This Week in Google 733, 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.

Jason Howell (00:00:00):
Coming up next on this week in Google. I'm Jason Howell filling in for Leo LaPorte who is on the East Coast for the week. Happy to do so. I'm here with Jeff Jarvis, ant Pruitt and Kathy Gellis, and we have a lot to talk about. It's actually a really big week for Google News, primarily because Google's big antitrust case is officially underway, so we kind of touch base on where that's starting and where it's headed. The Pixel eight, the eight Pro, and the Google Pixel Watch two teased by Google. [00:00:30] Is anyone tempted? We talk a little bit about that. Google's AI fund. We asked the question too little, too late. I'm not sure and feels like it's too late, but what about the rest of us? AI learning to smell? Is that a good idea? Actually, it might have something to do with memory. I think that's fascinating and glowing. Subscribe buttons, yes, you definitely don't want to miss that story and so much more. Next on this week in Google

Narrator (00:00:59):
Podcasts [00:01:00] you love from people you trust. This is TWiT

Jason Howell (00:01:10):
This is TWIG this week in Google. Episode 733 recorded on Wednesday, September 13th, 2023. Go, Kathy, go! This episode of this week in Google is brought to you by Miro. Miro is your team's online workspace to connect, collaborate and create together. [00:01:30] 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.

(00:01:45):
It is time for Twig this weekend. Google. I'm Jason Howell filling in for Leo, who is helping out his mom to today. Actually, he had planned to be not sitting in this seat because he's on the east coast, but he planned to join the show [00:02:00] remotely. Turned out he's got a lot of work to do over there, so he is like, can I get some assistance? I was like, absolutely. I'm always super thrilled to drop in on this week in Google. So I'm here sitting in the chair, not the Dr. Evil chair. I probably could have asked for it, but I'll be honest, it's not that comfortable. Joining me today is none other than Jeff Jarvis. Jeff, it's good to see you again.

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:23):
Good to see you, boss. How are you?

Jason Howell (00:02:25):
I'm good. They gave me, we're just back in town. What's that? We're just back [00:02:30] in town.

(00:02:30):
Yeah. Well, we were talking in pre-show. I was gone for almost a week, about five days, and I really became unaware of everything going on in technology. It was my nephew's wedding, so I was really focused on family and then coming back in especially to this job and this week in particular with Leo Gone, I was on security Now yesterday, this week in Google Today it's like going from zero to a hundred because it's like, all right, get smart on everything. Go. So it's not [00:03:00] that easy, Jeff. I have to say though, they handed me this card when I sat down and it's got the whole spiel for introducing you. But is it even applicable at this point or it needs some edits? I'm still at, so last week it was nicely said on the show that I'm air quotes retiring. I retirement. Congratulations on leaving.

(00:03:24):
That's a funny thing. People always say congratulations for what? It's an achieve. I lived long enough [00:03:30] to do this. It's an achievement. You've worked hard enough to do this, but I will be retiring, I'll be working, right? So yeah, I'm there officially through the end of December, but we can change tradition here as long as we still pay tribute to our greatest fan. Get ready. Get ready to play it. Who's our greatest fan? Who would it be? Is there we go? I mean, yeah, [00:04:00] I guess really until the end of the year. We can read well as long as, but Craig is too. I think there might need to be some adjustments. So whoever does those things, we'll have to make some edits. We might have to run it through an AI or something and tell the ai, Hey, I will be after December, well after actually next year. But don't worry about it. I will be the Leonard Town professor of journalism innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, but the city of University of New York Emeritus Emeritus. All right, [00:04:30] that's easy. I can just get a Sharpie and add it to this piece of paper. It'll take me two seconds.

Cathy Gellis (00:04:35):
I believe the appropriate protocol is to laminate the new one.

Jason Howell (00:04:41):
Yeah, I know. I'm going to have to peel off the old laminate and redo it. I also realized on the back of this thing, it's got all, all the other things that are important to mention about you. Disaster in the kitchen. So am I a nickel millionaire emeritus? Yes. Right. Does not take criticism well. Emeritus [00:05:00] so many things. Hated by Pat Sajack. I didn't know that one, by the way. Anyways, it's good to see you, Jeff. Good to have you here. Good to see you. We already know that Kathy Giles is joining us because she jumped in and I'm so happy she did. Thank you, Kathy. It's good to have you here.

Cathy Gellis (00:05:17):
Thanks for having me.

Jason Howell (00:05:17):
Absolutely. Author at Tech Dirt, US lawyer and focusing on technology, international law, civil liberties. Is it CG council.com [00:05:30] for people who want to find you online as well as read your stuff, your material on tech dirt, so it's good to see you. And then on the other side of the city of the beautiful city of Petaluma, no, sorry, actually you're not in Petaluma. You are up north one city. Yeah. Close enough. We'll leave it at that. Alright. All right, ant Pruitt, it's good to see you ant good to see you. Two times in one day. I saw you in the office and then now I'm seeing you on [00:06:00] Zoom. So that's right.

Ant Pruitt (00:06:02):
And Mr. Jarvis people say congratulations because that's a heck of an achievement. It is. And me being the oldish feller on this here panel, I'm looking forward to being where you are. I hope I get to where you are in your career and you can be able to say, you know what, I'm retired because man, it's going to be good.

Jeff Jarvis (00:06:23):
I was a podcaster for 30 years and now it's over. [00:06:30] And now what? Now when I talk, who's going to listen to me?

(00:06:37):
I just talk to myself all day about cameras, like most podcasters, computers, and I tell myself,

Cathy Gellis (00:06:45):
Emeritus

Jason Howell (00:06:46):
Emeritus. Yeah, podcaster Emeritus. I like that. There we go. The title. I love it. That's it. Alright, well I tried my best when going through the news of which [00:07:00] at the beginning of today I was very out of touch with. I feel a little better about it now to find enough Google stuff that we can do. The name, the title of this podcast justice, and I think we've got some reasonable amount of googley things. We've also got other things that we have to talk about that aren't specifically Google. But why don't we start things off talking about Google and I think probably the easiest top story related to Google [00:07:30] has to be the antitrust trial here in the us. The big Google Monopoly trial underway as of yesterday. There were the opening statements, of course the Justice Department is saying that Google paid billions of dollars to secure and retain its dominant position in search on smartphones and it used its strategy.

(00:07:54):
They called it as a powerful strategic weapon weapon. Jason, I was thinking [00:08:00] about this. Yes, I'll be curious to hear Kathy's view and aunt's view as well and yours, but if they had that position and didn't pay 10 billion, that would be a use of monopoly power. The fact that they paid says that there was a market value. It was valuable to them. They paid a lot of money and that's called capitalism. Dude, Mr. Jarvis people took the check, they cashed those checks. I'm like, why are we yelling at Google about [00:08:30] this? They said, you know what? We see some value here. Let us sign a check for you all so we can go ahead and do this thing and help our business as well as lying your pockets. So capitalism, stop fussing at Google for this. What does our legal beagle have to say?

Cathy Gellis (00:08:45):
Well, I haven't followed enough of the specifics of where this case has gone.

Jason Howell (00:08:48):
Oh, you just such a, that never stops us, Kathy. You know us Well, I've been out for the last week. I'm making up as I go along here. This is what we do here.

Cathy Gellis (00:08:59):
I'm sorry, [00:09:00] legal training and legal acumen is accuracy shadow. Okay. Because one of the points that I would generally make in law is the facts matter. And so knowing the facts matters for the analysis because whether Google did right or wrong or did something legally actionable or not does depend on what they do. And I've lost track of the plot of the stupid case because the original one, the original complaint was filed [00:09:30] was so stupid. And I have a tech post. If you search on tech dirt for generic side, you'll see a post where basically the entire theory of the case was they were big and successful and so therefore they construed market power. Even though there were other big companies, there were other successful companies. It was so irrational that I kind of lost any faith in the case. My understanding is that the case and the claims have changed over time.

(00:10:00):
[00:10:00] So it's possible that it's better rooted now. But in terms of what was just getting discussed about if Google did what was described, which was to pay off another market competitor, even though I'm coming from the starting position of I think this case is probably garbage, if that is the fact that a complaint is being brought on, I'm not finding that compelling to say, oh, well that's a defense because the thing that you do care about in antitrust law is the effect on the consumer because you want the consumers to be able to [00:10:30] have choices. And so if you've bought off another company that was providing choices, so now there are fewer choices, I think you can start to sustain that. There is something wrong here.

Jason Howell (00:10:40):
So two things. One, it's free. So the consumer is up there. Two, I take your point about choices, but no search engine died as a result of this. You could still,

Cathy Gellis (00:10:52):
I mean all the facts will matter, which is why I'm so tentative because I don't know what they are. And based on the original opening volley, I'm [00:11:00] inclined to think that they're under theorized and stupid. But you

Jason Howell (00:11:04):
Have to get it.

Cathy Gellis (00:11:07):
But all of these things would matter into the whole picture because I think at best it might be close calls on things, but you would want the government to be able to point to more things and say to not have it even feel like a close call to say they did X and therefore there was harm. And that harm is something that the law recognizes as actionable, and I am inclined to think that they have a weak hand, but if [00:11:30] that is a card that they can play in and of itself, that doesn't strike me as a weak card on its face. But I don't know if the other facts including exculpatory facts, so they all matter too. I think a lot of this is the optics of Google was big and successful and a lot of this case was throw the book at the big successful company that's always dubious.

(00:11:53):
And the fact that their opening volley was stupid, it doesn't help that. But at the same time, they're big and they're successful stuff [00:12:00] is going on and we should actually care about what impacts are to the consumers and the fact that lake search is free This and the other thing that might be enough to say there's nothing to see here, but I think one of the reasons it gets traction is because something, this is a difference in how our world worked and we're feeling a little uncomfortable with it. And so there's a sense of when we feel uncomfortable, something must be done and surely something in the law is available to do that. Something. I think a lot of the things that we talk about on the show and things that I talk about [00:12:30] is sometimes things are, they may not feel right, but it doesn't mean that the law should recognize them as being problematic. And when you start to throw law at them, you can create problems you didn't actually have. Sometimes you just need to put up with things that are, well, maybe this isn't great, but we can live with it and cope and move on and be successful in

Jason Howell (00:12:49):
Other ways. Any consequences.

Cathy Gellis (00:12:51):
So that's why, I mean I'm dubious about this case because it just feels like something must be done type case as opposed to something that's really [00:13:00] rooted in law absolutely would say no to this for damn good reason. And the whole thing is not coming together in a way that makes me think that there's something that must be done for damn good reason. And there are harms that could come if the government is successful and they may be worse than anything they're alleging Google to have done.

Jason Howell (00:13:18):
Are we in a position government? Oh sorry. No, you went. You go. Sorry. Are we in a position, and again, I'm totally ignorant with our government and law, but are we in a position now where the judges [00:13:30] that have these cases presented to them look at it and say, okay, this is dubious, this is bull crap. Come on dude, no, get this out of here. Or is it where they're really going to be at least on camera, diligent and going through all of the points of the case and then saying, okay, this is stupid. I mean, is there any hope? I'm basically asking is there any hope in our justice system when it comes to stuff like this? Because a lot of times it just makes [00:14:00] sense to a common person like me that says, okay, this is stupid. So why wouldn't a judge in the higher court system be able to see that same logic as me?

Cathy Gellis (00:14:11):
Well, one of the things that I can't answer because I haven't followed the case enough is exactly where it is, but this sounds like they're at the trial stage and if that's the case, they've probably already gone a couple rounds of evaluating the claims for are they stupid or not? So they would've already visited the motions to dismiss. [00:14:30] They might have even had, I guess they might've had summary judgment already, but they would've gone through a couple it sounds like. My understanding is they've gone through a couple rounds of just the judge thinking through whether the theory is stupid or not, but something still ended up standing and now some issues are being presented to a jury. Now at that point, the jury can decide nothing to see here, and then even if the jury decides there's something to be seen here, the judge could still weigh in and then once all that dust settles, [00:15:00] then they can still appeal it and judges can review everything and say there was nothing to see here. So there's a couple of rounds where if this is really stupid garbage, you can get rid of it. But something did percolate pretty far along in the process where I think they're actually having a trial in front of a jury, and that does not happen to all cases and it certainly doesn't happen right away in cases. So we've gone a couple rounds of somebody looking at this, but whether they've looked at it as effectively as they should, I don't know.

Jason Howell (00:15:29):
And [00:15:30] I mean I can't remember the specifics, but I do know that this case had a wider net to it until somewhat recently that I believe this judge could be mistaken on that kind of narrowed the view, but allowed it to continue to go forward as the antitrust case that is there now. It was a lot wider at one point, and I think at that stage they recognized it needed to be trimmed down [00:16:00] in order to continue. So there has been scrutiny. There's another case out there, which is I think a better case against Google by far is the advertising case where it controls that makes more sense both the buy and the sell side, the marketplace. And even though there can be arguments made for efficiencies there, blah blah, blah, that still is an issue. But search and shopping and those kinds of areas. The other thing we haven't talked about is that there's also just quality. Google search is the best search and there's nothing illegal about [00:16:30] that. There's nothing about growing thanks to quality.

Cathy Gellis (00:16:32):
You'll like my generic side post. I think I end up making that argument where the way the complaint was drawn up originally was sort of like Google was winning because it was better and therefore that's bad. It is like no, it kind of didn't hold up

Jason Howell (00:16:46):
At all. That's how the marketplace works.

Cathy Gellis (00:16:48):
But just to throw one more point to something Ant said, and I don't know if it applies to this case, but I just want to throw it out generally for how we interpret when we look at cases going through the whole lifecycle [00:17:00] of litigation and try to evaluate who's winning. Sometimes it may look like, well, the side you don't like is winning because the case still goes on in some form, but sometimes the judges will sort of have a looser hand because there's consequences where if they cut things off too soon, then on appellate review there may be a consequence to that where the case will come back alive. So sometimes a judge might sort of think, yeah, this is probably crap, [00:17:30] but it is better overall for the party they think is being injured by this litigation to let it go further. Now, one of the downsides to that is it's horrifically expensive.

Jason Howell (00:17:41):
Sometimes I would say that costs somebody a lot of money, right?

Cathy Gellis (00:17:43):
So it's not painless, but it could be, and I'm not saying it applies in this case either other than Google is obviously a party that can weather it, but sometimes when we look at this and we're armchair and trying to figure out, well, is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? Sometimes, [00:18:00] sometimes what we interpret as a win for the side we were rooting for may actually be like, you want a battle, but you're going to lose the war. And so sometimes judges with that in mind will cause certain battles to be lost because it's going to ultimately set up the party to be more likely to win the war. So I just wanted to flag that as in general, when we look at litigation, that's something to bear in mind.

