This Week in Google 691, 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. Jeff Jarvis is here. Ant Pruitt's here. Stacey's got the day off. But good news, Mathew Ingram from the Columbia Journalism Review is here. Of course, we're gonna talk about what's going on at Twitter. A little bit of inside info on Mastodon, why the leap second is gone, but hellabytes are in or are they out? It's all coming up next on TWiG!

(00:00:38):
This is TWiG This Week in Google. Episode 691 Recorded Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022. Maureen and Babs Tea Room

(00:00:50):
This Week in Google is brought to you by Melissa. Over 10,000 clients worldwide in industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and government. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. And by Eight Sleep for a limited time. Eight Sleep is offering TWIT listeners up to $400 off their sleep fit holiday bundle by visiting eight sleep.com/twit after November 30th. Go to eight sleep.com/twit and check out the pod and look for other exclusive holiday savings. Or save $150 at checkout with their normal offer. And by HPE GreenLake, orchestrated by the experts at cdw. CDW can help you consolidate and manage all your data in one flexible edge to cloud platform to scale and innovate. Learn more at cdw.com/hpe.

(00:01:59):
It's time for twig this week in Google. Oh, I know you've been waiting all week long for this one. It is it's excitement city here at Mastodon Central, joining us filling in for Stacy, who is out this week. Mathew Ingram from the Columbia Journalism Review, who is very much involved in all of this stuff. You see his new Mastodon url, journa.host/MathewI, Hello, Mathew. Hey, great to see you. Sorry about Canada. Thanks for having it. <Laugh>. Yeah, me too. <Laugh>. That's kind of just glad we got in. That's a way, way too generic of a thing. You talk, we're talking about the World Cup, which I am. Actually, this is the first time I've, the words have come outta my mouth cuz I'm so angry at fifa. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And think it's so reprehensible for so many reasons. And I, I'm not, I'm boycotting it, but I did see on Mastodon, I saw a number of Canadians being sad. So I'm sad for you.

Mathew Ingram (00:03:00):
Well, you know, we're just glad to be invited.

Leo Laporte (00:03:03):
Yeah. It's, it's just an honor to be nominated. Yeah. That's Jeff Jarvis Chortling away. Chortle. He is a professor. That's how come he chortles. He's the Leonard Dow professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig. Craig. Craig, Newmark graduate school of journalism of the City University of New York, also on Journa.host. Hello there. Jeff. Hello. Hello, boss. Oh, wait a minute. You've got mastodon.social as you as your That's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:28):
No, that's what I am. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:03:29):
Still am. Yeah. You didn't You wanna move to jo.horse host Hurst? No,

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:34):
I'm not. I'm, I'm just, just hanging there. Just hanging

Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
There. Mastodon.Social is the big one. That's Gans. That, and

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:40):
I think I got four Oh. Before the rest of the world, because it's his.

Leo Laporte (00:03:43):
Yeah, it's his. That was good to see you also, Mr. Ant Pruitt from hands on photography. Hello Ant hello, Mr. Leporte, also community manager at our fabulous club twit Discord. Where you have announced this is, wow, that's fast. They already made a meme <laugh>. Wow. That is fast. That took no time. That took no time. And you said that three minutes ago is on it. Yeah. Unbelievable. You have announced, we have three events coming up. Glenn Fleishman December 15th. He'll be back from Germany, I hope by then. He's in Germany right now with his son. Yes, he will. I had to confirm Stacey Higginbotham's book club. She's gonna do project Hail Mary, we've all read that. I will be there for that January 12th and look at that the week after the Laportes!

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:36):
Inside in the

Leo Laporte (00:04:37):
Ports. Yeah, the ports. It's an inside twit all coming up.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:42):
Le Laport.

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
If you are a Club Twi member, you can also do this. Unlike Twitter, you can mock me on Club Twit <laugh>. Just make sure you put parody in your handle. That's funny. It says, I'm the only one who's expendable at this point. Leo Laporte. Which if you didn't know, I said that might be actually scary, but it's not. It's true.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:02):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
I don't wanna make this. I almost, you know, I, I wanna boycott fifa. I don't wanna talk about the World Cup, and I kind of wanna boycott Elon Musk and Twitter at this point, except we can't news. It's news, right? It's an ongoing

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:20):
A s show.

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:22):
Cluster F.

Leo Laporte (00:05:23):
What's the latest? Should I just go to TwitterIsgoinggreat.com <laugh>. You know what, if you really care about this stuff, just go to that website and you'll you'll always be up to date. Twitter's trust and safety capacities massively reduced. You saw that Yoel Roth left. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And you and, and Jeff, you were saying how great it was that, you know, Yoel's still there and tweeting.

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:47):
He tried as tried as long as he could, but there came a point when you just give up and Yoel's brilliant. I mean, I I I have utmost respect for him.

Leo Laporte (00:05:55):
I think about

Mathew Ingram (00:05:55):
80% of the safety and security team has gone

Leo Laporte (00:05:59):
That's what the Washington Post said. And now they're telling us a story that on the November 10th, the trusted safety team conducted a sick out. But that was before. No, no. I guess it was after Elon took over, but it was last week. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:18):
<Laugh>. How long has it been since he took over? Now? God

Leo Laporte (00:06:21):
No knows, feels like

Ant Pruitt (00:06:23):
Years been almost a month, right?

Leo Laporte (00:06:24):
Oh my God. It was October 27th, I think. I know. Cause all I have to do is look at the Mastodon graph. Something goes

Ant Pruitt (00:06:31):
<Laugh>

Ant Pruitt (00:06:33):
Hockey stick.

Leo Laporte (00:06:35):
So the virtually the entire team, according to the post, dedicated to rooting out covert foreign influence operations was fired or quit. We had an interesting conversation though on Sunday, and I wanna throw this in. Phil Libin was here, CEO, founder of of Evernote. He's also been a venture capitalist. He has his own kind of incubator called All Turtles. It's an AI incubator. Certainly. somebody who knows a lot about running businesses, running large networking teams. He's, he was of the opinion that's very possible that this is this is Elon just building, rebuilding Twitter from, he said, don't give up on it yet. He doesn't believe Twitter will go down or have a major security event. And there have been, in fact, there have been articles now saying, this is what Elon did at Tesla,

Ant Pruitt (00:07:25):
What we said

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:26):
And

Ant Pruitt (00:07:27):
What I said long time ago, game

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:32):
Credit. But,

Mathew Ingram (00:07:33):
But what is rebuilding it as? Like, what's it going to be? Well,

Leo Laporte (00:07:36):
There doesn't seem to be a lot of vision, but Twitter 2.0, maybe the X Everything app. I don't

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:41):
Know. Oh. Oh, come on. Oh, come

Leo Laporte (00:07:43):
On. So

Ant Pruitt (00:07:44):
This is what I don't know about the whole Everything app. I get where he is coming from. I, I don't know if it'll work here, but I still like the idea of someone saying, you know what? This business has not been profitable at all. Let me true. Give it a shot and see if I can make it profitable.

Leo Laporte (00:07:58):
We, none of us.

Ant Pruitt (00:07:59):
But

Jeff Jarvis (00:07:59):
How all the advertisers,

Ant Pruitt (00:08:01):
You know, we may disagree with some of the practices, but at least he has in his mind, I I want to make this business profitable.

Jeff Jarvis (00:08:10):
Yeah. But, but, but Ant, the revenue, you can't have profitable without revenue. And the revenue comes from advertisers. And the advertisers are all leaving because he's driving them out. So, and, and he's driving the sales team out. And without a sales team, you don't have a

Ant Pruitt (00:08:23):
Sales team. But wait a minute, not all of them are leaving because people are still using Twitter, sir. Yeah, I know. She's, everybody's been talking about they're gonna leave. But wait a minute, using it,

Leo Laporte (00:08:30):
Wait a minute. Doesn't, what if he doesn't want be an ad supported service

Mathew Ingram (00:08:35):
In, he's talked about that, that

Leo Laporte (00:08:37):
Too. And, and I have to say you, it's not like anybody would say, oh, Twitter was so well run and so successful. Right. They only had one profitable quarter in 15 years

Mathew Ingram (00:08:48):
Ever. And there were gonna be huge cutbacks, even if he didn't buy it. I mean, they were talking about 25%.

Leo Laporte (00:08:55):
So in 2018, as as Tesla was trying to build the model he had massive layoffs. He micromanaged the company, moved into the factory, spent the night there. He, he, you know, he did something very similar. Talked about, you know, a new mission where you gotta, you know, you know, I don't wanna say the phrase, but he, you know, worked very hard. Yeah. one of his former employees, a senior engineering manager, David deacon, is quoted by the Times saying Musk thrives in an existential circumstances. He quasi creates them to light a fire under everybody. Spacex similar. It's not the look, nobody would say it's the best management style in the world. Nobody, I wouldn't wanna work for it, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, maybe this is what Twitter needs if

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:49):
You pissed everybody off and did that. But I think that, that what he's, I still think that the fundamental strategy here is, is political chaos, because that's what he's really doing. And he doesn't have to do that to do everything else.

Leo Laporte (00:10:01):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, he's really kind of an edge, Lord meme poop poster like this, the, I I, I was, I left Twitter when he did the thing about Master Bader Don. That was, that was enough for me. That's fine. The Nazi thing. But just the other day he posted a picture of a young woman with a scandal clad young. You know what I'm talking about? It was a, it was horrific. It was horrific. What's wrong with this guy? If, if that somebody posted that on any of my sites, I would've banned him immediately.

Mathew Ingram (00:10:37):
It's not just that though. I mean, he's defending all the worst people and he's allowing them all, you know, Marjorie

Leo Laporte (00:10:44):
Taylor Green is back. Donald Trump is his back.

Mathew Ingram (00:10:46):
And I mean, Marjorie Taylor Green is like, is Bugs Bunny compared to some of the people that he's allowing back on this platform?

Jeff Jarvis (00:10:54):
Well, he just, everybody back on. Yeah. That, that, unless you committed a crime, needed one of his stupid non pole polls and said

Leo Laporte (00:11:02):
That what happened did, wasn't he, wait a minute. Wasn't he gonna do a committee? Oh yeah.

Mathew Ingram (00:11:06):
That's, that's he's claiming that that was a deal with advertising groups and they re nagged. And so he's not gonna do it. He

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:15):
Uses, that's the same as

Leo Laporte (00:11:16):
A, he is activists. Like others use Antifa. It is this kind of generic term for people who are un, you know, secretly undermining Twitter. He sounds like a nut.

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:27):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
Okay.

Mathew Ingram (00:11:29):
I don't know if it's in the rundown, but there was a guy who worked at Tesla who talked about how Musk engaged in all this same kind of stuff and how there had to be basically adults around him. So there was a whole group of kind of people just below him who, whose job was to prevent Elon from wrecking everything. Yes. Which Twitter does not have. So maybe they'll get them. I

Jeff Jarvis (00:11:55):
Didn't, I've worked in mobile companies, Mathew. Right. I worked for Matt, Robert Maxwell, who was, who was a nutty mogul. I worked for good moguls. I worked at Hurst. I worked for the New Houses. But when you have a guy like Maxwell yeah. You were constantly in a position of thinking that he was on the edge of doing something horrible. And how do we kind of stop that from happening? Right. And you had definitely seen that dynamic happening.

Leo Laporte (00:12:18):
He according to New York Times, has stopped paying vendors and he travel expenses incurred before he bought the company. Sorry. We're not gonna pay you,

Jeff Jarvis (00:12:26):
Including former employees.

Mathew Ingram (00:12:30):
I think Elon's like his strategy, if I can sum it up, amount it to, I'm gonna buy Twitter and I'm just gonna stir up and I'm gonna, but why, you know, just cause chaos. But why? Cause I think that's, he finds that interesting and amusing. I don't think he actually thinks it's gonna be a great business at all. In fact, my favorite conspiracy theory is he is trying to drive down the value of Twitter so that the bonds are cheaper and then he can buy them.

Ant Pruitt (00:12:59):
Mm-Hmm.

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:00):
<Affirmative>, that's the first, that is the single first time I've heard a sensible strategy.

Leo Laporte (00:13:04):
<Laugh>. Well, it's not, you know what, it's what he did in it could, when he first started acquiring Twitter, he didn't tell anybody he was buying a 9.5 stake percent stake in Twitter. He illegally didn't tell anybody mm-hmm. <Affirmative> so that he could keep the price low. And then he announced he

Ant Pruitt (00:13:19):
Done about that,

Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
And then he announced 54 20, which was a much inflated price, more than he had paid twice what he had paid, which looked like a great strategy at the time. Now he's gonna sell the stock and he is gonna recoup a hundred percent profit. He didn't though <laugh>, he left out that part. It's, look, it's a fascinating soap opera. It's very entertaining. It's sad because Twitter is an important resource.

Mathew Ingram (00:13:45):
I read

Ant Pruitt (00:13:46):
Continues to stay top of mind. And

Leo Laporte (00:13:49):
Is that he like Donald Trump. He just wants to stay top of pop on.

Ant Pruitt (00:13:52):
Right. He's, he's gonna continue to stay top of my, and not us, but normal folks, quote unquote normals are going continue to go over to that platform just to see what

Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
He does. He's talking about, he does say traffic is an all time record.

Ant Pruitt (00:14:06):
And, and and continue to just off over, you

Leo Laporte (00:14:11):
Know, almost don't wanna say this, but he makes Donald Trump look sane because Donald <laugh>, Donald Trump wants to stay in the headlines so he can continue to fundraise.

Ant Pruitt (00:14:20):
Right, right.

Leo Laporte (00:14:22):
So he's got a real, like a sensible motive.

Ant Pruitt (00:14:25):
Yep. Well, you can call it narcissism or

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
Whatever. It just likes the attention

Ant Pruitt (00:14:29):
Right now.

Leo Laporte (00:14:30):
$44 billion to get

Ant Pruitt (00:14:32):
Attention. Attention.

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:33):
Oh, it wasn't

Ant Pruitt (00:14:34):
All, everybody's still using the platform. Yes. There's people leaving, there's brands that decided they're not gonna do it.

Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
Apple

Ant Pruitt (00:14:41):
Has left. There are other brands that are saying, you know what, okay, we're back now. So

Leo Laporte (00:14:45):
CBS left for five seconds, <laugh>. And by the way, the weirdest thing, of course, immediately, Elon post a meme from Broke Back Mountain with CBS telling Twitter, I just can't leave you <laugh>. He's the weirdest meme Lord ever. I mean, he, he belongs on Reddit or for Chan. He doesn't, I don't,

Mathew Ingram (00:15:07):
The interesting thing someone said to me was, you know, with Tesla and SpaceX, he treated people terribly. And his management style was garbage. And the companies were, were terrible. But everybody was united by the goal because there was a vision, you

Leo Laporte (00:15:23):
Know,

Mathew Ingram (00:15:23):
Put put people into space, you know, have a reasonably priced electric car and changed that, that industry. But Twitter, you know, to be frank, there is no goal at the center of it. There's no, what is the goal? It isn't even free speech because he's basically shut down everybody he wants to, whenever he wants to. So free speech, it's just free speech is defined as whatever Elon thinks when he gets up in the morning.

Leo Laporte (00:15:55):
Phil Libin was reluctant to say that Elon was anything less than savvy and a good businessman. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. He, of course, everybody points at Tesla and SpaceX. Others say, well, yeah, but with considerable federal subsidy he succeeded. But they did succeed. You know, both

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:13):
Tesla and SpaceX and federal help. Yep. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
No federal funds coming to Twitter. I don't think. I doubt

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:21):
Well, federal, Russian, federal funds, perhaps

Leo Laporte (00:16:24):
<Laugh>, you think there is some secret thing underneath this? All that we don't know about that wouldn't make it make sense? Cause it doesn't make sense. It does. Just doesn't make sense. No, no,

Mathew Ingram (00:16:33):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:16:33):
It's just crazy, crazy time.

Mathew Ingram (00:16:36):
I, I

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:36):
Do think that there may a political agenda, the chaos agenda. I think that's quite possible. That that's what he's thinking. He's

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
Never, I mean, he didn't used to be a Russian puppet. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:50):
This is where, where Kara Swisher

Leo Laporte (00:16:52):
I don't trust her either.

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:54):
I don't, I don't either. And she, her, she's been on the TV saying, oh, I know Elon. Cuz she knows everybody. And he was actually not this insane, and it's right wing me that brought him down. No, no, no, no. Like, like he

Leo Laporte (00:17:04):
Was put on her

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:05):
Insanity.

