This Week in Google 710, 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.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on This Week in Google, I, Mikah Sargent am in for Leo Laporte. He will be back at the end of the month, don't worry. But while the cat's away, the mice will play. And that means starting things off by talking actually about Google <laugh>. We kick things off about Google's decision to cut back on costs first by getting rid of micro kitchens and also by issuing its employees Chromebooks in some cases. But Jeff Jarvis says that's a great thing. We also talk about lawmakers who are regulating social media even when they don't understand it. And we have quite a few conversations about artificial intelligence. I ask the panel some compelling uses they've had for artificial intelligence. And we even get to the Google change log this week. It's all that. Plus the panels, picks, tips, tricks and tools coming up on This Week in Google.

Speaker 2 (00:00:55):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:06):
This is TWiG This Week in Google. Episode 710 recorded Wednesday, April 5th, 2023. Jexx Javros. This episode of This Week in Google is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. With employees working in different locations, providing a unified work experience seems as easy as herding cats. How do you reign in so many moving parts? The Meraki Cloud Managed Network. Learn how your organization can make hybrid work work by visiting meraki.cisco.com/TWiT and by Miro. Miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team. Get your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast.

(00:02:01):
It's time for TWiG This Week in Google. And yes, I am, yes or no. I am not Leo Laporte. I am instead Mikah Sargent because Leo Laporte is on vacation. Don't worry, he will be back. But until then, we are going to do This Week in Google in probably much the same way that it's always done, which is we'll talk about a lot of things that have nothing to do with Google and some things that do have something to do with Google. And we will find memes and tweets and posts and other ridiculousness along the way. Joining us this week is TWiT host and Club TWiT, community manager. Ant I dunno, battler of Turkeys Pruitt. Hello. <laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:02:46):
Don't explain it. Don't explain it.

Ant Pruitt (00:02:48):
Oh man. Look here. So if you wanna know what that means, you need to be a club

Mikah Sargent (00:02:54):
Twit Member Turkeys public enemy number one, Ant Pruitt.

Ant Pruitt (00:02:59):
Wow. And Mr. Sargent

Jeff Jarvis (00:03:01):
Hate him.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:02):
I just, oh God. I'm imagining now the, there's a wild Turkey and then it's got ants seal of disapproval on the top of it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:10):
<Laugh>. Nailed it.

Ant Pruitt (00:03:11):
Nailed it. Nailed it. And Mr. Sargent, I have to say as the this week's producer, I at least put some Google stories in there for us to talk about. You did. I mean, we gotta get at least one of 'em, right? And just hit the quota that we talked about Google.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:26):
Yes. I'm, I'm actually really excited to cover some Google things so that anytime someone out there goes, I thought this was called This Week in Google, you just point them to this episode and then they have to be quiet. Yeah,

Ant Pruitt (00:03:36):
That's it. So that's all I gotta

Mikah Sargent (00:03:37):
Do. We'll be good to go. <Laugh>. we are also joined by technology journalist and print historian. It's Glenn, the type setter Fleishman

Ant Pruitt (00:03:49):
<Laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:03:49):
Hey, hey, hey, Mikah. That's such a pleasure to be here. Now. I like Leo just fine, but well, lets just leave it there. <Laugh>. <laugh> great to be on a show hosted by you.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:01):
Oh, thank you, Glenn. I we, you know, we were planning for this episode and we knew unfortunately Stacey wasn't going to be on this week. And I said, I know we just had Glenn Fleishman on, but I'd love to have him back cause we've got a great rapport. So I'm glad you're here with us today.

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:16):
I appreciate it. If we're lucky, we'll do our folksy Frontier Voices. <Laugh>. Oh, prospector Voices. Yeah. What happened? What happened leftover from other programs?

Mikah Sargent (00:04:26):
We are also joined by,

Ant Pruitt (00:04:29):
Oh,

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:29):
He's got it.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:30):
The Leonard Tow professor, professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and the director of the Tow Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. It's Jeff The Man Jarvis. Hello,

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:48):
Jeff. Hey Craig. We

Ant Pruitt (00:04:49):
Need the choir. Where's

Glenn Fleishman (00:04:51):
Mark?

Mikah Sargent (00:04:52):
I think it played several times. It's fun.

Jeff Jarvis (00:04:55):
You went so fast they couldn't get the the cue in

Mikah Sargent (00:04:58):
There. That's what it was. I was too, too fast

Ant Pruitt (00:05:00):
For That's what it was.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:01):
Oh, man. How are you, Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis (00:05:04):
Good. Good. I'm, I'm, I am. I too am delighted that're Hosting. I too like Leo, but, but I really enjoy your shows and I enjoyed the last time you were on here, and so I'm glad you're here.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:14):
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, as Ant Pruitt promised we are gonna kick things off with Google. And this time we're not talking about bidets going away. Instead we're talking about Google <laugh> following through with some other cost cutting measures. This time we're gonna get rid of some micro kitchens at Google. So you, I I have actually have been, I'm sure some, at least some of you have been on Google's campuses before. Yep. And while you're there and you know, you're visiting if you have a Googler who works there and you get to go around, there are these little places that you can stop and grab a beverage or grab a muffin or grab something to eat or drink and Google to be kind of rolling back on the the spending on these different sort of micro kitchens.

(00:06:05):
And I mean, it makes sense. They just announced that they were going to be laying off even more workers and I think some employees were particularly surprised that this was happening at Google. Kind of thought they were holding their breath for a while, thought that maybe Google had pushed through that and got past any concerns about needing to or in, in their mind, needing to let people go. And so these costs, cutting measurements came into place at the same time that we've seen some layoffs. So, yeah, I mean, I, I do, I'm curious for all of you, I'm curious to hear your perspective on these sorts of perks that exist at companies because I, it has often been looked at as a means to not pay people what they're worth. And

Ant Pruitt (00:06:49):
I think it's a bit of a double-edged sword.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:51):
Yeah, go ahead.

Ant Pruitt (00:06:54):
A company I used to work for, we had nice little perks like this at the different facilities and it was good where it was nice to have it there and, and have some convenience and not necessarily have to worry about going out of the facility to go get lunch and pay extra for stuff that you really don't want. And you had people right there in the house, if you will, to, to take care of those little knickknack needs or what have you. But then at the same time, it also could indirectly encourage working 12 hours, like it's like eight hours, you know? So it, it was sort of, you know, a double-edged sword. Now granted, there were times, because in the IT world you're going to have some long days. You just, it, it, it, it get like that at times. I can't say that the company that I previously worked for really encouraged us to do that, but it was nice that when we had those long days, we had those extra little perks right there in house. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But I also get the argument of why don't you just pay these folks more? And, and yeah, I agree. Most people want want more money, more so than they want perks. Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:05):
He says as he picks up his sparkling water and takes his, oh, got outta the fridge here. Pizza

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:11):
From

Mikah Sargent (00:08:12):
Literally,

Ant Pruitt (00:08:12):
You know, as you know, I miss watching Windows Weekly last week as I was enjoying the TWiT sponsored lunch. You know, <laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:08:21):
Well, it seems like after the after the long working from home period maybe those perks don't seem as important to people as actual money. And Yeah. I guess there's that like shared sacrifice idea that if you're laying people off, everyone should suffer a little. The people making the low end of the, to the totem pole. And on the high end did Google really signal anything at the top that they were doing anything about compensation? I, I think it's great when you're, when the thing a company says is I think Amazon did this, maybe it was 20 years ago. It's that long ago when they had their first glitch in earnings after they opened a bunch of warehouses prematurely and then closed them and then later reopened them again. And it was there's no longer gonna be Advil or something like that in the break rooms.

(00:09:01):
And you're like, man, you should stock more of that. Like, that's the wrong decision. But it does feel like it's not rearranging deck chairs, cuz Google is not in any terrible financial situation. It's more like they had to do something symbolic, but why? I don't know, it looks like I, you know, I'm starting to get these things. Every company is pinching its users a little bit too. And I wonder if this is part of the same trend just off to the side. I just got a notice from the parking app that we use for parking meters in Seattle. I forgot it's paper something, right. Pay to park or something like that. Or pay by phone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they're like, we might start charging you in some areas for SMS. And I'm like, gosh, that sounds very Elon Musk. Oh, SMS is eating up tens of millions of dollars. And I'm thinking all the little freebies as users and all the freebies you had inside a company as a worker, are the company sort of trying to claw those back after many years of providing things. Yeah. Because they're trying to chew off some of the expenses that are, that are fixed and they, they want to get off their ledgers.

Jeff Jarvis (00:09:57):
I having worked at magazine companies, and I have a book coming out in November, I might as well mention on the air called magazine for Bloomsbury. I recount some of the culture that I went through there. And at Time Inc. When I was there on closing nights, cuz you'd worked all three in the morning and you were really tired and you had to do all kinds of stuff. So they catered dinner, that was one. They had free wine and beer. They had pepridge farm cookies all day. And you got a a limousine ride, you know, well limousine, but a dark car ride home if you worked past eight o'clock, which means everybody wait, worked past eight o'clock to get the car ride home. Right? Yeah. Even in the Hamptons. Right. And then I worked at Conde Nast where they, they had, oh, and also at Time Inc.

(00:10:41):
If you were a Time magazine, a steward in a white coat Oh my, would take around the, the liquor trolley, honest to God. And if at people where I was, which we didn't have that cause we were, you know, we were day class A, but all the senior editors and up, I was not a senior editor, the senior editors and up could requisition booze for their credenzas. Now, once they had an office, number two, they had a credenza, credenza, <laugh> number three, they had booze in it, paid for by the company. Right. And we all trust, we had expense accounts like crazy. We'd go out to live, there's one guy worked with the people who would go to Bloomingdale's and say, ah, that couch, I think that's about 25 lunches. I need to have fake receipts for the lunches. And that's how we do it.

(00:11:21):
Oh my God. Conde Nast, we had a beautiful Frank Gary designed cafeteria, which was subsidized and also cars, anywhere, also flying first class. All this, the point of all this at some point comes the moment when the piper comes for payment <laugh> and you don't have the same old culture you had and you get ripped apart properly. Well, the old days they lived like kings. And, and now look what happens to 'em. So I think that that's part of the problem too, is that you, you, you, it's the, it's part of the hubris Mm. Of silicon. I you're absolutely right. It's one way to get people to work all hours. But it's also a way to say, look how wonderful and special and privileged we are. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like other jobs in other companies. And it comes back to roost.

Glenn Fleishman (00:12:12):
I'll tell you something funny that, oh, sorry. No, go ahead, sir. Well, something funny about Amazon, I wanna say, you know, often we criticize big tech companies for the bad things they do. And, and one thing they did in the community is Amazon, before the pandemic was building massive amounts of office space in downtown Seattle. And they intentionally talked, I mean, they talked about it and it was true. I know people who worked there that they underbuilt the space that you could eat inside the buildings because they wanted to support this neighborhood that they were essentially overrunning and they helped subsidize some food businesses to come in there. They invited food trucks in. They really wanted workers to leave the building. I mean, it sounds so strange now in the 2020 plus world. Yeah. They wanted workers to leave the building and go sit in crowded restaurants and support, you know, pour the money back into the community.

(00:12:55):
And it also meant though, and I'll say this again for them, they didn't want people to work through lunch. They wanted 'em to leave the building for lunch. They didn't want people to necessarily have this uninterrupted, I'm at my desk. I mean, people did that of course. But they encouraged people. And if you went out there and occasionally make the mistake of on a weekday going into the Southlake Union neighborhood of Seattle and walking around and everybody has an Amazon lanyard, I'm like, it's actually working. And it was, you know, again, before pandemic, it meant, I don't know, probably tens of million dollar of dollars a years being poured into that. So arguably we're, you know, Amazon built inside a city and Google built in a suburb and a lot of the dot coms built in the suburb mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So they, they did provide amenities because they didn't want someone to take like two hours to leave the campus drive somewhere, park right. Eat after their dry cleaning. They're like, no, no, we wanna recapture that. But also if you read about like, oh, Palo Alto in some of these other places, they were overrun at times where it's just, there's literally no seat in any restaurant. No place you could go. The reverse problems happening now, of course, but mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, that was, there was an intent that of a time that's gone by that's not coming back.

Jeff Jarvis (00:13:58):
Wow.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:58):
See, there's so many aspects considered to this

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:00):
Way. Cult <laugh>. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:01):
Yeah. That, I guess that's, that can be sort of the, the offshoot of it as you do then get, I was reading a book and in the book it was actually kind of talking about, this was a fictional cult, but the, essentially the people as they moved up in the, in the cult then to become like a higher member, you had to, this is grizzly, but have your tongue removed. And the conversation surrounding that was

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:26):
Jesus. What do you read <laugh>? It, it's,

Mikah Sargent (00:14:28):
It's, it's a, it's a, it's a fantasy book. Gees. but the point is, I

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:33):
Especially weird, I'm sorry. I'm sorry Mike. I'm just gonna, especially weird for a guy who makes his living by talking <laugh> to read a book for pleasure. It's a, it's a s ripped out. I dunno, it's a

Glenn Fleishman (00:14:43):
Strategy book

Jeff Jarvis (00:14:43):
He's reading, self hating to me. I might be, but keep going, Griffin. I'm, I'm

Mikah Sargent (00:14:47):
Getting to the point here. The point is, without the ability to communicate, then they only can rely on each other for any sort of commiseration. But they can't talk to each other about it. They don't have the ability to go elsewhere and talk to other people. It creates this sort of reality distortion field where they all exist in the same place and they have no way, no means of reaching out. They also can't eat with, with other people. And so that is one of the main ways that human beings as just what we are, kind of connect with new people or connect with others. My point is in talking about sort of these, these groups where you end up eating together, even if that wasn't the original intention, you do start to get this sort of group think attitude that does lead to, oh, well this person stayed later.

(00:15:31):
I'm gonna stay later. We're all gonna stay later. We're all in this together. We're all a big family. We're all working on this. And so I wonder if over time, you know, Glen, where you kind of talk about perhaps in the beginning where it was about, you know, okay, we're in the suburbs. We also have to make sure that we keep the city council happy, that we're not getting people who live here complaining because you know, our workers overrun the community, but then they also see the benefits. They start to see the benefits of having these employees working and eating and, and I dunno, doing laundry together and how that can kind of lead to this culture where you just work, work, work, work, work.

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:09):
It is surprising that we don't have an employee dormitories in America, though. I mean, that is common in many other countries and many industries, including white collar, depending on the country you're in. And I've, I'm sure I am sure. So many companies have thought about like, let's just build housing for like a thousand people and you will live and work in a set of connected tunnels.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:26):
Isn't that common in Asia?

Glenn Fleishman (00:16:28):
Well, I think that's in Shehe, right? Where apple Fox has a huge Foxcon rather has a huge campus where they they offer living. And, and although, and to, to its credit within the context of many other things apparently the living conditions are generally pretty good compared to what someone could afford on that salary in the same places. So there is, there is some aspect, you know, it's a patriarchal or a benefactory, whatever you call, it's like a Yeah. A beneficial oversight of someone's life. I don't know. I don't

Jeff Jarvis (00:16:57):
Know. My, my, and I'm sorry. I know I'm concentrating on the wrong thing.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:00):
Oh no, here we go.

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:01):
<Laugh>. But when you don't have a tongue. Yeah. How did they get nourishment?

Mikah Sargent (00:17:09):
Did

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:09):
This go into gross detail that maybe, I'm sorry

Mikah Sargent (00:17:11):
I No, it didn't get nourishment without of tongue, sir. I, I guess you just, you do what Ant does, which is drink protein shakes.

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:18):
There we go. Oh.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:19):
Oh, okay.

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:20):
Straw based culture.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:22):
I'm just going to reveal the, the book, because I feel like everyone's just gonna be thinking about that for the rest of the episode.

