This Week in Google 738, 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for twig this week in google Paris Martineau is here. Jeff Jarvis, Ant Pruitt coming up. Elon musk says if we charge a dollar a year to join twitter, maybe the bots will go away, and again, maybe not. Vc Mark Andreessen loses it on the internet and thanks to meta quest 3, the glass holes are back. It's all coming up next on twig

Podcasts. You love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

This is twig this week in google, episode 738, recorded wednesday, october 18th 2023. The deorbiting professor. This week in google is brought to you by Mylio. Mylio photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit and manage years of important documents, photos and videos in an offline library hosted on any device, and it's free. See what it has us so excited by visiting Myliocom Slash twit and by our friends at it pro tv, now called aci. Learning. Aci's new cyber skills is training that's for everyone, not just the pros. Visit goacilarningcom Slash twit. Put listeners can receive up to 65 percent off an it pro enterprise solution plan. Just complete the form and, based on your team's size, you'll see how much discount you can get.

It's time for twig this week in google, the show. We cover all kinds of things you can find on google. Hello, jeff jarvis, I don't have my. I should have brought my card with me. I don't have my east coast.

Yeah, I'm here on the east coast at mom's house. Uh, jeff is of course the tow knight professor. Blotty, blah, blah craved. No, mark bobby brah.

So it's fine, we can forget any blotty blah, blah.

0:01:59 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, hi, jeff, hi, I we're. We're all on these coasts this week except for ant. Ant pruit is holding down the fort in beautiful pedaluma, california, and I'm told that the chicken sandwiches, we're awesome this uh,

Ant Pruitt
today I I had to pass on it this time because I knew I'd be filming from here today.

0:02:17 - Ant Pruitt
But oh, go out and get my own. But thank you, twit for the popo's, was it popo's? No, no it is a local joint.

0:02:25 - Leo Laporte
I was told it was better than popo's. It's from a company Restaurant called bell fair that I never even heard of in pedaluma and, uh, people were raving.

0:02:34 - Ant Pruitt
Raving about it. So, yeah, I had to check that out this weekend me too.

0:02:40 - Leo Laporte
And we're very pleased to see Paris Martineau, joining us from brooklyn. Hi Paris.

0:02:45 - Paris Martineau
Welcome to the east coast leo.

0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, three out of four paris writes for the information where she covers amazon and other big tech Enterprises.

0:02:54 - Paris Martineau
And you see, right there on our lower third or signal number, so that you can scoop her give her a listen and a big thanks go out to, uh, all the good twig listeners who reached out to me last week. You know who you are.

0:03:07 - Leo Laporte
You got even so. The last time you were on you said you'd already gotten some scoops on your signal. You got even more.

0:03:13 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you know who would have guessed. Uh, people who work in tech listen to this show.

0:03:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, we are not. We don't know you, we will never tell, never.

0:03:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we can't. There's no way that we can find out what she's talking about.

0:03:28 - Paris Martineau
Unfortunately, you just have to read the information dot.

0:03:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, there is a way and I'm a happy subscriber, love the information and that's why we love having you on welcome back. Uh, you know what I haven't done? I haven't looked at the rent out today Now you know it's likely remote.

I knew there was something I forgot. There are some stories actually breaking stories that today, uh, apparently sources have confirmed maybe even some of your sources, paris that elon musk is planning on charging a dollar per year to new accounts on x. Uh, the idea, and I think it actually makes sense, is to discourage.

0:04:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Bots. I mean, what does it cost to clear a one dollar transaction?

0:04:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting.

0:04:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they may not make a lot of money.

0:04:23 - Leo Laporte
We charge seven dollars for our club and get about five out of it because there's the credit card fees and the patreon fees.

0:04:29 - Ant Pruitt
That's what I mean he's not.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
He. I'm sure he gets a better deal than we do.

0:04:33 - Jeff Jarvis
But they also have to have. The immediate reaction I saw is oh good, yes, I'm going to give sensitive personal information to elon musk.

0:04:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, it wouldn't be you. So, at least, as currently constituted, it's only new accounts.

0:04:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I know, but it would be I'm saying new people would say I've got to get my credit card to elon musk. No, thank you.

0:04:52 - Paris Martineau
I will also say I'm not certain that this would stop people from creating bot accounts.

