This Week in Google 736 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.

0:00:01 - Leo Laporte
It's time for TWiG this week in Google. Jeff Jarvis's here, ant Pruitt is here. We're joined by Paris Martino in seat 3. We'll talk about the new Pixel 8 phone, the Pixel Watch 2, the new Pixel Buds and we'll tell you why you should not stick your new phone in a salmon. We'll also talk about Spotify's plan for monetization. Involves audio books. The podcast didn't work out all that well, and what happened to master class. It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

This is Twig. This is Twig this week in Google, episode 736, recorded Wednesday, october 4th 2023. Socks on the beach this week in Google is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and Collide assures that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit collidecom slash twig to book an on demand demo today.

And by Fastmail, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with Fastmail. Try it now free for 30 days at fastmailcom. Slash twig. And by Miro, the online workspace for innovation where your team can dream, design and build the future together for many location. Tap into a way to map processes, visualize content, run retrospectives and keep all your documents and data in one place. Search your first three boards for free at Mirocom slash podcast. It's time for Twig this week in Google to show we cover Google, the internet, the Google verse, as John just told me, anything you could find in a Google search. That's what this show is about. Jeff Jarvis is here, the Leonard Tau Professor for Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Craig Newmark. Graduate School of Journalism.

He's at the City University of New York. Hello, Jeff.

0:02:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Hello, hello, hello boss, welcome back. Did you cheese it up, oh my God.

0:02:25 - Leo Laporte
A lot of curds. They even put cheese in their brats. I had a macaroni and cheese bratwurst. Oh, sounds good. Yeah, oh, too much. Yeah, cheese curds, it turns out, are really just lumps of cheese. I don't know, I don't know exactly. Thank you, aunt Pruitt says he agrees, aunt Pruitt.

0:02:45 - Ant Pruitt
These things are outstanding, sir. Oh, you love it Cheese curds.

0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
See, I like the ones that were.

0:02:51 - Paris Martineau
Are you coming?

0:02:52 - Leo Laporte
out against cheese curds, leo. Uh-oh, I might be in trouble here. Who's that? That is Paris Martino. You know her from this week in tech. She's, of course, at the information, and there's a many many sense.

0:03:02 - Paris Martineau
You just replaced my lower third with cheese curd enthusiast.

0:03:05 - Leo Laporte
Are you a cheese curd? Where do you get cheese curds in Brooklyn? I mean, some bodegas have them Cheese shops.

0:03:11 - Paris Martineau
I love cheese. I'm lactose intolerant. I shouldn't love cheese. I love it anyway. I love cheese.

0:03:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm not against cheese. I don't understand the benefit of a cheese curd.

0:03:21 - Paris Martineau
It's cheese, but in a portable, uh, in a lump size, you know.

0:03:26 - Leo Laporte
See, I like, I love cottage cheese, which is actual curds. Okay, cottage cheese, that's actual Curds.

0:03:31 - Ant Pruitt
That's curds. What was that you said?

0:03:33 - Speaker 2
old man, I love you know cottage cheese, you like cottage cheese when you take your dentures, it is like an old man, isn't it?

0:03:40 - Leo Laporte
Give me some cottage. But was it Ronald Reagan loved cottage cheese? No, it was Nixon.

0:03:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a catch up. Isn't our cheese. I'm a little more up to date.

0:03:51 - Leo Laporte
I love cottage cheese and balsamic vinegar.

0:03:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh that sounds good.

0:03:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah it's like catchy Sounds appetizing.

0:03:56 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you should try it.

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Um, cheese curds, as far as the Wisconsinites are, uh, involved, seem to be basically like lumps of cheese. Although you can get them, that's just a curd. Okay, they're not like kind of cheese curds, they're not like curds and way curds, they're just cheese lumps.

0:04:16 - Jeff Jarvis
But I'm asking, I'm asking is there a special? Are they an earlier part of the process?

0:04:21 - Leo Laporte
I think in theory they were, but not now, anyway, I don't know. They are delicious, so you can get them plain, just like a lump of cheese, or you can get them deep fat fried, and that actually is quite tasty, that's what you want, but that's not much different than a mozzarella stick.

0:04:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it's way better than a mozzarella steak. Oh, now watch, watch, watch, watch. New Jersey and Brooklyn have high level mozzarella.

0:04:46 - Paris Martineau
Mozzarella. Yeah, that's true. Okay, I give you that. I love to get a big fresh ball of mozzarella.

0:04:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Go down over there. I give you that Deli and Hoboken I give you that.

0:04:56 - Ant Pruitt
New York. New York mozzarella versus mozzarella.

0:04:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Mozzarella, mozzarella.

0:05:03 - Leo Laporte
So I am very grateful to Jason Howell because this morning he got up at 7 am Pacific time probably got up earlier for a pixel event. Now Apple has finally figured out that you don't have to do these things live. You can produce a beautiful, highly edited, well flowing presentation that sells it very well. This felt like an event from 1975. It was like the old school days. Rick Osterlo up on the stage we love Rick. He came to Google for Motorola when they bought Motorola. He's now in charge of all hardware, started things off. It just felt a little, I don't know. Did it feel? Did you watch it, Jeff?

0:05:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I watched it live. Of course I had to watch your stream. Did it feel strange?

0:05:49 - Leo Laporte
to you.

0:05:49 - Ant Pruitt
No, it just felt small, small I got up and watched this presentation this bright early morning, and nothing against Mr Osterlo and the other members there, but man, their presentation was just so flat it was flat. I felt like I legit got another nap in watching that and woke up crazy refreshed right as they finished talking about the pixel bud pros or whatever. Yeah, it just. It just had a different energy level.

0:06:24 - Leo Laporte
The guy who came to Google from pixel, as always our focus is on making AI more helpful for everyone. I'm sleeping already.

0:06:35 - Ant Pruitt
It's what they're always like, okay, but all right.

0:06:38 - Leo Laporte
So, mr Samson, did you watch this? Paris, did you watch this?

0:06:42 - Paris Martineau
Um, I will say, when I stopped reporting on exclusively consumer tech, one of the first things that filled my heart with joy is that I will never have to sit through a God knows how many long hour long press release.

0:06:55 - Leo Laporte
That's what these are. One of the first things was like the.

0:06:58 - Paris Martineau
It was apples, one of their like demo days, or whatever. I was like God. I don't have to do this anymore. I mean, in this case, I skimmed to the product announcement. I think that each and every one of these sort of events proves that it should have been an email.

0:07:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I should have been an email. Uh, they announced the new pixel eight, which we already knew everything about. In fact, even they even had the kind of uh, I don't know the self deprecating nerve at the beginning of the event. They had a couple let me see if I can find this a couple sitting in the cafe. Oh God, this music even is God awful.

0:07:44 - Jeff Jarvis
That was a good line. The W eight is over. That was nice. It was nice.

0:07:48 - Leo Laporte
What, what, what does W eight mean? Just the weight, sure Weight, what?

0:07:52 - Jeff Jarvis
do you think that's?

0:07:53 - Leo Laporte
clever Sure.

0:07:55 - Jeff Jarvis
For the presentations it was, it was positively Seinfeld.

0:08:03 - Leo Laporte
There was an ad apparently. Oh yeah, we can't get rid of it.

0:08:07 - Ant Pruitt
Do you really think all those rumors are true?

0:08:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they were all true. Let's see.

They. And then they started the event, like they acknowledged. Yeah, we told you everything already. There's nothing good for that. They announced the pixel watch two, which is much needed because the pixel watch one fell apart, had all sorts of problems. Fitbit is very much a part of it. You get six months free of the Fitbit subscription with the watch too. As I said, the guy who came to Google from Fitbit, the founder, the guy who founded Fitbit, did the introduction on the watch, and they also announced the new pixel buds. Yeah, email, easy, easy Could have covered all of this. I did order. I mean I thought, well, oh, I should I have the pixel seven.

0:08:57 - Paris Martineau
How many phones did you order as a result of this event? Just one, I think just one.

0:09:02 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's huge, but I have to right, I sort of have to you have to. So I have the pixel seven pro. The good news is, because I'm a Google Fi customer, I can get the pixel eight pro I think it was 760 bucks with 256 gigs and trade this in for a couple of bills. So it's going to cost more like 500 bucks, which you know for a feature phone in the state of the art top of the line phone is probably not a bad price.

0:09:28 - Paris Martineau
I'm most Listen, come into this from iPhone land. That sounds like a steal. How much did I pay for the 15?

0:09:34 - Leo Laporte
pro max. What do you got? What do you have? That's a seven. This is the six pro. Should we trade it in? They look the same, don't they?

0:09:42 - Speaker 2
They look exactly the same. Yeah you can't have your phone.

0:09:46 - Ant Pruitt
He's got some sort of blocky thing. Oh, that's a magnet for when I get into the car. I just pop it on there.

0:09:54 - Paris Martineau
You know, I for some reason still think of magnets as the enemy of technology.

0:09:59 - Ant Pruitt
I think like the CRT like TV is really Really scared me anytime a magnet gets near my computer or phone, I'm like oh God you're not wrong, but I got in the car with one of the hard heads one day and he had a magnet on the back of his phone. You set it on the dashboard and I'm like, wait, no, that actually works and your phone is fine. It's like, yeah, okay, I'll try.

0:10:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. I feel Leo we all have that feeling like magnets. Really, you shouldn't know, although it is possible to do bad things. I have a phone. Did you see? The BMW is wireless charging burns out the RFID or the or the NFC in the back of the new iPhone. Burns it out, it destroys it.

0:10:41 - Paris Martineau
Okay, that doesn't surprise me, because there are some. Specifically, I feel like the wireless chargers I see in cars always make my phone incredibly warm.

0:10:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, oh, you wouldn't match her Manganos.

0:10:54 - Leo Laporte
Super it's, so provide us charging it's the best.

0:10:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, tell me when I can have a preemptive fit about the, about what? The eight? Can you guess what I'm going to have a fit about? Knowing what I have fits about? The pixel eight, the new, the new phone yes, what's. So I've been trying I mentioned this last week when you were a wall. I've been trying to get Google barred extensions working on my place account Right, and I went through three. I was on the show talking to service trying to figure it out three days, four days afterwards, till they never gave me an honest answer. Basically, the bottom line is it won't work with my account because I pay.

0:11:40 - Leo Laporte
Google for it, right, and I can use it All right, because you're new here, I better explain.

0:11:45 - Paris Martineau
Oh, this is an ongoing I was really enjoying the raid. This is, this is the whole step by step.

0:11:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yes, he has been complaining about the fact that he can't do with his workplace account the things the rest of us can do with our consumer Google. I pay for it all this time Go ahead.

0:12:03 - Paris Martineau
What things are you missing?

0:12:05 - Jeff Jarvis
All kinds of things you cannot do. That Google won't allow them to have all these new features come out Works everybody except the people who pay us.

0:12:13 - Ant Pruitt
All the AI stuff A lot of Well that's the thing.

0:12:15 - Jeff Jarvis
So I can see this happening. I spend $1100 for the F and phone and the main reason to buy it is because the tensor chip is on it and it can do all this neat AI stuff with my email and my maps and all the things that are promised with barred extensions. And I'll give you a 10 to one because my account is a workspace account. It wouldn't work and I would then have a $1100 piece of steaming anger in my hand. I would like to get it. I'm kind of due for a new phone. Don't tell my wife she wouldn't agree, but if I do, you would. You will. My head will explode on this show like you have never seen. You think I'll be Mr Calm all these years compared to what you would see at that moment. And I can't get a straight answer out of anybody as to whether or not maybe Paris can, because she works for a very powerful. Will barred extensions work with these June accounts? So that's my preemptive fit and I just can't order the phone because I don't know if it's going to work.

0:13:22 - Leo Laporte
One thing they did say is that a barred or some sort of LLM is going to come to Google assistant Not right away, but in the next few months.

0:13:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but that's that's. What they showed was basically barred extensions.

0:13:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you're going to get it. It'll work with that, because it's going to work in your assistant.

0:13:41 - Jeff Jarvis
So you're going to say everybody but not everybody but Jeff, jeff, jeff, that's the.

0:13:47 - Paris Martineau
Basically, what an account the verge of the victim.

0:13:49 - Leo Laporte
The verge says it's far from going full on barred, which again, this before the show we were talking about. Because Paul Thorot and I have gotten a little lovers quarrel, because I'm of the opinion that adding AI to search is a mistake, because AI doesn't guarantee the factual nature of its results, and that's the one thing you want from search is accurate results.

0:14:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So you know he's defending chat, gpt and Bing. Is that the ball he says it's going to?

0:14:19 - Leo Laporte
improve search and I think it's going to do everything but improve search because, if you're, you know. He said, well, look for what's the best vacuum cleaner. I said when I search for that, I don't want Google to tell me what the best vacuum cleaner is. I want to give me links to the wire cutter and consumer reports of various trusted sources that can. Then I can look at the ratings. He says, well, no, no, because what will happen is it'll say well, according to these sources, this is the best vacuum cleaner. And and he says, and I'll add this is where you can get it. And these stores are open. And I say, yeah, I'll have to vet every freaking answer, because it could be hallucinating Sure.

0:14:55 - Paris Martineau
It's reminiscent of what Elon Musk is doing right now with Twitter, where they've essentially said or I guess the website formerly known as Twitter, where he said oh, we're going to take away links, prioritizing tweets with links on Twitter because we want to optimize for people staying on Xcom. Wait a minute, it's probably a similar. Did he say that recently? Yes, he did.

0:15:16 - Jeff Jarvis
He did. Yeah, I think that was today.

0:15:20 - Paris Martineau
But I think it's no more links in Twitter. Similar because it's like you don't want to have people leaving Google search results and going to Wirecutter. You don't Sources.

0:15:30 - Leo Laporte
No, that's a good point Accuracy.

0:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Damned. Line 59 Leo.

0:15:34 - Ant Pruitt
Oh my God, YouTube was doing the same thing when you would put your YouTube video onto a website as an embed. It's like it wasn't really counting as a view. But if you put a thumbnail, have them click on the thumbnail. That takes it to YouTube. Then it's a view. So it's.

0:15:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I get people using their platform to be prioritized versus the content being prioritized, Sorry, Is it just urban legend or is it true that posts with links are deprecated in Facebook and LinkedIn? That's what people think is the case, so they put links in the comments under the post.

0:16:14 - Ant Pruitt
I don't know, I see, I didn't even know that. With regards to LinkedIn, I'm not sure with LinkedIn.

0:16:20 - Paris Martineau
If I recall correctly, there was something with Facebook when they were deprioritizing news content in the feed because of concerns over inflaming political tensions, where essentially they would say like oh, links to certain news organizations or links to content that we think could be politically charged will be deprioritized in the feed. But I'm not sure if that's still the case today or if it's all links.

0:16:47 - Jeff Jarvis
So Paris brings up what I think is a really important story and it adds into kind of a trend, right, so you have two things going on. You have an attack on links, basically because Facebook is getting rid of them in Canada because of C18. You have must say he's going to get rid of them. And then you have paywalls threatened around Facebook and Instagram and around X because he thinks he wants to. And now tick tock is talking about paywalls. So it's the closing in of our dear open web by these companies. I'm sorry, are you on discord? He's laughing.

0:17:30 - Ant Pruitt
You're now part of the official.

0:17:33 - Paris Martineau
You're now officially part of the.

0:17:36 - Leo Laporte
Magnet Suspicion Club. How do?

0:17:37 - Jeff Jarvis
they work Well, soon as your handy dandy stickers. Very important.

0:17:46 - Paris Martineau
I am going to need a whole pack of these.

0:17:48 - Leo Laporte
So I got a little bit. This was a little squirrel moment for me because we were talking about something completely different, but to take links out of Twitter is like that's the whole point of yes.

0:18:01 - Paris Martineau
Yes, yeah. Well, he has proven time and time again over the last year that he doesn't understand anything about what the point of Twitter is.

0:18:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Or he does and he wants to destroy it.

0:18:11 - Leo Laporte
You think he wants to go bankrupt, like he's just trying to get out of it.

0:18:16 - Paris Martineau
I don't think he's thinking that hard.

0:18:17 - Leo Laporte
He should tell Linda he's going to be a corino what his planes are, because she says we're going to be profitable next year. Yes, she clearly does not know what's going on.

0:18:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh she. I know somebody who knows her back in the day at NBC and I said was she that bad then? No, but geez.

0:18:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, you kind of have to. If you're going to work for Elon, I think you have to drink the Kool-Aid. Except you got to wonder when she got back after that. We're talking about the interview she did at the code conference with Julia Borsden of CNBC. First of all, she was a little off put by the fact that they had Yol-El Roth on right before her interview. He's the former head of Twitter safety who was ousted by Elon and then doxxed by Elon and had to move Right. I mean really was threatened by Elon's stands. So she was like, why did you have him on? So she was already on the back foot. But then she, at some point in this interview in which she's very defensive, shows her phone screen.

0:19:21 - Paris Martineau
And there's no. Twitter is not on there and I can also. May I point out she has the settings app in her dock at the bottom of the phone. I think is the most psychopathic thing I've ever seen the settings there. Who needs that much access to the settings app?

0:19:39 - Leo Laporte
We can debate that. I actually it's funny the verge ended up having on I think it was on the threads. All of their editors post their screens and you're right, none of them had the settings on the dock. But I can only imagine her going back to the office and in Elon saying you've got Instagram. You've got Facebook's met. You know what's that? You've got Facebook on your. Where's Twitter? Where's X?

0:20:08 - Ant Pruitt
I think that might be.

0:20:10 - Leo Laporte
So you know, maybe she doesn't even use it. I don't know.

0:20:15 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say X is on my home screen, is it really?

0:20:19 - Leo Laporte
You are brave. I don't want it on my home. Well, it's in a folder on my home screen.

0:20:22 - Paris Martineau
I don't know if it's not gonna.

0:20:23 - Leo Laporte
I don't use it.

0:20:24 - Paris Martineau
Minor color coded which I think everybody should. Oh, wait a minute.

0:20:27 - Leo Laporte
Let's see that you color code your home screen.

0:20:29 - Paris Martineau
Oh my, I don't know how to get the camera.

0:20:32 - Leo Laporte
No yeah, it's too bright, it's not going to Paris.

0:20:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I got this. This is a. This is a major lip test question. Tell me your books aren't organized by color?

0:20:41 - Paris Martineau
Um, they're not, there are. Maybe there's like one area, like my pointing the right over here, that has some blue books. I think they look nice together.

0:20:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Most of the other books are a little bit.

0:20:54 - Paris Martineau
My friend is this I'm not, I'm not going full, you know.

0:20:58 - Leo Laporte
Pinterest, very aesthetic though she has, I will say I do.

0:21:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I got to take pride in the background of my apartment. You're very crafty.

0:21:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, she has an interesting object dart in her faux fireplace, though I know we won't talk about that.

0:21:15 - Paris Martineau
Listen, you know we're not yet. We got to save that.

0:21:22 - Leo Laporte
Um, where were we got now? We've sidetracked Twitter Killing. We were originally talking about Google, the pop of the stack. We were talking about the Google, the new Google phone. We haven't finished that, oh that.

0:21:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh guys, Google, Remember Google. Even.

0:21:39 - Leo Laporte
Paris is chastising us.