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:28):
<Laugh>, or we think about

Mikah Sargent (00:17:29):
The Dresden files, which is about a sort of modern day wizard. Oh. And there's a group of people who essentially work for fallen angels. And in order to make it up into the higher rungs of working for these fallen angels, they have their tongue removed. So,

Glenn Fleishman (00:17:47):
Oh my

Jeff Jarvis (00:17:48):
Goodness. It's so effing weird. It's very weird. Let me, let me change the subject if I may. Please, please take it away from this and the other, the other cutback

Ant Pruitt (00:17:54):
At Google. Mr. Jarvis, you mentioned privilege yes. A few minutes ago. And it, it, it really made me think back with my own personal experience prior to working at that nice company that I used to work for, for ump 10 years. I had some pretty crappy jobs when I looked back at 'em. You know, I remember digging graves with my dad. Really? Jeez. You know, I remember doing crappy jobs like that. And so being in the position of being in a nice, beautiful facility that was air conditioned, <laugh>, number one, it was an air conditioned facility. I didn't have to wear ratty beat up clothes cuz I knew they wouldn't get dirty and stuff like that. Had coffee machines and, and, and a, a gym and a shower and all of this beautiful stuff right there. It it, it opened my eyes and I was like, shh, I can get used to this. I'm keeping this job. You know, that was sort of the thought that I had. Like, this is a privilege now. And I, and I'm, I don't wanna let it go. But yet the other side of that is those 12 hour days could have added up. I mine didn't add up like that, but they could have for some people. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Mikah Sargent (00:19:05):
It, it isn't that always sort of the balance that I think because I, I can remember I, I worked for my school district back in Missouri and so during the summers they would have jobs if you were, you know, of age to be able to work for the school district. I would climb up under the top of the roofs of the school building during the summer in like, the hottest time of the year. Yeah. And paint the roofs with this brutal brutality.

Ant Pruitt (00:19:27):
Oh, I did that too, dude. You did that. Yes. Yes. I've done that too. I've done, oh my goodness. I've done commercial building roofing with asphalt and some with that nasty rubber tar. And I, yeah, I've done all that stuff too in the summertime, so, yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:41):
And you, you have then whenever you do move into something else, and it does feel like it's so much of a, a shift in, in everything. And so you, yeah. I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I totally get where you're coming from in terms of trying to find perspective in all of these things because of course we know suffering is relative and the perspective does matter there. And you also don't like having come from something like that, working that way and finding appreciation in the job that you have. You don't want to sort of discount other people's experiences in their suffering in that job that you have, cuz they're, yeah. It, it's hard.

Glenn Fleishman (00:20:22):
<Laugh>. And you should also point out a lot of these companies too, they have tiers inside the companies too. So Google had all these issues with, some people do get the free lunches and others are in different buildings, but different colored badges and they don't have access to it. Right. So there's hierarchies within the hierarchies too. Oh yeah. And the lowest paid work left out of it. Yeah. Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:39):
Now, however,

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:40):
Yes. What seems like a cutback at Google, I of course am gonna consider a major and perk for the employees of Google.

Ant Pruitt (00:20:50):
Oh gosh, I know where you're going with this.

Glenn Fleishman (00:20:52):
The punishment there. This punishment, I think. But

Jeff Jarvis (00:20:54):
It is not at all, it is a benefit. They're gonna default to Chromebooks instead of these me. Oh, panny ass <laugh> privilege apples. Oh, I have to have my Apple. I can't work that an apple. Let's Google. You're working at Google. We make computers called Chromebooks, and you're gonna like 'em. Well see. That's a wonderful privilege. How

Mikah Sargent (00:21:13):
Often do they make their own though? I feel like it's mostly the third party manufacturers

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:18):
Of it is now. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:20):
They're gonna dig out the old ones that they make, that you're gonna use these first.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:24):
Well, they start making pixel books again. I'd be a very happy camper. Yeah.

Ant Pruitt (00:21:27):
You know, that was the point I saw in that article where they talked about developers are exempt from this particular rule. You know, so privilege. Why, why is that? You know, it is because those Chromebooks are not powerful enough to run those developer tools and Google has the power to fix that, but yet they won't. So Yeah. They're stuck with having MacBooks on campus.

Jeff Jarvis (00:21:52):
No, I'm not sure that's it, ed. I really wonder if that's not it. Mm-Hmm. Because, you know, you look at, at at friends of ours who use Chromebooks with Linux to program. Mm-Hmm. Right? And I wonder if it's instead the programmers are the upper crust of Google and we're not gonna piss them off.

Glenn Fleishman (00:22:12):
Oh, well, compiling apps is a thing. Like Xcode is such a, I mean, it's hilarious when you talk to them iOS developers and act developers about Yeah. Xcode. And it's like, you need a jet engine of a, you know, fan on the thing <laugh>, and you're like, you're compiling a fart app or whatever, and you're like, no, it takes the, we need the most CPUs for all this memory. And then it pales after and you're like, oh, this is why Apple. There's, there's one argument that Apple had to keep making Max and improve them because Max the only way to have enough processing power to create apps for iPhones and iPads. And it's, that is, I don't think that's a joke. I think in the darkest days a few years ago when it seemed like the Mac was re I mean, not even very long ago before the M one, and when it seemed like Mac sales were tapering off, people were saying, and including me saying they can't drop the Mac until there's an appropriate development envi environment that works on an iPad or iPhone, but not an iPhone that is, that has got that same hef.

(00:23:02):
Because otherwise you've got a million or however many iPhone and iPad developers out there who can't actually write the apps that makes Apple all that money. So you know, since then the max made a good comeback. Right. But there was there was that point.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:18):
Alright. the other thing where <laugh>, it, it seemed like Google was maybe looking for some cost cutting measures was with Google Drive turned out that, oh boy,

(00:23:31):
If you had a Google subscription, a Google Drive subscription or you know, as part of your sort of larger Google package or workspace package, you had a Google Drive access, even if you had the space on your Google Drive. So say it was five terabytes or what, whatever it happens to be, and you'd only filled it up to three terabytes, but you had reached 5 million items, then you would see a cap that would come up and it would say, no, no, we can't put any more files into this. So it was 5 million items or five terabytes whichever's first. Right. Many have even been in some cases less storage. Now, we talked about this t on Tech News Weekly on this last Thursday. Or was it, was it Thursday or was it Sunday?

Ant Pruitt (00:24:18):
It was ASEC guy.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:19):
That's right. Yeah. Was

Ant Pruitt (00:24:20):
I had the honor and pleasure and co-hosting what you on ASEC guy. That's how crazy is

Mikah Sargent (00:24:24):
That? That was that was a great time. And we, you had mentioned that this was in place, well short shortly after perhaps even Monday or Tuesday, I think Google said we take it back Now, <laugh> this is not a smart move, but I'm curious what is, what are we thinking? Was the behind the scenes reasoning for making this choice? Was it that 5 million items, even if it doesn't equal that storage space, is still too much processing for, I mean, I'm just so confused as to why we, why there would be this cap in the first place.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:01):
There's, there's an old programmers joke sort of a joke. I remember this from decades ago, and it was you know, when I'm running the software, when it, when it seeds more than 30,000 somethings, it slows down. Oh, we'll just find the place where it says 30, 30,000 and raised the number. Right? Like it wasn't a systemic epi phenomenological outcome. Right. Sort of a joke. That's what this feels like though, that Google's like, we stuck 5 million in there when that was a hard limit. What's irritating to me? Does this irritate any of you? It's not a power of two. Why is it not a power of two <laugh> to be a power of two minus one like God intended, and yet it's 5 million, two, two even power of tens

Ant Pruitt (00:25:40):
<Laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (00:25:41):
There you go. I've done my old fart free even.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:45):
Thank you. Google said,

Ant Pruitt (00:25:47):
I have no answer on that. Mr. Sargent, like the logic behind it, it, I'm mean, you're Google and you have tons and tons of resources, and that totally just seemed out of left field.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:58):
Google said in a tweet essentially, and thank you Scooter X in the chat. It did it to quote, preserve stability and optimize performance. And so what I was thinking is, if you've got that many files, perhaps if you've got that many files, then trying to search through those files, if they're, that many of them would be Yeah. Kind of troublesome would potentially, you know, load down the system. But I mean, they've got all this storage or they've got all this processing power to run barred now. So you'd think that they'd be able to do this.

Ant Pruitt (00:26:31):
Exactly. You got you. You've been bragging about your super computer. That's better than Nvidia. This, this shouldn't be a, a big problem to sift through 2 million files. Come on Google. You're

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:43):
Google,

Mikah Sargent (00:26:44):
You're Google. Gosh darn it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:46):
Just add a few more Chromebooks into the server room and well, exactly.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:50):
<Laugh>, especially those ones that you, that Google built itself, that's, they, they just need to repurpose those.

Glenn Fleishman (00:26:55):
They're missing some stories here or take some of those old apples they can't

Mikah Sargent (00:26:58):
Use anymore as employees. Yeah, there you go. And even the little processing chips inside the bide dayss they're not using anymore could be there as well. I'm sure. Sure. These have little computers in them.

Glenn Fleishman (00:27:08):
It is funny though, sometimes you feel like they slip the top off the reality glass and you're like, you're looking at the raw innards. This doesn't feel exactly like it because again, the numbers around number, it was hard coded at that, but it's like, there's most services, right? Every people using Google Drive, some people have like five files that are add up to like 700 k and other people are storing what is, you know, two terabytes or something, or five, what's the maximum? And it's and so somewhere in there though, usually it means, well at scales, you know, there's, there's on average people are storing, you know, like 50 gigabytes or something. So it, it works out fine. And you have the resources to devote because you can distribute them across as running a service like this. You kind of know what to expect. So it's weird to have this high end number that then they're like, well, we can just roll that back. It just, it's something is really peculiar about <laugh> about that to me.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:57):
Let's take a quick break. We've got lots more to talk about here on this episode of this weekend. Google, if you're just now tuning in and you're going, that doesn't sound like Leo Laporte. You're right. It doesn't because it's not him. It's Mikah Sargent filling Infil Leo this week. He will be back at the end of April. But until then, I do want to tell you about Cisco Meraki who are bringing you this episode of This Week in Google, Cisco Meraki. They're the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. So that way whether your employees are working at home, if they're working at a cabin in the mountains, if they are working on a lounge chair at the beach, if they are working from anywhere, well, a cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where they happen to be.

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It can use apps from Meraki's vast ecosystem of partners. These are turnkey solutions built to work seamlessly with the Meraki cloud platform for asset tracking, for location analytics and more. With that, you can gather insights on how people are using their workspaces. So in a smart space, environmental sensors can track activity and occupancy levels so that way they can stay on top of cleanliness. You can reserve workspaces based on vacancy and employee profiles. This is also called hot-desking. It allows employees to scout out a spot in a snap. Locations in restricted environments can be booked in advance, and they include time-based door access. There's also MD m mobile device management, integrating devices and systems. Allow it to manage, update, and troubleshoot company owned devices, even when the device and the employee are in a remote location. Turn any space into a place of productivity and empower your organization with the same exceptional experience no matter where they work. With Meraki and the Cisco suite of technology, learn how your organization can make hybrid work work by visiting meraki.cisco.com/twit. And of course, we thank Cisco Meraki for sponsoring this week's episode of This Week in Google. Alright, back from the break. And I think it's time to move on to a very good topic and I'm glad that it's here on the list and it, I I I, I think this might be a Jeff Jarvis topic, but we'll see. The, the Washington Post article lawmakers are clueless about social media.

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:39):
<Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (00:31:41):
They'll regulate it.

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:43):
Sauna, baby baby. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. That has Jarvis written all over it. <Laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (00:31:51):
Can I hear? I'm ready. I am. I'm I'm sitting in the pew. It's a hard wooden pew. I've got my offering ready.

Glenn Fleishman (00:31:58):
Does an have the button Ready? An are you ready with that? Oh, oh, oh yeah. Let's go ahead and get it ready. Okay. Just checking. Alright. See, I've been on this show a little bit <laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:07):
God, I wish I, I wish I could get outta my preacher thing going

Glenn Fleishman (00:32:10):
<Laugh> summon it. You're in it. Gentle <laugh> <laugh> Hell is upon us. <Laugh>. Eric, there's, I'm panicking

Jeff Jarvis (00:32:22):
About moral panic as usual. So a good story in the Washington Post that says that politicians are effing idiots and they don't understand social media and they're, and so the Utah, of course, did this horrible thing, which you talked about, I think last week, week before last. Two state bills that keep people under 18 off social media. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is a terrible thing. It happens. I'm, I'm, I I, this, this, this folder right here is filled with papers I've been reading about young people on social media and how there's this presumption that it's bad for them. This is presumption that things are worth. There's a guy named Jonathan Hater writes for The Atlantic who's writing a book about how, cause the social media has ruined teenage girls' lives. No, let me tell you. As the father of a not too long ago teenage girl, there's plenty else that ruins their lives.

(00:33:06):
 There's a social pressure of the, the lunchroom is enough to ruin anybody's life. If you link back to your own life then, and, and the moral panic of finding the social media as the folk devil that says it's, that's where all the problems come in is ridiculous. It goes back to every moral panic there's ever been around comic books and video games and rock lyrics and books and novels themselves. And so it's just ridiculous. So I'm glad that to see the Washington Post, let's give actually credit to the author Paul Walman. Very good. We're coming along and, and saying what's what? That these guys just don't understand it and they also don't understand young people.

Ant Pruitt (00:33:44):
That's what I was gonna ask, and I didn't want it to come off as disrespectful as it's, do you think this is an age thing with our

Jeff Jarvis (00:33:51):
Relationship? Yeah, yeah. Of course. You're making fun of old people again. I realize that aunt, but okay. I'll let you

Ant Pruitt (00:33:56):
I didn't smile that

Glenn Fleishman (00:33:57):
Time. That's good, Bernie. Very smooth action.

Jeff Jarvis (00:34:00):
Yeah. It, it, it it is. It's, it's, I I I read a, there's, there's a guy named Paul Ferry, f a e r i e, who collects old headlines. And what's great about his, his social accounts both on Twitter and on Mastodon, is that he goes back and, and the kids these days, he'll find a phrase like that and he'll find headlines decade upon decade, even in the, you know, two centuries ago about the kids these days. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, and then the, of course the contrary of that is we must protect the kids. Right. Both of which fundamentally children insult the judgment of kids, right. Of our own children. There's a researcher, I think the world of named Dana Boyd, who wrote a book called it's Complicated in which she says, you know, we gotta give our own children some, some credit and some faith that allow them to learn, recognize they will learn. They do learn. They figure these things out on their own. And so to come along and, and act this way, I think you're absolutely right, Anne. It's old farts who just don't understand not only social media, but their own children. And I, and I would hate to be It's

Glenn Fleishman (00:35:04):
Expediency too though, isn't it? Is that you have a lot of politicians who they know something. One of the most popular things you can do as a school district is, is flow to levy to buy computers for students. Or it used to be because everyone's like, oh, computers, that's the future. Let's do that. Forget about books and teachers and class sizes. The rest, one of the most popular things you can do in certain sectors as a politician is say, social networks are the enemy. They're the real problem. Right. We need to regulate them and clamp down on them, and then things will go back to the way they used to be or be better. And if you're people who are progressive, buy into that often too much because they don't like the advertising, the targeting, all the negative messages that are given the reinforcement, they may understand all of it and say, yeah, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, are the enemy. And this politician wanting to block it while there's first Amendment, other issues, but you know, it, whatever. And on the conservative side, you people saying it's exposing people to things they don't want my children to see necessarily. It's it's a suppressing voices that I want my children to hear. It, it's focusing is changing my child. And so it's what can you do that appeals to both sides? Facebook is evil. Let's impose regulations.

Jeff Jarvis (00:36:13):
Pew the Pew survey for 2022. Pew, pew. Talk to teenagers about technology, and the majority of teens say social media provides them with a space for connection, creativity, and support. And, and, and, and young people are finding value here. And in a time when young people are frightened of being shot in their schools mm-hmm. <Affirmative> of the climate going nowhere of not young women not being able control their own bodies. Yes. I'm gonna be political here. They need someplace, somewhere to go to have an outlet with friends. The Times did a I don't think I talked about this in the show. If I did an Stop Me Kick Me Under the Table. Okay. the Times did a a focus group with, with middle schoolers or young, young people a few weeks ago. And in there people were talking about how it's a relief to be able to go online and mute myself and not feel I have to talk.

(00:37:09):
It's a relief to be able to go someplace where I can be among friends. It's a relief and yada, yada yada. So I, I screenshot that and I tweeted it and I said, you know, the kids are all right. And they figured it out. Well, the responses I got, oh, boy. Were, you know, oh my God, you can't how these kids, they're, they're being ruined. How dare you say this, it sounds awful to me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they, they wanna not talk. How dare they mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I said, did any of you think, can you, can you remember the eighth grade lunchroom? Can you just try for a minute to remember getting on the eighth grade bus and, and the social pressure you were under. Mm-Hmm. All the hell you were under. And, and be a little empathetic.