Right, I mean, I remember whenever there was a time a couple of years ago for a story, I went on and kind of looked at the various different Uh surfaces out there to buy social media engagement and you could, you know, pay somebody 10 or 20 bucks to have a bunch of, I guess, bought Twitter accounts, retweet your whatever or like your post on instagram. They could just increase those charges marginally. The reason why people are creating bots typically is To get something out of it. I don't think a dollar is going to stop most people. What about.

0:05:30 - Leo Laporte
A number of people said that's exact credit cards too.

0:05:33 - Ant Pruitt
You know, burner cards are easy to come by.

0:05:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean I would we could use a privacy card one of our sponsors and have an anonymous subscription. Um, I think the more the point is as if you, if you, started to charge people a nickel Per email, or a nickel a month for email, spam would, in theory, go away, because the reason spam exists Is it's virtually free to send out millions of spam emails a day. I think that's what elon is saying Is well, you know, people aren't going to pay a buck a year for a bot, but I think you're right, paris, that's not that much.

0:06:07 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it Would. Obviously what this is going to do is put a Like speed bump for creating a new twitter account. Whether you are a user that wants to have a lot of bots or just a user who wants to retweet your favorite celebrities, it's going to, for a while, slow down both of those groups of people. Only one of those groups Ostensibly has, like a vested financial interest in their activity on twitter, and it's the people who are running bot networks. I mean, you know it's going to, I think, discourage more average users. Then in the long run, it would like dissuade people from getting up to no good on twittercom.

0:06:49 - Ant Pruitt
Well, just Paris. The average user is ready to come towards twitter nowadays, or are they often to deal more with the Up and come in social networks that are?

0:06:58 - Leo Laporte
based on the amount of disinformation On israel hamas on twitter right now it is very much a hotbed of disinformation. In fact, israel has started buying ads to uh to promote its side of the dispute On x. So I think x is still an important platform for disinformation.

0:07:18 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the one we have. It's where journalists are. I think it's part of the one thing they want to reach there. But but Paris, to your point, I wonder what the relative cost is of sending out spam email and spending out actual junk mail, mail, mail. Um, I think this would be cheaper.

0:07:37 - Paris Martineau
So I mean, I think one dollar a year is not much, it's not much right.

0:07:41 - Jeff Jarvis
So you know say for for, for a hundred a thousand messages to the world.

0:07:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah it's very likely this is just the first Trunch of charges or just another dumb elon idea?

0:07:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's not very much one.

0:07:56 - Leo Laporte
It's very much the kind of idea elon would have.

0:07:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I've got it. You're weak, I'll figure it out.

0:08:01 - Leo Laporte
Finally, yeah, yeah, matt mullenweg, who is, of course, the creator of wordpress, and uh, principle at automatic, hosted on october 18th, I guess that's today. Cost of spam. Twitter is Testing charging users a dollar a year with the idea that it will keep out bots and spam. Actually, twitter's calling it the, not a bot subscription, and uh, matt says it's an appealing idea and charging definitely does introduce a proof of work. That wasn't there before and this is the important point.

But the history of the web shows this is not really a big deterrent. Domains cost money, usually a lot more than a dollar a year, and millions are used for spam or nefarious purses Purposes. The spammers obviously thought their benefit would be more than the cost of the domain, or they use stolen credit cards and unedities. Oh yeah yeah, charging makeup may cause a short term drop in bots while the bad guys update their scripts, but the value of manipulating x and twitter is so high imagine there's already millions of dollars being spent, matt says, and I think actually this is the right Thing. Uh, he's correct here. There's no substitute for a strong, effective, trust and safety operation. Actual manpower, people, actual people and of course, this is what he line doesn't want to spend money on.

0:09:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, and this is what what um you know roth has been out there saying, yeah, ridder, the entire operation. What do you expect is gonna happen? You think I can do one easy thing and that's gonna solve this. This is really come. People are difficult. This is I mean, I'm Editing the next book right now and I'm going even overboard on just saying this is a human.

The internet is a human enterprise. Everything about it. That's difficult. It's not technology, it's not even the technology companies, it's us. People are going to exploit any open system that they can. Not everybody, only a few people who rule it first all. It's why we can't have nice things. It's just a few people are going to do that and you and it's very expensive to build up against that at scale. Siva buddy, nothing has said for a long time. Our friend at university, virginia, that it's a mistake to connect everybody on On the earth and I I always disagree with Siva, but I think I finally got what he was saying. It's a mistake to think that one service could do it and not deal with the mike masnik and problem impossibility theorem, that it's really impossible to moderate human behavior at scale on the twit instance of mastodon, little olio, there can do it, but much bigger than that no, hey, I'm just happy that he's actually doing something about this spam and bot problem.

