This Week in Google 734 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
This week, on This Week in Google, Jeff Jarvis is here. Ant Pruitt's here. Yes. I'm back in the chair. And our special guest, Joan Donovan. Now professor of journalism and Emerging media studies at Boston University will find out what happened at Harvard. Will talk about meme wars, Google and Taylor Swift. Who do you think won that battle and a whole lot more? It's all coming up next on Twig!

(00:00:30):
[00:00:30] This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 734 Recorded Wednesday, September 20th, 2023. Anarchy in the academy this week in Google is brought to you by our friends at IT pro tv now called a ACI. Learning acis New Cyber Skills is training [00:01:00] for everyone, not just the pros. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twit. Twit listeners will get at least 20% off and as much as 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan. Just complete the form. You'll get a proper quote based on the size of your team and by my Leo Myo Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit, and manage years of important documents, photos, and videos in an offline library hosted on any device [00:01:30] and it's free. Visit myo.com/twit.

(00:01:36):
It's time for Twig this week in Google. Hey everybody. Sorry I missed you last week, but I am thrilled to be back. I'm going to miss you again next week, but for now, I'm here. I'm going to Green Bay next week and then I'll stick around for a while. Ant Pruitt's also here. Thank you ant for I hear you're quite excited to be in Green Bay for a football game. Not only that, wearing a Green Bay jersey, I couldn't [00:02:00] say him with a straight face. Poor Lisa hurts her a lot more than hurts me. I just got to tell you. But no, it's going to be a lot of fun for our son's. 21st birthday. He's unaccountably a Green Bay Packer van. Someday I got to show you I'd like to see it. His man cave. Yeah, I'd like to see it. Which is, I mean, it's like a 58 year old guy's tribute to the Packers he's got.

(00:02:23):
I mean, it's unbelievable. Y'all did something right, sir. Well, I don't know about that. I don't understand where the Green [00:02:30] Bay thing came from. Anyway, we're going to have fun out there. Can't wait. That's good. Looking forward to meeting a lot of you. I can't tell you where Lisa says you got to stop promoting it. Yeah, we've got to slow it down now. There's too many people coming. All of the Midwest is converging on the Hitter Lands Brewery on September 29th. Wait a minute. Wait. Oh, oh, that's Jeff Jarvis. Hello, jj. Hello. I haven't talked to you since you announced your retirement. Can I still say the Leonardtow professor for journalistic innovation?

Jeff Jarvis (00:02:57):
I am still there through this term [00:03:00] and then I'm on leave and then I become emeritus. Oh. So I'll just add emeritus next fall. The Emeritus Leonard Tab Professor, that's another word. Title to the journalistic innovation at the emeritus.

(00:03:13):
Craig Newmark Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Yeah. No, it's great to see you. And I'm thrilled for those who are just tuning in, like CJ who said we're Stacey. Stacey has abandoned her podcast career and her blog [00:03:30] because she's now working for Consumer Reports in policy. Consumer reports. We're so proud of her and she'll come back, I'm sure from She will. So proud of her doing that. So we have an empty seat and what we've been doing, which is great. Last week Kathy Gellis was on Fuego.

Ant Pruitt (00:03:47):
I swear Ms. Gellis was on and I thought I was in a Southern Baptist church. Yeah, she just sitting there. She was preaching. She was on it, man. Oh gosh. She's good though. So much fire.

Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
If you're going to have anybody on the week, the DOJ sues [00:04:00] Google, you'd want to have a Supreme Court advocate. And that's the great Kathy Gala. Anyway. Thank you, Kathy. I'm sorry I wasn't here for that, but we have somebody today. We've been trying to get on ever since the shocking departure. Shocking departure from Harvard University, from the Kennedy School where she was an expert in disinformation, misinformation, and of course memes. Joan Donovan [00:04:30] is in the house. Hi, Joan. Yay.

Joan Donovan (00:04:33):
Hey, good to see y'all,

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
Author of Meows and the soon to be published Blockbuster. Why I Hate Ha or something. I know. I don't know what the total will be, but somebody You said that you're going to write a book about the experience.

Joan Donovan (00:04:52):
Well, yeah. I'm going to write a book about the last several years of this field and all the wacky hijinks that have gone on, some [00:05:00] of which Jeff has been witness to. I think it's been pretty crazy, but

Leo Laporte (00:05:07):
Info, is

Joan Donovan (00:05:08):
It safe? I'm probably going to call it Anarchy in the Academy. I love it. We got to have something mimetic.

Leo Laporte (00:05:15):
It sounds like something Sartre might've written. That sounds good. You should immediately trademark that. It does seem to me that people like you, our friend at the Stanford Internet Observatory [00:05:30] and others in your field, I don't know if I should name too many names. I don't want to catch, I don't want to get 'em in trouble, are under fire politically. People who are studying disinformation are a hot potato. You'd think you would be precious gold. This

Joan Donovan (00:05:48):
Is, well, no, I'm more like the golden goose In many ways. It's a lucrative field until it's not when it comes to academic fundraising. And [00:06:00] I think there's a lot going on. There's these congressional inquiries into this field of research. Jim Jordan has been leading these quote weaponization of the federal government hearings, and they've subpoenaed several different researchers. Luckily I haven't been one of them. I wasn't involved. I

Leo Laporte (00:06:24):
Would want to see that, Joan. I would want, oh, you should testify. Show up. [00:06:30] You just

Joan Donovan (00:06:30):
Show. I mean, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:06:32):
Yeah. Oh, that'd be so much fun to

Joan Donovan (00:06:33):
Watch. I'm not in the Twitter files because I wasn't researching any singular platform and it was very well known that my research would come out almost daily. I'd be letting people know what we were seeing. So, but that idea that civil society and academia partnering with a corporation should be something [00:07:00] that's exciting and fresh and moving our industries closer together. But unfortunately, when the government became the source of disinformation in many ways they didn't like the accountability.

Leo Laporte (00:07:20):
Is it because I know we should mention that you're now at Boston University. I am God

Joan Donovan (00:07:26):
Bless in the journalism department.

Leo Laporte (00:07:27):
You're teaching journalism.

Joan Donovan (00:07:28):
They're great. I mean, they called [00:07:30] me up right when they saw in the paper that I'd lost my job and they're

Leo Laporte (00:07:34):
So smart.

Joan Donovan (00:07:35):
Oh yeah. Well, I'll tip to her credit. The dean d Christina did ask me how I was doing, and we had been friendly because she was new in town and I met her right before the pandemic and did some stuff with her over the pandemic events and whatnot. And so she was checking in on me, but also I felt like Boston University was going to be the best place for me [00:08:00] given that I wanted to teach journalism students and I wanted to have PhD students. And there are great public policy schools here, particularly one at Tufts, the Fletcher School, and there's great work being done at Northeastern. And so it was only natural that I would stick in Boston and keep working where my friends and my family and my colleagues are.

Leo Laporte (00:08:27):
You were at the Kennedy School researching [00:08:30] online extremism, misinformation, disinformation, media manipulation. Will you get to do some of that research still?

Joan Donovan (00:08:41):
Yep. The plan is to continue on several trajectories, really digging back into the meme wars work. Unfortunately, the book came out in 2022 and I did some of a book tour and some events, [00:09:00] but I really didn't get to do what I really wanted to do with the project, which was Make a compendium podcast that will hopefully the podcast will happen during the primaries. And then as we get into the race, I just wanted to code internet culture for people. And so that's the kind of work that I want to be doing is helping people understand journalists how to report on the internet and then other folks [00:09:30] that are lurkers and looky-loos like I am. How to understand what you're seeing. Do

Leo Laporte (00:09:36):
You think a podcast is a good venue for that?

Joan Donovan (00:09:41):
Well, I think probably TikTok videos as well, or shorts as well to help with the imagery because memes are very visual, but there's going to be so much that happens in this election that you'll [00:10:00] blink and you'll miss it. And so I think all the mediums are going to have to fire on all cylinders to even understand one 10th of what's happening historically,

Leo Laporte (00:10:13):
How much are you worried about the emergence of large language models and AI in the fight against disinformation? Will that be a valuable tool? Will that make it even worse?

Joan Donovan (00:10:25):
Well, interestingly, I wrote a paper with Brit Paris [00:10:30] that I think came out in 2020. It was when I was at Data and Society and we were getting supported by Jeff's news integrity group and Craig Newmark and Britt and I wrote this paper, she's at Rutgers now called Cheap Fakes and Deep Fakes where we looked at audio video manipulations. And the state-of-the-art at that time wasn't much different than where we are now, except that it hadn't been rolled out for consumers. [00:11:00] And when you look at audio video manipulation and also these large language models or generative AI as some people call it, we're dealing with a massive intrusion to what we used to call copyright and copyright laws. So the way that data science tends to work is if I can scrape your data, it's [00:11:30] mine. This is not an appropriate thing because what we see all the time with these large language models is they're creating sentences, some of which that may have never been spoken before, but often it's chunks of things that were published elsewhere and that has some serious issues related to imposters and disregarding copyrights.

(00:11:57):
But the one thing that I am worried about, and I think [00:12:00] everybody should be, is just the way in which it's arriving in our phones and in our, it's going to be integrated into our email. It's going to be integrated into a lot of different technologies very rapidly. And we are going to be inclined to trust it because we assume there's someone driving the train, but there's not. Right? And so the thing that I'm afraid of isn't just, oh, [00:12:30] people get misinformation or things that aren't true, or you go to look up someone's bio and it'll give you fake awards that they won and things, and these are all minimally problematic issues. But I do think that if you match a large language model, this is where we get into the election stuff. If you match a large language model with an S M S or a text messaging system, someone can [00:13:00] think that they're texting with the campaign of let's say Trump, and they're getting information and they think the information that they're getting is true and they think they're talking to a real person and they're just talking to a bot that's been not just loaded with information, but is also responsive to individual queries.

(00:13:21):
Now, where that could be integrated into campaign technologies is one thing, but then I worry about just same things we [00:13:30] worry about with Robocallers and whatnot is that the more responsive these systems are to individual queries, the easier it is to deploy imposters and to trick people. So if you think that you're talking to the campaign of say like Buttigieg or whoever, and it's really some kind of nefarious actor that's trying to plant information, they can do it on a massive scale for very low [00:14:00] prices. And there's no real way for people to discern if they're the only ones that are seeing this, if other people are seeing it. It's not like advertising.

Leo Laporte (00:14:11):
That was the problem with the Facebook harder tracked out campaigns in 2016 is these were such small campaigns, no one would see them. You're not proposing though that copyright is one of the ways to defend against this, or are you?

Joan Donovan (00:14:25):
It has to be. I mean, it exists for a reason. I mean, I'm a child of [00:14:30] Napster. I was an early it. I was at Northeastern when Napster became a thing and I was using the intranet there, and I still have all my MP threes, right, this all the

Leo Laporte (00:14:49):
Authorities

Joan Donovan (00:14:50):
On her. I know.

Leo Laporte (00:14:53):
Just to offend, you get Metallica on the phone. I have hundreds of gigabytes of Metallica songs I got from Napster. So go ahead. I have no comment. Yeah,

Joan Donovan (00:15:00):
[00:15:00] Exactly. If Lars wants to come for me, that's fine, but well, all I'm pointing out is that we are witnessing this major disruption to copyright, and there's no champions right now that are defending people's right to their own art. And things have changed at different scales where in some instances copyright is around to make sure the artist gets paid. In some instances [00:15:30] it's been bought up by hedge funds or whatever. I'm thinking here of Taylor Swift and copyright is a problem for some artists. This by no means a perfect technology or a perfect policy, but we do know explicitly that Dai doesn't have the permission to have all the data that it has, and that these technologies, the way that they're rolling out so quickly, [00:16:00] the point is to get big fast so that any regulation or any claim to copyright cannot catch up. And so we have to think about the tools we have now policy wise to get them to play by

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
The rules. I got to get you on with Corey Drow at some point, who is in fact very explicit in saying copyright is not, he says, copyright won't solve creator's generative AI problem, although [00:16:30] it's not going to stop creators from trying. John Grisham now and George r r Martin have joined Sarah Silverman, Jody p Coe, a whole bunch of authors who are suing Facebook is making these arguments open. Speak against that. So John, I'll dare to disagree with you, which is always a risky thing to do. I think that depending upon how the content is accessed, I think it's fair use and I think it's transformative. [00:17:00] And my worry is that if we tell the machine you can't read, that sets a precedent for the rest of us.

Joan Donovan (00:17:07):
Yeah. It's the difference between reading and copying and distributing and listen, I was on a panel just yesterday with Amy Brand who's the head of M I t press, and she was saying that she's got at least seven emails from major companies in the last few weeks, major AI companies asking [00:17:30] her to name the price for the entire corpus of M I t press. Oh, wow. And so, but she doesn't know there's an opportunity there, publisher there. Well, she doesn't know as a publisher, does she even have that? Right? Because it's not part of the original contracts with any of the authors. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
Here's the Joan, right? If you just grab stuff off your Metallica, then you got a problem. But let's say you buy the copy of the book, you own [00:18:00] the copy of the book, you require it legally, however means libraries or otherwise. Once you have that, you have a right to read it. You have a right to make it in a transformative acts. It's

Joan Donovan (00:18:14):
A fair use. You're making the claim though that machines have human rights.

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
I'm making the claim. I know. I know that's my way, but I am making the claim that there's a precedent set that should worry the rest of us in an age of copyright militancy. My [00:18:30] real argument, which in the Guttenberg parenthesis out now is that I can't help it. Yeah, we've got to plug. Yeah, plug.

Joan Donovan (00:18:41):
Oh, you got it right there. Right here.

Leo Laporte (00:18:43):
In the Gutenberg parenthesis, copyright was not created for authors and creators. It was created for booksellers and publishers create a marketplace to make creativity to a tradable asset. And I do think that it is outmoded [00:19:00] in ways we have to discuss, and this is one of those contexts in which we have to discuss it. But I'm concerned about various precedents, especially when

Joan Donovan (00:19:07):
I'd say this is the same situation. So my first position is copyright isn't going to solve it, but it's one of the tools in the toolkit that we have now, the

Leo Laporte (00:19:18):
Threats,

Joan Donovan (00:19:18):
Yeah. But I would go further, I think to say that the way that copyright is being read by these computer [00:19:30] scientists and these technologists, it's just disregarding what the actual law is. So I'm more of a realist in the sense that I'm like, well, if we have laws and we have policies, employ them, but I wonder who's being protected by this argument that well, if data's out there, it should be able to be read and transformed, let's say by machines. They do call these things transformers. And in that process of [00:20:00] transformation, the machine itself creates something new, but it's not like an homage or a parody, it's something else. It's mimicry. It's like a butterfly effect in a way that mimicking of the pattern of the thing that is the problem. And so when you look at AI song making for instance, and you can make a mashup between Drake and the weekend, [00:20:30] it's not always clear in the distribution of that transformed item one, that those artists didn't participate in that. Or also that these artists work very hard at their craft. And I don't know if the machine is doing anything other than mimicking. If I

Leo Laporte (00:20:54):
Write a book report about a book I read and I don't work very hard at it, that doesn't make [00:21:00] it any less a transformative act. I mean, hard work is not in the requirements for transformative. I'll give you though a counter example, and I'd love to hear what you all think of this because this supports Joan A. Little bit. Steven Fry just told us that he was shocked to find out that AI took all of the uk, he read all the Harry Potter books, so I don't know, that must be hundreds of hours of Stephen Fry took it and narrated a documentary [00:21:30] with his voice.