Glenn Fleishman (00:37:47):
My 15 year old missed most of middle school in person. And I don't think that was a terrible thing. Like, I'm sorry they missed their friends. They turned out, they realized they were more of an introvert than they realized too. So they were able to flourish in that. So there was a lot of downsides. But there was something where I was like, how do we get this one through middle school? It's like, oh, it was all online. Thank God. Yeah. I mean, everyone, you know, Jeff, you know, as, as a printing historian, fellow printing historian, <laugh> I'm often looking at sources next to you, but like, childhood is an invention of the 18 hundreds in Europe and America. Right. Kind of didn't exist. And then it's like, oh, these little humans that worked now have something called childhood. It's magic. We're

Jeff Jarvis (00:38:21):
Reverting to that now, aren't we? I saw that us exactly right. Bringing back child labor. Look,

Glenn Fleishman (00:38:25):
Child laborers all over ra, their little hands are good at things. In the type of graphic industry. Girls and boys always worked in making metal type. Cause the tiny hands were so efficient. But anyway, you look at any newspaper, I'm looking at train of rat. I'm looking at newspapers also from like, you know, 18 hundreds to the 1950s, sixties, seventies. Every time I'm looking at something, I'm looking for a particular you know, article about a thing or whatever. And there it'll be, there'll be the headline every, every newspaper, this is going to ruin the children. This new invention called reading. Reading is terrible for people. It ceases them all. The memorization and the children will become lazy.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:05):
One of my favorite quotes that I have in my next book next year about the internet about the dangers of, of, of reading and of

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:16):
Reading.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:17):
Yeah. And, oh, where the hell, who's gonna buy

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:19):
That book? Wait, I'm confused.

Jeff Jarvis (00:39:21):
No, d it's actually the wonders of the internet. <Laugh>. So this, for 1795, my sight is everywhere offended by these foolish, yet dangerous books. I have actually seen mothers in miserable carrots crying for the imaginary distress of a heroin while their children were crying for bread.

Glenn Fleishman (00:39:40):
Incredible, incredible.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:42):
<Laugh>. I can't, but this is just gonna keep repeating itself. Right? I mean, we're very predictable. Us humans. It, it's, I don't, I, if we look back, I guess did we ever, what did it take to actually convince people that books were not going to be the end of humanity? It was time. Right. Time is what did

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:06):
It. Yeah. Right,

Mikah Sargent (00:40:07):
Right. So we're just going to keep doing this over <laugh> and then video games. I mean, even today still people are saying video games are, you know, the turning people into bad people. So we haven't gotten through that time yet. I it's just in the short term while it's all going on. Good. God. Is it exhausting?

Jeff Jarvis (00:40:23):
<Laugh>? I think that's, I bought, go

Glenn Fleishman (00:40:24):
Ahead. Well, I think you have to agree though. Here's the one, the big proviso is that social networks are terrible. I mean, they are terrible, many of them that exist now and in many ways, and they are bad in some ways for people in general. So are they particularly bad for children? Are they different than other methods? Children interact? That's something. But we can't argue that Facebook has been in, say, an unalloyed good or even a neutral over time or Twitter. Maybe Instagram being the best of them. But it's changed culture too. So I think my starting point is more, can they, you know, I'm not, it's very hard to regulate things in a free speech culture, right? We have a First Amendment and we have commercial corporations have lots of rights to speech. There's a lot of freedoms that allow them to work in an unrestricted fashion, which is, which is good in many ways. So how do you regulate something that's producing bad outcomes in many cases where they don't seem to wanna produ put any kind of bar across their own bad behavior? So, I mean, I think that is the background for me. And then you examine where kids' roles are in that more specifically. But I don't know. Is it good for adults? Kids

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:28):
Also get to escape their parents, which is

Glenn Fleishman (00:41:30):
Important. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:31):
Very important. And by the way, Glen, we've met in social media, social media's not That's right. That's how

Mikah Sargent (00:41:35):
I was going to ask. I was about to do a follow up to ask if you agreed with that statement, Jeff. No. Because it does seem something you wouldn't

Ant Pruitt (00:41:42):
Well, I was gonna say that from a devil's advocate standpoint. You, you brought up that, that survey Mr. Jarvis, but there's

Jeff Jarvis (00:41:50):
Devil's advocate. Who do you think you are? Leo Laport. <Laugh>.

Ant Pruitt (00:41:53):
I'm

Mikah Sargent (00:41:53):
Definitely, I'm somebody's gotta be Leo. He's,

Ant Pruitt (00:41:56):
Somebody's gotta be. He's definitely not me. I'll say that. <Laugh>. but there's just as many surveys out there that are saying the exact opposite of what the survey you pulled up from Pew. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because children are, have, we've spoken about it on this show several times, how some children are getting suffering from depression because of what they're seeing on TikTok with the sensationalism of, of living my best life and all of this fake stuff from influence and things like that. So, okay. Go both ways. Yeah. But

Jeff Jarvis (00:42:26):
It's, I, I had to buy this book for the next book called The Plugin Drug. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> 1977 by Marie Wynn about how television is terrible and is gonna ruin everybody. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then she revised it over the years because new things came along, like the VCR and the computer and, and video games. She said, well, it's all the same. Cuz you're looking at a screen again, a screen. It's not what's on it, it's the screen. She said, certain specific physiological mechanisms of the eyes, ears, and brain respond to the stimuli emanating from the television screen regardless of the cognitive content of the programs. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's a one way transaction. Wait, so that was, that was what was terrible about television, right? So now problem is,

Ant Pruitt (00:43:05):
I know our sleep expert has no,

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:06):
This stuff is interactive. It knows you. Right. And that's bad. Have

Mikah Sargent (00:43:12):
You seen the video of Bjork describing television? No. So I think she must have read, I think Bjork must have read that book because there's this, there's this ridic. I I don't think we can show it be. Well, I don't, it doesn't have music, so maybe we could, I don't know. But Bjork basically is sitting down, I, it's like an interview for a news program and she's describing television and she's talking about how

Speaker 6 (00:43:36):
Every single little tiny pixel is shining light into your eyes and that is making it so that it is hypnotizing you. And it is changing everything. I'm basically doing the video right now. I love this

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:50):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:51):
You got your watch watching

Jeff Jarvis (00:43:52):
Your image. This is not a big field. You're the

Glenn Fleishman (00:43:55):
Top specialized industry of Bjork impersonation.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:58):
<Laugh>. Anyway, a lockdown. You should, for your book. For your book. You've gotta listen to that Bjork interview. I'm telling you.

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:04):
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I will, I will.

Glenn Fleishman (00:44:06):
Everything rots children's brains because, because parents want control over their children. And I think exactly. There's a speaking has one of multiple parents on this panel. It's always a it's always a battle. I think there's a battle of like ego, ab negation where we have to give up some of ourselves to let them be who they are. And some parents don't do any of that, and some parents do too much of that, fighting that balance. So when you have another force in there that you can say you have access to the blah, the, the written word or the screen or social media, it's a, it's a tool for parents nervousness to

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:39):
Express itself to, yes. Well

Ant Pruitt (00:44:41):
Put, I wanna say I saw something about Miss a O C joining TikTok, and it, it seems like that could be something to end up coming back to bite her in the end. I don't know. I think she's great. Social media. What's that?

Jeff Jarvis (00:44:57):
He's great at social media. She and her

Ant Pruitt (00:44:59):
Team. Yeah. I mean, I get her a premise of, of basically joining TikTok when the rest seems like the rest of the country is like, no, we need to kill off TikTok. We need to ban TikTok. You what are your thoughts on that, Mr. Jarvis?

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:11):
I, I think it's very smart. Jamal Bowen who was a, who was a really good representative. I'm not sure where he's from.

Glenn Fleishman (00:45:18):
Oh yeah. I love

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:19):
Him. Yeah. bow. Yeah. US representative from the great state of New York, how can I forget, 16th <laugh>. So he's been out there saying this TikTok stuff is way overdone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and I think we're seeing a tech lash in the tech lash happening here mm-hmm. <Affirmative> where some representatives are recognizing, especially Democrats if we piss off all the kids mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:45):
<Affirmative>

Jeff Jarvis (00:45:46):
Art old man Joe you know we like you Joe, but you know, you're even older than Jarvis and Le and, and Laport and you're, you're not helping our future here by hating TikTok.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:01):
Especially because there are a number of people who, I mean, just even casting inside the people who genuinely have found joy by going and using that app every day and experiencing new stuff, even not thinking about them, but the, the number of people who have lived out the, you know, long-lived American dream by becoming a content creator on that platform though mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, not only are we taking away potentially, they, they suddenly don't have this, this revenue stream that they had. And a lot of these folks are not sort of thinking in the long term. And so it can, it can be detrimental to them, but it also then results in those folks specifically having this vendetta because they took away this, this tool that they had been using to make a name for themselves. And we had just seen where some of the covid the, the positive information and the true information and the sort of instructions and campaigns being spread on the platform in a good way. We've seen the success that the platform can have in terms of getting information to the Utes. And so to lose all of that, and as you're pointing out to look incredibly unhi and not en vogue is not

Jeff Jarvis (00:47:19):
Great. And shutting off the speech of young people. Sorry.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that's pretty soon you'll see like, well, no, no, I'm not good. Nevermind. I was thinking about inventing a meme there, but it's a meme that I don't want to exist, so, Ooh. People without

Glenn Fleishman (00:47:34):
Tongue Good. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:35):
I I know where you're Yeah. People. Yeah, exactly. You know where I'm going. <Laugh>. Yeah. Oh boy.

Ant Pruitt (00:47:41):
I, I still have my stance on, you know, our, our country is picking on TikTok, you know, because of the China connection. Yet at the same time, there's just this much craptastic and, and disgusting content rolling around on Facebook, rolling around on YouTube. That, that's slips through the cracks of moderation and you never really hear much about it as much as we're hearing, well, China, China, China, China, China, Hey, take care of the house first. That's, yep.

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:10):
Hey, I've got moral purity here because I don't trust the Chinese government's involvement or interaction with TikTok. I don't trust TikTok, but I also killed my Facebook account three years ago, and I stopped using Twitter and must look over. So I have a tiny bit of moral high ground

Mikah Sargent (00:48:25):
And you need a new sign with, with,

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:26):
With halos on it.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:27):
More

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:28):
Clearly

Mikah Sargent (00:48:29):
Purity. Why should

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:32):
Do the purity. Yeah. It's, I'm just slightly less of a hypocrite than other people complaining about TikTok.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:37):
It's like a punch card, right. You you have to walk around constantly and it's like, if you are less of a hypocrite than the person next to you, then they have to punch your card. And if you get enough,

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:47):
It's such a good place thing. It's like, oh, I had almond milk. I can't, I can't now I have to take that off.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:51):
Yeah, exactly. Yes. Right.

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:53):
It's

Mikah Sargent (00:48:53):
Like I'm killing bees. So now, oh, well

Glenn Fleishman (00:48:56):
I'm still wearing blue jeans that are dye with indigo from Oh, no.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:00):
So then they punch your card instead of the, or you have to punch their card instead of the reverse. So somebody else is getting, I don't

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:06):
Know, you, Cory doctor had this concert called Woofy back in I think it was down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Like, what'd you call me 16 years ago? Woofy? Woofy. <Laugh>. W H U F F I E. And it was, it's exactly what China is, is implemented as a social like quality score more or less, although theirs version is more negative, but it was kind of in a, you know, Cory doctoral dystopia and people who people engaged with each other and you earned Woofy. And Woofy was sort of your social score and the higher social score you had. Yeah. And you, so it was kind of a way you could get things and people would work with you and whatever. And I realized that's it. I need to work, I work on my woofy. I've, I'm off Facebook. I'm not using TikTok. Get that wooy number up.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:44):
All right. I'm gonna start keeping track of my wolfie. <Laugh>. It's sort of a what a modern karma.

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:50):
It was like clout. Just remember the clout with a K back.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:53):
Yeah. Clout. I remember. Remember Clouts? Aw.

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:56):
Oh, I hate

Mikah Sargent (00:49:57):
It. Aw, me too. I hate

Glenn Fleishman (00:49:58):
It. Plus K in something. I don't know. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:01):
All right. Let's, I think we can take another quick break and then we've got lots more to talk about. Oh my goodness. It's just stacked tons. So much to talk about. But first I wanna tell you about Miro who are bringing you this episode of This Week in Google. I got a question for you. Are you and your team still going from tab to tab to tab to tab to tool to tool losing brilliant ideas and important information along the way, cuz of the context switching with Miro? That doesn't need to happen. Miro is the collaborative visual whiteboard that brings all of your great work together, no matter where you are, whether you're working from home, if you're in a hybrid workspace, we were just talking about hybrid workspaces. Everything comes together in one place online at first glance, you know, you may go to miro.com and you may think, oh, it's just like a whiteboard, but it's online.

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But no Miros capabilities run far beyond that. It's actually a visual collaboration tool that has a bunch of features for the whole team to build on each other's ideas and create something innovative from anywhere you can shorten your time to launch, so your customers get what they need faster. With Miro, you need only one tool to see your vision come to life. There's planning, researching, brainstorming, designing feedback cycles, and it can all live on one mural board across teams. And faster input means faster outcomes. In fact, Miro users report the tool increasing project delivery speed by 29%. You can view and share the big picture overview and as cinch, and when everyone has a voice, then everyone can tap into a single source of truth. Your team remains engaged, invested, and of course, happy of utmost importance. You can cut out any confusion on who needs to do what by mapping out these processes, these roles, these timelines, and then do that with several templates, including Miros Swim Lane Diagram.

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So they've got a bunch of different templates that you can use, a bunch of different diagrams, including swim lanes. And it just makes sense. It's very easy to sort of work through the process and understand who's supposed to be doing what, when, how, and why. Strategic planning gets a whole lot easier when it's visual and accessible. So you can tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team. So they not only view it, but have a chance to give feedback along the way. And if you're feeling that meeting fatigue while Miro users report saving up to 80 hours per user per year just from streamlining conversations, it's that it could have been an email, well now it could have been a Miro board ready to be a part of the more than 1 million users who join Miro every month like us.

(00:52:44):
 In fact, Leo and I use it for Ask the Tech guys because we can get every single thing we need on this one board so we can see the Google Doc that we have that has some information in it, get access to the tweets that people have sent us, access to the emails that people have sent us. And you're not having to jump between tabs and windows. Like when you walk through a door, you're going to go get something and you walk through that door and then you forget what it was you were supposed to be going after. Yeah, our brains aren't good at that context switch in that moment. So this can help kind of keep everything rolling along right there in one spot. You out there can get your first three boards for free to start working better together at miro.com/podcast.

(00:53:28):
That's M I R o.com/podcast to check out Miro. And honestly, go there. Seriously. miro.com/podcast. Go there. You do it now. You do it after the show. Just check it out. Cause I think once you get there and you see how it works, it's like, oh, I, why I should absolutely be using this. And then you get everybody else involved too. It's a lot of fun. I mean, even if you're just using it for personal reasons, it's a lot of fun. It's kind of a fun place to hang out, make different stuff, create boards. So head there, miro.com/podcast. Thank you Miro, for sponsoring this week's episode of This Week in Google. All right, we are back from the break. And if you're just now joining us, I am mic a Sargent in for Leo Laporte, who's on vacation. Got Jeff Jarvis, Glen Fleischman, and Aunt Pruit here with me. We've had a great time thus far, but now we're gonna talk about ai. So it's about to get No, I could. So every once in a while I, we start talking about AI and the chat room just goes, here it comes. Oh, not this again. Oh boy.

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:27):
<Laugh> look,

Mikah Sargent (00:54:28):
Ai it's, it's everywhere. And Bloomberg, it's

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:32):
The new nft,

Mikah Sargent (00:54:33):
It's the new N <laugh>. It's the, but this NFT sticks around and it's actually a real thing. I find this interesting, a large language model trained on financial data. And when I say I find this interesting, what I mean is I find it interesting that someone finds it interesting enough to create it because

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:52):
<Laugh>, it's

Mikah Sargent (00:54:53):
Not, I don't care about it myself, but are

Jeff Jarvis (00:54:56):
You saying how bored are you? Yeah. Is

Mikah Sargent (00:54:58):
That what you're saying? I'm a little bit saying that, look, I get it. I get why why Annie Company. I mean, that's the beauty, right, of a large language model is that you can train it on different sets of data and then it can actually work to, to answer the questions that you might have. So, I don't know am I able to type into Bloomberg G P T and say, how do I make $1 million

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:23):
<Laugh> Now that, that would be great technology

Mikah Sargent (00:55:27):
<Laugh>, that would be great, right? Ugh. But that's not what this is.