0:10:34 - Ant Pruitt
Consider and that was part of his message of not buying it back in the day- Isn't that ironic.

0:10:40 - Leo Laporte
We're coming very close. In a week It'll be the one-year anniversary.

Yeah, being forced to buy it and he tried to get out of it saying there's there's too many bots. The monthly or daily active user Count is is way over inflated by bots and it's taken a year to come up with this Solution. We will see if it works. They're starting at New Zealand, in the Philippines. Newly registered accounts there must now verify their phone numbers for authentication. Not gonna do that, those who choose not to subscribe will have limited privileges, restricted To read only actions. So you could create a free read only account, but you can't post. You could read watch videos, follow accounts.

0:11:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm fine with that. That's all I'm not. My wife does. She doesn't want to post anything, but she reads, she. She knows crap ahead of me by by hours.

0:11:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is also in the face of news that and I don't, I don't know, maybe Paris, if you can confirm her, you know not. This information that twitter's Use is plummeting is falling dramatically.

0:11:47 - Paris Martineau
I was just saying. I don't know specifically. I'd have to check a few things out. The thing that this Uh made me think about is twitter is right now in an advertising crisis, right in part because usage is down, adviews are down and advertisers have left. You're really me capping the future business if you're setting up a system when every new user has to pay you a dollar to sign up. I mean, that is death for a platform.

0:12:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, you're right, paris, and what we hear all the time in news is if we only had micro payments, right, everything would be okay. Uh, lex freedman just discovered that recently. Like, oh, micro payments, if I could just pay a dollar for an article, any speed bump will drive people away.

0:12:35 - Leo Laporte
It's funny, lex is showing his youth here, because we've been saying this since the beginning of the internet.

0:12:40 - Paris Martineau
I was. Every three months a tech guy discovers micro payments. Yeah, exactly.

0:12:45 - Leo Laporte
Um, I don't think micro payments is a solution, and I think it's also important to point out Really, the main reason advertisers are leaving X is because it's not the kind of you can't be guaranteed, it's not a good environment. Advertisers are very sensitive to the content around their ads. We have all sorts of writers in our contracts about things that you know You're not gonna. You're not gonna. You know, do this or that right, and if you do, we can pull the ad. Um, of course, you know we are a good place for advertisers to be, but twitter, you can easily see, is problematic and it's a wonderful place for us. We have, please come on more of you.

0:13:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I didn't say that. Twitter and come here. It's a nice.

0:13:26 - Leo Laporte
Lose a couple letters, but it's a, it's a bad play. Yeah, just lose the t? Er and then you could Uh it. If. If you're not, if you don't have a good environment for advertisers, people are gonna leave that. Interestingly, some of its biggest advertisers have not left apple. In fact, people are really wondering why apple has never left twitter as an advertiser. All right, you know, tim cook famously did. He stopped posting on twitter. But apple, the company, continues to company still there because it's business.

0:13:55 - Ant Pruitt
It's business to get eyeballs there. They get the traction there. They put up a full-length Uh tv show that runs for about an hour and millions and millions and millions of people watch that Um tv show on a twitter app, cnbc.

0:14:12 - Leo Laporte
No, I say this is not from CNBC. The most recent story promise, twitter is Probably deceptively, but uh, at least some in some ways saying oh, no, we're gonna. You know, linda, yeah, carino, oh, we're getting more engagement they always give us that. That's kind of not exactly the same as how many daily or monthly active users you have. Yeah, um, but, and so we're. It's always a guessing game. But people who follow this kind of stuff are generally saying twitter's monthly active users are falling and they have been falling every month. And and having more bots is not, uh, you know, obviously that's something he's got to get rid of. But I don't. I honestly don't think. I think I'm agreeing with you, paris. A buck a year is not enough. It's not enough. Deterrence, um. Well, he's so right he said it twice.

0:15:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's true. But those are right You're right, you had two screens of Leo. There You're double right.