Leo Laporte (00:17:06):
Look what's on her Twitter header. She's standing next to Elon on her Twitter matter. She's just as crazy as he is if you ask me.

Mathew Ingram (00:17:15):
I think he has been red pilled to some extent. Like, I think it feels to me as though, you know, he's been surrounded by all of those types of people who are sick offense or who just wanna be around him cuz he is rich or whatever. He, and I think he has,

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:31):
He's, he's Glenn Reinwald like in that sense, isn't

Mathew Ingram (00:17:33):
He Mathew? Yeah. In a way, I think, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:35):
Look at this exchange between Kara and Elon. This is three hours ago. She's talking to Elon. There was a time when you cared about the truth that is long gone. I'll add, playing to the cheap and dirty seats is no way to live. You may be my greatest disappointment in 25 years of covering tech. Well, you and having interviewed Jeff Bezos on a segue once to which Elon responds, there was a time when you cared about the truth. That is long gone <laugh>. This is Days of Our Lives

Mathew Ingram (00:18:09):
<Laugh>. Who's writing this stuff? This is

Ant Pruitt (00:18:12):
Terrible. Is his show to thread? What, what does that reply say? There was one reply

Jeff Jarvis (00:18:16):
I replied to

Ant Pruitt (00:18:17):
Him. Oh.

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
Oh, of course. It's Jeff Jarvis. Yeah, no, I, okay. No, there's a lot of people.

Ant Pruitt (00:18:23):
Oh, now a

Leo Laporte (00:18:24):
A lot of people, lot of, I replied earlier, there's Julie Child shaking Turkey, <laugh>. There's Kara talking to Elon wearing a, a weird scarf around his throat. I don't know. I just I mean I course I

Mathew Ingram (00:18:40):
Prefer

Leo Laporte (00:18:40):
Not to cover this, but I'm sorry we have to because Twitter is important or was news. Yeah. I go to Twitter now. It was so, okay, so maybe it's cuz of who I am following. But I go to Twitter now and it feels like a strip mall. Doesn't feel,

Ant Pruitt (00:18:54):
You know what, I, I've been hearing a lot of people in my Twitter community saying, you know what, I opened up Twitter and all I'm seeing are Elon Musk post, like his actual same here, his actual feed. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I have not seen that. And I wonder why that is cuz I don't follow him. And I, yes. I've got a lot of meat

Leo Laporte (00:19:11):
Words. Oh, well, if you don't follow him, you won't see him. Maybe

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:13):
That's, I follow him, but I more of him than the algorithm is throwing him.

Mathew Ingram (00:19:17):
I don't follows pushing it, but I see him all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:19:20):
Cause people respond. You shouldn't see somebody you don't follow. Right.

Mathew Ingram (00:19:24):
Well, my Twitter's been doing that a lot. Twitter's been doing that a lot. Like

Ant Pruitt (00:19:28):
I barely use my Twitter account. I don't follow Elon most, but yet I keep seeing Elon Musk pop up. Like they actually him.

Mathew Ingram (00:19:35):
Yeah. Twitter will actually alert me and say that Elon tweeted something.

Leo Laporte (00:19:41):
Oh

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:41):
God. Because you don't wanna miss that.

Mathew Ingram (00:19:43):
Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (00:19:44):
I'm glad I have mute words in here. And I'm pretty sure he's a mute word for me.

Leo Laporte (00:19:47):
Yeah, that's,

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:49):
That's what it is.

Jeff Jarvis (00:19:53):
I'd be curious if you unmuted for just a bit at what you, what you'd

Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
See. Oh, here. Okay. I just opened mine. I'd logged out. Wow. he said, I found, I went to a closet and I found a bunch of hashtags stay woke shirts. Right. So now he's releasing a stay at work shirt, Elon, nobody's gonna stay there if you beg them. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (00:20:19):
That whole finding the t-shirt stuff was

Leo Laporte (00:20:22):
Here's the stay woke, here's the stay woke shirts. He doesn't like that word. Does he woke? He doesn't like that.

Ant Pruitt (00:20:29):
I don't either.

Mathew Ingram (00:20:30):
Well, and then he

Ant Pruitt (00:20:31):
Started mad at me for saying that

Mathew Ingram (00:20:33):
He started rela re-litigating the shooting of, I think it was Michael Wilson. Like, he, he had a whole thread about, you know, how, so it, it seems like he's, that's the sort of red pilling that I'm talking about. I think he has actually been mm-hmm. <Affirmative> kind of converted by whoever into, you know, anti wokeness here

Leo Laporte (00:20:56):
Feels

Mathew Ingram (00:20:57):
Tweets

Leo Laporte (00:20:58):
Calling here's a musk tweet from 12 hours ago. More. And over time, as we hue closer to the truth, Twitter will earn the trust of the people.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:06):
Just means clap trap,

Mathew Ingram (00:21:08):
Which people

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
Hue closer to the truth. <Laugh>,

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:12):
I don't subscribe to it, so I couldn't read it before in policy. Just the headline is amazing. Twitter's destruction would be a geopolitical catastrophe not to the United States, but also for the democratic world. You can't get more apocalyptic than that. Around true though. I don't think so. But it, but it does say it's more serious than we've treated

Mathew Ingram (00:21:32):
Advertising for Twitter. That

Ant Pruitt (00:21:34):
Headline. Well, I just looked at my muted words. Elon Musk is not in my list of muted words. Nothing

Leo Laporte (00:21:39):
Lucky then. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:41):
Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (00:21:41):
Your feed is

Leo Laporte (00:21:42):
So it is the case. I believe I saw this, maybe it was an Elon Musk tweet. 80% of Twitter users are outside the us. It's they're very big in Japan. For instance, a massive penetration in Japan. So it may not be overstatement for foreign policy to say, you know, it's a geopolitical catastrophe. It's not an

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:04):
Issue at least Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:05):
Issue not catastrophe, maybe.

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:07):
Yeah. That's been strong.

Leo Laporte (00:22:11):
You know, it's, but is it

Mathew Ingram (00:22:13):
Possible democracy completely

Leo Laporte (00:22:14):
Danger? No, of course not. In fact, it might be the best thing ever if Twitter got deprecated and we had conversations in other spaces that were less

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:24):
Like competition in spaces. Yes. Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (00:22:25):
Like,

Leo Laporte (00:22:27):
Like, like to, okay, let's talk about TikTok because now Mark Warner, Senator Mark Warner is saying TikTok is the worst thing that ever happened. And what

Mathew Ingram (00:22:38):
The hell that's been going on for a while. That's been going on for while He

Leo Laporte (00:22:42):
Says Trump was right about banning. I mean,

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:45):
Warner, take those words outta your mouth and just, and just look at 'em, you know, as a, as a bubble. Trump was right about anything.

Leo Laporte (00:22:53):
Mark, Mark Warner was a respected Democrat, right?

Jeff Jarvis (00:22:57):
Yeah. But he's physics anti,

Mathew Ingram (00:22:59):
I think there are some, some genuine concerns about TikTok accessing the accounts of American users and their data. And there are fears that the company is basically lying about that. And, and

Ant Pruitt (00:23:12):
The fact that the, the Chinese government is pretty much curating its citizens TikTok.

Leo Laporte (00:23:17):
Well maybe that's true, but they're not curating my, no,

Ant Pruitt (00:23:20):
They're not

Leo Laporte (00:23:21):
Pretty. Apparently. If they are, they must really want me to see girls and bikinis. Right. They, maybe they're trying to undermine our, if youll, you know,

Jeff Jarvis (00:23:30):
Morals,

Mathew Ingram (00:23:31):
Its a bread and circus is bread and circus is

Leo Laporte (00:23:34):
A person. It's, no, it's very clear. That's algorithm is not motivated by politics, but by what you look at. Cuz you can modify very easily if you just pause at other, my, my daughter is a master master of modifying the TikTok algorithm. She's explained to me, she says, you know, oh God, don't stop on anything. If only stop on good stuff. You know, just swipe by it as fast

Mathew Ingram (00:23:55):
Possible. It's hard though. It's hard. Well, like even if you just pause for a few seconds. Oh yeah. Then all of a sudden your feet is

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
Fine. That you got Theto

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:03):
Stewarts. We're talking about bikinis here. Yeah. If, if Stacy were

Leo Laporte (00:24:06):
Here, she'd be rolling her eyes. Yeah. Well, or sandwiches. Cuz my son who is a, you know, very successful because of TikTok. Thank you. Tiktok. FCC commissioner. We reported this before. Brennan Carr said it should be banned. FBI director

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:19):
Is a nut job.

Leo Laporte (00:24:20):
FBI director Christopher Ray says this is a little farfetched. It contributes to China's status as the number one thief of US data in the world. Okay. Let's break that down for

Mathew Ingram (00:24:34):
That could be true. What

Leo Laporte (00:24:35):
Are they

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:36):
Stealing? That's your cue.

Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
Moral

Ant Pruitt (00:24:40):
Think it. That's

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):
I'll do. That

Mathew Ingram (00:24:42):
Could be. What are they? What kind of data are they stealing? They're stealing, you know, your,

Jeff Jarvis (00:24:47):
That Leo likes bikinis.

Mathew Ingram (00:24:49):
They're stealing crap. I mean, is that helpful to them somehow?

Leo Laporte (00:24:51):
Yeah. I don't, no, I don't think it is. I don't think that that's, I think the one thing you could say about TikTok is perhaps it could be used as a propaganda machine. But I don't think there's any evidence that is being done that's being done today. I haven't, haven't seen anything about China in my TikTok feed

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:06):
Ever. Nothing. No. Or geopolitics in

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
General. No. People though. You get their news from it. People my daughter's age use it to search. We talked about this before. I said you can't search for effect on TikTok. Oh yeah, you can. She said gimme effect. Yeah. I said, how old's the Golden Gate bridge? She said search for that instantly.

Ant Pruitt (00:25:26):
<Laugh>. The thing is though, what, what we are seeing is the fact that once most people pick up TikTok, they can't put it down. That's the

Leo Laporte (00:25:34):
Problem. Mm-Hmm. Well, TikTok addiction is the problem, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative> so is Facebook addiction at one time.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:39):
So, so in the day was book addiction,

Mathew Ingram (00:25:41):
The Chinese one addicted and then they'll move in.

Leo Laporte (00:25:45):
Right. Because we'll be so busy glu to our phones that they can just march in and it's over. I, you know, anger. I think that it really is moral pain. I'm not, I'm not one to say moral pain. Definitely. But that's definitely moral pain.

Jeff Jarvis (00:25:58):
I want one. You

Leo Laporte (00:26:00):
Get

Ant Pruitt (00:26:00):
That one.

Mathew Ingram (00:26:01):
People are, it's not like people are dancing in in the background. It's uighurs are bad, Uighurs are bad. You know, it's like, I mean, I haven't seen anything even Chinese related

Leo Laporte (00:26:13):
If, if they're doing it. It's very subtle. If

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:15):
Russian related or, you know, pick

Leo Laporte (00:26:18):
Your country. Honestly by the way that Mark Warners story was in Fox News. If you wanna talk about somebody advancing political agenda using propaganda, it's Fox News. It's Ruper.

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:31):
Burdock. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:33):
Or I guess if you're, if you're on the right, you could say MSNBC and that's probably true

Jeff Jarvis (00:26:37):
Too. No, they're not equivalent. They're not at all. Burn

Leo Laporte (00:26:40):
It. Well that's just cuz you're a leftist. Yeah. Fine. You agree with them. But I mean, they have a very strong agenda, don't they? Democracy. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. <laugh>. Anyway. Lose you a few more viewers, but no, I haven't had anybody yell at me recently, I guess. Yeah. Cause they're all gone now. They're all gone. <Laugh>. There's nobody, there's

Mathew Ingram (00:27:01):
A guy, speaking of TikTok, there's a guy who I idolize now. He wrote about his or shared his a few things from his feed. And he said that he only clicks on things that are bizarre and unexplainable. And so his feed is just chaos. Like, he shared a few clips and I honestly cannot figure out what is going on in them. So <laugh>, it's like an anti feed. I admire that. He clearly put some work into it.

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
<Laugh>. So there is a kind of a drum beat of people. Maybe their Elon Musk stands or maybe, maybe they know something who say no, wait a minute. Just hold on. Elon Elon's has a plan. He, yes, he's destroying, he's, he's, he's destroying Twitter. But, or this is a medium post. He has so little use for what was there. He prefers simply to get rid of everything he considers bad lackluster or dead weight and start from scratch. It's creative destruction.

Ant Pruitt (00:28:03):
Yeah. Is there anything wrong with breaking something down to build it back up? You know, just Totally.

Leo Laporte (00:28:11):
So he got the cash flow to do it, baby. Apparently does. You know, this is Enrique. Dan's writing on on a medium. I don't know who he is, but I bookmarked it. So he must be somebody mm-hmm. <Affirmative> <laugh>. That's he says Musk knows Twitter and wants to transform it. To do that, he first has to take it off the market. Secondly, he has to get rid of so many of its employees and of a culture that in his eyes does not work to the point of changing everything. Even the decoration, even the t-shirts. Yeah. thirdly, he's only gonna keep those employees excited about a radical change to the point of dedicating more hours to it than they have ever done. Or can't leave. Or can't leave cuz they're H one B. Right. Right. And their visas would force them to go back to Canada. People can be replaced. Fourthly, he's shredding users who don't like the way he does things. He's happy to see us go to Macon or wherever or hive or wherever people are going who don't like where they think the government is headed and who are not willing to pay to use Twitter. Okay. That middle clause, I think it doesn't make any sense. Finally, he's going to take out the trash by removing fake, inactive or annoying accounts. Not doing that. That would be, sorry.

Ant Pruitt (00:29:29):
But that would

Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
Be great. In fact, when he had the, the vote on whether Donald Trump should be invited back, it was clear that he made no attempt to keep bots from voting. Mm-Hmm.

Mathew Ingram (00:29:40):
<Affirmative>, well say

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:40):
With the latest one, should I let everybody back? Should I get, should I take everybody who was suspended and just put 'em back on?

Leo Laporte (00:29:45):
What's to say again, that's not Russian bots with Of course not

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:49):
Of course at all. His, all his claims of growth are not bots.

Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
He's, by the way, he was all worried about bots until he owned it. Now he doesn't even talk about 'em anymore. Right,

Jeff Jarvis (00:29:59):
Right. Good

Mathew Ingram (00:30:00):
Point. He just wanted the price to go down.

Leo Laporte (00:30:03):
Yeah. Yeah. That was just, that was, and see, that's the thing to remember. He is willing to do misdirection to get what he wants. He doesn't Yes. Musk is destroying the company he bought. This goes on and he is doing it on purpose and consciously, carefully, woo, carefully is a big word. When he finishes his demolition job, he'll begin his project, which for now consists only of getting rid of a corporate culture that is of no use to him. I'd agree he's doing that. His Twitter will initially be much smaller than its previous iteration and which will have a few completely different characteristics. Culture, features and leadership. Okay. I can't say that's

Mathew Ingram (00:30:38):
Not true. Yeah. Okay. He is moving fast and breaking things for sure. But whether there'll be anything left

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
A professor of innovation at IE. Business school

Leo Laporte (00:30:50):
Which I think is international. It's in Spain because he writes in Spanish on his blog.

Mathew Ingram (00:30:58):
I mean, he could rebuild it and it could be Gab, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't have a vision.

Leo Laporte (00:31:05):
It is possible. It is possible that you're right. He got red pilled and he's now just a diluted qan honor and he just wants to remake it in that image. That's possible. I guess.

Mathew Ingram (00:31:15):
I mean, that's what his tweets would suggest.

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):
Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:31:18):
That's the attention he wants.

Leo Laporte (00:31:20):
I mean, that's what ha look, I know people who have become Huan honors. Yeah, I did too. And, and they you did too. And, and there's no, you can't, they are fervent believers. Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (00:31:33):
Once they're there,

Leo Laporte (00:31:34):
They're there. And, and if that happened to Elon, this may be exactly what you would want, what you would expect from him.

Mathew Ingram (00:31:40):
You can't bring facts to a culture war.