Jason Howell (00:18:24):
Interesting. At one point the justice or the government [00:18:30] side called what Google was doing, monopolist, flexing. That's a lot of really interesting. I'm sure it's this way in opening statements a lot of the times. There's a lot of very much taking what Google was doing in its business and turning it into a war metaphor. You know what I mean? It's all about combat and battle. And Google's strong army, I guess Kathy, boy, something must be done. He must go to war. It's [00:19:00] violence against Apple essentially, or Firefox or whatever. But yeah, I mean I would agree. At the end of the day, Google has demonstrated that it has a product when it comes to search anyways, ads, different story, although it's very powerful there obviously. But with search, it is proven for many years to be the superior search product. I would argue a wide majority of people, that's just [00:19:30] a fact. There's people that don't feel that way, but I think a lot of people do. That's why to Google something became a metaphor for searching the internet because that's just what you did. You Googled

Cathy Gellis (00:19:42):
It. That's the generic side post because essentially what happened to Google is it became the verb. And normally when you're a trademark owner, that's bad. You don't want that to happen. But it was sort of a sign of if you could Google something with binging that sort of suggested that there's a market which has more than one player [00:20:00] in it, because you can do the verb on the other product, on the

Jason Howell (00:20:03):
Other platform. Yep. Yeah, yeah. And we are at the beginning of this case, I think on a case like this, do they normally peg it as having X number of weeks? We expect this to be done in six weeks. I think I read that somewhere, but I couldn't tell if that was a guess. On the author's part, there's an estimate. Yeah, there's an estimate. Obviously you can go longer, but it'll be in the news for a

Cathy Gellis (00:20:28):
While I think. Yes. [00:20:30] And I think some of it is when they do case management, the courts themselves want to have some controlled over their calendar and have some idea of how long it will take to present things. So I think both sides tend to be sort of transparent about, okay, if we're going to go through this, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. And the other side will say, we're going to do 1, 2, 3. And they sort of figure out how long that will take. And obviously things can happen, but I think they try to make those estimates and I suppose those estimates are what's getting reported.

Jason Howell (00:20:56):
Yep, yep. Well, there we go. All right. So expect more [00:21:00] of that on this week in Google and so many of our other shows here on the network. I think there's been a lot of buildup to this story. And also this moment in time is so very government, so very politicized around big tech. And this is big tech. This is kind of the marquee. One of the marquee examples of that is, all right, well we finally got Google in the hot seat antitrust, it's time, let's go. [00:21:30] So we'll see where that takes up. And the FTC has not done well with antitrust. So this another, this is through the d OJ a Biden administration effort here, and we'll see what happens with it. Although this began three years ago, the lead up to this I think initially was three years ago. It was during the Trump administration. So it's been a while to get here even. And it'll be a while more. I feel like we need to stick with law because we have you here, [00:22:00] Kathy, I know that you've written some things, but they aren't Google specifically the stories. Lemme see down here.

Cathy Gellis (00:22:11):
No, I don't think I've written about Google specifically, just sort of the general, everything that goes on that affects tech and polarizes tech and stuff like that. So everything that we get, the zeitgeist is covered by the stuff that I'm doing. And some of it sticks to Google and some of it isn't Google [00:22:30] specific, but it's all out there affecting our technology and our world.

Jason Howell (00:22:36):
And there's another legal story on Line 32, the YouTube anti-tax. Oh, okay, there we go. That's like the legal story. Yes, indeed. The one still in Google Land. Yes. Okay, cool. Because in my mind I had it all organized like, okay, we're going to stick Google, stick to Google through the beginning. But then I, I'm very out of practice. All it takes is a week for me to get out of practice a vacation. It was known [00:23:00] as a break of sanity that you had. Yes. Well, like I said in pre-show, took my foot off the gas pedal of technology and it's just really hard to start the car again sometimes. But yes, you're right. So this was the lawsuit about an anti-vax activist, a gentleman named Joseph Mercola, who yesterday, apparently according to this article on ours, lost a lawsuit that attempted to [00:23:30] kind of push YouTube into providing access to videos that were removed after YouTube had banned his channels for I guess spreading his anti-vaccine message. He was trying to argue that YouTube actually owed him more than $75,000 there were for damages as a breach of contract, his user contract, [00:24:00] and then of course denying him access to his videos.

(00:24:07):
And let's see here, YouTube says they were under no obligation to host that content, and of course they terminated his channel in 2021, they said for violating their community guidelines by posting medical misinformation about covid 19 and vaccines. So yeah, I guess this just ensures re forces, there's no [00:24:30] first amendment issue here obviously because YouTube has the first amendment right to carry what they want and not carry what they want. I'm curious about the contract angle here through the community. I presume in the contract somewhere it says the community standards supersede the contract.

Cathy Gellis (00:24:47):
Well, okay, this is one of a zillion cases where everybody is trying to insist that there's a must carry thing for everybody's stupid content that they want to have happen. And [00:25:00] this is just one of, I'm in a mood, but love it. We we'll be hitting

Jason Howell (00:25:06):
On I love the cat galls mood.

Cathy Gellis (00:25:08):
Yeah, okay,

Jason Howell (00:25:09):
Bring it.

Cathy Gellis (00:25:10):
So I mean this case, I don't think it stands out for any particular reason. Every so often when they take swings, they try to recontextualize it and they'll talk about, well, the terms of service said this, that, and the other thing. And that doesn't work because you have to start with the understanding that a terms of service is something that platforms do to [00:25:30] avoid trouble. So they're not going to write a terms of service that is going to tempt trouble. So there's never a viable claim there. The only things that have really survived, and some of this is older, is there was the Barnes of Yahoo case where content was actually, I think content was not removed and the platform promised that they would remove it and then that claim was able to survive on it or a theory of promissory estoppel because even though the platform didn't have [00:26:00] any obligation to do anything to the content, it had now created for itself by giving a gratuitous promise that it would do something and not created the potential for a claim to survive. But that's what that

Jason Howell (00:26:12):
PROMIS promissory, estoppel

Cathy Gellis (00:26:15):
Estoppel, promissory estoppel, basically there wasn't a contract, but there was a promise that, I mean, it's not a great claim, but the theory is promissory estoppel is you didn't have a contract, but somebody created an expectation that you depended on [00:26:30] and then they didn't meet that expectation and you were harmed by it. So even though a contract hadn't officially formed, which then you could say, oh, well you totally promised, and you've breached that promise. It still functions as sort of a quasi-contract thing that even where you didn't have a contract, promissory estoppel is a theory of law that says, look, you raised expectations in a way that they were relied upon and it was detrimental reliance because you didn't meet those expectations. So in the Barnesville Yahoo case, the contract wouldn't [00:27:00] have gone in anywhere. The terms of service wouldn't have made anything. Section two 30 would've done away with the claims, but because when the person had reached out, the platform had said, yeah, we'll take care of it, and then didn't, the court was like, well, that extra promise of saying you'll take care of it became a basis for a complaint.

(00:27:17):
I don't know if it fully gets there, because the other thing with promissory estoppels, you have to have detrimental reliance on the promise. And I'm not entirely sure how the way that case played out that was dealt with because I don't think [00:27:30] anybody was harmed from relying on that. But at the point in that case where it becomes an issue where now everybody who's a tech lawyer learns it is platforms don't make promises anymore. Even if you might like them to be helpful and make promises, there'll be dragons. So nobody's going to make a promise because that just opened up an avenue for a lawsuit to survive much longer than it should have. So some of these cases are that kind of thing could survive, but mostly they don't because the platforms have first amendment [00:28:00] rights to choose what they carry and what they don't carry.

(00:28:03):
Section two 30 backs this up, although this litigation is generally not using the Section two 30 defense, it's more using the First Amendment defense at this point. But a lot of people take a lot of swings and they generally all fail, which is the comment from Eric Goldman at the bottom of that article, which is basically they all fail and they should, but weird things are surviving like the stupid, [00:28:30] sorry, we're going to do it again. The Missouri versus Biden case that now the Fifth Circuit has spoken on that left a similar type claim that survived and it shouldn't, and I'm going to have a hard time talking about it because it makes me so angry. Even with the Fifth Circuit allegedly improving the decision, it's awful, it's garbage. And this claim should have gone nowhere and it's the Fifth Circuit rewriting an awful lot of law [00:29:00] in order to keep these claims alive because they prefer that sort of content.

Jason Howell (00:29:04):
What did they mean by improving?

Cathy Gellis (00:29:08):
So the original district court came out with an injunction against many, many, many officials in the White House in the Biden administration and with 10 points of things they couldn't do, and all of them were overbroad. So in theory it improved by now going down to fewer officials, [00:29:30] only one thing they can't do and the language prohibiting them is narrower than the district court did. So now we just have one terrible grounds for an injunction as opposed to something more broad. But I think the upshot of it is it's still as awful as it was. I think it's still over broad. I think it still censors the government in ways that are impermissible. I think it censors the platforms in ways that are impermissible and the way they found standing for the individual plaintiffs [00:30:00] is dubious. And the way it found standing for the states of Missouri and Louisiana is even more horrific because it essentially gave the states of Missouri and Louisiana veto power over the editorial policies of the platforms. It just favored their view as opposed to the view that the Biden administration had. And ultimately now what the platforms can do effectively is being shaped by this injunction, and it's an injunction shaped by these states [00:30:30] getting upset that certain views that they favored were getting kicked off the platforms that is states trying to control the platform's, editorial discretion. And the Fifth Circuit said, yeah, this is fine, it's not fine, this is bad.

Jason Howell (00:30:43):
Oh gosh, I don't know what to say other than I was like scary though. Other than that, I was completely entranced by your rant. And Kathy, I appreciate that you're here to break this stuff down for me. [00:31:00] I love your passion on this topic as dwindle in I r C says, go, Kathy. Go. Exactly. How do you follow it up? I don't even know. Oh,

Cathy Gellis (00:31:11):
I don't think stupid is going to cover it, guys.

(00:31:15):
I think we need another word than that. Sorry about the nightmares, but this is bad and I don't know what will happen. I don't know if the DOJ will try to challenge it. I sort of think they might need to, but there is a view, although I don't agree with the view that on a practical basis, [00:31:30] the injunction is a little bit more controllable than it was before. But I don't think in any significant way, and I think the Fifth Circuit, the fifth Circuit has now created some precedent that we're going to be stuck with and this is not good, but that means next step is the Supreme Court, which also has its own idiosyncratic ways of dealing with the First Amendment that are marginally better than the Fifth Circuit, but obviously problematic and nearly everything it touches too.

Jason Howell (00:31:57):
Concern regardless. Yeah,

(00:32:00):
[00:32:00] Interesting stuff. Okay, well I feel like this was our legal block. Let's take a break and we'll come back. We'll dive into more Google and then we'll go wherever the heck Kathy takes us because I love the role that you're on today. Yes, yes, yes. Keep that valve open. That's right. Working for me. A stoop. A stoop. Yeah, like it. [00:32:30] Alright, let's take a break and thank the sponsor of this episode of this week in Google and then we'll get back. We have so much more to talk about, but this episode of Twig is brought to you by Miro. Miro is so cool. Let me ask you just a quick question here. Are you or is your team still going from tab to tab or from tool? This tool to that tool losing brilliant ideas and just important pieces of information along the way? It happens, right?

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You can do that with several templates [00:35:00] including Miros Swim Lane Diagram. Strategic planning becomes easier when it's visual and accessible. You can tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team so that they not only view it, but actually have a chance to give feedback as well. It's very collaborative and if you're feeling meeting fatigue, Miro users report saving up to 80 hours per user per year just from streamlining conversations and feedback [00:35:30] ready to be a part of the more than 1 million users who join Miro every month. Well get your first three boards for free and you can start working better together at miro.com/podcast. That's M I R O M I R O miro.com/podcast And check it out for yourself. It's just a really incredibly creative way to get your ideas into a tangible format that everybody's [00:36:00] speaking the same language. I've used Miro a number of times for different projects that I've done and I was amazed at what the destination after all the work, and it's really fun. It's very visual, it's just a really enjoyable process. miro.com/podcast and we thank them for their support of this week in Google.

(00:36:23):
All right, privacy Sandbox. This is Google's plan to phase [00:36:30] out third party cookies still on target to happen by the end of 2024. That's next year. The way time is speeding by, it's going to be here in a heartbeat and privacy sandbox via Chrome is how Google plans to do that. Phasing out those third party cookies and now is kind of a milestone in of itself. The APIs that are going to drive it available by default in Chrome, so you no longer need to go [00:37:00] into a flag and activate it. It's going to be going on most Chrome installs by default. Google plans to keep 3% unaltered for AB tests just to test things along the way. The plans to fully turn off third party cookies support in Chrome is at least starting with 1% of Chrome users in Q 1 20 24. So we've got the a p I happening now [00:37:30] in a more default way.

(00:37:34):
What has the conversation been around the elimination of third party cookies and the replacing it with this Privacy Sandbox approach? Are people's positive about this? I mean, I think we can all get behind the reduction of third party cookies tracking you all over the web, but is this a good alternative? It's a case. I would be careful what you wish for [00:38:00] publishers because the Wall Street Journal went on the attack against cookies, what they know now some years ago, and this is where we land as a result, but publishers are going to be hurt and Google, they're screaming. I saw Windows Weekly. Paul said, get rid of Chrome, Paul, come on, relax. It's okay. I'm still using Chrome Pro.

(00:38:26):
And just to reiterate here, what's going to happen is that there's [00:38:30] going to be data about you that stays on your browser that does not go up, that classifies you with certain categories that can then accept ads in those categories and it's more privacy friendly as a result. And I think that's really true. I mean Steve has said that. I think he said that he endorsed this. I think he said I thought so too. Okay, on Security now. Security now. Yeah, I thought so too. But there are people screaming that, oh my [00:39:00] God, oh my god, Google's going to know more about you and Chrome's going to know more about you. Actually, no, it's less. And the publishers demanded it and regulators demanded it. And so they're doing something that tries to give as still have advertising supporting the free content. We all get give advertisers some measure of targeting ability while not setting data up about you.

(00:39:20):
So I think it's good. The question is, I don't know how it's going to work for people other than Google because Google will have the structure. It will have enough data [00:39:30] and they're not trying to do it to screw the publishers. But if the publisher I teach in our executive program, and I was asking all of our executives from various media outlets, how many of them have first party data structures set up in their media companies and most of them don't. There's just a very few that are at the beginning of trying this. They've had years of warning that they should be creating and gathering and analyzing and acting on first party [00:40:00] data as a way to build individual strength and they're not doing it. So I think we're going to hear screams from publishers when they realize that they're a little worse off as a result, but they asked for it.

(00:40:17):
Indeed. Alright. I want to say was it Mozilla or someone had some contrary thoughts on this as well? [00:40:30] We sort of spoke about it a little bit last week too when we caught wind of this. But again, if it's going to be for the betterment of the consumers, I'm all for it. I mean, we'll see how plays out. I think there are always unintended consequences. People are going to be on this case like crazy investigating what happens and what happens to your privacy. So I think there's plenty of privacy advocates out there who will be on the case here and we'll see how this plays out over the next few months. [00:41:00] Yeah, this next story has nothing to do with privacy or I mean I guess it could in the sense that all smartphones are tracking what we do, I suppose. But that has nothing to do with Google's announcement of the Pixel Watch two and the Pixel eight phone.