0:15:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you did. Oh, yes, I didn't see that. Okay, uh, anyway, there you go. And actually, uh, that ties into the story about kids suing social media over addiction Miners and parents suing meta, uh, facebook and other technology giants. This is from bloomberg for the kids social media platform addictions. What an important ruling. In california this week, a state judge friday throughout most of the claims but Said she would allow the lawsuits to advance Based on the single claim that the companies were negligent, that they somehow knew their design of the platforms Would maximize minors use, improve, harmful. That doesn't mean she's agreeing that that's the case, just that that is the one count that can say what did they throw out?

0:15:58 - Jeff Jarvis
the only summary of that it was behind the paywall, so I didn't see it say again. What are they throw up? What are the judges throw out? What are a couple of those?

0:16:05 - Leo Laporte
Uh Counts for so, first of all, there's 200 suits across the country, but they've all been assigned to one of two judges in california. The state court in la. That's who made this decision. There's a federal court in oakland. The state court ruling applies just to the state court, obviously. Um, let's see.

0:16:23 - Ant Pruitt
Let me see if she said I didn't see what was actually thrown out in in the story.

0:16:28 - Leo Laporte
It was just one of a number of claims. Um, I'm scanning through the bloomberg story. Oh, here it is. The judge tossed out seven other claims in the lawsuit, including an argument that the company should be held liable for the defective design of their platforms. The concept of product liability, the judge wrote, was it's not for social networks. It was creating a different era to solve different problems. Oh, here it is.

0:16:55 - Jeff Jarvis
In other words, my lighter blew up on me, yeah.

0:16:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. In other words, yeah, your lighter was full of butane but had no protections. And well, that's reasonable. She says that's not for social media. Social media, she said, presents new challenges under the law because it's not tangible. You can't reach out and touch them. Oh uh, lawyers representing minors in the similar collection of lawsuits filed in federal court Are also Waiting to hear what the judge says. The companies have asked to dismiss the case there as well. So, superior court of los angeles, yes, one count will stand and you can go to trial on this. That they designed it intentionally to be addictive, that's an interesting contention.

0:17:36 - Ant Pruitt
I also like the fact that the george pointed out this is quote george pointed out, quote obvious inequalities between, quote Unsophisticated minors and the internet companies who exercise total control over how their platforms function. I like that they mentioned unsophisticated minors Because it they are businesses, these different platforms are businesses and they want you to stay on the platform for ad revenue and whatever else Money that they can pull, and that makes sense. Um, and I think a more sophisticated individual can see that right, or is that just me being I?

0:18:12 - Leo Laporte
well, it's interesting because that's the judge is saying that the minors were not sophisticated, so we have to protect them. She says, as you said, the facebook, instagram snap, tiktok alphabet, via youtube, knew the physical harms of social media were quote foreseeable and substantial. And uh, and what she was saying is there is a power inequality between the platforms who should know better, and unsophisticated minors who are the victims.

0:18:43 - Jeff Jarvis
And uh, washington Post had a story today about how to stop from doom scrolling, and I think that's pretty rich, because the Washington Post and every newspaper is designed for doom scrolling itself. Right, all of media is designed for us to come back and stay with it.

0:18:54 - Leo Laporte
All right, sit coms, everything uh, let's see what else elan musky is facing. Some competition over space? Uh, this is from the wall street journal. Sorry elan, christopher mims, sorry elan. The satellites of the future are heading to space right now. New competition for starlink from, uh, amazon. Amazon launched Two satellites, but we've been waiting for this. They got to go ahead at the same time as the FCC gave the go ahead to Starlink to launch these satellites. Is taking them a little longer to get them up? Uh, they say. They're gonna have thousands. Uh, they're. They're also governments um public private partnerships Under way, according to the journal, in china, europe, taiwan, canada and germany. So I don't know how good a business starlink is, but it will not have the business, although itself.

0:20:04 - Jeff Jarvis
There are two other stories that I didn't put on the rundown. One was that at&t is trying to stop amazon and because it'll interfere with other things, and two that amazon is also touting a satellite that you can put up and it can um assemble satellites, refuel them, update them and create kind of a um space wan for satellites.

0:20:27 - Ant Pruitt
Well, I had two questions for you, mr Drivers. What one was? Why would at&t Consider them interrupting something? What in particular, number two was was anybody even concerned about space junk, or was that this weekend space where that conversation came up?

0:20:43 - Jeff Jarvis
wasn't the latter, it was, it was. They're trying to argue that there be a Uh uh interference with their signals radio interference. They're just trying to do anything to stop competition, which is what they do. There's a whole department that does nothing but that. All of them with law degrees Um.