Leo Laporte (00:31:43):
Nope. Yeah. But why wouldn't he just, yeah. Somebody's in the chat room saying this is a good point. PS chops, wouldn't it have been a faster, easier, and cheaper if he just started his own platform and <laugh>, why did he have to take Twitter and destroy it to do that? He didn't have a choice. That's why he was messing around and he got caught with his hand in the car jar and they made it do it. Right. Anyway, that's enough of this. I do wanna talk though about jona.host cuz there is an interesting conversation around this. So some journalists have left Twitter and formed and we've talked, I think we've talked about it before. Adam Davidson have Planet Money has three's at Be Yes. Has created a and this is what you do with Macon, I might add, has created a Macon instance. And he says, I wanna make this a place for journalists. We'll be very careful about who we let in will have to vet you. You'll be verified as a journalist so that anybody who's on on jona.host, which you are, Mathew as verifiably a journalist. And it's an interesting idea and I wanna talk about it because there are some in the Fed averse who are not happy about it. And mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, we shall talk, but we're gonna take a break first. Okay? hmm. Thank, thank you sponsors. <Laugh>. Thank you sponsors. <Laugh>. Thank you at PR for reminding me. Everybody breathe.

(00:33:05):
Mathew Ingram is here from the Columbia Journalism Review. And apparently, well, I don't even wanna read his t-shirt, but <laugh>, he is fr Satan's School of Gay and Communism. Good, good. It's good school. Yeah. Yeah. Very prestigious. Very Canadian. <Laugh> not that well run, but it's a good school. The hazing rituals are hard, but they're tough, really tough. Also, Jeff Jarvis who is a professor of journalism, so he should know wherever he speaks. And then it's me and Ant who just are along for the ride. Ant Pruit from hands up very much. We're just here much. We're just here. Chilling. Yep, just talking. We're talkers. That's what we are. <Laugh> our show today. Brought to you by Melissa. Love Melissa. Melissa's a leading provider of global data quality and address management solutions. Every business should be using Melissa Poor data quality. Bad information on your address lists can cost organizations an average of $15 million every year.

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Jeff Jarvis (00:37:14):
You launch, sorry, before you launch into journal, may I do my full disclosure? Yes, please. Which is that through the auspices of the Town Night Center that I directed the, the Craig Craig, Greg Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. I have granted money to general.host for its out pocket expenses.

Leo Laporte (00:37:32):
I saw that money came months and that was you.

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:34):
That's me. Good for you. Well, the New York Times first said it was the Tower Center at Cole University who has a lot of money and we don't, we're a public school and they didn't give any money. We did, but nevermind

Leo Laporte (00:37:45):
All that fix that time. So it was cuny

Jeff Jarvis (00:37:46):
They did fix it. It was, yeah, it's the Newmark Greg. Greg, Greg Newmarks for Journalism <laugh>. And also I just got another grant from someone to, to carry that on. So Oh, that's nice. Didn't

Leo Laporte (00:37:58):
Know that. So you gave them a lot more money than they need. I just wanted to point that out, but Okay.

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:03):
<Laugh>, it'll last, it'll last them maybe a year.

Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
Okay. I run our server with 6,000 people for $385 a month, but Okay, that's fine. They have staff, right? They have, well

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:14):
They they've brought people on to do some tasks. Yeah. They've, they've had to, I think what we're trying to do this is, he's talked about it publicly. So Adam I set up a bat signal to people to say, Adam can't keep doing this forever. And so knew

Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
He was doing it on his own. Is that right? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:29):
Well he has seven now volunteers Wow. And others. But

Leo Laporte (00:38:33):
They're volunteer part-time moderat. They're

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:35):
Absolutely volunteer.

Leo Laporte (00:38:36):
Yeah. They're people who watch the stream and then say, oh, we're gonna block that.

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:39):
And, and more than that their, their approvals and all that. Yeah. but we talked to the Pointer Institute, which is probably likely to take it on.

Leo Laporte (00:38:46):
Good. How many how many people at J Host now?

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:50):
I think he's up to two, 2000. Okay. Because he said the same thing he said, he said if he, if he approved everybody he's tried, it'd be like 30,000. I talked to him this afternoon.

Leo Laporte (00:38:58):
Oh, I'm very careful. We have 6,000 members, all of whom I have individually approved <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:04):
Okay. And, and I quoted you in

Leo Laporte (00:39:06):
In my spare time. In my spare time. We don't have any additional moderators.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:11):
You, Leo also said that you were gonna limit it to the club, which I think is very

Leo Laporte (00:39:15):
Smart. Yeah. So that, so just for people understand, first of all, there's a common misunderstanding about Mastodon. There's the thing that you're joining is the Fed averse, which is much bigger than Mastodon. And it includes Pixel Fed, includes oma, it includes peer tube, it include, there's a lot of other things. Micro blog, manton, Reese's Micro blog. There are a lot of other things, including by the way WordPress and I know you want to talk about it, Jeff, so we'll mention it. Tumblr has said we're gonna get on the fe averse as well. So all of these are part of a, a group of interconnected social sites that communicate using something called Activity Pub. So what really is the key technology here is activity pub activity streams that allows individual sites using various software on these sites to communicate and for you on any one site to follow people on all other sites. So for instance, going forward, I would be able to follow a Tumblr account on my twit social account. Cool. Right. It's not Twitter, it's not designed to be Twitter, but it does have some of the features of a Twitter like service. So Adam has created his own home on the Fed averse uses Master on software, but it's his, but it's a fed averse site for journalists only. And he has to vet everybody. Right? Everybody is has to proably be, be what with a journalistic organization

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:42):
Or journalist with their freelance. They send in, they show clips and so on. How

Leo Laporte (00:40:46):
Did you how you could get in Jeff though, as a professor of journalism?

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:49):
Yeah. Well also I'm on the board so I think I can get

Leo Laporte (00:40:52):
In that way. Okay. You could get in.

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:53):
But yeah, but but yeah, I think other professors are on Jay Roses there. I'm pretty sure.

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
So the key is for any masses on site, except for the biggest ones which are trying to be Twitter. And, and by the way that's a little problematic is to create a local community. Cuz you have a local feed that is somehow connected. In our case, it's all the people. This is the middle thing here. All the people who listen to Twitter in jo.host to be all the journalists talking amongst each other. That's a great thing. There's a secondary value to jo.host. Cuz you can presume if I see an account on jo.host that they're vetted journalists, right? Yes,

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:29):
Yes. Yeah. That's the idea.

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
But there is a downside, as

Mathew Ingram (00:41:33):
I'm sure you

Leo Laporte (00:41:33):
Well, the downside is any other fed averse member can block any other mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So I block gab I block. There are some, you know, sites that I don't, if somebody, if people will start brig us, this is a very big important part of this. If a site starts brig us, we just block the whole site from my site. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I don't see them anymore. I can, individuals can do this too, by the way. Anybody with an account on the Fed averse can say, I don't wanna see anything from that site or from that person. That can be individual and I can do that. That as, as a host. Yeah. Mathew,

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:12):
Rob, somebody who was a little little I think over the top in blocking because one, well, Mathew, you should explain.

Mathew Ingram (00:42:18):
Yeah. I think the, the, the, one of the sort of problematic aspects is when a server or instance blocks an entire other server or instance, which obviously is one of the things you can do. If, if that instance has a whole bunch of people that you don't like, like Gab for example. So a whole bunch of Mastodon instances blocked jna.host, and they had a bunch of different reasons for doing it. Some of them just don't like journalists. There were trying to look at, oh, click bait tabloid journalists who will collect, search through and misinterpret anything you say. Enabling hate and harassment. Surveillance capitalists was another comment.

Leo Laporte (00:43:14):
There was, there were, there were, I seem to remember some problems with some of the people on jona.host

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:22):
When he turned it on. He didn't understand what was going on and he briefly got smashed because he thought that when he, once he turned it on, that anybody could come in. So he, oh my God. And he stopped. That was 0.1, 0.2. He let in a writer from National Review online. Right. That's what, that's what pissed off. Especially one server in Australia that said, because of that, you're all awful. I'm gonna block every, everyone there. So

Leo Laporte (00:43:45):
That's just that practice. But anybody who runs a server can do that. And if, if you are on their server and you don't like that, first of all, they should a server, they should publish that information. Not all do.

Mathew Ingram (00:43:55):
So there were two other, two other aspects and one I sort of got caught up in because I used a link in my piece in CJ that someone shared that showed how many people blocked jona.host. So that software that shows you how many people block a certain instance was created by Kiwi Farm Kiwi Farms. Oh yeah. And so yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:44:21):
Adam used that Kiwi Farms tool as well.

Mathew Ingram (00:44:24):
Right. So then a bunch of people used that as evidence. Kiwi

Leo Laporte (00:44:27):
Pharmacy

Mathew Ingram (00:44:28):
Was clearly up. That person

Leo Laporte (00:44:29):
Was a, a kind of of a troll

Mathew Ingram (00:44:32):
Farm. Yeah, it is.

Leo Laporte (00:44:33):
Instance, yeah. They're still around. Yeah. Most people block Kiwi Farms and using a Kiwi Farms tool, even though it doesn't by itself have any point of view was seen by some people on the Fed. Yeah. Right. The thing you have to understand, the Fed averse, first of all, <laugh>, it's kind of like a a health food store. You know, it's a

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:54):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:44:54):
You're wandering quiet taste. Is that what you're saying? No. But you're wandering into there was a culture before you all came. Yeah, yeah. And you're wandering into this culture and this culture was very different than the mass culture was not you're

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:05):
Bringing your hamburgers. Damnit. I

Mathew Ingram (00:45:07):
Agree. There's actually a really good I'm trying to remember the guy's name now, but he wrote a piece exactly like that talking about how, you know, this was to be expected. Not just the j hosting, but just people from Twitter, refu Twitter, refugees showing up, not understanding the culture, behaving in all sorts of ways to try and get their toots to go viral or whatever that they're used to on Twitter and <laugh> and Yeah, we don't like that. You made some good points. Yeah, yeah. That, that, that people had a thing going on. It's like they're having a basement party with just half a dozen people and they're playing, you know, songs on the mandolin or whatever, and all of a sudden 3000 frat guys show up exactly with a or whatever better.

Leo Laporte (00:45:57):
It's more, that's more apt. But at the same time that happens, remember when you know, AOL was allowed under the internet and every, you know, it was this long September. The long September.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:07):
I just, I just got the book about that Net wars.

Mathew Ingram (00:46:10):
And in fact, the guy, the guy uses that analogy in his piece about MAs

Leo Laporte (00:46:16):
Practice.

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:17):
Can I, can I just read this real quickly? I think this is what Mathew might referring to people grumbling, the ma don is slow at the moment. You've just turned up with 1 million people in a tiny rural village and you're complaining there's a queue to get into the only tea room, which is run by gay pensioner's, Babs Maureen as a retirement hobby on Monday through Wednesday. Relax

Mathew Ingram (00:46:33):
<Laugh>. Yeah, it was good.

Leo Laporte (00:46:35):
But to, to its credit. The actually the feta versus expanded quite well. Oh yeah. And handled this onslaught quite well. I think there's seven or 8 million new users all of a sudden and it's

Mathew Ingram (00:46:45):
Happened. Imagine what Yu's life has been like since.

Leo Laporte (00:46:48):
Well, Yugen gets a lot more attention than he probably deserves. He wrote No, still. He wrote a client, which we all use, which you like. They called Mastodon. But there's others. There's Oma, there's

Jeff Jarvis (00:46:58):
Oh yeah. By the way, I asked today, I asked some, somebody, a fortune reporter called me before interviewing him and I said, do me a favor, find out how he pronounces it. Is it Ogan the German way or Eugene? He said o's Right. But I go by, I, I, I, you know, kind of give up and I take

Leo Laporte (00:47:14):
Eugene actually I always called him Garron because that's his mastodon easier. Yeah. Right. And everybody knows Garron on Mastodon. Now it's because he's been in Time Magazine. But

Mathew Ingram (00:47:25):
I should mention in my story, I mentioned that a, a guy on Macon had mentioned something to me about however many instances block Trinidads. He reached out to me and said excuse me, I'm not on Macon, I'm on Oma. Yeah. Which I had never heard of

Leo Laporte (00:47:43):
Before. It's a fed of her people keep calling it Macon. It's not, it's

Mathew Ingram (00:47:47):
The fed of No, it's not. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:49):
It's really important to make that distinction. Yes. For a variety of reasons. But best practices in the fe averse is not to block a whole instance unless that whole instance is provably problematic. Yeah,

Mathew Ingram (00:48:02):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:02):
Remember as I said, each individual on your server and every other server can block an entire instance if that person doesn't like it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or an individual, they're very good tools for an instance to block an entire instance is really extreme. I only block about seven or eight.

Mathew Ingram (00:48:18):
Yeah. It feels like that's kind of the nuclear option.

Leo Laporte (00:48:20):
It's very much so. And so maybe, but again, it's also the privilege of the instance. Yeah. Runner. It's coming out pocket, it's coming outta my time. I'm doing it if I want. But everybody who is on the instance should know what you're blocking. Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (00:48:35):
So, and in fact some people I've seen have left that server. Yeah. Specifically because it did that. That's

Leo Laporte (00:48:41):
Way they, which onto it, that's

Mathew Ingram (00:48:42):
The way they respond, which is your option. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:48:44):
Exactly. It's a little bit of a hassle. I mean it's a big hassle. And it's also you lose your toots from,

Jeff Jarvis (00:48:49):
You lose it Or does it just stay there with the

Leo Laporte (00:48:51):
Old url? Yeah, it stays there.

Mathew Ingram (00:48:53):
It stays there. Yeah. It stays there. So, and in fact if people go, cuz I moved from macon.social to jna.host your stuff still on Macada. Yeah. So I exported my file list, imported it, and now when people click on the old link, they just see my old profile and it says, I've moved to this.

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
Oh,

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:13):
So your old posts are there under the old profile. Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (00:49:15):
Cool. That's good. The other side of this is I'm sitting here in Twitter, social, I don't see any, I don't, there's a lot of other stuff on the Metaverse that I don't see. I only see people, I follow people. That's the home p I'm using the advanced web interface. But this is the same thing. If you click the buttons. I see. Who's people I follow in home. You

Jeff Jarvis (00:49:36):
Caught me. I boosted something

Leo Laporte (00:49:37):
During the show. That's fine. <Laugh>. I see that's allowed on messing. I see the local timeline. And by the way, you don't have to follow anybody who's in your instance because you're already can see everything that's going on in your local timeline. Oh, cool. And then the federated timeline is not everything. So I don't see Gab or I don't see any, I don't see all the other stuff. I only see people who people on my instance are following. So that's a somewhat self-selecting group. If you have a good instance. And then if I do see something coming over the federated timeline, if I see nudity or pornography coming over, I'll block that person. I won't block their instance. But if I instance, blocking is really, if you're getting brigade, if like a hundred people from an instance are coming over to your instance and harassing

Mathew Ingram (00:50:19):
People. The thing, the thing that interests me partly is in terms of behavior and sort of culture is things like the content warning. So when I first,

Leo Laporte (00:50:28):
That takes a while to get used to. I noticed that's going away though. People aren't using it anymore.

Mathew Ingram (00:50:32):
It is going away. And yet people are getting more upset about it as it's going away. I thought it was interesting when someone explained to me, don't think of it as a content warning. Like it has to be super serious or it's gonna trigger someone or whatever. Think of it as a headline. Yeah. That's what I used. Yeah. Yeah. And so people, once I started thinking about it in that way, then I used it differently. So if someone sees like Bird Site info as the headline. Yeah. I don't, maybe they don't wanna, I don't wanna

Leo Laporte (00:51:02):
See, see it. They'll,

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:02):
You know, the best use I've seen of it. This is, this is gonna sound a little trivial. I don't mean it cause the best use is something that truly is triggering or or offensive to people. And especially as journalists, we should be kinda aware of that. Though we shouldn't be content warning things about equity and justice in my view. You know what, what, what makes me so sad on Twitter is dead and Facebook is dead Pets.

Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
Yeah. You, you would want a content.

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:24):
Somebody's putting a content warning on the Dead pet. Cause I really just don't wanna be word pressed. I'm sorry for you. I recognize

Mathew Ingram (00:51:29):
Youand,

Jeff Jarvis (00:51:30):
But I don't need to.

Leo Laporte (00:51:31):
Just as you feel that way about Dead Pets and Bridges, there are people who feel that way about eye contact <laugh>, which for a long time that was considered to be an appropriate, really. Yeah. Yep. So really, yeah. So I think it's a, you're coming into this new community. I think content warning is probably gonna go away only because there's so many people who don't do it. Yeah. It's kind

Mathew Ingram (00:51:51):
Of, well you can turn it off in your, in your,

Leo Laporte (00:51:53):
I I as an instance moderator, don't I expand everything cuz I

Mathew Ingram (00:51:58):
Wanna see it. Yeah. I turned it off.

Leo Laporte (00:51:59):
Right. And you can do that, but do, yeah. And I wish everybody used content warning, but I mean all the time for every post, but they don't, so that's fine.