0:21:42 - Paris Martineau
Uh, I got to start from a position of power here.

0:21:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, google.

0:21:47 - Paris Martineau
This is a show about Google.

0:21:49 - Leo Laporte
Um, actually there isn't really much to say. I think that there are a couple of things. That's interesting. The new phone is using a screen technology called LTPO, uh, which I'm ironically came from Apple. Uh, it is a low temperature. Uh, what does it stand for? Low temperature? Polycrystalline oxide, I think, Uh, but it is bright. In fact, they, uh, they are even brighter than the new Apple phones 2400 nits that's awesome. That's a lot of nits.

0:22:22 - Paris Martineau
Wait, have we talked about how one of the new Google phones can sense your temperature?

0:22:26 - Leo Laporte
That's okay. Yeah, we haven't got there, that's, you know, that's the one interesting new feature, anyway. So the bright screen, you like that and um what about the photo controls, the camera controls?

0:22:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that just catching up, and or is that maybe really good?

0:22:39 - Ant Pruitt
Uh, I think it's going to be pretty good. Well, at least what I saw in a demo and I was awake for, it's going to be pretty.

0:22:44 - Leo Laporte
I think that's going to be nice. I got it. That's actually what put me over the top, because I thought, you know they always have had the best camera. I'm going to give it a, I'll give it a shot, and there's a lot of AI in there, um, but I do think that the most, there were two things that were interesting. One is that they're going to put parts of Bard, parts of their AI, large language model AI into Google assistant. They will be the first, if you're allowed, to use it.

Well, you will you will, but they'll be the first to do that. I mean, there are bits, you know hints that Amazon would do it. In fact, amazon did a big investment in anthropic, ostensibly for that reason. There were hints that, uh, apple was working on something like that for Siri. But this will be the first one and it's not there yet, but it will.

0:23:26 - Jeff Jarvis
This is what we've been waiting for, is just that that is exciting, seriously, is to imagine what can be done locally, fast privacy. That becomes really interesting to have your little server there and using your own, rather than the whole LLMs, the whole world, using the corp aura right, leo, corp aura, very nice of your own data. Um, you know, which is better than asking for vacuum cleaners of the whole world?

0:23:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Uh, and I think, done right. There are certainly uses uh in search. I wouldn't use AI and search per se, but for instance, I use, as you know, I've been trying to find a Google alternative. I use this paid search now since Neva went under called Kagi and Kagi has the. You're kind of sad, Leo.

0:24:15 - Paris Martineau
Oh man, I know. It says let's fetch, dot, dot dot. But no, it's okay, you're fetching.

0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Give me a search term, I'll fetch the. Uh, give me, uh, give me some of this. I'll search for Paris Martin. No, because you know more than anybody what it should say about you, right? And in fact, look, the auto, auto complete, has a picture of you. There we go, I'm going to click it yeah, that's uh yeah, there's your website.

0:24:39 - Paris Martineau
My website. You can get you know when you were wired. You know, right, there's old pictures of you.

0:24:46 - Jeff Jarvis
There's three and a half year old stories rather than the current story.

0:24:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, no, I think there's a you know. There it is the report or the information. Well, there's your information.

0:24:54 - Paris Martineau
I will say to Kagi's defense, and this may be the only time I say that sentence. Uh the information only recently became easily searchable by Google.

0:25:06 - Leo Laporte
So Kagi is it might be.

0:25:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you know it might be uh but here's an interesting thing.

0:25:12 - Leo Laporte
Let me, let me uh take a uh one of your clips. How about that? You've got a on your page a long, strange trip for the Uber, for nurses, right? So this is an article you wrote for the information. Let me go back to Kagi. Get ready for this Cause. At the bottom of the Kagi page they have something called summarizer it has a bottom.

0:25:33 - Paris Martineau
That's unique this might not work for Kagi because the information has a paywall, but let's leave you.

0:25:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you're right, I didn't even think of that, okay.

0:25:42 - Paris Martineau
Let's see you should do a wired article.

0:25:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I should. Well, it has a paywall too, but this is going to sell, but not as hard to me. This is what I could do. Well, now look, I guess it went through the paywall. Here's the summary, the bullet points from your article. And now, this is the top, this is the top Okay, so I yeah, but you get the idea.

0:26:01 - Paris Martineau
Go to go to. Yeah, that's useful. I think, that is very cool.

0:26:05 - Jeff Jarvis
So you add the, the, the Bard. He says you don't use Google, but you got to use Google. If you're always going on, you could add the Bard box to Google search. So I would have you search for something. The box comes up there.

0:26:17 - Leo Laporte
Let's do the same.

0:26:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll tell you something about this so here I am on Googlecom the sequel to bird box that anyone has. Pretty much.

0:26:24 - Leo Laporte
Where is Bard box?

0:26:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't see it when it well, you've got to. You've got to install that as an extension. It's a different extension, but you install that on Google. If you go to Bardgooglecom and then and then install that as an extension, it'll show up. The weird thing for me is it changes languages constantly and I asked once why are you showing me Persian? Because you're using the Persian keyboard? No, I'm not. Oh, that's interesting. I'm sorry. I'm just a development machine. I don't know anything.

0:26:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's exactly the kind of hallucinations that worry me. The whole language, yeah, although that was one thing Google showed at the event today is that you can dictate in. I think this is something probably not a lot of people are going to use, but you can dictate text messages in multiple languages at once, like you can start a list of people and then fade into. Spanish, then switch.

0:27:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Listen to my students. They go back and forth like crazy.

0:27:15 - Leo Laporte
So maybe there is a use, did you?

0:27:17 - Paris Martineau
watch Hagen. It is actually very impressive from a like. Well, it is the fact that it can tell the difference. Yeah, yes, so turn that into translated speech or not translated? But written speech Fantastic yeah.

0:27:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, I spoke with a state department group of journalists, belarusian journalists, and they're trying to learn English. That's why there was there. I spoke slowly to them so they could hear my English, and I talked about Hagen and they were just like wow, you see that, leo, I assume.

0:27:48 - Leo Laporte
What, what who.

0:27:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Hagen, hagen yeah. So, it's phenomenal because it will record video. It will translate. It'll translate and speak it in your tone of voice oh yeah, it sounds like you and move your lips. It looked really good.

0:28:08 - Leo Laporte
So we're interested in this because Spotify has announced for podcasts the ability to take an existing podcast like this one and, in our voices, translated into another language, and I think I mean one of the things I would like to do is make Twig available in South America, for instance in Spanish speaking countries. What the German version? Or German? That would be fantastic yeah.

0:28:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Spotify also said we're dancing around here that they're going to put up full transcripts, which I think would make great sense for you.

0:28:38 - Leo Laporte
We already do that. We already have English language. Now you can add but now we can have foreign language.

0:28:43 - Jeff Jarvis
What I'm saying is now you can add language and you can add summary, not just of the show notes, but the audience can query the transcripts.

0:28:53 - Paris Martineau
And what service do you use for the transcripts here right now, podium? Is that another AI one? Yeah, it's an AI.

0:28:59 - Leo Laporte
We just started using it. We were using human written transcripts. We had just signed a deal when all of it, when whispery and all these came out and I was like oh my God, but it's podiumcom, that's another company.

0:29:16 - Paris Martineau
Probably a podium salesman.

0:29:20 - Leo Laporte
I can't remember. Now let's see.

0:29:22 - Paris Martineau
I really like. Trent is what I use for all my recordings. Trint is great, because you can search.

0:29:29 - Ant Pruitt
Podiumco.

0:29:32 - Leo Laporte
No, it's a page here, it is, oh, that page.

0:29:35 - Paris Martineau
Hey, there you are on the page.

0:29:39 - Leo Laporte
So this, what this does give us is fairly good transcripts. They're getting better at speaker recognition, so it'll say speaker one, two, three and four, but then our editor can say no speaker, one is Paris Martin, oh, and they will then fix that. It's also getting, so it's getting pretty good transcripts. And then we're using Anthropics Clawed to do show notes out of that to, in other words, what I just did with the summarizer at Cogge summarize the show and then so I think more and more we are using to automate that is.

0:30:11 - Jeff Jarvis
You could also put up the transcripts and allow the audience to come in and say tell me everything that Twit said this week.

0:30:18 - Leo Laporte
Yes, exactly, and that. But you could do that now with with one of these summarizers. Right, we don't have to even do that. Right.

0:30:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know you mentioned Paris.

0:30:28 - Paris Martineau
No one has to listen to this show. Stop it, stop it. What is wrong with you? They can just listen to a, you know, an artificial version of you, reading the summary of what you did, and your lips will move along with it.

0:30:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Okey-dokey. Well, she arrives one half hour later. She's killed the whole bed.

0:30:47 - Paris Martineau
Sorry guys.

0:30:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, here is the here's. The affiliate link for podium is podiumtwittv. I didn't know we had an affiliate link. Awesome Tools for podcasters. So you mentioned this person. I thought this was interesting. The one weird new feature that nobody had leaked of the new pixels eight and eight pro is a temperature sensor and they said now you can aim your phone at your stove to see if the eggs are at the right temperature. And coming soon with FDA approval, you'll be able to use your phone to tell you what temperature you are, which I thought. I have one of those infrared, you know it's a looks like a gun, but it's not thermometer.

You aim it like inside an oven A meter, a thermometer. Those meters, thermometer that measures temperatures, and you that's useful.

0:31:42 - Paris Martineau
I will say I was ready to make fun of this, but as someone who has lost a little stick in poke thermometer, I used to check if my salmon is cooked.

0:31:49 - Leo Laporte
Exactly my phone would be very convenient, but don't stick your phone in the salmon.

0:31:54 - Paris Martineau
I mean please. Sometime. I can't really control where the phone ends up, but not hold that against it as far as temperature reading.

0:32:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's meant for I was wondering that.

0:32:04 - Leo Laporte
It's meant for reading surface temperatures, not internal salmon temperatures, but I use it. I use the little gun thermometer for pizza ovens and things like that Because you want to make sure that the right temperature before you put in. That's what I got it for, so that's useful if it's accurate, and we don't know if it's accurate.

0:32:22 - Paris Martineau
I want to know how this feature came about. I mean, it had to be like a COVID era. We should add a thermometer to this.

0:32:29 - Leo Laporte
It came from 2020. You're exactly right.

0:32:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Like that's got to be it.

0:32:33 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and then they were like okay, wait COVID's over, we got to find something else Eggs.

0:32:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's hysterical. Oh my God, that's hysterical. You're right.

0:32:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah, it's a syncopated development.

0:32:46 - Leo Laporte
I tell you I'm reluctant after buying the pixel tablet, after Google has done is killed, stadia has, I'm very reluctant to buy a Google product of any kind. I just I've lost faith in them.

0:33:00 - Jeff Jarvis
They're better known for killing them and starting them, which is really a shame.

0:33:05 - Ant Pruitt
And you know, I still have faith in I think we spoke about this, Somebody asked me about this. I have more faith in them with phones because they're controlling the stack a little more with the tensor.

0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, look at the Jamboard Right. This is the whiteboard that they put out that you bought for a lot of money.

0:33:26 - Jeff Jarvis
A lot of money we have. We have a whole bunch of those at my school.

0:33:29 - Leo Laporte
They're deprecating them. At the end of the year we're into 2024. When did they come out?

0:33:34 - Paris Martineau
Where are you gonna jam? How do?

0:33:37 - Leo Laporte
you jam. They came out not that long and I have. I have colleagues who five thousand dollars they Like three or four years after their release, they're saying, yeah, we give up. That's to me. This is what this is, why they gotta stop doing this. Have some commitment. So makes me very nervous to buy anything from Google these days.

0:34:03 - Ant Pruitt
Again that that still points to leadership, in my opinion. I agree. You know you're saying, have some commitment, or what have you? But how about leadership? Going in and looking at the research and saying, all right, what other? What is the competition in this space? Do we stand a chance or can we take, you know, a fair amount of the market?

0:34:21 - Leo Laporte
You mean before they sell, all, before they sell them, before they sell twenty five thousand dollar devices to a school.

0:34:29 - Ant Pruitt
Right, yeah, and then leave them out. You know, leave them hanging to dry there at the end when there's no support for them.

0:34:35 - Leo Laporte
That's, that's a jamboard will no longer receive software updates on September 30th 2024, a year from now, and its licensed subscriptions will expire the same day. Companies and schools with an upcoming renewal may remain subscribers up to that day. To the prorated amount, end of life.

0:34:52 - Paris Martineau
October perfect for back to school.

0:34:55 - Leo Laporte
It's dying in the first month of school.

0:34:58 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's, I mean to your point, aunt, though I think that this is me like. I think there's that meme you know of everything and Google ends up in a graveyard.

I think, it's more of a symptom of Google being such a large and unusually decentralized kind of organization least in comparison to, you know, your Facebook's or Metas and what not of the world like Apple. At the very least, you don't have all these different teams Working on products that some of which end up being perhaps the same product and they end up releasing them around the same time. But at Google that sort of thing happens somewhat often.

0:35:33 - Leo Laporte
This is the.

0:35:35 - Ant Pruitt
Site we talk about all the time killed by Google killed by Googlecom.

0:35:38 - Leo Laporte
and there it is, right at the top jamboard, then podcast and then Google domains, google optimize I didn't even know about that killed five days ago.

0:35:46 - Paris Martineau
Google domains is crazy to me.

0:35:48 - Leo Laporte
But they killed that they sold it to Squarespace?

0:35:50 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, they gave them over to Squarespace right.

0:35:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Squarespace, yeah, but Paris, I wonder whether In a decentralized organization would it be easier to hide like don't tell anybody. They still have longer going after all these years? Yeah, they do, is I mean?

0:36:06 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I think. Obviously it's easier to keep some of these pet projects alive for longer, but that's also why they end up developing these kind of cult followings, because they're able to grow. And then someone's like why the hell Do we have blogger? Why the hell do we still have are spending this much on Jamboard every year? And someone higher up in the hood and pull decides to you know, cut that from the budget line for their larger team and you end up with a lot of dissatisfied customers, which I guess would be Obviously. I think if Google was running a somewhat different way, where every product release was something that you had buy-in from the highest levels of the company, you wouldn't have as much innovation and it'd be a very different Google than the one we have now, but you would have that trade-off.

0:36:51 - Leo Laporte
And we have a billboard that we were thinking we would put up on the highway 101 out here in Northern California, Featuring your image, I think. This is our marketing department at work right away. Got right to work.

0:37:14 - Paris Martineau
People are really clamoring for this.

0:37:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what your job is right here.

0:37:27 - Jeff Jarvis
See, she thought that being on a show about Google meant coming in and killing things. Even the show.

0:37:33 - Paris Martineau
You know I was being on brand. Really I take the name.

0:37:41 - Jeff Jarvis
This week and then it's gone, oh Lord.

0:37:45 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break. I think we've said everything there is to be said. We I will get the new pixel 8 Pro a week from tomorrow, so I'll have it for two weeks from now seriously.

0:37:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you have a workspace account?

0:38:00 - Leo Laporte
We, we use Google workspace at work? Yeah, but I don't. It's not my personal.

0:38:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I want to see if you can test whether or not you can get, or. I guess the AI stuff isn't isn't in it yet, that's coming later.

0:38:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I can test it for you yeah, it's not, it's not out yet. Oh well, so I will be logging into my Google Fi account when it comes, and that's one of the reasons I got it, because I have I use Fi, their cell phone company, which I'm sure is next on the block, so I'll put that on there. But I could log it in instead to a Leo a Twitter TV. We use Workspace yeah.

0:38:35 - Speaker 2
I'd be all up for a company what works in yeah.

0:38:37 - Leo Laporte
I'll give it a try, um, when that time comes, if you buy it with Fi and get the 400 bucks off.

0:38:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Can you then say, oh and hell without, I'm gonna put a Verizon chip in that's a good question.

0:38:47 - Leo Laporte
It's unlocked. Yeah, yeah, I don't know that's. Don't tell that. Don't say that out loud. Ruth Borat will kill it.

0:38:59 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah, that's not okay, it's a huge twig.

0:39:02 - Leo Laporte
She listens all the time. She knows what to what to kill based on what we say. Paris.

0:39:09 - Paris Martineau
She's coming for the podcast.

0:39:12 - Leo Laporte
Fortunately she doesn't own this show. Apparently this is. This is more. We've talked more about Google on this show today than we ever do like in years, so let's stop. And we haven't even gotten to Chromebook plus yes, well, we'll talk about that in just a moment, because that's I, that's kind of voices you say Chromebook plus. There's an irony in all that. Watch it. You're getting close to the nerves here.

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You're watching this week in Google, jeff Jarvis and Pruitt and Paris Martino joining us in a seat number three. All right, let's talk about Chromebooks for gaming. The irony is Google just killed stadia. So you get the feeling this is another case of Google Saying oh, you know, it'd be great to work with stadia, we could have our Chromebooks stream games using stadia. And so they worked on that, and then they killed stadia. And so what? What are they gonna do? They, they're gonna kill Chromebook plus, now they went ahead Because now Microsoft or Amazon or Nvidia can benefit. It's just crazy. Are you gonna buy one of these, jeff? I know you're a Chromebook fanatic.

0:42:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Doesn't work now and the microphone doesn't work, so I gotta buy a new one. Oh, pixel book. Oh, it's the last Google one.

0:42:51 - Leo Laporte
Which I love. Yeah or no, not to go. I like the pixel.

0:42:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I love my old pixel. Yeah, I miss those. May it rest in peace. Yeah first poor things they killed. So the the expensive HP one was what I thought I was gonna get.

0:43:07 - Leo Laporte
Kevin, like the likes, the Kevin Toeful at about Chromebooks calm, what is he like? Which one? The the 714? Well, he's always liked that. But is that a combo plus?

0:43:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I was debating that one too, the Samsung one that came out two years ago I like, but it's it's old now, so I was waiting for plus, and these are running in 399 499. They're they're less expensive. I just don't know what the build and screen quality is gonna be like, and and battery.

0:43:35 - Leo Laporte
So these are. These are the specs. So one of the things they're promoting I even see that's for gaming on Chromebooks is this these aren't the gaming Chromebooks that we've been talking about.

0:43:44 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no. This is just just a job trying to set a base level for a serious Chromebook.

0:43:50 - Leo Laporte
So now there's gonna be kind of three kinds of Chromebooks. Is Chromebook for gaming, the highest end? Those are using i3s and i5, intel processors and better screens. Presumably they say 120.

0:44:03 - Jeff Jarvis
And along with them, the really expensive thousand dollar ones from HP I think it's the ultra premium call Chromebook and don't laugh at me for saying that.

0:44:10 - Leo Laporte
And then there's the Chromebook plus, which is adding things like I guess it has an NPU or neural processing unit of some kind, so it's doing a more with AI. Video calls are even better. They say They've got magic eraser and things like that. And then there's the normal crappy Chromebook that you have by a fruit.

0:44:30 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, I have the. I buy. This is a thousand dollar machine. Oh, not a crappy one.

0:44:35 - Paris Martineau
Okay, sir Well right, you're your Chromebook that doesn't have a working touchscreen and is something else broken? That's the not crappy one.

0:44:42 - Ant Pruitt
Hey.

0:44:50 - Paris Martineau
This is you know.