Jeff Jarvis (00:55:30):
<Laugh> what's so good about it though, is that, is that I think we've gotta get in the sarcastic parrots paper we've talked about by Tim Guru and Company, one of the things they argue is that, is that the boys of Silicon Valley and the boys of AI always wanting bigger things cuz hey, we boys are like that. And, and so having bigger and bigger and bigger language models is not the goal. And in fact, that makes it harder to understand harder control, harder to audit and, and, and, and, and keep in quality that in fact, you want things that are finite. Oh. So for Bloomberg to come along and say, we trained this on financial data. Full stop. Colleague of mine at the journalism school named Sankar showed me just yesterday how he trained he used CHE tb, but he limited it to a certain amount of data about the school. So we can understand that. So it would get the answers right, because it was using the right data and knew what data it was using.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:24):
Less of a chance for hallucination.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:26):
Pardon?

Mikah Sargent (00:56:27):
Less of a chance for hallucination, which is like, when it makes up data that doesn't exist, that's actually really good. <Laugh>, I like this.

Jeff Jarvis (00:56:35):
Even the idea of hallucination bothers me because I think, I think one of the ethical things we've gotta do with LLMs is too late, the horse is out the barn over the horizon and already made in the glue. But <laugh>, I, I think one of the problems here is that we, by, by having LLMs speak in the first person we anthrop, mophies somebody, we think it's own to human. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Well, it should say the machine or the program. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then also to say that it wrote, didn't write anything, it assembled language. Okay. What they should be saying is, you know, the program assembled blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead it says, well, I wrote this, or I thought this, or I fell in love with Kevin of the New York Times, wanted to bring up his marriage. And, and, and we buy this as if it's gonna have something more than what it is, which is a word prediction machine.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:24):
This is where I want to bring up an excellent piece in the Washington Post from Tatum Hunter Consumer Technology Reporter there. And it, I, I want to point out it does have a sort of buzz feedy headline, but I promise you this is a really good piece. It's three things everyone's getting wrong about ai, but the piece is talking about taking things past news literacy and talking about AI literacy. Mm-Hmm. And this was a really excellent piece that kind of discussed what you're talking about there, where we do need to think about the definitions, think about the terms, think about how we are not just talking about ai, but even contextualizing ai. And there was one point in here that I, I actually, we interviewed her on Tech News Weekly, and I sort of made the joke that I felt like I was being attacked because there's the part where we're talking about once I, I, let's say I, I asked the AI to answer a question about, I don't know if I mix these two colors together and what color do I get?

(00:58:38):
Or even something like the, just the other day I actually did this cause I was curious what was gonna happen. I said, can you invent three new emoji give them names, describe them. And then for bonus, I actually said this in this verbiage, I said for bonus points explain how one of them could actually be misinterpreted by the end user and ends up sort of going viral in its misinterpretation and it assembled words that were really compelling. And what Tatum Hunter was talking about though is you see it do one thing, right? And then because you see it do that, right, you may start to think that it can do everything right. And right. It's not like if I see my toddler walk for the first time, that I should then give them the nuclear code launch codes because if they're good at this, then they're be

Glenn Fleishman (00:59:32):
Good. Well, I'm sure your kid is so smart <laugh> Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:35):
In that, in that very specific case, it works differently. But no, I, and, and I actually kind of had to have that moment where I went, you know what? You're right. Just because I see it, do this one thing correctly. It's a really good point. I shouldn't give it, you know, sort of a free range to, to not be skeptical of it getting other things. Right. But anyway, it goes along with what you're talking about there. And I, I like the idea of sort of narrowing with this large language model. Maybe it's a, instead of a grande, it's a tall language model,

Glenn Fleishman (01:00:08):
<Laugh> <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:10):
It would be nice to, because that's what almost what I, I would almost want to have a, an l l M trained to my specific dataset. So may, if I was a, specifically, if I was still doing consumer tech journalism involving writing, it knew my writing, I trained it to that, and then I trained it maybe to some r s s feeds that came through from different articles in that I would read. And then just to use that as the means of, of answering questions versus now where I could ask it. One question I remember asking the other day, I was so curious, a, how it would respond, and b, I kind of wanted a quick answer that I knew would take a while to be Googling around. I was just thinking about car companies or car insurance, I mean, or no, no life insurance. And I was thinking, how in the world do life insurance companies actually make money? Because, oh,

Glenn Fleishman (01:01:09):
I got, hold on. I can tell you it's very interesting. Oh, sorry. No.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:13):
Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say

Glenn Fleishman (01:01:14):
<Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:01:14):
And I, I didn't know sort of, and so it gave some different ideas and then I was able to later in the day, use that as my jumping off point and go, okay, are these three things true? And it was right in that case, but if it's got access to however much it's scooped up up until September, 2021, cause I'm using G P T four is, is what it's going to answer about one of these questions. Right. It may get 10, right? But then it gets 11 wrong. And if I don't, if I give it too much trust, I won't know the difference between them.

Glenn Fleishman (01:01:45):
Well, this Bloomberg story is particularly interesting because I think they're carving out something like that is, is, I love this language, the complexity and unique terminology of the financial domain warrant to domain specific model. Now let's feed that into an AI to explain it. Yeah. But it's, it's, they're, you know, they're saying they're working, they're using this dataset to improve natural language processing, which is fascinating because I think one of the great, the greatest things that chat G p T introduced was the notion that you could answer a free form question. And regardless of how the answer was, it was typically a pause, right? It was, it was on the topic you asked about. And often, if not always gave you something in the realm of correctness. So, you know, there is the issue of how of accuracy and what's being derived from and so forth.

(01:02:33):
But I see this as, I mean, natural language processing or being able to make natural language queries has been an extremely difficult thing. It's been something people have been trying to solve for 40 years or more. Because we want to be able to talk to a computer the way that we talk to other people, and we call, we wanna be able to call. I mean, and a lot of companies want us as consumers to put our support requests into a format where they just throw an AI at it and we don't even know. And AI gives some good information. So Bloomberg is, I think this is actually a very interesting space where they're using this to study how best to be able to produce better answers to natural language questions about difficult things to conceive of in the financial world, because the financial world is so reconite, right? There's so much terminology and, and background and so forth you need, and so it's, if it's a tool to improve the way you can ask a question and get an understandable result that seems like a shaped missile as opposed to a dropped nuclear bomb,

Mikah Sargent (01:03:33):
Well put. That's Yeah, I agree. That's exactly what it is. Now <laugh>, sometimes we take our, the technology that we've created and we do irresponsible things with it, and then our parents come along and they slap our hands and say, you shouldn't have done that. And in this case, they keep it for themselves. Yeah. And yeah, they say, don't eat that cookie. That was for me. In this case, mid journey is the parent and the cookie is the free trial. We don't get our free trial cookies anymore

Glenn Fleishman (01:04:14):
Because we Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:04:16):
Why we can't have Nice, exactly. Why can't we have nice things? Because people put the pope in a coat and apparently that's enough to, to be <laugh> to be bad. I don't know, a rope

Glenn Fleishman (01:04:28):
Pope in a rope. Okay, Pope in a coat, not okay. No. Right, right.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:32):
What is the, what is, what are the thoughts here? Because I Oh, yes. You will automatically cut off a certain number of users who would've done potentially irresponsible or silly and perhaps unimportant, I guess, things with this technology by removing the free trial. But does this not also limit access to people who may, I mean, thinking about sort of the democratization of this technology or access to this technology, doesn't this also cut people off who may not be able to afford it, who could be creating really cool things and shouldn't it instead be on the, it shouldn't be the responsibility of the, the groups that are making the technology to keep it from doing something like a relatively believable photo of Donald Trump being arrested?

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:29):
You mean

Mikah Sargent (01:05:29):
Content moderation? Yeah. That thing. Yeah. Those two words that people don't like to

Jeff Jarvis (01:05:34):
Hear <laugh>, how do you, how can you possibly, the, the problem with that is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you're asking the program readers to predict everything bad that bad people could do with it. Yeah, yeah. And then get blamed if you didn't predict something and they invented it anyway. Which of course, you know, look at Kevin, Russ he wanted the computer to be fall in love with him so he could write a story saying it fell in love with me. How ridiculous. I couldn't sleep that night with my wife because it, she now knew that he, he would've wandering eyes for a computer. So I think we've gotta be, it's back to the story you mentioned, the Washington Post. We've gotta be more realistic about these things Yeah. And recognize what they are, and take that at face value, the, the, the desire to panic so suddenly and say it could do bad things. Well, so I saw a story, I forget where it was today, where the, the journalist got the computer to say something bad and then wrote a story saying, look at the bad thing the computer said.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:31):
Yeah. Yeah. Those stories really get on my nerves because Yes, if you make it do the thing, it's go, it's doing the thing. And especially whenever we see how, sometimes how much bending over backwards, sideways and doing, I don't know, a, a a triple back flip spiral to be able to even make it do this thing that they wanna write the story about. Yeah. That is frustrating. I guess I, I should rephrase sort of what I was saying, because you're right, it is not that I even want the company or the, the group to have to moderate in that way. I guess really what I'm saying is it, it's, I don't like that we have to, or we think, I guess that we have to close down this tool because of the people doing the bad things. I almost wish somehow we were better at it <laugh>, we were better at, at, at spotting whenever it's somebody doing a bad thing with it. Because there are people out there who can't gain access to this tool because they can't afford the extra money to do it. But could maybe benefit from this, I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis (01:07:31):
Yes. Yeah. In our, in our international, in our executive program that I, that I helped start at the school most, almost half the students are international and English is their second or third, or god knows fourth language. I feel like a stupid American. I only have one. And they're using these tools to smooth out their English Mm. And to code switch for American and and English readers. Right. Well, that empowers them. Yeah.

(01:07:59):
And you know, I've had other thoughts that I think these tools can be used to help people tell their stories in ways they don't feel capable of doing. It extends writing, it extends the, the privilege. Those of us who write for a living have to express ourselves. Well, and, and I think that that's amazing. But you're right, Micah, if you cut it off, you say, oh my God, danger, danger, danger. Everything could do wrong. Then we cut off the possibilities of people that we can't imagine how they'd use it. And what's the harm of putting the pope in a coat

Mikah Sargent (01:08:29):
<Laugh>.

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:30):
And everybody knew it was about, I think, I think everybody had the same experience. I didn't tweet it. I said too good to be true and love it too. Good to be true. Some people didn't. And they tweeted it and thought, oh, I got fool. I just, within 10 minutes, everybody knew it wasn't real.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:45):
I just wanted my Google lens to find that code online so I could buy it. That's all I cared about. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:08:50):
Yeah. That's actually what I think is going to happen, is that people are going to design fashion and then the machine can make what they've imagined.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:58):
Yes.

Ant Pruitt (01:08:59):
What I find funny is the headline says Mid journey ends. Its free trial. After fake images go viral, we're still gonna get fake images for people that decide to, you know what, I can just go ahead and pay for mid journey. Right. It's not like say on Twitter, the Twitterverse was my phone not muted. Holy moly. Sorry about that. Say like on the Twitter verse people buying that, that blue check to look important or look verified or what have you, and end up just being a troll account. It didn't stop, stop them for being bad actors and, and paying to be a bad actor. So what's the difference here? We're gonna keep seeing some pretty fascinating images that are fake. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:39):
Also, there's a literal meme online called looks Fake. You can tell by the pixels people have been Photoshopping stuff. I know Adobe hates it whenever you use it as a verb, but Oh well. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:09:50):
Do

Mikah Sargent (01:09:50):
People have been photoshopping these things for years? These, these kinds of photos for years and just Bec <laugh>, I mean, and I would love to talk to the original creator of that specific there, those two specific photos to hear what they had to type in, how many times they had to like, regenerate it, if they, you know, upscaled it, if they took one photo and, and had things added in the background. I mean, it's not, it's not trivial. I don't think they just typed well, and I, I can't be sure. But from the look of it, and based on my own experiences with the different AI generative tools that I have used, it takes more than just typing in one sentence and getting what you want. So in that same time that the person sort of tweaked things, they could have found a photo of of, of, you know, white man getting arrested and then just photoshopped Trump over the top of it. So

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:47):
Yeah. Is it anything, the guy who did the pop pope with the coat said that he was high on mushrooms. It was just having a ball. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:54):
That's amazing. It, the, the coat is sort of mushroom, like, so it's really inspired. I think it really

Jeff Jarvis (01:10:59):
Is. So if I may, if I may, please. No, I know it's not a democracy. I, I just wanted to, to throw in something from later in the show that I'm gonna, I'm gonna now sacrifice one of my numbers for this purpose, cuz it's relevant. I know you all are waiting to figure out what it is that you should get me for Christmas. And I wanna give you plenty of time to figure this out and learn new skills about how to sew things. Because I have found the puffer code that I want, and I know Glen Fleischman is gonna want really badly. The 9 98 Micah line. 98 line

Mikah Sargent (01:11:30):
Line 98. Yes. If Benito, you can. Oh my goodness. Oh. Oh, that's lovely.

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:36):
<Laugh>. No, no,

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:37):
That one is, I was listening the keyboard puffer coat by liminal, and the coat is nothing but gigantic puffy keys of a typewriter.

Glenn Fleishman (01:11:48):
It's No, I want the one that's, that's the type case. So it's got a, a giant section for an e and t and a smaller Ys and Zs and Qs. So my has to be just that gonna be, but

Jeff Jarvis (01:11:59):
This is what you get for your, your collaborator and shift happens.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:02):
I love the Okoth being used as the zipper pole. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:06):
That's a pretty why

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:07):
Notice that

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:08):
I'm shocked that I haven't seen this before. So each of those are, I mean, ever, like, has anyone anyone ever made a keyboard coat before? I

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:14):
Don't know whether I think I'm presuming that it's made up. I don't know.

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:17):
Oh, I see. It could be. It made.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:19):
Isn't liminal a

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:21):
Brand? I tried to look it up.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:22):
I thought liminal was like a, a generative art thing.

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:27):
Oh, well, the one should

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:28):
Now too.

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:29):
The one should now make this, and it should be Bluetooth enabled <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:32):
Oh my God, Glen. Yes. We can get phone to make it into on Twitter to make it into absolutely,

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:41):
Absolutely true keyboard. That's hilarious.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:44):
Hello, Glen. I'm tweeting from my, well,

Jeff Jarvis (01:12:47):
Jill,

Glenn Fleishman (01:12:48):
I don't know. Or all of us Lori Anderson fans. Some of us might be Lori Anderson. Remember her keyboard? Ty She'd come out and she'd play the keyboard honor tie during concerts. It was actually connected back to her. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:12:57):
That was a dream glen. That was a feature. No,

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:00):
It's eps everything related to Lori Anderson seems like a dream. But is true.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:04):
I want the letters to be placed so that I can spell Macarena by doing the Macarena

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:08):
<Laugh>. Well, listen, all things are possible in the

Jeff Jarvis (01:13:12):
Future.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:12):
All things are possible with AI and a sewing needle.

Glenn Fleishman (01:13:17):
Well, here's the thing that would be funny is e eventually, I mean, I'm actually interested in AI as a generative tool in a different way. And it comes up from bits and pieces. Like someone said, oh, I was able to get and, you know, one of the LLMs to, it sounds like I'm saying lol, l one of the large language looking models. I was able to get it to write an entire app that I could compile and then upload onto the app store for, for an iPhone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I think, and then they detailed it was much more complicated than a single query. But I, gosh, I, we've had, there was a conversation that happened. I don't wanna mention his name because I'm gonna then go off on him, but there's a, there's a pundit out there, not a Jeff Jarvis, but more like a, well, what's Jeff Jarvis backwards? We need evil Jeff Jarvis <laugh>. I can't do that in my head. Is that

Mikah Sargent (01:14:02):
Wait, let me ask, let me ask Chad, g p t to do an anagram of Jeff Jarvis.