Mathew Ingram (00:52:08):
Someone also pointed out that it's easy to think because we're used to Twitter where it's this kind of monolithic thing. They said you can't assume that That's

Leo Laporte (00:52:18):
Right.

Mathew Ingram (00:52:18):
Just because people on one instance do something or say that this is supposed to be done that way. That that's the way everybody in the Fed Verse does it. Because lots of people have different opinions about this.

Leo Laporte (00:52:29):
But remember that ma on particularly, but the Fed averse in general was originally people were fleeing Twitter. Yeah. Because they were, were, they were not safe on Twitter. And so it has a disproportionate number of people who felt unsafe on, on Twitter. And that's where that whole culture came from.

Mathew Ingram (00:52:46):
Yeah. And I had a couple people explain that to me. Yeah. When I was, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:52:51):
No, I noticed nobody

Mathew Ingram (00:52:52):
Anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:52:54):
So

Jeff Jarvis (00:52:54):
Yeah, I see it, it's funny how it, I see it a

Leo Laporte (00:52:57):
Lot rare. I also see a lot of people saying, well, we want the quote tweet, we want the quote tweet <laugh>. We talked about this last week.

Mathew Ingram (00:53:05):
I think that would be bad. I think

Leo Laporte (00:53:06):
It's a little rude to come into a place and say, here's, we want to be more like the old place.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:11):
Let me, let me give you a contrarian view of that. And, and here I'm quoting somebody named Jonathan Flowers. Dr. Jonathan Flowers, who I think has been brilliant on the topic.

Leo Laporte (00:53:19):
I follow him. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:20):
It's, it's about black Twitter and, and he's explained a lot of things. The first, first is, we talked about this last week, how quote Tweet ended up being used is call response. And it's a cultural use mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And he explains very well how it's used. Then the other thing happened was he was talking about this and then, and then Adam Curry came in and said flowers said something about, about White Tech Bros. And then Adam came in all defensive as white people tend to do and said, you know, well just name Salma. This is no what's wrong

Leo Laporte (00:53:50):
The way is why I block no agenda. Social is one of the few places we don't federate with.

Jeff Jarvis (00:53:55):
Wow. It's good to No. So Adam, then Yeah, don't,

Leo Laporte (00:53:58):
If you wanna follow No Agenda or Adam Gray don't come to twi that social partly because they were brig us. Yeah. They, so they're, they're the chief source of trolling on all the TWI stuff. So, so,

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:10):
So he was doing that. So then, then he, he ended up answering flowers that way. And I said, why don't you listen to people. And, and what, what Adam then said was the same standard was open your own instance. And I thought flowers came that a

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
Brilliant block response <laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:27):
A brilliant response, which was, that's, that's your way to say fu that's your way to say go somewhere else. That's your way to say, well, I have the tools and you don't. Yeah. Right. And, and, and that's to say that's, he didn't say it this way, but I will. It's almost saying separate but equal. Okay. If you wanna do odd stuff, go off of your own place and do it. Rather than saying, do we value the experience and the mechanisms that people and other cultures are bringing to this? And so it's not just about everybody adapt. Yes, listen, adapt, learn to what's there, but also listen, adapt, and learn to the new value of diversity that's coming in. And, and this is nothing but society. Adapt this norms and figuring this out, not doing very well at it. We'll see if we can do it better in, in master do or not. I don't know. I will tell.

Leo Laporte (00:55:12):
It's interesting though. You know, there are, there's Hive now hive.com, which I have not. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> joined. This is an op. There's post do news. There's a lot of places. People

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:22):
Are, oh, let's talk about post, do news for a minute. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:24):
What is that? It's invite

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:25):
On now. Right? Now. Next. Well, okay. That's No Barden founder of Waze has started an effort. Let me do another full disclosure here. He contacted me some time ago. He asked me to put together a board of advisors. I had a lot of conversation with him. I liked No, him, he's very, very smart. For various reasons I backed out. And I'm not, I have no official relationship to post news. Are you? But I'm on it. I'm on it. It's his effort to have people. I think I have an invite. I think I can sent it to you. Actually. I'll do that. <Laugh>. so by the way, Kara Swisher is, is, is, yeah. Is is an advisor slash investor. And is not, and so is Scott Galloway. And I don't know if they're talking about that or not. That was part of my rationale.

(00:56:05):
Kara did not mention it when she spoke about so, so but she evidently did say it on her podcast. Anyway, it's noms effort to it's a, it's a micropayment thing. It's a noms effort to have a pool of money that's gonna go to creators and by creators, he means in great measure news organizations. Well, that means he's gotta do deals with the news organizations to get their stories up on here. All he, all he has raw, I think now is Reuters. And he's gotta be able to have that deal. So the pennies that you give, can they go to that news organization? So it's part of its belief is that that will work out. It's interesting that, that, the first day I was on, it was a bunch of Reuters and a bunch of Sherry Reuters. Now, most of it's not news. Most of it's, it's just very Twitter like, and so here's my pet, you know, here's my party, here's my other stuff. It's that social reflex. There's more news discussion. I matched it on than there is on postop news to me.

Mathew Ingram (00:57:03):
Interesting.

Jeff Jarvis (00:57:05):
Mathew. So you haven't gotten on yet, have you? What have you ever been hearing about it in your, in your news world?

Mathew Ingram (00:57:09):
Well, it seems, you know, the same things I've heard about jona.host, which is it's elitist and journalists should, you know, just quit thinking they're special and having their own little social clubs or whatever. And just so I've heard some of that.

Leo Laporte (00:57:29):
Yeah, I, I'm, I think maybe there's a lesson that we can all learn now about centralized things. I think micro payments need to need to happen, and that has to be centralized, I guess. But I kinda like decentralized. I don't like it that, you know, Elon came along and took this thing called Twitter and destroyed it because it was centralizing cuz he had money. That can never happen to the Fed

Mathew Ingram (00:57:51):
Averse. And in fact, if, if Elon took over like Macon social or something and turned it into something, we just

Leo Laporte (00:57:59):
Deeded

Mathew Ingram (00:58:00):
Just deed. Exactly. Go on with your life.

Leo Laporte (00:58:03):
And I, I should, and this is one of the reasons Garron slash Oregon is less important. It's an open source project with many people working on it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> he started it. God bless him. Thank you. But there's a lot of people working on it. You could fork it and create your own OMA I think is a fork truth. Social is a fork, by the way. Yeah. So open source software is, is another example of decentralized that everybody can play and play how they want. And I really, I, I'm, I've always strongly preferred that I realize I was running against the current, you know but maybe we've kind of learned a lesson here that there's some value in something that nobody can own and that any, any norms that we develop or developed as a group by

Mathew Ingram (00:58:52):
Consensus. It is funny to me though, it's funny how you know, people, it's, it's popular particularly on Twitter to talk about how hard Mastodon is and how Oh yeah. Nerdy it is. And how it's all nerds with on their computers. And, and yet, you know, email and lots of other protocols people use all day long are distributed and networked and no one owns them. And yet everyone forgets about that. And they think that social networks and the way that that Twitter and Facebook have operated is the norm. And that, that's the way that things are supposed to be.

Ant Pruitt (00:59:27):
It's funniest to me, is I heard how nerdy Google Plus was too. <Laugh> the same, same phrase. It's a bunch of nerds. And

Leo Laporte (00:59:34):
This is, well, I kinda

Mathew Ingram (00:59:36):
Like, that's where I

Leo Laporte (00:59:37):
Wave. Yeah. Wave. That's where I want to be. So

Mathew Ingram (00:59:40):
Wave was

Leo Laporte (00:59:41):
Great. I I <laugh>, I was never

Mathew Ingram (00:59:43):
Comfortable. I'm sorry. It was great. I liked it.

Leo Laporte (00:59:46):
<Laugh>

Ant Pruitt (00:59:46):
Instead wave Google Plus how De did though,

Leo Laporte (00:59:50):
Plus, well, I'm sure Google's kicking themselves, right? Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (00:59:53):
Plus was cool. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:59:54):
What, who's the guy? He went on to do a Cartia that was

Jeff Jarvis (00:59:59):
Oh, I

Leo Laporte (01:00:00):
Forgot his name. But he was the champion of Google Plus. And when he left Google, that's when Google Plus kind of died. He was the guy who went to Larry and said, we've gotta do social,

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:09):
Social Vic,

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
Vic, Gundotra,

Ant Pruitt (01:00:11):
FTRA.

Leo Laporte (01:00:12):
Right. We gotta do social. It's the next big thing. And I bet you Google kind of wishes <laugh>, they they position to do this. Somebody saying well look what happened to Parlor aws shut them down. Yeah. Cuz it were centralized.

Ant Pruitt (01:00:26):
Centralized.

Leo Laporte (01:00:27):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. They were centralized. So I don't know why, but for some reason I'm running on a server in France. But <laugh>,

Jeff Jarvis (01:00:33):
Which somebody pointed out to you that you may be in better shape on some law because France has a law that would consider you a news organization. You're in better shape there in some ways

Leo Laporte (01:00:43):
Than others. Maybe that's why our, our I'm on mato.host, which is a managed mastodon. Maybe that's why Hugo who runs it does it cuz he's in Spain, I think. But anyway, we're running off French servers. But if I, but, but I could take the whole thing. I got copies and I could put on a different server. So it's not a that's the

Mathew Ingram (01:01:06):
Beauty. There is another, it's

Leo Laporte (01:01:07):
Not centralized.

Mathew Ingram (01:01:08):
There is another journalist oriented server I should mention. Okay. news newsy.social, I think it is. Yeah. Jeff what's his last name? Jeff

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:17):
Doesn't put his last name on the, on the page, I

Mathew Ingram (01:01:19):
Don't think. Yeah, I know, I know. I keep forgetting what it is. <Laugh>. yeah. But he's got, and I know a number of people like that too.

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:25):
Do you know what, what's his shtick? Do you know Mathew?

Mathew Ingram (01:01:30):
Yeah. I'm not sure it has one. Just seems to be Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:33):
It's Jeff

Mathew Ingram (01:01:35):
Friendly place for journalists to hang out.

Leo Laporte (01:01:37):
That's, I think that's great. I mean, I really like it that we have a,

Mathew Ingram (01:01:40):
It's like a clubhouse,

Leo Laporte (01:01:41):
A thing we could be, which is Twi and that's our clubhouse. And it makes it a very, very fun instance with very, you know, people with like, like-minded individuals and all

Jeff Jarvis (01:01:50):
That. So he says this, this is, but this is contrast, right? As opposed to journal.host, newsy.social is a master ont instance for journalists, news people, journalism of educators and comms professionals, otherwise known as PR people.

Leo Laporte (01:02:03):
What's

Mathew Ingram (01:02:03):
Fair Book? Oh, no.

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:05):
Although anyone, anyone who follows our rules of guidelines is

Mathew Ingram (01:02:08):
Welcome. Not today,

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:08):
Satan. If invited

Leo Laporte (01:02:10):
Today. Satan,

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:11):
Jeff Brown is his name.

Mathew Ingram (01:02:13):
Yes. Brown. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:15):
And they have 14,000.

Mathew Ingram (01:02:17):
Yeah. He's a,

Leo Laporte (01:02:19):
So it's bigger than Jodo host. By by. Yeah. That's cuz you let PR people in.

Mathew Ingram (01:02:23):
It's all the PR people

Leo Laporte (01:02:24):
In <laugh>. Oh God. Good. I will def federate right away. People are great.

Jeff Jarvis (01:02:30):
<Laugh>. No, there's, there's a

Mathew Ingram (01:02:31):
Lot of best friends are

Leo Laporte (01:02:32):
PR people. No, I'm teasing. Alright, let's see. So we've really done our social stuff now, haven't we? Here's a surprising story. Amazon Echo. A colossal failure. $10 billion lost. What does that mean? Lost loan. How is

Mathew Ingram (01:02:56):
$10 billion lost?

Leo Laporte (01:02:58):
Here's the story they make and sell these at cost. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they don't make money on the hardware. Well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:04):
Like Ra and, and, and, and razor blade companies lose money on the razor handles.

Leo Laporte (01:03:09):
Okay, go ahead. Yeah, but they sell razor blades. There's nothing that Echo sells. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:03:12):
Amazon sells you everything on

Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
Earth. Well, that was the thinking was, and that's why Jeff was all, Jeff Bezos was all over it.

Mathew Ingram (01:03:19):
But people don't

Leo Laporte (01:03:20):
Do it. But people don't do it.

Mathew Ingram (01:03:21):
Yeah. They just don't do

Leo Laporte (01:03:23):
It. The report says this is from a Business Insider spoke with a dozen current and former employees on the Competence companies hardware team. The report says that while the Echo line is among the best selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost. The one internal document describes the business model by saying, we wanna make money when people use our devices, not when they buy the devices. Razor blades. The plan never really materialized because not many people wanna trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. By year four of the experiment, echo was getting a billion interactions a week. But most of those conversations, and think about what you ask your echo to do.

Mathew Ingram (01:04:07):
900 million of those were make a list, add something to my shopping list. Right? What's the weather?

Leo Laporte (01:04:13):
The two most popular play music and ask about the weather, which are not monetized. Right. I, I do buy stuff on my echo, you know, in fact I bought razor blades. <Laugh>, but, but I, but, but not enough. That's most of the stuff I buy on Amazon. I don't use an echo for Amazon also tried to partner with companies for skills. Like buy a Domino's Pizza or call an Uber. Remember you could call an Uber with an echo. Amazon would get a kickback by 2020. According to this report. The team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use. They also tried to paint it as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren't shopping by voice. But the studies of that theory found that the financial contribution of those users often fell short of expectations. Furthermore, it's thought that Google's having the same problem. Uhhuh Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google assistant business model last month. You can't monetize what's the weather and set a timer for 10 minutes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Ant Pruitt (01:05:20):
Well why?

Mathew Ingram (01:05:21):
Unless you control the

Ant Pruitt (01:05:22):
Weather. Why giant companies, you know, leveraging better marketing strategy to sort of, you know, make it top of mind. Say, Hey, you can order that pizza mm-hmm. <Affirmative> right now through these magical devices. Google

Leo Laporte (01:05:34):
Said all of their attempts to monetize what? Display ads and company partnerships have failed. A billion requests. That costs you a lot of money. There's servers that have to run. There's software that has to be maintained. It's not free

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:50):
Yet. Shahan and Zu off argued in her book that I finally finished the grit of my teeth the whole

Ant Pruitt (01:05:55):
Time. No, you love that,

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:56):
That that voice was the, was the, was the key to the whole strategy to invade our lives and steal our data. And I it was

Mathew Ingram (01:06:03):
Lines, I think it was, it just didn't

Leo Laporte (01:06:05):
Work. It didn't work. Be probably because people like Shan don't trust it. Han has this cold notion that it's listening and collecting data and all, which is, it's, it's provable.

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:14):
Well, if that were the case wouldn't have those high usage numbers. You can't, you can't have both.

Leo Laporte (01:06:18):
It's provably not phones. You don't have an assistant in your house, right? At

Ant Pruitt (01:06:25):
No, I don't. Cuz I just have no interest in it because I have a phone that will do the exact same.

Leo Laporte (01:06:30):
Well, that's true. That's a good point.

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:33):
I got one and I never use it. Cause I don't have, I can't think of the uses for it.

Leo Laporte (01:06:36):
We use it based The only timer.

Mathew Ingram (01:06:39):
Yeah, timer. And

Jeff Jarvis (01:06:40):
Don't you have them in every damn room house?

Leo Laporte (01:06:43):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Well that's true. Right? So different devices will have different uses in the kitchen where I have an Echo Google Siri and a Sonos. Wow.

Mathew Ingram (01:06:53):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:06:54):
The, it's funny because Lisa really likes to use the Echo for a timer. I like the Google for a timer cuz it plays fun music. Wow. And it shows pictures of food. Or if I have multiple timers, sometimes I'll use the Echo. Sometimes I use the Google <laugh>.

Mathew Ingram (01:07:08):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:07:08):
Missed before the Echo's great for reading audio books. Okay. You can say Echo read to me. The Sonos. The only thing I can do is play music. And usually you can't even do that. I've

Mathew Ingram (01:07:19):
Got, yeah, I've got the G word assistant on the Sonos. So I just tell it to go to the next song. Or

Ant Pruitt (01:07:27):
I use my phone for a timer making coffee every day. I tap this one screen to pull up the 32nd timer for my Bloom and Brew. It's, I didn't need Amazon to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:07:38):
The only reason I ever talked to the Sonos, cuz it, it really is terrible, is the Voice is Giancarlo Esposito who is the guy who played Gus Frank on Breaking Pad, you know, the El Foyo Armos? So the Chicken Brother. So I like hearing from Gus once in a while, but mostly what he says is, I don't know what you're saying. Use the app.