0:44:51 - Leo Laporte
I'm just happy about attacking me, that's all.

0:44:53 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I will. You didn't really get me with the idea of a gaming Chromebook. Really, do you?

0:44:58 - Leo Laporte
want a gaming Chromebook really no, I don't.

0:45:01 - Paris Martineau
I have a steam deck, so but yeah that's much. I'm getting more into Gaming on things that aren't in Nintendo switch, so why?

0:45:08 - Ant Pruitt
why not have a gaming Chromebook? You know it, is it strictly because this stream deck is just more portable? You put it in your, your backpack or what have you?

0:45:17 - Paris Martineau
um, personally, it's honestly, because being on a computer reminds me of being at work. I Can't really think of the idea of enjoying myself while sitting down in a little laptop typey type mode. So I do really enjoy. I also just love the handheld ask. I don't really take it my steam deck anywhere, but I love sitting on my couch.

0:45:38 - Leo Laporte
It feels like you could, if you were ever to leave the house.

0:45:42 - Paris Martineau
Yes, you know, I just want the. I want the option of being able to run out into the street at a given moment and still play Baldur's Gate 3 wall. Okay, you know pacing.

0:45:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, baldur's Gate, you're into it. Yes, yes but you know you play that into it really you play that on steam.

0:46:02 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I have vlogged at like 200 hours in Baldur's Gate. It's really embarrassing. It's taking over my whole life. What character it's gonna be my pick of the week you know, okay, we'll save it, save it, save it.

0:46:13 - Leo Laporte
We'll ask you about it later about how good Chromebooks are.

0:46:16 - Paris Martineau
Jeff.

0:46:18 - Leo Laporte
So here's the Chromebook. I do mean that sincerely here's the good, here's so I. That's why I was confused. So they have this Chromebook plus, but they have an even higher end version of Chrome design for gaming. And see, I would think this is what you would want, jeff, not because you want a game, but because it's gonna have the highest age features non gaming version of that with high-end chip and so on. Yeah, I don't think you care about an RGB gaming keyboard.

0:46:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I certainly do not turn that off immediately.

0:46:47 - Paris Martineau
It's sad, though I mean they have your multi-colors as you type away your lecture.

0:46:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. And then they say play your favorite games on leading cloud gaming platforms. And I sure they wanted Stadia to be in this group but it's gone, so it's Xbox GeForce now in Luna.

0:47:06 - Paris Martineau
This work like because it's it's streaming browser based, because Browser-based gaming exactly.

0:47:14 - Leo Laporte
And they do have some graphics capabilities, which is kind of interesting Better displays, 120 Hertz refresh rate displays, but it's all streaming.

0:47:25 - Jeff Jarvis
It has to be with streaming this is so maybe this is what you should the future.

0:47:30 - Leo Laporte
Maybe this is what you look at. Is you know? Like you see, if you know he liked the Acer spin, this is basically the gaming version, except you don't really want that keyboard.

0:47:39 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I do not, I do not.

0:47:41 - Ant Pruitt
I will never understand how streaming in in the game is. Space is optimal I it just doesn't make sense. I'm like the latency would be a bit of a pain in the brain.

0:47:52 - Leo Laporte
It's not optimal, it's just what it's, just it's, she's but people are still offering it.

0:47:58 - Ant Pruitt
Do you know here here's game, here's a gaming device that you can't connect to the internet unless it's wireless, and I don't get that. Yeah, I don't. I don't see why that makes sense, but apparently people are buying these products.

0:48:11 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was just saying I play video games because I don't want to be connected to the internet, like that is like it's like top three reasons as to why I'm playing a video game. But I Don't know. Apparently I think that also cost is probably a factor. It's probably easier to have a machine that's able to stream this, then have it all Within it.

0:48:29 - Leo Laporte
I think Microsoft and video, amazon and Google all would like streaming Gaming to be a thing, and I think gamers try it and then go yeah, no, I Honestly don't say it's also probably also about control.

0:48:44 - Paris Martineau
That you know, then you're going, you don't have the games locally, which is already a huge trend in the gaming industry. You have to connect through this portal. They can change kind of the terms of that agreement pretty much at any time. If you, you know, miss your monthly payment, your games are gone.

0:49:00 - Leo Laporte
Hmm, yeah, that's true they like the other thing.

0:49:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I think Paris is that I'm not a gamer and I would like to try some games. I would like to get into it, but I'm not gonna go buy a whole bunch of equipment. Yeah, doing something and saying, oh okay, that's that. So if I could stream games on my machine and maybe I'd get into it, it's what the problem is. That's not. That's not very much of a demographic you want to build for for gaming.

0:49:23 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you know you're curious. Is not, no, a huge like tan, that's otherwise known as closer?

0:49:30 - Leo Laporte
The new crumb of plus specs requiring Intel i3 or better or and I would look for this Actually AMD Ryzen 7000 series. That might be better, frankly. A 1080p IPS display, 1080p webcam, 8 gigs of RAM, 120 gigs of storage. Those are the minimal Specs. They're gonna include Google photos, magic eraser and other editing tools, offline file sync, ai powered video conferencing and things like lighting, noise not sure what that means, that we already have.

0:50:03 - Paris Martineau
Why do we need AI powered for video conference?

0:50:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'll give you an example. And they showed this noise cancellation. Morning is the noise cancellation. They were really hot. Oh, okay, you can have your microphone and the babies. Do you want to record the baby going Google, gaga, but there's a dog barking in the background and I could teach class from the beach. You could teach class from beach. They wouldn't even know. That's huge. Where they wouldn't even know, except they'd be blinded by your bright, shiny white knees.

0:50:33 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, they've never seen sunlight, they've never seen sunlight.

0:50:37 - Leo Laporte
That's right. In a few months. You're right because, jeff, you feel, as I do, that men should not wear shorts.

0:50:45 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, I also. I don't like getting sand in my socks and I don't go to the beach?

0:50:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, don't, okay. Here's a little tip next time you go to the beach, don't wear socks.

0:50:56 - Paris Martineau
That you know. I mean that. How is he gonna keep his knees from?

0:51:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a good point. Joe, can you get to work on this? I want a picture of Jeff At the beach in short. Can you get to work on that, joe? No, no, you like me, don't you, joe? Prices for the Chromebook Plus will range from 400 to 700 bucks. Acer, a Seuss, hp and Lenovo they all come with a. This is interesting Three months subscription to Photoshop on the web. How is? How good is that, and is that useful at all?

0:51:43 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, it's pretty good. You have to use Chrome, though you can't use.

0:51:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's all you can use on a Chromebook.

0:51:49 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, yeah, you have to use Chrome, you have to use Edge, but yeah, it's pretty good. They've had this out for a while, beta wise, and it's gotten better.

0:51:58 - Jeff Jarvis
For students would be great to be able to start to use this stuff streaming and not have to buy all this expensive Mac stuff. Yeah, good.

0:52:05 - Leo Laporte
They also include a subscription, a trial subscription to GeForce now, in which is, I'm sure, be it must be, just really grind the gears of the of the Stadia people, like we were making that, we were doing that man. Wow that's sad.

0:52:25 - Ant Pruitt
Maybe the Stadia people got nice severance checks, who knows?

0:52:27 - Leo Laporte
I hope one of the things Paul Therat was saying I'm sure they did. One of the things Paul Therat was saying is that Microsoft needs to take Chromebooks seriously, that Microsoft needs to get in a classroom, then they need a product like Chromebooks. So he he feels like Microsoft's missing a bet by not having a Chromebook like product for schools.

0:52:52 - Ant Pruitt
The last time they tried, or maybe it wasn't necessarily Microsoft that tried this, but the netbooks reminds me of all the Chromebooks that's what I brought up. That was pretty crap tastic back there. Oh, they were bad.

0:53:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I just answer your question from 10 minutes ago. Why Chromebooks it I? All I ever really do is the web and I never bother about updates and apps and reg files and anything. It is just so mindlessly easy. I Because I'm on a show this week at Google and I thought I should really go deep into the Google thing. That's why I started. But I love it. I wouldn't go back.

0:53:32 - Paris Martineau
I grew with you on it. You know as too many apps running at all times that I only shut down for Recording. This sort of show Could never be me, but I do respect your browser based lifestyle.

0:53:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Browser based lifestyle yes, I.

0:53:52 - Leo Laporte
Generate I. I, oh no, what did you do? Generated an image of Jeff on the beach in his shorts, with his Lai, because there's no socks there. Oh yeah, I have another one with socks. I did say socks, let's, I'm too three, let's up scale number three. And and I will give you that one with the socks.

0:54:25 - Paris Martineau
There you go. I think that's a good. That's you right. There we go.

0:54:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I really like the socks, yet the toes out, because that helps with the sand, that it's okay. It's a good invention yeah, I.

0:54:40 - Leo Laporte
Didn't say Jeff Jarvis, I just said an old man. So I'll try to. I don't know if it knows.

Photoshop yeah well, that was another thing Google showed at the pixel eight event and I thought that was really good. When you're doing a group shot, we do this every year for our I'm gonna try this with a new phone on our Christmas picture, and we do this every year there's always somebody because there's 20 people in the Christmas picture going, or with his eyes closed or Burke, making a weird smile, being who he is, and so what you can do in a group photo is, tap on the people's heads and I'll show you cuz take a bunch of photos right, and then I'll show you all the different Pictures of that person and you could pick for each person the best shot.

And Now, if that does a good job, that's really good.

0:55:23 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that's a nice Deep, fake Moral panic here.

0:55:29 - Leo Laporte
It's not a deep thing where they're already. No, it's got the image.

0:55:35 - Paris Martineau
Deep fake in the sense that that picture doesn't ever exist and it is an amalgamation of Other pictures. It's kind of a human centipede of a deep fake.

0:55:45 - Jeff Jarvis
But it could be. It could be that that you're sneering at me for something I say, but then the photo could be, can be replaced to make you smile at me, and that's kind of a lot, just like what most ads are already doing now for the last couple decades via Photoshop.

0:56:01 - Leo Laporte
I think you guys are terrible. This is not that. This is. You just have a family photo and and the kids. I agree with you.

0:56:14 - Ant Pruitt
It was in it. I think it's a good tool. Yeah, I think it'd be a good tool for families to fix. But, a group text or that group slack channel, you know.

0:56:26 - Paris Martineau
Say this would be a perfect product for my mother, who hates every photo ever taken of her. Yeah, and for that, that's right, that's right, you're my.

0:56:34 - Ant Pruitt
Now you got a choice, just tap it and fix it.

0:56:36 - Paris Martineau
I was like just pick the one that you like. Yeah exactly Any of your mom. Here's all the images picture.

0:56:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so here I'll show you, just as this is the Google event, I'll show you so. So one of the things there she's talking about right now is improve the audio eraser.

0:56:54 - Speaker 6
That will take background noise out, which is cool distinct layers that you can control so here's the picture.

0:57:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh wait, this is the baby with the dog.

0:57:06 - Ant Pruitt
No, it's cancellation.

0:57:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually think the dog is part of the charm of I would take the baby out. Take the baby, leave the dog but the Ogoa second before that, didn't it did she said layers, I think what was before. That showed the layers and you could affect each one, yeah.

0:57:30 - Leo Laporte
But if you look at it closely or listen closely while she's doing it, you'll hear that weird phasing in the background that you get when you have digital processing and they downplayed that. But I think you would notice it to be a three is so efficient.

0:57:44 - Speaker 6
Not only does it run more ML models, more complex models, but in many cases it runs them concurrently.

0:57:51 - Speaker 2
This is their tensor it delivers so many. I think I went back to.

0:57:55 - Speaker 6
For that no other phone can the clear calling is pretty cool.

0:58:00 - Leo Laporte
Let me find. This is the camera, the video.

0:58:05 - Speaker 6
Like when you're trying to get a group photo over and over and over again, only to find somebody is always blinking or rolling their eyes. Group photos, mom, but pixel gives you the option to make them easier.

0:58:22 - Leo Laporte
This is kind of cool, so each face you could choose a best take.

0:58:27 - Speaker 6
Best take use the series of photos taken closer together to help you create the shot you want.

0:58:34 - Leo Laporte
Now for this to work, you'll obviously have to take the a bunch of photos without people moving, and you can hear the Google employees in the front row, by the way.

0:58:44 - Ant Pruitt
Wait, you're standing there with the, with the same perspective. You're not on a tripod, but it's. You're making it easy for the AI to be able to cycle through to different. We do that, don't we? I?

0:58:55 - Leo Laporte
mean, when we take the Christmas shot we go to, yeah, the other thing they showed, which is kind of cool. I sometimes will do this. I don't know where I got the idea, but I say, okay, act surprised, and everybody's surprised. Okay, act grumpy, everybody's grumpy. Okay, happy, happy and do three selfies that way. But you could actually do that and then pick the pictures you like, yep.

0:59:19 - Jeff Jarvis
She looked the mother of that shot ended shot. Look weird Well.

0:59:23 - Paris Martineau
I will say I noticed that as well.

0:59:25 - Leo Laporte
The chin area Strange and that's the problem, is you, when you do this demo, real quickly at all? Oh, it looks so cool.

0:59:33 - Speaker 2
And then, if you, look at if you pixel. If you pixel, people peep it well.

0:59:38 - Leo Laporte
You're always let's see, look at the, let's look at the images. Yeah yeah, that doesn't see her head doesn't match her neck.

0:59:46 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it doesn't yeah.

0:59:52 - Ant Pruitt
And it's gonna have to learn over time okay, but it's not there yet clearly right. They said December.

1:00:00 - Paris Martineau
It is strange to use that as the demo, though. Yeah, why not choose one that looks?

1:00:06 - Ant Pruitt
Oh, we're expecting polish here from from Google. Really, come on, yeah this wasn't.

1:00:17 - Paris Martineau
Someone in the chat pointed out, my last name is misspelled in lower third. Thank you, chat, I did. It is not even close something there similarly, my last name is misspelled and I think the what's it called Twitter handle X handle.

1:00:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh my god, mar ti and e a, you, are you French? Is your family French, is that?

1:00:43 - Paris Martineau
yeah, families French. Are they from Paris, um, or just like? It they're from a like small town in like southern France that I'm forgetting the name of, but we at Some point went back and, like found at the church. Oh my great, great, great great grandfather got baptized in order. That's really cool.

1:01:05 - Leo Laporte
All right, I'm gonna take a little break. Come back. We have more to discuss. A lot of Google.

1:01:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That's enough to last us an hour worth of Google in a show.

1:01:14 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say you know, we've hit our Q4.

1:01:17 - Ant Pruitt
We're done.

1:01:20 - Leo Laporte
Got it all, man, we did it. Paris Martino, great to have you. Thank you for being here. She's at the information. What's your beat? You cover. I know you cover like big tech right.

1:01:30 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, my beat as of this year is kind of just features and investigations on interesting subjects, so you get to choose. I will say yeah, I mean the last nine months or so it's been a lot about a startup stewing fraud or that sort of stuff.

1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have. I didn't realize the information is 10 years old now. I've been subscribing since yeah launched and Incredibly happy. It is a one of the reasons I subscribe is there's so many scoops and we are often Reporting on what the information has said about all this stuff.

1:02:07 - Paris Martineau
So is the rest of technology media yeah yeah, it's been really nice to work at a place that has like a sustainable and profitable business model that truly the the state like the way we operate is higher. Good reporters, let them do work that is important and break news and not much else, so it's quite nice.

1:02:28 - Leo Laporte
Bravo. Jessica's lesson, who has been on our shows and was a reporter herself. I think she was at the Wall Street Journal, yeah, at the last, and decided you know what, I'm gonna stop working for the big companies and do my own thing and it's put together.

1:02:41 - Paris Martineau
I will say Leo, I think one of the things that pushed her, changed the needle for her was she had to do some cover, some sort of event like this Google event today. I think it was an apple like day and she was like why am I live?

1:02:56 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, I know her. I know the feeling. I Started my own company so I could live, block it, and that was where I went.

1:03:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Jason's one who knows the feeling because he had to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning.

1:03:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, now I have people to do that for me.

1:03:10 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, mr Howe.

1:03:13 - Leo Laporte
Ant Pruitt is also here. You've put together some very exciting new events in our in our club To a discord. Tomorrow You're interviewing John Scalzi, the esteemed. One of my favorite sci-fi authors. Is that his latest starter?

1:03:28 - Ant Pruitt
villain, starter villains. This is his latest one. They sent me an advanced copy and I will be finishing it tonight. As you can see, I'm almost done with it. I'll finish it tonight, just in time for my interview with him tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it. I should be, fun.

1:03:42 - Leo Laporte
I am looking, he's done some great books. He will also. His book will all kaiju. What is it called a reservation society? I do. Preservation society will be the subject of Stacy's book club next month. So that's right. November. Renee Richie, former Host on Mac break weekly now creator liaison at YouTube in a fireside chat in November. And then it's the old farts Jeff Jarvis, me and girls In our shorts and black socks at the beach in our shorts, it'll be a lot of fun.

That's December 7th, the day that will live in Infamy. Many, many other events if you're not yet a member of club to it. That's how you get the ad-free versions of all these shows. That's how you get into the club to a discord with all the special Shows that we put together, like hands on Macintosh, hands on windows, the entire Linux show, scott Wilkinson's home theater geeks, and on and on and on. It also is how you get that good feeling in your heart because you know you're supporting what we're doing here. Do it twit, tv slash, club twit and a prude, of course, community manager. So he's, he does a great job putting together programs. Are you gonna be participating in the escape box?

1:04:55 - Ant Pruitt
Yes, sir, we have our escape room coming up on October 26. I'm a tad bit nervous because mr Burke is gonna be in there to your. What the heck he's gonna pull out. So, lisa, before, if we're gonna be trapped on a deserted island, most people have said they want to be trapped on a deserted island with either me or Mr Burke, so so you're like the professor Burke is like Gilligan.

1:05:25 - Leo Laporte
I'll be honest. No, but you never know. We'll find out. That'll be fun October 26 Twit TV slash club. Twit if you're not already a member and thanks if you are. Our show today brought to you by oh, I love these guys.

Fast mail I've been a fast mail subscriber for more than a decade and I've said this over and over again if mail, if email is important to you, stop using free email services. You're not gonna get support. You're, you're a product, not the customer. You need fast mail. If email for people who care about their privacy. I have been such a fast mail fan. It's got all the tools I want. They use the open source Cyrus server. They contribute back to it all the time. They also established standards for authentication.

I have all of my domains hosted, the DNS hosted, a fastmail. You can do that, and the reason I do that is because not only do I, you know they do a great job of that, they also give me email at those addresses. And it uses dkim and spf and all the email authentication protocols. So it's a really great way to have an infinite number of email addresses. If you're a business and you're, you know you're still at hotmailcom. Can you stop, go to fastmail and have your own domain name? They sell domain names now at fastmail. They set up all the records for you, so it works immediately. Or you can bring your own, which is what I did, which gives you the ability to both send and receive emails from your own domain. You can have multiple email, infinite email addresses at that domain.

Fastmail has, of course, will work with all existing email clients, so it's easy to move over from anything that you're using. They have a great webmail interface themselves. I think you'll really like it. They also have apps for iOS and Android. They have quick settings in their interface. From the quick settings menu, without even leaving the mailbox, you could choose a new theme, switch between light mode and dark mode, change your text size.