Glenn Fleishman (01:14:08):
Super, super feig <laugh> the terrible, terrible pundit. But there's a guy who's always wrong about, except by his narrow domain. And he was like, oh, well, this is gonna replace, this is gonna replace programming because you would just type a query in and it'll produce a program you need. And I'm like, no, it's an amplification for programmers because you type a query in instead of having to do a certain amount of coding work, it might produce something that's possibly workable or maybe accurate. But as you need to, you need to have the expertise to evaluate it, troubleshoot it, extend it. But I do think something like, would you create me a cutting you know, create me a template that would allow me to create this puffer jacket in a way that I could then upload it to a place that there's all these service bureaus that do fabric cutting, laser cutting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, 3D printing. Mm-Hmm. Whatever it would be very Will Gibson, bill Gibson you know, just I want this thing, instead of me using fancy 3D software and goggles to do it, I'm just like, Hey, here's a thing I want to do. And I'm describing it and it creates the stuff for me now that seems more feasible. That, that, that could eventually be something that was creeped

Mikah Sargent (01:15:12):
I would like to update real quick. I said I need a name that sounds like Jeff Jarvis, but sounds evil, like an evil twin. And here is what the AI compiled <laugh> said, how about Jack's jro? It has a similar sound of Jeff Jarvis, but with a more sin menacing twist

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:32):
Is that is really good.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:34):
Js jab good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:35):
Well, JS I think sounds perfectly

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:37):
Have bashing

Jeff Jarvis (01:15:38):
An

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:39):
Evil way. <Laugh> evil twin, now you got your evil twin Js Jabos Js Javas

Mikah Sargent (01:15:44):
<Laugh>.

Glenn Fleishman (01:15:45):
Good jab. I'm very happy with that.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:49):
Moving right along in the ai sort of area. We've got AI guys now, you know, we had the crypto guys, what was Ether? Was it Ether? What was it that they had? E e

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:03):
It was

Mikah Sargent (01:16:03):
Ether in their, in their names. And it seems that now we have reached a new level where you've got the AI guys. Now what

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:13):
I wanna know is, are all these people, people who were crypto guys, right.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:17):
In fact, and they changed,

Jeff Jarvis (01:16:19):
Changed to become, oh, of course. I'm an AI guy. And by the way, during the pandemic, I really knew a lot about epidemiology,

Mikah Sargent (01:16:25):
<Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:16:26):
<Laugh>. Yeah. They were Ukraine and Russia experts for a while. Oh yes, absolutely. And now they're AI experts. It's a great, it's a great hustle though, isn't it? It's, here's how you move from a thing that's bankrupted morally and ethically to you know, here's how we do this other thing.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:42):
I have seen, I'm curious in your own sort of research regarding ai. There have been a few guides out there that I think can be helpful. Sometimes people will publish sort of their own interactions with, with a, well, okay. See, every time now I've got this little Jeff Jarvis, or excuse me, Jeff's jabos sitting on my shoulder, <laugh>, who, depending on what words I'm using. Yes. One shoulder. Yeah. Jeff is like, exactly. <Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:17:12):
Your tag. Look at your tagline, Jeff. There we go.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:16):
And so I <laugh> No, but I, they have occasionally written some really great instructions and guides and helpful bits about you know, if you, if you ask this way or if you include this amount of detail, then it's helpful. Cause I have sometimes found where if I give too much information, and it's kind of like what you were talking about, Jeff, where these large language models, they just keep making them larger and larger and larger and larger, which opens up an opportunity for mistakes that it can be helpful to kind of find that sweet spot. But you risk coming across a lot of these AI guys who in some cases are selling the exact same pamphlet that doesn't have any new information in it about prompting. And I'm sure that this question has come up before. But I am curious about for all of you, and maybe we can just go down the line starting with Glen, can you tell us about a compelling use, an actual compelling use that you've had for ai, be it these, this generative AI systems? Oh, so it can be the chat version, or it can be images, whatever.

Glenn Fleishman (01:18:29):
Well, I'll, I'm gonna give you two because one, I'm borrowing for somebody else, but I haven't tried it yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. So the first one is giving myself explanations of very technical topics. And I feel like I'm a technical person and I know how to research and whatever, but I got I got undiagnosed for medical condition as I keep saying it, I, I, I was diagnosed with something incorrectly, but not totally. It's long story. Don't need to share that part. But when I was undiagnosed, I got this thing from a doctor. It was the first reading of a thing or the, you know, medical result. And I was like, I don't know what this means. So I asked Chap G P T, and it sort of uns spun it for me mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then I used that to confirm it was accurate.

(01:19:08):
And I thought, this is great. And of course, you can't just do that on its own. You have to be able to research it to make sure it's telling you something that's accurate. But I was able to give it terminology that was too sophisticated for me in the medical realm. And I think, gosh, every day people are confronted. They're supposed to, everyone is supposed to be an expert in everything. My older kid is going to college this fall, and we are suddenly in the last year, supposed to be experts on college admissions, financial aid, the fafsa, the c s s, all of this, right? I, I don't really wanna be an expert in it, but we became, my wife and I, as much of an expert, as much experts as we needed to be. So the idea of being able to lower the expertise basis by taking jargon or terminology or, or lengthy things and saying simplify.

(01:19:50):
I've had already had that be beneficial. But my, my second one, which is very quickly, is I have a friend who's also making a transition into researching the past. His area is Shakespeare. Mine is 19th Century Printing. And he said he, because some of these models have ingested all public domain, he's using it to get leads on things that are hard to find by searching on path trusts, Google Books internet archive. You just ask a model that has it all in there, Hey, what do you know about this? And it starts to spit out stuff. And some of it again, is whoa manufactured. But ah-ha ah-ha, mr which model,

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:24):
Which models have path in there?

Glenn Fleishman (01:20:26):
I don't know yet. I gotta talk to him more about, I don't wanna experi, because Google Books I think is been, it's your homework tested. But, so anyway, that's a use I'm looking forward to as a researcher, is being able to say, you have all public domain knowledge. Tell me how to find this. Tell me what

Jeff Jarvis (01:20:39):
I would, yeah. Right. I I could imagine tomorrow going to half Happy Trust for those who don't is, is, is the product of Google scanning all this great material, all these libraries got it with tons of old journals and books and magazines and, and, and, and it's, it's invaluable. And I would love to be able to go to it and say just use Half Trust and find me examples of moral panic around children <laugh>, you know,

Mikah Sargent (01:21:02):
Oh, that

Jeff Jarvis (01:21:03):
Wouldn't be, it may make them up, but then it, no, it, it inspire a cause. It probably will make them up, but it may, they get the stuff actually from the defined the source. And, and in any case, it'll inspire you.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:13):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think that's, yeah, that, that opportunity for inspiration. I'm, I'll name two, one that is just kind of silly and one that was actually helpful. So the other day, a family member had we'd been talking a little bit back and forth and they said, how are you? And I wanted to say I was busy, but I wanted to say it in a way that was sort of funny, <laugh>. And so I said, someone asked me, big six machine, someone asked me how I've been, I want to respond with a hilarious, slightly bizarre country style metaphor, aah sweatier than a long-tailed cat and a room full of rocking chairs that explains how I've been incredibly busy lately. And I said, the response should start out busier then. Can you give me five options? So here were the five and then I'll tell you which one I went with. There's busier than a juggling octopus in a circus act. Not great busier than Times Square on New Year's Eve. Also not funny.

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:10):
Let's

Mikah Sargent (01:22:10):
See. This is the one that I went with and I thought it was funny. Busier than a centipede at a shoe sale.

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:16):
<Laugh>. Oh, that's good.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:17):
<Laugh>. That's good. That's good. That's you. That's, you learned

Mikah Sargent (01:22:21):
<Laugh> busier than a flea at a dog show. No, eh, it's okay. And then the last one was busier than a pan. Busier than a penguin on an ice cream delivery mission. What

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:34):
<Laugh> that is.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:35):
So

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:36):
I like that. I like

Mikah Sargent (01:22:36):
That one. I only had the one that I chose, which was centipede, a shoe sale. I thought that was great. And then the person bought people,

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:41):
You have no follow. People have no follow up questions to the penguin one. That's the utility that give that response that no one will.

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:48):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:49):
If I, I'm done, I am done talking to this person, give me a reply where they're not gonna

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:53):
Same. His

Jeff Jarvis (01:22:54):
Brain's going a little crazy. I think I'll just leave below it. Yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:22:57):
That's right.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:58):
But the, then I, the one that actually was helpful and I've been using G P T for using G PT Plus to get access to that. I don't know if G P T four is available now broadly, but my, I'm not used to having like very, very dry hands. But in the past, like month or so, my hands have been incredibly dry and cracking. And so, dude,

Jeff Jarvis (01:23:21):
Jim Sonoma County, duh. Well,

Mikah Sargent (01:23:23):
But it hasn't happened to me before. I've lived here now since 2019. And this is the first time that it's happened. So I said, you know, my hands are dry, they're cracking, they're chopped. Could you give me a multi-step regimen and some product suggestions for healing and re moisturizing my hands? It started, it started off by compiling words, including a phrase that says, I'm not a dermatologist, but I can offer some general suggestions for this regimen. And what I was surprised by was not only did it give me a really good regimen, including cleaning the hands, exfoliating, moisturizing, and then even providing some ideas for like overnight treatment. But it also talked about something that I actually have heard from a dermatologist before, which is consistency being important. You have to keep doing it to restore the building.

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:07):
I, I don't know, you know, people get nervous enough about Dr. Google, Dr. Chat. G p T makes me really nervous

Mikah Sargent (01:24:12):
Right there. Well, this is what surprised me, Jeff, is they, I'm not sure it actually named Real Products. And that's what I was like, wait, what? It didn't just say, you know, you probably want to use this sort of, you want to use a hand cream? Or you No. It said like, you want to use O'Keefe's Working Hands and Neutrogen. Oh my God. It actually named three or four different real brands. Wow. Is this

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:35):
Product placement, are we gonna, right. That's what I d pt, product

Mikah Sargent (01:24:37):
Placement. That's what I thought. I'm going, okay. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:40):
Revenue

Mikah Sargent (01:24:40):
Stream. What's going on here? So anyway, that's

Glenn Fleishman (01:24:42):
How they can make money from it. Yeah. Underwrite it with, oh, product placement. Brilliant.

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:46):
There we go. No,

Mikah Sargent (01:24:46):
Please don't. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:48):
<Laugh>. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:49):
Alright. Jeff, you're next in line. How have you used it?

Jeff Jarvis (01:24:54):
I proposed to use, so I haven't done, I, I talked to the board, and I hope I haven't mentioned this show before of the Marshall Project, which is a wonderful journalistic endeavor about justice in America where we have too little of it mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and a lot of the people they serve are incarcerated a fairly large size of their audience are considered illiterate. And they want to bring out the stories of the people they serve. And it struck me that you could use these tools so that someone could say, I wanna tell, I want you to help me tell my story better. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, now it's a sense of code switching. Right. Tell it in the way that the world's gonna understand mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But I, I think there's an op, or, or even almost Exci more exciting is to illustrate it.

(01:25:40):
I don't have a camera in prison. I can't draw, I can't show you what it is, but I can describe it and get it in a way that people may empathize with and may understand because it's visual. I, I think that these tools could be used in those ways for our journalism students. We have some students who come, again, New York is the world, so they, English is the second and third or fourth language, and it can use to smooth out their language make it dull in some cases, which wouldn't be great. And but I, I think it's, it's interesting to, to imagine how it expands literacy for people.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:15):
Wow. Yeah. That is, that is a compelling answer. <Laugh> and compelling use. And we'll round things out with Ants.

Ant Pruitt (01:26:25):
I got nothing. None. No. It, it, no, I, it, all of my stuff's been private. If folks are following me on social media, you know, I've been in campaign mode for Hardhead, so I've been working with some images of my boy mm-hmm. <Affirmative> trying to, you know, make like little posters and things like that and still trying to quite figure out in painting and figure out how, you know, the image to image process. And, but it's been fun and created a couple things that look okay. And you can still use a little work, but that's been the only per only use I've gotten out out of is just, just art and the freedom and, and you know, just whatever you can imagine, you can pretty much put it out there, as we've seen when Mid Journey says, yeah, we need to slow this thing down. And cuz people can just come up with anything and it's creating nice, wor nice pieces of art.

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:13):
I think after the show it'll be going on and saying, how do I get rid of Euro Jing Turkeys <laugh>.

Ant Pruitt (01:27:19):
Yes. I know how it's, it's called a, a big wooden stick. That's

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:24):
<Laugh>. Okay. What's the pot? A large cooking pots.

Ant Pruitt (01:27:28):
Yeah. And that and, and Mr. Sargent Far as your, your, your hands. You know, I know a, a pretty good manicurist that would recommend paraffin wax and gloves,

Mikah Sargent (01:27:39):
Paraffin wax and gloves. I happen to know that manicurist and I would trust that manicurist. So I am going to write that down.

Ant Pruitt (01:27:46):
Paraffin wax and gloves. And I have done that myself, so yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:50):
Oh, nice. Hot

Jeff Jarvis (01:27:50):
Paraffin wax.

Ant Pruitt (01:27:51):
Paraffin wax and gloves. It works.

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:55):
Also a popular mystery show.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:58):
<Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:27:58):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:59):
Oh, now I'm gonna have to ask G p T to invent mystery show called Para and Wax and gloves. <Laugh>. while that's generating, let me ask any of these other AI topics that really stand out, Jeff, that you wanna, you wanna cover before we move on?

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:17):
Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:28:17):
I wanna make sure not to miss anything that was really,

Jeff Jarvis (01:28:19):
Or any, anybody. Any,

Mikah Sargent (01:28:20):
Any, yeah. Yes, of course. Anybody before we move along to the next topics,

Glenn Fleishman (01:28:26):
Huh? I like image notification. I'll tell you one of the most exci. So one of the best things that Apple has rolled out is it's machine learning based. So it's not l LM based so far. And Apple's been noticeably sitting this one out cuz they're good about avoiding certain kinds of things until they think it's mature and they're like, we didn't get a lot wash. Let, it's all wash over us while we're making our 30% profit margins. Let everybody else fight it out. But one of the, I think the biggest improvements in my life as a user of Apple integrated products is how well they've gotten object recognition and text recognition inside of images. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I would, so, you know, you can search now and I'll search on the word Gutenberg in honor of Mr. J's, i, sorry, Jeff Jarvis <laugh>.

(01:29:07):
And can I lose track of it? And dross, dros and I have, sometimes there's a page, it's like a galley of a book upside down at an angle. It's three pixels and it will recognize the word Gutenberg in that. And this change is how you interact with your photos. So this story about meta working on a generative, or sorry an AI model identifying items within images. I think it's gonna be kind of a, there's a few areas that I think are going to be both terrifying and important in the future. One is every photo that's published of anyone ever that's available publicly will have them recognized regardless of safeguard. So you'll be able to do a search on Aunt Pruit and I'll find you everywhere. And it won't matter how much you'll laws <laugh>, he's, he's a shadow. You'll never find him.

(01:29:51):
He's hiding in this, in the background. And the other is, every piece of audio you've ever been in eventually will be rec your voice will be recognized. Identified, will be transcribed, transcribed, every piece of text and every image. And so some of this in every object and every topic discussed an audio on video in an image, I think will also be characterized. So that's like an oncoming storm. And I think we're seeing in, in both good and bad ways. Like we need, it's kind of like California, you know, we need the water, right? You need the water because we are out in a drought condition. But that was too much water. Let's not have that much. So but I think this is a sign of what's coming is we're gonna see a lot more of this sub recognition. So it's not just there's a cat in that, but it's, here's the cat's name. It's Fluffy <laugh>, you know, fluffy

Mikah Sargent (01:30:36):
<Laugh>. I know. I, I agree with you. I did not realize, it took me a while to realize a very helpful tool in iOS where when I'm in, especially in messages, but it's in any text field there's a new little button. And when you press that button, it is a text import feature. And it basically or not, basically it does, it opens up the camera and you can do a live view over something in front of you, and then it will sort of lift that text off of the page and then it gets dropped into that text field. So

Glenn Fleishman (01:31:12):
My, I'll tell you my stupidest tip, my stupidest tip of my time. Tell us your

Mikah Sargent (01:31:14):
Stupidest tip.

Glenn Fleishman (01:31:15):
I, I've written an article about this stupidest tip. So, you know, when you, someone tells your phone number and you have a pen, you can't, you're using your phone and you can't. So you write it down and then you're like, oh, now I have to go through all of the trouble. It's like the 1890s of dialing the number that I'm reading there. Well, if you write it neatly enough, you take a picture with your phone, you tap the text recognition thing, you tap the number, and then it says, do you wanna dial this number? You dial the number that way. Brilliant. It's the best, ridiculous, brilliant, worst, worst life hack ever. Cause you know, typing in 10 digits in America, that's too many. I don't Brilliant at a time. <Laugh>. Well, it's to be my age. It's too hard to remember 10 digits <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:31:52):
I guess then though, aunt, you're talking about how you, you the he'll have trouble finding you. Yeah. I mean, you are on a publicly available video program at the moment. Oh. So mm-hmm.