Ant Pruitt (01:08:00):
Oh, oh, use horrible experience.

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
I you know, you know the worst interview question in the world by the way. But whenever I do interviews somebody, there's always a few of the same questions. But one of them is, what's the best new technology? <Laugh>. Yeah. I hate superlative questions. What's the worst thing that ever happened to you on the air? What's the best thing that ever Anyway, what's the, I know that,

Mathew Ingram (01:08:25):
But can I tell you one, one anecdote about that? Yeah. I went to a demonstration or well presentation in Toronto by a couple of gentlemen from Hiroshima and it was about the nuclear explosion. So they had a bunch of like blast radius maps and so on. Oh my gosh. And you know, they were talking about Hiroshima. Na

Leo Laporte (01:08:45):
Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (01:08:46):
Yeah. It was fantastic. Like really in depth. And this poor radio reporter shows up late and then he walks up to one of the gentlemen and he says he, you can tell he has no idea what is going on, but he needs a clip. He needs a clip for the, so he says just how bad are nuclear weapons? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:09:08):
Wait.

Mathew Ingram (01:09:08):
He's waiting for, you know, like, Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
Here's show here, Shema survivor, what's the worst thing that happened to you?

Mathew Ingram (01:09:15):
How bad are nuclear weapons?

Leo Laporte (01:09:17):
So anyway, one of the, so I get that question a lot. And for a long time I was saying voice assistants are the most exciting new technology. The ability to interact. Well it, it ties hand in hand with edge computing, computing, moving off the desk into everything and then you need to communicate with it. So voice seemed like the way to do it. I really think. I thought it was a transformative technology. Well, I have to tell you, given what we've just learned, it seems highly likely Amazon and Google may stop making these.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:48):
Well they still have the software. An spo, they still have the

Leo Laporte (01:09:50):
Software. It's in your phone for the phone. It's in my watch. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:53):
And you still use it. And so they're not really, the only question is do they choose to not market it? I think they'll have devices that do this, but they just think marketing. They sell you something else.

Leo Laporte (01:10:03):
You know, I just realized what that reporter should have gone up to ask him. He should have said war. What is it good for?

Mathew Ingram (01:10:09):
What is it good for? Huh? I got a gen six watch, which unfortunately Google Assistant doesn't work on it. So they give you, so I thought hysterical. I can get it. I can get it. Is it

Leo Laporte (01:10:27):
An Android wear watch?

Mathew Ingram (01:10:29):
I know, but on that Chip said for whatever reason Google Assistant doesn't work. That's so, they're like, oh, just so fine. So I start trying to use a, to send a text from my watch. It says I have to register with the app, which is the world's worst app. Yep. Of course. Course it is. Yeah. So the app takes five minutes to load. I try to add the smart watch. It has no idea there's even a watch in the room. So I try everything. Finally, I spent hours with tech support at Amazon. Oh yeah. They had no clue what was going on. So I had to reset my account. I had to select a new password. I had to forget the watch. I had to remember the watch. And it finally, the guy's like, like, I'm sorry, I can't help you. It must be a fossil problem. Of course. Yeah. And all you were trying to do was just send a text and say, is bring home some? It shouldn't be that complicated. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:11:25):
Well, I, you know, I guess it's going away. I mean I guess if they can't monetize it,

Mathew Ingram (01:11:30):
I won't miss it.

Leo Laporte (01:11:31):
Yeah. 10 billion Amazon lost.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:35):
I wanna see that

Mathew Ingram (01:11:36):
Calculation. That's real money.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:38):
Wait, wait, wait, wait. If they sold it at cost, how do they lose 10 billion? That's what I don't get. Where, where did that number come from? And what's the calculation?

Leo Laporte (01:11:46):
The cost of running the service? It's very expensive.

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:49):
Well, Google's, they can't keep doing it cuz it's for your phones. Apple's gonna

Leo Laporte (01:11:53):
Keep doing it. They have your, your right. So maybe just Amazon. Yeah. Although unfortunately Amazon has now made a lot of deals with Fossil among others. <Laugh> cars

Mathew Ingram (01:12:02):
Is going very well. Should make a phone maybe,

Leo Laporte (01:12:05):
I hate to tell you, but it's over by the moon right now. It's on the Orion. Here's a beautiful picture by the, it is of the Orion capsule. Yeah. I'm gonna tell you something very cool about this. That's the, that's the moon and the, and the earth and the distance. Earth rise over the moon. That's the astronomy picture of the day today. It's yeah, don't you remember they put Amazon's echo into here so that the astronauts could talk to it and they actually put an iPad in there. But I, I do have a story about this if you're interested. Here's,

Mathew Ingram (01:12:39):
Can they just say, you know, start the lander Alexa, or

Leo Laporte (01:12:42):
Yeah, that's what that was. The idea is that astronauts would, would talk. It was, you know what, I'm sure Amazon gave 'em a ton of money for it. <Laugh>,

Mathew Ingram (01:12:51):
That was, that's where the 10 billion went.

Leo Laporte (01:12:53):
That was the real, that was the real reason. Well now you can display a message in order to, by the way, in order to use the Amazon Echo, they had also put an iPad up there so that there would be something to talk to the Echo. Cuz as you know, there's nobody in the capsule. So they're using an iPad. And now you can display your message on the iPad and get a picture taken of it and and, and download it the iPad and space. So in order to do that, you have to go to the Calisto website and you say select send a message. This is Calisto, this is an iPad in a box.

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:32):
So this will be Leo Laport says, I'm the, I'm the only person who's not needed here. Or is that the message you're gonna

Leo Laporte (01:13:36):
Send me? <Laugh>? Yeah. It would be funny, wouldn't it? Wouldn't that be hysterical? No, I think that because they vet every message, obviously you, you have to say something like, you know, peace on earth, goodwill towards men.

Mathew Ingram (01:13:48):
There's no intelligent life here. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:13:51):
Right. And then it'll be shown on the screen with your name and your email address. Upon submission, your message will be reviewed and selected for display at the sole discretion of Lockheed Martin. Messages with derogatory, defamatory, racist, sexist, or otherwise inappropriate content will automatically be rejected. Messages include copyright materials or endorse any person's products, brands, et cetera will also be automatically rejected. I think you have to write something pretty ady to get it up there. You know, peace on earth, good will toward men.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:22):
I can see Howard Stern's guy managing to get a dirty name on it.

Leo Laporte (01:14:25):
Bba Bowie to you all.

Jeff Jarvis (01:14:27):
Speaking of which, speaking of which and whom? Howard Stern's interview with Bruce Springsteen was amazing. It, it's gonna be on HBO this Sunday. How did you see it, Neil? Well I, it's a tribe serious. You can see it, but also it's gonna, they're gonna, I listened to it then. But they did it on video. Howard was in the same room. He got passed his germophobe because it was Bruce. And imagine that you can watch it on, on the serious app. This morning Howard was on Morning Joe for a full packed hour. Oh, nice. Wonderful discussion. Just wonderful. And then the Bruce interview is gonna be on HBO this Sunday special deal.

Leo Laporte (01:15:07):
The the Howard Stern rehabilitation tour continues

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:13):
<Laugh>, it's pretty amazing. He's he's an incredible interviewer. It was, it was really quite, quite great.

Leo Laporte (01:15:18):
Let's take a little break. Come back with lots more. Stacy will not be here next week again. She's got a very busy November. She'll be back though after that. But next week we have a very important show and I want you to start warming up for it because our guest will be Alex Stamos and he was in charge of security at Facebook. Left Facebook cuz he was so upset over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Former CSO at Facebook. He's currently at Stanford University Center for International Security

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:53):
Cooper Cooperation, also by Craig Newmark.

Leo Laporte (01:15:56):
And is an expert in security and disinformation should be a very interesting guest. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:03):
And he's, and he's keeping lists of the security problems he sees in Maroon and the Vs. So I can't wait to

Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
Hear. Oh God, that's gonna be, so his thoughts about that. He was alsos chop. He was also a Yahoo when a billion records were infiltrated. So he's <laugh> he but he has been fighting the good fight to prevent encryption back doors. I'll ask, actually, we'll ask a little bit about the attempt to eliminate encryption by the federal government

Mathew Ingram (01:16:29):
Of, I remember writing about Alex the first time I heard his name was when he prepared an internal report for Facebook about Russian activity. Yeah. And he wanted to describe it in detail and was told basically not to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:16:44):
Mm-Hmm.

Mathew Ingram (01:16:45):
<Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> right. Not to use the word Russian.

Leo Laporte (01:16:48):
Well, he was right. He is currently partnered with the former CISA director Chris Krebs and the CREs Krebs Stamos Group. How do we get Alex Stamos on this little show is my question. Hey.

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:02):
Hey. Did you

Leo Laporte (01:17:04):
Do that? Did

Jeff Jarvis (01:17:04):
You get him? No, actually this is one I didn't I take, I

Mathew Ingram (01:17:07):
Tweeted Adam and said he should do it.

Leo Laporte (01:17:09):
Did you? No. Oh,

Speaker 6 (01:17:11):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:17:12):
I, I really, I don't, I don't know where we, where he came from, but I'm thrilled. Oh. We said we did. We had a conversation. Said we should get out. Yeah. One time listener. First time. And Jason Howell, Jason producer went and did his work. Just because he's that good. Booked him Jason booked him. Nice son. Thank you Jason. Wow. so that's next week on This Week in Google. More of more of your calls coming up. No more <laugh>

Speaker 6 (01:17:43):
Much sir.

Leo Laporte (01:17:44):
Let's go to the switchboard

Speaker 6 (01:17:47):
S

Leo Laporte (01:17:48):
S time for the weather with at Pruit <laugh>

(01:17:54):
Our show Rain. You would think I'd be more coherent. I got a great night's sleep last night and thanks. I might add to my eight sleep. Our sponsor this holiday season, yay Ooh is right this holiday season. Give the never ending gift of deeper sleep. Doesn't this sound nice? Just the idea. I want more deep sleep. Consistent good sleep 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 the key is that deep sleep, the garbage collection process, even 50% more deep sleep, can make all the difference in your ability to concentrate your performance, your recovery hormone regulation. Now how does the eight sleep do this? Well, it's actually really simple. The eight sleep is an amazing tech layer that goes over your mattress. Like a fitted sheet that dynamically cools and heats each side of the bed to maintain the optimal sleeping temperature for you.

(01:18:58):
With the eight sleep pod, you can start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees. That's pretty chilly. Or as hot as 110 degrees. That's pretty warm or anywhere in between. It monitors you, monitors your sleep, monitors where you are in your sleep stages. It also monitors the room temperature. Of course, everybody, I think, you know, the worst thing in the world is to wake up hot in the middle of the night sweating. That's not good. But it's nice to get in bed and it's cozy, right? So that's how I have my sleep set. I set it to be warm. I get in, it feels good, especially during the winter. It feels good. It's so cozy. And then as I drift off into sleep, it brings me into deeper sleep by slowly cooling down. And then in the morning it goes back up. It ramps up. It's almost like an alarm.

(01:19:41):
They do have a little vibration alarm in there you could use to, but I don't need it. Cuz as it gets cozier and warmer in the morning, I'm going, oh, the only problem with it, it's so comfy. I don't wanna get outta bed. The eight sleep's amazing, but it does it to both sides. So Lisa has a completely different sleep pattern and it does it differently for her. It's so cool. You fall asleep faster, you sleep deeper and longer than ever before, clinical data shows that eight sleep users experience up to 34% more deep sleep. It's incredible. It's not a holiday miracle. Now I have to say the holidays are coming in the Northern hemisphere, it's getting cold. But as we head to summer in the southern hemisphere, this is a great solution too because I've had this for more than a year. So we went through a summer, a hot, hot summer, and having the eight sleep as almost a little air conditioner made it so nice.

(01:20:35):
It also saves money because I don't have to heat the house. I don't have to cool the house in the summer. The eight sleep does it in a much more efficient fashion just by heating and cooling our bed. I love it. If better sleep is on your wishlist. Look no further than the new pod three. We have a pod two and we're gonna upgrade to the pod three because it's got twice the sensors. I can't, I am so excited. I can't wait for a limited time. Now we get a really good deal for you, but it's only good through November 30th. So you need to act right now up to $400 off their sleep fit holiday bundle. That includes the pod cover I was talking about. That's my favorite. They also sell a mattress, but the pod cover is, if you like your mattress, the grid goes right over the top.

(01:21:17):
Go to eight sleep.com/twi. Okay. Eight sleep.com/twi to get those holiday savings up to $400 off they currently ship in the US Canada. Good news, Matt. The UK select countries in the EU and they do ship to Australia. E i g h t s l e e p eight sleep.com/twi. Now if you're hearing the show after November 30th, that's okay because you still go to eight sleep.com/twi and look for other exclusive holiday savings or save $150 at checkout with their normal offer. But right now is a really good time to do this. Up to $400 off their sleep fit holiday bundle. Eight sleep.com/twi. Now let's go to the phones. No, I'm joking. This time. Will you read the instructions about putting it on? Yeah. So when I, when we first got it and we got it cuz Kevin Rose recommended it and the name we got it cuz he said it and she said, oh, it's a great, so we got it before they were an advertiser.

(01:22:17):
We got it. And you know, tech bro said, oh yeah, it's easy. You just put that. I could see that you just put that on the boxes. Wait a minute, what's this <laugh>? I had a whole extra part. So then I went and watched the YouTube video and I realized I'd put it on upside down. So I had to take it off and do it over again. So funny. Yeah, so funny. Just watch. It's easy to do. But you probably should watch the YouTube video. <Laugh> they tell you to. Geez. It's like, oh wait a minute. What's this? Oh, that goes underneath. Oh. Whoops. Whoops. <laugh> Honey. Honey. No, Lisa was laughing at me the whole time. Oh my God. Well she, okay. She should <laugh> She took off to do grocery shopping or something and I said, oh yeah, I'm gonna put this on. And I, we have a fairly heavy king bed. You know, it's one of those Casper giant king beds. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I find myself, this is a big mistake. I don't know if you've ever done this, but it's kind of floppy. I lifted it up and I'm holding it like Atlas holding the bed. Oh yeah. The bed. Oh,

Ant Pruitt (01:23:26):
I've done this

Leo Laporte (01:23:27):
<Laugh> and it slowly I'm

Ant Pruitt (01:23:30):
Going, I've done this. Oh no.

Leo Laporte (01:23:35):
And I ended up on my back with the mattress on me.

Ant Pruitt (01:23:38):
I've had to move our bed a handful of times.

Leo Laporte (01:23:41):
Recording. You're, and if you are having that, imagine me little, I mean you

Ant Pruitt (01:23:45):
Strong man. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:46):
You, you pack of lunch. I thought I was Ann. That be, I thought I was Ann. I thought, well I could do Thises. I'm a man c She said next time she came home and I was on Honey <laugh>. Oh, here. She said, next time, wait till I get home. We can do this together. Oh

Ant Pruitt (01:24:04):
Man. So funny.

Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
Hey, here's some really good news. For a long time Google has been lobbying Facebook two lobbying to end the insanity. No, not daylight saving time.

Ant Pruitt (01:24:20):
Oh dang it.

Leo Laporte (01:24:22):
<Laugh>. The leap. The leap. Second. Do you know about the leap second?

Ant Pruitt (01:24:27):
Yeah. You mentioned this several months ago,

Leo Laporte (01:24:30):
But they didn't like it cause it screws computers up. Yeah. So the earth is not, believe it or not, as consistent as a computer or an atomic clock. It's rotation varies. And some, and it diverges since 1972, whenever the uni the, the Toma clock, which doesn't vary diverges from the actual Earth time by more than 0.9 seconds. A leap second has been added to universal time. I, and maybe, you know, you, you remember this it was only a couple of years ago. They went ten nine at midnight. New Year's Eve. 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1 0. Yeah. They add a little a second. The problem is it breaks havoc with computers. Cause they don't, they go, what are you talking about? One, one <laugh>. It's, it's midnight. What are you talking about? So Google, Facebook, a lot of computer companies were saying, look, can we get rid of this leap Second, it's not, it's not gonna make that big of a difference. So this has to be ruled upon by the worldwide general conference on wait and measures. They met outside per, you know, where they meet? Versai

Ant Pruitt (01:25:48):
Versai, not bad boy.