(00:21:34):
That's a different issue, which is that's a really interesting likeness and use of reputation and so on. He says, it's only a matter of time before there's audio of me endorsing Donald Trump or something. He disagrees with It won't be long. He says, and this is just audio until deep fake videos are just as convincing, which is probably the case [00:22:00] says that's where privacy law started with a woman's image on a bag of flour, and she didn't get permission for her image to be used. That's different from copyright. So his voice is the equivalent of image. But how is that different from a writer's reputation? How is that different from George r r Martin's voice? That's a good thing that Joan's raising here. Is there a right to voice? [00:22:30] But then what about cover bands?

Joan Donovan (00:22:33):
Well, I consider this more of an issue of next generation identity theft, right? If someone steals your financial information and uses it, that is incredibly damaging for you. Here you're talking about people who make a living off of their likeness who do not want to be mimics. And I think that [00:23:00] that means that they should be entitled to their own voice and their own sound because when the technology started to come out, it was cute. It was Joe Rogan saying his butt smells and it was just dumb stuff. But now that it's here, you could ostensibly make entire TV shows with actors and actresses interacting [00:23:30] and they don't even need to be there.

Leo Laporte (00:23:31):
You say It was cute. I remember, I think it was twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen, I was at Adobe Max and the next to the last day of the event, they always do their sneak peek of new products to come. And they were talking about voice synthes, voice synthesis. I can't say it. You know what I'm trying to say? Yeah, synthesis. Just making short synthesis. You don't have to say synthesization. No one could say it. And the developer was up on the stage presenting it [00:24:00] and whatnot, and they hit play and it was former president Barack Obama speaking in waveform. And most of the time when those events go off the crowd, it's like, wow, it's so cool. But it got crazy silent. People started thinking about the implications. But Joan, didn't this come up? I mean, you wrote Mem Wars. Isn't this come up with memes too? The issue of you're taking copyrighted images and turning them into memes. It's the same thing, isn't it?

Joan Donovan (00:24:24):
But there's supposed to be an element of parody. Parody there that is [00:24:30] interesting. And so

Leo Laporte (00:24:33):
Far it seems like, and we don't have a real decision, but for the most part, the courts seem to have treated this as transformative, that it is covered by fair use, much as a meme would be covered by fair use, but yet ironically not covered by copyright. I mean, keep in mind that when copyright was created, newspapers weren't included, magazines were not included. Even when it arrived to newspapers, there was much debate as to whether or not should include news articles because those weren't really creative. Yeah. Cory said More copyright [00:25:00] doesn't benefit individual creators. More copyright benefits the big corporations that end up holding the copyrights. Right. Well, let's also remember the fights about DVRs and VCRs, right? That, oh my God, you're copying. How dare you. And then you couldn't get around

Joan Donovan (00:25:14):
Jeff. We were just time shifting. We weren't copying. Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:25:18):
Exactly.

Joan Donovan (00:25:19):
That was the

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
Argument. That was the argument. That's

Joan Donovan (00:25:21):
Right. That's right. Of the against beta. I can take my shows. I'm just time shifting them. Listen, I don't think anything [00:25:30] legal is going to be a panacea. I think the thing that we have to face here is that you have an industry that does not believe it has to follow the laws as they're written, and it believes that it's entitled to anything that anybody puts online. And that's going to create a lot of problems, whether it's problems for large corporations that own a bunch of copyrights or for individual [00:26:00] creators who do not want their stuff put into these models. Now, I often think about things like I'm a normal person and I think about it and I'm like, would I want my entire Instagram account to be in some kind of database somewhere where I don't have control over deleting it or not deleting it? And the answer's no, [00:26:30] but the reality is yes, it's already done. And so I think sometimes we almost trick ourselves into believing that there's ownership of the digital and that ownership is possible. I am thinking here too, of all the great stories about Bitcoin fraud and how people were like, I thought I had the magic beans and there was never [00:27:00] anything there.

Leo Laporte (00:27:01):
It might be encouraging that OpenAI has asked m i t for their corpus that Google has proposed robots text style way of blocking this kind of scraping. They're probably recognizing that. Well, we can't just do what practically. We can't move fast and break things, whether it's legal or not. We've got to kind of consider the blowback from this. Think

Joan Donovan (00:27:23):
About what Yeah, but I don't think those rules are intended for them because those groups already have [00:27:30] massive amounts of data. Data. I think that they're trying to block smaller innovators,

Leo Laporte (00:27:38):
Pull up the ladder,

Joan Donovan (00:27:39):
Progressing. Exactly. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:27:41):
Regulatory capture,

Joan Donovan (00:27:43):
And we've seen this before and they don't want to interact with government now pass until they're

Leo Laporte (00:27:47):
Due, right? Yeah.

Joan Donovan (00:27:50):
Like, oh, and we went through this with big data. You remember that? Ever heard of that thing? Big data. Big data.

Leo Laporte (00:27:56):
Oh yeah. Whatever happened to

Joan Donovan (00:27:57):
That? It's the only reason why AI can exist is [00:28:00] because we went through the phase of big data and nobody stopped them.

Leo Laporte (00:28:05):
Joel, the other thing I've been thinking about is that I don't separate the internet, just what you just said. I don't separate the internet from ai, that AI couldn't exist without the connections that the internet creates, and I see it as a continuum. Well, that's kind of what she's saying, but maybe we should stop on each step of the way and consider the impact. It does seem like a natural [00:28:30] progression. And by the way, at the other end of this natural progression is my D n A being cloned. I mean talking about right to likeness. Who wants their own Leo? Yeah. Nobody, that's the good news. Jeff Jarvis is the author of the Gutenberg parenthesis, but a credit where credit's due. We also have the wonderful Joan Donovan and Joan, I think we found your book. I looked in the bookstore and I found Anarchy, the Academy [00:29:00] and memoir by journal. It's there. Oh my God.

Joan Donovan (00:29:02):
Somebody made it.

Leo Laporte (00:29:03):
John Spattered with blood copyright and it's crim. It's crimson blood. I might add. Who's Joe Esposito once again in our,

Joan Donovan (00:29:12):
Oh my God, God. Somebody email me a copy of that, please. I will

Leo Laporte (00:29:14):
Make sure you get a copy of it. Joe, I'm going to take Joe's a master. I think he may have actually done your cover art already. You may be stuck with that title.

Joan Donovan (00:29:25):
I'm not worried about it.

Leo Laporte (00:29:27):
I'm here for it. It's a good title. I like it. Alright, we'll have [00:29:30] more in just a little bit. It's not just, I love it. The Jones here so we can talk about these issues. But there's a lot of Google news this week and there's a lot of Amazon news this morning. Amazon had its, and of course it's all sprinkled with AI everywhere. A lot of AI news, tons of ai. Tons of AI news. We'll get to it all. Some Musk news in there too. Oh lord, there's more Musk all the time. Steve Gibson yesterday on our security Now after I took years to get him on Twitter, then I've been trying to get him off Twitter for years [00:30:00] and now he says, I'm getting off Twitter because Musk's going to charge. And I didn't want to tell him, I doubt Musk will ever make good on that.

(00:30:08):
That's just his way of getting more news cycles under his belt. But it worked. Everybody's, somebody gets it. Finally. Thank you. It works. Now that you're in journalism, fix this crap. Okay, I'm too old. Well, it's really interesting. President mean, did Trump invent this? It certainly paid off for him to just kind of drive [00:30:30] the news cycle consistently. It doesn't matter what you say, whether it's true or not, as long as you get in the news. I guess it's the old adage, right? There's no such thing as bad press, but boy did he weaponize it. And Elon's just following right along with that. I wonder if there's a precedent, historic precedent for that Father Coghlan. That's Putin. Putin, yeah, maybe Russia. That's bonito our wonderful Bon Gonzalez, our wonderful td, who is also a great deep intellectual thinker. Yes he is. [00:31:00] That's why we gave him a microphone.

(00:31:01):
He is so sharp Putin. But before that, did Teddy Roosevelt manipulate the press? Well, William Randolph Hearst did, but I Well, why did FDR R decide to do fireside chat? Because he speak directly. He was having negative publicity. People couldn't get the people and radio was new newspapers hated it. They tried to keep radio out of news, out of advertising, out of everything. And FDR R said, opportunity. I'll go around the bastards. [00:31:30] That is an excellent and excellent point. I think I write about it in the Gutenberg parenthesis. Joan did not write about it in, wait a minute, lemme get this me wars, me wars or anarchy in the academy. Well, if she's going to have two, I have two coming out. Oh, the new one magazine take a, I really actually want to read this one. This is going to be good. Oh, you didn't want to read the last one?

(00:31:58):
You so hard. I tried to read [00:32:00] the last one. It's too, I'm sorry. You're too smart for me. I couldn't fucking smart. So where's your book? I am not smart enough to write a book. Good gosh. No. We'd like to see an Pruitt. You want a photography then? Yeah, there you go. Alright, Joe, talent. Wait, I'm going to take a break and then we'll go on with Joan Donovan, our wonderful guest, an Pruitt, Jeff Jarvis, our show today brought to you by our friends at IT pro tv. It's now called a C i Learning in today's IT [00:32:30] talent shortage. Whether you operate as your own department or part of a larger team, your skills must be up to date. 94% of CIOs and CISOs agree that attracting and retaining talent is increasingly critical to their roles access to more than 7,200 hours of content. That's pretty impressive.

(00:32:50):
And you might note that number's gotten a lot larger and that's because there's more to talk about. More tests, more software, more skills. It's a constantly [00:33:00] evolving arena, but all 72 hours are fresh content. A c i learning seven studios operate Monday through Friday, nine to five to make sure you get the latest information to keep you at the top of your game. And by the way, it's not just videos boring old droning on videos. No, they're entertaining. They're engaging for a few reasons. First of all, the instructors are all experts in the field and they have a passion for what they're talking about and that passion communicates. Your team will love this training. [00:33:30] Of course, it's completely informative. So I mean, what better way, wouldn't you? Isn't that the best way to learn anything by somebody who's passionate about it, who knows everything about it, who's communicating it perfectly so you can learn it?

(00:33:41):
No wonder a c i learning's completion rate on their videos is 50% higher than everybody else. A C I Learning has a lot of great tools for you too. Like cyber skills. You'll want to use this in your entire organization, not just the IT department. It's a cybersecurity training tool for everybody in your organization, [00:34:00] especially not IT professionals, so that they're up to date on the latest tricks that bad guys use to get into your network. With cyber skills, you get flexible on-demand training, covering everything from password security and phishing scams to malware prevention and network safety. Your employees will stay motivated, engaged throughout the learning process with easy to follow material, and it starts with a simple one hour course overview, which will give your employees attack specific training [00:34:30] and knowledge check assessments based on the common cyber threats they're going to encounter every single day in their job.

(00:34:36):
They'll also get access to additional bonus courses, documentary style episodes. They can go as deep as they want and many employees do. It's so good. The content is so well done. They'll learn about cyber attacks and breaches and they can do it in their own style at their own time. Because one of the things I love about a C I learning is all the courseware is 20 to 30 minutes bite-sized chunks, which I think you need to be. [00:35:00] Research says you only learn three things at a time, right? So you try to learn too much, you overwhelm yourself. So the chunk at the time during lunch, on the way home from work as you're eating your cereal in the morning, that's a great way to learn. A c i learning knows that a c i Learning. They help you invest your team and entrust them to thrive while increasing the entire security of your business.

(00:35:21):
Boost your enterprise cybersecurity confidence today with a C I Learning. Be bold, train smart visit go dot ACI learning.com/twit. [00:35:30] You'll get at least 20% off or as much as 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan. It's based on the size of your team. So fill out the form, find out what the discount is going to be. ACI learning, they're the best. Go dot aci learning.com/twi. We thank 'em so much for their support of this weekend. Google, where should I start? There's so many stories [00:36:00] to talk about. Here's some good news that just came in. Actually, Walter Ott was talking about it and I'll put this in here for you. Jeff Jarvis, Google is now promising 10 years of updates for Chromebooks. Yep, yep, yep. This was something they were getting hurt by really a lot of schools and others were saying, well the Wall Street Journal did a story saying that it's all electronic junk and every, tell me any machine that can stay alive with a child for more than still a boat anchor.

(00:36:30):
[00:36:30] Fine, I'm kidding. But 10 years is good and I've got a machine at the office that's probably will now update. Update. So I'm happy about that. Good. It will particularly be for more recent Chromebooks starting the next year. All Chromebooks released since 2021 will automatically receive 10 years, 10 years of security updates, which is pretty amazing. That's pretty good for older models, consumers and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the release [00:37:00] date of the platform. So for instance, my daughter who has the last pixel book, which I think was 2017, she loves her pixel book, but she said, dad, I see it's going to going to expire in March. Well now she'll be able to extend it to 20, 27, 10 years after its release, which is, I think that's good. Thank you Google. Google also said Chromebooks that go out of support, and this is important probably for everybody to hear are still relatively secure because of the verified boot.

(00:37:27):
Nobody can modify your firmware without your [00:37:30] knowledge and that doesn't go off just because your Chromebook isn't getting updates and Google is also investigating whether they can update Chrome standalone. So that really, that's the main thing you're using with a Chromebook. So if you can make Chrome, because they're plenty to separate anyway. Yes, exactly. Very good news. If you're interested in a Chromebook, and I think this was in direct response, did Paul actually say something nice about Google with this? He said good news and I think it's because a lot of schools [00:38:00] have spent a lot of money on Chromebooks, but even so Leo, how many really computers of any sort in an eight year old's hand is going to last 10 years. Yeah.

(00:38:16):
Yeah, that's a good point. Are you ready for the flying taxis? No. Hundreds are being made in Ohio. Home of the Wright Brothers. These are stretch for the local [00:38:30] angle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well this is the associated press. I don't know how the idea is this is Joby, which is hysterical, right? Because we know job all people crater tools, they make the gorilla pods, they make gorilla Pods, tripods Mike's. It's the same Joby, right? Joby Aviation is making what they call ev ol aircraft electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. [00:39:00] They're drones. In fact, if you look at the picture, they got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 props. Did they specify batteries in this thing? And so the range would be, I dunno what the batteries are. We talk about range in the cars, in the EVs. Look at this. Wait a minute. It takes off. They're pointed straight up and then when it gets going, yeah, they do.

(00:39:23):
They go that way. It doesn't need a runway. It's like a harrier. It's pretty cool. Each [00:39:30] one of those has a battery, has its own battery each prop. But that's the problem. That's a lot of energy to propel this thing is get 'em off the ground. They're designed to go according to Joby, to transport a pilot and fort passengers. It speeds of up to 200 miles an hour, maximum range a hundred miles. So they're taxis, they're to get you from Newark, Manhattan to the airport to Manhattan or from J F K to Manhattan. What about from Petaluma? Petaluma. We could get [00:40:00] to SS F O. Yeah, that's 55 miles. It wouldn't be able to get back. That's the thing it they've been talking about these vertical takeoffs for a while and twit listener. Well, they're building a factory, which means I think they're going to do it. I don't know if we're there yet, man. Just on the battery tech. We're more there than we are. Must self-driving. I don't know. I have more faith in that than I do him. If you've been waiting for flying cars, this is the beginning. It's not [00:40:30] going. I'm not there. You John, would you go in one? I'm not there. I wouldn't mind it, but I'm not there yet.

Joan Donovan (00:40:35):
I'm not going to lie. I do not like getting in Teslas. I am like, oh no. And the other part is I can never figure out how to open the door because it's like you have to push on one side of the handle and then it opens.