Ant Pruitt (01:32:05):
<Affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But this, this last experiment, and I kid, of course, you know, we searched for me in Google and it came up with nothing. But yet

Mikah Sargent (01:32:12):
What

Ant Pruitt (01:32:13):
Miss Stacy came up with all kinds of interesting information about her <laugh> on the show, couldn't find anything about o Aunt Pruit. I'm totally fine with that. That's

Glenn Fleishman (01:32:24):
Good. Hmm. I think you should be proud. I think you should be proud of that. I, as someone on a site, I write for tidbits reader was asking a question about how to research classmates for class reunion. They have 750 people on their class and they've tracked down about 500, which is pretty good. Cause I think they're Yeah, that's good. A little over than, and they said there's 250 people we can't hide. Haida her of are these sites that help you with reunions, whatever helpful. And people are saying maybe not, but I was like, man, that is super impressive, that 250 out of 750 people, you can't search on their name and find them. Those, it's like, is this the disappearing class? But I helped organize a class reunion several years ago, and it was earlier in the history of Google and everything else, and there were some people, even today I'm like, God, I wonder whatever happened to so-and-so. There's not a trace. Yeah. I don't think they died. I think they are an Aunt Pruit. They are off the radar.

Ant Pruitt (01:33:11):
<Laugh>, I'm, I missed a couple of class reunions for that reason, right there. And then folks decided, well, maybe we should look at Twitter or maybe we should look at Instagram <laugh>. And they found me there. Oh. So yeah, I've missed the 10 year and I've missed the, yeah, I think I missed, no, I missed the five year, or, or was it No, 10

Glenn Fleishman (01:33:29):
Year excuse mumble mumble. I missed the mumble mumble

Mikah Sargent (01:33:31):
Year. We just had a very lazy student council. So none of the folks who were elected that year have had any interest in making reunions. Not that I would be going, but still it was just kinda like, yeah, every year, every gotta be rid of each other.

Glenn Fleishman (01:33:51):
Yeah. <laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (01:33:53):
It's, it's, everybody's gonna relive their embarrassment of 11th grade. Go back, they wanna meet in the

Glenn Fleishman (01:33:59):
High school. They blew up, they blew up the school at the end of the movie and we're all done. <Laugh> never going back.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:04):
Xo xo. Most famous alum from my high school in Lombard, Illinois was Ted Kazinski, the Unibomber. Oh, not lovely.

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:14):
Ours was probably Tracy Bonham the rock artist.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:17):
Oh, I, I ain't got a little

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:19):
Better. Oh,

Ant Pruitt (01:34:21):
I got nothing. Oh

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:22):
No,

Ant Pruitt (01:34:22):
Really? Maybe me. You,

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:24):
You, you aunt is the most favorite graduate of his high school.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:27):
That's fine. I don't know, but I have put

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:28):
Yourself on Wikipedia as the most notable graduate.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:31):
<Laugh> <laugh>,

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:33):
Who's gonna stop you? Who's gonna,

Ant Pruitt (01:34:34):
Who's gonna stop him? No, I, yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:34:37):
Glen, you have to do it.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:38):
My teammate, man. You do. For Anne

Mikah Sargent (01:34:41):
Who go in the LaCroix LaCroix the inventor of LaCroix.

Ant Pruitt (01:34:46):
No, he played in the Major leagues for many, many, many, many years. He was my high school teammate and not Dad.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:54):
Can you tell him my favorite flavor is black Raspberry, please. Oh gosh, dude.

Jeff Jarvis (01:34:57):
<Laugh>

Glenn Fleishman (01:34:58):
Again. Product placement. What's going on here? I don't

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:01):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:02):
I'm sorry. <Laugh>. Oh, I, I basically, I'm saying it's you. It's you.

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:09):
<Laugh> you win.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:10):
You, you win. 

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:12):
You won high school.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:13):
I did want to quickly, I I felt bad for for Jack's or for Jack's Chaveros. So I asked if we could just do the other names as well. So if you're curious. Oh, my evil twin's name is Morak Serpent.

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:29):
Ooh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:29):
<Laugh>. Oh, that's very good. That's great. Very good.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:33):
Ants. evil twin is <laugh> is <laugh> Ax Proli. So it's like prowl on the end. Ooh,

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:42):
That's pretty

Mikah Sargent (01:35:43):
Good. And then Ax

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:45):
Proli at night. Yes,

Mikah Sargent (01:35:46):
Indeed. And then Glen, you going

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:48):
After Turkey? Turkey?

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:50):
Oh, ax Proli are

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:53):
Quay

Glenn Fleishman (01:35:54):
At midnight. Ax

Jeff Jarvis (01:35:55):
Proli of

Mikah Sargent (01:35:56):
Acts Pro. We're sitting around the radio. Glenn, you get to choose because I wasn't sure which of these two were which one you wanted. So you have the choice between gas, fiendish, claw,

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:11):
<Laugh> <laugh>,

Mikah Sargent (01:36:13):
Or Grim fla Shard.

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:17):
Oh, you know, these sound like Halloween names. I I used to go with with ghoul. Fleshman. Oh, that's good. When we changed our Twitter handles. Back when that happened at Halloween. Go

Mikah Sargent (01:36:28):
Fleshman. See, that's a little bit,

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:30):
I think I did better than

Mikah Sargent (01:36:31):
Yeah, you did. I

Glenn Fleishman (01:36:32):
Did. Better than Ace. You know, human beings

Mikah Sargent (01:36:34):
Won. Maybe it knew that you already had that one and it thought I gotta, or no wait, it doesn't know because it's not alive. Right. Write Js <laugh>. I'm sorry, my little friend. I'm sorry for saying AI was alive.

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:48):
<Laugh> my name. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:36:51):
All right, let's move on. I don't want to talk about Twitter, so let's not the

Jeff Jarvis (01:36:56):
Boss. There's not an, you're the boss, you're call caller is to it.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:00):
Let's, I know that Stacy isn't here, but I also like to talk about smart home stuff. And I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts if this falls into moral panic area for you or sort of societal panic area for you, Jeff. And then just your thoughts in general. So Amazon has this feature called Sidewalk. And what Amazon did was they said, okay, we've got all of these devices in people's homes, Stacy's story, these echo devices, and we could take a small little portion of that echo device that is connected to your local wifi and is connected to the internet through your router. And we just take a small portion of that and we make it available to nearby Amazon devices so that they can use that internet connection. And they put a cap on it so that you can't, you know, it, it, it won't end up harming your bandwidth.

(01:38:01):
 It won't take up all of your network, it won't be anything like that. And this will help in theory. It sort of, it takes a village, I guess because then you've got all the different ring cameras and all the other stuff that Amazon has all working together to provide network access no matter where you are. Originally, if I recall, this was a feature that Amazon had planned to have on by default. Then they decided to have it off by default. And so you have to go in and say, yes, I wanna be part of Amazon's sidewalk. What they've just done though, that I found interesting is they've decided to open up the Amazon Sidewalk network to anyone who is a developer or manufacturer of different GA gadgets. So the idea is that if you use sort of their sidewalk developer kit, then you could also latch onto this network, this free network that's available called a low power wide area network and give folks the chance to, you know, make devices that can connect even whenever there's not full on wifi nearby. Now, I think it's important to note that we have seen similar behavior through many in I S P. Lots of internet service providers who also give you the router slash modem package will make part of people's networks available to other subscribers of that particular isp. And

Ant Pruitt (01:39:37):
So, yeah, that's what I was gonna ask. Is this similar to that? Well, walking out the neighborhood, I can connect to the quote unquote carrier's wifi network on my mobile device and still have access to the internet without having to lean on the cell phones.

Glenn Fleishman (01:39:54):
And that piece, I think it's, they're actually if I remember right now this could have changed over time, but I know that like Comcast Xfinity, I think Charter some other companies, they were saying they weren't gonna take from your bandwidth. They're essentially gonna provision additional bandwidth onto your network to make it available to other people. And at one point that seemed ludicrous cause they didn't have that much overhead, and now it's not as unreasonable. You know, they're, they have sometimes hundreds of megabits per second available in neighborhoods. They're just saying like, we're not gonna impact your network. We're not gonna apply it towards caps. Okay. it's not, there's a, there's a firewall. I mean, I'm making, I'm making it sound better than it is possibly. There's a firewall virtual, well, evil cable company. Virtual land. Yeah, exactly. There's a v land between all these things. So Right. Ostensibly, it's it's a, those systems are letting you have actual internet access. This is all kind of like little things, right? It's internet or devices. It's something needs to do a DNS look up or, or pull down a weather thing, right? Micah, this is all like little

Mikah Sargent (01:40:51):
Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely, it is. Yeah. Amazon sidewalk, it's not just, I can get on your internet and do whatever I want <laugh>. It's but one example is Amazon's own accessory, which was a mailbox sensor where when you opened the mailbox, then it would know that the mailbox was opened and then let you know. But a lot of times people's mailboxes are pretty far away from their homes. And so if there was, I see somebody's device closer to that, it would use that internet connection. So it is in some ways the same in terms of just that there is internet access out there to be used so that it kind of works the same. But in terms of how much room they're giving on specific persons network, it's very little. The one concern that I saw from different companies, or not from different companies, but from a few publications, was that due to the nature of Amazon's sidewalk whenever you were sort of provisioning a gadget to work with Amazon Sidewalk, if there weren't too many folks nearby who had Amazon Sidewalk Walk turned on, you could kind of geolocate someone's property by by turning it on, turning it off, trying to find that Amazon sidewalk.

(01:42:10):
But again, that's sort of a very specific and it's not as if they can find Mikah Sargents, Amazon Echo for Amazon side targeted. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:42:22):
Yeah. It's this reminds me if we go way back, is when I was running the wifi networking news site in the Audis like 2005 or six, a company called Phone, f o n was trying to get folks to swap in their own routers and essentially build a public, like private or not public private, but a like a homeowner network of hotspots that would supplement stuff in areas that didn't have ubiquitous access before cellular networks that adopted like 3G speeds even. And so phone is the first thing like that, that I remember. And, and it was an interesting idea, but it required hardware swaps and it are they they're still around. Yeah. phones.com. Well, they, I wonder, wonder where they do these days? They they had to deal with ISPs you know, legitimate use recruitments in which you were literally not allowed to do that.

(01:43:08):
But then some ISPs got on board, some partnered, I think there's Telecom did. I feel like the idea keeps cycling around and it's hard to beat, like Apples find my network. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is crowd crowdsourced based on the fact there's just like a billion Apple devices out there that can pass this information. It's very, very limited at sending short Bluetooth messages and encrypted location information. But I think Amazon would love to have something like that as well. I know Google's also, I saw in the news this last week that Google has or there's a discussion that Google may be trying to launch a similar system to Apples that's device-based. So, but between the three, you can have incredible ubiquity of of not access, but like location information or small data, you know, moving like a IOT networks, ZigBee or something like that. But everywhere instead of just inside a house or Bluetooth LEED by Agile content in 2021. Hmm. Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:06):
I hate it when that happens.

Glenn Fleishman (01:44:08):
<Laugh> own the past, but he created the future. There you go.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:13):
Yeah, I, I think it's interesting how different companies are attempting to sort of make their network this, this all-encompassing network. And, you know, we saw after Amazon's acquisition of Euro that then there were echoes that when that acquisition is sort of completed and as goo, or excuse me, as Amazon rolled out new firmware updates to those echoes, surprise, there's actually a little wifi radio in there that can work as its own little router as part of your system. And with the networking tools available, I've thought about cuz I read the white page or the white paper, excuse me, the white paper about the security of Amazon sidewalk. And I felt pretty good about it. And it did have that sort of, it takes a village vibe where I wouldn't mind doing it if other people are doing it as well.

(01:45:09):
 Because I have plenty of room and they only allow so much. And it's for things like dog trackers and again, mail trackers and, and to send, it's not for actually viewing a, a doorbell or viewing an outdoor camera, but actually sending motion notifications. It can do over this, this network. So you wouldn't be able to use someone's connection to stream that. But just to get the notifications back to where they needed to go. It's, it's a compelling idea. But I know that regardless of all of that, folks have their security concerns which in many ways are not backed up by sort of how the system works. Meaning that, that's what I was gonna ask. Is those concerns or warranted? No, they, yeah, I don't think that people don't quite understand exactly based on what I read in the white paper and in some of the support documents regarding Amazon Sidewalk.

(01:46:04):
Cause I used to do this show here at TWiT called Smart Tech today. And that Amazon sidewalk kept coming up over and over again. So I did that deep dive and did a lot of research on it. And it is a very secure system. And honestly, like Amazon is very aware of Echo and A L E X A as being sort of in the past especially, but in some cases even still something that folks are wary of for privacy reasons. And so they genuinely have worked to try and combat that and you know, answer to those concerns that people have. So yeah, in this very specific case Amazon Sidewalk, I don't feel like the concerns about it somehow being a privacy issue are warranted based on the data that's available to me. Alright. let us cover one more topic before we head into the change log. Ooh.

Ant Pruitt (01:47:09):
Ooh. The change log. The

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:11):
Change log. I've heard of this mysterious change

Ant Pruitt (01:47:14):
Log. It's been overlooked.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:15):
<Laugh> IED

Ant Pruitt (01:47:18):
<Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:19):
I'm so, well now I'm feeling weird. Like maybe we shouldn't be doing the change

Ant Pruitt (01:47:22):
Log. Nope, nope, nope. Do it without a spite look, if you're

Jeff Jarvis (01:47:26):
Like, yeah, yeah. Leo Grumbles about it. Do it to do it enthusiastically. To do it with Verb, with Verb <laugh>, him and

Mikah Sargent (01:47:34):
Vigor. I wanted to talk to you three about live audio and

Ant Pruitt (01:47:40):
Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:47:41):
How, for a while there, I think especially at the beginning of the Pandemic, I mean remember hashtag remember Clubhouse mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there were all these old enough to <laugh> Yeah. All these services that touted live audio and people would hop on together, you'd have conversations and people would tune in to these live conversations. And over time the, what is it, monthly active users or No, the downloads, I guess of these audio apps have just dropped and dropped and dropped and dropped and plummeted. I gave up on, on Clubhouse shortly after I started using Clubhouse. Cuz for me it just wasn't compelling. But I know a lot of people really like these services for a while. And I'm kind of curious, everyone's take on what made them a success in the beginning and why we think they have dropped in popularity overall. Is there just more that's better now or is everyone just typing things into chat, G p t <laugh> for their entertainment these days?

Ant Pruitt (01:48:45):
I think in the beginning it was a lot of the whole pandemic karma, if you will. People needed contact and being able to connect and, and hear voices and not necessarily read text. Some people found that comforting to just, just have a chat about, I don't know, red Sox or something and, or, or Cats or whatever. And then it got to where it's even more niche where you get professionals out there pro photographers, I, I remember several photographers opening up a clubhouse or what have you, and just wanting to ta chat about what they were working on or share some tips and answer questions for people that were trying to learn and things like that. And, and it, it, it was fairly helpful for those folks. I get it. But after a while, I know personally I got tired of listening to the, to 'em. It turned into the same old thing of, of a bit preachy, at least on the photography side of things. And sometimes it didn't really come off as encouraging to the community in my opinion. But I've said that about professional photographers in the past that a lot of 'em just for whatever reason, are just jackasses and jerks and don't really <laugh>. They just don't really

(01:50:01):
Do anything to help encourage someone that's interested in this art Yeah. To go forward and at least try it, even if it's just with a phone. You know, don't just dismiss them because they don't have a body, you know, a camera body, just photography, it's photography, you know? But then also it seems like all of these little live audio things turn more into crypto and N F T Talk talks. Yeah. Yeah. In that turned off a lot of people.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:29):
Well, well, also the fascism that's so Yeah. That,

Jeff Jarvis (01:50:32):
That ha that played, that happened. Yeah.

Glenn Fleishman (01:50:34):
Anna, I think that also the rise of, I mean, discord was certainly doing well ah, for beforehand, but they have so many, they keep adding more audio tools and group things. I mean, I'm looking, I'm looking at to promote Twitter's own service here. There's, you know, the livestream and other kinds of audio chat environments you can do entirely within Discord. And I wonder what was Clubhouse to some of these other tools? Were they gateway drugs for people to go, Hey, you know, audio chat with people is kind of neat, but I don't wanna talk with all these bozos. I wanna find my affinity community to talk with directly, and then I'll use a tool that's entirely my community or one of my communities. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So, so I wonder if overall the amount of group audio chats being facilitated be via platforms, have the minutes still gone up and it's really the public ones. These things like Clubhouse that were overvalued and overhyped. Did those just Twitter spaces, did those just reduce in value as people found communities?