0:21:00 - Leo Laporte
At space junk? I don't. I'm surprised that the sophisticated twist hosts terrick malick and rod pile would even Bring this up, because space is a very big place.

0:21:13 - Ant Pruitt
It's huge and that was, I believe, yeah, because I td that. So, and I want to say I mentioned that on that particular episode and, um, they were, they agreed with me on that, but it was more like powers that be, uh, our government. That that is was saying, hey, this, something needs to be done about the equipment that's in space because of the there is there's a problem with with traversing space we talked about we talked about, uh, a big Fine from the FCC?

0:21:41 - Leo Laporte
No, for a satellite that was not properly disposed of and was was out there. So there's that one issue, you're right. There's these astronomer issue where they're seeing a lot of um occlusion of the sky by these satellites. But but remember, the space is big and if you took the 29 000 satellites that are currently revolving around the earth, rotating around the earth, is it revolving or rotating? John, they're doing something around the earth. It's orbiting, orbiting and you put them on the surface of the earth. You know, if you spread 29 000 people on the side, entire surface, it's a lot of job. You wouldn't run into another person very often. Okay, I?

0:22:21 - Paris Martineau
know space is big and the satellites are small in comparison to it, but also they're just going to be up there Orbiting forever and then we're going to add more it I don't know how well they they are able to deorbit them Um do they have another robot, for that was one of the amazon robots. No, actually.

0:22:41 - Leo Laporte
Elan and responded this with space x, with the starling satellites, by giving them thrusters, and they can when they're done and they do have a limited life Uh, they can either thrust to a higher Orbit or or decelerate like the orbit.

0:22:53 - Jeff Jarvis
That's what I'm doing in my career at the end of the year re-orbiting it.

0:22:59 - Leo Laporte
Emeritus deorbitus. When we were uh, when we were at uh lunch with mom at her old age home, one of her compatriots, who's got to be at least 80 or 90, said you know, I because mom goes around saying how famous I am.

And she said Ross said I had my daughter look you up and had said you're retired or should be. I should have told her no, I was just deorbit it, it's okay. Where were we anyway? Elan must facing. I think it's a good thing. I think one of the problems I have with starling, you know. At the time before it launched, we all said, oh, this is gonna be great, we're gonna put satellite internet access in every corner of the earth. It'll really, I thought, make a big difference in areas where there isn't good connectivity, not so much for the first world but the developing nations. Yeah, but he charges so damn much for it that it's not even really economically viable for many people in the us. So is it a fair cost for?

0:24:06 - Ant Pruitt
him as a company to charge what he's charging. Sorry, miss Ferris, I think I'm sorry.

0:24:11 - Paris Martineau
I didn't go ahead.

0:24:15 - Ant Pruitt
What is? Is it a fair fee that he's charging based on? You know what is company is well, the journal says he's not gonna make a lot of money.

0:24:25 - Leo Laporte
He's not making a lot of money. He charges. What is it? It's 450, 500 bucks to get the gear, and then it's a hundred twenty nine. It was a hundred dollars a year and I think it's gone up above that. Oh, a month I'm sorry, not a year a month for the internet access, that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. But apparently it's not money. He may be losing money, and that's actually an interesting thing.

0:24:49 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the standard. The priority is 250 to 1500 a month for 40 to 220 megs.

0:24:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, I mean, I get, we get fiber here Much faster than starlink for 60 bucks a month. Yeah, no.

0:25:05 - Jeff Jarvis
No, sorry, you were gonna say I.

0:25:07 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I was gonna say I mean it makes sense then that the most I've heard people using starlink is that burning man.

0:25:15 - Leo Laporte
Burning man and the Crimea.

So that's you know yeah, you know the two genders and the wall street journal says ships at sea, right, uh. But they also say, it must be said, for most people in the developed world Terrestrial internet is already pretty good, yeah, and with the expansion of fiber and 5g getting better all the time. So the one appropriate response to the promise of all this internet bandwidth, says the journal, is essentially how big a deal is this really? They quote tim ferrar, president of tim ferrar associates. You know he should be the president of that. It's an interesting coincidence though, there are a few Elon musk fans out there, says tim ferrar of tim ferrar associates. But in general the economics of satellite internet are not as good as, say, 5g wireless On the ground.