Leo Laporte (00:40:50):
I don't think they want you to open the door car. I think you should stay in the

Joan Donovan (00:40:55):
I know I should stay in the car like Judy, right?

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
Jetson. Judy Jetson never gets out. [00:41:00] Job's getting $500 million, 325 million in incentives from Mike DeWine in Ohio. Part of the Jobs Ohio Economic Development Office. That's a lot. Geez. $500 million project. They're partnering with Toyota, Delta, Intel and Uber, which Delta Airlines parts or airline. And the good news is they are the first e v ol firm to receive US Air Force airworthiness certification. Wow. That's okay. [00:41:30] So they're not going to fall out of the sky as the Air Force. I Air Force. Okay. Best Progress America, the United States Air Force. I didn't know the Air Force. I'm just quoting the ap. I'm just reading the news. I don't actually think about it. I just read it just like the rest of that's the way it is.

(00:41:54):
It does say a lot that they have all of this extra backing here and they're building a plant. [00:42:00] Toyota, a long-term investor worked with Joby in 2019. We've seen these, I feel like we've seen them at c s. They've been at c e s for years to design and successfully launched. I just saw online in LA just a couple months ago. I mean they're out there. Was it flying? Yeah, but again, it was a publicity stunt. They literally just go up and come right back down because they don't have the power to do much else. Well, the other thing that's important is that, as you know with camera drones, they're [00:42:30] noisy. That's an issue. These are apparently not. Well, they fixed the blades over camera drones over years to be less noisy. So I'm sure that's the same instance going. They say, here's the next question, would you get into one without a pilot? No, these are pilot. No, these are piloted. These are not. Although I'll be honest, I think that's what's held flying cars back is people driving them. I think if you're going to do it, you can do full self-driving to start from day one. That's going to be safer [00:43:00] because they can say, Hey, I'm coming your way. Get out of the move. Instead of, hey, you got a cigarette and you go, oh my God. They say the quiet noise profile is barely audible against the backdrop of most cities.

(00:43:18):
Okay, that's a really backdrop of, that's a funny little fudge words there as tested in the New York subways, the backdrop of most cities. [00:43:30] Good for Joby. I think that's hysterical. No, they're the different Joby I believe. But no, I think it's the same Joby from Santa Cruz. That's the same one. That's the same one that's like anchor making submarines. Yeah, so they got, okay, alright, that's cray cray, man. Again, I guess it does make sense if they were autonomous because I can't necessarily say I expect Queen Pruitt to listen to a T C and making sure everything is okay or listening [00:44:00] to C. We got Toro 6, 5, 9 or where are you going?

(00:44:08):
Who told you to call me bro? Six, five, nine. Have you filed a flight plan there for a I don't need a flight plan. I'm just going to the salon. No flying cars please. But you guys realize when you fly airplanes, there's no pilot there either. That's autopilot. Most of the time it's autopilot. Yeah, but in fact, in many commercial jets, when you're landing [00:44:30] at least one time in five, I think it was, they have to use the autopilot to land and they often say the landings are better, but at the same time, pilot can intervene and Attc says, you know what? I need you to drop down another. Yeah, I think 3000. This doesn't say that these are autonomous. This sounds like they a pilot, by the way, your book is now out. Aunt Pruit create Dominating. Okay, there we go. There we go. Thank you. That's what I wanted with the patchy Joe, make me a book. [00:45:00] Do not make me a book, Joe. I'm just telling you I don't want to see what you might come up with. It'll be in five minutes. Done.

(00:45:09):
So the trial continues against Google. I know you talked about it a lot last week and I was curious was Kathy's take on this, that this case has Merit Justice Department, 38 states and territories. I'm blanking saying Google used [00:45:30] its deep pockets and dominant position to pay other companies to be the default search engine in particular 10 billion a year to Apple, which is a big chunk by the way of Apple's profit and services revenue. Did she think there was merit to this case? I cannot remember Mr. Driver. I can't remember exactly what we landed either. You tuned down, choose let to the show. No, no, no, no, no. We were just calling a lot different points. It's so gone. My opening point was that, and Ann agreed with this, [00:46:00] if Google's paying $60 million, that's not a use of power. That's a market value, right? They saw value and the fact that Apple said, yeah, we'll take this money.

(00:46:12):
I don't really have a problem with them paying somebody, right? No, no. They said, in fact, I liken you're going to this for us for free, so damn powerful. That's different. You'd be ashamed of something happened to that. I likened it to Captain Crunch going to the grocery store saying Put an end cap of Cap Crunch cereal there. Here's a thousand dollars. In fact, [00:46:30] that's the primary revenue for most grocery stores. There is End cap. Exactly. And nobody's ever said, that's illegal Best Buy now. Yeah, it's marketing. I don't know. Anyway, we'll keep following Google is, I've always said this, where Google is most vulnerable is advertising where they own buy side and sell side. That's what I say too. We talked about that on Sunday on twit and I think agree, that's frankly what has to be fixed is divest that buy and sell deserves leader, leader leadership.

(00:47:00):
[00:47:00] Know that consumers have choice in this matter, even though it's default on said iPhone, you can go in and change the setting. I just whined on Twitter the thing some people call X, but I will, I believe it's calling x.com x. The New York Times just Brad Chen, Brian Chen, Brian, Brian Chen, Brian Chen, Brian X. Chen said, Google says, switching away from search engine is easy. [00:47:30] Well, he's wrong. It is easy, but for most people it probably, that's true for most people. That's not. No, no, no, they're not. Then. Well, there would be no duck, duck go. There'd be no binging. It's just Google's better, right? Yeah.

Joan Donovan (00:47:45):
I don't know if better is the word. It's entrenched.

Leo Laporte (00:47:48):
It isn't better anymore, is it?

Joan Donovan (00:47:51):
Yeah. Instead of calling it tissue, we call it Kleenex. Instead of calling it Xerox and instead of calling it a coffee machine, we call it Xerox, we call [00:48:00] search Google. Even I'll be sitting shoulder to shoulder with someone and they'll say, I'm going to Google it. And they'll be on Bing binging in their address bar. Exactly. What do you use, John? I mean, I use a variety of things, but I think I'm mostly, when I'm looking for things, I'll use search on certain platforms. I'm a big YouTuber, a big talker. [00:48:30] But if I'm searching the open web, if I don't get good answers from Google or I am three or four pages into the search looking for something, I will switch to DuckDuckGo or binging. And if I'm doing reverse image search, I might even use Yandex or other places that are going to pull up more relevant entries.

Leo Laporte (00:48:53):
My argument is Neva, which as you all know, oh, you loved it. I loved it in piece. [00:49:00] I paid five bucks a month to use it. It had no ads. So instead of the ads I paid, and it really, it was doing its own initially as everybody does. It was using binging, but they weaned themselves off of binging. It was two executives from Google who started it, and over a period of five years, they were able to create their own index. And it was very good and I loved it. And they went and they pivoted. They got out of the search business and they went to the AI business because they said the tyranny of the default, you cannot compete against Google. Not because [00:49:30] people can't change to Neva. I did. It's not, sorry Brian, it's not that hard. But in fact, Neva and I think Duck Duck go does this and a lot of others provide apps and browser extensions to simplify that process. That wasn't the issue. The issue was 99% of people just say, just Google. As you say, Joan, that's the verb. I'm going to Google it. And we call it the tyranny of the default. And Neeva went out of business. [00:50:00] They couldn't triumph over that. What phone do you carry, Joan? I've never asked.

Joan Donovan (00:50:03):
Oh, I am an Apple person. I was very interested in into Androids. And then this is a funny story. The day I went to New York, I turned my phone off. It was the day I was going to be interviewing at Data and Society for a job. I eventually got and I flew from New York, shut my phone off. I was in California, shut my phone off, got to New York and it wouldn't turn back on. Oh no. And then [00:50:30] I was in New York City, literally at J F K thinking, I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what I'm, and I went to Sprints and luckily I was able to just buy a whole nother phone.

Leo Laporte (00:50:46):
That's a cautionary. When I sold to Apple, you're right without, our phones we're helpless. I knew I was buying the new iPhone. I'm getting it on Friday, and I was at my sister's last week, and as [00:51:00] I'm leaving on Saturday, I said, I gave her my phone. I said, have my old iPhone 14 getting the new 15. And then I realized I'm out of luck. I don't know how to drive to the airport.

Joan Donovan (00:51:14):
You know where you're going,

Leo Laporte (00:51:15):
Where I am. I've been missing calls all week and I have an Android phone. It doesn't matter. Your life is in one phone, right? I am this week using Google, the Samsung [00:51:30] Flip, which is actually a great phone. It's a nice phone. It's attractive. It is. I do have everything on here and all of that because I've been dual phoning for a while, but it isn't the same. Your phone is really like your handbag, right? It's like without that, where would I find my mince and tissues? I don't know. I kind of have it.

Joan Donovan (00:51:56):
It was just particularly disconcerting because [00:52:00] I grew up in Boston and so New York is never anything I wanted to learn about. So I was kind first

Leo Laporte (00:52:07):
Version, hey

Joan Donovan (00:52:09):
To, okay,

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
I grew up in Providence,

Joan Donovan (00:52:11):
Ask in New Yorker, and

Leo Laporte (00:52:12):
I didn't know how to get to Logan. So there, okay,

Joan Donovan (00:52:15):
Yeah. Yeah. So it was a whole thing for me. I was like, I'm going to ask this guy in a Yankees hat for Mercy.

Leo Laporte (00:52:25):
I'm driving from Providence to Boston to Logan, and I'm thinking this is actually, it's less than an hour. [00:52:30] It's fast, it's easy. And then I got mad at my dad. He would never take us to Red Sox games. He said, oh, it's too far away. You're like, this is an hour. What you talking about? It's an hour away.

Joan Donovan (00:52:41):
Leo. You come to Boston, red Sox game's on me. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:52:44):
I love Fenway. I have since gone, Fenway was the best many a game at Fenway. I love Fenway Fenway. I took my daughter and her best friend to a game at Fenway, and [00:53:00] we had kind of out by the green monster seats. And the steps are a little bit like mos. This feels like a hundred years of beer and hot dogs have soaked into the cement. That's why I want to go. And they're not changing thing. They're almost soft from all the years of beer and other Detroit is washing down the steps at Fenway and they're worn. You could tell new a hundred years of baseball fans have walked on these steps. It's awesome. [00:53:30] I would love to

Joan Donovan (00:53:30):
Be here. It's like beach glass or something. It's got that. It really

Leo Laporte (00:53:36):
Does. There's something going on with it. There's something going on there. This was the week for leaked documents. Oh boy, Microsoft. Somewhat embarrassed by a trove of documents leaked in discovery in the F T C case against their merger with Activision, which the Fed said was Microsoft's fault, right? Yeah. It was supposed to be one page, [00:54:00] but there were attachments and it turns out the attachments were hundreds of megabytes of internal whoops presentations. Looks like we were talking about on Windows Weekly. And for the best description of it all, tune in Windows weekly. Paul's been reading it, but it looks like many of them were presentations intended for the board of directors to say, here's our plan. In fact, one of the things he said, our plan for dominance by 2038, [00:54:30] this is how we're going to beat Sony. So that was actually quite interesting and worth a read.

(00:54:39):
And it's fairly recent in the last couple of years. So everything in there is fairly recent. Well, apparently also as part of the Microsoft Activision Discovery, there was a leak of a document from Google Dove, Zimmer Ring who was leading the Project Stadia project. Since its beginnings, [00:55:00] it's actually a really great document. I highly recommend Stadia was, you may remember the project Google started for cloud gaming and they started it before anybody else. This was back nine years ago. They started this and the idea was, we'll run the servers, we'll run the games. You can play them on any device and it makes sense for the company that makes Android and Chromebooks that this would be, now you'd be able to play AAA games [00:55:30] on these low powered devices because all the powers in the cloud. So it's, it's good all around. It makes Google's cloud money, makes Google's devices work better.

(00:55:41):
They did a very deep, if you read it, market research where they really looked into what was going on. And actually I think we've probably, I've made fun of Stadia probably, and I think I know I did. I want to take it back. You have indeed. Yeah, I will. I want to take it back because I'm impressed by the amount of thinking that went into it. [00:56:00] So it's your fault that all this good thinking went to not they made one mistake, and it's a completely understandable mistake. They should have used Windows on these servers because all the games that are written are written for Windows. But they said, when this is quoting him, was selecting the technology stack, including G P U system, a p I for the Stadia servers that would run games. We considered several alternatives. We faced a decision [00:56:30] between, on the one hand, technologies that would provide the most flexibility and opportunity for us to realize our vision.

(00:56:37):
Or on the other hand, technologies with which third party game developers were already familiar. The first was Linux, right? More flexible, more opportunity for customization, easier for us to use that we don't have to pay Microsoft a little something, something for each instance. We believe this would enable the creation of new types of games and lead to the best [00:57:00] end user experience on Stadia and the best streaming quality. They weren't wrong, by the way. Their stack was very good, but Game Studio said, we're not going to redo our games for Linux. Oh, I see. Why would we do that one negative? This is the quote, one negative consequence of the decision. It increased the cost for external game studios to build games and port existing games to Stadia. Despite Stadia considerable investment to ease these costs [00:57:30] through developer tooling, middleware and personnel to directly support game studios. It just wasn't enough. Stadia was the most advanced cloud gaming service. He says generally outperformed competing cloud gaming services. And I'd agree with this in key metrics, video quality, smoothness of performance, et cetera. They had this great controller that was direct wifi direct. It really reduced latency for first person shooters and stuff, but they couldn't get [00:58:00] the AAA titles.

(00:58:03):
This is another quote, vigorously competed with other gaming services and partnered with several publishers to bring their games to Stadia. EA brought FIFA Madden, N F l, star Wars, Jedi Fallen Order to Stadia, but they couldn't get the new games. Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. More importantly, these competing services offered a wider selection of AAA [00:58:30] games in Stadia. And this is the problem, our internal research confirmed players expect to have access to many of these games on their chosen platforms. They're not going to choose a platform where they can't play that Call of Duty, that AAA title. Everybody knows that. It didn't take a lot of research to come up with that. One of those, it's a great example of where you make a decision early on that impacted all the way down. Everybody nods and said, yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Linux, [00:59:00] was this a post-mortem? Who was it written for? Yeah, I guess I'm not sure. It's not clear. It includes information from the whole process. The beginning of the end was when Google killed there, and we talked about this when it happened in 2021, their own studio to develop games for Stadia. That was like, then Google said, well, maybe can sell this white label list to third parties. Nobody wanted it. Yeah, I remember that.

(00:59:26):
So eventually, and this is what happens in a company, while [00:59:30] Stadia enjoyed success in supporting smaller developers' efforts to support their games to Stadia, we were unable to reach agreement with the developers of AAA games who complained about the cost of porting their games to work on Stadia. Given the lack of users on Stadia, even with the subsidies we provided, you don't get the flywheel. You don't get the users, the games, the users, the games, the users, the game. Actually, when you see this written out, they did the work, they did the right thing. I even think they made the right decision [01:00:00] with Linux, but there was no way they were going to win once they did that. In fact, this is what Steam's now finding out was Steam Deck.

Benito Gonzalez (01:00:08):
Sorry, this isn't why they failed. This isn't why Stadia failed. I'm sorry. Why

Leo Laporte (01:00:11):
Did Stadia fail? Bonita from the outside, the actual gamer. Get

Benito Gonzalez (01:00:14):
'em. I was a game journalist when the Stadia came out, so I was really on top of this at the time. This didn't work because it sucked. Period.