(00:41:20):
There's an event that they have scheduled coming up here at the beginning of October and right on time, huh? Right on time. Yes. I mean honestly, I [00:41:30] can't believe that we're nearing the end of this calendar year. It's just kind of blowing me away and tell me about it. This news was one of those eye-opening moments for me where I was like, seriously, we're already here and we're going to blink and it's going to be Thanksgiving and Christmas. And yes, I figured the Pixel event is another holiday. That's just what it feels like to me. But anyways, in the old days, my son, every fall we used to have the new TV shows and the new cars. Now [00:42:00] we have the new phones. The new phones change. Yes. How much things change? Much Four. Tired stayed the same. Yes. But we're going to have the Pixel eight, the Pixel eight Pro, the Pixel Watch two. Google is continuing to do what it's been doing the last couple of years anyways, where instead of being victim to the leak, they are kind of like getting ahead of the news and just being very leaky in a more official sense, [00:42:30] more revealing, maybe less leaky, more revealing and saying, yep, here it is. This way we don't have to deal with all of the poorly shot third person on a subway with a, it was them potato here, it was them the year before.

(00:42:46):
It wasn't leakers, that was Google giving it to people. Say, Hey, go out in public and act like you saw this mysterious phone there and then take a really big picture of it. Google did this or it's [00:43:00] Google giving devices to someone to say, go out and use this very obviously, and we will wait for the person to actually capture, unlike Apple, we won't arrest you and break down your door and do kinds of evil things. And the other thing is that the Pixel seven Pro is $250 off right now. That's true. Well, yes. So Google is having a very big 25 years sale, right? Isn't it? A 25th birthday, right? 25th birthday. Yes. So, oh, [00:43:30] happy birthday Google. So they are selling all of most of their big hardware right now at a pretty steep discount of the seven Pro $250 off the six 50 right now, the

Cathy Gellis (00:43:42):
25% I want off my phone is its size. I don't want the phones to be this big.

Jason Howell (00:43:50):
What is your phone right now, Kathy? What do you have?

Cathy Gellis (00:43:53):
A three I think. And everything else is at least marginally bigger than it, although at least with the seven [00:44:00] A one of the dimensions, it didn't go down to three sides, but it went down from anything previous. And with the eight it looks like not the eight pro because they know that one's going to be big, but the eight pro is slightly smaller than the seven A and one dimension, but not in the other. So, and it still doesn't quite fit in my pocket. So I'm holding my breath, keeping this thing alive. I need something that I can actually carry with me and they're not doing it. [00:44:30] They did do a phone, but they folded it the wide way so it didn't make it any smaller and they charged $2,000 for it, which I'm not putting $2,000 in my pocket. So I'm holding my breath waiting for something that is usable for me.

(00:44:46):
And they're kind of starting to turn the corner where they're not necessarily making them all bigger, but they're not making them smaller. And I don't completely buy all the reasons that they're not doing that. [00:45:00] And this is very inconvenient for me because I would rather get a Pixel Android than anybody else's because I like being closer to the mothership in terms of the operating system and getting updates and things like that. But also the Samsung, which has the really nice flip, it also isn't particularly affordable either. It just happens to be much more affordable than the pixel folding.

Jason Howell (00:45:22):
Than the pixel fold. Yeah. The Z flip was going to be, oh, there we are. Kathy Wig, bring the fire, Jo

Cathy Gellis (00:45:29):
Esposito. Okay, and [00:45:30] now I'm going to tell you, you misspelled my name.

Jason Howell (00:45:32):
Its C, not K. Try again. Jo Esposito or fan, did you four A? Did you try I pixel for a, I mean it's easy for me to say I have, you don't have a three, but I remember having the four and then moving down to the four A and it was significantly smaller and it was actually fairly comfortable to be that small. So have you looked at the four A? I

Cathy Gellis (00:45:59):
Didn't, [00:46:00] but if at this point I'd want to invest in a phone that is so not the latest, I could see maybe giving it seven A in an eight world, but I'm not quite sure I can justify getting a four in an eight world because then

Jason Howell (00:46:16):
These

Cathy Gellis (00:46:16):
Things getting supported.

Jason Howell (00:46:18):
I agree. At that point you're buying it right at the end of its support. And I

Cathy Gellis (00:46:23):
Mean if this phone dies on me, actually, and I should think about it. If the phone dies on me and the only thing I can have [00:46:30] to limp through, hopefully something better coming out and it's cheap enough than fine, maybe I would get a four A just so I have a phone. But I mean, normally I'd rather get something that good, I've made this purchasing decision and I don't need to think about this for the next umpteen years.

Jason Howell (00:46:50):
Well, there we go. We got the correction. Thank you, Joe. He works fast. Kathy with a C, I'm sure we'll have five more stickers by the end of this show.

Cathy Gellis (00:47:00):
[00:47:00] Collect them all.

Jason Howell (00:47:02):
Exactly. No, seriously collect them all. Yes. He's the one that's on fire creating the stickers. I was thinking of the Pixel five, which if you remember, the five was kind of like the well was the Covid release and it was a 5.7 inch device. So it's a little bit more recent, but still, again, you're dated as far as this is a phone that came out a couple of years ago, and not to mention the five was [00:47:30] largely pointed at as, okay, really that was your follow-up, even though kind of understood for the time why it was what it was, it just what didn't move the bar forward very much as far as the pixel phones were concerned. But the reason that I bring it up is because when it came out, I remember feeling like, okay, Google's actually caring about the small form factor. Again, that was a 5.7 inch. It was pretty small in light of today's gigantic devices six two. [00:48:00] Yeah, 6 2, 6 3 and I guess the eight that you're talking about, there is no exact figure that Google is saying yet that it is this size or that or whatever. But we do know that it is smaller than the eight pro and significantly smaller. I don't know that it's going to be a 5.7 inch, but I mean it could be a six inch, could be and 6.2, but that might even be too large for you based on what you're saying.

Cathy Gellis (00:48:30):
[00:48:30] I mean they end up futzing around with the bevel and the green going to the edge, which I care about because I want the case to be protected. I don't want this thing, it's going to land on the floor and I want it to not crack immediately, but I don't care enough. The thing is, if it's not fitting in my pocket, this phone all of a sudden loses so much utility to me that it isn't worth negotiating. Like, oh, I need a little bit more of the screen. The flip is gorgeous. It is, but really nice. [00:49:00] I covet it, but I'm not quite sure I want to move away to a third party producer and it's still pretty expensive. Although it's

Jason Howell (00:49:07):
The Google flip. No, it's a fold. It's not a,

Cathy Gellis (00:49:13):
That's the book size, the Google one folded. Yeah, Google one folds the long way so it doesn't get the smaller profile and it was horrifically expensive. So I'm kind of holding my breath to see if maybe the next time they do major releases, there's a new foldy thing and one that would go the [00:49:30] better way and also not cost an arm and a leg. But I mean I think it'll happen eventually, but I don't think it's going to happen before my current phone dies.

Jason Howell (00:49:39):
No, I don't think so either. I do think that Google eventually has some sort of a flip, but obviously it's not going to happen in October, which kind of sounds like that's what you need. You need a phone now. Yeah, I mean, I totally understand the desire to not get a phone that moves away from the Google thing, the Pixel thing. [00:50:00] Having said that, if I was to do that, I would seriously consider the Z flip. It is a really nice phone and Samsung's got a lot better over the years as well.

Cathy Gellis (00:50:11):
And they've also, they've got new generations of theirs too. So actually then it puts me in the same conundrum. In theory, the older models will be cheaper and maybe one at a price point that's like, okay, this isn't obnoxious and I treat it more disposable, but I'm wary of getting older models because I worry [00:50:30] about the updates and the support and things like that. And I've not been a Samsung consumer, so I don't know where that takes me. But they're working, really the market is working to attract me as a potential consumer because they came out with something that meets my need and they're only the only game in town that's coming close.

Jason Howell (00:50:48):
Well, Samsung, as far as updates are concerned, Samsung is kind of the top of the heap. They are, if I'm not mistaken, five years Google commits to three years [00:51:00] of major US five years security patches. Samsung I believe is four years oss, five years security. I'm trying to get confirmation on that. Okay. Yeah. Technically if were to, yes, and I am correct, I'm seeing it now. If you were to get last year's flip, you'd get the same amount of updates as this year's pixel, if that makes sense.

Cathy Gellis (00:51:26):
Oh, okay. You

Jason Howell (00:51:27):
Know what I mean? That would take you to the same distance.

Cathy Gellis (00:51:30):
[00:51:30] That's eerie, but okay.

Jason Howell (00:51:32):
Weird way to think about it. If you got last year's flip, it would take you to the same point as if you got this year's pixel.

Cathy Gellis (00:51:40):
But getting back to our earlier discussion about antitrust, this is the market potentially working where all of a sudden we're talking about what are my choices, what are my needs? And which manufacturer is delivering to me. And Google is not delivering me what I want, but another vendor maybe. So yeah, there you go. So Google is completely exonerated in case dismissed. So [00:52:00] we're fine.

Jason Howell (00:52:00):
Case dismissed. Case

Cathy Gellis (00:52:02):
Dismissed.

Jason Howell (00:52:04):
So let's see here from moving on from the Pixel to, oh Ant, do you have the Sunday ticket? I know you watch football on the weekends. Do you care much about N F L or is it all college football? Got to tell you, I would love to have the Sunday ticket, but not for that dag-gum price not happening. It's too expensive. I saw this news that they had this amazing percentage [00:52:30] of signups with this package on YouTube tv, and I'm like, I thought people were out on money. I thought people were broke. Oh, but priorities, sir. Yeah. N F L supersedes any sort of monetary, the kids,

Cathy Gellis (00:52:44):
I was saying social media was awash with people being like, I'm providing tech support to my parents to help them to sign up for YouTube TV today.

Jason Howell (00:52:54):
Yeah. Was he part of that too though? Miss Kathy was the Disney E S P [00:53:00] N and spectrum issue that happened last week, right on the day of college football season starting and roughly six days out before N F L started. So a lot of people signed up for YouTube TV right then and there, assuming nothing was going to happen. Those that are spectrum cable customers. And of course, as soon as you go to the YouTube TV page, there's this huge banner, Hey, join now for the N F L Sunday ticket. I'm a subscriber [00:53:30] and been on YouTube TV for a long time and I keep telling that Daggum ad, no, and it still pops up. I'm like, come on man, it's not going to work for me. It's too much. Well, you can get a seven day free trial if you don't want to pay. That's nice. Try not falling for it, dude. Not happening.

Cathy Gellis (00:53:47):
I have nothing nice to say about any of this industry. And I don't just say that because I'm a Cal fan who just had my conference blown up because apparently there wasn't enough money in all the right places. [00:54:00] And I don't know what the uc regions were thinking and letting U C L A leave and being surprised that the conference that their other school was in collapsed around them. But it's all about the money and it's just insane. And I'm sorry, the money does not justify the head injuries. The best you could do is to say that there's some sense of community and story tradition and that there's other valuable things that college sports help hold us together. But it's all come down to the money. And I am angry, angry, angry. Although [00:54:30] also slightly relieved because at least we do have a conference to go to next year. But this is, oh my God, this is terrible. And the way that money just inserts itself, including at the college level is ridiculous. And it's all monopolistic. And then it's got weird claims to copyright. How can sportscast be copyrighted? The best argument you get is that the video capture was some sort of original work of authorship, but that's really pretty thin. [00:55:00] And this idea that, oh, we author the sport is like, are you saying you fixed the game? That this game is something that you've contrived to play out in a certain way, otherwise on

Jason Howell (00:55:10):
Factual. I know. Yeah. Raise the roof. Yes. Oh gosh.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:18):
There is a lot of stupid to talk about this week.

Jason Howell (00:55:21):
Yes. That could even be the title. A lot of stupid to talk about this week's topic. Lots of stupid. Yeah, it is. Oh, I talk [00:55:30] sports on here. It is. Nice. There's someone else comes on here and Yale's about the ails of sports. Oh, nice work Ms. Kathy.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:38):
Thank you. I mean, I tied it together with copyright. Yes, you did.

Jason Howell (00:55:42):
And you really put a very nice point on it too. I hadn't really considered that, but it's true. It's not like they're out there creating some unique play that they wrote start to finish. It's a capture of some people playing a game and yeah. That's crazy.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:58):
Yeah, I don't think it's enough to [00:56:00] just say, if you put people on a field and heres the rules, that there's original work of authorship based on the way it plays out. Especially if we want to believe that this competition is actually a competition between the players. I think there's a real big hypocrisy with the argument to say that they have authored it and that the game is not fixed. And I think it's time to start asking questions. I'm not saying it's fixed, but I think basically claiming that it is fixed in order to get their monopoly. And I think they need to pick,

Jason Howell (00:56:29):
Not to mention FanDuel [00:56:30] and all of those big partnerships that just happened this year too with the N F L and so forth.

Cathy Gellis (00:56:36):
Just and talk about, talk to

Jason Howell (00:56:37):
Me Ms. Kathy,

Cathy Gellis (00:56:38):
Talk about our monopolies like this garbage for like, okay, is Google being slightly antitrust? Maybe a little bit, but compared to everything else we're putting up within Monopoly land, it's nothing. We have serious problems with monopolies, including with the ones that we keep handing out willy-nilly to single players. And then it skews every market and every consumer experience [00:57:00] and our athletes who keep getting head injuries and the schools and their academics and the storied leagues of a hundred years and our connection to history. It's all taking a dive, but not the monopolies. The monopolies are fine.

Jason Howell (00:57:15):
We're going to have her back soon. Right? Absolutely. I don't even want to talk about the details on this story anymore. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We set it up. Nice story. [00:57:30] We can move on for that one. So how does Kathy feel about AI generated political ads? Okay. Alright. I could set this up just a little bit, give you some time to AI generate your thoughts, but Google is going to require that political advertisers prominently disclose their ads made with ai, particularly as we're leading [00:58:00] into this highly politicized season leading up to the next presidential election, starting in November, Google says that advertisers will be required to disclose when an election ad features some sort of synthetic content depicting realistic looking people or events, which by the way, this has already been happening. There was an AI [00:58:30] generated image targeting President Joe Biden in an ad by the Republican National Committee last April.

(00:58:39):
There was, apparently, I haven't seen this one, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had an attack ad against Donald Trump and Anthony and Fauci and had AI generated images there. So basically Google is getting ahead of this trend and saying, as we go move [00:59:00] forward, you must stipulate when this was generated by a computer, this audio was computer generated, or this image does not depict real events. Something along those lines, and something that is more than an inconsequential adjustment to removing red eye with AI or brightening an image, that sort of stuff that wouldn't need to be disclosed. But it's the really consequential stuff that will, and I think [00:59:30] that's good news. I think absolutely something like this should be disclosed, especially considering where we are right now in this highly politicized environment. I like this idea and I wonder, will this carry over to the television side of things and will they have some type of precedence that says, you know what?