0:26:04 - Jeff Jarvis
The promise was you were going to connect the unconnected Um, but I was the latest number. I was like five billion people have some connection to the internet right now, and the population of earth is about Eight billion. So yeah, and how many of those can afford this? There's if a billion, if you've got a market of a billion people, that's not peanuts.

0:26:22 - Leo Laporte
Right now, starlink has about two million subscribers, uh, which is Frankly kind of bad news for all those other people launching. Oh, he was gonna have like 20 million, he was gonna have a huge number. He's one tenth what he had expected. Yes, back in 2015, right, um, so anyway, don't know what there is to say about that. Um, I think it's good to have competition, frankly.

I mean, google fiber did a world of good to by by threatening To put fiber in people's towns, and that brought prices down and brought the Verizon and AT&T and others in to put in fiber themselves. So competition is good in this space, and that's one thing that telecommunications companies hate and have fought against, and, as you said, at&t don't like it either. Are you ready for the uh Netflix Store in your? I bet you there'll be one in brooklyn.

0:27:18 - Paris Martineau
Oh sure, williamsburg at the very least yeah.

0:27:21 - Leo Laporte
Williamsburg Netflix to open store where fans can play, shop and eat. It'll be called netflix house.

0:27:30 - Jeff Jarvis
HAUS or the need at the end house.

0:27:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh Uh, initial locations in the us will be followed by global expansion, but for some reason, this is from bloomberg. Don't get your hopes up. For some reason it won't be till 2025. Not next year, but the year after.

0:27:45 - Ant Pruitt
Hey and that looks house isn't built today, you know 2025 would get here and this will all be forgotten, yeah this is a bad idea.

0:27:53 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I tried to propose a tv guide theme park when I was a tv guide.

0:27:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, wait a minute. What would it have? Lousy crossword puzzles and brief capsules of no the shows, the show.

0:28:05 - Ant Pruitt
Oh.

0:28:05 - Leo Laporte
I see, yeah Well, they're gonna do a squid game obstacle course.

0:28:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Did you send anybody down to the google um visitor center?

0:28:14 - Speaker 3
Which is gonna be yeah, you, you went, you cover the world. Somebody show?

0:28:18 - Paris Martineau
about google like who send the corresponded down? Would you go down?

0:28:21 - Leo Laporte
send jeff jeff Do you want to go down.

0:28:24 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually, I'll be, I'll go down there. What I've been saying it when is it? It's at the. The big titty thing, the hq. Look it up, look it up, it's got. It's got talking about the big titty thing of the new headquarters building thing.

0:28:38 - Ant Pruitt
All right, right, what do they have? The? It looks like. It looks like circus tints down.

0:28:44 - Leo Laporte
I'll go down, sure I'll volunteer, I'm over there.

0:28:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Hold on, let's look it up here the visitor experience welcome to the game obstacle visitor experience Five things you can do what tell me? Learn something or meet someone new at an event? No, go on an artwork scavenger hunt. Uh-uh. Get a taste of the google at the google cafe. However, you have to pay you poor shmuck a taste of google.

0:29:11 - Leo Laporte
Discover and support cafe.

0:29:14 - Jeff Jarvis
At the pop-up shop. And number five Experience how our hardware products and services work together at the google store unless, of course, you have google workspace, but I won't go into that right now.

0:29:26 - Leo Laporte
Why did companies do this? What is this a?

0:29:30 - Paris Martineau
this is a zero interest rate phenomenon I'm free money like this is this is something that will not be happening for the next couple of years. That tent uh-uh.

0:29:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, that tent is there.

0:29:44 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that tent is there, they're not building another tent.

0:29:47 - Ant Pruitt
No.

0:29:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh.

0:29:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Netflix house.

0:29:53 - Leo Laporte
Is gonna also have A mix of retail dining and live live experiences. When you say Netflix and chill to somebody, you don't say, hey, let's go down, let's go down to the Netflix house.

0:30:05 - Ant Pruitt
I gotta tell you, mr La Porte, that is so 2020 what you just said.

0:30:09 - Leo Laporte
People don't do that anymore. Yeah, and at that, that's what do they do. Paris, you're young.

0:30:14 - Paris Martineau
Doomschool.

0:30:21 - Leo Laporte
Eating ice cream out of the container and doom scrolling yeah yeah, yeah that's what we did, that's what my generation did. So if we didn't have doom scrolling, we had a channel surf.