Leo Laporte (01:00:25):
Well, no, Bonita, wasn't it the lack of games you wanted to play?

Benito Gonzalez (01:00:28):
No, because I had those games on Windows. [01:00:30] Why would I buy a new thing to play those games? And also there's latency in the control and there's going to be a certain set of games. You

Leo Laporte (01:00:37):
Can't beat the

Benito Gonzalez (01:00:38):
Latency where you're not going to be able to play that. You're just seriously not going to be

Leo Laporte (01:00:41):
Able to play. Yeah, you can't fix that. Everything we argued about and those are all the games people want to play. Yeah.

Benito Gonzalez (01:00:47):
Online especially.

Leo Laporte (01:00:48):
It's not more fortress that's going to make this Exactly platform. It's Call of Duty, Mr. Howell.

Benito Gonzalez (01:00:56):
So this article was just like, this is why we failed. This is someone [01:01:00] saving face.

Leo Laporte (01:01:01):
Okay. Mr. Howell did a review of the Stadia here however many years ago it was. And boy, that was a battle. He said the same thing, didn't it? He said it sucks. It was so hard for him to get that review done. Alright. Alright. You're right. Screw you. Dove Zimmer ring. It's okay. Joan, are you a gamer? Sometimes you lay an egg man. And that was Google laying an egg.

Joan Donovan (01:01:26):
I got the switch during the pandemic. I [01:01:30] like to

Leo Laporte (01:01:30):
Don't tell me you played animal crossing. That thing's killing it. I

Joan Donovan (01:01:33):
Did. Well, my old neighbors, my old landlords had it. But to be honest with you, it was so complicated trying to link up with other people that I just switched to Mario Kart and would just battle preteens.

Leo Laporte (01:01:49):
I played so much middle of the night animal crossing my island looks so good and I don't want to go back. I know it's going to cockroaches much life and cob. [01:02:00] It's very much like life was. It was

Joan Donovan (01:02:02):
Capitalism.

Leo Laporte (01:02:03):
It was in Covid when I didn't have a life.

Joan Donovan (01:02:07):
That's true. I couldn't figure out how to get off my island. Then I just went fishing all the time because that was the only thing I knew how to do. I had the PlayStation two many years ago. I had one game, grand Theft Auto, and all I wanted to do was set cars on fire with the plane thrower and so I never actually played [01:02:30] the game and I feel like you can get away with that with certain games. The other game I really loved was Simpson's Crazy Taxi, which Oh wow. It had like a call. Call f that game was so much

Leo Laporte (01:02:43):
Fun. I've never played the Simpson version, but crazy Taxis a great game,

Joan Donovan (01:02:47):
But you're just crashing cars and yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:02:49):
You just hit cars. It's very twisted, man. That's it. Very anarchy. Someone gets to watch real people crash real things.

Joan Donovan (01:02:55):
I know, right? But it was fun. I don't know. I liked fun games [01:03:00] and I was totally that person that watched my older brother play Castle and all the Nintendo games and so I always admired it from afar. I really wish I was better at games then. I think I would enjoy the actual game part.

Leo Laporte (01:03:22):
Sounds like hard hit. It's true. I feel the same way, Joan, but there are games for people like us [01:03:30] who aren't good at games. Yeah. There's no game for me of drama.

Joan Donovan (01:03:33):
Send me some samples.

Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
Minecraft was for me a great game because you didn't have to be great at it. You just built stuff. Okay. I play a lot of Heim, which is Minecraft for Vikings. I say the ones you running around by yourself are totally fine. There's nobody in there. It's just me and I build a lot of castles and houses and there's a few bad guys and you just go whack and they're dead. Or just be a game where you're like the medic support even though you're horrible at shooting things. You be the medic. Be the medic. I don't [01:04:00] like games where you have too many fiddly bits. And I'm with you, Jon. There's too much. It's too complicated. I don't want that. I just want simple. Alright, we're true. We're going to take a break. Come back and talk about ai. Google. So last Sunday we had Sam Lessen on who's great VC show Slow Ventures.

(01:04:21):
That was a good show. Jessica Lesson's husband, the intern, and I said, I used to work with his father. Father was great. Sam's father, [01:04:30] Bob Lessen. He died some years ago now, but he worked with him at County na. He was an amazing, oh, I didn't know this early investor. So Sam's father made media mogul. Yeah, that's pretty cool. From the money side, I first became aware of Sam because he did a great startup called drop.io, which would let you store stuff and it was really a good thing. He sold it and he's gone on to better things. Anyway, I said, Bard sucks. [01:05:00] He said, no, Bard's the best. Well, Bard's trying to become the best. We'll talk about what's next for Google Bard as well coming up in just a moment. Joan Donovan is here. I'm not going to say the author of Anarchy in the Academy, although keep saying it, I say it becomes more real. It's stick. Just keep saying it. Her most recent book, which isn't even that old and is really good. Do you feel like when you write a book Mean Wars, that it's going to be dated very quickly? I mean, this is a fast moving [01:05:30] target.

Joan Donovan (01:05:32):
No, because we did the thing where we kind of tried to put the chapters in such a historical context that you actually start with Occupy and Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, and it's really this fascinating if I do say so myself. Fascinating story of the last 10 years of net history. Absolutely. So it has a lot of lessons for where we're headed, but each [01:06:00] chapter tries to reveal tips and tricks for people who are maybe not super interested in the politics, but are interested in what's happening online, how they can understand memoirs and how it operates, and how these different platforms engage in content moderation.

Leo Laporte (01:06:23):
Nice. Now I have to read it. I will.

Joan Donovan (01:06:28):
I'll send you a copy. [01:06:30] I don't know how I didn't

Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
Send you a copy. I'll buy a copy. Read the audiobook.

Joan Donovan (01:06:34):
It's wicked cheap on Amazon right now,

Leo Laporte (01:06:37):
Kendall. It's like 1260. So

Joan Donovan (01:06:40):
Yeah, I get

Leo Laporte (01:06:41):
It. I will get it. Get it, get it. You don't have to send it to me. I will get, everybody should get it. We had Taylor Lauren on a couple of weeks ago on track.

Joan Donovan (01:06:48):
Oh, she's

Leo Laporte (01:06:48):
Great. And her new book is coming out in a couple of weeks similar. And it's kind of funny to read these for histories of something that just happened that I, I've [01:07:00] been living this a week ago, but it is history and I mean it's really interesting. And when you start to read this, you go, oh, I remember that. It all is so evanescent that if you don't do what you're doing, you're writing this book and her book, it's going evaporate. And our students are younger than the internet, so we have to teach this. When I talked of course with Douglas Rush, I didn't think of that, that they didn't know the internet before. And I just taught a course with Jay Rosen, a [01:07:30] class with Jay Rosen. He does this every year with me and it's a lot of fun where he goes from the very beginning of the internet, then we start hitting the nineties. This is before them. Well, and Jones writing about talking about a o l and that kind of stuff is who New Jones writing about. I mean history. But it's recent history, like how the Stop the Steal Movement. It's all recent to us from online to I know. It's amazing. Well, if you're interested, this sounds great. I just [01:08:00] bought it so I, I'm looking forward to reading it. Me Wars, the Untold Story of the online Battles. Upending Democracy in America came out last year. So it's not an old book. It came out. No,

Joan Donovan (01:08:13):
We were just getting started. It ends on the day of the insurrection, but we had to write an epilogue. Everyone was going to jail. Big surprise.

Leo Laporte (01:08:24):
Oh wow.

Joan Donovan (01:08:26):
And so we do have a whole chapter on The Proud Boys. We have a chapter on [01:08:30] what we call joker politics, which is the rise of Nick Fuentes who ends up eating Thanksgiving dinner with Trump and Kanye West. That's right. Not that long ago. Any sunlight. So I think we're the first people to really chronicle where he came from and what his power level is and how he ended up hosting conferences where Paul Gosar and M T G had showed up to talk to the crowd. And so [01:09:00] there's a lot to learn and discover. I think sometimes I feel like I live in this shadow world where you have mainstream politics and if you watch what's happening in right-wing politics on the internet, six months later it's happening in the party. And same thing with left-wing politics. If you watch what's happening online, eventually it shows up in the mainstream. And so as authors, we really wanted to decode that.

Leo Laporte (01:09:29):
I might note [01:09:30] that this is the exact one year anniversary of its release.

Joan Donovan (01:09:34):
Oh, you're right. Wow. September. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:38):
Crazy. Isn't that great?

Joan Donovan (01:09:41):
I should have had a book birthday.

Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
Happy birthday. Me mores.

Joan Donovan (01:09:45):
I mean that's true. Did

Leo Laporte (01:09:47):
You imagine when you wrote this that people like Leader of the Proud Boys would be going to jail for 22 years?

Joan Donovan (01:09:56):
I was hoping, but

(01:10:00):
[01:10:00] No, I couldn't believe it because you know, when this stuff was happening and in motion, most people disregarded them as just these weirdos, these zealous idiots, these MAGA fans. But if you look at the history of the people that came to be the Proud Boys and how they made tons of money off of t-shirts and all kinds [01:10:30] of 1776 gear. And so the Proud Boys were actually a business in many ways and not just a movement. And so once you start to look at those dynamics, I realize how serious it was and that we perhaps got away lucky even though there were several people who had died on that day. But I still don't understand why they didn't bring assault weapons, [01:11:00] and I don't think they're going to leave him behind the next time. But it's still remarkable to me that I think they really did believe in their hearts that Trump was going to call the Insurrection Act and they had people stationed with weapons offsite ready to come in and when he didn't do it, they left the White House. I mean the Capitol building. But I said [01:11:30] the White House, I was thinking about Inauguration Day. But yeah, I think it's a strange thing to kind of witness this and see so many people pretend these people pretend as if the Proud boys were not a legitimate threat, even though there

Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
Were years. I felt at some point I thought, oh, these are just Coplay military. They're just basement losers who are coplay military, but they really were [01:12:00] dangerous.

Joan Donovan (01:12:01):
Innocent. Yeah, they were. And also some of them were you.

Leo Laporte (01:12:06):
They weren't just cosplayers

Joan Donovan (01:12:07):
Playing military. Yeah, exactly. They had training, not just the Proud Boys, but also thinking here, the Oath Keepers and other folks that took up January 6th as their anthem. And it's so weird because you're right about it being so recent, but [01:12:30] it does feel like a lifetime ago, 2016 and then 2020, and now we're headed towards 2024. And from my perspective, all betts are off.

Leo Laporte (01:12:44):
Joan Donovan is our guest author of the fabulous new book Anarchy in the Academy.

Joan Donovan (01:12:51):
You're killing me now. You're getting all my Ss e o Now I got to read my Don't look too.

Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
Who warmed it?

Joan Donovan (01:13:00):
[01:13:00] How did you get the real book?

Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
What

Joan Donovan (01:13:06):
Is going on that you've got the book in front?

Leo Laporte (01:13:09):
Welcome to the future 2024. I can

Joan Donovan (01:13:15):
Tell you, you have got to send that to me.

Leo Laporte (01:13:17):
What

Joan Donovan (01:13:18):
Did you three D print this?

Leo Laporte (01:13:20):
Where did this

Joan Donovan (01:13:20):
Come from? Who's got a printer like that?

Leo Laporte (01:13:23):
Shit. G P T wrote I Lulu. It came out. It's done. It's done. It's out. Don't read the top part though, that says, I don't [01:13:30] think this is true based on the 2002 National National Electrical Code. I don't. I think that's an error that's See, that's hallucination. That's AI hallucination right

Joan Donovan (01:13:42):
There. Yeah. Oh my God.

Leo Laporte (01:13:44):
It's shocking. Guys.

Joan Donovan (01:13:46):
Eat too much. Too

Leo Laporte (01:13:47):
Much. The shocking expose. So good. I love this crimson blood draw. Oh, it is good. It is good. It's so good. Oh, Mr. Esposito, well done. It's a collaborative effort here at twit. [01:14:00] I got to say,

Joan Donovan (01:14:02):
I don't know how you managed to make an actual book, Mr.

Leo Laporte (01:14:05):
Joe Esposito's work and in the clever engineering of the one and only Mr. Burke here at TWIT Burke. Well done.

Joan Donovan (01:14:13):
Wow. I need that now for my personal archive. Oh yes, I have Leo. I used to

Leo Laporte (01:14:20):
The first edition, Joan.

Joan Donovan (01:14:22):
Yeah, but I told you this before. I used to cruise around in LA listening to you on Sundays and go [01:14:30] into estate sales and hear, and you talk about which tablet to buy and what scam not to fall for.

Leo Laporte (01:14:39):
Now, I'm putting these skills to good use.

Joan Donovan (01:14:43):
Oh my God. Awful circle now.

Leo Laporte (01:14:46):
Well done team. We'll have more. Yeah. What a team. I love it.

Joan Donovan (01:14:49):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:14:50):
Hilarious. I'll have more in just a moment with Joan Donovan, Ant Pruitt and Mr. Jj, Jeff Jarvis. He's Dynomite [01:15:00] Jarvis. We call him the show today. Brought to you by, I love Leo. I was just telling Paul Thra about my Leo because he's doing, as we all must do at some point, the great digital cleanup, right? You got a migration happening. You live your life, you collect in digital detritus in your documents folder, your photos folder, and you just got all this stuff. At some point you say, I got to do something about this and organize [01:15:30] it. So he's doing that right now. Actually, it's been great because he's been posting videos to YouTube from Microsoft briefings and stuff, all sorts of good stuff. But he's got all these photos and he said, I suddenly realized it's not just Google Photos. That isn't even the most complete collection.

(01:15:45):
They're here and here and here and here and here, and I got to somehow get 'em together in one place and I got to get rid of the duplicates. I said Paul, my M Y L I O, and by the way, it's free. So [01:16:00] get it right now, free for one computer. You're going to maybe end up wanting to get the myo photos, plus then you could put it on all your computers. And that's what I've done. I have it on every single computer. It's a smart, powerful system. It's what you and I would call a dam, a digital asset management solution. But by the way, not just photos, it has O C R built in, so it can take PDFs and other documents. It understands Word documents. It'll import them. It will then index them based on the contents. Makes it very easy to search.

(01:16:30):
[01:16:30] Here's the best thing. It's not storing them on anybody's cloud, not Google. It's your stuff. You can keep it completely offline if you want, or it has encryption built in. You can encrypt it and then upload it to Dropbox or iCloud or Google Drive anywhere. You've got some storage, but it's encrypted. So nobody except you can see what's in there. It's the solution to optimize and preserving your digital legacy. And it's absolutely [01:17:00] free. I should check my myo. I think it's over 200,000 photos in there. And what's cool about it's, it doesn't slow down. I've heard of Myo catalogs with 2 million photos in it. It's remarkable. Lemme see. We've been doing it for document control in the Pruitt household because one college boy and another potential college boy headed out. There's a lot of documents to keep up with and it's always a question of, well, where is it on the computer?

(01:17:29):
Right? [01:17:30] Right here, I've got the calendar view and it's got each month and the photos that belong to each month. What's great is it also shows in this bar on the right and you can move it around, but I've got 205,000. Oh yeah, you can look over my shoulder. That's good. 205,000 photos and it shows all the devices that I'm hooked up with. So there's my laptop, my desktop, my tablets, my iPhone. Here's a Windows machine, and you can choose how much [01:18:00] data you see. This one has thumbnails and optimized copies. My desktop, which has a lot of storage, has the thumbnails, the optimize, and the originals. You can have them anywhere you want, so you never lose anything. And then I told Paul, the best part, first of all, you could take your Google takeout. I downloaded it to Google takeout and then just import it exactly as it comes from Google.