Jeff Jarvis (01:51:29):
I don't know. I'm thinking it's hypecycle. Like everything that Jason Khans touches <laugh> <laugh>, it soars up the hike cpr. Yeah. And, and, and Mark Andreessen and all, and, and the boys all said, this is the hot thing and everybody has to do it. And then, then of course they made it special yet to have an invitation. You couldn't really do it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then the hype cycle, then, then at, at, at, at the, at the apogee of the Hype Cycle, everybody else says, we gotta do this too. So of course Meta does it and Reddit does it. Spotify does it, right? Yeah. And they, they give up sooner than, than clubhouse because they don't have a whole company based on it. And they said, oops, this was dumb. This is like a pivot to video. Why would we do that? Right? What, what were you thinking? <Laugh>? And, and it's gone. Right? And then clubhouse now has to say, we're, we're still here. Anybody wanna talk? And, and I, and I think that it, it it was the usual overdose. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I think, Glen, you're right. I think people see the utility in doing this and people can enjoy it. But I think at some point though, yeah. It it got to be too big. Too crazy.

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:41):
Yeah. It was like, everything's gonna be audio. This is the future. We're worth billions of dollars. Everyone's like, come on, you're flashing the fan. And then we were proven, right? Smugly, we get to say we were proven, right? Yes. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (01:52:53):
All right. Thank you for the analysis. Genuinely. That may have sounded Sar <laugh>, but I didn't mean

Glenn Fleishman (01:52:59):
<Laugh>. What are you talking about? Thanks for the

Mikah Sargent (01:53:01):
Analysis. Oh that was, you're welcome, bro. That was, yeah. Who was that retrieval name? Muskrat. Yeah, that was, that was Mu Mordax serpents coming out there first.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:10):
Mordax Serax. More serpents.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:13):
Oh. Moving along to the change log.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:18):
Change log, the change. What happened on the PC's A little low? Is that it? Oh, okay.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:28):
That's the intro. I want those for my shows. Those are so fun.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:32):
<Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:53:33):
Who do I gotta talk to? Get a a stinger like that.

Glenn Fleishman (01:53:37):
Ask Chad g p to make

Mikah Sargent (01:53:38):
One for you. There we go. That's what I'll do. First and I, you know what we're gonna do this, I, I don't know if this is supposed to be speed round, but we're speed rounding because actually the first one is a story we already talked about. Google Drive does not have a file cap. Now it's just the size or the storage cap. So if you've got 30 terabytes of storage space, by golly, you can fill up all 30 terabytes of storage space until you reach that next limit that they just haven't said yet. So who knows what that looks like? One Google files that is a number. Folks, in case you didn't know moving right along Google has launched an ad transparency center. So you can actually learn about where the ads that you're seeing in search in YouTube and on your Google display are coming from. It shows the ads and advert advertiser has run. It shows which ads were shown in a certain region and it shows the last date and ad ran and the format of the ad. So if you see an ad for a skin car, skin car, yes. That is a thing I don't even wanna imagine in my head, cuz it sounds horrifying.

(01:54:54):
That is terrifying. Anyway. A skincare product you're interested in, but you don't recognize the brand, you want to learn more about it. You can tap to learn more and then see who or what is advertising and see what the ads look like depending on where they're being shown. So in different regions you can see that. I think this is great because I like the idea of all of us being able to know sort of what company is behind it. Cause if I, if I tap on the company for the advertisements and every single ad is different and they're, none of them are related to one another, it's not, it's, it's all over the place. Or if it's only being shown in specific regions, it just gives you a little bit more insight into what's going on with, with that specific ad.

(01:55:43):
So I think that's a, a, a pretty cool change. And of course, anyone feel free to cut in if there's something specific you wanna say about one of these change log moments. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But then Google Search is going to get some new features. I saw this. And I think this is kind of exciting because I, I very rarely travel, but I've been a few times in the past year where I have maybe needed, I was going to need to travel and it didn't end up being the case. And so I used Google Flights to do this. But now there are just some features built directly into search, including browsing hotels. So you can actually like look through hotel images to see where it is. It, it sort of presents itself as a story, almost like an Instagram story or one of those where you can kind of tap through and see different images, see how much it's going to cost. There are also with Google Flight, you can actually lock in some prices there. Yeah. Price guarantees. That's what they're called. So if it has, so it's not exactly locking in, but it's saying and I'll, I'll quote directly from the, the blog. It says quote, if you see a flight with the price guarantee badge, it means we're confident that the price you see today won't get any lower before takeoff. So based on sort of their Oh, their tie in

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:08):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It won't get any lower <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:11):
Oh, that's a good point. I guess it's, but it can, it won't get higher. Okay. So that's not

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:15):
Ru price guarantee is we're gonna charge you more. No, I don't think they're gonna do that. Oh, man. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:57:19):
That's, I misunderstood that. That's kind of sad.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:22):
That sounds like some lawyer ball right there.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:25):
It does say we'll monitor the price every day until departure. And if it goes down, then we will send Oh, so yeah,

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:32):
You can, oh, they will. Oh good. You

Mikah Sargent (01:57:33):
Can pay for it.

Glenn Fleishman (01:57:34):
That's better. That's the language is hilarious. The price. We guarantee we won't charge you any less. <Laugh> me. That didn't mean that a new friendly Google <laugh> we're all Chromebooks and we're grumpy

Mikah Sargent (01:57:48):
Possible. And then also via Google search, you can explore an area. So if and instead of actually finding someone who does travel guiding, you can just use your Google search toolbar to do that for you. Alright. A oh, you might be si excited about this. Jeff, the Google Pixel tablet has arrived at the fcc. I don't know if it means in person, but it's going to feature ultra wide band connectivity.

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:19):
Yeah, explain that to me. What does that? Uwb is a ultra wide frequency. 

Mikah Sargent (01:58:25):
Oh, we've turned on wide, we've turned on Glen g

Glenn Fleishman (01:58:28):
Pt I've been writing about, I've been writing about U Uwb for 15 years, since 8 0 2 15, 2 3, I can't remember the numbers. And you, one point it was gonna be a Bluetooth, I'm talking all over your now at one point used to was gonna be a Bluetooth personal area networking standard, but they never got it to work Exactly right. So instead it's become this like finding and positioning tool that also carries data. Now I'm gonna stop talking over you. Well, how does it affect my

Mikah Sargent (01:58:52):
Life if I own this? Well, Jeff, if you have any smart speakers from Google in your home, then what the ultra wide band chip in a pixel tablet would do is let you, if you're jamming out to Katy Perry as you do on your tablet, that's me. Yeah. And you're just, you know, rocking. And then you come home and you want to make the whole house rock, then you can tap or move that pixel tablet close to that that Google Nest hub, and then it will transfer the music to that. And then it'll play throughout your whole home. So Katy Perry, everywhere as opposed to just on your pixel tablet, it's, this is nine to five Google's thoughts about why they're planning to do this. Basically, ultra wide band is a chip that's in iPhones apple watches and the HomePod devices that Apple sells.

(01:59:44):
And so they have all of this sort of transfer mode because of ultra wideband technology is just better at determining how far or how close and also where in space device is in relation to another. Then I can, if I'm talking on the phone and I come home, I can tap my phone top the HomePod and it will transfer the call to the HomePod. And then I can pl like talk out loud if I wanted to. I never do that cuz A, I'm never on the phone. And b I don't want everybody hearing my call. Only another person in my house. But

Glenn Fleishman (02:00:14):
Mic Micah, that was a beautiful description. That's the best description I've ever heard. Heads down. Thank you. Technology. That was great. It's when, back in the day, they thought it was gonna be a multi gigabit per second like wifi alternative for short range networking, like within a house. And instead we have, do I remember the standard, is it 8 0 2 point 11 ax or something? There's a, there's a higher band. The what what, actually it's a couple different things happened. One is 5G adopted the millimeter wave band that's up in 60 gigahertz. That's where we got the ultra high band or the ultra high speed T-Mobile and other networks on 5g. And then in the house wifi committee, the wifi group moved towards a different higher band technologies. So now you can use six gigahertz has been rolling out, so you remember there's 2.4 gigahertz for 8 0 2 point 11 B and G. And then, and then n And then we have five gigahertz is even bigger because there's more spectrum and they can big have big wide channels. And now six gigahertz really started to roll out a bit in 2022. We're seeing a lot of it in 2023. So UWB is kind of, it's tangential to all of it, but it makes this neat package. You can have super high throughput at all kinds of levels. Cellular in the house, and also at exact positioning with a small set of chips now in a single device. And

Mikah Sargent (02:01:32):
The other thing,

Glenn Fleishman (02:01:32):
Yeah, I thought UW B was all about telephony. I I didn't know it

Mikah Sargent (02:01:36):
Was, I guess it just depends on what, you know, how it's being used on, on the iOS side or on the, I guess Apple side in general. It's a little bit more about as the, the technology we talked about so far. And then also according to nine to five Google, Google is maybe working on improving its own finder network. So Jeff, if you know, you're rocking out to Katy Perry and you get home and you get distracted by a wild Turkey in your backyard and so you put down the tablet somewhere. Can't, I can't scream cuz I have no tongue, right? <Laugh>. Yes. And you can't scream because you have no tongue. I'm just kidding. So you go out to the back and then you come back in and you go, well you don't say it out loud cuz again, no tongue, but you think to yourself, where did I put my Katy Perry tablet?

(02:02:20):
 You could use that ultra wide band chip that's in it to, with your Google Pixel to find it. So you could actually look on your phone and say, I need to find the tablet. And you can move it about, and it'll say it's, it's 30 meters that way. I don't know how big your home is, 30 meters and oh, you need to go. Right. It's, it's sort of a warmer, colder game, but it's better than just Bluetooth on its own. So there are a few reasons why you might want that uwb in your next Google Pixel tablet. <Laugh> let's move on. We've got three more to hit here. Oh no. Oh

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:52):
No, I'm just kidding. I was like, like, oh no, we've only turned three more. Kidding.

Mikah Sargent (02:02:57):
There's

Glenn Fleishman (02:02:58):
Funny

Mikah Sargent (02:02:59):
People's Saver. Yes. Mm. This, oh, I'm pulling it out of that chocolate, that box of chocolates we talked about earlier. <Laugh>, this one has a nice oh, is that a marshmallow filling? Hmm. Anyway, YouTube now has a page that's dedicated to podcasts. So if you are looking for This Week in Google on YouTube you can tap on that podcast tab and perhaps come across it. So it's just a quick little change where they are acknowledging the fact that a lot of people are publishing their podcasts to YouTube. If you use the Google Now launcher, I'm sad to say that it is truly fully, completely and absolutely shutting down. I'm a little sad about this because I don't use an Android phone super regularly, but I do have a Google Pixel last year's model and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I always forget that the Google now launcher is not really popular I guess. And or that frankly that they've been trying to sort of shutter it <laugh>. And so I'm always wishing that I can use it and then it's gonna have all of that, that functionality that originally had. But yeah, we finally have to say truly goodbye to the Google now launcher later. Like, you're, you're okay with that? Sounds like

Glenn Fleishman (02:04:21):
Time

Mikah Sargent (02:04:21):
To move on, dude. Yeah. Moving on. And last but not least Google wants to make sure that apps will actually let you delete your Ooh account. So if you want to participate in the Google Play Store and you want to be able to make your app available to folks via the Google Play Store, the company is adding a requirement that in order to publish your app, you will need to make it easy to delete an account and do that even if you still have the app on your device. So this is just, I think, I think this is a really good move where if you've gone on, you've created an account, you've published data to that account, you've got your usage data and everything in there, and then you have to try to find, you're going through the app, you can't find anywhere. So then you have to go to the website and then it's in white text on a white background, the place where I can actually delete my account. But when you delete your account, is my data still there? Are they gonna get rid of it after a month? What's going on? I like that Google is trying to make it a little bit easier and clearer that I am truly deleting an account and getting rid of the stuff that's stored with that specific company.

Glenn Fleishman (02:05:42):
Good

Mikah Sargent (02:05:42):
Stuff. Woo. Alright. That isn't that a, a pull from what Apple was doing? Wasn't Apple doing something similar? Similar, they've got basically nutrition labels, but for apps. And so you can go in and see how your privacy is, how your being used in, in different means. So it'll show you here's how we're collecting your data, here's the data we are collecting, here's who that might be shared with. But it just like nutrition labels can be a little confusing. Yeah. And unlike nutrition labels where companies are required to report, as far as I understand, I don't work for the fda, but as far as I understand, required to report everything the, this is sort of a self-reporting tool. And if you, you kind of are, are just sort of, they, they look at you sternly to make sure that you've got it all in there <laugh>. So it's not a hundred percent what I'd want it to be. Glen, any corrections on that?

Glenn Fleishman (02:06:36):
No, I think it's I think Google may be going further than Apple here and because I don't think Apple does the ecosystem and tries to enforce that an account is actually deleted off its systems. And it sounds like Google is actually going to enforce this more, I don't know. Sounds like more severely It sounds good. Yeah. I mean I think, you know, that's that where does your data live? Problem and we're always, if we're working with other companies, they're always gonna own some data we have and be able to manipulate it. So anything that makes it, that has a big, like, I want multi-trillion dollar companies to be on my side. Yes. When it comes to privacy, let's just put it that way. Yes.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:16):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. I agree. All the, those multi-trillion dollar companies and all of their lawyers with their evil twin names. Let us <laugh>, let us bring an edge to the change log is Esquire after your name to know you're evil. There you go. That's good point. Good point. Even just the e s q period is enough and go, oh, I'm scared. Alright. Moving along to our picks. Oh, there's an end. Oh my goodness. You, this is a fancy show. This is, this is, you have, you have the owner on the show. You get everything. My God, when is my caviar and champaign coming? This is great. Alright. All right. Delivered to you via wifi. Ooh. Can you ultra wide bend that ova to me. All right, let's get into our picks. Cuz now I'm doing weird voices and it's all smell like my, my grandmother here. <Laugh>. let's start with t t What is your, okay. So it's odd because everything in the picks have different nouns next to them. It's ants thing. Jeff's stuff, Glen's pick. And it was Leo's tool. So it becomes Micah's tool. So Ant what is your thing?

Ant Pruitt (02:08:25):
My thing, I have two of them just go around. First one is to piggyback off of last week's where I told you all to just go out there and spend $20 on a dagum dumbbell to sit next to your desk to do some curls or some shoulder presses or something just to get moving. And got a lot of interesting messages about that. So thank you. I I appreciate that. You all appreciate that. So now I'm gonna say level up and go get yourself a pull up bar. Alright. I have one of these, oh, geez, <laugh> and <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:08:57):
Yeah. You couldn't leave well enough alone.

Ant Pruitt (02:09:00):
Hey, this is, this is what everybody's trying to level up

Mikah Sargent (02:09:02):
With. And then now it's Yes. Do you even lift bro? <Laugh> get, just lift

Ant Pruitt (02:09:08):
Myself. Pull up bar. You know, I have two of the ones that you put inside of the door and I have busted door frames because I'm apparently too heavy for 'em. So if you're powerful, someone is about as heavy as I am, you might want to get a bar like this. This one is only a hundred bucks. They make some that are way more expensive. But you don't have to get those. Just get one of these. And you can do pullups, you can do dips, you can do some pushups on them. Either way. Just

Mikah Sargent (02:09:33):
Oh, like vertical pushups?

Ant Pruitt (02:09:36):
No, down at the bottom. Oh. Has some handles. And you just get down there to do pullups to get a deeper stretch at the bottom of your pushup.

Mikah Sargent (02:09:44):
I was excited about an easier pushup. <Laugh> not in there is hard. Thing is easier. The floors not good enough for am.

Ant Pruitt (02:09:52):
Nope. No

Mikah Sargent (02:09:53):
Such thing. 

Ant Pruitt (02:09:54):
No such thing. But yeah, get yourself one of those racks there. And then lastly, mine was I, I, I needed a laugh. It's just been a little hectic here for me outside of work. And every now and then, I just needed to laugh. And I found a good one from Mr. Fred here at the dry bar. Fred Clap. And this one, I, I also put it up here because it made me think about Mr. Jarvis. So if you can uhoh, if the audio comes up, Mr. Bonita, you got the audio for it. I think he'd appreciate it.