Leo Laporte (01:25:50):
The Hall of Mirrors. It's a tough gig. On the November 18th. And they've decided, okay, but we're not gonna do this right away. 20 from 2035. We're not gonna do leap seconds anymore. What does that mean? Well, it's not predictable cuz the earth is wobbly. So they don't know how much we're going to, they, how

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:14):
Often in general do they do leap seconds?

Leo Laporte (01:26:16):
I think it's like every, every five or six years. I can remember in my lifetime. Several. 

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:24):
Mathew, do you Ant, do you like remember leap seconds in your life? No. Is that a normal thing to do?

Leo Laporte (01:26:33):
<Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:33):
Sir. To remember them what I ate for breakfast today. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:26:36):
Exactly. Let me ask Macon. Hey Macon

Jeff Jarvis (01:26:39):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
Anyway, I re do you rem you remember it? Look, I bet you John remembers them cuz you're kind of geeky. You remember leap seconds kind of, kind of talked about it. <Laugh> <laugh>

(01:26:53):
Representatives from Canada, the United States and France were among those at the CG p m who called for the leap second to be scrapped. But Russia, which voted against the proposal, of course, if you guys like it, we don't like it. Wanna push back the date to 2040 or later to deal with. Oh, actually they have a good reason. They have their own GPS system. Lonas. And that is a problem fornos the Russia system. I'm, I don't know why the Russian system incorporates leap seconds. GPS is already ignored them. They, but for some reason the Russians built those in. So Russia is gonna have to install new satellites and ground stations.

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:37):
Jesus

Leo Laporte (01:27:38):
For glow na to work. Whoops. astronomers who rely on a UTC to align their telescopes will also have to adjust for the change. Because they are, the telescopes are care about the Earth's actual rotation. Nobody else does. By the way, if, if you're, if we're off, if the, if the, if the year or whatever, or the day, if the the day was off by a 10th of a second, who would, who would care? A notice, right?

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:09):
John

Leo Laporte (01:28:11):
Kylo and biscuit. Kylo. Kylo and biscuit. No, they're the ones that confused by the leap. Second, they know what's wrong. You're like, wait a minute, they're confused. The current situation is unsustainable says Elizabeth Donley, who handles the time and frequency division at the NIST Boulder where the universal

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:30):
Did you I used to listen to that on when I was at my ham radio. Short wave radio base.

Leo Laporte (01:28:35):
Yeah. Wwv. She says the current situation is unsustainable would continue to get worse. Different organizations handle leap second differently. Google, for example, smears the extra second over a 24 hour period. They don't, they can't just stop for a second. This creates an ambiguity between time sources as much as of as much as half a second, which she says is huge. Although in the long term, Earth's rotation is slowing as a result of the pull of the moon. A speed up since 2020 has also make the issue more pressing. Because for the first time ever, oh see I was doing the wrong thing. It's actually 5 4 3 2 0.

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:19):
Oh, I see you

Leo Laporte (01:29:21):
Skip ahead. Thought for the first time a leaf second might need to be removed. Oh no, no, I wasn't wrong. So it is 5 4 3 2 11. You're adding a second. It might need to be 5 4, 3 2 or one zero. No, 5 4, 3 20 leak. Cuz a leaf second has to be removed. UTC has only ever had to slow by a beat to wait for Earth. It has never had to skip ahead to catch up with it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:45):
Boy, you know, I'm sure this is gonna be on the

Leo Laporte (01:29:47):
Year end. Highlights

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:48):
Of year <laugh>. I have no doubt.

Leo Laporte (01:29:51):
Oh, you'd probably talk, talk about Elon Musk or something. This, this is

Jeff Jarvis (01:29:54):
Rive. Oh, I think Gutenberg's better than this. Geez. Geez.

Leo Laporte (01:30:00):
Okay, well then I'm not gonna bring up the ro bite. You obviously don't.

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:04):
Was just about that. The Ronna. Yeah. I was

Leo Laporte (01:30:06):
Just reading. Do you care about the Ronna bite?

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:08):
Of course I do. Leo. Of course, of

Leo Laporte (01:30:10):
Course. So Google

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:11):
The Ro Graham you mean?

Leo Laporte (01:30:13):
Well, it's a, there are lots of Ros, there's <laugh>. So Google we, we run out after yada and Zeta bites. Right? That's we run out. We don't have anything that cause Y z we're at the end of the alphabet. Google has been proposing that the next step after Zeta bite should be hella bite. <Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:36):
<Laugh>. That's a hella bite. That's

Leo Laporte (01:30:38):
A hella bite. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:30:39):
Every teenager here in Sonoma County. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
So it's a hella bite man. Zeta is 10 to the 21st. Yada is 10 to the 24th. We don't have a 10 to the 27th or 10 to the thirties. You know, it's, you know, it's every three zeros. You have to add another thing. So the, the general same people again at VER side, they were busy this week. They have, they

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:05):
Have, they decided it long before they've been out at restaurants constantly

Leo Laporte (01:31:08):
<Laugh>, they should cut it. So 10 of the 27th will be aona bite and 10 of the 30th will be ATA by Q U E T T A. The world produces a zettabyte of data every year is expected to reach a yada bite a year in the next

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:26):
Decade, yada, yada,

Leo Laporte (01:31:27):
Yada, yada, yada, yada. The problem is they, they start with letters of the alphabet. And the only two letters that are currently not used are Q and r Google one. It's conspiracy.

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:39):
Google

Leo Laporte (01:31:39):
Wanted and hella bite and bronto bite

Jeff Jarvis (01:31:43):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:31:45):
But h and B are not available. They've been used. So it has to be Q and r. When you go small, it ends with an A. When you go big, it ends with an O. So for instance, the earth is six monograms. That's a six follow by 27 zeros. Is this better or worse than the leap? Second,

Ant Pruitt (01:32:07):
Please find the, the

Mathew Ingram (01:32:08):
Same. It's about the same

Leo Laporte (01:32:10):
<Laugh> news from so, okay. Right. I'm just gonna stop.

Mathew Ingram (01:32:19):
I heard the a that came up with, this is known only as the Punta <laugh> and they meet, they meet fortnightly in a location known as the Meadows.

Leo Laporte (01:32:30):
Is that true? Are you making that up? Oh no, that's,

Mathew Ingram (01:32:33):
That's from, so I married an ax murder. Okay. Mike, Mike Myers talks about his dad is convinced there's a secret group called the Pen Tait.

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
So there's roto roto bite, which is

Jeff Jarvis (01:32:44):
Over those seconds. We've just lived

Leo Laporte (01:32:46):
Through. That's actually, well wait a minute. I'm not the cause I gotta tell you. Oh, I bet you're not. There's a roto meter and a quick to meter. So that's the negatives. Okay. Then. Oh, it's smaller. Aa it's bigger. You know, they didn't like this on Twitter either. When I brought it up. <Laugh>,

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:04):
I

Mathew Ingram (01:33:05):
Think you're getting a message.

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:07):
No, he's not

Ant Pruitt (01:33:09):
Getting

Leo Laporte (01:33:10):
The message.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:10):
Libin was like, nah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
Mm-Hmm. Yeah, it wasn't interesting.

Mathew Ingram (01:33:18):
He's

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:18):
Got a whole list. There's tons of stories folks. There's just lots of stories in here. All kinds of interesting things happening in this world.

Leo Laporte (01:33:25):
Right. And he

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:25):
Picks that to go on. Right. I got for 30 minutes.

Leo Laporte (01:33:28):
I got one for you. Elizabeth Holmes. Okay.

Mathew Ingram (01:33:31):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:32):
11 years

Jeff Jarvis (01:33:32):
Leap seconds she's gonna

Leo Laporte (01:33:34):
Be losing. Yeah. 

Mathew Ingram (01:33:37):
That's real time. There's

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
A reason why it's so long though. That's kind of inter I find this interesting is because there the sentencing guidelines are tied to the amount of money she took. It's not, oh, she, you know, people could have died. No, no, no. <Laugh>. Yeah. That's not, that's not what's going on. It's people lost money. A lot of money. Right. Big shots.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:03):
That just shows more issues with our system. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:34:06):
It it, this is from npr.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:08):
Has it been

Leo Laporte (01:34:09):
Changed? No. How Silicon Valley fervor explains Elizabeth Holmes 11 year prison sentence. The, the, the, the, the sensing guidelines are dependent on how much money investors lost. And because Theranos raised so much money from Rupert Murdoch, who don't wanna mess with Rupert, Larry Ellison. Betsy DeVos, George Schultz they identified 10 investors who were defrauded. Came up with a number of 121 million, which is actually a fraction of what the total raise was. I think they raised almost a billion dollars. The judge said that's how much investors lost when offset by the amount Theranos stock would've been worth without home's deceit. So,

Ant Pruitt (01:35:02):
You know, I guess that's the black and white side of the law.

Leo Laporte (01:35:07):
I think it's so

Ant Pruitt (01:35:07):
Insulting. Binarys. Right? These are the facts of the matter. Yeah. What happened is money was lost. Not necessarily people died. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:15):
What about the people's lives that were risked by the fraudulent blood drop technology? Right? Oh no, no. We're more worried about Betsy DeVos's millions,

Ant Pruitt (01:35:27):
You know, but we also have a new CEO of a social media platform that just skates around doing whatever the hell he wants to. Yeah. It's our system, man.

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
The sentencing guidelines, after multiple factors are considered, spits out an offense level. Her level was 33, 24 points of it was def was based on the amount of money she defrauded. So anyway 11 TX is gonna be in jail for, oh yeah. What was that? What was that like the time you got there? Or was ro rot years? Rot of years. Ro years, rot of years. See you are using it already. You got quit

Ant Pruitt (01:36:12):
Toast. It actually made sense when he was talking about it. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:36:17):
<Laugh>. How about this great story in the Financial Times. Lessons from a decade of Candy Crush. This is the subhead, the puzzles. Game puzzle games reaches huge. So why isn't it more talked about culturally? Cause it's boring. So stupid. <Laugh>, three of the highest grossing mobile games ever launched in 2012 Candy Crush Saga, clash of Klans Puzzles and Dragons, billions in revenue, even before you count the spinoff titles or the licensing deals. Just buying the games and the in-app purchases alone, which means by the way, that Apple also cashed in. Right. 30% of that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Candy Crush Saga. 3 billion downloads still today. 200 million players a month. 200 million active users a month.

Ant Pruitt (01:37:11):
That's the thing we're how many

Leo Laporte (01:37:13):
Play t toe in a month? I wonder,

Ant Pruitt (01:37:14):
We're talking about normal out there.

Mathew Ingram (01:37:17):
It says they wanted to turn Candy Crush into a, into a TV show.

Leo Laporte (01:37:22):
Yeah,

Mathew Ingram (01:37:23):
But what would that look

Ant Pruitt (01:37:24):
Like? I'm surprised Netflix hasn't done

Leo Laporte (01:37:26):
It yet. And then the Financial Times is baffled that it did not last longer than a first season. It's just boring. Wild. Anyway. I don't, there's not much to say about that either. I, I'm not good today. I'm sorry.

Mathew Ingram (01:37:41):
That's not true. Don't, don't beat yourself up like that. Leo.

Leo Laporte (01:37:47):
You're doing great.

Mathew Ingram (01:37:50):
You're smart on people like you. I

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
Am Intel. Even if you're not needed, I am completely irrelevant. Intel has unveiled a real time deep fake detector. They say 96% accuracy. It's called Fake catcher. That's good. That's

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:07):
Not problem solved

Leo Laporte (01:38:08):
Analogy

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:09):
Solves technology problems. There

Mathew Ingram (01:38:11):
You go. Did you hear about the deep fake of Sam Bankman?

Leo Laporte (01:38:14):
No. Fried. Oh no. Where's that?

Mathew Ingram (01:38:17):
It was quite well done actually. It showed up on Twitter and it was him offering you money back and all you had to do was, you know, send something to a specific address. It was extremely convincing.

Leo Laporte (01:38:28):
Can I, can I play it? Am I allowed? We got how Mac Break Weekly got taken down because I, I didn't even put the audio on. I played an Apple ad. Just the pictures yesterday.

Mathew Ingram (01:38:39):
Oh man. Just

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
The pictures. And Apple says no, you can't even play the pictures of their ad, of their ad Country ad play stupid.

Ant Pruitt (01:38:48):
I remember you saying that too.

Leo Laporte (01:38:49):
Stupid. unfortunately I can't show you the video cuz the account has been suspended. <Laugh>

Jeff Jarvis (01:38:56):
Saved from

Mathew Ingram (01:38:56):
Yourself for obvious reasons.

Leo Laporte (01:38:58):
Yeah. Yeah. The biggest giveaway of crypto. A hundred million directed people to a website which existed where people could enter a gateway to win crypto. It's a scam obviously. Yeah, yeah. But unfortunately do you think people were fooled by the deep fake?

Mathew Ingram (01:39:16):
Oh, I think somewhere

Leo Laporte (01:39:18):
Probably. Yeah. Well, so it was only a matter of time. Wait a minute. Maybe, maybe there's video here. It does kind of look like him. Looks kind of cooky. I it's a little too happy. I wanna give you money. I do. I know he was, by the way, the guy who did this was a verified course.

Mathew Ingram (01:39:40):
Blue Check was

Leo Laporte (01:39:41):
Of course check fella.

Jeff Jarvis (01:39:44):
Did you see that New York Times story in the blue checks? No, they didn't underst understand the difference between verification before and paid blue checks now and then they did this huge analysis. Oh Lord. Checks. That was kind of meaningless as far

Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
As I could tell. Let's see. Movie theater stocks pop after report says Amazon plans to spend a billion dollars on releases.

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:12):
Meanwhile, Disney's going through hell because nobody's

Leo Laporte (01:40:15):
Streaming. Yep.

Mathew Ingram (01:40:16):
Boy, if family Amazon wants to lose money, movies. Movies, that's the way

Leo Laporte (01:40:20):
To go. There you go. Yeah. <laugh>

Mathew Ingram (01:40:21):
Can lose a lot of money really

Leo Laporte (01:40:23):
Fast. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:40:24):
Right.

Ant Pruitt (01:40:25):
I will say I'm enjoying their football coverage. Even when the games have been dogs. It's not their fault

Leo Laporte (01:40:32):
Change. Do you think the NFL screwed them? Like they were looking at the schedule, said let's give those to Amazon.

Ant Pruitt (01:40:38):
No. Well, well

Leo Laporte (01:40:39):
No. I mean, I guess you don't know ahead of time

Ant Pruitt (01:40:40):
Pre-Season wise is potentially they were good games. It's just, you

Leo Laporte (01:40:43):
Know, I don't know though. The NFL seems really good at picking Monday night and Sunday night games. Those are usually good.

Ant Pruitt (01:40:49):
There's been some dogs on Monday night. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:40:52):
<Laugh> I liked last Monday night. That was a good one

Ant Pruitt (01:40:54):
In now. But I've enjoyed the, the Amazon coverage especially with the stats view and, and allowing you to see the different old

Leo Laporte (01:41:03):
Ladies, you

Ant Pruitt (01:41:03):
Know, what in real time

Leo Laporte (01:41:04):
And Herb Herter is great. I like Herb Ke Street or whatever. It's Herb Street. Herb

Ant Pruitt (01:41:11):
Street

Leo Laporte (01:41:12):
<Laugh>. He is, he is very good with Al Michaels. I like them together. It's a very That's a good team. Yeah. alright. I think it's a change log time. What do you say?

Ant Pruitt (01:41:23):
Is there a change

Leo Laporte (01:41:23):
Log? Lay the drums. Oh yeah. Oh, they're change log. Oh, is there a change log today? The Black Friday deals for the Google are spectacular. If you were, you were smart if you held off and didn't run and buy a Pixel seven a Pixel watch or Pixel Buts Pro, some of the discounts are amazing. Pixel seven Pro, well this isn't the best. $749. That's only 50 bucks off Pixel Watch 50 bucks off as well. But shop around because I see Pixel seven on sale at Best Buy. Target, Amazon and Google for 4 99. Pixel seven Pro 7 49 is 150 off. So I guess that's okay. Six a $150 off. So there's some good, there's some good deals out there.

Ant Pruitt (01:42:15):
So I gotta ask Mr.

