspiring,
Leo Laporte (02:42:14):
So exciting. Yeah, really, really
Ant Pruitt (02:42:17):
Exciting. Go check that out.
Leo Laporte (02:42:18):
Yeah. Highly recommended twit.tv/hop episode 1, 2 7, press professor. Jeff Jarvis is the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig Newmark graduate school, Craig journalism at the city university of New York. They do sound tired. The singers have been waiting two hours and 40 minutes. Yeah, they're they're pretty bushed. They're pretty bushed. <Laugh> thank you very much. Jeff buzz machine.com. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twig 2:00 PM. Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern that's 2100 UTC. Every Wednesday you can watch live@livedottwi.tv chat live at IRC, do.tv or in our discord, which is for our club TWI members. If you wanna join club TWI for ad free versions of all of our shows go to twi.tv/club TWI. You can also get the shows at the website, twi.tv/twig after the fact or on the YouTube channel, dedicated to twig or best thing to do subscribe in your favorite podcast client. And you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Thank you everybody for being here. Have a great week. We'll see you next time on twig. Bye. Bye.
Jason Howell (02:43:37):
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. Huyen Tue Dao 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 Twitter.