Speaker 7 (02:10:24):
Oh, you're lucky you get to work on cruise ships. However, for what I do, that's not true. All the time. This cruise that I was working on, there was mostly Germans in the audience. Germans in the audience. And as we all know, the Germans are a jovial group.

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:37):
<Laugh>,

Speaker 7 (02:10:39):
This is my impression of a German gut laughing

Jeff Jarvis (02:10:42):
Ha <laugh>.

Speaker 7 (02:10:50):
And they, and they weren't really laughing. I finally looked at a guy and said, why aren't you laughing? He said, eek for

Glenn Fleishman (02:10:57):
<Laugh> <laugh>. After

Speaker 7 (02:10:59):
The show, I found the international hostess and asked her, what does Eek Forand dust mean? She said, I do not understand. I said, eek for,

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:07):
Oh no. But I thought, I thought I, Mr. <Laugh>, this is a good one. He's a great comedian on dry bar YouTube channel, but he does a lot of other stuff as Fred Clay.

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:24):
I'll tell you a funny thing, which is when I was in Berlin last November, and I happened via Twitter, the evil Twitter, of course there's a German TV writer and comedy writer. I've met you there. And I'm like, Hey, you wanna get together? And he took me to have the, he said, it's the best Apple stle in the world. And it was, so we had Apple St at Style Cafe in Berlin. I give the, it's like Einstein Cafe

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:47):
Einstein. Oh yes. Okay.

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:48):
Yeah. So you even, so, and he's a comedy writer. I'm like, tell me about comedy in Germany. And he said, well, we don't really have a tradition of it. That's kind of the whole joke,

Jeff Jarvis (02:11:55):
<Laugh>. Yeah. But it, it's

Glenn Fleishman (02:11:56):
Difficult. They don't have an improv tradition. So he has been part of a generation, he's in his, I think maybe late thirties now, early forties. He's been part of a generation. It's literally introducing the notion of, of humor to Germany that's not like morden or deep or very dry. Just like he got a grant to go and study improv in la. Wow. It's really amazing. Wow. That's actually really cool. Imagine that. Helping bring humor to Germany.

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:21):
Nice. That's a tall order, apparently. It is. Alright, let's go to Jeff. Oh, what did we do today? I already gave up my coat. <Laugh>. Okay, so companies that young people wanna work for. Oh, gen Z. Well, who, guess what's the number one company people wanna work for?

Glenn Fleishman (02:12:44):
Young? The Tick, the Talk.

Jeff Jarvis (02:12:47):
Oh the Taco Bell. Youtube. Well, we had a story about Taco Bell on the rundown, but no, not Taco Bell. Youtube. Oh, oh, you too Guess in and Out. Oh, Google. Then Google. Still really Google. Hopefully 16% Google Federal Government. Holy six. Oh, this is Gen Z. Okay. Gen Z. Young people. Young people. Okay.

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:08):
That's what I was, that's amazing.

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:10):
That is awesome. Maybe when they hear they have to use Chromebooks and they don't have m and ms all over the place, maybe that'll change. Let's get change. Yeah. They've got all those movies that make them think that Google's gonna have like slides and ball pits and stuff. Maybe. But I love that. Federal government was so high. That's awesome. Yeah. Isn't that weird? Has that changed? Apple five. So Google, 60% federal government is 6%. Apple five let's see, going down here, I guess we got Disney, 2.2.

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:35):
Thought federal government been so demonized. That's amazing.

Mikah Sargent (02:13:39):
They wanna

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:39):
Fix it. Point one.

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:40):
Good, good. Great. Get youthful people. Let the, but at the

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:44):
Same

Glenn Fleishman (02:13:44):
Inside the government,

Jeff Jarvis (02:13:45):
You may wanna go work for those companies, but it may not last long because there's another story here also from Maxo on the layoffs they've been doing. Oh yeah. And so Amazon is the biggest layoffs of 27,000. Meta Next biggest with 21,000. But interestingly, so Amazon's layoffs are less than 10% of the company. Little old Twitter is laid off 33,700, but that's half the company.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:10):
Oh wow. Okay. So this is, I see the chart now. Okay. Yeah. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:15):
Google 12,000, Salesforce 9,000, Dell 6,700. Microsoft 10,000 meta. 21,000. and Twitter, 3,700. But most of the company

Ant Pruitt (02:14:26):
Friended the show. Mr. Richard Hay. It was official for him just a few days ago. March 31st in his time at Google. So he's officially out looking for work. Yeah,

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:41):
That's too bad. But that's my happy jolly numbers.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:43):
<Laugh>. Well, I like the first part of that. I was really inspired that the kids wanted to work for the federal government, but we can't forget that. Yeah. People are, unfortunately

Jeff Jarvis (02:14:53):
I was gonna end with the puffy keyboard coat here. It was a nice way to go out, but I, I contributed it.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:58):
You did blow the show. You did. And so don't forget the puffy keyboard coat. I can't wait for Glen to send me mine so I can spell out the Macarena <laugh>. I don't know why, Glen. I just feel like you're the one that's gonna make it cuz you Oh, I'm

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:11):
Gonna keyboard

Jeff Jarvis (02:15:11):
Expert.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:12):
Yeah. Make this happen. Own

Ant Pruitt (02:15:13):
It. Inflatable. Own it.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:14):
That's pretty great. It's pretty great.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:17):
Moving along now to Glen's pick.

Glenn Fleishman (02:15:20):
Oh, well I've got this great pull-up bar that <laugh>. See here. <Laugh>. Oh, my camera's glitching. There we go. No, I'm sorry. It's a tripod attachment. You know, you all know what it looks like. <Laugh>, tripod, etc. Anyway, no, I've got a, I I wanted to start, I've got two things. One is one is an object, but I'll start with the funnier one, which is I family is gonna be able to cash in our miles and go to Europe for a couple weeks in June. Very excited about these trip. Delayed for since 2020. Of course, we were gonna go in June or July, 2020. Now it's time. And we hit that window where we could actually book flights with miles that weren't horrible as something opened up nice. And we grabbed it. So looking for rentals in London and trying to find something that's affordable. And there's four of us and the kids are teens, so they want their own beds now. They can't, you can't throw them like little kids in the same bed overnight, whatever. And so looking around and I'm like, oh, this looks like a good re and there's a review Oh, review in French. So it's an international, like people have stated from around the world, French is such a beautiful language. [inaudible] Excuse my French, Viv.

(02:16:32):
And I'm like, this is wait, presence of insect living insects in the food, in the refrigerator. Also dead ones. Okay. Okay. Oh, <laugh>. So perhaps the beautiful language inform me through translation that perhaps that rental is not the one I wanna choose. So thank you Airbnb for providing translation services when you're looking Oh

Mikah Sargent (02:16:52):
My gosh.

Glenn Fleishman (02:16:53):
For thanks. Wow. Those avoided. My actual pick is I see. And I don't wanna steal your sun thunder cuz I see Micah, you have a carabiner on your list. But it prompted me to remind myself to recommend this. It's a great item from rap as you're viewing a huge number of Apple air tags air tag holders last year. I'm still working my way through them. And this one was really impressive because I took up lock picking as many people did during the pandemic. Yeah. Only of our own stuff not breaking into other people's houses. Right, right. And I have a whole extensive kit now, and I can pick a number of kinds of locks still working on others. Combination locks are often very poorly made and easy to pick. So this design, it's, it's incredibly rug ruggedized metal construction.

(02:17:37):
You slip the air tag in there and it's got a combination lock that you can attach to luggage or something else like lock up. Right. And it's a three digit combination, which is unfortunate because you could sit there and in a matter of minutes you could run through a thousand combinations. But it takes time and focus. I have tried using every technique I've watched on YouTube and that have worked on other combination locks. I have my possession, including master lock locks that sell for 40 or 50 bucks a piece. All of which it's just to you with there, you spend the things, you're great. Right. I cannot crack this lock. So even though it's three digits, it's pretty great. Can't get anything into the slots, any of the, the tools can't crack it by hand by feel. So if you're looking for a simple but well made rugged air tag protecting holder, the only way someone can get the air tag out is they have to sit there and run through all the combinations. Or they have to take a hammer and a chisel and like pound it out of that holder, which is made with polycarbonate plastic. So I, I really like this thing. If you, it's, it's a, particularly for the cases in which you want your air tag to be more visible there's a lot of products that hide an air tag, but if you wanna give people the intent, Hey, I'm tracking this thing. Yeah. Know where it's at mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, then this is I really like this item.

Mikah Sargent (02:18:50):
No, that's cool. And yeah, it looks nice and sturdy, which is, which is nice. My tool as that is what my noun says is a, it's called Night Eyes Key Rack. And I've had these for quite some time. Ooh. and every time I've brought them up, people are like, wow. So it's a little key rack that you put all these tiny little sort of s carabiner clips on. And so each one of your, your I there we go. This way each. Nope. There we go. <Laugh>. each one of the items that you put on there can be clipped on using the carabiner clip. And then I've also got like an open spot here. This little tool is made by Night Eyes as well, and it's a multi-tool that has Phillips and Flathead. It's a, a bottle opener.

(02:19:48):
It's got a little ruler on there. And so everything just kind of looks like a saw to get out of jail with Yeah, exactly that as well. <Laugh> I've got my lock picking tool. No, I don't. And so each of these just kind of sits on here nicely, but anytime I want to, I can just very easily unclip something and use that alone. I am one of those paranoid people who doesn't like to have a bunch of stuff hanging on my keys when I'm driving because Yeah, yeah. There was the one car company Yeah. Where Yeah. So you, you all know what I'm talking about, but for folks who don't know there, I don't remember which make it was, but essentially if your knee bumped the keys just right, it would turn your car off so you could be on the highway and have your car get turned off and then you get into a car accident.

(02:20:30):
 And so I, yeah, I love to be able to just unclip that very quickly and use the key as I need to, and then clip it back on after I'm done. So that is Night Eyes And Night Eyes makes a lot of different products. They've got stuff for like pets. They've got these easy little clips that are for your keys. They've got some that lock as well. So you can get the, the little s clips that there's actually a little metal spot in the middle that kind of turns and locks, the clips closed. And then they make l e d lights, all sorts of things that are just key chain focused. And I have used, I had the last one I had, I had for years and years and years, and I finally replaced it with new ones because they had just worn out after, I don't know,

Ant Pruitt (02:21:14):
Like

Mikah Sargent (02:21:15):
Eight, nine years. So they last a long time as well. So that is my tool.

Ant Pruitt (02:21:22):
That's pretty cool.

Mikah Sargent (02:21:23):
Comfortable for the pets to be hanging

Ant Pruitt (02:21:25):
From the <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (02:21:27):
Yeah. When I clip my dog onto the kitchen chain, <laugh> <laugh>. Oh Lord, have mercy. Sorry, it was the picture in my head. I know it's not right <laugh>. No, but it is, it is a, it is a picture. Folks, that brings us to the end of this episode of This Week in Google. Let's go down the line and have everybody mention where they can be found if they've got anything to pitch, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll start with you, aunt Pruitt, TWiT host and Club TWiT, community manager. What would you like to promote this week?

Ant Pruitt (02:22:01):
First I'd like to promote miss Stacy's book club, part of Club TWiT that is coming up on, at the time of this recording, Thursday, April the sixth. We're gonna talk about Sea of Tranquility. Ooh, very, very, very interesting book with I'm sure we're gonna have an interesting talk about that. So if you want to join that, that chat and talk and what have you become a member of Club TWiT and join in join in on a discussion, but also check out my show HandsOn Photography TWiT tv slash H o p, having a lot of fun creating shows for everybody to help get better in the world of photography and post-processing.

Mikah Sargent (02:22:39):
Beautiful special guest technology, journalist and print historian Glen Fleischman. Thank you for your time today. Where can folks find you online and what would you like to promote?

Glenn Fleishman (02:22:51):
Well, in honor of the one year anniversary of me registering glen.fun, in order to be, to make it easier for people to find me when I was on this show, they can probably make glen.fun. G l e n a f u n. That's right. And I just wanted something short and sweet that I could say aloud that people might remember or be able to type in. But I'm active on maam, which is a, a happy, wonderful place using the TWiT server Quick social, and you can find me there at Glen f That's Glen with two Ns. I'm currently working on a lot of historical research, reading, looking at old things, about to go to the Billy Ireland Comic Library Museum at the Ohio State University for an event on April 22nd, free afternoon event for the many watchers. And listeners who are in the Ohio area come to Columbus and April 22nd, be surprised Printing. Yeah. Well, hey, come and say hi. She'll be a lot of fun, but that's kind of my, that's where I'm gonna be. I'll be physically there that one day and, and virtually lend out fun.

Mikah Sargent (02:23:49):
All right. And the Leonard Town professor for journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmar Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. And

Glenn Fleishman (02:23:59):
Newmar,

Mikah Sargent (02:24:01):
The director of the Town nine Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmar Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. It is Jeff Jarvis. Thank you so much, Jeff Jarvis, where

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:12):
You did a great job. Great job. Thank

Mikah Sargent (02:24:14):
You. Thank you. How can people find you online and what would you

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:17):
Like? Well, I've gonna, I've gonna, every, every show from now, we're gonna plug the book, the book, the book. So the book's coming out in June. So the book parenthesis, if you go to guttenberg this.com, you can pre-order it today, add a discount. Ooh. Ooh. Louis Perry has my copy for I think 10% off. 

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:36):
Yeah. Love that cover. And

Mikah Sargent (02:24:37):
I have to say, yeah. If I'm judging books by their covers, you have figured it out my friend, because I didn't, both of these books are

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:45):
Mine are dead. Oof. Bloomsbury Blueberry's been a very good publisher to work with. I've been happy. 

Glenn Fleishman (02:24:51):
If we're lucky, Jeff and I will be on stage together in early July. Details to come talking about he and I and some other type and printing related people.

Jeff Jarvis (02:24:59):
Geek him out, nice

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:01):
Out. See if it all works out. It'd be great.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:04):
And I'd also like to give a special thanks to Jex Jro ax Plith Mordax Serpent and Gas Fiendish Claw, aka a ghoul Fleshman for their time today, the

Jeff Jarvis (02:25:18):
Parallel Universe. Much

Glenn Fleishman (02:25:20):
Now we're all ready for Halloween now.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:23):
Goodbye everybody, and thank you for joining us for this episode of This Week in Google. I do wanna mention that if you would like to subscribe to the show, if you're somehow listening to it, and it's not because it's downloaded to your podcast app of Choice, while the way that you can get this show every week is by going to twis.tv/TWiG or t w ig. There you will see a webpage where you can subscribe to the show in audio or video format and you just choose your podcast provider. If it's Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, YouTube pockets. I mean, we try to be in all the places so that you can get the show. We've got that Plaino RSS feed for the audio and video versions of the show. And we'd love to have you become a follower or a subscriber depending on what service you're using.

(02:26:10):
You can also tune in live to watch the show at twit.tv/live every Wednesday, starting at roundabout 2:00 PM Pacific Time. And I should mention Club TWiT at TWiT tv slash Club TWiT. Join the club and you can get every single one of Twitch shows ad free. It's all the content none of the ads because you in effect, are supporting the show by subscribing for starting at $7 a month or $84 a year. You also get access to the TWiT plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show special events, all of that gets published in that special bonus feed. And you get access to the members only Discord where you can chat with fellow Club TWiT members. And also those of us here at twit. That's a fun place to hang out.

(02:26:58):
Lots of animated images get strewn about and you can have a great time again, all starting at $7 a month, $84 a year if you'd like. You can choose to up your monthly subscription. We continue to try to make the club more valuable by introducing new shows and new new special features. Some of those include the Untitled Linux Show, which is a show all about Linux, as you probably guessed. You can also check out Paul Throt Hands on Windows program, which is a short format show all about Windows, making the most of your Windows PC and my show Hands on Mac, which is a show about using your Mac, but also about using your iPhone, your iPad, all of that stuff. I've got short format tips and tricks for all of those devices. And last but certainly not least for now at the very least is Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. He's got Jolliest Laugh in the Business, and he is incredible when it comes to home theater knowledge. So if you are looking to get inspired or looking to up your home theater game, you definitely wanna join the club and check out that show, all of that great stuff. Part of the Club TWiT tv slash Club TWiT, please check it out. And now I'm officially truly really saying goodbye. And thank you for joining us for this episode of This Week in Google.

Speaker 8 (02:28:22):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-Chief VAD as magazine. And each week I joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space Books and tv, and we do it all for you are fellow true believers. So, whether you're an armchair adventure or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this weekend space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time