(01:18:21):
And so I got everything important, so I know I have every, and you could do that with Flickr, you could do that with Instagram. You could do it with all your different computers. Now I have all of [01:18:30] the photos and all the different disparate places in one place, but as you might imagine, there's lots of duplicates. It's got a de-duplicate command that works so well. It's perfect. It'll show you what it's suggesting. But after I looked at, I went through a few of 'em, I said, no, you got it. You're doing great. So I pressed do 'em all and boom, they're gone. It keeps track of edits. It lets you go to an editor. It has smart tags, so I've got all the people tagged, but it'll [01:19:00] also automatically do things like Lakes, mountains, snow outdoors lakes activities, animals, plants, long exposed colors, smart tags.

(01:19:13):
I remember back in the day, there was this great app that Google bought and killed called Picasso. Oh, don't bring that up. I miss Picasa. This is like Picasa on steroids. This is like picasa 10 years later if they kept working on it. And in fact, these guys have been working on Myo photos for that long. They've been improving it every [01:19:30] year. In fact, they just announced a whole bunch of improvements. I can't tell you I'm N D A, but they're coming soon. Older documents you thought were lost, you can update them right in the app and keep the original intact. And with a myo photos plus subscription, all your devices as you saw in one library with no cloud storage required, or you can use cloud storage. What I've got is I've got my Sonology, I put Molly at Myo on my sonology and that one's [01:20:00] yeah, read only so it can download everything, but it can't be modified.

(01:20:04):
So that's like a backup. Yeah, that makes sense. You don't have to rely on anybody's cloud to keep those files accessible in all the devices. I just don't wait. Preserve your digital legacy today. Get my LEO photos for free on your computer or mobile device, our special U R L. Please use this my Leo, m y l i O, my Leo m y. I just say it really slowly for Paul, for some reason, M Y L I o.com/twit, [01:20:30] you download my LEO photos for free. Just verify it'll do everything you need. My leo.com/twitter. It completely replaced Google Photos for me. myo.com/twitter. What did you do, Burke? You took it and you fixed it. Was there something wrong with it? I think it looks still pretty good. I don't know. It looks pretty sharp to me. It looks good to me. Anarchy in the academy based on the 2002 National Electric Code. Get [01:21:00] get yours today. At

Joan Donovan (01:21:01):
Least make it about telephones or something relevant.

Leo Laporte (01:21:05):
Well, I think it's going to be a thicker book than this too, with all the revolution, all

Joan Donovan (01:21:09):
The revolutions. Well, you'll be surprised. I've literally felt buried for a year, and so there's a lot I want to say, which is why I need an editor. Yeah, I was going to say, editors

Leo Laporte (01:21:23):
Going to have the razor out. I read, and I've mentioned this before, but I loved it. It was so many, it was 1300 pages. The Robert Moses [01:21:30] biography. Oh yeah. The physical book is literally this thing.

Joan Donovan (01:21:32):
Wow. Was it good?

Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
Oh, it's incredible. He's been talking about it. I can't stop. Well, it took me two months to read. It's 64 hours on Audible, but there was a great documentary about Bob Gottlieb who passed recently. Jeff knows who Gottlieb is. One of the great editors at, what was the publishing house? Simon and Schuster? I can't remember. It was Random House. Random House, and I think Koff, he started Koff. I don't know. Anyway, [01:22:00] I don't remember. Gottlieb was Robert Caro's editor, and they had an amazing partnership. And Gottlieb's daughter made this documentary before Bob Gottlieb passed, and it's about Caro and Gottlieb and their collaboration. And one of the things it's called Turn Every Page highly recommended. Where did I find it? I think it was on Criterion Collection. But anyway, it's worth finding. If you can, it's great documentary. But it turns out the manuscript was [01:22:30] twice as big son, and they had to cut 130,000 words because no press could print a single volume big enough.

(01:22:42):
And Kara said, well, why don't we make two volumes? And Gottlieb said, look, it's going to be hard enough getting people to buy one book on Robert Moses. There's no way they're going to buy two. So they had to cut 130,000 words. That's how long my book was. That's a whole book we wrote. They cut a whole book out and imagine how hard that was. [01:23:00] You're right, Simon and Schuster and Koff and Goleb said, it wasn't like those 130,000 words were bad. He said every word. I mean, Carol's amazing. Every story. You didn't want to cut anything, but you had to. Geez. And it looks like it is available for rent on pretty much all of the string platforms. Oh, good. Turn every page. I really liked it. That's my pick of the week. Let's see what else is going on. I should do the ai.

(01:23:27):
You want to do the Bard story? Oh, yeah. Let's [01:23:30] start the AI story with, well see. I need your help here. Google's saying it's released, it's out, it's extensions. I can't figure out how to use it. I want to use it before the AI show tomorrow. Can you find any way to actually attach Bard to your Gmail? Oh, to attach it to Gmail here. Let's see. I just went to bard.google.com. Introducing Bard extensions. Oh, there next. Let's see. Let me guess. Quickly get what you need from Gmail. Okay, next. Double check. Bard's responses. [01:24:00] Okay, done. I guess that's, did I do it? I don't know. One of the things Bard does that chat does not do is this disclaimer. There is a little disclaimer on chat G P T, but it's not quite so honest. Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views. Okay, I got it. I don't get that. I'm not seeing any. Maybe I'm special. Okay. Extension is [01:24:30] at the top. Based on your places update location. Where do you see the extension?

Joan Donovan (01:24:36):
I don't know why this extension thing is making me think of that movie. Snow Piercer as if there's a little person inside the machine that works for Google that's typing your emails for you. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:24:48):
I like

Joan Donovan (01:24:49):
That. That's the image that I got when you were like, oh yeah, it might, it's a little person. Stay on true things. It's like, well, do you know that movie At the end, the big reveal is that they're [01:25:00] cannibalizing children because they're the only ones small enough to work the

Leo Laporte (01:25:03):
Machines. Oh, geez.

Joan Donovan (01:25:06):
It's a scary one. But I just feel with these, if only they could get a machine to read my emails and respond to emails, and I wouldn't have to do anything. Is this

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
A good movie? Should I watch Snow Piercer? I've always kind of avoided. Oh,

Joan Donovan (01:25:22):
It's fun. It's

Leo Laporte (01:25:23):
Fun. A train in the snow was the only thing I, well, fun,

Joan Donovan (01:25:26):
But it's spooky and I don't how to explain

Leo Laporte (01:25:29):
It. It's a Bja hoop [01:25:30] film. It parasite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parasite was interesting.

Joan Donovan (01:25:37):
But yeah, no parasite. I loved. I

Leo Laporte (01:25:39):
Loved, yeah, well won the Academy Award, so I'm sure it was good. Look on one of those things on the top of the screen where you do an extension. Let's see you using here. Okay, look, see the little puzzle piece with the red dot? Do you have a red dot on yours? No, I don't. Oh, okay. So I clicked the little puzzle piece. Turn extensions on or offer anytime. Okay. Google Flights. [01:26:00] Google Hotels, Google Maps, they're all on. See that Google workspace? Let's turn that on. Yep. All right. Actually, I'm going to connect it. Well, I'll connect it. Who's talking? You're saying the magic words. Google. Google. Google. Hey, you. YouTube. So now, I don't know, I guess it's on now. If you go to your YouTube, let's go to YouTube. You should have that kind of question ready for you [01:26:30] or a space for you.

(01:26:31):
YouTube, it says, discover and learn from YouTube videos in your Bard conversations. So now I'm just adding the YouTube stuff as fodder for the little child in the Bard machine. Maybe you could ask her to search her email. That's one of the things you could do is summarize Gmail. Go my email from Lisa about the business. Lemme go to, that would be useful. Why would this be useful in YouTube? Well, you can ask it because Joan, you said she uses YouTube search. It's [01:27:00] a better search. Tell me how to do this and it'll show you the videos.

(01:27:07):
It's saying Discover and learn from YouTube videos in your Bard conversations get inspired. Research a topic. Okay, so research. Well maybe go to Bard Leo and say, show me how to, oh, that's probably what it's install a Don't you love this part of the show where we ostensibly experts on Google, try to figure out how the hell this stuff works. Summarize [01:27:30] all the emails I've received from Shein. Let's see if it knows. It is. Got my Gmail. Finding your emails, accessing emails. Oh, whoa. You've received five emails from Shein promoting new arrivals, discounts and seasonal collections. They also encourage you, oh, French, how cool are you? Well, it's because I'm LaPorte. I know. Okay, let's do one [01:28:00] for the YouTubes. Find me the YouTube video I watched about fixing up a car. Let's see if it knows what I watched. Right? It's gone through my YouTube.

(01:28:19):
It's pretty cool. I just asked this, how many messages do I have in my shipping folder? Oh, that's good. And I got a response. I don't have access to your email account, so I can't tell you how many messages, [01:28:30] even though I just, you clicked the little thing. Yeah, I just did all of that. Oh, you have the thing. I thought you didn't have it. You have it. Yeah, I do. I put the little, you know what? I'll bet it's because I'm Google Workspace. Oh yeah. It's because your workspace. Workspace. Anyway, that's nice. Yeah, I turned it on. I guess it's going to take, what are the, those maps. Have it do what you did in Italy where it hadn't planned a trip. Try that. Now I have to say, every time I've given a Bard prompt, it's not been as good as Chachi. Especially [01:29:00] version three.

(01:29:01):
Fiverr. I mean four. That's the latest four, right? One of the stories is that Google is now working on Gemini, which is what they call multimodal. L l n means that you can give it images or ask for images. You can do music. You could do a multimedia in effect thing. So what did you want me to do search for? Just do the perfect tour of Venice. Give me the perfect tour of Rome. I'll do, because that's where [01:29:30] my son is right now. Oh, and with anything, what should I, any qualifiers. Something about food. Something weird about food it with the best. I'll just put food tour free pasta. Give me the perfect, here we go. Gluten-free tour of Rome. Nice. Ask him to put it on a Google map. On my Google map.

(01:29:56):
I like that bonito. Okay. Give me the perfect gluten-free [01:30:00] tour of Rome on Google Maps. It's opening Google Maps right now. It's thinking Bard was just updated. Here's a possible gluten-free tour of Rome. It's working now. Start your day with coffee and pastry. Oh, wait a minute. At pan gluten-free bakery and cafe, then head to Voya de pizza, gluten-free, a snug eatery that serves up delicious gluten-free pizza. Take a walk to the Trevi fountain and visit the Pantheon. There's no gluten there. [01:30:30] Then head to the Coliseum and Roman forum for dinner. La SoFi, a family we restaurant that serves house pasta specials and homestyle dishes from Rome and ab Bruso. And here's the map. I think it's pretty nicely integrated. Look at that. Yeah, I bet. Yeah, that's good. Doesn't have my path on it.

(01:30:51):
Okay. Alright. Alright. Anyway, those are there. But let's talk a little more about this Gemini thing. This is a story from the info [01:31:00] OpenAI hustles to beat Google to launch multimodal L L M. Now, we got a horse race is this business. Google has shared Gemini with a small group of outside companies, but OpenAI is racing to integrate G P T four with multimodal features similar to what Gemini does. And, [01:31:30] okay, that's all. That's the story. Any comments? Okay. That's a yawn. Nope. Oh, have you seen stability? AI's new stable audio? Oh, I haven't. This is another multimodal, but it only does audio. That's You want to make some music? Let's make some music. Now it comes with some samples, which are predictably. AI ish. AI ish. Jason was making music with this last week on, oh, he already did it. [01:32:00] Well, it's okay. No, no, no.

(01:32:02):
One on our show was on the other show. AI show. It was on AI inside. Jeff and Jason do AI inside every Thursday in our club Club Twit. If you're not a club twit member and you'd like to hear more of this awful music, that's not awful. That's decent white noise. At least when you say white noise, mean noise from white people, or no, that's other gibberish that y'all do. But [01:32:30] this sounds exactly what a computer thinks music is. Yeah. No heart. No want to worry. But again, that's just white noise. That would totally be fine as a music bed on some video that's just showing off a product. It would be totally fine for that. The prompt for this is ambient tech meditation, Scandinavian Forest. 8 0 8 drum machine. 8 0 8 kick claps. [01:33:00] Shaker synthesizer synthase. Synth thrones. Beautiful. Peaceful, ethereal, natural. 122 beats per minute. Instrumental. I think it works. Let's get Mr. Nielsen in here with a camera to shoot B roll of this Logitech M 10 mouse with that in the background and it will work. Yeah, you're right. It'd be a perfect YouTube channel.

Joan Donovan (01:33:22):
Does it have anything for heavy metal?

Leo Laporte (01:33:24):
Oh, you want some heavy metal?

Joan Donovan (01:33:26):
Yeah. Another plug. Probably going to make some, I started [01:33:30] a band last year. Year. What?

Leo Laporte (01:33:31):
Are you serious? What?

Joan Donovan (01:33:33):
I'm in a punk rock band. Yeah. We play shows. We play all ages shows. We're called pushback because it's my favorite HR term. And I'll send you some stickers. We're recording a demo soon. Oh, don't

Leo Laporte (01:33:46):
Worry. We'll make you some stickers. I

Joan Donovan (01:33:47):
Love music

Leo Laporte (01:33:48):
Stickers. Have you made stickers? Snickers.

Joan Donovan (01:33:52):
Make me a book. Have Bard. Write it.

Leo Laporte (01:33:54):
You don't have to write anything anymore. Hey,

Joan Donovan (01:33:56):
Write me an album. Put in [01:34:00] Norwegian black metal. See what comes back.

Leo Laporte (01:34:03):
Is that what you play? I'm

Joan Donovan (01:34:04):
Interested. Well, not the Norwegian part, or more like North Shore of Massachusetts,

Leo Laporte (01:34:10):
But

Joan Donovan (01:34:11):
That's not a genre yet.

Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
More like a lobster roll and roast beef

Joan Donovan (01:34:16):
Sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. Come get some salt and be by.

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
So Kelly's on the beach. That's the ad is a roast beef sandwich next to a lobster roll.

Joan Donovan (01:34:27):
Oh yeah. That makes my stomach. Kelly's is still there. That

Leo Laporte (01:34:30):
[01:34:30] Website stomach. That website was beautiful. Oh,

Joan Donovan (01:34:32):
Well,

Leo Laporte (01:34:32):
I don't know if I'm ready for that. What is this asking you to do? Verify what? I have to log in. Oh, I'm just going to log in and then you're going to give me a prompt, Joan, for the music from your, what do you play in your band?

Joan Donovan (01:34:48):
I sing in the band.

Leo Laporte (01:34:50):
Give me an example of some the Joan Donovan singing de

Joan Donovan (01:34:54):
Vocalist. Oh God, no, no, no, no. Not falling into that trap.

Leo Laporte (01:35:00):
[01:35:00] No. Oh, I can continue with Google here. Well, I'll continue with Google.

Joan Donovan (01:35:05):
Yeah. See if Google will write a heavy metal song.

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
This is Stable AI stability, which was one of the early image guys. Okay. I have read and accept the terms and conditions. Of course I haven't. Yeah, you did. I saw you read 'em. Just do. So I'm going to need you to give me a prompt. So you wanted Norwegian [01:35:30] black metal. What else?

Joan Donovan (01:35:36):
That's it. I mean, let's see what it does.

Leo Laporte (01:35:38):
Wow. Song with an ode to amazing Harvard gravel voiced lead singer, gravel voiced female female gravel lead. I love its gravel voice. No. One

Joan Donovan (01:35:56):
60. I'm a gravelly voice.