There are all sorts of options related to the fastmail screen you're viewing. You can create masked email addresses with one of our sponsors, bitwarden, or one password. That's a great way to even greatly secure even more greatly secure your logins, because not only do you have a unique password for every site, but you have a unique email for every site. It all goes in your fastmail inbox, but it doesn't look like your fastmail email. It's a unique email each time. You can generate new masked email addresses. You can auto-save contacts. I do that and then I have a very. They have a very powerful Sib scripting language that will really help you organize your inbox.

Of course, it's great for getting rid of spam too. So when I am getting an email conversation with somebody, that person's added to my contact list and then I have a rule that says well, if somebody's sending me email and they're in my contact list, put them in the important folder because I know them. That by itself is one of the best filters ever. You can use it for calendars in address book too. In fact, I've gotten rid of Google entirely and now sync on my Macs and on my PCs and on my Linux boxes with Fastmail's calendar and contacts. That's my centralized contacts. Because it's private, it's secure.

For over 20 years, fastmail has been a leader in email privacy. The Fastmail team believes in working for customers as people to be cared for and have products to be exploited. As little as $3 a month yeah, sure, you can get free email, but you're paying for it. With your privacy Fastmail, get started, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity. Fastmail If you ask any geek, they'll all agree the best email server anywhere, easy to use, very powerful, privacy, first. Very secure Fastmailcom you can try it free right now for 30 days. Fastmailcom Use that slash twist Make email yours with Fastmail. Well, he wasn't as fast as I am, but Joe Esposito has come up with an image of Jeff Jarvis in his socks at the beach.

1:09:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that looks good.

1:09:50 - Ant Pruitt
That's huge. That is Brian Lawrence, brian Lawrence.

1:09:56 - Leo Laporte
It actually looks. You look a little like Dick Van Dyke.

1:10:00 - Jeff Jarvis
That's pretty good, though, yeah. Pretty good, I saw his 14 shoes.

1:10:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's like some sort of weird soccer shoe or rugby shoe. Maybe you're playing what keeps the sand out. Oh, that's it. Okay, that's good. So thank you, that wasn't Joe. We got a credit where credit is due. That is Brian.

1:10:20 - Ant Pruitt
Lawrence. Thank you, Brian. Unfortunately, horizon lines off a little bit, but we won't go there.

1:10:26 - Leo Laporte
How can the AI get the horizon line? That's crazy. Should be straight.

1:10:32 - Ant Pruitt
Come on, ai First thing I saw. Come on.

1:10:36 - Leo Laporte
AI, ai. Oh boy, there's so many other things to talk about. You want to talk about the end of the red envelope no more Netflix DVDs by mail. It stopped on September 34, 30th. I should say, yeah, end of an era. But there is something to be reported on with this we talked a little bit about on Sunday on Twitter. It means that it's the end of the long tail for DVDs, so you could get by mail from Netflix any one of maybe 50,000 or even more DVDs. They had them all, but now Netflix doesn't say but there are probably fewer than 4,000 streaming titles on Netflix as a streamer. So that means there are many, many movies that you can no longer get, and that's a big deal, if you ask me.

1:11:35 - Ant Pruitt
I still like the idea of just the quality of having a physical disc when you play it back. Mr Joe Esposito sent ina movie to me to check out not too long ago and just seeing that Blu-ray quality and hearing that Blu-ray sound really made me miss being able to just go and grab those physical discs and then, and how much I enjoyed it.

1:11:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh you know, have you, did you? When you moved out here, did you schlep a thousand DVDs along with you?

1:12:04 - Ant Pruitt
No, but I have about 15 or so that I still watch that are like the DVDs.

1:12:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I mean, I mean you can make that case. What's his most watched movie?

1:12:16 - Ant Pruitt
I'll let you guess first, because it's going to catch you by surprise. The ones that I watched most probably outlander.

1:12:21 - Leo Laporte
There can be only one. Nope, that's.

1:12:26 - Ant Pruitt
Highlander with John Connor. The disc that I watched the most is down there Wait a minute, wait a minute it's Pearl Harbor. Some would have said the Star Wars stuff. But no plays in saddles Play. Oh, that's the disc that I watched the most down there Blades and saddles Parts.

1:12:53 - Leo Laporte
Is that the?

1:12:53 - Paris Martineau
one Totally caught you off guard.

1:12:56 - Leo Laporte
Do you watch DVDs?

1:12:58 - Paris Martineau
Paris Is that I was about to say I don't even know how I would play a DVD now, where would I stick?

1:13:04 - Leo Laporte
I don't know where to put it.

1:13:05 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I'm not saying that's not for a lack of trying. There have been movies that I've wanted to watch where I'm like I can't find this anywhere on streaming. I would purchase a DVD, but places don't sell DVDs anymore and places don't sell ways to. I guess I could buy a DVD player, but I don't even have a slot in my computer.

1:13:22 - Ant Pruitt
Right Gaming console. I use the gaming console.

1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
That's the one last and that's going away. As we know, Microsoft's going to get a slot.

1:13:29 - Paris Martineau
I was about to say they're selling gaming consoles without the disc. Yeah.

1:13:32 - Leo Laporte
Is this true it's just all streaming. So that's problem number one how do you play the physical media? You have to have a device that'll do it, but I worry about the fact that that's a lot of our heritage, that's like 95% of it that's going to suddenly be an unavailable. I guess you could go to Amazon and buy the physical media.

1:13:52 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think that this is like a larger issue is that if companies just want to completely disappear or content because they don't want to pay writers or actors or residuals, they can. I mean, hbo did this when they switched to Max, I believe they got rid of for some reason I'm thinking Westworld, but that made it.

1:14:10 - Leo Laporte
They moved a lot of their titles off. Yeah, they got rid of Westworld and a bunch of different titles are all gone and you can't buy.

1:14:15 - Paris Martineau
I mean, perhaps in those cases they're on Amazon, but if it's a film that came out 20, 30 years ago, where are you going to get that?

1:14:22 - Leo Laporte
The story from Solana I was reading. I talked about a movie called the Peter Brooks Mahabharata, which was a great DVD and was available from Netflix in the red envelope but is not available streaming. You can't get it anywhere and I just went to Amazon to see if I could find it as a DVD. It's somebody's selling it, but it's $400. Son of a windwang.

1:14:44 - Ant Pruitt
Son of a windwang.

1:14:45 - Paris Martineau
What is Netflix doing with all those DVDs, I wonder? Are they going to sell them as a lot? Could someone out there buy the whole Netflix DVD collection? Could be a fun little business.

1:14:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, john says you can get the VHS for $84. Do you have a VHS player? Probably get the VHS player for 25.

1:15:10 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's okay, we'll teach you how to adjust the tracking? Yeah.

1:15:13 - Leo Laporte
End of an era. End of an era. Supreme Court has agreed to review the Texas and Florida horrific social media cases.

1:15:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Even this court will recognize the First Amendment, surely?

1:15:31 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. That's asking a lot from this court.

1:15:34 - Leo Laporte
The social media laws would essentially allow states, states attorney general, to tell social media take that down. Or, conversely, you can't take that down, leave that up. And, of course, this all came about because Donald Trump was booted off of Twitter January 7th and there are some people who think that was a bad idea. They want the ability as governmental agencies to say no, you can't Twitter take down Donald Trump. But this is exactly what the First Amendment says. Is that, as a government agency cannot tell a private individual or a private company what they can and can't say, or can they? Well, we'll find out. The US Solicitor General, elizabeth Prelogar, told the justice is the art of culling and curating the content users see as inherently expressive, in other words, protected by the First Amendment.

1:16:32 - Jeff Jarvis
It is for speech, yeah.

1:16:34 - Leo Laporte
Even if that speech is collected, is almost wholly provided by users, and especially because the covered platforms only products or displays of expressive content, a government requirement that they display different content plainly implicates the First Amendment. I think that's pretty obvious.

1:16:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I think so too, and they just said the White House, you can't tell the platforms even that maybe it's better if you don't have lies about the ingesting bleach, because that violates the First Amendment. So you know, if you can't mess with the platform's decisions that way, why could you mess with it this way?

1:17:07 - Leo Laporte
Because there's no larger the Texas law allows state residents to, as well as the Attorney General, to sue Sue, that's the whole game now If they believe they were unfairly banned or censored from the platform. The Florida law penalizes social media companies for blocking a politician's posts.

1:17:25 - Paris Martineau
I will say unfortunately. I think this is going to be a lit mis-test to just how detached from reality the Supreme Court is in its current state.

1:17:32 - Leo Laporte
It might be yeah, oh, and what was your question?

1:17:36 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, yeah, If a social media company was just flat out private and you had to pay to use it, every person that was on that platform paid a some sort of a subscription fee to use it and they said you know what we don't want? Your violated in our terms of services with this particular post. Is that still a case for the Supreme Court?

1:18:03 - Jeff Jarvis
What's the difference?

1:18:05 - Ant Pruitt
Well, I don't know if there are lines drawn when someone says you know what, you're in my house and I expect you to act a certain way. That's the point is that You're paying to come into my club. I expect you to act a certain way. You can do that. You can't boot you out.

1:18:19 - Jeff Jarvis
You can always do that. You can kick somebody out just because you don't like them.

1:18:23 - Paris Martineau
I think the issue, ann, is that you're trying to apply logic to this argument that is inherently illogical. The reason why these cases keep getting up to the Supreme Court is more just an act of political animus, and the fact that being shadow-banded by big tech has become a political talking point that, I mean, does work on both sides of the aisle, but has become a rallying cry for the right. And I think it's more related to that than any grounding in actual First Amendment law.

1:18:53 - Leo Laporte
And to give you an example, ann, you are the bouncer at a place where people pay to get in our club-tweet discord. We have the right to boot people. We do sometimes have to boot people, and we do Because it's a private entity, we're allowed to do that, and the government can't say, oh, you can't boot Joe Esposito, you know, reinstate him. They can't say that. They shouldn't be able to say that. I think Right, I was preparing a suit right now.

There are cases. I mean, for instance, there are golf clubs in San Francisco that didn't allow Jewish people in for a long time Government forced them to do that or Black people, or women Women, yeah, this was a famous case. In Petaluma there was a women's health club. It was a very good health club. Lisa was a member and some guy came along and sued him saying, well, I can't have a women-only health club. I thought it was a very good idea and Lisa loved it and they were put out of business because the guy sued him.

1:19:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's the ridiculous thing where powerful men in San Francisco go off to the woods and pee against Bohemian, the Bohemian Grove, bohemian Grove.

1:20:07 - Leo Laporte
Is that still men only? Oh God, yes, you can't let women in there. They're peeing on trees. I spoke at the Bohemian Grove many years ago, when the internet was just getting started. They said what is this?

1:20:19 - Paris Martineau
How many trees did you piss on?

1:20:21 - Leo Laporte
I only peed on one, three, five I felt obligated to, though, because that was the whole thing. I also remember it was Bastille Day, so it was July 14th.

1:20:31 - Paris Martineau
I also remember it was Bastille Day. I remember it was Bastille.

1:20:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Day when I peed on the tree. He is Mr Lapau. No, the reason.

1:20:38 - Leo Laporte
I remember, that is, there was a fairly drunken musical group that I understood came from the lodge where George Schultz was a member, playing the Marseillais marching around while I was peeing on the tree. I don't know.

1:20:54 - Paris Martineau
Just a little memory from Leo's memory book. I love that's a really core memory for you.

1:20:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I'll never forget it. I lost all four to La Petrie. Would you pay? Did you sing while?

1:21:07 - Jeff Jarvis
peeing along with it.

1:21:08 - Leo Laporte
I might have, I might have I might have. Yeah, you know, it's just part of the experience.

1:21:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It's part of being a powerful man, part of being a powerful man.

1:21:20 - Leo Laporte
No women allowed. Actually, there were plenty of women. Oh, I shouldn't go on into that, let's move on.

1:21:26 - Paris Martineau
Do you have the Shiwis?

1:21:28 - Leo Laporte
Thanks, there were women.

1:21:29 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, we don't need to go there. They weren't allowed to spend the night.

1:21:32 - Leo Laporte
Let's put it that way Metta, okay, would you pay for access to Instagram or Facebook, and how much would you pay?

1:21:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, give it to the condition of oh.

1:21:41 - Leo Laporte
Ad-free Ad-free, I should say An ad-free version of it. I might pay. I don't know, though Metta wants to charge, according to the Wall Street Journal, $14 a month.

1:21:51 - Paris Martineau
Oh, come on, that's a lot of money.

1:21:54 - Jeff Jarvis
One of them $17 for both. Hold on.

1:21:56 - Ant Pruitt
What a deal. Hold on. What do you get out of it? What's your return on your investment?

1:22:02 - Leo Laporte
Ad-free. Ad-free versions of Facebook. This is in Europe, where they think they're going to be forced to do this. It's a response to European privacy, because the European Union has said well, you shouldn't be able to track people's digital activity for ad targeting, which, of course, is their business. So they say, okay, fine, if you don't want us to do that, we could have a paid version. And I think this is a little bit of an FU from Facebook to the EU, fu, eu.

1:22:33 - Jeff Jarvis
People have been begging for this for a long time, but not for $14. Give it to the ad team. $14 is okay. $14 is okay. Here's a version.

1:22:38 - Leo Laporte
I'd pay. Okay, I might pay $5 for an ad-free version of Insta, maybe.

1:22:44 - Paris Martineau
That's what TikTok is offering right? Tiktok's going to do that too, is that ad-free.

1:22:50 - Ant Pruitt
Okay, so Twitter blue. Remember back in a day was it $3? $10. Right, yeah, my first signed up for Twitter.

1:22:58 - Paris Martineau
Blue was like $3. And I was like I would have paid back in the heyday of Twitter, when it wasn't for a blue check, I would have paid $15 a month for Twitter, but that's because I was addicted to it.

1:23:09 - Ant Pruitt
Well, you were addicted quote, unquote, but you also got some good value out of it from your day to day. Yeah, the Nuzzle feature was great. Oh, I love that.

1:23:17 - Paris Martineau
Where you could essentially see the trending articles that people on your network had. I think that the issue with this is that I don't think that that many people are going to crave an ad-free experience enough to shell out $14 a month. That's to be something else.

1:23:34 - Leo Laporte
TikTok is, they say according to a report by the Android authority hello, android authority testing an ad-free monthly subscription plan for $99 a month. They have confirmed that this is not. They've confirmed it to TechCrunch. This is not. The service says it's limited to a single English speaking market outside the US. But that's how these tests often go. I TikTok is interesting. Would you pay five bucks for TikTok?

1:24:06 - Speaker 6
I wouldn't, but I think there's some people who would I would. I would I love.

1:24:10 - Leo Laporte
TikTok yeah.

1:24:14 - Paris Martineau
No I don't see that but there just would have to be something else. I mean, I don't find advertising that intrusive on social media, especially not TikTok.

1:24:23 - Leo Laporte
The Instagram is maybe a little bit over the top. I haven't used Facebook.

1:24:26 - Jeff Jarvis
It is.

1:24:26 - Leo Laporte
It's just because you buy everything that shows you, Leo, I do and I'm paying them. It's actually cheaper for me to give them $14.99. Not see ads, and it wouldn't be a city ads. I spend much more than that every month on a crap that I don't want.

1:24:41 - Ant Pruitt
It is fascinating, though as big as TikTok is, at least in my experience, I don't see nowhere near the amount of ads I see on the Instagram side of things.

1:24:49 - Leo Laporte
I think a lot of times on TikTok you're seeing an ad and don't know it.

1:24:53 - Ant Pruitt
Okay, yeah, do you think, maybe that's that I think.

1:24:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, it's easy enough to swipe by them, but I think there's an ad every five or six TikToks.

1:25:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, what's a TikTok ad versus what's a?

1:25:04 - Leo Laporte
influencer. Like here's an okay. So the third swipe up killers of the flower. A flower moon, which is an ad for a movie. I love your advertising.

1:25:13 - Paris Martineau
I love the look into your advertising profile we're getting here. I get a movie.

1:25:23 - Leo Laporte
Then a woman in a bikini, then another woman in a bikini, then a woman in a short skirt. Is this an ad? No, Then another, then they're remodeling a bus. Then a Jewish wedding with an unexpected surprise. Then somebody live doing what is going on with TikTok live. It is weird. Now this woman is trying on.

1:25:45 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think that TikTok live is just a boy to keep you in the app. Here's a woman in a bikini made out of tape.

1:25:53 - Leo Laporte
This is cause.

1:25:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo stays on the wrong thing. I should. You know. My daughter tells me this. She says your fault because you linger.

1:26:00 - Leo Laporte
I said but how do I not linger? She's not wearing any clothes. So this is, this is a sun power. So that's an ad? Right, I'm 24. My son is eight. Okay, who cares Home Depot? So you get some home improvement Anchor wireless charger. Is this an ad? Yeah, it is, see, it says shop. This is an ad from a company called.

1:26:24 - Paris Martineau
I don't think that's an ad, but I think that that is a created content that they can get a commission from.

1:26:29 - Leo Laporte
The next one is an ad.

1:26:32 - Paris Martineau
Cause it says I'm seeing more of where, I'm seeing more of the ad.

1:26:34 - Ant Pruitt
I'm seeing more of the creator stuff. I think I've seen three ads so far, maybe every third or fourth swipe if that. But everything else I'm seeing is like creators. But see, part of the problem is, as you pointed out.

1:26:47 - Leo Laporte
Taylor is Taylor Paris is that? I can't tell the difference between this, whatever this is, and an ad.

1:26:58 - Paris Martineau
I mean that's. It says the bottom left hand corner.

1:27:01 - Leo Laporte
Where? Where? Bottom left hand corner, Bottom left. Look how small that is.

1:27:05 - Paris Martineau
I don't know, my eyes go immediately to that, but it's also because I can't get it. Advertising and I'm always looking to swipe through it.

1:27:14 - Leo Laporte
But so you, the first thing you look at when you're, when you're doing TikTok, is a little sponsored thing down here which is intentionally very tight.

1:27:21 - Paris Martineau
I mean I'm not saying that I'm exclusively focusing on it, but it's the first thing my eye is drawn to when I see something that is clearly sponsored. I immediately notice it and keep swiping.

1:27:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, okay. So that's good. There's a little deer.

1:27:33 - Speaker 2
Yeah, see it's. Look how small that is. It's so tiny it's pretty hard to differentiate. I can't even read it.

1:27:39 - Leo Laporte
Sure, all right, so we'll, but I wouldn't pay 4.99 for this experience. Without that there's another one. It's not a big. See, there you go. Every third or fourth one. I think it's quite a quite a few of these that's interesting, so now I'll look for that. That was so. It's every third swipe.

1:28:00 - Paris Martineau
That's too much, and they kind of got it in there there it is. Hey, semi-glutides.

1:28:06 - Leo Laporte
Wow.

1:28:07 - Paris Martineau
You're going to buy that through TikTok.

1:28:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let me get my Rebelsis at TikTok. Oh, but these are tablets. Wait a minute, that's good. I don't mind that so much. I'm sorry TikTok is testing this project only in one market, outside the US, but I wonder if this might also come here. This is what it looks like. Pick your plan. Choose whether you will see ads. There's standard free. Enjoy TikTok with ads. We'll also use your data. We also use data from third parties. That's the thing, yeah.