(00:59:51):
We can't just have this stuff going out to the millions of people on their regular Overthe Air TV for free, and them assuming all [01:00:00] of this stuff is real and screwing up our democratic system even more. So I wonder if this would carry over. But then I also wonder what will these campaigns do to try to combat this? Will they still just continue to create some content, but create the story as it's not political, just be some generic story and then here's a depiction of [01:00:30] a man that's deciding to go to the liquor store and it's getting robbed and he just walks in and walks out, oh, by the way, it happened to look like Joe Biden, but it didn't necessarily say at the end, vote for this person or vote for that. It was just a narrative, a story there. I wonder if we'll see stuff like that happening.

Cathy Gellis (01:00:50):
So I think the question that we're wrestling with a little bit is I don't think it's bad that Google is attempting a policy. I think the question is whether the policy is [01:01:00] workable or does it need tuning and what could make it more effective? We may have to wait and see, because I think what you're describing is that there's some gaming that could potentially happen depending on how they write it. And I think also in terms of Facebook had had, not in the AI world, but had some rules based on political ads and it was a mess. It was something that might've been well-meaning, but it ended up just sort of incentivizing poor behavior. So it kind of ended up making the problem worse as opposed to better. So it's worth caring about [01:01:30] the quality of Google's internal policy decision, but I'm not that worried about it because I think the general principle of is Google trying?

(01:01:38):
I don't think that's necessarily bad. We will need to care about how they do it, but in and of itself, I think the internal platforms deciding to say, look, we don't like furthering this. We think it's damaging. So we want to say no to it. And as long as platforms have that sort of editorial discretion, they can say no to it. And I don't object to Google exercising that prerogative. What [01:02:00] worries me more is a bill I saw proposed by Senator Klobuchar and Josh Hawley trying to make it illegal. And then there's another senator involved, I think it's Collins, but Klobuchar and Hawley do not say Hi. We've got a nice First Amendment protecting law that we are proposing here. It's got neon warning signs all over it, and there's a little bit that might be appropriate for government to do if it's over the air because that's one of the angles [01:02:30] that the government does get to regulate and possibly maybe something that would get under the F T C in terms of deceptiveness, but it's got to be a light touch. And I just see all the moral panics trying to clamp down on expression without understanding the technology or the issues or how people use it. And I would rather support Google as a private actor trying to figure this out as opposed to supporting the government trying to figure this out because they're not going to and it's going to be damaging.

Jason Howell (01:02:59):
Another piece to this [01:03:00] is I was dealing with my students this week, so I use spellcheck. Is that using ai? I use Translate? Is that using ai? What does it really mean to tell? I'm fine with the transparency. I think that's a fine rule, but what is it really telling the public? I used a tool, I used Photoshop and you can do a lot more of a Photoshop to make fake things up. Doesn't ant know, but I [01:03:30] corrected the image. Where is the line here in terms of what we're trying to actually tell the public about things? Just it was made with ai. The issue is you took responsibility for this and if it's a lie, it's a lie. Whether it was made by a human or a machine, it doesn't matter

Cathy Gellis (01:03:48):
If

Jason Howell (01:03:49):
We're demonizing AI now.

Cathy Gellis (01:03:50):
Yeah, well, AI is suffering from the same branding defects of the people who are promulgating five G. I mean that was a branding that just came [01:04:00] and bit everybody with the idea of five G, five G, and then everyone's like five G is evil. And then they're like, no, no, no, it's something else. It's something else. So one of the problems is AI is being just overused as a buzzword. Nobody really knows what it means and nobody knows what it does. And so you can't really scrutinize whether it's good, bad or otherwise because it's doing 10 million things. And some of them are fine and some of them are not fine, and a lot of it is misunderstood. So I kind of think that anybody who's like, Hey, I will save us, is kind of [01:04:30] getting what they deserve because a lot of this is moral panic. On the other hand, there's some really dumb ideas.

Jason Howell (01:04:36):
We got to cue it.

Cathy Gellis (01:04:39):
Oh, I did not mention

Jason Howell (01:04:40):
Feeling about this.

Cathy Gellis (01:04:44):
I did not know that you had that.

Jason Howell (01:04:47):
We just created it for you, Kathy. We were waiting for you to say world panic, and then we had the AI whip it together. That's kind of power you use. Oh,

Cathy Gellis (01:04:56):
That totally redeems. That AI is totally fine.

Jason Howell (01:04:59):
I know. [01:05:00] I don't know how else we could have animated Jeff saying that. Seriously. Yeah, it's true. What is the cutoff? What is the delineation? What's the reason? Yeah, I was going to say that's a really good point. Okay. It's one thing to say AI created this and to create rules around that, but what is the reason for the rule is because we don't want people to be misled. Is it because we're afraid of the technology and what it could lead to? Therefore [01:05:30] we have to start here? Or what is the reason? That's a really important question. And again, right now, this is just for policy and political ads, but okay, so after November, will we see this type of message for Coca-Cola or the brands that decide to use AI generated content to sway people into buying their products?

Cathy Gellis (01:05:52):
Coca-Cola just did, Coca-Cola just rolled out what is being referred to as a collection of soda experiences [01:06:00] driven by eight. I like

Jason Howell (01:06:03):
Why there It goes one by numbers, but we can contribute it to the cause. Here, if you go down to line one 19, Coke y, 3000 y, 3000 Blas on the can is made with ai. Oh no, what the heck does that mean?

Cathy Gellis (01:06:20):
I was alive when they rolled out new Coke, new Coke. And I have a sense that nobody who's attached to this decision was alive when they rolled out new Coke because the idea that you would make [01:06:30] that mistake again,

Jason Howell (01:06:32):
They'll make this mistake for 30 years. It's just

Cathy Gellis (01:06:36):
Exactly. Well, they went nearly a century the first time, so I don't know why the stupid is accelerating.

Jason Howell (01:06:42):
Right. So I went to Bard and I asked it to give me a recipe for a new Coke. My Internet's acting funny. I dunno if you can get to blue sky there, Jason. And it's actually very funny from what it says. Do you see that in the next line? One 20? Let's [01:07:00] see here. So what is it? It's line 1 21 20? Yeah. Oh, I see. Oh, there it is. Okay. Sorry. I was doing a Google search for Blue Sky, Jeff Jarvis. I didn't realize it was in the doc. Oh, okay. And I'm not logged in, so of course I can't, can't see. Nevermind.

(01:07:16):
If you're getting to it, can you read it or I can? No, I can't because I can some really weird going on with my D N Ss for bio. I have it. Some sites aren't coming up. He says, give me a recipe for a futuristic flavored cola drink, and [01:07:30] it gives them a list of ingredients. You get a cup of water, cup of sugar, half a cup of cola syrup, quarter cup of lemon juice, quarter, a cup of lime juice, vanilla extract, a cinnamon teaspoon of nutmeg and a pinch of black pepper, pepper, pepper. I think we may just made Dr. Pepper and then it went into how to actually do the mixture and heating it and cooling it off properly. It's pretty thorough here on the next page, it gives you other possibilities to throw [01:08:00] it in for variety. Okay. Yeah, I just asked Claude the same question. Oh, you did? Yeah. You want to know how it differs? It created a drink called futuristic fizz, one cup lemon lime soda. Hey, you can't do that. It says take Sprite or seven it up. No, the point is to create a soda drink, not create a soda drink out of another already existing soda drink. This recipe already doesn't work.

Cathy Gellis (01:08:28):
I want to ask the question though, [01:08:30] when it thinks it's doing this, it's not actually suggesting adding real cocaine.

Jason Howell (01:08:36):
Yeah, not that time.

Cathy Gellis (01:08:37):
I mean, how is it programmed of where that's not a thing that it thinks should go into something called Coke?

Jason Howell (01:08:43):
Well, let's see here. Claude include cocaine. Let's see. Oh no. I cannot recommend adding illegal or dangerous substances.

Cathy Gellis (01:08:52):
Oh, interesting. Because the original Coke did not have that concern. The original Coke has its name because they did throw in all sorts of [01:09:00] terrible poisonous now controlled substances.

Jason Howell (01:09:03):
Yeah. I'm trying to reason with Claude right now. I said like the original Coca-Cola, and it said, I understand your reference now. Oh, it gets it. It didn't before it gets it. Now

Cathy Gellis (01:09:17):
I feel so validated that the bot understands me.

Jason Howell (01:09:23):
So now it gave me, it explains the history around the Coca leaf and everything. It says [01:09:30] modern sodas do not contain any cocaine whatsoever. However, here is a revised recipe of the recipe it originally wrote with a nod to the original Coke that aims to capture the flavor while being perfectly legal and safe, and they called it futuristic fuzz 1886 style. And so there you go. So it's not quite cocaine, but no, I think the closest you get is cayenne pepper. But anyways, [01:10:00] there you go. That was our AI creating soda segment. Didn't see that one coming.

Cathy Gellis (01:10:07):
It's weekend soda.

Jason Howell (01:10:08):
Yeah. Although I am curious to taste this Y 3000 because why the heck not? I can't even remember if the new Coke was actually horrible or if it was just different, and that's why people hated it. It was sweet. They were trying to compete with Pepsi, so it was sweeter. Oh, okay. I remember people really being ill about it. It didn't really bother me. I remember people being, I didn't [01:10:30] drink a lot of soda like that back then, but then I remember when they decided to bring Coca-Cola classic. That's right. To try to save themselves. Yes. I'm bi Cola, I'll have Pepsi or Coke. It doesn't much matter. But Bi Cola back in the day, I actually haven't had any since 2001. I can't have caffeine. I used to have basically a six pack a day. Oh, that's too much. Wow. Wow, dude. Yeah. Loved it. I wake up first thing in the morning. It is. Yep.

(01:11:00):
[01:11:00] Yes. Was one of them. I am familiar with that. Not on my own, but I know people. I have friends. Okay. Gosh, which direction do we go here? Actually, let's take a pause and just think about, I want you to take a moment and ponder what your AI generated soda would taste like. We'll be back in a moment. Okay. Well, I hope you enjoyed that moment. Thinking about [01:11:30] your AI generated soda now, what are we going to talk about? Let's see here. We've got, I think we pretty much got through most of the Google stuff, but let's open it up at the point to where we can kind of go anywhere we want. Do we actually want to talk about Musk, Elon Musk? I know when that topic comes up, usually at this point we see a bunch of people in chat room start yelling at us.

(01:11:56):
But there's a book and it seems like, I don't know, as much [01:12:00] as I don't really care to talk or spend my time thinking about Elon Musk very much these days, I did enjoy some of Walter Isaacson's other books about famous people. Is anyone excited about this book about Elon Musk by Walter Isaacs? Let me read to you Kara Swisher's review. Okay. I can't say I like this book. I'll be honest with you. Sad and smart sons slowly morphs into mentally abusive father he abhors, except for with rockets, cars [01:12:30] and more money often, right? Sometimes wrong petty jerk always might be crazy in a good way, but also a bad way. That was her entire review. That's a solid summary. Sounds fair.

Cathy Gellis (01:12:44):
I don't know. She's caught criticism for having been a little too reverent of him in the face of evidence earlier on saying that that was misplaced. So [01:13:00] yeah, I think that's one of the problems. I like what Carl Bode keeps posting on social media about, look, we've had warning signs for a long time and everybody just sort of went with the, he's a genius. He must be a genius. And he's kind of like, why is the press supporting this view in the face of evidence to the contrary? And I think his concerns are well taken because there's a harm that results if you treat somebody who's potentially dangerous as some sort of savior because it puts them in a position of being more [01:13:30] dangerous and perhaps we should not do that.

Jason Howell (01:13:32):
I get yelled at by folks. I come off as an apologist or what have you, and that's not necessarily the case. I'm just someone that says, you know what? I give credit where credit is due and I'll give criticism where criticism is due. And yes, he has been a bit of a turd in a lot of situations, but he still deserves some credit for some of the things he's done with getting teams together at Tesla to make EVs more [01:14:00] affordable. The stuff that's going on with SpaceX, even though I could care less about space exploration, the stuff that's happening with SpaceX is pretty impressive. Far as him being able to get all of the right minds in the same room and on the same page and do what they've been doing. They deserve credit for that. He deserves credit for that. But is that him? He's still a turd though, but

Cathy Gellis (01:14:23):
Is that him? A lot of the allegations about his behavior is that he's taken credit for things that really weren't him [01:14:30] that

Jason Howell (01:14:31):
I can't say that, like I say, at least getting people in the same room, a C E O in general is someone that can get a team of folks together to make a company profitable and successful. That's not necessarily saying that c e o is doing all of the work and building the widgets or whatever, but they're part of the brain power to getting everybody on the same page so they can get that job done maybe, right? Maybe

Cathy Gellis (01:14:56):
He's got other people in the room and it sounds like some of the stories are, [01:15:00] other people were actually like, okay, he got a couple of the right people in the room, but everybody took the ball and ran with it. But meanwhile, if we're going to go with the, okay, he at least had the vision to get people in the room and everything else. He didn't do it, but everybody else did. I think we also have to look at the horrific allegations of racism that were happening at the Numi plant for the Tesla. Tesla that is grotesque stuff out of a decades ago, and that was happening in Northern California, right?

Jason Howell (01:15:26):
In Fremont, if

Cathy Gellis (01:15:28):
He's the brilliant genius that causes everything [01:15:30] to follow, then that's on him.

Jason Howell (01:15:32):
Right? Then he takes the blame for that stuff too. That's why I said he deserves both the credit and criticism, in my opinion. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (01:15:40):
I will say something nice though accidentally, but this

Jason Howell (01:15:44):
Is the wrong show for that. Kathy, today is only about you saying not nice things. Just kidding, not allowed.

Cathy Gellis (01:15:52):
The lawsuit that he's filed challenging the AB 5 87, I think it's AB 5 87 from [01:16:00] California that attempts to mandate transparency reports is absolutely correct. That is an unconstitutional law. The lawsuit, which is in part represented by Floyd Abrams, who knows his first amendment is well drafted, well-written, and it's really sickening, but he should win, which means that the state of California needs to write a check for his attorney's fees, and that's a disgusting position for the state of California to have voluntarily put itself in. [01:16:30] It's also sort of reprehensible that we have to leave it to a schmuck like Musk to bring this challenge because it's affecting a lot more people and a lot more platforms who also have money and more credibility, and they've been sending on their hands and they're sending on their hands in a lot of these state bills from California, from Utah, from Texas, from Arkansas. Although there's starting to be some challenges, but we should not let Musk be the hero, and in this particular issue with this particular challenge, he should be the hero because we're [01:17:00] in trouble if he doesn't win.

Jason Howell (01:17:04):
She said something nice.

Cathy Gellis (01:17:06):
I said something nice,

Jason Howell (01:17:08):
Must give hero the same sentence. You shouldn't let this insane narcissistic jerk actually do something. Right? It's kind of what she said.