Leo Laporte (01:35:57):
You don't. A gravel voice. What else? What else?

Joan Donovan (01:36:00):
[01:36:00] Oh, I do when I sing, when

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
Sings. I was 160 bpm because it's going to be true. Punk. Dfl. In? In D. Oh, flat. Oh yeah.

Joan Donovan (01:36:10):
Drop D.

Leo Laporte (01:36:11):
Let do it. All right. Let's see. This is going to be good or not. It takes a minute. This is probably,

Joan Donovan (01:36:16):
It's just going to talk about white noise.

Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
Ready? Here we go. Here we go. Is it playing? What is going on here? No, it's still thinking. It's still thinking. It's pending.

Joan Donovan (01:36:27):
Yeah. You hear

Leo Laporte (01:36:28):
That a lot of punks

Joan Donovan (01:36:29):
About how long it [01:36:30] takes us

Leo Laporte (01:36:30):
To pending.

Joan Donovan (01:36:31):
Write a song pending.

Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
It might take a minute or two. We we're pending. Alright, we, we'll come back to it. Stay tuned for Norwegian Black Metal Punk Rocking D Flat show Title. Norwegian black metal. We did Harry Potter. I think that's it. That's the AI segment. For now. For now. Well, I know there's a little more below. In fact, we should plug AI inside on line 50. It's coming up [01:37:00] on AI inside. Something good Or we'll just play. This is a little promo this last week. We plug next week. Last week. Here's last week. Backup inside. Thank you for taking some time to talk with us today. We really appreciate you. It's a good line at the end. Alright, Alex babin zero systems.com. We will bring it back in. Guy somewhere down the line. Check back in on that, Jason, on where this is all kind of continuing to develop into. We're so good to talk practically, not stupidly. Yeah, [01:37:30] right. Much is so hyped up. It is very practical and it has to be right. And the tolerances for hallucinations and stupidity is much lower and I'm glad to see that. That was great to hear. I also appreciated the comment not taking jobs is taking the jobs of people who aren't utilizing ai. He of course worded it a lot more eloquently than I just did.

Joan Donovan (01:37:54):
Remember

Speaker 5 (01:37:54):
20 ago when there were job advertisements [01:38:00] and people like companies were looking for people, there was almost everywhere aligned knowledge of computer is required.

Leo Laporte (01:38:07):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:38:08):
So now no one puts it in because it's just redundant. Everyone knows how to use the computer, but now it's going to be like work with AI is required. Ability to know how to prompt correctly is required. And I would say English majors are taking the world back by storm.

Leo Laporte (01:38:28):
Science can write a [01:38:30] prompt English

Speaker 5 (01:38:31):
Major. That's

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
Nice. Who was that guest? He's good. I like him. He made a good point. He runs a company called Zero, and the line that he had coming up there was that the most powerful programming language in the world today is English. English language. Well, in that case, I think we should hear some Norwegian black metal and D flat.

Speaker 6 (01:38:57):
Joan, can you sing with this so bad? [01:39:00] Yeah, I could. And I gave the academy. This part's a little weird actually. You know what? Vocalist, this is not bad. It's a vocalist. Yeah, I think you were smart. Is the vocal sound

Joan Donovan (01:39:25):
Completely underwater?

Speaker 6 (01:39:27):
Yeah. A lot of what AI music sounds [01:39:30] underwater for some reason, but it's at least it's 60 beats per minute and deep flat. I

Leo Laporte (01:39:35):
Would work with this. To me, all punk sounds the same, so I would work with it. There you go.

Joan Donovan (01:39:42):
We do, Leo, you're asking me to make you a Spotify playlist, I guess.

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
Oh, would you please? All

Joan Donovan (01:39:48):
Punk sounds the same. Would you please? Oh, I would be delighted. Would you

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Please? I actually recognize that as the basis for Metallica. Yeah. So maybe you can make me, I [01:40:00] would love if you made me a Spotify playlist. We'll share it with our audience. We'll put it in the show notes. You don't have to do it right now, but yeah, sometime before the end of the world

(01:40:12):
If you would do that. Well, I would appreciate it. That would be great. Jeff, you did have a bunch of AI stories in here. So let me prove worthwhile. The beauty of it was next week, by the way, Whitely spot joins Weis Plat is going to be on. She has a new newsletter [01:40:30] called AI Panic. She's exposing me Oral panic. Moral panic. We had to read on the show some time ago because she was talking about how tech journalists have basically been forced to do something bad. I can't remember something like that. They were moral panic. Moral panic, moral panic. It was all moral panic. You loves being on the network feeling about this. Here's Ant's book has just come out. We're very excited to share [01:41:00] with you for the first time. The galley proofs are here, create and dominate by Mr. Ant Pruitt. It's not quite ready for public consumption. It's the anarchy in the academy. It is in works. We've got some, we've got to find more for Burke to do. I think that's what this proves.

(01:41:20):
That's what this proves. Oh, you know what? I played the wrong clip from AI inside. I should have played the clip above on line 49. You gave me the wrong line number. That's what, no, actually no. That was the background. [01:41:30] Okay. You were right. You were right. I did not lead you astray. I would not do that. Was there any other story here? What else you like? Oh, New York Times. I saw this times. That's a good word. Yeah. The New York Times is hiring a generative AI lead full-time job at the New York Times. They posted this a couple of days ago. The mission, blah, blah, blah. Here's the job description. Seeking a senior editor to lead the newsroom's efforts to ambitiously and responsibly make use of generative artificial intelligence. [01:42:00] Joe was having chat, G P T write his application right now. I saw a good, in fact, I think I bookmarked it. Let me look at my bookmarks. A good response to this.

(01:42:14):
Lemme see if I can find it. Technologists who are prototyping new capabilities and running experiments across the newsroom. Experiments for news. Ena Freed wrote on Axios a response to this, the right news word, jobs for the AI and the wrong ones, [01:42:30] her thought bubble. Good luck to the winning applicant to that New York Times job listing. Journalists like many other professionals are fearful and anxious about the new technology. This is not going to be an easy job, but she says, I'm generous. So here's a memo with helpful advice. Dear Future Robot Wrangler. Many publishers have jumped right in to use generative AI for writing entire articles. A task technology is not yet ready to take on. [01:43:00] Don't write whole articles. Far more interesting opportunities lie under the surface. Today's generative AI systems make mistakes, plagiarize, say inane or embarrassing things and make stuff up as Gizmoto and the Onion and M s N and Columbus dispatch and geo media and CNET have learned with very spectacular, very public flops.

(01:43:22):
Even if they get better at sticking to the facts, algorithms can't assess credibility. We know that today's technology often does a passable [01:43:30] job summarizing an interview, but it has no idea if the interviewee is the foremost expert on a subject or someone who's in over their head or someone who's just making this crap up. There are some very limited writing tasks. AI can be let loose on today. Corporate earnings stories. How hard could that be? No, that's just data. That's just data. In fact, the LA Times has had a bot do this for years on earthquakes, giving them what people wanted to know. How big is the tremor? [01:44:00] Where was it centered and so forth. The bigger newsroom opportunity writes is to use AI for other parts of the reporting and writing process. She says, I've been using Otter AI to record and transcribe notes and it's AI chat bot lets me ask questions of my notes.

(01:44:16):
I love that. That was what Notebook ML did too, right? That's what exactly lm. Yeah, LMM. And I am constantly looking for other tasks it might assist with. I think AI will someday soon help me identify sources from my email, [01:44:30] for example. I think maybe now Bard would be able to do that with your Gmail. AI can also be used to find patterns in vast amounts of data. Very good at that. Better maybe than humans. Maybe not an organization's zone archives as well as large swaths of public information. A reporter might only have time to read through a handful of dozens of speeches. I'll give you a good example. This memo drop, inadvertent memo dump from Microsoft. Paul was trying to read through it before the show. That might be a perfect example of take all those documents, [01:45:00] give it to an ai, say summarize, and then more importantly, people to ask it questions. What are Microsoft's plans for 2038? That kind of thing. Illustrations and some kinds of conceptual graphics. Another area of promise for ai. We've seen that lots of people on stack now using AI illustrations. Everybody's using it for the thumbnails. We use it. Why? I think an AI was used to generate Joan's book.

(01:45:28):
No, he's not an ai. He's an Esposito. [01:45:30] He's a real human. He's a real boy. Illustrations and some kinds of conceptual graphics are another area. Oh, I said that. Yes. But visual journalists have raised strong questions on, this is what we we're just talking about, ethical and intellectual property related grounds about many of today's generative AI image systems. She says, experiment behind closed doors first. Yes. Be transparent. Let the audience know what you're up to and [01:46:00] why. She says the LA Times actually is a good exemplar of how to do this with its quakebot. I am sorry. Go ahead. AI can help with the news business, but it also threatens that journalism has been slow to adapt other recent text shifts and pay to heavy price, but that needin be the case with ai. So Joan, in a faculty meeting at BU in the journalism department, how would you address this question to your colleagues who look at you and say, oh, she's the geeky person.

Joan Donovan (01:46:30):
[01:46:30] I mean, this actually happened to me not in a big faculty meeting, but in our first faculty retreat and you go

Leo Laporte (01:46:38):
On retreats.

Joan Donovan (01:46:39):
Well, no, it's like they call it a retreat, but they just, it's really

Leo Laporte (01:46:42):
Just a visit to Kelly's roast beef.

Joan Donovan (01:46:45):
That would've been classy. This was cold bagels. The university is not known for the niceness resorts, the resorts. [01:47:00] But the issue for me with AI is ostensibly you have this new consumer technology coming out on the market, and if it is something that students want to use, we have to become smart enough to teach it. Which is difficult because we don't know what's in it precisely. And we don't really know a ton of use cases for it [01:47:30] other than plagiarizing. There's been this talk of AI being a good tutor for students, but I don't think that that's a responsible use case. If it also knows, that will tell you the wrong information. I think the best AI salesman's going to tell you that it's going to replace the library and the librarian for you. But it shouldn't because librarians or professional knowledge professionals [01:48:00] and the libraries a place where books are often called and thought about the curation process.

(01:48:08):
That's why I don't really love the AI argument. Like, Hey, it's like we got the biggest pizza in the world. It's got everything on it. Literally everything. We've got arsenic and toothpaste and it's going to be great. And we forget that these things are meant to replace what we already [01:48:30] have in some respects. But they do a pretty mediocre job. And so I've become a fan of saying this over and over, but truth is a human process. How we arrive at the truth is through methodology. And we need humans at every stage of that in order to validate what we know is true. And I just feel like AI in education is really setting students up to fail if they [01:49:00] rely on it too much

Leo Laporte (01:49:03):
Based on these basic qualifications that they list here. New York Times list here. I disagree with them. With AI replacing anyone here. The basic qualifications states deep journalistic experience with the ability to make sound judgments by journalistic quality and process as well as standards and ethics. And then the second one that got my attention was technical curiosity and fluency, [01:49:30] including understanding how language large language models work and how to evaluate them in a journalistic context that doesn't sound like they're just throwing it at the computer and hitting enter and just letting it spit out what it wants to spit out. They're at least going to try to go about this the right way. And it sounds like they're trying to leverage the power to be able to create even more if it speeds up the process a little bit.

Joan Donovan (01:49:53):
But there was a recent article that went out that was an AI generated obituary. Jeff Leo. Did [01:50:00] you

Leo Laporte (01:50:00):
Guys read about this? Oh yeah, we talked about that.

Joan Donovan (01:50:01):
Yeah. And it called the Man Useless. That's pretty rude.

Leo Laporte (01:50:07):
Doesn't mean

(01:50:07):
Not. We didn't talk about it. I put it in our slack, the kind of thing an AI would say. And they brought it down. I put it in our slack and they brought it down like three days ago. Oh. So I can't refer to it. Useless. Another useless human bites. The dust. Where did it go? It was, yeah, it was on mn.com. Brandon Hunter, useless at 42 is the headline, but they've taken it down since then. Once you're dad, [01:50:30] you are pretty useless. Except for worms and butterflies. He was an N B A player and that's terrible. But what it was was I believe he changed teams. He didn't die, so he wasn't even dead. Right. Well, that's premature uselessness. Well, that's an issue. Yeah. Yeah. It's not up now.

Joan Donovan (01:50:52):
Sorry, I was spreading this information. I really thought it was an obit.

Leo Laporte (01:50:57):
Well, it wasn't. Wasn't wasn't [01:51:00] obit, but he wasn't dead yet. But he wasn't dead.

Joan Donovan (01:51:03):
He wasn't dead

Leo Laporte (01:51:05):
Enough. A G I will kill him. Sn published that. Yeah, this was up for a couple hours. There's the U R L, but it's dead now. If you click on it, it's a dead length. So Jonah, I've been saying for a long time that what's the outcome of all of this is going to be that you just won't believe anything you read ever. Same thing that happened with print. Leo. He's

Joan Donovan (01:51:25):
Print. That's what the Russians want.

Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
Yeah. That's flooding the zone, right? Kidding. I'm kidding.

Joan Donovan (01:51:30):
[01:51:30] It all goes back to Russia. Well, I mean, you can live your life with a lot of doubt. You can doubt all kinds of things, but there are certain things that are factual and fact-based that you do have to confront from time to time. And our entire information environment is changing. And [01:52:00] I don't think we're doing enough to protect what we need to protect, which is safety and clear information about voting and our democratic processes. And I think we need to protect medical information. And so unfortunately, we're just getting into these really large scale problems because tech [01:52:30] companies are pushing products on us that people aren't asking for.

Leo Laporte (01:52:36):
Number one, it's not just their fault. Well, go ahead. I'll let you continue. Well,

Joan Donovan (01:52:42):
No, no, go ahead.

Leo Laporte (01:52:43):
I say it's not just their fault. We just read a job listing for the New York Times now. So I mean, the answer to flooding the zone with garbage is to find trusted sources, whether online or offline for information that you say, well, I read it here. So that's [01:53:00] now, obviously M S N has now lost that mantle of trustworthiness. One would hope the New York Times would have a certain or of trustworthiness as the paper of record, but if they're going to start using ai, they're going to let that croft drift into their content. That's a bad thing. I think what happens when there's a lot of disinformation and garbage out there is all of us then have to figure out where our trusted sources are. And then those trusted sources have a deep responsibility to stay trusted [01:53:30] and not use poor sources. They have to do a good job, isn't it on them? You don't have any faith in them with trying to be trustworthy, at least based off the quality that they put in black and white right here. I hate to see them saying, let's talk about AI generating content for us. That seems like the wrong direction.

Joan Donovan (01:53:53):
Well, it's where news is going. I mean, the layoffs have been hard on many [01:54:00] news organizations and they're shrinking revenues related to advertising. So there is a very real crisis of high quality journalism. That's why you see billionaires buying up newspapers, or I guess I should say news organization.