It takes away the privacy Tracking, but does it Because I have to point out, but does it?

1:28:54 - Paris Martineau
That's the question.

1:28:55 - Leo Laporte
They don't say as we do. By the way, when we say ad free for a club, to it we say and no tracking, because there'd be no redirects.

1:29:02 - Jeff Jarvis
But they don't say that here. Tiktok is still going to personalize, so it's going to have, yeah, it has to track you. It has to. It has to. Or whatever they do.

1:29:12 - Leo Laporte
So, Paris, you would pay for Twitter, but you wouldn't pay for 1499 for old Twitter. Old.

1:29:19 - Paris Martineau
Twitter not.

1:29:20 - Leo Laporte
Not new Twitter. Nobody would pay for that.

1:29:22 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, john, new Coke, new Twitter, old Twitter, but frankly no other platforms. No other platform, I mean.

1:29:28 - Leo Laporte
And would you pay anything for this stuff?

1:29:31 - Ant Pruitt
I would not, but I know people that would pay for the Facebook premium because they make a lot of money off of their Facebook traffic.

1:29:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yes, but what strikes me I said earlier on the show, when Paris brought up we brought up the links is that it is the online companies. The last of the open web goes away. When you kill links, when you put paywalls around everything, all that's left out in the prairie is tumbleweed and weeds. You know it's, it's, it's bad, and it makes me say that I should have come to Bastadon years before. Well, that's similar to what.

1:30:11 - Ant Pruitt
That's similar to what Cooper Quinton of the EFF was saying this morning on Floss Weekly twittv slash floss open source developer show, open source community show we have here on the network. He was talking about pretty much the same thing. It's such a crap show on social media with all of the tracking and data hoarding that's going on and if we want to fight back we should be posted more to these platforms like the Fediverse or Blue Sky and whatnot.

1:30:45 - Leo Laporte
Did you get the? Did y'all get the national alert this this morning or this afternoon? Oh yeah, the one that was going to activate all of our microchips. Yeah, did it activate your microchip. Was that the conspiracy? I still have.

1:30:59 - Paris Martineau
the conspiracy is that all of us vaccinated folks, we're going to be zombified, and that the great, you know reckoning was going to come, and then Donald Trump would return to power.

1:31:11 - Leo Laporte
And this time his speaker at the house right.

1:31:14 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I mean the floor is open.

1:31:19 - Leo Laporte
I've just got my sixth vaccine, my sixth shot on Monday, so I guess I've been activated, because I heard it loud and clear. Here is a screenshot on your phone of the emergency alert that you might have received. John, don't judge me. It says wait a minute. Oh no, john, john switching away. I didn't want to show it.

1:31:49 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say Leo, we discussed before the show, were not allowed to curse.

1:31:52 - Ant Pruitt
Okay, fine, we saw a particular term there.

1:31:55 - Leo Laporte
Fine, I mean that was from Yanko Rentgers. Okay, all right. Yeah, it made the noise. I don't know if we gained anything by that, but at least we know that if we're going to all die in a nuclear holocaust, we'll get a little bit of a warning.

1:32:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's what the AI will turn it off before it kills us. So you know it's weird to everybody.

1:32:18 - Leo Laporte
Everybody I mean everybody in the country got it Right. It was on all cell phones. Yeah, yeah.

1:32:24 - Paris Martineau
It was a fun little moment for all of us, you know, bringing the nation together. Were you surprised? You can disable those alerts. No, not that one.

1:32:30 - Ant Pruitt
I wonder if people had to alert disabled if they still got it.

1:32:33 - Paris Martineau
No, yes, they did. Oh, no, you can't. I have the alerts disabled and I still got it.

1:32:37 - Leo Laporte
I don't want no stinking amber alert. I don't care if somebody's child got abducted To heck with that.

1:32:41 - Paris Martineau
I don't care what's going on with the kids, but I guess I have to get this one. Tornado is okay.

1:32:45 - Leo Laporte
Baby, I was surprised, yeah, no there's no way to turn that off. That one was forced on all of us. In fact, even if you had an inactive SIM, it would still have gone off. It did not go off on my Pixel, though that I removed the SIM from the Pixel so I could put it in the new phone, and it did not go off on this.

1:33:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was going to say this has to be a problem for you, leo man with dozens of phones. Was it just kind of a coffee?

1:33:09 - Leo Laporte
It was a little noisy in my office. It was like a cuckoo clock at midnight. It was the clock maker's house at midnight. It was very loud. Anyway, I guess it happened. I don't know if it means anything, but it happened, it worked. What else? What else is going on? Lots so much. There's a lot in here. Spotify, who you know? Remember? Spotify's problem was that the record labels decided whether they were going to make money or not. They were completely at the mercy of the record, the three big record companies. So they diversified, First with podcasts, which didn't go that well.

They spent a lot of money for Joe Rogan and call her daddy, and hundreds actually half a billion, I think Prince and Meghan and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the Obamas and a lot of that stuff fell through and it wasn't. I think a lot of people thought celebrity podcasting was going to be big and it wasn't. So Spotify seems to have lost money in that their new thing is audio books. They are offering paying subscribers 15 hours a month of audio books, which doesn't get you through a whole book.

No to me. I feel like this is treating audiobooks the same way Spotify treats music, which is as wallpaper, and I think it's the kind of devalues and some authors agree the devalues the audio book, just as they've, in a sense, devalued music. But I understand why they want to do it. Their business needs them to have other sources of revenue by the way.

1:34:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Speaking of audiobooks, if I may, I got the good news that at the end of the month, I will be recording, at long last, the Gutenberg print.

1:34:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and you're going to be the voice You're going to read it.

1:35:00 - Ant Pruitt
Oh yes, oh, that's so fun.

1:35:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I will be speaking slowly.

1:35:10 - Leo Laporte
Lisa won't read it until it's an audiobook. And I offered to read it to her and she said I want to hear you, I want to hear Jeff, so she'll be much happier. That's why they said yes, awesome, dude. Yeah, so if you start recording it next month, it'll be just in time for Christmas. What a wonderful Christmas gift for everyone.

1:35:27 - Jeff Jarvis
There you go.

1:35:28 - Paris Martineau
And me while I'm recording process, for that take Four days. Four days, what? That's all?

1:35:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, what I had that a long time ago. There you go, there you have it. Oh, that's so funny. Well, I guess I'll just go on.

1:35:36 - Leo Laporte
That is quick. This is a 328 page book, jeff. I don't read the footnotes. Okay.

1:35:45 - Jeff Jarvis
You're just gonna have to not talk for a couple weeks after this by the way, I insisted on not doing it on a Wednesday, so I'm gonna be here and torture you, thank you.

1:35:53 - Leo Laporte
Give us a free paragraph. Just read a little bit of it, just so we can get an idea of what it's gonna sound.

1:35:58 - Paris Martineau
All right, all right, I'll tell you are not gonna be doing enough of this.

1:36:01 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jifus. Okay, this is wait, wait, I gotta do the right thing audible hopes you've enjoyed this podcast. No, no, that's the end this.

1:36:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Go ahead please, I'll see how long I go before you stop me one. The parenthesis. Gutenberg's era, prince era, the era of the book for the last 550 years, was a grand exception in the course of history. That is what Tom Pettit, lars Ole Sauer Berg and Mary on Borsch, professors at the University of Southern Denmark, assert. In the theory they name the Gutenberg parenthesis now I know why they're like this.

1:36:39 - Leo Laporte
They're gonna make you read this because only you could pronounce those weird names. Knows what? There's a?

1:36:46 - Jeff Jarvis
So, leo, I need you to be honest with me now about something. Did you really take Latin? Yeah, so there's some Latin words in here I'm gonna need pronunciations on. You can?

1:36:58 - Leo Laporte
Problem. I'll just give you a little hint, jeff everybody who spoke Latin is dead.

It has been dead for a hundred thousand years. No, there's two days. So here's part of the problem. What's gonna refuse? So I studied Latin in the 70s and right in the middle we were saying Cicero, and that my, my Latin teacher said oh hey, they've decided it's kickerow. I Am not kidding. They changed the pronunciation in the middle and then there's a church way to say it which is chicharro. So the so Roman Catholic, let Lord, has a different pronunciation. Then old Latin. You know the traditional way of saying it, like Athenaeum. And then there's a new way of saying it. You know a moa maa samat, a mama samama samat. But if you want, I will do my best, you're gonna have a, for example, aren't you?

gonna have a producer who will do this for you.

1:37:55 - Jeff Jarvis
No, they don't. They don't do it, in fact I guess so mad at somebody books who you know people a book about Germany? They can't pronounce German.

1:38:00 - Leo Laporte
Mike and my consortium also, by the way, studied Latin, so we could be like a team of Wow yeah a lot of latin. He's a.

1:38:09 - Jeff Jarvis
French too. Yeah, I'll do the German when Paris can be the French index. The problem Prohibitorum, how would you say that?

1:38:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, not like that. I Think the rolling of the yards is a little much. I thought it was nice. I can't do it.

1:38:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought it sounded like I never could do it. I just did it so Mike is a bit of a term.

1:38:31 - Leo Laporte
Mike is saying, and this is right, we used to say Vainy, vidi, vitchie, I came, I saw, I conquered, and then all of a sudden it's Winnie witty wiki. Oh, I know. So I think you want the traditional. So index is correct. That's good, that's a good start. What was the next word, broram? Say it again, I'll, I be ROR you and oh, library or Libra, or more of books, the index of books, libra room, okay, yeah, that's good. Libra room, prohibitorum, prits prohibitorum. That's very good. You did just don't roll the Rs, that's all right.

1:39:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I never do, I just index.

1:39:08 - Leo Laporte
Well, he, but tall, that's a little, that's a little tallyon. Eight Lion is a very good language to learn and I know Michael would agree because it bothers you. Yeah, it's the old days, but Mike is young it prepares you for kind of the uselessness of most endeavors. Well for jeopardy frankly.

1:39:28 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's actually smart, yeah, see you should be on jeopardy.

1:39:31 - Leo Laporte
I feel like I don't know why, but I think like, have you ever been on jeopardy?

1:39:36 - Paris Martineau
No you feel like my knowledge is Very specific. I'm not sure that it would go well for jeopardy.

1:39:43 - Leo Laporte
Alex, I don't want that category. Can you give me another one? Let's do a show.

1:39:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's do geek jeopardy, you know. Oh, we would know we've done that.

1:39:51 - Leo Laporte
We actually have done that. We used to do that in our new screensaver show. We would have the we call it the game of geeks and we had.

1:39:58 - Paris Martineau
If there was a tech and business news jeopardy, I would clean. So the trivia questions.

1:40:06 - Leo Laporte
But then the other thing is this is fun we put on a blindfold and Anthony would hand us a geek object and you'd have to identify it by touch alone. Um, what that was hard explain more like a palm pilot and you'd have to go.

1:40:24 - Paris Martineau
Amazon Firephone for that perfect example.

1:40:26 - Leo Laporte
That would be a hard one.

1:40:28 - Ant Pruitt
You guess this is an iPhone 12 when it ends up being an iPhone 14. If you're a real geek stuff like that.

1:40:34 - Leo Laporte
Yes, if you're a real geek, you should be able to, just judging by the camera alone.

1:40:39 - Paris Martineau
Just distinguish the different versions that I thought you could gum that iPhone, kind of come in there.

1:40:44 - Ant Pruitt
Wow, wow.

1:40:49 - Leo Laporte
It's like titanium. The US issues its very first finds for this would be a good jeopardy question. For what do you think the very first finds from the federal communications ever?

1:41:11 - Paris Martineau
Telep scams nope telemarketing 125,000.

1:41:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, 150,000 dollars, I'll give you it. It was to dish network. Now, do you know? Do you think you know this network for space junk likes? Oh, the company dish admitted liability over the Echo star seven satellite which was first launched in 2002?. Dish was supposed to move at the end of its life in 2022, was supposed to move its satellite 186,000 miles out. It was in geostationary orbit, I guess, but it ran out of gas and they can only move at 76 miles. It's been floating around a junker, so they find them 150 thousand dollars. What do they do?

about it though.

1:42:02 - Jeff Jarvis
They do anything.

1:42:03 - Paris Martineau
Okay, if you've got some junk in space, I feel like 150 grand probably doesn't mean much.

1:42:08 - Leo Laporte
No, no, in fact dish makes six made sixteen point seven billion dollars last year in.

1:42:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Rebs Christ, it's not happens when all of Elon's hundreds of satellites are deprecated? What are the? What happens? Well, I guess.

1:42:24 - Paris Martineau
Tesla that's in space.

1:42:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the thesis here is that the FCC could, if you don't clean it up after yourself, could find you. But you make an excellent point. So what? They can't the satellites out of gas? So there is. I wasn't the Chinese that had a satellite, a Debris space, debris garbage collector satellite that would go around and grab satellites? Or was that in the movie moon raker?

1:42:55 - Ant Pruitt
They want to retrieve these so retrieve visions. Yeah, but no. What I'm asking is that does the FCC expect Companies to go back out there and get this deprecated stuff, and then what? Put it into recycling? I guess so.

1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
FCC enforcement bureau chief, loyal on a gal that's pronounced waney weedy, witchy Said as satellite operators become more prevalent in the space economy accelerates. We must be certain that operators comply with their commitments. This is a breakthrough settlement. Making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce is vitally important. Space debris rules, but they they aren't being. Are they gonna clean it up? They can't. According to NASA, they're more than 25,000 pieces of space degree measuring over 10 centimeters the travel at this incredible speed and, yeah, rip through.

Orbital speed is 17,500 miles an hour.

1:43:56 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that stresses me out, yeah so much space junk up there's a lot of junk.

1:44:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, space is big, that's the yeah, I know.

1:44:03 - Jeff Jarvis
But yeah, no, I my luck. I.

1:44:10 - Paris Martineau
Live the sort of life that I'm gonna go outside one day to get coffee and it's like space, junk, space, junk, space, junk.

1:44:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I have behind me Paris, an actual piece of space junk from skylight. Did it hit you? No, it hit Stan Thornton in Esperance, western Australia.

1:44:27 - Leo Laporte
The International Space Station has had to dodge Space junk 32 times in the last 23 years and it would it. They sees it coming and it fires its thrusters and dodges it. So it actually is a problem, and the last time was when the Russian Russian Didn't the Russians destroy a satellite? They blew it up and then, when the space junk was flying around, they had to dodge it. Let's see what else, and let's talk about Amazon. That's one of the things you cover, paris Martin heard of it.

Some of it, a little bit of it. Amazon, according to An FTC lawsuit, had a secret project Nessie. Nessie is the nickname for the Loch Ness monster. I don't know if this is related. It was an algorithm used to set prices. I think we all know that Amazon does that well every every retailer does this. Yeah, why not?

1:45:30 - Ant Pruitt
Why not?

1:45:31 - Jeff Jarvis
according to Wall.

1:45:32 - Leo Laporte
Street Journal of the algorithm helped Amazon improve its profit on items across shopping categories.

1:45:40 - Ant Pruitt
Why is this news?

1:45:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, but but ant, an algorithm did it and we know that algorithms are evil.

1:45:50 - Paris Martineau
It's true.

1:45:52 - Ant Pruitt
Some, some algorithms are people with calculators, like physical calculators.

1:45:56 - Leo Laporte
Here's okay, here's why it's a problem, partly because it isn't a human, it's. It's very fast, right, nessie? You was used in what employees this is again the Wall Street Journal saw as a promotional spiral. Amazon would match a discounted price from a competitor, let's say target comm. Other competitors would follow, lowering their prices when target ended its sale. Amazon and the other competitors would be locked at the low price Because they were matching each other. They no longer paying attention to target. The algorithm helped Amazon recoup money and improve margins. The FTC's lawsuit Redacted an estimate of how much. It alleged the process Ex quote extracted from American households.

1:46:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sure that that Walmart never does that.

1:46:42 - Leo Laporte
Amazon says retail. The FTC grossly mischaracterizes the tool Project. Nessie was a project with a simple purpose to strike, try to stop our price matching when resulting in unusual outcomes or prices became so low that they were unsustainable. The project ran for a few years on a subset of products. It didn't work as intended. We scrapped it several years ago.

1:47:06 - Ant Pruitt
Sounds like a likely story, do you?

1:47:08 - Paris Martineau
have a sense of whether or not this is. They're talking about raising prices, but is that on Amazon's like first party kind of private label goods, or is that on Third party goods?

1:47:20 - Leo Laporte
I'd assume it has to be the well, part of these FTC Suit is about third party right. Amazon, and particularly Amazon's power over third parties, which the FTC contends raises artificially, raises prices for consumers. You can I I'll give you an example. I have a friend who used to sell a Air purifier on Amazon. This is many years ago. Amazon copied the product. In fact he thinks they actually just bought a bunch of them and Peeled the label off of it and sold them.

Okay and then Amazon lowered the price below his price Right, so that everybody would buy that he brought his price. Oh, there's your, there's get, is it gizmo?

1:48:10 - Paris Martineau
Is my. There's everybody.

1:48:11 - Leo Laporte
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna interrupt this story so you can meet the little fur baby named gizmo. We have black and white cats too. They're the best kind and she matches your sweater Perfect.

1:48:21 - Ant Pruitt
They sort of blend in in there.

1:48:22 - Leo Laporte
Yes, she's got camouflage. Gizmo tried to know part of the lens. She says, no, I don't want to go there, I'm going that way. And she's causing so she just she's just gonna like, wants to be a muff.

1:48:37 - Paris Martineau
I Do you know. I think she just wants to put her butt in new and inventive places.

1:48:44 - Leo Laporte
Fact, paris did that this morning to me.

1:48:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, wait, wait, wait, your cat is named Paris. Yes, yes, I miss that.

1:48:57 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's so fun.

1:48:58 - Leo Laporte
I didn't even think of that. We named our cat, there's Samantha and there's Paris. No, we named her after the city.

1:49:06 - Paris Martineau
I've heard of it. Yeah, no, but I mean to the point of Amazon. I think part of the issue has been that, like what you were saying, with this air purifier example, amazon seemingly screwed over a lot of or left a lot of third-party sellers feel like they were left in the lurch because they would build up these large brands, have people coming to Amazon to get their product.

Then Amazon would create kind of a duplicate of it and undercut them exactly in Other examples, amazon may not have created kind of a duplicate product, but in order to stay ranked at a high place in the search page, sellers would have to make sure that their product isn't being sold for a lower price anywhere else. So that's, they would have to keep their things artificially low, which is where things like this project Nessie come in and get complicated, because as Amazon tries to Find a way to kind of balance that out, it has a lot of unintended consequences.

1:50:04 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly it. The FTC says that Amazon forbids companies we're selling an Amazon from offering their product at a lower price elsewhere, and that's what costs American consumers money. The FTC says because Amazon's cost to sell is higher than other platforms, due to its fees, it creates a higher price point for goods, not just on Amazon now, but because of those restrictions everywhere. Because sellers have to use the Amazon price as their floor, that's the lowest price they can offer it.