Leo Laporte (01:42:16):
Laporte. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (01:42:18):
Why are these phones not those prices to begin with? This happens every

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
Single, every time

Ant Pruitt (01:42:24):
You wait 30 days, it's a significant discount tax beyond that is another,

Leo Laporte (01:42:29):
The schmuck tax and I pay it every year. Oh yeah. I pay the Schmuck tax. Look at this. A Nest Mini normally 50 bucks, $18. We know now though that they money, they get rid of <laugh>. Its funny. Clear 'em out. Get rid of them. Get rid of 'em. That's a Walmart 1999. Best by Target and Google. So these are all from the Verge. But some really good deals right now on on Google's stuff. Google Phi. If you're Google Phi customer, you're gonna get, even then I bought mine through Google Fi. I wish I'd known this. You could save $300 in the Pixel seven Pro if you buy it through Google P fi. I did save a hundred bucks cuz I got it through P fi. Phi is Google's M V N O, their cell service. And which I have, you know, I have an account with. I like it. Especially for international travel. Google is launching new search shopping and maps features. Whoop, that's the wrong story. That's, oh, did

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:34):
I do that again? I don't, she's I thought I fixed that.

Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
You linked to the wrong story.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:38):
No. Cause the problem is when you, when you, when you look something else and you, and then you, then you change the link. It doesn't remember the changed link.

Leo Laporte (01:43:43):
Was it on the Google blog?

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:46):
No, it was from the TLDR newsletter.

Leo Laporte (01:43:49):
Okay, well let me just, I bet you they took it from the keyword.

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:53):
If you search for the headline, they'll probably cut

Leo Laporte (01:43:55):
It. Yeah. 

Jeff Jarvis (01:43:59):
Sorry. It's my fault.

Leo Laporte (01:44:01):
Well, hey, thank you for putting a story in there though.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:05):
I

Leo Laporte (01:44:05):
Try. What are you playing a video game? Who's playing that video game? Oh,

Ant Pruitt (01:44:09):
Sorry, <laugh>. My alarm went off.

Leo Laporte (01:44:11):
Oh, okay. Google launches search, shopping and maps. Features multi search. There you go. You got it for food. So

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:21):
So you see the dish, you take a picture of the dish and you say, find this dish near me.

Leo Laporte (01:44:25):
Oh, Haman. Tasha near me. All right. That sounds good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:30):
I don't think that was aasha.

Leo Laporte (01:44:32):
Well it was kind of

Jeff Jarvis (01:44:34):
Version

Leo Laporte (01:44:34):
Of it. Go haha. Is what that was <laugh>. Exactly. you can also search for specific, well I guess that was specific dishes or no, how is that different? See a food dish you think looks tasty and makes you hungry. Well, with Google lends you take a photo of that dish typed near me in the multi search and you'll have a where I can get that. In addition to searching by photo for dishes near you, you can also type your search in to find those specific dishes. Truffle mac and cheese near me. And then you'll find mama's handmade.

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:09):
You know, truffles are overrated. I'd, I'd, I just don't like adding truffles to everything. I'm just a man of the people.

Leo Laporte (01:45:15):
Everyth makes everyth. Everything tastes good. Everything. Oh no

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:18):
It doesn't.

Ant Pruitt (01:45:18):
No, I'm with you Mr. Jarvis. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:20):
No.

Leo Laporte (01:45:21):
See, I knew that

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:22):
You are not a truffled man, Ant and I knew

Ant Pruitt (01:45:25):
That it's not bacon. You know, don't go to Peru Bacon on a chrome Ford Mustang bumper and just tastes good. You

Jeff Jarvis (01:45:33):
Put truffles in everything. Everything, everything

Leo Laporte (01:45:35):
Google is using now GaN models the generative adversarial networks that Stacy loves so much to improve translated text with Google Lens.

Ant Pruitt (01:45:48):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:45:50):
Launching later this year, before the end of the year looks like the same exact text. I don't know how it's improved, but anyway, Google's shopping with AR shoes. <Laugh>, Google's releasing shopping features to help you see shoes in augmented reality. Right over your own shoes. <Laugh>. Google's, this is so sad. This is like straight outta Idiocracy. Google says this new shopping ar experience for sneakers. Oh, not even any shoe, just sneakers or trainers as you might be saying in other lands, allows you to spin Zoom and see shoes in your space. This will work across brands like Sony Vans and Merrill starts rolling out in the US today. Here is a screenshot of what this looks like. Don't put your shoes on the table.

Ant Pruitt (01:46:43):
Where's Adidas or Adidas? They were working on this several years ago with

Leo Laporte (01:46:47):
Adobe. Yeah. Do you call him Adi Dos?

Ant Pruitt (01:46:52):
No, I just said that for the European folks. European folks. That's exactly how they pronounce it.

Leo Laporte (01:46:58):
Adi Do Shirley

Ant Pruitt (01:46:59):
Dos a

Mathew Ingram (01:47:00):
Adi Dos. Yeah, that's that's his name.

Leo Laporte (01:47:01):
That's the great Pronou. Deutch.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:04):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (01:47:04):
Adi Dassler

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:06):
Du.

Leo Laporte (01:47:07):
I'm gonna call Marty Doss from now on. I like that.

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:10):
But Oregon is Eugene. It's so confusing.

Ant Pruitt (01:47:13):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:47:14):
New shopping models for ar beauty, augmented reality search features for you to try on products like skin tones. 150 models representing diverse. Oh, so you tried the makeup on a skin tone that matches yours or face shape or ethnicity or skin type. So you can test foundation shades and see what that's gonna look like. Google Maps has added a live view search, so it's kinda like Lens as well. So you you, you open it up, turn on the camera and it'll say, oh yeah, over there. That's that's a nice place to get some hot pot or something.

Ant Pruitt (01:47:54):
Some what?

Leo Laporte (01:47:55):
I don't know. London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. I don't know why I came up with that. Hot pot. Hot pot. It's good. Google Maps

Mathew Ingram (01:48:04):
Hot pot.

Leo Laporte (01:48:04):
Yeah. It's Mongolian. Yeah. Yeah. Google Maps adds ev charging filters and wheelchair accessibility. Good. There's lots of new features. See, you thought this change log was just gonna be some lightweight crap. No, no. That's it though. Wait a minute. Youtube releases in depth podcasting guide with best practices. I bet you Renee Richie might have had something to do with that, don't you think? And you can now ask Google assistant to search and play podcasts by guest or episode. So you could say, I wanna hear Mathew Ingram on this weekend. Google. Ooh. And it will play, you know, whatever it wants. Really <laugh>.

Ant Pruitt (01:48:47):
Mr. Laport, were, were there any rumors of YouTube pulling a Spotify As far as the podcast? Where it goes?

Leo Laporte (01:48:55):
Doing what? Pulling. Oh, you're saying you'll be exclusive,

Ant Pruitt (01:48:59):
Right?

Leo Laporte (01:48:59):
No, I haven't heard it, but I wouldn't be surprised. Haven't that

Ant Pruitt (01:49:03):
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this piece about, you know, the best practices for

Leo Laporte (01:49:08):
Podcast. Well, let me see. Harding best practice was start to do something. Don't put your podcast anywhere else. That's a bad practice. Put

Ant Pruitt (01:49:15):
It on rss.

Leo Laporte (01:49:16):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:49:17):
RSS with podcast as Dave Wener would say. Podcast without RSS is not a podcast.

Leo Laporte (01:49:22):
I agree. It's not a podcast. It something else, but it's not a podcast. Spotify, yeah. Show podcast on

Mathew Ingram (01:49:30):
Dave Va and

Leo Laporte (01:49:31):
No

Mathew Ingram (01:49:32):
Have Dave and Adam Curry on And you could, they could talk about who invented

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
Podcasts. Yeah, they did it together. But Dave somehow has decided he doesn't like me now, so I don't know. He was really, yeah, he's mad at me. He says, well, I'm just gonna have some other journalists try feed land.org. <Laugh> Dave Wener. Is that Yeah. Yeah. He said the Macon. He said, yeah, I like Dave. I got nothing against him. I guess I, I guess that made him mad that I didn't like feed land or something. I don't know. Feed. Did you talk about feed land? It was in Macon Feed land. Well give it a plug feed. Land is an interesting idea. I did say it would be nice if I didn't have to use Twitter to authenticate, but, but, and that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's the only way to do it. You gotta, but and it's not working cuz I probably signed off. But anyway the idea is you, you have feed like you're, it's like RSS feeds, but it's social. Like I see your feed and you see mine and I just, I don't, that's not what I use RSS for. I use RSS to prepare the shows to find the big stories about yada bites and leap seconds. You <laugh>, you're not gonna find those any anywhere else. You gotta, you gotta do your, your work. And that's the Google change law.

(01:50:52):
All right. We're gonna take a little break, come back and your picks of the week are next. So prepare them with diligence. Our show today brought to you by H p e GreenLake, orchestrated by the experts at C D W, the helpful people at cdw. Understand that your organization needs simple management over its big data, but with some needing to keep their workloads OnPrem due to organizational requirements. It can feel challenging, you know, to do that, to organize and optimize your data. And that's where CDW can help your organization. By consolidating and managing all your data in one flexible, unified experience with the HPE GreenLake Edge to Cloud platform, the experience you get with HPE GreenLake is unique cuz no matter where your data or applications live, you can free up energy and resources with automated processes and streamlined management. We can always use some streamlining these days, can't we?

(01:51:50):
Not only that. HPE GreenLake creates a seamless cloud experience among multiple data environments, thanks to the, as a service model that meets your remote workforce at the edge. And with unrivaled scalability, you'll see an instant increasing capacity, allowing for greater flexibility and accelerated business growth so your team can tackle bigger priorities like innovation when you need to get more out of your technology. H p E makes data transformation possible. CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/h p e. And we thank CDW for their support of this week. Google cdw.com/h p e. It's so nice to have you. Mathew Igram, the Columbia Journalism Review. He's on jona.host/Mathew. I with one T.

Jeff Jarvis (01:52:47):
One T. Mathew

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
One T Mathew. He's the one. Ladies and gentlemen do you have a thing of the week? This week?

Mathew Ingram (01:52:57):
I have a number of things. Oh, thank you. So many. Let's do

Leo Laporte (01:53:00):
You to choose from. I love

Mathew Ingram (01:53:01):
Them One. So one that just occurred to me when we were talking about who's verified on Twitter. I saw someone bought one of these, I think it was Ryan Broder, who has a great newsletter called Garbage Day. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:53:16):
I love Garbage Day. I

Mathew Ingram (01:53:17):
Love it. Yeah, it's fantastic. I just,

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
So he had

Mathew Ingram (01:53:19):
A picture of this. There's a plaque and it says in honor of at Broad or whatever, who had a verified Twitter account before they were available for purchase

Leo Laporte (01:53:31):
<Laugh>. Oh, I'm getting that

Mathew Ingram (01:53:33):
Plaque. That's

Leo Laporte (01:53:34):
Frame. Oh,

Mathew Ingram (01:53:35):
I $80.

Leo Laporte (01:53:37):
I have a verified plaque. Oh, 80. There you go. 80. But you have to buy,

Mathew Ingram (01:53:41):
I mean, this is good quality

Leo Laporte (01:53:42):
To verify that you have Twitter. Twitter, yeah. Wow. Should I buy it? It's a

Mathew Ingram (01:53:48):
Great little

Leo Laporte (01:53:49):
<Laugh>. That's

Mathew Ingram (01:53:50):
Awesome. I think someone gave it to him. Anyway, if you're into that sort of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:53:54):
Oh look, I have to authorize, verify forever to access my account. This is like serious. Okay, wait a minute. It's generating my plaque. <Laugh> lasers are firing up. Oh, look at that.

Mathew Ingram (01:54:08):
There you go. There you go.

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
Oh, see, wait a minute. Just if I copy the image, maybe that would be <laugh>. Hey, won't

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:16):
Be consumable for that.

Mathew Ingram (01:54:18):
Do that on the air.

Leo Laporte (01:54:19):
Wow. You are verified. Check out below to claim you're black. That's pretty funny. Go cool. Yeah,

Mathew Ingram (01:54:27):
I

Leo Laporte (01:54:27):
Thought it was funny. Right? I'm gonna buy it.

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:29):
Worked on a proposal for the, what I worked for Advance the newspaper company for a function we called Plat.

Leo Laporte (01:54:36):
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:54:37):
And my idea was, cause people love when your kids are on the, you know, the kids' names in the paper. Yeah. You want that. So it was a whole thing where you could see a story and you could say, gimme a plaque of that. And I worked with a guy who had a whole trophy company. We weren't gonna do that, but it never turned

Leo Laporte (01:54:49):
Out what else you got. You said you had more than one thing.

Mathew Ingram (01:54:53):
So the second thing that

Leo Laporte (01:54:54):
Was pretty good though, by the way. Nice. The start. That was good.

Mathew Ingram (01:54:57):
The second thing is a little weird, but I, you know, it's just a, it's a rabbit hole that you can go down if you want to. It's research into a common parasite called Toxoplasmosis Gandhi, which is commonly transmitted by, it's

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
A cat's a that's a cat. That's the one that turns people into cat people. Yeah.

Mathew Ingram (01:55:21):
Well more than that. So the theory is it, the, the parasite is trying to make you more attractive or get you to have sex with a lot of people so then it can pass itself on. So it makes you more appealing to the opposite sex. It's not clear to me whether it makes you more appealing to another person with t Gandhi or whether it just makes, makes you more appealing in general. It also research shows that it encourages risk taking behavior. So I think that's one Elon

Jeff Jarvis (01:55:52):
Musk has. That's how we figured it out. You've diagnosed him.

Leo Laporte (01:55:55):
So this, you get you get tolas by, by contact with feline scat. So cleaning kitty litter or eating it. Yeah. And don't eat it, but if you

Mathew Ingram (01:56:08):
Did, some high proportion of cat owners already have

Leo Laporte (01:56:10):
It. They already have it. And the, and the I've heard before,

Jeff Jarvis (01:56:13):
Damaging pregnancies.

Leo Laporte (01:56:14):
Yeah. It's not good. But the life cycle of this parasite is wild because it, it grows in your brain. And then the idea is a cat eats you like a big cat and it gets it. And so it's a cycle that goes around and then it, it poops it out and then another human eats it and it grows in your brain and then the cat eats you. So the thesis was for a long time that if you have this infection you will suddenly want to be around cats a lot and that eventually a big cat will just eat you and then the parasite goes on. But, so no, this is a new new, a new thing. Yeah. This, this is and you know what, I find my wife extremely attractive. So it might be real cuz

Mathew Ingram (01:56:56):
She definitely, so the guys, the guys extrapolating from behavior that is seen in rats, for example, they actually, instead of being repulsed by cats, they're actually attracted to them. Yeah. Which then of course makes the cat eat

Leo Laporte (01:57:09):
Them. Yeah. They see, I think that's, it's not about,

Mathew Ingram (01:57:11):
I'm just trying it fascinating.

Leo Laporte (01:57:12):
It's about edible <laugh>.

Mathew Ingram (01:57:14):
Yeah. I find it fascinating that the idea that this little parasite is controlling people and making them engage in certain types of behavior that's more, you know, appealing theoretically to sexual

Leo Laporte (01:57:26):
Partners. There is actually a a Elon Musk connection because a more recent study found people infected with toxic Tolas Plasmosis Gandhi were more likely to engage in risky entrepreneurial behavior. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. They have a lower risk of fear of failure or,

Mathew Ingram (01:57:45):
And multiple sexual partners is also Yeah. And he's got,

Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
He wants to have as many children, like

Mathew Ingram (01:57:50):
12 kids

Leo Laporte (01:57:51):
Or so. I think we figured it out.

Mathew Ingram (01:57:52):
Yeah. I think we're on on,

Jeff Jarvis (01:57:54):
There's a book by Robert Dorton, Darton, the Great Cat Massacre may occur in Silicon Valley

Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
Talk. So Plasmosis,

Mathew Ingram (01:58:02):
I'm gonna apply for funding to look into this in greater detail.

Leo Laporte (01:58:08):
I keep telling Lisa she's got it <laugh>, by the way, I bought the plaque. Do you have cats? I bought the plaque. We will show you bought the, I bought the Good on You will

Jeff Jarvis (01:58:17):
Put up on your desk there

Leo Laporte (01:58:18):
On the put here on the desk. It was a little pricey, but you know what, it's for a good cause it's worth it. My own self worth <laugh>. And then there's one more. Don't stop now.

Mathew Ingram (01:58:32):
Yeah. So the third one is about a T-Rex skeleton sale. Christie was going to what? Yeah, and it, it, so these skeletons go for 15, 16 million. This one I think was expected to go for 20 plus. And so they, they had it listed. And then apparently this previous skeleton that was sold tre skeleton a company retained the rights to that skeleton, the rights to make replicas of it. And so they alleged that

Jeff Jarvis (01:59:08):
Is the NFT skeleton. What? How do they do

Mathew Ingram (01:59:10):
That? No, no, that they just, they cast the parts and then you can buy a cheaper version that's plastic. Oh. It's only 600 grand or something. And so they alleged that the owners of this other skeleton basically cast replacement parts from the previous T

Leo Laporte (01:59:30):
Rex. But couldn't you tell, I mean, plastic's not like pretty fossilized bone.