Leo Laporte (01:54:20):
Can we trust the Washington Post now because Jeff Bezos is a patron and is going to give it billions of dollars to run. And so it doesn't have to run for,

Joan Donovan (01:54:27):
It depends on how the organization split up, [01:54:30] but it does. Who you're funded by does extensively affect the kinds of questions you ask. And we know this very clearly from Fox, is that you're not as hard on the businesses that your funders are meddling in. And so with Bezos, maybe I would look twice at Amazon information in the Washington Post and I'd wonder if the Washington Post reporter was holding back. [01:55:00] And that's what I mean about having a kind of cautious skepticism about what it is that you are trusting and look for multiple ways if you have to act on that information. That's the other thing is we spend most of our day getting information that we don't have any control over. Doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. But on information that's going to make you get up and do something different. Or you have to think about, well, is this the right course of action? Or [01:55:30] in most cases with online information, it's not about getting you to act, but it's disincentivizing you, getting you not to vote, getting you not to

Leo Laporte (01:55:38):
Take a vaccine. There's a good example, voting's good and a vaccine's good. These are things where you are going to act based on information you collect. Vaccine's a great one. So then it's incumbent on every individual to get the best information possible. Every single journalistic entity, big journalistic entity is owned by [01:56:00] a mogul. I mean, that's always been that way and we're finally learning that. But N BBC is owned by Comcast. I mean it's Viacom owns C B S A B C world. It could be Disney, but it might be somebody else. We'll see down the road. But it's always somebody with vested interests and investments in other areas. And there's always going to be some skepticism maybe. And look, podcasts, we're having the same problem [01:56:30] with funding drying up, but maybe it is blogs and podcasts and finding somebody who you really can trust.

(01:56:39):
I don't know how you vet somebody salary. I'm going to go back to Gutenberg. I'm sorry, I have to go ahead. Look at the salary they're offering for this position. Annual based salary for this role is between 180 K and 220. Well, this is Manhattan's. That's basically a middle class. No, that's still decent salary that not in Manhattan. And write prompts. And write prompts [01:57:00] and write prompts. That's good money for prompt writing. Yeah. So I mean, who did people trust in the pre big mass media days, Jeff? So that's my point is that, I'm sorry. I'm going to go all the way back to Gutenberg. When print came out, nobody trusted it because it had no provenance. Anybody could make this pamphlet. Anybody can make a tweet, anybody can make a Facebook post. Anybody can do this. Right? And then we had to create [01:57:30] the institutions that of editing and publishing that brought authority to this.

(01:57:37):
Before that it was social. There's a concept that I write about in the next book called Fama, which is about the social authority that adheres to the person telling the story, the story itself, the subject of the story. And if you pass it on, and the analysis was not around media, it was around social relationships. That's all you had. That's that's kind of where we are right now [01:58:00] until we invent new institutions of authority. Isn't that though, the source of the great polarization in this country is that at this point we use our confirmation bias to judge the information we're getting. And so we believe the stuff that fits, that's conformant with our existing beliefs, and we don't believe this stuff that's not, and so we are polarized truth. The filter bubble stuff has been debunked in great measure from research that says that our filter bubbles that exist are the ones that are real lives. The big sort by Bill Bishop [01:58:30] said that we moved into the towns and took the jobs and joined the houses of worship and joined the bowling leagues where people like us, what the internet does is puncture that bubble and expose us to the people we haven't been exposed to. And that scares some people and it gives us a whole bunch of spitballs. So no, actually the research, Joan can tell far better than I can. But the research that I've seen says that people online are exposed to more contrary opinions than those who are offline.

Joan Donovan (01:59:00):
[01:59:00] But there's also so many mitigating issues here. Where we write about this in Meir is the rabbit hole. When you start to get into something new online, the algorithms really try to pull you in deeper and deeper into that subset of information. And so it's different. It's really different than reading one article on something and then saying, huh, maybe it's true. [01:59:30] If you are bombarded with content that saying to you that the government is lying and that the election was a scam, and that they're coordinating across states to knock down all of these court cases that Rudy Giuliani's bringing. And I mean, this was 24 hour content barrage online if you were in that world. Similar with the Q Anon stuff, similar with the white supremacist fascist [02:00:00] stuff, there's more garbage. And then once you get into that world, especially on YouTube, I know that they keep saying that they fixed the algorithms, but I get so much anti-trans propaganda on YouTube, and even when you want to turn away from it, you can't. It'll keep recommending it. And so I don't know what the fix is here, but I do know that there is something qualitatively and quantitatively different [02:00:30] about the amount of information and the kind of filter bubbles that might not be partisan, but are definitely based on wedge issues that operate just the same way that you would find and discover Norwegian black metal bands. I'll say hi to my cat. Does she? It's the

Leo Laporte (02:00:54):
Same way. Suitable black metal name?

Joan Donovan (02:00:57):
No, that's just Milo.

Leo Laporte (02:00:58):
Oh.

Joan Donovan (02:00:59):
So [02:01:00] I got two cats. I got Milo and Dottie, and they're my life. Those

Leo Laporte (02:01:03):
Are great names.

Joan Donovan (02:01:05):
Oh yeah. One's

Leo Laporte (02:01:05):
Not called Thrasher.

Joan Donovan (02:01:08):
Actually, my poor dearly departed Thrasher. I had a cat in my twenties named Thrasher that I love dearly. He was a Scottish fold. So yes, there has been a thrasher in my life.

Leo Laporte (02:01:22):
You're right. Sorry, the cat. The cat broke our trail. The

Joan Donovan (02:01:26):
Train of thought. Yeah. But I was just, all I was saying is that there's something fundamentally [02:01:30] shifting about the way we sort and distribute and gain access to information and the fleeting moments where we have these thoughts. What is everybody talking about? Jewish space lasers. Let me look that up. And then you're stuck in it, right? And it's like quicksand in a way. The more you struggle to get out of it, the more content you're going to see in that way. And it's just an unfortunate situation that we've gotten ourselves into. [02:02:00] Call it tabloid culture, whatever. But it is almost so enveloping that it's hard to imagine a way out once you're in it. And that's what I'm most afraid of for the 2024 election that, oh, don't even get me started.

Leo Laporte (02:02:21):
Just do that. Really don't get med. I just started searching for Jewish space lasers. I'm sorry. No, Leo, this is fascinating subject. This is not be

Joan Donovan (02:02:28):
You. These, [02:02:30] I'll not be giving you any more rabbit holes to go down subject. Oh my. What

Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
I'm curious about is if I click a few of these, you're so screwed. If YouTube is going to start encouraging me down this hole, this rabbit.

Joan Donovan (02:02:44):
Yeah, well, it will. It'll say, oh, you like this, you watch this. You've been

Leo Laporte (02:02:48):
On it for 10.

Joan Donovan (02:02:48):
This is the next one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:50):
Though research has shown that people who go to the nutty stuff on YouTube frequently [02:03:00] come from outside links. They come from Breitbart and places like that. It wasn't that YouTube took 'em down the rabbit hole. It's that YouTube is a storage place for the nutty links that people want to send you to.

Joan Donovan (02:03:13):
Well, there's that, but also it does take you places. I mean, if you were to look at my YouTube, you would be disgusted. I mean, my biggest fear about getting fired from Harvard wasn't that I get fired from Harvard for what happened, [02:03:30] but they'd look at my search history and be like, you are an animal, you cannot work here. But a lot of it had to do with me letting my computer go on and allowing to serve me the next thing. But when you're in these really vast and cavernous rabbit holes, like quote Q anon, it gets really overwhelming.

Leo Laporte (02:04:00):
[02:04:00] We're going to run out of time, so I hate to move on because this is a great subject and I really would like to know what the antidote is. Is there, that's Joan's whole career, Joan, give me the short version. What's the antidote?

Joan Donovan (02:04:18):
I always go back to the same thing that we were talking about earlier, which is it's really hard to hoax a newspaper. Go back and find your trusted sources and stick with them and with [02:04:30] a newspaper, at least if they get it wrong and they're a reputable one, they're going to correct it the next day and you're going to get the correction. And so rely less on social media to get your news and information and rely more on reporters that you admire, reporters that you trust and purchase journalism as well. I think we are also in this moment where journalism needs to be directly funded and can't subsist off of advertising.

Leo Laporte (02:05:00):
[02:05:00] That's what

Joan Donovan (02:05:01):
We're doing. And it's crucial if you like that kind of media, if you want your media to care about the truth, if you want local media to exist, you have to, as a community member considerate it. Your social tax, I guess. And I think that the last thing I'll say on this is timely, accurate, local knowledge. We need more talk online. We need our algorithms and our search boxes [02:05:30] to surface more local content, especially when people are looking for news and information because everything that goes online is national. There's been this race to scale, and when you go on different news websites and you search for stories, they're likely to give you national publications first. We need to get search engines to reverse that and to work more on surfacing local news and local information. I love that. And [02:06:00] I think that that's something AI could really help with is saying, okay, we have all of this content. How do we prioritize the local when it matters?

Leo Laporte (02:06:09):
Well, you have my pledge that we will here at twit Endeavor in every case to be fair and accurate and give you the best possible information about technology. That's always been our mission here. And we don't have an ax to crime. We're a human institution to do that. And of course, every publication and every blog, every podcast has [02:06:30] its own beliefs or slants, but I think we work really hard to find the truth, and I think it's so important that there be sources of trusted information and we do everything we can. I think we have a really wonderful group of contributors and hosts and editors and producers who do the same, which is why. What did talk stand for again? Joan?

Joan Donovan (02:07:00):
[02:07:00] What'd you say? I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:07:01):
What did talk stand for again? Trusted,

Joan Donovan (02:07:04):
Timely, accurate, local knowledge.

Leo Laporte (02:07:07):
Thank you. Love it.

Joan Donovan (02:07:08):
Real talk. Real

Leo Laporte (02:07:09):
Talk. Timely, accurate local knowledge. That's so cool. In our case, the local is not geographic locality, but a common interest. Interest. Yeah, but I think which is very similar. I think we've got to redefine local around that. Yeah, I think it's very similar. I mean, certainly everybody in Petaluma should care about what's going on in Petaluma, but we have a community [02:07:30] of interest that is global, but is a fairly narrow niche of topics like this. And I don't know how many people are talking about this kind of stuff as often as we do. I mean, I think what we do is pretty important. I am sad to say like every other outlet, the finance resources are drying up. I don't have a Craig Newmark grant, but Craig, if you want to, I wouldn't say no, but what we do have is you our listeners. In fact, [02:08:00] honestly, it's always been our favorite way to support what we do is to have the listeners support it.

(02:08:06):
And that's why we created Club Twit two years ago. It's only $7 a month ad free versions of all the shows, additional content. Our community manager, aunt Pru's, always putting together great events and ideas. You've got great stuff. Well, you've got John Scalzi coming up. If you're a sci-fi fan, you'll enjoy that. Tomorrow. It's the AI and sideshow. No, that's tomorrow. Yeah, that's tomorrow. Next [02:08:30] week. Lou Mariska fireside chat with John Scalzi is October 5th. Stacey's book club's coming up. Renee Richie will be back. Jeff I and Doc Sles will do the old farts fireside chat in December. That's going to be a lot of fun. And not in here just yet, but October 26th we're going to do an escape room. Oh, I can't wait to do the escape room. That's going to be so much fun. We're going to do that. Our hosts are, we've got some sort of weird game escape room game that we're going to try to solve [02:09:00] in front of all. I'd be so bad at that.

(02:09:04):
Get Jeff's in it, make sure Jeff's doing it. Anyway, I think that that is an important part of what we do is getting you to help us out. If you can afford it, of course, $7 a month we will always have ad free. It's not a paywall. We'll always have ad supported stuff as long as ads continue to support. But for the rest of it, twit tv slash club twit, thank you for letting me put in that little plug. Thank you everybody. But I think what we do, it's [02:09:30] exactly that is we're trying to do reliable, trustworthy content for this community of interest of ours, and that's what I've always tried to do. Can I ask Joan a question on the news? So the UK just passed its air codes yesterday, it's safety bill, and they pulled back a little bit on encryption, but it's still a lot of danger to encryption there. What's your take on this, Joan, from your perspective [02:10:00] of the bad guys doing bad things with some of these tools, but also privacy and one's individual rights?

Joan Donovan (02:10:07):
Yeah, I mean, I think I really get my opinion from listening to Meredith Whitaker at Signal on this issue, which is you either have encryption or you don't. There's no way around it. And so safety I understand is important, [02:10:30] but we do have the right to privacy in our communications. One of the things that's always struck me as interesting about the field of media manipulation is you don't need to drain the ocean to go fishing, right? The issue here is that it's meant to trick a large group of people or a small group of journalists, and in the case of encrypted communications, we're not talking about the effect of mass distribution of propaganda. [02:11:00] We're talking about potentially terroristic cells that are using communications to get coordinated to do an attack. That would be the pan ultimate use of this tech removing encryption or creating these back doors.

(02:11:19):
But I just don't think that that is really going to save lives. I think what we have to understand [02:11:30] is that fundamentally we have a right to private communications. The government is made up of people, people are flawed, and we want to make sure that when we have access and power over other people, that they're not allowed to do things that dehumanize us, that remove our rights of privacy. And I just hate to say it, but unfortunately we need encryption in our lives [02:12:00] and we need high quality encryption that doesn't allow for these back doors.

Leo Laporte (02:12:08):
What about regulation in general, the UK saying we're going to be the safe place on the internet and we're going to have age requirements for porn and we're going to demand that the platforms take down harmful content and all that where

Joan Donovan (02:12:23):
You come? I mean, I don't know. I met an 11 year old with an A T M card the other day, and my mind was

Leo Laporte (02:12:29):
Crazy, right?

Joan Donovan (02:12:29):
Blown. [02:12:30] So the thing that would've kept younger folks away from online porn would've been that some of it costs some money and you would need to use a credit card to validate your age. I just don't think it's possible, and I do know that we have to confront these things and the AI that is being used to figure out parental controls around finding out if your child is looking at nudity and whatnot are getting better. [02:13:00] But yeah, I just don't think there is a safe space for people online. I just think that part of it is, like you were saying, the human institutions oversight, good parenting friends that care about each other that don't want our friends getting into trouble or getting too deep into addictions. It's a really complicated place online, and I think that [02:13:30] children especially have no idea what they're stepping into. And so I applaud every effort at safety, but the realist in me, those that kids lie and they're good at it, and now they got credit cards.

Leo Laporte (02:13:51):
Oh, and a liar with a credit card is your worst nightmare. Wow. Scared a horny liar with a credit card. Exactly. Meredith Whitaker is [02:14:00] in flight, so she hasn't yet commented on the passage of the online safety bill in the uk, but she has reiterated that a, she doesn't think it's a good idea, and that signal will never, if the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor or leaving, we would leave England. Oh, good. She has said, and I think we talked about this yesterday on security, now that she believes that the compromise language in the bill means they don't have to leave the uk. But of course, time will tell whether [02:14:30] it's not exactly, it merely adds a line, something like if it's technologically feasible to break the encryption, we shall see what the English Parliament does with all of that and law enforcement does with all of that. So I It's off. It'll be up to the regulator off. It's going to be up to off con. That's where also Wikimedia is begging for help here because they fear that they might have to leave as well. Yeah, so we'll keep watching that. It's not clear exactly [02:15:00] whether there was a victory in England for the forces of good or the forces of evil. The war continues. Moving on to something a little lighter, A couple of Google items. I guess it's time for the Google change log.

Joan Donovan (02:15:16):
Oh, wait, before you uhoh.

Leo Laporte (02:15:18):
Oh, coming. Oh, no, watch

Joan Donovan (02:15:20):
Out. I have someone at my door. Go

Leo Laporte (02:15:22):
Answer the door. Go. Go. Joan. This is the time to go. Perfect. Time to go because nothing has

Joan Donovan (02:15:26):
Been told. I don't know if I can come back.

Leo Laporte (02:15:28):
If you can't come back, we'll just wave [02:15:30] your book and say thank you.

Joan Donovan (02:15:32):
Thank you guys so much. See you

Leo Laporte (02:15:33):
Jonas. Great. Thank you Joe, and congratulations on the BU appointment. Have me

Joan Donovan (02:15:40):
Back

Leo Laporte (02:15:40):
Anytime. We love you. We'll have you back soon. Just go. Thank you.