Cathy Gellis (01:17:17):
We set himself up for. You should not put somebody like that in a position where he's going to be the hero. Why would you enable somebody to accidentally redeem himself when he's otherwise [01:17:30] deserving of so much criticism? And the policy of the state of California has been to put him in that position where, I mean, I don't think anybody would've guessed it that he would actually do something right for the right reasons because most of his personal grasp of the First Amendment is absolutely terrible. But one of the things, yeah,

Jason Howell (01:17:46):
I always hear the whole free speech. Oh, doesn't argument come out of his mouth. And I'm like, none of that makes sense. He's sort of hypocritical in some of the things you say versus some of your actions. Yeah,

Cathy Gellis (01:17:56):
No, he doesn't understand it at all. But one of the things about Musk is he seems [01:18:00] to be somebody who is vulnerable being pushed around by people who have some form of influence over him. And in this particular instance, competent lawyers seem to have had his ear and pushed him to do something, which is actually right. I don't think he personally has any intuition about why his case is just and correct, but somehow he was in a position where he was able to green light it and have it happen, but his otherwise completely out of step with nearly everything else. He engages on a First amendment front. So it's an aberration, but I think [01:18:30] that's part of the evidence of he gets blown with certain wins and just in this case, it was a positive win that blew him in a direction which may be productive but bad on the state of California for putting it in a position where this could happen. I mean, really, if somebody else had brought the lawsuit, it also should be, it's unconstitutional on its face. It's just that the first people to step up and be brave enough to challenge it or this idiot.

Jason Howell (01:19:00):
[01:19:00] So go read the book about Elon Musk or, or dos

Cathy Gellis (01:19:05):
Or read the lawsuit. It was a nice lawsuit.

Jason Howell (01:19:11):
Yeah, read that. If you've got to read something, read that instead. There you go. Although I am still sort of curious about it. I like the way Walter Isaacson kind of creates the story, so I It's got a

Cathy Gellis (01:19:24):
Very large picture of a musk on the cover, so beware.

Jason Howell (01:19:27):
Yeah. Yeah. Be very, very aware. You [01:19:30] have the New Yorker, you have Ronan Farrow, which I think you talked about this last week or before last, talking about how Musk is a government in and of himself, and I think no geography there, whereas the Isaacson books, I picked up the bookstore, I'm not going to buy it, pick up the bookstore, and there is a musk quote followed by a Steve Jobs quote, and I do not want to see any kind of equivalency of those two being made here. Yes, they were both jerks, but one was [01:20:00] a better jerk than the other. Yeah, totally fair. This is actually pretty big news, and Steve Gibson talked about this on security now yesterday, but essentially the UK government is signaling that it's backing away, or rather a defeat of its fight to break end-to-end encryption has to do with the online safety bill and a spy clause [01:20:30] in there that would have required encrypted messaging services to scan users', private messages for child sexual abuse material, C Ss a M.

(01:20:40):
And the government is now basically acknowledging that the technology to do this effectively and securely doesn't actually exist. So they're kind of acknowledging what technologists and security professionals have known for a very long time, which is you can't have your cake and then also eat it. You know [01:21:00] what I mean? You can't offer that kind of access in there. It's just not possible to do it in the ways that the governments, both in the UK and the US and everywhere where they're trying to push back against this encrypted encryption technology. It just can't be done in the way that they think it can be. And at least now the UK government is starting to recognize that then if it can't be done effectively, [01:21:30] then that's just not something that we can pursue. Steve Gibson talked about it yesterday and basically said, this is a very big deal for also signaling to other places like the US that potentially there is something to be said for the fact that that technology cannot be broken into in this way.

(01:21:52):
And if that's the case, it has the potential to have ripple effects as a result, and from the land that supposedly cares [01:22:00] greatly about privacy. You can't have it both ways there. Yeah. Right. So that's a victory. Privacy advocates see it as moderate as a big victory. So the law is still a hot mess. This law originally was that they forced platforms to get rid of legal, but harmful content, that stupidity went away. The getting rid of encryption went away. There's still, I think, age verification for porn and stuff in there, which is a huge [01:22:30] privacy violation. Obviously. I'm not sure what the status is. It is about to pass any minute. I don't think it's passed yet.

(01:22:40):
Should we do a little, I know we talked a little bit about ai, but there's a bunch of other stuff in here. You're the God of AI that's worth, you've got to talk about ai. Not yet, Jeff. Someday maybe, but I'm still very much the student of ai. Okay. Yes. That's firmly [01:23:00] where I feel comfortable right now. I am merely AI emeritus. You are right there with me, man. Google launched the digital futures projects, and I mean, it's a $20 million fund, which by Google standards I would say is a pretty small amount of money, but a good amount nonetheless, managed by google.org and basically granted to academic institutions think tanks, [01:23:30] to take a closer look at ai, the opportunities, the challenges, asking questions will, what impact will AI have on global security? How will AI alter labor and economic structures? Just really broad ideas around the impact, the kind of wide skill impact I wish hadn't gotten rid of Tim, Nick, Gabriel and Margaret Mitchell.

(01:23:53):
No kidding. The stochastic parents paper, but absolutely. Yeah. I wonder how Tim [01:24:00] and others feel about this announcement too little too late. But definitely Google also acknowledged that this is an effort that should be done not just on a singular scale, like a single corporate effort, but a broader scale. And there are other things going on this the Frontier Model Forum that Google is also involved in looking at responsible use of AI through different lenses. But devil's advocate moment, [01:24:30] you said someone would say, this is potentially too little, too late. Why isn't this sound like Google is acknowledging, well, damn, well, maybe we should have done a little bit better with understanding some of the ramifications that AI has put out there. So let's go ahead, let's point forward. Let's go ahead, let's do it and start working towards it. Let's go ahead and try to make this right.

(01:24:59):
Why [01:25:00] would someone say too little too late to that? And that's my question because I can't say I'm glad that they're at least acknowledging this and hoping that they take some other folks that potentially look like me bringing them into the fold and bringing a whole lot of other people into this to help fix this up. But the issue, Ann, is they got rid of a black woman from Africa named Tim Neg, who was leading their responsible AI team alongside Margaret Mitchell, and Yep, [01:25:30] I agree. They did. What I'm saying is now they're like, okay, we now they're trying F up, we effed up. We are going to, we haven't said that quite, but yes. Okay. Alright. But at least they're trying to fix this now. Yes. Okay. Wouldn't see they're making some efforts. I know you don't look at gift horse in the mouth, but I can't help but look at a $20 million donation into this and I can't help but think seriously, [01:26:00] if you feel that passionate about this and you're Google and you've made the mistakes that you have in very recent memory around AI and ethics, why not put more of your money where your mouth is like 20 million?

(01:26:14):
Seems like an incredibly small amount for something that is supposedly incredibly important, or I think you're right here, is by funding outside independent efforts, those that will choose to take Google's money. I think that that's a better [01:26:30] way in some ways than doing it in-house though. They still need an in-house team. Still need an in-house. Yeah, still need

Cathy Gellis (01:26:36):
In-house. I think one of the mistakes in our thinking about this is that Google is as monolithic as everyone expects it to behave. And I suspect that it's a big company with different people, with different senses of what the company should be doing and different amounts of budget with which to do it. And what you might see with sort of a, well, is this a really comprehensive policy that a billion, however many [01:27:00] billions Google is worth, should be doing? I don't know. But is this maybe evidence of some people who figured out what sort of leverage they might have to get the company to at least do something? It may be those people flexing their muscles and at least not stopped. So it also could be cynical with what's the cheapest way we can get the PR shift or something like that. But this may be just the splintering of large companies are really hard to steer, and this is some people who [01:27:30] are able to figure out what to do constructively and being able to do it. But you could still fairly say that, okay, fine, but it's a huge company and it really needs something larger and more comprehensive and maybe that's yet to come and maybe you criticize it if it doesn't come.

Jason Howell (01:27:45):
And I think when I said too little, too late, I'm speaking from the perspective for the assumed perspective of people like Tim, Nick, Gabriel, which is like, okay, now you're doing this. [01:28:00] Where were you a couple of years ago when you canned me for doing this? And I totally understand though there is a point at which they have the right to say that she in particular does have the right to say, wait a minute, now you're doing this. Now you're taking the message, taking the notes from us. Yes, they have the right, but at the same time, I believe there should be some acknowledgement of [01:28:30] them saying, you know what? We better work on this. We better fix this. So let us put our money where our mouth is because everybody's not doing that. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Google is at least in this case, so that is good.

(01:28:43):
I know Jeff, you had thrown into the rundown your comments to the copyright office on ai, I think as related to this story. Is there anything you wanted to add on that? Yeah, so the copyright office put out a call for comment [01:29:00] and it actually a pretty good document. All in all though, it had a few things in there that I found frightening, but that's normal for me. I get scared and Kathy gets angry, and that's what we do Among, they asked these things, these questions, but among the things they asked was whether or not, whether or not there should be a mandated licensing [01:29:30] of content to ai. Well, okay, what I point out here is the journalists read each other and adapt each other's content constantly, and we don't license it to do that. So what sets AI apart then? Should there be the content, the copyright office asks an opt-in structure? You can't read from my content unless you get an opt-in. Well, that sounds kind of okay, but on the other hand, no, [01:30:00] we have a right to read in this country. Part of the right to speak is also a right to read. And so there's tough issues around here. So I actually filed this as comments to the copyright office, unlike Kathy, who actually gets into the Supreme Court and does things that have an impact. This will have no impact at all, except I got a blog post out of it. Is

Cathy Gellis (01:30:22):
This the one that's due on October 18th? Yeah. Yeah, because you're just making the rest of us look bad that we haven't done our homework yet.

Jason Howell (01:30:30):
[01:30:30] Oh, good, Josh. Yeah. See, that's the problem, Kathy, I don't do the homework. I just blather my opinion. Now you're actually going to do homework.

Cathy Gellis (01:30:38):
I mean, I am aspiring to write a comment, but I haven't done it yet. So I'm sort of like, wait, wait, I'm not ready to talk about my comment yet. I haven't written it and I've got time about my late.

Jason Howell (01:30:52):
But I also wanted to point out some of the history here, which is that, and I might've talked this about the show before, but the 1792 Post Office Act [01:31:00] provided for newspapers to send each other copies of their newspapers for free. That is to say, didn't charge for the newspaper, didn't charge for the postage so that it would start a defacto national network of news long before there was the Telegraph and the Associated Press and stuff, and newspapers employed people, their honest to God job title was Scissors editor. And they would cut out stories from the paper and then say, we can all run these stories. And it was okay as long as you credited them. That's all they wanted was be credited When copyright [01:31:30] started, it did not cover newspapers, it did not cover magazines, it didn't cover news. Even when it did cover newspapers, there was an argument that news shouldn't be included.

(01:31:39):
So this idea that, oh, news is sacrosanct and the New York Times, you don't dare read our newspaper and learn from it as an AI is a historical as can be in the concepts of copyright. And Kathy knows far more about this than I do, but even I know that based on this, [01:32:00] there are issues here. So I just wanted to kind of respond to this in my journalistic way. And I say it there one point I said, I'm no lawyer. It seems like fair use to me for the machine to read. And if we restrict the machine from reading, does that set a precedent about us as humans being able to read? And that's what worries me. What is the difference?

Cathy Gellis (01:32:21):
Alright, so if I don't have time to write my own comment, I think I'm just going to do plus one to everything Jeff said.

Jason Howell (01:32:28):
There we go,

Cathy Gellis (01:32:30):
[01:32:30] Your

Jason Howell (01:32:31):
Homework to read it.

Cathy Gellis (01:32:31):
I would like to give everything you've just said, a standing ovation that was APTT fascinating and I did not know about the 1792 Act. Highest crazy I can imagine. And that was juicy and delicious, and thank you for that.

Jason Howell (01:32:43):
Oh, oh, now I got to get her angry to make the theme with the show continue. Well, I also go on about this thing I've talked about in the show before, my fta crazy concept of credit, right? Versus copyright and how we have to re-envision this idea that creativity [01:33:00] is property, that art is the artifact, not the act and collaboration and creation. And there's all these other ideas we've got to figure out here. So at the end I just say, good on you, copyright asking questions. But please don't rush into any moral panic stupidity here.

Cathy Gellis (01:33:17):
I'm not sure abouts

Jason Howell (01:33:18):
To have you read this and see what you

Cathy Gellis (01:33:19):
Think. Okay, because I'm not sure about that last point. I think you're getting into moral rights territory and there'll be dragons there as well. But in terms of the right to read and everything, [01:33:30] one of the things that's so scary about the moment in time we're at is the, oh, don't train up your ai. Using my material is using the same legal levers and the same legal arguments as kids don't get to read books or kids don't get to read the internet. If you don't respect a right to read, it's going to show up in a whole bunch of places and be really, really bad and also completely counterproductive [01:34:00] because the whole point of copyright is to incentivize, is to promote the progress of science and news arts. There was knowledge to be spread and you needed a mechanism to encourage it to be available, to be spread. But we keep getting fixated on the, oh, what did it take you to produce it? And missing part two, which is why do we care that you've produced it? It's because it got spread and people got to benefit from reading this stuff, and that whole part of the copyright argument has been left on the cutting room floor and that's bad too.

Jason Howell (01:34:30):
[01:34:30] Before I move on, I just want to say that, Jeff, you mentioned way back when the thing about news originally not being copyrighted and then there was a hubbub about should news be copyrighted. And what it reminded me of was earlier in the show when we were talking about the Super Bowl and we were talking about football and the act of playing a game, being copyrightable, what are we copying? What [01:35:00] are we protecting when we, and so I don't know that I have a point around that, but it was an interesting kind of corollary between the two things kind of going, oh, the more things change, the more things stay the same. It's like the argument, pardon me, I haven't had a plug yet, so I'll plug it in. The Gutenberg parenthesis out now. Go guttenberg parenthesis.com for a 25% discount from Bloomsbury. I argue that this whole idea of content and property is at an artifact of the Gutenberg age.

(01:35:28):
And before [01:35:30] the press, we didn't think of this as content. We didn't think that it was owned. People copied things. The only way you could get a book was to copy it and copyright didn't come along until from 1450 to 1710 before that business model arrived. It's not a forever thing. It's an institution that was invented for a purpose. And that purpose was not to protect creators, it was to create a marketplace to make creativity, a [01:36:00] creation, a tradable asset for the benefit of publishers and booksellers. So now we come to today and we have a whole different world of creation and collaboration possible, and we're being hamstrung and people are trying to mangle copyright law as protectionism. I'll get off this I horse right now.

Cathy Gellis (01:36:19):
It's the correct horse.

Jason Howell (01:36:20):
Yeah,

(01:36:22):
It's the highest horse at least. Whoa, Nelly. Whoa. Calm down there, right, Nelly. Okay. Okay. [01:36:30] Sorry. I'm just waiting for the opportunity to do my horse impression. There we go. Oh, you're good. That was good. Do it again. Do it again. Okay. Okay. That's all I got. It's the only impression I got and people who know me really well know that that is absolutely a lie, but I'm not going to tell you the other ones. Oh, oh. Now we have a challenge to get Jason's impressions. You're just going to have to stumble across them. They just happen. Do you do a John Wade here? No, I cannot.