1:50:35 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and because the Amazon price or the way Amazon operates currently to sell on Amazon isn't as simple as you just list your product on Amazon. You have to ship all your goods the Amazon warehouse. Pay Amazon like storage fees. Pay Amazon's logistic stuff Increasingly. You have to pay Amazon ads in order to make sure that your product, like your products, rank high enough in search. There's a lot of extra fees on there. Let's play with that.

1:51:05 - Jeff Jarvis
One. Amazon could not offer any of those services and only sell their stuff. But they actually enable all kinds of new merchants to do stuff. One, two and a cost.

1:51:12 - Leo Laporte
You try to get yourself a grocery store or more. You're gonna pay all that.

1:51:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Or any store where you're trying to get shelf space, you're gonna pay all kinds of fees and advertising. It's how retail operates, yeah.

1:51:26 - Paris Martineau
I agree with you and that's why I think this you can't sell your product for less anywhere else aspect of Amazon's kind of requirement for sellers is important because, yeah, this is how most retail, this is how you know you. When you go to grocery store, people have paid to put their products there. There's a whole, you know, complicated supply chain there. But you know, if I go there and try to get Tate's cookies, I could also go to Tate's cookies, their you know location and here in New York and get the cookies at a potentially lower price there if that grocery store had marked them up.

I think the fact is he's particularly cool Brooklyn cookies that I don't know any find out about there like a Hamptons base cookie brand, then got purchased by a private equity firm and are now like a multinational conglomerate, I think owned by Mondalees. So probably bad example.

1:52:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Excuse me, I got there to get the Tate's please.

1:52:26 - Leo Laporte
It's so funny. If you said that Tate's were a long island based cookie, you wouldn't get.

1:52:33 - Jeff Jarvis
You wouldn't be rocked.

1:52:34 - Paris Martineau
No, but you say Hamptons and it's like mmm, mmm, oh yes, in Southampton, quaint cottage whipping up cakes, cookies and other baked goods Tate's baked bone to pick with Tate's, because I went there this summer thinking, all great, I'm gonna get fresh Tate's cookies, but no, they don't make them fresh anymore because they are a like you know. Yeah, they're made God knows where.

1:53:01 - Jeff Jarvis
They have limited edition pumpkin spice cookies.

1:53:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, honestly, tate's cookies are great. I feel like a crunchy cookie. Try them out.

1:53:08 - Jeff Jarvis
The only, the only cookie.

1:53:10 - Paris Martineau
So you went all the way south Hampton to this little cute Hampton my, I had like family staying there. Okay, we happened to be within the 15 minute walk of the Tate's cookie place and I was like great.

1:53:22 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of you know it's sad, because this is so cute and quaint and and now it's just a packaged cookie.

1:53:29 - Paris Martineau
It's like no different thing fun fact about Tate's bake shop is there was a great book I'm forgetting the name of a recent. It was like we are the plunders or something about the scourge of private equity, and they were looking. As part of it they asked kind of private equity Interest groups do you have any examples of how private equity has really helped the world? And Tate's Cookies is their number one example of. We bought Tate's Cookies, the small South Hampton cookie shop, and now we've turned it into this national brand that's in retailers all across America and we sold to Mondolas for like a huge profit. I'm not sure if it was actually Mondolas but some large company like that.

1:54:11 - Leo Laporte
It is called Plunder. I'm gonna get this book. That sounds fascinating. The Scourge of Private Equity and we've seen this Is that these are the newspapers. Yeah, Plunder by Brendan Ballew. It's a Harper, no.

1:54:27 - Paris Martineau
I'm thinking of. These Are the Plunderers how Private Equity Runs and Wrecks America.

1:54:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, I bought that book.

1:54:33 - Paris Martineau
By Gretchen Morgensen and Joshua Rosner, different but similar Plunder-themed Private Equity book.

1:54:40 - Leo Laporte
It's very similar Plunder Private Equity's Planned to Pillage America by Brendan Ballew. It's very similar. I gotta read that one as well.

1:54:48 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:54:49 - Ant Pruitt
Is that Amazon's version?

1:54:51 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting. Okay, so Brendan Ballew is a federal prosecutor and special counsel for Private Equity in the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, so he sounds like he knows where love, he speaks, but I will. So what's the other one? These Are the Plunderers.

1:55:09 - Paris Martineau
These Are the Plunderers. Which was recently named like the best. It won the Best in Business Book Awards. It was, or as a finalist there. It's by a like a financial journalist.

1:55:23 - Leo Laporte
And Rex runs and Rex America. Wow, gretchen Morgensen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Well, it must be true if you've got two books about the same thing.

1:55:38 - Paris Martineau
I mean, if you have an industry obviously there are, I'm sure, examples of good actions by Private Equity forms so you have an industry that largely is about extracting value from companies at scale. Of course there are going to be unintended consequences or, in some cases, intended consequences.

1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
From the information, anthropoc, which is one of the big three AI companies, is in talks to raise $2 billion from Google and others. They've already raised money from Amazon one and a quarter billion dollars. So Anthropoc is like the. So OpenAI has got Microsoft money and now Anthropoc comes along and is getting money from Google and Amazon. I think there's going to be a battle here. We use Anthropoc's Claude AI for some of our stuff and I was very impressed with what Claude what do you use, claude, for?

1:56:29 - Ant Pruitt
Claude, go ahead, ant, you know better than I probably Do a lot with our show notes and transcription summaries, and it cleans it up. It makes it a lot faster for us to put stuff out there, because it goes through and listens to the show, because right now Mr Jason Howell is the producer of this week in Google and he can't always just be able to note down every little point that we say. But Claude can step in and pull out some of those interesting things and let him know what was said so he can stick it into the show notes.

1:57:05 - Leo Laporte
We have the transcribed show notes and then the AI will go through the transcription and generate bullet points. But what's interesting so here's an example is a lot of this comes down to the prompt. So Anthony wrote this prompt and showed it to me and I said I don't like it. It's kind of it's in passive voice, it's not. It sounds very mediocre. So he rewrote the prompt and got it really good. In fact, even I have to find the rewritten prompt, but he got it. So it added emoji, bullet points and stuff. It was really impressive. Oh yeah, I remember that. It was like I said I take it all back. This is we should be doing this. This is better than any human would do. Frankly.

1:57:48 - Jeff Jarvis
And for the humans to do it it's kind of torture. It is not fun, it takes away.

1:57:52 - Leo Laporte
But we still want human oversight, so editors and the producers still go through the show notes, make sure Claude's not hallucinating. But as it turns out, that's something and we've talked about this before with notebook LM and in other contexts that's something that AI seems to be very good at. If it's given a corpus of information and says you say, just summarize this body of information, it's very good at that. There's no hallucinating involved because it's coming from an actual source and it seems to be very good and you could check it.

And you could quickly readily check it, so it seems quite good. Anyway, anthropic will be the next big one, I think Google has said.

1:58:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Who runs Anthropic? Are they long-termism nuts like the others or not?

1:58:40 - Leo Laporte
Yes, they're test-screal, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, let me.

1:58:45 - Paris Martineau
I'm sure whoever runs it is probably peed on that same tree as Leo. I know nothing to back us up, but feels correct.

1:58:55 - Leo Laporte
I think Anthropic I want to say Anthropic is are they related to alpha? I'm not sure.

1:59:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Founders Daniela and Mota and Jury Mota oh wow.

1:59:10 - Paris Martineau
So maybe not.

1:59:11 - Leo Laporte
Maybe not, maybe they're not test-screal, maybe they believe. So I just did something.

1:59:17 - Jeff Jarvis
While you were in commercial, I went to GooglebooksGooglecom and I searched as one can. The Musk and the Bankman freed biographies Two hot books Long-termism the word long-termism does not appear in either Either one, even though that is clearly that's core to the story. They're cultists.

1:59:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, interesting by the way, the Elon Musk Walter Isaacson book number one bestseller. A lot of people reading it. Great takedown on the Verge by, was it?

1:59:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Parrot, gary Steingart's interview and the Guardian was spectacular takedown. The New Yorker, I'm told, had a great takedown, takedown's everywhere.

2:00:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:00:10 - Ant Pruitt
What do you mean by takedown?

2:00:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Just that he got too in love with Musk and didn't oh. Ok, yeah, here's the. I know Walter from back in the day, do you yeah? He wants to do his pretty best. He's pretty prestigious.

2:00:23 - Leo Laporte
This is Elizabeth Lopato has been Institute how the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson. One way to keep Musk's myth intact is simply not to check things out. Essentially, he took on faith. Isaacson took on faith Everything Musk said. No, we know that Musk says a lot of things that aren't true.

2:00:45 - Jeff Jarvis
And he just wants to. He was the hero narrative.

2:00:50 - Leo Laporte
Isaacson is.

2:00:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Michael Lewis. His star is falling faster than a oh no.

2:00:57 - Leo Laporte
He did. Michael Lewis was embedded with Samuel Bankman Freed on the way up and on the way down with FTX. His new book just came out this week, so what are the people saying about it?

2:01:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I haven't seen reviews are similar, as they both. They both wanted to put these guys in the boxes. Genius, they're used to writing about yeah and they don't fit, and they couldn't adapt. I mean, I haven't read out of the book, nor do I intend to. Are you going to read?

2:01:19 - Leo Laporte
Musk's? No, I have no Knowing what I know about Isaacson and about Elon. There's a great book by Ashley Vance about Elon Musk that I would recommend instead. This is before all of the Twitter stuff, right, but I think it was quite accurate. Lewis's book Going Infinite is all about Samuel Bankman Freed. It was. Washington Post had a good review of it. Yeah, I'm looking at it right here. Michael Lewis goes close on Sam Bankman Freed maybe too close. Yeah, fails to capture the nuances of crypto and I like Michael Lewis, I think he's written sport ball.

2:01:57 - Jeff Jarvis
He just got in trouble for the. What's the story of the football?

2:02:03 - Leo Laporte
player who was the blind side. Yeah yeah, that was a problem, because it turns out. Michael Orr says anyway that if you saw the movie with Senator Bullock it looked like these one. I have to say the movie may be queasy. These wonderful white saviors who came along and found this poor black kid and made him a great football star. Even from the movie I was very queasy. I never read the book and apparently Lewis was not skeptical enough.

2:02:33 - Jeff Jarvis
And now Well, and the subject now has said he earned a lot of money, the family earned a lot of money that he did. He didn't get any of it. As a very subject. Right, and Lewis was part of this, and then Lewis defended the family immediately. So his, his star is falling in my view, like Isaacson's. Oh, that's too bad. But I have read the books, so maybe it's unfair as hell with me.

2:02:55 - Leo Laporte
I know that, white savior, I can't spend my time doing so. Yeah, I might not. Is that the kind of thing, paris Is that.

2:03:02 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a weird question, but covering the business that you cover, businesses you cover is that the kind of thing you think, oh, I should read it, so I know it's one. Or can you say, no, that's not my game.

2:03:12 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. I mean I think if it was a book that I thought had a significant amount of new report. I think that there are some business books that you know the quality of the journalist and in many cases, that they're a active journalist and that this is their beat. You know that this book is going to contain a wealth of new and interesting reporting on a subject that matters. I think that, again, I have much like you're saying.

I haven't read the Bankman Fried book or the Elon Musk book. I could be getting it entirely wrong, but my understanding of it from reading other people's reviews is that both of these books kind of fall into the category of like access journalism. I think that when you are profiling a great man quote unquote and your book hinges on being able to follow him around and sitting on all of his meetings and spend dozens of hours with him, of course it is going to end up favoring his viewpoint. And you're I mean, you would have to be a complete soulless monster to not empathize with the person after spending that much time with them, listening to them and having conversations with them, and I don't think that that's often the most productive use of a journalist's time and effort.

2:04:33 - Ant Pruitt
You know people feel the same way about Mr Walt Mosberg the way we're looking at. Isaac's has Walt written any books Well, not books, but he has a lot of written work out there.

2:04:48 - Jeff Jarvis
He's gone back and forth on Cara Swisher that on the one hand she plays tough or the other hand she has access to yeah access journalism, and Mosberg certainly was a victim of it.

2:04:58 - Leo Laporte
I think Cara is as well. It's what we sometimes would call a Beltway journalism, where you're so indebted to the sources that you can't really fairly cover the story, and I think probably Cara and Walt both have a little bit of that going on. I always felt like Walt was a little too close to Steve Jobs, for instance, and really couldn't do that.

2:05:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Harris, let me ask you something, because you've covered this industry. You know I wrote an admiring book about Google called Google Do.

2:05:29 - Leo Laporte
I think that's another one People do.

2:05:31 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's too close. I'm in the pocket of big Google, I'm fine with it.

2:05:35 - Leo Laporte
You've just done that. Sorry, continue. You ought to see him in shorts. Let me just say that. Ok.

2:05:45 - Jeff Jarvis
But these Tescreal long-termism AI boys. I could dismiss the NFT boys and the blockchain boys. They were a little crazy, but that didn't happen. These guys, the long-termism AI boys, really frightened me, and so I look back on my own writing and I think well did I. I don't think I hero worshiped them, but I admired the smarts of them and I think I was part of this too. Where it was that? Putting these boys up on too high a pedestal, a cliff, and they believed their own PR. So you've covered these people. How do you cue them?

2:06:27 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think what you're describing is a much larger phenomenon than yourself. We are coming off of this age of tech journalism that for a while was very hero worshiping because everything was new and exciting. Like you said, they were these cool boys in a college dorm room just trying to take on the world and what could go wrong. We're just talking about things on the old computer that sits in your back room at home and little do we know. Everything about the world has changed how many times over because of the various advances in technology and, I think, obviously as the power that these companies and executives wield has become more evident. Obviously a caring and conscientious press should hold their feet to the fire and I think that we're kind of now in a bit of the backswing of that.

I think especially the fact that we have had, over the last, we're on the tail end of this tech boom in terms of fundraising these astronomical sums, people getting given basically unlimited capital to follow whatever their wildest dream that they decided to put in a pitch deck was. And I think we're entering this new era where you have to be a lot more critical about these things. And I guess, to answer your original question, how I approach this, I don't always think that executives or the big names at the head of every company are necessarily the most important people to focus your reporting on, because, ultimately, many of the decisions are happening almost all the decisions are happening downstream of them. So I think that that's kind of how I try to approach these critical lines. That's good journalism.

2:08:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's another, but I would like to think that Larry and Sergei and Satya and Marissa and the people of that era are pretty smart and I hope they're not cultists. Is this something that's been there the whole time and we haven't seen it? We only see it now? Or is this this particular breed of Musk, teal, altman at all? Who are the long, that kind of cultish long-termism thing?

2:08:49 - Paris Martineau
I think it's a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. I think that those people you specifically named are definitely steeped in specific kind of political social movements and continue to radicalize themselves and those around them. But I also think that the culture that Silicon Valley Largesse has created over the past decade or two, it's a culture where radical ideas and big thinkers have historically been rewarded.

So, of course it's gonna skew towards the extremes of the guy who was five years ago talking about taking ice baths three times a day. Everyone probably thought he was crazy now, but now they're like doing that and having 20 supplements a day and replacing their blood with the blood of their kids. So I think that, yeah, I think that it is more of the loudest voice wins.

2:09:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll put air quotes around the word philosophy and politics. And in covering technologies, the information does better than anybody else. How, why does that umbrella cover now, in terms of the culture?

2:09:59 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it depends on the reporter and the beat. Like we have a really great we can section. We recently heard this great reporter, Julia Black, who has done a lot of phenomenal reporting on this, and she just had a great story about kind of the the world that Peter Thiel and his associates hoped to bring about by their various investments, and it specifically kind of dealt with these sort of issues of kind of the complicated social bleed associated with a certain group of, you know, tech luminaries. But I think that it's something that you can't really ignore. I think that obviously, kind of the informations bread and butter has always been like scoops and journalism about like business news and market moving things, but also, if you want to do a service to readers, when you're talking about the technology industry at large, that's going to have kind of coverage of a variety of social influences and impacts.

2:10:54 - Leo Laporte
I think we've learned. I mean, I was, I'm absolutely was guilty of, you know, thinking Elon was Tony Stark and you know Larry and Sergey had some sort of magical powers, but this was all part of the as we've talked about before, jeff, the early days of technology, where we were all very optimistic about the future.

2:11:15 - Ant Pruitt
But you had reason to be optimistic.

2:11:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, we want you know, and the behavior that was presented, it was new, it was growing, it was new, but in hindsight I think anybody who's paying attention anyway has realized yeah, these guys had feats of clay and they were not what we thought they were and it has not become the utopia we thought it would, and it's probably good to be a little bit more skeptical. I think Nier at Weissblatt has talked about that on our show.

2:11:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he actually has the other thing that I in the next book I'm working on, the internet book. I look back to Gutenberg and the technologists were in charge at the beginning, as they had to be, but then they faded in the background. And the question is, when will the technologists fade in the background? And what's more interesting than the technology is what we do with it.

2:11:56 - Leo Laporte
You know it's different this time is they have so much power, and I think there is a point at which you're so powerful, you're unassailable, and I wonder if global has gotten to that point, or other Chi Amazon has gotten to that point where there's nothing you can do about it. I look at the FTC and the DOJ and the actions they're taking at these big tech companies and the question I keep saying is yeah, but what's the remedy? What are you gonna? Yes, agreed, Google shouldn't be buying and selling ads? Both be a buyer and seller of ads, but that's the easiest one. But what well? Yes, that's the one that's obvious, that's clearly wrong.

How do you fix it? You force them to divest that. Then what's their revenue model? It's very hard to do that surgery now and I'm wondering if they're now at the point where they're so. They're too big to fail, they're unassailable, they can't do anything about it, which is, frankly, pretty scary.

2:12:49 - Jeff Jarvis
But this is where I think that the regulators go off the wrong end. Europe went after shopping in Google wrong thing to go after and the FTC now is gonna hurt consumers. People love Prime. They love it and they should. They save money. They get more choice-free right now.

2:13:03 - Leo Laporte
Sometimes it's hard to convince. Consumers are not the litmus test, because consumers think zero ratings great too, why you're not gonna charge me for Netflix, somebody's cell phone bill, that's fantastic, and they don't understand the consequences of that. It's our job to explain why net neutrality is important and why you can't pick winners at cell phone companies. So I don't know. This is a tough one. It's really tough. I like Brad Stones. What do you think of Brad Stones books about Amazon Paris, I think-.

2:13:29 - Paris Martineau
I love Brad's. I think Brad Stone is like the example I was thinking of, if I've read both of his books and I think they're fantastic.

2:13:36 - Leo Laporte
You learn about that companies in ways that you can know what are those.

2:13:40 - Paris Martineau
It's a deep dive into the decisions that we're going on inside Amazon and all these critical points, the various executives at play. It's got an interesting narrative and it's got so much new and valuable reporting.

2:13:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the business journalism I like to read, where it's not hagiography, it's not access journalism.

2:14:02 - Paris Martineau
Same with Mike Isaac's Super Pumped, I think. A classic example, Excellent.

2:14:05 - Leo Laporte
Isaac's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's too bad that, because Michael Lewis kind of used to be that trustee oh, I loved his books. It's too bad if he's-.

2:14:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not saying that those books aren't valid or anything, it's just that he tried to both. These guys again had a mold and they picked the wrong. They showed very bad judgment in their subjects.