Mathew Ingram (01:59:35):
So a lot of tre skeletons, like, there's very few that are complete. So they all have replica bones. Oh. So their argument was the replica bones that they created were identical to the ones in this other skeleton to which they have the intellectual property rights.

Leo Laporte (01:59:52):
Who owns the T-Rex?

Mathew Ingram (01:59:54):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:59:56):
Hmm. Well, Mathew, you've earned your place here on the, on the tweet. Geez. It's no rot aite, but Okay. It'll do <laugh>. Jeff, your pick of the week. Actually. A nu Do you have a number?

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:11):
I do have a number. I know, I, I could have gone back to the, to the listings and talked about perhaps unstable diffusion. An AI porn generator. But I won't do that.

Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
Oh geez. I won't. Thank you. Oh, geez. Thank you. Thank you

Jeff Jarvis (02:00:26):
<Laugh>. Instead, pew has a new survey of teenagers and the internet. Of course, what you expect is it's ruining their lives. They'll never be the same. The future is dead. They're all in fear and hatred, but of course you're gonna hear me say, no, that's not the case. Eight in 10 teens say that what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to what's going on with their friends lives. That's nice. Well, 71% say it makes them feel like they're have a place where they can show their creative side. That's true. 67 percents make them feel as if they have people who can help them, help support them through tough times. A smaller share. There's still a majority say the same for feeling more accepted, more accepted. There are these positive sediments are expressed by teens across demographic groups when the overall impact of social media on them personally. Most more teens say it's effect has been mostly positive. 32% than mostly negative 9%. The largest share say that it's neutral. 59% believe that social media is neither positive nor negative. Teens are more likely to view social media as having a negative effect on others than themselves. So that's the number of the third person effect.

Leo Laporte (02:01:40):
This is like asking an alcoholic, do you think alcohol is causing a problem? Well, isn't it, these teens are self reporting. This is not Well,

Jeff Jarvis (02:01:49):
But that's the same. How is that different from the moral panic? Get ready Ant that says oh. It's teens say it's terrible. Depends on how you do the survey. You know, it's

Leo Laporte (02:02:00):
Self bad though. Yeah. I don't know if you Yeah. Self-Reporting is the worst way to find out how people really feel about,

Mathew Ingram (02:02:07):
Just remember what Homer said. Alcohol is the cause of, and the solution too. All like

Leo Laporte (02:02:14):
<Laugh>.

Ant Pruitt (02:02:15):
Well said.

Leo Laporte (02:02:16):
Said, well said my man. Well said. Ant, what's your thing of the week?

Ant Pruitt (02:02:23):
I've forgotten. Oh, Boris Effects. Of course this is now the Black Friday and holiday shopping season. Boris Effects have a discount going on for dairy package. What

Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
Are BOS effects?

Ant Pruitt (02:02:36):
5% Boris effects are, is is a group of plugins that you can add to various video editors as well as some photo editors like Photoshop to do different special effects and motion tracking and, and even green skiing, green screening for composites. Really, really nifty tools. I've used their particle package before particle illusion. I'm pretty interested in getting the continuum package and playing around with that. But what

Leo Laporte (02:03:09):
Is part? So just give us some idea what, what is

Ant Pruitt (02:03:12):
Particle illusion allows you to say you want to just create a graphic of something exploding. You can create the particles to make it look ooh, realistic. Oh, that's, you know, I used it for one of the hards where where he was running and I just put a trail of of sparks behind him because he was running fast. That was with particle illusion and it was, their interfaces is pretty straightforward and it allows you to create these particles quite quickly and easily. So I thought I'd give them a shout out. And like I said, it's 25% off starting, I think starting today through the 27th or something like that for their Black Friday deal.

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
And

Ant Pruitt (02:03:57):
That's my pick. And then I wanna give a shout out. We had a heartbreaking loss with the boys. Oh no. He had, he had a great game still. It was four touchdowns, two passing, two Russian. It's not his

Leo Laporte (02:04:12):
Fault. In other words, <laugh>,

Ant Pruitt (02:04:14):
We lost 42 to 41. It came down to the wire. We went for two. At the end of the, the game, he went to throw the pass to go for the two point conversion. Our guy de Cal commit, he was wide open and hardhead through the ball, but it was batted down at the line by a very tall defensive lineman. It was a great play, great game. That

Leo Laporte (02:04:37):
Sounds like a great game. A

Ant Pruitt (02:04:39):
Real nail. It was an unbelievable game against Camplin. Down to the wire. We got a shout out from several different newspapers and whatnot. I was proud of him and I had a great view of one of his touchdowns and it just really made me proud of him because it's something that we've talked about for years and years of his training far as just, just having grit and wanting to be better and wanting to do better. And he proved it on that particular run. Yeah, it's online. 1 27 there.

Leo Laporte (02:05:14):
I had a nice view of this effort.

Ant Pruitt (02:05:17):
Oh, it,

Leo Laporte (02:05:18):
You put it on Twitter. Well, how am I supposed to know that?

Ant Pruitt (02:05:21):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:05:22):
Okay.

Ant Pruitt (02:05:23):
But he is running along and you know, he is about to get sacked and he steps away and he's like, Nope. Excuse me.

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
Whoa. Nice touchdown.

Ant Pruitt (02:05:31):
I, and it's just, that's just the kinda stuff that I've always tried to put in his head. It's like, go get it. You gotta want it, you know? Yep. And I was just really,

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Sometimes you gotta make the play yourself.

Ant Pruitt (02:05:42):
Really, really proud of him. I'm proud of the whole team. They played hard and I appreciate the coaches and all of their support this year.

Leo Laporte (02:05:49):
So does that, are they eliminated now? Is that We

Ant Pruitt (02:05:52):
Are out, we finished the season nine and three. Camplin is playing in playing in the championship game. They're 12 and oh, they're playing against San Ramon, some schools of San Ramon. So we'll see how that,

Leo Laporte (02:06:04):
Well the bright side is he can eat as much as he wants at Thanksgiving.

Ant Pruitt (02:06:07):
<Laugh>. Well, he needs to, cuz I need him to gain more weight. That Rascal still won't gain enough weight. <Laugh> this driving crazy. You

Leo Laporte (02:06:15):
Can't win.

Ant Pruitt (02:06:16):
Lastly I wanna say big thank you to the whole twit family. Thank y'all so much for coming out and supporting Queen Pruit on opening night while I was at that game. And we lost. And man, she was so, so d I'm excited and happy to see all of y'all's

Leo Laporte (02:06:33):
Queen Pruitt in her SpongeBob. Yeah. <laugh>. Lot of great. This is opening night and there's Anthony Nielsen and Jason. How There's Micah sergeant, the only one in a mask. Megan Moroni. Also some, some old timers. 

Ant Pruitt (02:06:51):
So

Leo Laporte (02:06:51):
Cara was there. That's nice. That's

Ant Pruitt (02:06:54):
Great. She was so d happy. Nice. And thank y'all. Really, really appreciate it. I'm gonna go Sunday to see it.

Leo Laporte (02:07:02):
You still haven't seen it, huh?

Ant Pruitt (02:07:04):
Haven't been able to go yet, but I will be going Sunday. He's

Leo Laporte (02:07:06):
Memorized it, but he hasn't seen it.

Ant Pruitt (02:07:08):
<Laugh>. That's so true. I do have it memorized by now, <laugh>. But we're looking forward to it. Me and a hard head. We're gonna go Sunday. Very nice at two o'clock to check it out. Everybody's been been saying a lot of nice things about the show in general, so we're looking forward to it. But thank y'all. Thank y'all so much for the bottom of my heart. And she was, she was over the moon to see everybody there.

Leo Laporte (02:07:31):
Very nice. Very nice.

Ant Pruitt (02:07:35):
Yes. I'll

Leo Laporte (02:07:36):
Do it. Mr. A Pruitt, you find him on hands on photography twit tv slash hop. He's also very active in the club. Twi Discord cuz he's the community manager in there. By the way. We all feel like you do such a good job. Thank you for doing that. Makes

Ant Pruitt (02:07:51):
A big difference. Yeah, we appreciate I try. I try. Yeah. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:07:55):
You. Thanks to Jeff Jarvis. He is the director. I mean the big shot. The director of the town height center for entrepreneurial journalism at the great, great great graduate school of journalism at the City University of New York. His book is almost out be out in a couple of months, but you can

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:15):
June, but more than a couple, but

Leo Laporte (02:08:19):
Couple could be eight. It's hard to wait for BT dot ny slash by Gutenberg if you Woohoo. Want to pre-order that btny slash buy.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:30):
Thank you boss. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. You too. What, what's, what's, what's what, what are you, what all are you preparing tomorrow with what machine?

Leo Laporte (02:08:37):
I am doing nothing for the first time in several years. I usually do it.

Jeff Jarvis (02:08:41):
Your son should be cooking dinner.

Leo Laporte (02:08:42):
I wish my son were <laugh>. He did some amazing stuff. I'm watching his Turkey day stuff. He's cooking, but he's not bringing any of it up here. We're going, we're going to Lisa's sisters, so that'll be fun. What are you doing for Thanksgiving? A little cacho, Peppe

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:01):
Costco Chicken. We love Costco chicken. I picked up two of 'em today.

Leo Laporte (02:09:04):
That's your Thanksgiving. Is it just the two of you?

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:07):
No, no, no. My father and my sister

Leo Laporte (02:09:08):
Will be here. Oh, good. Is Jake coming home? More kids? Yeah. Oh good. Just arrived. Yep. Oh good. Well have a wonderful holiday. What are you doing? An you having a good family gathering?

Ant Pruitt (02:09:19):
I'm going to do ham. My sister-in-law will be here for a few days and but yeah, I'm doing ham again. Is

Leo Laporte (02:09:27):
There, is there a kind a, a North Carolina or South Carolina tradition for around Thanksgiving.

Ant Pruitt (02:09:34):
It's just like everywhere else with the, you know, Turkey or what have you. But I don't want Turkey. Give me, gimme the pig.

Leo Laporte (02:09:41):
Ham is a nice Virginia, Virginia thing.

Ant Pruitt (02:09:44):
Yeah. Give me, gimme the pig. Good. And I'm totally fine with that pig mac and cheese and

Leo Laporte (02:09:49):
Mac and cheese. You

Jeff Jarvis (02:09:50):
Had his

Ant Pruitt (02:09:51):
Beer.

Leo Laporte (02:09:51):
I have old doctor's mac and cheese recipe. It's a pretty amazing, he I made it for the what? Jesus Thanksgiving. A couple of mostly Velvet <laugh>.

Ant Pruitt (02:10:00):
No, no, I don't need that.

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
I made it a couple of years ago for Thanksgiving. And it was quite popular.

Ant Pruitt (02:10:07):
Oh, mine's good too. Ain't no Velveeta in it, but it's good too.

Leo Laporte (02:10:10):
Maybe there's not, maybe I'm doing it with this service. <Laugh>. There's several kinds of Jesus, all I remember is you take chunks of white cheddar and you, and you thrust it in the middle of it, so it's gonna melt. So you get a cheese bomb in the middle of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Oh, you know that, you know that trick call. Oh, alright. Now I was gonna ask Mathew Ingram what his plants were, but he had Thanksgiving last month.

Mathew Ingram (02:10:33):
<Laugh>? Yep. Yeah, it's over.

Leo Laporte (02:10:35):
You

Mathew Ingram (02:10:36):
Have, it was good though.

Leo Laporte (02:10:37):
Oh, good.

Mathew Ingram (02:10:38):
Oh, we had all the usual stuff. You know, Turkey and

Leo Laporte (02:10:41):
Canadians do it earlier. Mathew of course is at the Columbia Journalism Review cjr.org and he's on j.host. So make sure you follow 'em. On your twit social instance or wherever you are on the fe averse jona.host/atma. Mathew I one t m a t h e w I thank you for spending some time with us, Mathew. I appreciate it.

Mathew Ingram (02:11:07):
Yeah, thanks for having

Leo Laporte (02:11:08):
Me. Yeah, I'll, I'll send you a selfie with the plaque. Okay. Some. So you can frame, put on your wall.

Mathew Ingram (02:11:14):
I get a kickback for every

Leo Laporte (02:11:16):
Plaque. <Laugh> somewhere. That money's going somewhere. We do this weekend. Google every Wednesday, 2:00 PM Pacific. 5:00 PM Eastern, 2200 utc. If you want to join us live, you can@live.twi.tv there's audio and video there. You can, if you're watching live, you probably should chat with us. Couple places you could do that. Of course, the IRC opened all irc.twi.tv or in our club Twi Discord. If you're a member of Club Twi, of course you already know how to get there. If you're not, can I encourage you to join The Fun Club? TWI is a mere $7 a month, but boy, you get a lot for that money. Ad free versions of all of our shows, plus shows that we don't put out in public. Like Hands on Macintosh with Micah Sergeant Hands on Windows with Paul Thro, the Untitled Linux Show with Jonathan Bennett, the Gz with Victor Bartolo.

(02:12:06):
That's gonna move once once I stopped doing the radio show December 18th to right after this in Google on a Wednesday evening. But it will be in the club only. So if you're a GI F fan, you gotta be a club member to watch. There's also the TWI plus feed with shows that we don't, bits we don't put out anywhere else. And of course the Discord as well. All of that for seven bucks a month. And it really, I, you know, these days we need it. It helps us out an awful lot. Let be known, let Score two as members. You get what I a discount, discount in the, in the TWI store as members that TV slash store, 10%

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:42):
Discount. So I'm now a paying member. I felt bad.

Leo Laporte (02:12:44):
I saw that. Did promoting it. You don't have to do that.

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:46):
And I know I had a freebie and I felt like, you know, I was a moer at the party and I, and I, I loved as much as anybody else, at least I could do is really join. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:12:54):
You Jeff. I really, I really appreciate that. It does help us out a lot. Times are a little bit tight. Lisa and I are going with that salary this month, which is fine. We do it sometimes. Oh, this was the one that I want to put this in. Elon's Closet. <Laugh> <laugh>. The real chief twi. This is all in the TWI store. Yeah, you get 10% off as a Club TWI member. We thank everybody who has already joined. I mean, the club is fantastic. It's a great social event. And that money doesn't just pay for the shows, it pays for everything else. All our staff salaries, it pays for the Mac It on server, it pays for the

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:29):
Look at the Christmas card picture. That's a lot of staff.

Leo Laporte (02:13:32):
Yeah, it's, well, it's, we're down a lot from our peak. We're down to I think 15 people. But still, yeah, we still a lot of males to figure we care. We care about 'em and we want to wanna keep 'em gainfully employed, making good stuff that you like. Twi.Tv/Club twit. If you're not already a member after the fact on demand versions of the show of all of our shows, all the public ones anyway, available@twi.tv In the case of this show, TWI tv slash TWiG. It's easy to remember. Just the short version of the show name. You can also watch us on YouTube youtube.com/This Week in Google. Or subscribe. Really, that's the best thing to do from my point of view. If you subscribe, you'll get it every week the minute it's available. Just find a podcast. Client uses RSS and we're there.

(02:14:19):
We are, you know, I think we probably are on Spotify and other places we are too. But RSS love that. And it means we can't spy on you. You can't spy on us. It's fair <laugh>. But if you, if your podcast client, whatever it is, allows reviews, if you would just leave us a nice review, tell the world about This Week in Google, that would be really great. Thank you all for joining us. Have a great, if you are in the us, have a great Thanksgiving. And we will see you next week on This Week in Google. Bye bye.

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:50):
So you're doing another show after this on

Leo Laporte (02:14:52):
Wednesdays? I won't be, Dick will be.

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:55):
Oh, I

Leo Laporte (02:14:55):
See. Oh no, I'm not on that show.

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:57):
That scared me. Cuz you would be really grumpy by then.

Leo Laporte (02:15:00):
<Laugh>. I don't know if another show.

Speaker 7 (02:15:06):
The world is changing rapidly, so rapidly in fact that it's hard to keep up. That's why Micah Sergeant and I, Jason Howell talk with the people Making and breaking the tech news on Tech News Weekly every Thursday. They know these stories better than anyone, so why not get them to talk about it in their own words? Subscribe to Tech News Weekly and you won't miss a beat every Thursday at twit.tv