Cathy Gellis (01:36:58):
We don't have a theme. [01:37:00] Is it just animal impressions or does he do people or, I don't know, machines

Jason Howell (01:37:04):
Or, yeah, it's totally random. He's just not going to know until some random thing triggers me to do an impression of a horse. They just happen like that. This is just how my mind works. I guess. Getting quickly off of me, Sam Altman continues to scare everyone with his view on artificial intelligence. This time speaking at Salesforce Dreamforce event, Altman admitted [01:37:30] that he isn't so sure that artificial intelligence will protect humanity if it goes rogue or even him for even him. Even him. I knew he was a prepper, but oh my God. If you scroll down a little bit, Jason, he's a Mondo prepper. He talks about filing guns, gold land. Yeah. What else? I know that actually close. This is guy who's in charge of our future. Okay, so [01:38:00] what is he getting out of this? That was my question. Ai, he continues to kind of say these things.

(01:38:10):
Is he humanizing himself? Is that kind of the goal here? He's another long termist. He and Teal and Musk Jason. We're going to do long-termism on the AI show at some point because it's an amazing part of the story and it's almost a religious fervor that there's [01:38:30] saving the future of humanity. That's why they have transhumanism with chips in their heads, which is what Musk is doing. That's why they believe in having lots and lots and lots of babies. They think they make the best babies. That's why they want to populate Mars in case the earth gets screwed up and we really don't care about Earth. Anyway, that's had a great discussion about that on Club Twit with Daniel Suarez and Hugh Howie, but you guys have to subscribe to catch that. Wow. Sorry. Oh, good plug. Good plug and yay.

(01:39:00):
[01:39:00] But he's the c e O of an open ai. But yet everything I've seen in the last 10 minutes from Sam Altman, it was all of this gloom and doom talk about ai. So I'm to the point of, all right, it's a good question to answer. What is the end game for this guy? It's marketing. I'm so powerful. I can destroy the earth. Yeah, and you better regulate. This is so dangerous. You better regulate, but not [01:39:30] me because I'm Washington. Regulat it my way though. I'm fine. Yeah. Basically saying I regulate it my way, how I say so. Yes, that kind of thing. Okay, nice try Jackass. Oh, sorry. I said that out loud.

Cathy Gellis (01:39:44):
My entire appearance on the show could have just been reduced to that sentence. So IMP applies to everything

Jason Howell (01:39:52):
Perfect. Expect a sticker coming, especially now that my bad [01:40:00] editors see lots of stupid.

Cathy Gellis (01:40:05):
That makes it sound though, that I am clairvoyant in some way as opposed to it just being so self-evident. We are just surrounded by it.

Jason Howell (01:40:14):
Nothing else surrounded by stupid. Real quick here at the end of this AI segment, and then we can get into the change log of which there's a solid number of stuff here. A handful of this show is fast [01:40:30] producty thing. Am I running it too fast this show? I'm looking at the clock, I'm like, man, this clock is going fast, dude. Yeah, I love this. Show's some great stuff. Love this show. That's great stuff to talk about. That's what happens. And we're getting older and when we get older, time seems to move by. Fantastic. You still going to, I got one story. I'd love to sneak into the ai. I know you skipped over it. Oh, did I? Oh yes. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. Do that one. They're, they're teaching AI to smell, so Okay, [01:41:00] then I don't know why I find that fascinating. It's not a news story, it's a paper, but they're figuring out how to associate certain molecules with smell so that AI can smell. Wow. An odor map of human olfactory perception brought to ai. I don't know if I ever want to see or smell an odor map that doesn't. Well, I wonder. I think that has a place for medical reasons [01:41:30] down the road that could potentially help some stuff out. So yeah, I'm down for

Cathy Gellis (01:41:34):
This. Actually, my first thought was, oh, the AI doesn't have covid then. But actually I suppose Anne's point is that that could have applications for people who are stuck with losing their olfactory sense. And then the other thought that I had was, it's actually creepy, but I don't think for the obvious way, and I was thinking about it in terms of how to the extent that AI truly approximates human [01:42:00] intelligence, which I don't think we're anywhere near, but in theory we're trying to get there and that actually seems key and a really important thing to get right in order to unlock that, where you actually can start to truly mimic human intelligence because of the connection of how humans respond to smell and memory. If you are going build a new out of

Jason Howell (01:42:22):
My brain, Kathy, it's like we're on the same wavelength. That was exactly what I was thinking. I was like, there's got to be a connection between this and memory and [01:42:30] yeah, you nailed it. That's awesome.

Cathy Gellis (01:42:31):
Yeah, and I think that's the thing. If you're going to I, we lose the site with the AI discussions that in theory we're talking about building commander data, but in the meantime, we're nowhere near Commander data. We're just fancy software and I don't think we quite understand that there's this gap. But if you are shooting for a commander data, and it's interesting, I don't think the show actually ever dealt with him smelling things, but maybe I'm forgetting something. But I think if you're going to try to build [01:43:00] something which could be sentient or so close to human that you can really approximate sentient in a way which is credible, that does seem like one of the key things you might need to get right along the way.

Jason Howell (01:43:14):
Apparently in the next generation Angel one data is perfectly capable of smelling and accurately distinguishing a variety of smells. Just

Cathy Gellis (01:43:25):
I appreciate that. That fact was so readily available to us.

Jason Howell (01:43:30):
[01:43:30] It's up. And

Cathy Gellis (01:43:33):
I actually feel rather embarrassed that I did not remember that myself. I am ashamed. I shall go watch some reruns posthaste

Jason Howell (01:43:41):
That one episode. I'm thinking that the robot dogs will now be able to sniff. Oh, they'll be super accurate. Yeah, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with that. A robot, robot dogs bomb sniffing dog. Right? I'm totally [01:44:00] fine with that. And I listened to a podcast called Huberman Labs with Mr. Andrew Huberman, I believe he's at Stanford. And a couple episodes back, we spoke about this with far as memory in our olfactory senses and stuff. And it was really, really good discussion. And I could see AI tying into this and could be beneficial for some,

Cathy Gellis (01:44:25):
Are we getting ahead of ourselves? Because the way you were talking about, okay, a bomb sniffing dog. Okay, that makes sense. [01:44:30] But we have machines capable of detecting aromatic molecules. We have smoke detectors. So in theory, what is different about what they're shooting for as opposed to what we currently have now? And that's a question I would throw out. Is

Jason Howell (01:44:45):
That aromatic or

Cathy Gellis (01:44:48):
Well, ultimately there's a molecule and you're detecting the molecule. So how are we detecting the molecule? Is it something where we have to process it in a way that is a smell like humans determine whether the molecule is there because [01:45:00] of our sense of smell or how do we understand it? But is that even important in terms of what the actual purpose is? You just want to detect the molecule. So however the molecule is getting developed, but I think it's a bigger thing for the AI conversation of we keep talking about this magic we haven't had before. That's totally unprecedented. It's not as unprecedented and nobody's being clear about what is new about this, if anything, as opposed to what we already had before. And I think it just absolutely skews [01:45:30] the conversation about whether it's good, bad or otherwise, or whether it creates true problems or is not as useful.

(01:45:37):
There's a gold rush mentality and like, oh, this is all fancy and new. Oh yeah, true, true. I don't think that serves us because I think it both sells snake oil and I think it also masks benefits. And it masks problems because it's just not a clearheaded look at what the new advance actually is. So we can contend with whether that's what [01:46:00] the externalities of that advance is, because at the moment, I mean what we've just described isn't really necessarily in advance. So somebody needs to explain what is different and fancy and then we can go evaluate whether we should be scared.

Jason Howell (01:46:13):
It's my phone. I put it in the rundown. Maybe it's a nothing burger. I don't know.

Cathy Gellis (01:46:16):
No, I mean it's not enough. Nothing. Nothing.

Jason Howell (01:46:18):
Burger smell like

Cathy Gellis (01:46:19):
No, it's not nothing burger

Jason Howell (01:46:21):
Than a burger. Does it have a smell?

Cathy Gellis (01:46:23):
No, but it's not nothing that you did. My objection is not that we talked about it. My objection is that other people have put it in the public discourse [01:46:30] as if this is meaningful and I think it's worth scrutinizing what is the actual meaning here? And even we kind of got like, Ooh, fancy. Let's think in a very sci-fi way of what the implications are. And I mean that's not necessarily bad and inappropriate and we're doing a show, so why not? But it was kind of to take a step back and say, hang on a second, let's look at this a little more closely. And I think the thing that the AI discourse needs more of in general is the, hang on, look at, let's step back and look at this [01:47:00] more closely and figure out that there's even a there.

Jason Howell (01:47:02):
Well, yeah, what that reminds me of unlike the visual arts side of things is Photoshop has existed for a very long time. It has allowed people to do things with photos that at one point they may have felt has been copying or that's a step too far. Now the Photoshop has AI capabilities, people are upset about it again, or artists are upset that it easily [01:47:30] can duplicate their style or whatever. And just sometimes it's like because it's the new thing and it's the new technology, we are angry. But why is the anger there? Is it actually the technology or is this something else? Because Photoshop has always been doing things that really kind of pressed up against the lines of what anyone thought was possible before. And that's just what's happening now. But why is it different?

Cathy Gellis (01:47:57):
That's my point about the marketing. The same reason that five G [01:48:00] blew up. Everyone's trying to say, Ooh, you're going to want five G, you're going to on five G. And then everyone pattern matched and is like, hang on, we're going to hate five G. And the branding blew up. But I think the same thing is happening with AI where everyone's talking about, Hey look, our Photoshop software got more sophisticated. We can do things with less computer power or produce quicker results, whatever. But we're not talking about like, oh, our software is just better. Our software is now new and fancier, indifferent, and it's using this fancy thing. And everyone's like, oh my gosh, in this fancy thing, it's actually scaring me. So now we've [01:48:30] all got pitchforks and torches going after the fancy thing when the fancy thing was really just branding because nobody's really distilling what the differences and the extra shame of it is. There actually are cool things where what are the advances we are making that bring us more to a commander data world and they're all drowned out by just marketing crap where we made our software better. Well, okay, you could talk about that. How is your software better? But you're not having a realistic conversation about how the software is better. [01:49:00] We're talking about something that's close to a marketable form of magic and this is not useful.

Jason Howell (01:49:05):
Yeah, you confused me. I kept on thinking you were saying, I'm not enough of a sci-fi fan. I thought you were saying command or data. I thought this is some doctorate, some legal doctrine I've never heard of. No, I'm not

Cathy Gellis (01:49:16):
Entirely sure why I referred to him by his title and not data or I was just afraid of like I could have said Mr. Data, I don't you trying to be

Jason Howell (01:49:24):
Respectful

Cathy Gellis (01:49:24):
Here. I know I was really respecting the Office of Commander Data. [01:49:30] I am not quite sure what that says I was going to do.

Jason Howell (01:49:36):
And then real quick, Amazon, eBay, both basically taking a page out of the same book because they both have a tool to generate product listings for selling things. So you know of using generative ai. So it's going to get easy. That's interesting, Jason, because the conversation we had before about Google and political ads, thou shalt reveal [01:50:00] ai, number one. Number two, Amazon has now required that if you put a book up or something, you use ai, you're supposed to say so fine, good transparency. However, then they turn around and create tools for the advertisers to create ai. And I suspect it's not going to tell you it was created with ai. No, probably not. Yeah, that's a good point. If it's, I mean, yeah. Are you playing by the same rule book or are you not? In the case of this, that's the point. It's product details.

(01:50:27):
It's money being transferred from one person [01:50:30] to another. One would think those would be reasons to disclose for the same reason that the other things are required to be disclosed because they also carry consequences if they are not. And somebody makes the wrong decision as a result. So that's interesting. I wonder why I have to go back. I'm sorry. It's another Gutenberg moment. I know I have my quota from the show, but you owes two more in the, everybody's going to get drunk. So I mean the first days of print, [01:51:00] no one trusted print because the provenance was not clear. Anybody can make this. Anybody can make a pamphlet. Anybody can make a tweet. Anybody can use ai. These new tools aren't first always distrusted until we come up with the systems. And this is an effort to come up with systems to know what we're dealing with.

(01:51:16):
But in the end, it's still about the responsibility of who uses the output and do they check it and do they stand by it? How about anything created by AI is given on the internet is required. The font [01:51:30] is required to be in a very specific color that cannot be used on any other purpose. It is just a comic Sands is owned by AI comic. I like that. Right. Anything that is ai. Oh, that's perfect actually, anything that is generated by AI has to be printed in comic sands. And then we know, I was thinking about

Cathy Gellis (01:51:51):
The color. I want to see the IP litigation between Pantone and anybody claiming to rule out whatever color it is you've just described. [01:52:00] I mean, sometimes it's also dysfunctional. There's no one to root for. You just want to get 'em in the boxy match and watch them

Jason Howell (01:52:06):
Kill each other, see

Cathy Gellis (01:52:06):
What happens.

Jason Howell (01:52:09):
It's a specific color and it's comic sands and I think we've solved it. I think we've found our answer. And then Adobe has AI for creative Cloud users. It's generative AI for creative cloud users. They're raising the plan prices. So they weren't offering this before. I mean, [01:52:30] I've seen generative AI in some Adobe products that I've been using Photoshop primarily, but that's been beta and now they're pushing it out. That's correct. We've had Firefly for several months now from Adobe, and it was only available as a beta product and you had to have an Adobe account to be able to go in there and use it. And now they're putting it into the actual creative Cloud package now. So you get it by default if you're already paying for that monthly subscription, like someone like [01:53:00] me and the pricing is going to go up. And quite honestly, I didn't really see that as news because that's business. Everything's going up in price. Heck, I'm paying more for fricking YouTube TV and everything else. So sort of expect this to happen.

Cathy Gellis (01:53:20):
You can't expect them to put on all those football games for free. That costs a lot to script and to cast and to,

Jason Howell (01:53:27):
Yeah, true. [01:53:30] Well, there we go. That was this week in ai. Before we go to the change log, any last stories? We'll do the change log, pick some stuff, see here how we've covered, I mean we've talked a lot of this stuff from the stock. You always do a good job, Jason through it, through a lot. Oh, I wanted to sort of go circle back real quick though. And this was from way earlier in the show when we were talking about Google. I mean this is this we Google, but we we're talking about [01:54:00] the pixel launch coming up here in a couple weeks. I wanted to give a shout out to you, Mr. Howell, for unintentionally telling me not to buy the Pixel watch the original one. Oh, were you considering getting the new Because I was considering it. Yeah, I was considering it because they just kept discounting it and then I got another additional discount offer sent to me and I was like, man, part of me is just go ahead because of the price.

(01:54:29):
Didn't necessarily [01:54:30] need it, but I was like, wow, something's not right. Something doesn't feel right. So I asked you about it, why are they pushing us? And you pretty much said to me and you was like, the watch is on your wrist, is it working? And I said, yeah. And he was like, well, why do you need another watch? Why do you need, okay, perfect, perfect, perfect response right there, sir. And so with this Pixel two, do you have any thoughts? I didn't know anything about the specs of it or whatnot, but after watching the Apple [01:55:00] Watch presentation yesterday, it just really cemented in me how much I really liked the look of the Apple Watch from a jewelry standpoint. I am not an iPhone user, don't have any intention to be one. And I would go out and buy an Apple Watch, but it would totally be overkill and too much money considering I wouldn't be able to get any of the use side of it unless I had an iPhone.