2:14:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that's the complaint I think the Verge had, which is at this point, Walter Isaacson is trying to create a series of books about geniuses. Right, he has this whole kind of overarching plot line that these are the great man theory, these are the people who are changing our world through their sheer force of will and genius. And yes, and he admits it, they're flawed, but they still. What will we do without them? And it has to fit in that mold or he's kind of. His whole premises is screwed. So, yeah, I think he got-.

2:14:59 - Paris Martineau
I mean. Something I think about a lot is the first page of the essential book the Journalist and the Murderer which, like the first time, goes like. Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. Oh my God, I'm a confidence man Like.

2:15:19 - Leo Laporte
By that you mean like- oh, this is Janet Malcolm's book. Oh wow.

2:15:24 - Paris Martineau
You specifically like. Your job is to gain a sources, trust, empathize with them. In these cases, follow men around for like hundreds of hours, god knows how many days or weeks or months and then remove yourself from your relationship with that person that you've built up and write a piece outside of that, but based on the knowledge that you have gained from that relationship, which is hard because it can feel like a betrayal of the very human and empathetic relationship you just built. But your job is not to have a good relationship with that person and have it reflect that it is to both you know, witness what is going on and then contextualize it in a way that is unrelated to yourself as a person. Your personal relationship with that source Very challenging.

2:16:13 - Leo Laporte
It reminds me of the she's writing about Joe McGinnis, who wrote a book about a murderer and basically got kind of co-opted by the murderer.

2:16:23 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like Billy Bush and Donald Trump in the bus. Yeah Right, we're all appalled that Billy Bush laughed at Donald Trump. Yeah, but I understood. In that circumstance, what do you gotta do?

2:16:32 - Leo Laporte
In that situation, standing in the standings of Donald Trump, if I might have done the same thing. It's like, yeah, what he just said is horrific, but what am I supposed to say? He's keep going. I'm not supposed to say, oh hard, you're a horrible person, donald Trump.

2:16:42 - Speaker 2
No we got an interview. I got to interview him now.

2:16:45 - Leo Laporte
So I was a little more sympathetic of Billy Bush. It cost him his career, but I was. I could see myself in the same and I understand that too.

2:16:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but it's. I think it's what Paris's point is. So right is that we make a bargain with the devil's recover.

2:17:03 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, are you binding a rewind pendant? Are you gonna buy one of these?

2:17:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, actually stupid, jeff. I played, leo, I did, you did. I ordered it, oh my. And then I said you idiot, Jeff. Of course it doesn't work with Android, Cause I actually thought I would use it in class and I saw a use for it, so tell us what this is.

2:17:26 - Leo Laporte
So what you just bought.

2:17:27 - Jeff Jarvis
So the idea is you don't want it by the way I'll buy it from you.

2:17:30 - Leo Laporte
It's only 16. Well, no, no, I got a refund.

2:17:32 - Jeff Jarvis
They were very nice, but they refunded it. No, I might buy it later. So you put it around your neck and it records everything you're saying and others supposedly some way they can do with the deal of privacy. I have no idea, but it records everything, puts it on your phone so that you can then do all the AI stuff with it.

2:17:49 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, I want this just for future reference when I argue with Lisa, when she says no, I told you that and I could say well, let's rewind.

2:17:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Amen, brother, amen.

2:18:00 - Ant Pruitt
How does this work with?

2:18:01 - Paris Martineau
recording laws. There's a significant portion of the country where you can't have like you can't record something without everyone's consent.

2:18:11 - Leo Laporte
It says supposedly we'll cut out certain people or something like that it says it rewind pendant is a wearable that captures what you say and here in the real world, then transcribes, encrypts and instores it locally in the phone.

2:18:27 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's in violation of wire tapping law in California.

2:18:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah slight problem. Well, now I want one, of course. No it's illegal, I'll take it.

2:18:37 - Jeff Jarvis
You can sue you Instored locally for your privacy, respects the privacy of others. We offer features for you to ensure no one is recorded without their consent. I don't know what that means. I don't know what those features are.

2:18:53 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, how would that work If like I mean, if I had that on right now, I'd technically be in violation of you know, because I am recording you, leo and Antwerp. In California, jeff and I, we are in one party states. Here's how they do this.

2:19:10 - Leo Laporte
How can we prevent people from being recorded without their consent? One we only store recordings of the user and anyone else who has verbally opted in. Oh yeah. Using voice, fingerprints and speaker diarization is possible to say who said what. If a person hasn't previously said sure you can record me, then it will not store anything they say and it's as if they never said anything.

2:19:32 - Paris Martineau
So you have to go around in your life, you go back to that screen. Look at the last line on that thing.

2:19:37 - Leo Laporte
These are exactly the kind of features the device depicted in that one black mirror episode. Literally, I mean little on the nose. It doesn't store verbatim transcripts, just summaries. But you do have to say so. That means I'm gonna be at the grocery store and I'm gonna have to ask the clerk can I record you? I might need to record this. No, because I don't care what the clerk says, or do I? I'm buying it anyway. Why did you get a refund?

2:20:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Well. But here's the thing, Leo. So I tried to cancel because I said you can cancel when I buy it. Okay, I feel like Leo, all right, and I'm buying it. And then I looked up how do I cancel? How do I even know if they know that I'm gonna refund, cancel?

2:20:19 - Leo Laporte
well, they're not even close to making it. I think it's a subscription or not?

2:20:23 - Paris Martineau
It's a subscription service? Oh, of course, every one pro is $19 per user per month.

2:20:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh no sorry, you're late Wow. So it's $59 for the hardware, but but then you pay $20 a month.

2:20:38 - Jeff Jarvis
If you go to the top and see pricing on their page, it'll show you what's included and not Free.

2:20:46 - Leo Laporte
Ooh, there you go. So I have a friend who does this and anybody could, just with a little effort on his phone. He has his phone recorded, sends the, uses a script on an Android device to send it, to whisper AI to transcribe it, then sends the transcription onto chat GPT to summarize it, and then all of this is done by a script automatically. I think I mentioned it, didn't I mention this? And I was at. I went because we went to see Oppenheimer and we had a conversation and we did a remarkable job. So you could do this on your own, you don't need these guys to do it.

2:21:25 - Paris Martineau
I want to see that thing's transcription of when the bomb goes off in Oppenheimer, I assume it was recording.

2:21:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh Right, it just says boom, that's all Boom boom, boom, boom, boom.

2:21:40 - Leo Laporte
So you get boy. By the way, if you pay for the pro version, you get the CEO's phone number. So that's, you know, that's worth something. Sure, recording is compressed and stored locally on device Only. You have access to what's recorded Mac and iPhone apps. That's why you didn't want it. Jeff, browse back and forth. Exactly, I like this, you know.

You remember Gordon Bell, who was the founder of DEC, great computer scientist, later founder of the computer history museum. He had a camera he would hang around his neck. His wife, gwen, suffered from severe Alzheimer's, so I think originally it was to help her keep track of stuff. But eventually he came up with the idea of life recording, that he would record everything, and this was not audio, this was pictures. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, I remember that now, and I don't know what happened. It was called my Life Bits, a system to digitally here he is talking about it at the Library of Congress system to digitally record. Then this is in the early days. Now we could do a lot better job. Everything that happened, I think it would take a picture every few seconds. And his concept was wouldn't you like to blog your whole life? No, you, by the way, a picture of what it looks like if you do. That's Gordon and a pile of magazines.

Interesting idea, though Just audio is all you need.

2:23:16 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say my version of the rewind pendant. Is this guy right here? Oh, look at that.

2:23:21 - Leo Laporte
A little Zoom recorder. Looks like a Zoom recorder.

2:23:24 - Paris Martineau
And then you put this in your ear and you can have your headphones over it. And it just records the side of the conversation. Do you record interviews? I do, yeah.

2:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and you said you use a transcript. What do you use again?

2:23:37 - Paris Martineau
I use.

2:23:37 - Leo Laporte
Trent Trent T-R-I-N, which is another AI powered one.

2:23:42 - Paris Martineau
I like it because it's paid, it keeps my stuff secure, but I mostly like it because it has a really good search function. You can kind of cause I take kind of timestamped notes whenever I'm interviewing people and so then I can go and be like, oh, I'm going to kind of scroll through and click on 22 minutes 39 seconds and they'll pull up the transcript right there Wow, and start playing it then and I can kind of edit it live and then continue to transcribe.

2:24:09 - Leo Laporte
I've used order AI to do this and then, of course, whisper will do it for kind of for free. That's a, that's a trend. I'll have to T-R-I-N-Tcom. Yeah, I think for reporters this is huge.

2:24:23 - Paris Martineau
It's fantastic. I mean, it's just like there are some stories where you know you talk to like 20, 30 people. Sometimes you're like 30 minutes to an hour each, and it's like, without having recordings of this in my notes, how would I ever remember anything?

2:24:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh, God In the old days, that's yeah, you'd have to. That's what you do you take, you take. You have a little note, reporters, no pad, and you'd be running as fast as your little fingers can.

2:24:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I cannot hide fast enough for that, no yeah, no, it's very hard, but my notes will go cold in 20 minutes. Yeah.

2:24:56 - Leo Laporte
All right, you have a lot of stories in here, jeff. This Westlaw case, jeff Jarvis, that's interesting, that's worth Tell us about this.

2:25:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So um Westlaw, part of um Reuters, right yeah, thompson, right yeah yeah, thompson Reuters. Uh, thompson Reuters is suing Ross. The company came along and they wanted to kind of break open the legal search business and they tried to license Westlaw and Westlaw said F off and they went to another company where they basically recreated the structure. And I don't use Westlaw, I don't know, but what I understand. Westlaw has a summaries and be a taxonomy and search structure makes the law far more accessible.

2:25:39 - Leo Laporte
So we should explain Westlaw is is kind of like Lexis Nexus. It's an online service that has all the law journals, all the law books, and lawyers pay a lot of money, I think. I think it's pretty expensive. Yes, so that they can easily quickly find citations and precedents and so forth and keep up with what's going on. So that Ross was a company that wanted to write create a comp competitor.

2:26:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, basically, and well, yeah, a service that would do some of the same things. So so what? What's interesting to me is that they weren't duplicating the content, they were duplicating a structure. On the one hand, you say, well, that's not copyright problem. On the other hand, you could say, that's exactly what copyright is. It's treatment of information. So that's interesting.

2:26:25 - Leo Laporte
And then um, and Ross was the other AI for this. We should point out this is an AI service, ai company.

2:26:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So all they had to do was train the model. So is this is what raised it for the whole kind of other things. Once you've trained the model, you throw away all the input material. All you have is the relationships left, and the model has a skill.

2:26:43 - Leo Laporte
So this is analogous using that skill to George RR Martin and Sarah Silverman complaining that open AI has scanned their works. They don't keep the right.

2:26:53 - Jeff Jarvis
So if AI learns how to do jokes because it was taught by Sarah Silverman, um, is that copyright violation? I actually think not. I think that's some use in transformative, but that's where the fight. So this is a whole, this is a parallel case which is really interesting. It also, you know, involves our laws. Damn it. There are laws and there are case law. That's public property in a way. Um, so what does that have to do here and um. And then it goes to, you know, the questions of the, of the link stuff happening in Canada with their, their complete mess, um yeah, cause so West law is.

2:27:29 - Leo Laporte
The contents of West law are public domain. They're owned by the lawmakers and the you know uh. But so West law's, only West law's point is the only thing we add. Our secret sauce is our organizational structure.

2:27:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I understand. I could be wrong so. Ross is, so if Ross copies that, they're copying the one that has somebody who kind of trained it, but it trained it on how West law operates. Yeah, is that? That's an?

2:27:58 - Leo Laporte
interesting. It's more derivative than saying oh that read all my books, and now it's going to be. This is like they're trying to copy the secret sauce, the one thing that West law so the other issue reverse engineer it without actually having it.

2:28:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, so the other issue part here is that West law is a means for searching our law right. Publishers want search engines in Canada to pay for linking to what they think is their news. For the sake of the analogy I write, imagine if West law had to pay to link to our law. Imagine that if Google charged us to search for our information in the world. You get, you, you, you, you. It has a quick leap here probably not in the courts, but in a philosophical basis to this whole notion of what's happening with links right now, and made even worse now with Musk deprecating them too. But in Canada, with C18, the, the publishers said you must pay to link to us because our content is what's valuable.

Facebook said screw off. And, by the way, it didn't hurt Facebook at the least, but the publishers lost 30% of their traffic. So what was valuable in there? Was it the content? No, it was the links. That kind of comes into this as well. What's valuable? The law or the treatment? Who can charge whom for what? Who can put a fence around it? This opens up all kinds of new things when the, the model, is just learning how to do something, how it learns and how it's taught.

2:29:29 - Ant Pruitt
So is this about? Like in mid journey, someone saying create an image of a cat in style of Andy Warhol?

2:29:39 - Jeff Jarvis
A little bit, I think, ant, but I think it's a little more operational, procedural than that.

2:29:50 - Ant Pruitt
It's not so much the style because it. Because what you're saying is West Lodge has all of this, this public data, but they figured out a way to package that public data a certain way.

2:30:01 - Leo Laporte
And the packaging is their secret sauce.

2:30:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, well, every newspaper has public data right. Every newspaper has. The New York Times has tons of public data. It's their packaging of it that we buy. Yeah.

2:30:12 - Leo Laporte
We got it. We need to move along. I wanted to talk a little bit about mean girls on TikTok. This is a complete way to end around the writer's guild and the screen actors guild. Oh, don't put it in the theater, you don't have to pay residuals. We'll just put it on TikTok the people who Paramount Pictures, which owns Mean Girls. He has posted the entire movie Mean Girls on TikTok In 23 individual videos.

2:30:41 - Paris Martineau
I want to know the discussions that happened with a legal team to allow this to occur.

2:30:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh my, they did it on October 3, which is mean girls. Mean girls. Thank you yeah.

2:30:54 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, I heard about that yesterday and didn't know what the heck mean girls their attitude probably is.

2:30:59 - Leo Laporte
well, this is promotional, it's TikTok. We're not putting the, well, we are putting the whole movie, but nobody would watch the whole movie. Oh, but we would watch the whole movie. So well, people are doing it like crazy without you know as pirate movies Might as well be a new, new kind of distribution yeah.

2:31:16 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I've, I've update from the chat. After that place published the article, Paramount removed the clips allowing you to watch the entire Mean Girls movie from the Mean Girls TikTok account. Oh, interesting, this is a time so probably the legal team got it and was like listen guys, what are we doing?

2:31:32 - Ant Pruitt
Yes, wow.

2:31:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that is interesting. We do need to take a little break.

2:31:37 - Leo Laporte
We will and come back with your final thoughts and picks of the week in just a bit. It's been a long time. I don't want Paris to feel like these shows are going to go on for a while Because we haven't even done an AI corner or a change law.

2:31:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Change law.

2:31:52 - Paris Martineau
We've got a lot of fun stuff to get there, we're done, we're done. We're done, we're done.

2:31:57 - Leo Laporte
We're done. I just want to go home. I showed it. I showed it. You know we were just talking about Jamboard. One of the things Google said is well, all right, we're going to put Jamboard in our business, but you can use Miro. I love this because Miro is. You can use it right now your first three boards for free at Mirocom slash podcast.

What is Miro? That's? That's the tough one to answer. It's a. It's an online workspace online, by the way, no hardware involved for innovation. You can use it on any computer or a Chromebook or an iPad. But what does it mean? How can I help you?

Miro is an incredible visual place that brings all your innovative work together, no matter where you're located, and it's flexible. It can be anything you need it to be. It can be swim lanes, can band post it notes. It could be a mood board. It's packed with all the things that you need to make it your dream products home base. Six whole capability bundles, from product development workflows to content visualization. It's powered by Miro AI, so you're generating new ideas or summarizing complex information pretty much instantly with the help of the AI.

Miro can work for any team in any situation, but product development teams are one of the sweet spots. They really get the full experience. It gives a product development team the richest feature set of any visual workspace tools that'll help you with strategy, process mapping, facilitation tools that'll help you run effective design or agile sprints. I mean this. It's amazing. Miro connects super seamlessly to the platforms you're already using using Confluence yeah, jiro, yeah. Google docs, yeah, sana. Yeah, no problem, we use it. With Zapier and Google docs, you can centralize working a way that makes sense for your team. They don't leave Miro, and that's the other thing. That's a real advantage. There's no context switch, so you stay in Miro to update product statuses. It's all. Even using those tools, you still do it in Miro. That means there's a single source of truth, a single place. Everyone can go to see where the project is. It's also a massive time saver. Miro users report saving up to 80 hours a year because they streamline conversation. Yes, per user per year. They streamline conversations, they cut down on meetings and it is really helpful in a hybrid workplace because people, no matter what time zone they're in, no matter where they are geographically, can get the most up to date information in one place.

Miro just released a new feature. They're always doing new stuff. This one just came out of board video recording feature called TalkTrack Kind of like what we were just talking about to save time pre recording your thoughts, leaving them on the board instead of scheduling yet another meeting that slows down the productivity. It's another great way to add your comments, your thoughts, your ideas, your brainstorming to your Miro boards. The best news is because Miro could be whatever you need it to be. You can try it free right now. Your first three boards are free. Start working better at Mirocom slash podcast. M I R. Ocom slash podcast. Mirocom slash podcast. We thank them so much for their support of the show Paris. You put in a fun one that could be your pick. I'll let you. I'll let you choose, but I see this masterclass looks kind of cool. Yeah, I'm really interested in that story.

2:35:28 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, this is a story I recently reported just about how masterclass hit it big during the pandemic, like most content companies did, had a surge in users interested in watching masterclass and signing up. When they were locked in their homes, raised a buttload of money because of it and then spent a lot I mean spent a considerable amount of it very quickly on somewhat frivolous things and have had to do kind of a crazy amount of layoffs and budget cuts to try and make its business work.

2:36:04 - Leo Laporte
This, this uh uh graphic at the front is Bob Iger in his office. Actually looks like an AI of Bob Iger in his in his office.

2:36:13 - Paris Martineau
It's definitely Bob Iger's uh head pasted on.

2:36:16 - Jeff Jarvis
It looks like that Google head and ship thing.

2:36:18 - Leo Laporte
But, you point out and this was the thing I loved about masterclass they were a sponsor for a long time Is their production values were incredible. I didn't realize how incredible you say they spent $850,000 shooting the Bob Iger masterclass.

2:36:31 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and $100,000 of that came from. They originally were like we want to shoot in Bob's office and it didn't really work. You know, it was a small thing, logistically they couldn't get them. So like, oh, we're going to spend a hundred grand recreating Bob Iger's office one to one in a Disney conference room on a different mom. I mean, the thing is, that surprised me so much about this is like I've, in a lot of the reporting I've been doing over the last year, seen a lot of examples of tech companies blowing money on silly things. But I hadn't really ever considered the like Hollywood aspect of it, which is kind of like that but notched up a degree. I mean, I think the average masterclass for a long period of time had a budget of a million dollars production.

2:37:18 - Leo Laporte
It looked like it's talent. It looked like it, though, I mean, when you looked at those talent was totally different.

2:37:24 - Paris Martineau
They were probably paying talent anywhere from a couple hundred grand to a couple million, depending on the name of celebrity Freaking.