Joan Donovan (02:15:44):
Go be

Leo Laporte (02:15:44):
Thank you. Go say hello. I appreciate it. I'm sure it's the roast beef. Roast beef sandwich is

Joan Donovan (02:15:49):
Waiting. No, unfortunately, it's a professor from Harvard, so it'll be what it is. See your

Leo Laporte (02:15:55):
New book Anarchy in Academia?

Joan Donovan (02:15:59):
Not yet. [02:16:00] Save it for me.

Leo Laporte (02:16:02):
Can somebody behind the scenes email it to Joan so she can show it to me? I've already,

Joan Donovan (02:16:06):
I've sent her the copies. See it So good. Oh, perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:16:08):
I've already emailed it. Thanks, John. It's great to see you. Thank you, Joan. Thank you.

(02:16:12):
It was a pleasure. Taylor Swift broke Google this morning. Oh boy. So yesterday Google decided it'll be fun to have a little contest with the 1989 Taylor's version. They had a little game calling. All [02:16:30] Swifties loves a game. So is our latest Easter egg in search. Want to play search for Taylor Swift? Click on the blue vault and solve one of the word puzzles. There are 89 of them. Get it. And you'll be helping Swifties around the world. Get out of the woods around. Lock the vault as everyone collectively solves 33 million puzzles. Well, they did it this morning and it immediately broke the internet.

(02:17:00):
[02:17:00] Taylor Swift fans, I guess there are Legion, and they were able to bring the whole thing to its knees. Fran were frustrated. They couldn't participate or were upset at the large number of puzzle completions required when the game wasn't working properly. One user tweeted, I feel like Taylor constantly forgets how big she is. 33 million is a lot. When you take into account the vault not working. [02:17:30] Google actually posted late yesterday. This response, Swifty, the vault is jammed. They're working to fix it. Wow. A promotion as this happens again and again with Taylor Swift, that people, it's hard to imagine the impact she has and good. It just brings everything. Even She's kind of the last of the big old massive superstars. [02:18:00] Blockbuster economy. I don't know. Is she? Well, we'll see. Good owner. We'll see. Next one's a robot. Yeah. Next one will be Iduo.

(02:18:08):
Google's rolling out Android. 14 Q p r beta one for the pixel. We're getting close. Google's event is when? October 4th, fifth, October 4th. Jason Howell and Wintu Dow will host our coverage of that event. 7:00 AM Pacific, 10:00 PM 10:00 AM Eastern. Have at it, Mr. Howo. We'll see everything. There's to know about the Pixel seven and Android [02:18:30] 14. Life Hacker points out. You could finally offer bookable appointments on your Google calendar. Sorry, Calendly. It's available on free accounts. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Bookable blocks. So Lisa uses Calendly. She does a lot of meetings. We use it for our tech checks. Yeah, works well. There you go. Yeah. Works well. Needed a way to say, when can you're available. Here's where we're available, and work that all out. [02:19:00] You can now do the exact same thing in Google Calendar. And even for paid appointments. So a Calendly calendar, Calendly killer from Google Nest devices are now limited to one Google Home speaker group. I don't even know what this means, but I thought I'd tell you. Congratulations. Is that good or bad? I think it's good. Sure. Google Domains is done. They're donezo. They're cooked. Remember they sold [02:19:30] the business of Squarespace and as of now, no new domains. They haven't transferred them yet though, right?

(02:19:40):
Oh, that's interesting. They stopped selling domains September 7th, but then, yeah, I don't know if they transferred him. The Squarespace acquisition was completed September 7th, according [02:20:00] to ct. Is there in r c? Yes. They were transferred. They were transferred. Okay. Okay. It is almost, by the way, the end of the line for Taylor Swift's puzzle. So I guess if you care, go to google.com editor Taylor Swift. Shall we do it? Shall we do it? Oh, let's do it. Taylor Swift. And then there's a vault. Did you see that come down from the sky? [02:20:30] Yeah. And there's a key click the vault and your computer just scratched. Oh look, you did it. You unlocked the vault. Now what? I'm so excited to share the new vault track titles with you. They are. Is it over now? Now that we don't talk, say don't go. I guess it's over because they're revealing these. This is so dumb. Yeah.

(02:20:59):
Did [02:21:00] Taylor pay for this? I doubt it. That's a good question. Why would she? I don't know. I just Google stretch it saying, Hey kids, look, we're still cool. Come on, kids. Sad. And that's the Google change log. Well, well, boys and girls, let's take a little break when we come back. Your picks of the week as we wrap up this week in Google for this week, Jones [02:21:30] disappeared and reappeared as Jeff Jarvis. Joan turned into Jeff Jarvis. One proposal for another we're interchangeable. Jeff, you want to kick the picks? Kick it off. Oh geez. Yeah, why not? We don't have Joan to do it. So you can do it. Alright. What did I have here? What did I have here?

(02:21:51):
I want to do a quick congratulations to Fiji cmo, the C E O for the last two years of Instacart had a I P O went very well. I think she's done [02:22:00] a really good job of making Instacart more than just a delivery service. And I'm grateful to Instacart because it allowed me to keep my father in groceries when he was in Florida. Oh, that's nice. But now it's an advertising company too and all that. I think that's wonderful. Radio Times magazine is a hundred years old, which is to say that radio popularly, B B C is a hundred years old. Was Radio Times like the TV guide for radio in the uk? [02:22:30] Yes. Actually it's here too. It was also then tv. Yeah. Wow. Now what is it?

(02:22:39):
It's just old. It's just, it's just old. Okay. It's just old. All right. A hundred years. And then SpaceX was supposed to have 20 million Star Lake users by 2022. Nope, not so much. How about 1 million? 1 million? It still mean, let's point out a multi-billion dollar business. It's not like it just didn't. Not as many. Not as many multi [02:23:00] as he thought he was going to have. Yeah. And that's important because he was going to use that to fund SpaceX development and so forth. So not good. Mr. Ant, Pruitt, you have a pick Forest. My pick, I couldn't remember if I did this or not, but I'm put it in here anyway because it's top of mind. You did not. And it is a super fast U S B C to U S B C cable. I can use this on my new 10 gigabit per second iPhone.

(02:23:30):
[02:23:30] Yes, you can. Yes, you can. And I particularly use it for recording six K 60 frames a second footage, and it's just so fricking So that's one of the things the new iPhone will do, is you plug in this cable and then you plug the other end to a hard drive to a disc, and it will automatically record four K 60 frame of ProRes to the disc. So this would be the cable you would use. ProRes is so great too. But yeah, that cable is, what do you hook up? It's inexpensive. It's like 15 bucks and it's got a lifetime warranty. [02:24:00] And it's because it's from Condor Blue and I'm figuring for 15 bucks, you can't really beat that. I have a couple of them. I don't know why. I have a couple of them, but they're lifetime warranty, so I shouldn't have to sweat.

(02:24:11):
And what do you hook up when you record? What do you hook up to? Mine is hooked to a Samsung T five Ss. Oh yeah. One of those little sssts. I think we use some up here. Is that fast enough to record? Oh yeah. Four K video. Nice. Yeah, it'll do. I do B raw six K 60 frames a second. Oh, nice. With no problem on there. That's amazing. [02:24:30] Yeah. Then I can now use my iPhone. That's crazy. To record four K 60 frame video to in a little external drive. Yeah. And I have other U S B cables, but yeah, it definitely makes a difference if they can't handle that bandwidth. I have. It's coming through a hole in my heart where my iPhone used to be. Oh gosh, that looks weird. Oh, but someday there will be a new phone. A new phone that'll look similar.

(02:24:54):
As I said, it was kind of an impulsive decision to give my sister the old iPhone. [02:25:00] And then I realized, what the hell am I going to do my whole life? She just took sim out or do you use Sims? No, I didn't even use a sim. She had a sim in her old fun. She had a 10 Ss. 10 R. But with the iPhone, you put a side by side, you say, here's your new phone, here's the old phone. And then it says all, oh, that's so cool. You have a sim in the old phone. But I use eims. Shall I just transfer the number over? And it was done and said, throw out the old sim because you don't need it. So that gum cool. Welcome to the 21st century [02:25:30] kids. Soon. Did you hear we're going to have flying cars? I'm not buying that. I'm not be flying along. I ain't giving you my flight plan ass on the ground with this fist in the air. He's the angry cartoon guy. Yeah, right now you at the air. You're not getting my fight plan. No. At no time soon.

(02:25:51):
No. My last one, I want to give a shout out to my sons. It was quite a magical night last week, there on a bye week this week. [02:26:00] But in the first half, he just played, he's the qb, the best game that I've look at. That pass. Dropped him right in the basket, his career. And I caught myself sort of losing it here and there because that week in practice, I felt he can rush. He could pass. Did you see him look back right there? Yeah. He says, is there anybody? There's nobody. I'm just going to try. Get out of the way, ref. Get out of the way. There's nobody in practice. That was a hard head. He was not doing very well. He couldn't [02:26:30] hit the right side of a barn in practice throwing the ball. It was really, really bad. And I felt bad for him, but I told him, we'll, just keep pushing.

(02:26:37):
And this, well, not that play, but it was a play before that. You could see that the emotion hit him as he scored and he was just jumping. Got bad hit there. Is he? Okay? Look at that. That's a bomb. He just dropped it right in there. If you could throw long like that. And then you see that guy, colleges. Colleges. Take this guy, you need this guy. Smu, Clemson, [02:27:00] Texas a and m. You need this guy. Ridiculous. I felt grateful. Tide was happy for him. Oh, I'll take real tide. War Eagle. No, maybe not War Eagle, but Tide.

(02:27:13):
I just had to give him this period. You got to against Auburn. No, nothing against Auburn. You don't want him to. We call Auburn the Clemson of Alabama. My brother-in-law went to Harvard, called Yale, the best school in New Haven. I know how that feels. Gosh. But he [02:27:30] played, he had eight for 11 passing 185 yards, three touchdowns. He had 13 rushes for 195 yards and three touchdowns. And that was in the first half. Wow. And he, that's weekly. Jacob Prude report on the sports leader. I had to give him his credit. Okay, nice. That's awesome. Beautiful. That's amazing. Way to go, Jacob. So yes, you see Berkeley. Y'all can give us a call too. Come on. Uc. [02:28:00] Berkeley Cal Be good because he's interested Stanford. He's interested in that. Stanford, you let them fight over the As. Praise new state. Yes. We're interested in that too. So give us a call. It's going to take a full ride. I got to warn you. The I R C is chanting. We don't pay Ant. So he's He's got to get a full ride.

(02:28:19):
Nope. All he gets is coffee does pay me. And I am quite happy that Twit pays me. I live a good life. Thank you. We love you, Ann. Are you kidding? We love you all. Do we love [02:28:30] you too, Jeff Jarvis? No, nobody likes me. Everybody likes you. No, he's right. Most people don't. That's soon to be the former director of the Town Night Senate for entrepreneurial journalism at the Thank you. Mark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. I haven't had a chance to talk to you since your medium post about moving on, but you're happy about it. Yeah. Thank you for doing it on the show. When I wasn't there that week, you were the news story of the week. Yeah, but you're happy about that. And you [02:29:00] got some irons in the fire. No, but that's life. That's life. ERUs has a certain ring to it.

(02:29:05):
When you go to the old age home, they're going, which could be sooner than we know. I know. We moving in next to Mary LaPorte. Yeah. When we bring mom over there, I'm looking around, I'm going, you know, she's only 23 years older than me. I could be there any minute now. And in fact, she said, why don't you should come here. That reality set in. Wow. Wow. Oh my gosh. [02:29:30] I think my mother had me when she was 18. I think so. So when you see, as they get older, you realize you're just right behind them. Yeah. Wow. Right behind. It's not far, but that's all right. I'll be ready. I'm ready now. I want one of them real rascal scooters. I'll drive around. Oh, I'll be so happy. Give me a high ball. High ball. Raco. That's all I need. Knocking on Mrs.

(02:29:56):
LaPorte's. Tork. You have a little bourbon there. More [02:30:00] bourbon than you can one with the handle. There's still any left in there. Jeff is not retiring from Twit, right? No. No sense. You cannot get rid of me that easily unless you force me out. What you can do. I'm not going to force you out. I will not be here next week. I'm sorry. Jason Howell will take over the reigns once again. Thank you, Jason. He does a good job. We're going to Green Bay for a Packers game. Go pack, go. Oh my God. I actually can't wait. Geez. [02:30:30] Vince Lombardi Stadium is historic. It is also owned by the city of Green Bay, as is the team, and it's the only N F L team and stadium that are owned by the people all have shares, which yeah, in fact, our son has a share. I bought him one for Christmas a couple of years ago.

(02:30:47):
He got a bumper sticker. Says owner. That's right. That's awesome. That's right. He loves it. We all got jerseys to celebrate. Green Bay jerseys. It's going to be fun. [02:31:00] I've always wanted to go. And Lisa got us at Stadium Tour. We get to come out of the tunnel onto the field. That's great. I cannot wait for that. That's going to be so, so what's the food you have to have when you're there? Brats. We're having a tailgate. Brats. Okay. We're having a tailgate fried. You got cheese curds. Really? I'll do that. Fried cheese. Cheese. Cheese curds. I'll do that for the wind, sir. Yeah, you'll thank me. You put gravy on it or you won't need the gravy. It's not poutine. It's just fried cheese curds, fried cheese curds. I like cottage cheese, which is UNF fried cheese. You can [02:31:30] see yourself out now.

(02:31:34):
You and Richard Nixon next week, this week in horse Impressions starring Jason Howell. It's going to be a great show. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do twig on Wednesdays at 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 2100 utc. We will have yet another wonderful guest next week filling in for Stacey. But we are homing in. [02:32:00] Homing in on a permanent replacement. No, not going to say anything. I'd be curious myself to know what you're thinking. Well, I'll tell you offline because it's not official yet. I'll tell you offline and off mic, because people like them. Yeah. I don't want, yeah, those eavesdrops. But I've suggested somebody, we think that person is interested. They have to get permission from their publication pending that we may have some news in a few weeks. I know [02:32:30] it. This is important show for us. We really want to make sure we've got a full cast.

(02:32:33):
But it has been great to have people like Joan and Kathy. It's pretty wonderful it in some waysman. I like it. Glenn is great. Mike Elgin's. Great. So we have, and it used to be Jeff, you'd travel a lot. Can I get you back on the road a little bit? Hey. Hey, go ahead. Just force me out then. Mr. Jarvis. You're fart. Get out of here. I did not say that, Mr. Jarvis. So you know there would be no show without you. So it is absolutely [02:33:00] the Jeff, it used to be the Jeff Stacey and Ant Show. We're going to have somebody equally worthy in a couple of weeks, I think. But I will leave that for your imagination. Thank you for being here. Get the show if you want. You can watch it Live. Live TWIT TV or listen live. But after the fact, of course, it's a podcast, so you could subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You can manually download an episode, audio or video from the website, twit tv slash twig. [02:33:30] If you can get through the Jewish Space Laser videos. We're also on YouTube actually. You watch More Twig, you get fewer Space laser videos. That's a little tip for you.

(02:33:45):
There's a dedicated channel for this week in Google, and of course subscribing is the best thing you can do. Join the club and then you won't even hear any ads. This is true. That's good. Yeah. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time on this week in Google. Bye-bye. [02:34:00] See you.

Speaker 7 (02:34:02):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but your game console, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk. And you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it. The Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning CISs man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on The Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe [02:34:30] to the Club TWIT exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit tv slash club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.