(01:55:28):
But from the Pixel two [01:55:30] is, do you think Google's finally going to catch up? No. No. Okay. I mean do I think that Google is going to catch up in the sense the Pixel Watch two has any sort of potential of going toe to toe with the Apple Watch and beating Apple at its game or offering maybe not toe to toe, but at least getting in the playing field. Honestly, we don't know a whole lot about the Pixel Watch two at this [01:56:00] point other than the only thing that I really know is from the teaser that they released, it doesn't look all that different. The form factor looks very similar. I like how it looks. I like how it too, it's a nice, a nicely designed watch. I do like the look a lot there is an improved or altered sensor array underneath that contacts your skin.

(01:56:24):
My understanding there is it's a continuous electrodermal activity sensor, so that's things like calmness, [01:56:30] sweat gland stress, it's like a stress monitor and then it's IP 68 rated, which is dust resistance as well as water resistance. The previous one was water resistant, not necessarily dust resistant. That's all I know about or all that we know about this based on some of the reveals that Google did just a couple of days ago. I don't feel like that's an amazing step into an [01:57:00] entirely different world for the Pixel watch. It seems pretty iterative to me honestly. If you're still super tempted to get the original pixel watch and you've got a screaming deal on it, maybe that's an argument to just get the Pixel watch one then because the two doesn't do now better that much now. Right. I probably have a better deal now with the two coming out.

(01:57:23):
I'll have to look, but it's hard for me. I was just wondering if it was worth the money. Yeah, mean [01:57:30] again, I think it just goes back to what do you want it for? What do you need it for? What do you have right now and what about the thing that you have right now isn't working for you? I'm not entirely certain that the Pixel Watch can fill the gap for you. I think that's a personal, I needed to track my steps. I need it to keep up with my workout sessions. Yeah, I can do that till the time correctly. [01:58:00] Okay. I mean, but at

Cathy Gellis (01:58:01):
That point you've just described my Garmin watch. Yeah,

Jason Howell (01:58:05):
They all do very similar things now. Yeah, and that's what, this is similar. This is not a smart watch, but it also connects to my phone. This is a watch from ings and they do a lot of the smart home stuff and it works fine. It keeps up with the stuff I needed to keep up with, but again, I just saw the jewelry aspect of the Google Watch as well as the Apple watch. [01:58:30] I'm like, those really look nice. I like that and if it was functional, that would be another win for me, but if I don't need to spend that extra money, then don't. This one is functional and it looks fine on my wrist too

Cathy Gellis (01:58:44):
And it may not be enough of a leap where I think it would have to be a really good bargain where basically for X dollars you're getting what you have plus the look you like, plus maybe a little extra functionality and depending on what those X dollars are, [01:59:00] is that worth it to you? But otherwise it does not sound like you're craving everything that a comprehensive smartwatch would bring because your needs aren't there yet. In which case if X is too many dollars, it doesn't make sense to spend it until your needs have changed or the watch is so super duper that screw what you think your needs are. You've got new needs you didn't even know you had, but I don't think you're there yet.

Jason Howell (01:59:24):
No, and I'm not the guy that wants to go around talking into my watch either. I do see people here [01:59:30] in the area talking into their watch. One of my hard hits does that too, and I'm like, yeah, I remember thinking that would be cool to do with the whole Dick Tracy days and all of that. And then I look at my son, I'm like, you're a jerk. You can just pick up your phone. You don't have to. It could be a daggone phone and talk on it, not the watch.

Cathy Gellis (01:59:50):
It's amazing how bored people seem to get when I'm talking to them because they're constantly looking at their watch and then I realized, oh, they're not checking the time. They're just checking a little vibration, but it's sort. [02:00:00] I don't think we've adapted our norms of politeness to deal with this yet.

Jason Howell (02:00:05):
Think so true. Well, if you do decide you want to get the Pixel watch, we talked earlier about Google having the 25 year celebration of the beginning of Google and the Pixel Watch L t e version is the same price as the wifi version right now and you get two years of L T E service free data for it. [02:00:30] You need $300 for that. I don't know, it's kind of wow,

Cathy Gellis (02:00:35):
At this point

Jason Howell (02:00:36):
It's a deal, but do you need it? Just because it's on sale doesn't mean you have to spend your money on it. That's the question

Cathy Gellis (02:00:43):
At this point we're having this week and I'm not paying full price for Google.

Jason Howell (02:00:48):
Why pay full price for Google when you don't have to pay full price for Google in a month if you're getting the Pixel eight and the eight Pro and then be upset two months after that when they go on sale [02:01:00] and you could have saved $250. That's how it goes.

Cathy Gellis (02:01:05):
It's real time. We opened with the Google antitrust thing and I think we've just spent the whole show talking about what monopoly we're busy ignoring them as a market player.

Jason Howell (02:01:15):
Totally. Oh my goodness. So true. Alright, why don't we jump into the Google change log. The Google change log. That's what I just said. [02:01:30] Okay, and we got a few things in here. We'll just rattle through these because I don't think any of them are incredibly, I can remove the birthday sale. We already did that one. Okay. Starting with Android Auto users are going to get some new features. If you have Android Auto in your car, you are going to get support for web conferencing apps like WebEx and Zooms, so now your car while you're driving someplace isn't even safe from meetings. [02:02:00] You're going to have to join those meetings because your car allows you to do that. Maybe that's a feature. Also things like

Cathy Gellis (02:02:07):
Finding, I think it's just getting it off your phone because a lot of people do Zoom. That's true. Zooms from cars and I've done zooms from cars. The bigger issue is you can't be tempted to do it while you're driving, but a lot of people pull off and park and zoom from their phone and now in theory it's better integrated.

Jason Howell (02:02:23):
Yeah, yeah. Well and Prime video as well. I'm guessing these things, some of these things aren't actually, [02:02:30] well no, how would the app know if it's it's streaming from your phone? It wouldn't know that you are driving necessarily to know that it can't serve something I'm thinking of They

Cathy Gellis (02:02:42):
Think they can.

Jason Howell (02:02:43):
They think they can. Exactly.

Cathy Gellis (02:02:44):
They think they can. They think they can. The problem is this is we sort of have one reflex to say, well, the software base should be smart enough not to let us do things when we're driving. On the other hand, we really should have a reflex to say software for your mind, its own fricking business and trust us to be grownups. [02:03:00] And I kind of think we shouldn't give up that reflex so easily, even though there are going to be some stupid people who will basically do it while they're driving because they can and then they'll have some horrific accident. See

Jason Howell (02:03:14):
Yeah, scooter X is giving some valuable additional information here. Prime Video is one example. Select Al, what is it? Al Polestar and Volvo Cars, other brands to follow [02:03:30] and they say whether you're, is it Reul? Renault? Renault, Renault, Reul. I'm old to remember what Americans said. Renault, Renault, Renat. We've learned Renault. Let's say whether you're waiting for school to let out or charging your vehicle, you can now catch up on blah blah blah, blah, blah. So there I imagine that means positioning it as if you are parked and not driving, which is the safe way to go. So there you go. Find my device 3.0 [02:04:00] rolling out. I don't know that I know any of the features, but I do know they changed the logo and there you go.

Cathy Gellis (02:04:07):
Well, they need to not keep doing that. Changing the logos is really customer obnoxious. It is really strange. Trademark things and what people were pointing out is really not very accessible oriented that there's a whole bunch of users who basically had managed to use their phone and these were older users or users who [02:04:30] had learning difficulties and the icons changing just completely broke, made the device useless for them and that's not a thing that should be happening nearly as casually as it's happening.

Jason Howell (02:04:44):
That's a great point. Yeah. Google has been on, I was going to say on a tear of changing all of its logos, but I guess it's been doing this for a while. It's not even a tear at this point now it's a trickle. It used to be a tear. It was like a bunch of their apps. They were like, we're changing all the logos [02:05:00] right now. Boom. And then slowly over time the remaining ones are being changed as is Google

Cathy Gellis (02:05:07):
Final device and I don't get it. I live in IP world where everyone's like, we need more power for our IP monopolies to cover our trademarks, and you're just trashing your trademarks. People recognize that when they saw this thing, it meant you and you're like, well now we're going to change it so you'll now only have to look at a different thing and recognize this. That's not the way true. Why have trademark law at all if we don't actually [02:05:30] care about that form of consumer recognition?

Jason Howell (02:05:32):
We don't want people to recognize us. That's too easy. Chrome apparently for the desktop is getting a change and I don't know why I put this in here. Usually I don't include things like material you design, language changes, but apparently if you're using Chrome on desktop, which a lot of people do, myself included, you'll see the look and feel of it changing things, getting more rounded, [02:06:00] pastelly primarily things

Cathy Gellis (02:06:03):
Like that. Oh, well that's going to drive me to use the platform I was looking for. That's what's missing. A kinder, gentler, more aesthetically rounded experience or else I just didn't want to use this browser at all.

Jason Howell (02:06:14):
There you go. See, it was done for you. Rounded edges does it for you. She's not being angry is so she saws,

Cathy Gellis (02:06:19):
I dunno, you can tell with mys, I mean let me just be clear. That was sarcastic.

Jason Howell (02:06:26):
I

Cathy Gellis (02:06:27):
Don't want to be known as that sort of user.

Jason Howell (02:06:30):
[02:06:30] I don't know if dark mode will still be supported, but if it is not, Jeff will celebrate Google visitor experience. Apparently. If you go to the Google campus in Mountain View, and you are not an employee but a visitor, they have new public spaces, a pop-up shop featuring new, you got rid of the shop and Google store. Last time I was out there I thought, oh, I'll go to the shop. It's always fun to see what the gone, it was gone. Now it's coming back. Now it's coming back. Now's up [02:07:00] better than ever

Cathy Gellis (02:07:02):
Reinstalled. So you're not just not paying full price for a Google product. You may not be able to buy it at all,

Jason Howell (02:07:11):
But depending on why you're there, they might give you a free t-shirt or a pair of binoculars. I remember God, how many years ago went to Google io and we did this weekend, Google at the inside, the Google campus. Do you remember this, Jeff? I know you were there and they had a studio in there that they brought and [02:07:30] I was not on the panel I don't believe. I think I was there as producer or whatever, but you were going to do Android the next after maybe that's what it was. I know I was there and I watched this week in Google and we got T-shirts. We got T-shirts, but we also got binoculars. I still have the binoculars and they were really good binoculars, so they should sell those in the store. Interesting. Yeah, it was very interesting. It was a strange kind of swg like Google branded, but I'm foreign. It was awesome. We still [02:08:00] use those. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Google's going to feed you the first ever Google Public Cafe. Oh, so you like Google can explore our hardware, products and services in person at the first brick and mortar Google store on the west coast. You said you can eat Googlers, you mean out of an rv? Is that what you said? Yes, that's where the store is. Well, I want you to remember the last time I ate at Google, there were no cookies, there was no dessert. It's fallen apart. I'm telling you,

Cathy Gellis (02:08:28):
I've had only disappointing [02:08:30] meals at Google Hadley. I was like, I haven't been invited a ton, but I've been invited a couple times and we were in one of the outposts that just didn't have anything or closed down early. But one of my great regrets from.com boom, 1.0 was never eating in the Silicon Graphics cafeteria. That was thought to be the best in Silicon Valley in the 1.0 and I never actually got there, but

Jason Howell (02:08:57):
The store is opening on October 12th, [02:09:00] the plaza under the big new dome canopy thing. Oh, okay. The big sci-fi dome Chromecast with Google TV now getting support to stream gameplay from your PSS five. So if you have a PlayStation five, you can actually stream to your Chromecast with Google tv. I thought that was kind of neat. I'm not sure if they do that with other, have done that with other gaming systems in the past. I don't seem to recall that, but I could be wrong. [02:09:30] But that is great for PSS five owners. And finally, if you're using YouTube and you are part of this limited test when you're watching a creator and you know how they always hit that point to where they're like, and subscribe. Just smash the subscribe button down below, subscribe whatever. Apparently YouTube's going to detect when they say that and they're going to flash the subscribe button on the screen. [02:10:00] So a little bit of interactivity, a little multimedia experience instead of forcing the creator to do an animation or some point to the screen, wherever it happens to be subscribed to me down there, wherever it is that can flash it. I mean

Cathy Gellis (02:10:18):
Used

Jason Howell (02:10:19):
To,

Cathy Gellis (02:10:20):
That's pretty, I don't know. My web development skills before I went to law school got me to the point where I probably could have coded that to happen like 20 years ago. [02:10:30] Right.

Jason Howell (02:10:31):
What I'm trying to understand though, I don't know that this is coded into is a creator setting a point and saying at this point in the video I say subscribe and that's where it links. Or do they have systems that recognize, I mean they have the transcript, so maybe it's where they get to that point in the transcript it says, don't forget to subscribe. It recognizes that it flashes the button. I'm just curious to know how it actually works. Of course, I do videos about business [02:11:00] models and news and I talk about how people don't subscribe to newspapers. They should subscribe or what do you mean you don't subscribe? Flashing newspapers just need an automatic detection of that and a subscribe button. That's what newspapers

Cathy Gellis (02:11:16):
Need. Oh my gosh. Could newspapers have any more obnoxious UI than they already have as their websites? And to the point of they're self-defeating because their sites are so ugly and so unusable that if I'm lucky [02:11:30] enough to get past the paywall, which is a big giant, if I don't want to be there anymore, I still can't read the article and I'm willing to indulge in advertising to support it, especially to not have the paywalls. But these things are so poorly designed, they're just obtrusive and you can't read anything. You just want to throw your computer.

Jason Howell (02:11:51):
I can subscribe. That's not the actual video. There is actually on the nine to five Google, there is an animation [02:12:00] of a video and what it looks like. It's actually pretty subtle around the subscribe button. You see it kind of glimmer a little bit. Blink, blink. But anyway, there you go. Possibly coming soon to a YouTube. I didn't look at the Discord for five minutes. There's a hundred more gifts there, all about subscribing. I wonder how this will interact with folks like me that watches YouTube 95% of the time on the television interface versus the computer or mobile [02:12:30] device. Curious, I'm guessing you probably won. See anything still go into some of that stuff? I still go and hit on videos while I'm watching it on the television from my couch. I still go and hit if I need to or dislike because I like how things are curated for me and I wonder if this will work on the television also. What about full screen videos? Yeah, there's that too. If you're full screen, will it do anything? Yeah. I'm guessing that it won't. I imagine it would only show this [02:13:00] if you're actually, you'll find out soon at the thing. But at the site, I think on all the podcasts, we've got to say subscribe. Yes. Every time we're just going to say it 20 times now. Just keep you on your toes, make sure that you're doing it and that subscribe. And with that, subscribe to the Google change log

(02:13:23):
Real quick before we get to picks and tips and tricks and all that kind of stuff, want to take a quick moment and let you know a [02:13:30] little bit about something we do here at TWIT that has become incredibly important to how we do business? And that is the Club. Club twit $7 a month. All you got to do is go to twit tv slash club twit and when you're paying $7 a month, you get access to so many awesome things that we are doing. Yes, you get access to the shows that you're watching already. This show and all the other shows that you can get through your standard R s s. You get access to those no ads included. So [02:14:00] it's just the content. This ad isn't even there. If you subscribe to Club Twit, you get access to TWIT plus podcast feed, which is a special feed just for club members, includes so many different shows and events.