2:37:30 - Ant Pruitt
Sam Jackson was one of your top top.

2:37:32 - Paris Martineau
It was a great day for a single, on a single day of like shooting. They filmed this barbecue pit master, Aaron Franklin outside the backyard.

2:37:41 - Leo Laporte
What's that?

2:37:42 - Paris Martineau
one over and over again they had like 70 people on set to film him.

2:37:47 - Leo Laporte
It's like a Hollywood movie, jesus Wow. So, it's a crew of 70. So it didn't work. I mean, they raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

2:37:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh it was. It was hot as hell. The other thing Paris is that it motivated. It was the hot thing around schools so we had to do our own masterclasses, we had to find people we did. We got a grant and did like five masterclass, like things around journalism.

2:38:12 - Paris Martineau
That's so interesting. I mean, I enjoy my subscription I paid for it for a couple years.

2:38:18 - Leo Laporte
Me too, I watched a lot of them now, but it is.

2:38:21 - Ant Pruitt
It was a lot of good information in there and it was freaking beautiful.

2:38:24 - Leo Laporte
But if you think about it, Ant. I mean, how much do we pay? It was a couple hundred bucks or something, yeah it was like how are they going to make that? Million dollar production fee cost back.

2:38:34 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, that hurts.

2:38:36 - Leo Laporte
So what happened to them?

2:38:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean. So that's the thing is. They have had they had since basically, their pandemic boom. People started going outside and their subscription numbers no longer were just going up into the right Think growth kind of plateaued. People weren't looking to spend that much money on the contents. They've had to do kind of massive budget cuts in terms of their production value. They've had like four or five different rounds of layoffs of their staff, cut like 300 people. They had 300 people, no, they had like 600 people.

2:39:10 - Leo Laporte
This is an amazing story. By the way, One of the things they did during COVID was they all moved to Iceland.

2:39:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they were like we've got to, you know, keep production going. So they're like we're going to do production in Iceland, where you know stuff is somewhat under wraps. But they flew a whole masterclass crew of production people out via private jet to Iceland, move them and their families there for like six months. I love that Then through all the instructors via private jet there put them up in like a fancy place to stay with their families during quarantine.

Just big spenders Wow Big spenders and I mean it could work, except for the fact that it's like an annual subscription thing. I mean, people are paying $120 a year for this. Yeah, it's not really scalable. So now what they're trying to do is kind of lower budget content, much less like glitz and glam, glamour, like celebrity masterclasses. Instead, they're doing kind of almost like a quibi type thing where they're talking about quick bites of content where they'll have, like that was my thought exactly.

2:40:14 - Jeff Jarvis
They'll be on.

2:40:15 - Paris Martineau
TikTok before you know, it I mean they're like you know they'll do a 15 minute episode on how to do the best coffee, or a 19 minute episode in which the 16 year old pickleball champion from a couple of years teaches you how to play pickleball.

2:40:30 - Ant Pruitt
You know cost and make things more expensive, but they shouldn't cheapen this product. Please don't masterclass.

2:40:36 - Paris Martineau
I think it's also they're trying to figure out what people want, because there's not that many people that want to sit down and watch a three to eight hour in depth thing from a bbiker or something and actually consume all of that content.

2:40:53 - Jeff Jarvis
So they're trying to find a way to balance it. Sorry, it's also kind of what you were talking about before with the the Isaacson and Lewis problem. How many world-class geniuses who run the world do you really want to hear from?

2:41:08 - Paris Martineau
And it's also like how many of those people who are good at something and have name recognition are good at teaching it.

2:41:13 - Leo Laporte
Yes, those are two very different skills. This is true. I have to say, though, and I know you and I both watched a lot of these. It was fantastic. I mean, I always wondered how they did it and notice, by the way, one of the reasons Twitter is so cheap and cheesy is because I learned from watching tech TV go down the tubes because it was so expensive and I said, can we do this for less?

And even in 2005, we were doing this for a tenth of what tech TV was doing and tech TV wasn't financially viable. But I knew if we could do it that less, that inexpensively, we could be. I'm not to besmirch masterclass. I loved their ethos and their style. You're still subscribed.

2:41:57 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think that's the thing is, they attracted top tier talent as far as production went, because they were like, wow, I'll finally get the time, energy and money to create something beautiful. That is also kind of educational. But that's a difficult business to make profitable, especially on investor's timeline.

2:42:12 - Leo Laporte
So they've, they're going to just subscribe. Is it fair to say they've pivoted Paris, or what?

2:42:19 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they pivoted it. What does the future.

2:42:21 - Leo Laporte
Hold for them.

2:42:22 - Paris Martineau
I mean the future holds more classes, like you know. I was saying like these little series where instead of it being a like three to eight hour class from Natalie Portman.

2:42:34 - Leo Laporte
They're going to be like a 15 minute episode from Leo LePortman how to make a good pizza yeah yeah, yeah, not as good as Natalie, but he sounds the same Great time to do a masterclass. Great article. If you have not, if you're not a subscriber yet you. This by itself would make it worthwhile. The information unbelievable masterclass takes a crash course in frugality. See, when I read the headline I thought oh, there's a masterclass on frugality. I need to learn that.

2:43:04 - Paris Martineau
But no, they need to listen to one of those.

2:43:09 - Jeff Jarvis
What I love about it to Paris is that it's not the with the information, it's not the obvious boundaries of a tech story.

2:43:17 - Leo Laporte
No, it's really well done, right, obviously, the time to do it right and to write it. I, you know, I'm very grateful for Jessica and them and the information and publications like the New Yorker, where great writers are allowed to take their time and write long. Steven Levy always calls it slow journalism to do good journalism. Yeah, and that's how it should be and thank God it's still there because there's so much terrible. It's kind of like the masterclass of journalism.

I just very good stuff. Thank you, Jeff. You just got interviewed in the Columbia journalism review. Thank you for pointing that out. The history of the magazine this is your new book, right? This is what your new books on.

2:44:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, yes, but they also talk. I also, of course, talked about Gutenberg the book big book.

2:44:11 - Leo Laporte
You know there's no one better to do this, because you were on the front lines as the magazine industry changed and eventually died.

2:44:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So I finally get to tell the story of Entertainment Weekly, which I've never did Fantastic. And I use it as a way to explain the economics of magazines and why they've changed and so on. But I go back to the history of magazines, back to the 1700s up to today. It was a lot of fun writing. It Is that book out yet this one. Yeah, it's out. I think next you can order it now. It's very short, it's a little tiny book.

2:44:42 - Leo Laporte
It's 150 pages, it's a quick read Jeff was one of the founders of Entertainment Weekly. It was my idea. Yeah, Magazine object lessons in magazine publishing by Jeff.

2:44:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Object lessons is a great series they have. They have got how many like almost, I think, more than 100 objects.

2:45:05 - Leo Laporte
That's a good idea Television set. It's a good idea. I like that. It's a great idea. All right, you said you had a pick for us, paris Martin, no, I gotta hear this what the picks are supposed to be, but my pick the only. Thing.

2:45:19 - Paris Martineau
I can think about outside of working hours is the game Baldur's Gate 3. It is a video game that is Dungeons and Dragons, but a video game, and it's absolutely phenomenal. It is a compelling story, fantastic animation. It is a like RPG, like a role playing game as turn based combat really incredible, like in depth kind of story and gameplay. I've spent 200 hours playing this game.

2:45:50 - Leo Laporte
Wow, and I just got out of the alien ship and now I'm wandering around. I can't figure out how to get anywhere.

2:45:56 - Paris Martineau
So maybe I get some tips from you. Yeah, what character are you?

2:46:01 - Leo Laporte
playing. I'm playing.

2:46:02 - Paris Martineau
Well, I started with a custom origin character which kind of you can be whoever and I finished my one round of that and then I'm re. I am replaying right now with it's called the dark urge, which is an origin character. We are a normal person but for some reason you can't remember anything about your backstory and some voice in your brain keeps kind of pushing you to kill things.

And you it's actually I think is should be the main character of Baldur's Gate, because it ties in perfectly with the story and is incredibly satisfying. More wise, but it's just probably some of the best writing I've ever seen in a video game.

2:46:39 - Leo Laporte
Interesting. I have a hard time getting used to turn based combat. That's the biggest challenge for me.

2:46:45 - Paris Martineau
I will say I'm a big turn based combat person. I love, I don't know, fire emblem tactics, ogre triangle strategy, all that, but I think that, from what I've heard of people who are haters of turn based combat, this is a game that does it really well yeah.

2:47:02 - Leo Laporte
I almost turned based combat. Don't even worry about it, there are people.

2:47:06 - Paris Martineau
It's essentially you know, there. If you think of a normal video game, we were like shooting and doing stuff live in the moment. Turn based combat is more kind of like chess, where it's like it's your turn, you've got to figure out. What I like about it is. You've got to figure out the optimal moves for your characters. You've got to survey the battlefield. I can sit there and like think about what I want to do and it's great.

2:47:25 - Leo Laporte
And then they're, and then they get a turn, and then you get a turn.

2:47:27 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and then the enemy gets a turn, and then yeah.

2:47:30 - Leo Laporte
I hate it and I play chess. I hate it, I just want to. I'm more of a warcraft type. I want to slash, slash and burn slash.

2:47:37 - Paris Martineau
That's the thing is I get overwhelmed. I'm like, listen, I need to. I need to pause and take a moment.

2:47:42 - Leo Laporte
This game has had such great reviews is probably the game of the year.

2:47:46 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think it's frankly like the best video game I've ever played in my life. Wow, without a doubt, and you played on this game it used to be. Skyrim. Yeah, I got a. See, I love Skyrim. Love the steam deck. Yeah, it is like Skyrim, but better in every way and has like a more compelling story and better writing.

2:48:04 - Leo Laporte
I did love Skyrim on the steam deck or a PC or I think you could play it on your. I know you could play it on. Now They've got Mac.

2:48:11 - Paris Martineau
PlayStation five.

2:48:12 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be coming to Xbox soon.

2:48:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, highly recommended, honestly, if you want to destroy your personal life, I'm married.

2:48:24 - Leo Laporte
I don't have a personal life. Jeff Jarvis, your pick of the week.

2:48:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, so I'm probably never going to go there because I can't stay in Las Vegas, but like everybody else, I watched the sphere. Isn't that? Amazing.

2:48:36 - Ant Pruitt
It's pretty cool.

2:48:38 - Jeff Jarvis
And what occurred to me was I also I flew out to Phoenix for Google News, geist and the new terminal A at Newark, because it's new. There are huge screens, right, every gate has a long, big, specially shaped screen telling you it's boarding and so on and so forth. And it occurred to me that one phenomenon I don't think everybody's written about a lot is the impact on the world of cheap screens. We think about it in terms of the phone. Also, cheap cameras right, the fact that we could afford a camera in the rear bumper of every car, it's pretty amazing. But screens everywhere and the creative uses to which they're being put not just informational with this just really got me thinking about that as a core part of our time. That wasn't that long ago, when a screen was only so big and was just as deep as it was wide.

2:49:31 - Ant Pruitt
Screens were the devil too.

2:49:34 - Leo Laporte
It has changed concerts for sure. I started noticing this about 10 years ago. Where it used to be, concerts would have a lot of practical set stuff and fireworks and stuff, and increasingly they just had a very high resolution screen. That could be anything. And now this takes us to the next level, because it's a 360 degree sphere that they broadcast the content.

2:49:55 - Jeff Jarvis
And you're at all the screens watching the screen Plus.

2:49:57 - Leo Laporte
that's the funny thing about this is not one ever see all the people with the cameras. Now one person's enjoying the show. They're all recording it.

2:50:05 - Ant Pruitt
It would never be me Watch the show.

2:50:08 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, can't do it. Yeah, Because why don't you go to watch that video?

2:50:12 - Leo Laporte
No one. No one wants you to know no one's looking at your video. I'm certain being right.

2:50:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I watched it.

2:50:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

2:50:18 - Leo Laporte
Vacation slide show, yours Let me show you the spell please, although of course we are watching somebody's shot, so I guess yeah actually we're the problem, we're the ones watching their video that they recorded in their and their phone.

This is from the Verge article about the sphere. I tried to. I managed this before I tried to buy tickets for this. I really want to see it and my credit card said no, you are not going. You are not going. You've done so well, you've hurt me enough. Enough pain. Anyway, it looks pretty cool. It's going to you'll. There'll be more opportunities to see them, I'm sure. Oh, yeah, they're going to. They're going to residency and there'll be other.

2:50:59 - Jeff Jarvis
The other issue was for it. I mean, there's, there's bad seats If you, if you bought the seats the wrong way, leo, as you did for a time or a time, or thank you, are there bad seats here? Yeah, you only get there's there's if you're at the top. You don't get the full thing. Only at the bottom Do you get the full sphere. Okay.

2:51:18 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, but Mr Howell is saying it is made nosebleeds, not so bad anymore.

2:51:23 - Leo Laporte
I guess it depends on the people say the same thing that maybe you wanted to sit higher up because then you'd see the whole thing. There's obstructed vision.

2:51:31 - Ant Pruitt
I don't know where the high prices are.

2:51:33 - Jeff Jarvis
venues you know, maybe it's bottom.

2:51:35 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if Jason knows more tell us, jason, cheapest tickets for the shows that haven't sold out yet Start at four hundo dollars. Going to what?

2:51:49 - Paris Martineau
Google.

2:51:50 - Leo Laporte
Chromebook, the one I tried, the ones I tried the ones I tried to down closer one hour in the sphere or Chromebook last year for a brother have an hour in the sphere. Thank you and Pruitt. Pick of the week.

2:52:07 - Ant Pruitt
My pick of the week is part of my YouTube watching. Recent YouTube watching this guy I can't remember his name, but he's done a series. He's did a previous video about how filmmakers are making cameras disappear and scenes and some of the movies and television shows we watch, and now he's done a part two and is quite captivating again because you get to see some stuff far as green, skinny green screening, blue screening and just some of the practical movements of the camera and it's it's really well done. He doesn't like talk to you like you're an idiot about it. It's, it's a very nice series how filmmakers make cameras disappear in all part you tea on YouTube.

2:52:48 - Leo Laporte
Paul tea. That's it. Tea Interesting, I didn't know they use mirrors.

2:52:53 - Ant Pruitt
That's very interesting or make sense the one-sided mirrors. You know they have to.

2:52:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, because the camera. You don't want the camera, camera in the shot.

2:53:03 - Ant Pruitt
Yep. And then, lastly, it's October, which means it is breast cancer awareness month, and some of you that may know me a little more intimately, I know I have been wearing these little rib pink wrist bracelets for nice I don't know how many years now, because there are survivors in my family and yeah, so raising awareness October. If you want to donate to the national breast cancer, breast cancer foundation, please do national breast cancerorg.

2:53:37 - Leo Laporte
And it's also sober October. Because I have drunks in my family, I'm celebrating sober October, cool yeah. I don't drink anyway. So it's easy for me no breast can't national breast cancerorg. Good, good cause. Thank you you. Thank you, paris, mark no, for putting up with us for three hours. Thanks for having me guys. Survived the marathon.

2:54:05 - Paris Martineau
What else am I going to be doing on a Wednesday?

2:54:07 - Leo Laporte
evening. Will she be back? I hope play Baldur's Gate. We'll see if we get her to come back. I mean listen, so what I'm going to be doing after this you'll find her at the informationcom and she I love it that it says this. Don't use your work phone and call her or leave a message at her signal if you have a tip, yeah.

2:54:26 - Paris Martineau
Do you work at a tech? Reach out to me on signal.

2:54:30 - Leo Laporte
But don't use your work phone.

2:54:31 - Paris Martineau
I've got some great sources from being on Twitter. Don't use your work phone, though Truly. Right. That's the one way they can catch you is if you text me from an encrypted like an encrypted messaging app using your work phone.

2:54:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that would be a mistake. Yeah, do not back signal up to iCloud either. That's a bad idea. So you actually gotten tips from being on Twitter.

2:54:53 - Paris Martineau
Somebody oh yes, I have multiple sources. Oh, I talked to this day that have come in from a. Oh well, I won't name names, but know who they are If they're listening out there, that's pretty cool.

2:55:06 - Leo Laporte
I like that. It's pretty good. I like knowing we're helping you.

2:55:10 - Jeff Jarvis
They're trying to keep the world honest. Yeah, doing your good work.

2:55:13 - Paris Martineau
I think there's nothing like listening to a bunch of people talk about journalism and tech to help tech workers realize that we're not all evil and out to get them.

2:55:21 - Leo Laporte
No, we're just trying to tell a story, man, it's true. Thank you, paris. Really appreciate your being here. Thank you, of course.

2:55:28 - Paris Martineau
Thanks for having me guys.

2:55:29 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis, you know him. As it says, emeritus on the card, now the director of the town. I'd center for entrepreneurial journalism at the graduate school of journalism at the city university that's pronounced emeritus.

2:56:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeff is also, of course, the author of the Gutenberg parenthesis, gutenberg parenthesis dot com and his new book about magazines from the, who published it again and if you're in New York, if you're on New York Tuesday I just tweeted it you can come to my Twitter feed and find the sign up of Jay Rosen and I'll be discussing the Gutenberg parenthesis at the New Mark J School. Oh, how fun.

2:56:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's great. And magazines published by Bloomsbury.

2:56:30 - Ant Pruitt
Bloomsbury, bloomsbury.

2:56:34 - Leo Laporte
AntPruitt is at antpruittcom to check out his beautiful prints at antpruittcom slash prints. He's on the insta underscore Pruitt. And of course he's our community manager at club twit where he will be interviewing John Scalzi tomorrow. How excited I can forward to it. That's like a forward to you. Got a book to finish, though I'm gonna let you go because you got to be done with that before you got to be done.

2:56:57 - Ant Pruitt
I want to be, I want to be semi prepared. Yeah.

2:57:00 - Leo Laporte
I like to cover that. That's great sci fi. Great sci fi author, john Scalzi. Tomorrow, 9am, pacific in the club. If you're not a member, twittv slash club twit. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do this show this week in Google every Wednesday, 2pm, pacific, 5pm Eastern 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it at livetwittv club. Twit members can also talk about it in front of us. You have now a sticker, thanks to the club, for Jeff emeritus. Love it. Yeah, and I like the Prince logo that goes along with that. Which way get it?

2:57:42 - Ant Pruitt
It's Prince, formerly known as formerly known as the person formerly known as the press professor.

2:57:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I see. Yeah, I see there, I see it.

2:57:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the emeritus formerly known as Professor Jeff Jarvis.

2:57:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Papa Once a better. I'm always a professor, damn it yeah.

2:57:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right. Thank you everybody, we will. Oh, you can also get copies of the show. After the fact that the website twittv slash twig, there's a this week in Google YouTube channel where you can watch and share. By the way, that's one of the nice things about YouTube makes it easy to share a clip and, of course, the whole show is available, as always, in your favorite podcast player to search for twig or search for twit and subscribe to all of them. Thank you All of the shows. Subscribe to all of the shows. Thank you very much, everybody. Have a great week. We'll see you next time on this week in Google. Bye, bye.

2:58:34 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, Scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of club twit, which costs seven bucks a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only $2.99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of Home Theater Geekitude.