(02:14:19):
I mean, ant you are busy as the coordinator of so much of the stuff that happens at Club Twit, creating just a rich kind calendar, a schedule [02:14:30] of events for these things that only club members get to enjoy. You do a fantastic job with that. Thank you, sir. I try. I try. Yeah. We've been having a lot of fun on the Twit plus feed and doing the book club with Mrs. Stacey Higginbotham. She's not here on this weekend, Google anymore, but she's still doing the book club and we've picked a new book and been able to speak with some sci-fi authors recently and doing some AMAs and [02:15:00] we got a lot lined up here. All Stacey likes aunt more than Leo and me. Well you said it. Not me, but not us. You said it, not me, but that's okay. We still love the old farts too.

(02:15:12):
As you see there on the screen, we have an event coming up. You're having that coming up the year, the old farts fireside check. It's going to be a lot of fun. So yeah, check us out y'all. Seven bucks a month. That's pretty much how much one of your Starbucks coffee costs nearly free as you can get. So just [02:15:30] throw away one of your coffees in the month and subscribe to Club Twit and help support our network. It really does help us out. Appreciate it. It really does. And it's always at this point when I realized, oh dang, I didn't make my event for AI Inside, which is the title of the AI show. We've selected AI inside. And so while you were talking Ant I created an event for it. I didn't put any description information in there. I'll have to do that. You didn't do it later.

(02:15:59):
It'd be all [02:16:00] right. And the art is not final art. It was just some random thing I used in AI to create. So we're true to our word when it comes to AI here on this show. But yeah, tomorrow, which is Thursday, September 14th, Jeff Jarvis and I are going to be recording at 1:00 PM Pacific. And actually I think definitely with this show and I think with a lot of the other shows potentially, but we're going to be recording live on the stream if [02:16:30] you want to get to it after the fact. You have to be a club member. So twit TV slash club twit to get to that after the fact. And like I said, the conversation I had with Daniel Suarez and Hugh Howie, that's still just, I'm beside myself for even being able to have that opportunity. Those two dudes, they shared a lot of great information being prolific sci-fi authors and now have a TV series that's super popular [02:17:00] and just shed a lot of insight on the process and a little bit of inside baseball.

(02:17:04):
And for them to be two friends that knew each other, it turned out to be a really good conversation. That's amazing. That's amazing. I love all the stuff you're doing there, everybody. You're going to love it too. So twit tv slash club twit, you get the feed, you get the no ads, you get the discord that a lot of this stuff is even accessible through. And yeah, seven bucks a month, it's totally [02:17:30] worth it. And you get the knowledge that really you are supporting us directly, you're keeping our content going by doing that. We just can't thank you enough. So we really appreciate you for doing that. So thank you Club Twit. Thank you. Hope to see you there. Alright, with that we have picks, tricks, tips, anything you want to talk about. Kathy, I forgot to give you the heads up on that ahead of today's show. So if you don't have anything, that's quite all right. [02:18:00] If you do have something though, share it.

Cathy Gellis (02:18:03):
I'll mention something in passing, but it's not a very tangible thing.

Jason Howell (02:18:08):
Sure. Okay. Do you want to go ahead and start it or you want to end it?

Cathy Gellis (02:18:14):
Boy, we just really brought too much attention to it.

(02:18:20):
The thing that I am happy about as a favorite thing is I accidentally, well I keep saying accidentally, but it wasn't planned exactly, but I spent a couple of days in [02:18:30] Rockport, Massachusetts and I liked it. I was missing coastal New England and it was a nice chunk of coastal New England. And I went kayaking and looked at the old buildings and had good clam chowder and it was exactly what I was craving. I hadn't experienced coastal New England in a while. And so I appreciated that I was there and it wasn't too hard to get to. And there I was.

Jason Howell (02:18:52):
Very nice. I've never been simple pleasures. That's what we're talking about. Absolutely. I'm just kind of flipping through some [02:19:00] of the images on Google because I've never been to Massachusetts. Really. My East coast exposure is very limited. I have not spent much time on the East Coast, to be honest. Well, we have to fix that. You got to get out here, man. Apparently this is beautiful. This place looks awesome and it is 78 degrees there right now, just so you know. And only five and a half hours to get there from San Francisco. So

Cathy Gellis (02:19:26):
Using very specific vehicles, [02:19:30] not all vehicles.

Jason Howell (02:19:33):
No, I transport there. That's all you need to know. Excellent. Well thank you for that, Kathy. Jeff, I know we already kind of blew the lid off of the Yeah, I got another one if enough. The site is very slow, but it's pretty cool. So there was a, I think it was with Microsoft and m i t, I'm not sure working with the internet archive has huge [02:20:00] growing archive of AI generated books. The stuff that's up there. Oh, here we go. Yes. Right. So if you search for, let's say Twain, if you do a command F search. Yeah. And just pick one. You can hear the voice. See here. Oh, can't hear his audio up. [02:20:30] Oh well. Oh, hold on. Project. Oh, you got to turn up the, give

Speaker 4 (02:20:33):
Feedback on the quality of a recording. Please visit a k ms slash audiobook

Speaker 5 (02:20:39):
Christian Science by Mark Twain. Preface book I of this volume occupies a quarter or a third of the volume and consists of matter written about four years ago, but not hi to published in book form. It contained errors of judgment and a fact I have now corrected these to the best of my ability. Not

Jason Howell (02:21:00):
[02:21:00] Bad later Knowledge not bad.

Speaker 5 (02:21:02):
Two was written at the

Jason Howell (02:21:03):
Beginning, not great either. Picky, it said hi. Right. It's better than the automated stuff I've heard before. True, true, true. I mean, yeah, it's not perfect, but man, these things keep getting better and better. It's get in there for sure. Somebody who's, I hope soon going to be recording my own book and boy is it hard. It is really, really hard [02:21:30] to do that. I bet it is. As you can imagine for me, mush mouth that I am, Mr. Jarvis, I read, I've been reading your book aloud and it is, like you said, it's tough with your particular content. That is tough to read aloud, man. Wow. How you doing with the Latin? So good luck to you with your audiobook. I look forward to it. Indeed. Wow. Gutenberg parenthesis. [02:22:00] There you go. So anyway, so that's, yeah, that's a project at, I don't know, what do they call it here?

(02:22:10):
The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection. There you go. Right on. Alright, and then And what? You got my two picks? I'll keep 'em quick. First one is, as of today, recording this show here, Adobe has announced its fall updates for [02:22:30] the Adobe video packages focusing more on Premier Pro and After Effects, we got some performance boosts of course because Premier has been known to be quite slow at times, but it's gotten better on its performance. And then they've updated the text-based editing tool, which is based off of Adobe Sense ai. And I got to tell you, it was already pretty good, but now they've added some more features to pick up [02:23:00] pauses and things like that in a group for the whole transcript or what have you, and be able to knock it out in one swoop to make your cuts and stuff. And for social media content or just quick and dirty promotional content, that tool is really, really, really good.

(02:23:19):
And I believe our team uses it as well. So yeah, that's on my website.com. We got a link in the show notes where you can go and check out the information on that update. [02:23:30] And lastly, I was a guest on another podcast, comedian and writer Marina Franklin invited me on. I listened to her show a lot and she invited me on a week or so ago, and we talked about AI and man, I'm still a little bit beside myself. She's pretty damn damn good. It was her and Von DeCarlo as the co-host and we had a good time just talking AI and talking [02:24:00] about the moral panic and talking about the good things, the bad things, and how there's a lack of middle ground on the coverage of AI other than myself. And yeah, check it out. So on the Friends Like Us Podcasts by Ms. Marina Franklin. Nice. Good work, sir. Thank you. Yeah, friends like us. Check out that podcast Mine.

(02:24:27):
Okay, so my pick is the original Pixel [02:24:30] Bud. It's not actually the original ones with the wires, but the that wireless one, the original ones. That's why I brought it on because I remembered Jeff, that you had horrible experience with these. I like them now, but I hated 'em then. Oh, so are you using the ones that released in 2020? That's what I have here is the 2020 release and then they had the Pixel Buds Pro that came out. No, I have the Or do you have the Pixel Buds A, or which ones do you have a, I guess [02:25:00] it wasn't, I got Series A and I liked them, but one of them burned out here recently. So interesting that you mentioned that. So yes, I liked the series A as well. This is the one that I got back in 2020, kind of like their first in-ear version of.

(02:25:16):
Yeah, that was the bad one. The Pixel Buds the bad one for me. I actually had pretty good experience. In fact, I've used these so much over the last three years in many ways they've been my go-to. I know that you had a lot of issues [02:25:30] with them, Jeff, and I think early on I did too, but I think software updates must have addressed it because over time I didn't experience any of those issues. But the reason I'm even bringing this up today is because last night I went to use 'em. Actually, I went to use 'em another time and I just chalked it up to, oh, they must need to be charged last night after I know there were plenty charged, I went to use 'em and the right earbud no longer works. It's absolutely dead, completely blank. And [02:26:00] I don't know, I don't know if I was bringing them on to make fun of them because they only lasted three years or praise them because I've used them so much.

(02:26:10):
But I guess it's both, I guess in the realm of wireless earbuds, they only have a limited lifespan. That's just a fact about these things. They have tiny batteries, you're going to burn through 'em eventually or you're going to use them in some other way and they're not going to last forever. And there's a part [02:26:30] of me that doesn't want to get rid of these because I used them so much and I now I know I got one that works and I still can't get rid of that bad gum case. It like there's one here that is just not working, but I can't throw 'em away. And I want to give kudos too, because again, I mentioned earlier Hardhead, they're iPhone people and so they got Apple Watch and whatever, but they use Pixel Buds because Pixel Buds, they're [02:27:00] like, these sound better. Actually, college Boy does have the AirPod or whatever they called, but he admitted too that Pixel Buds are better and would rather have them.

(02:27:11):
That's interesting. Yeah, I wonder how other people feel about that too. I haven't spent much time if maybe popping them into my ears for five minutes with AirPods. I just never liked the Dangle thing. It's just not my neither. But anyways, and [02:27:30] I do think that it is possible to replace these on a per bud basis. I don't know about this old one. I know you can on the more recent ones. The newer one is so good. I mean it works now. And my new phone, it works together, so I'm happy with this one. I didn't get the Pro, but this is I guess the A or the later one. Yeah, the A, which is an amazing value. I loved the A. And then I do have the Pro right now Google sent me the pro and I'm still testing it and using it and always checking back in on it.

(02:27:59):
And primarily [02:28:00] it has the noise canceling. So that's its main kind of upgrade is that it seals off the area. So if you're taking it on a plane, you can block out the plane and just listen to the music. So anyways, so I guess pour one out for my Pixel buds. Goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye bud. See you later. Goodbye bud. This bud's for you. I hardly Yes, exactly. Hardly knew you. Go ahead. Go over there, but don't fall off the table because I'm not ready to lose you quite yet. We have reached [02:28:30] the end of this episode of this week in Google and it has been a lot of fun. It always is. I love the directions that we go. Sometimes they're planned, sometimes they're very unplanned, like the Coke recipe that was delightful. Maybe I'll share the recipe with someone they can make it report back and let us know how it is. Kathy Ellis, always a pleasure to get you on the show and definitely a pleasure for me to actually get to do a show with you. Usually I'm on the producer side, so it's fun to be able to chat with you. Thank you so much for hopping on with us today. We really appreciate [02:29:00] it.

Cathy Gellis (02:29:01):
Always fun.

Jason Howell (02:29:02):
Absolutely. Of course. Can find your work at tech dirtt cg council.com and then Mastodon, that's your social of choice.

Cathy Gellis (02:29:13):
I've largely abandoned Twitter, so I'm at Kathy Gillis, I'm at Mastodon Duck Cloud, and I also have the same handle at Blue Sky.

Jason Howell (02:29:23):
Right on. Awesome. Well Kathy, we'll be in touch. We'll have you back again real soon. Thank you. Great. And [02:29:30] Pruitt my office partner in crime, but not today. You're at home. But anyways, it's always a pleasure getting the chance to talk with you on the show. Anne, thank you so much. Likewise, sir. What do you want to point people to your prints? Yeah, keep going. Amp pro.com/prints. I've been trying to work on some new prints to put up there. I only have maybe two new prints out there right now, but it's been a little bit busy and it's football season, so things going to slow down with [02:30:00] me in that camera. But it is what it is. So amp pro.com/prince, please. Thank you. Yes indeed. Thank you. And thank you Jeff Jarvis, always a pleasure to get the chance to talk to you. And now, I mean, I get the chance to talk to you pretty much every week on AI inside.

(02:30:16):
So that is poor Jason. Pretty awesome. Poor me. I love doing a show with you, man. It's the highlight. It's the highlight. I learn something every week and think about new things every week. Indeed. Well, we've got a lot of fun in store for AI inside. [02:30:30] And of course Jeff Jarvis has a lot in store for you here on this week in Google, Gutenberg parenthesis and everything else that Jeff is doing right now. Follow him on Mastodon and gutenberg parenthesis.com. Thank you, Jeff. Always pleasure. Thank you Ross. Jason howell.net if you want to go to a website for me, but it's just some music that you may or may not like, but go there and see what you think. You don't like it. Thank you. You can also find me at Doing Tech News Weekly here [02:31:00] at twit twit TV slash tnw, along with Micah Sargent every Thursday.

(02:31:05):
Do not forget to go to the website of this show. That is TWI tv slash twig. And the reason that you would want to go there is because you can subscribe very easily from the page. And did I mention how important it is if you like a show here at twit to subscribe to it? I know you might get it a million different ways, but subscribing is really, really important. So please do that. [02:31:30] And that goes for live viewers as well. If you're watching us Record Live, you're probably joining us every Wednesday, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2:00 PM Pacific, 2100 U T C. And if you're doing that, still subscribe. It's good to get it in both directions and that way we can say, Hey, we have lots of listeners, and then we get money so that we can continue doing shows. I'm just being honest. So anyways, we love doing these shows for you. Hopefully you love watching and listening to them. Thank [02:32:00] you so much for supporting us throughout the years and we'll see you next time on this week in Google. Bye-bye everybody. Hey there. Scott Wilkinson here. In Case you hadn't heard, home Theater Geeks is Back. Each week I bring you the latest audio, video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system product reviews and more you can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club Twit, which costs seven [02:32:30] bucks a month. Or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only 2 99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater Geekitude.