0:30:33 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say you're passing stone tablets back and forth solemnly.

0:30:37 - Ant Pruitt
That's us, it just.

0:30:44 - Jeff Jarvis
It was scrolls, rolled them yes.

0:30:47 - Leo Laporte
I make sense, scrolls, uh next, has been doing this. They've been experimenting with pop-up fan experiences for a couple of years. Oh, the word experience? Oh yeah, 40 of them in 20 cities around the world, including the queen's ball of bridgerton experience and that of drinks and dancing inspired by bridgerton that's traveled around. Actually, a pop-up Netflix store at the grove shopping mall in Los Angeles. Did you ever, uh, paris, go to any of those instagram pop-ups? Like the ice what was there? An ice cream?

0:31:19 - Paris Martineau
No, I never did. I see them. There was a a museum of ice cream.

0:31:23 - Leo Laporte
That's what it was a museum.

0:31:24 - Paris Martineau
I did uh See for a while. I believe Netflix had a stranger things experience at the brooklyn navy yard near me, a fact I only know because when I would be going to uh, I took woodworking classes there at night for a while and it was very ominous because they had part of the building lit up with the neon red stranger things lights, so it looked very spooky to bike by at night but would you go into the under?

0:31:50 - Leo Laporte
what do they call it? The under, underworld, under land?

0:31:53 - Paris Martineau
on something you know I want to say under dark, but that's from dnd, so that's probably not it. Yeah.

0:32:00 - Leo Laporte
Um, I could see for halloween. That'd be kind of cool.

0:32:04 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean it reminds me of, like universal studios, halloween, horror nights or something like that I don't really understand from a brand perspective. What is this?

0:32:12 - Leo Laporte
the upside down for a company. The upside down. You're right, the demo gorgon yeah.

0:32:17 - Paris Martineau
I would be cool. That'd be fun.

0:32:19 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah in the horror house.

0:32:24 - Paris Martineau
That's true, we do need the twig. We need the twig experience. Yeah, the twig experience.

0:32:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what's the twig experience? Be you, come in, you expect google and you get something else. You play with a little puppy.

0:32:36 - Paris Martineau
Hang out at leo's big desk. You see a wall of 75 cell phones that you once owned.

0:32:45 - Jeff Jarvis
There it is the twig experience guy might a ladder or move a light. Yeah, you can sit in leo's chair that nobody else likes.

0:32:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't even know what my mom that's a nice thing your face on a screen next to leo.

0:33:00 - Paris Martineau
I made my mom.

0:33:01 - Leo Laporte
She might be watching right now. I set up youtube live on her tv. Bye mom, your house. You can see your house and she said she was talking about the leather chair. I sit in at the studio. She said you need to get some leather cared products.

0:33:18 - Jeff Jarvis
She's right.

0:33:19 - Leo Laporte
She's right. She's right, uh. So, john, get right on that, will you? Um, all right, let me take a little break and talk about a sponsor. Then we'll be back. We're having fun, aren't we? There's lots of news and we've got a great panel. Paris, mark no, joining us from the information. Wonderful to have you here once again. Amp pruit, uh, he is our community manager in the club as well as the host, uh, on this show, and you also do. People don't know. Behind the scenes, you do floss and you do a twist.

Td twist, twy it and floss and yeah, you do a good job with all of that. Thank you, thank you. And and, of course, jeff Jarvis no one really knows what he is.

0:33:58 - Ant Pruitt
No emeritus.

0:34:00 - Leo Laporte
He is, he is in the. Uh what? What did you say? Deorbit, I'm.

0:34:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Deorbit, the deorbit professor I'm like skylab, I'm soon gonna be black junk on the ground Our show today is brought to you by milio.

0:34:15 - Leo Laporte
I love this company and I love this product and I want you to try it. It's absolutely free, milio photos. It's a smart, powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit and manage years of not just photos, but all your documents, videos too, in a library that, by the way, is not necessarily in the cloud. You can host it locally on any device, totally free for a device. And I always get nervous when people say, oh, it's free, like well, okay, but you need to make money, right? So there is a Milio Plus and you get the. You could try it for free on your computer, on your phone. Works on Mac, Windows, it works on iOS and Android and then, if you decide you like it, you can subscribe to the Plus very affordably. That's what I did immediately, because then you can have your photos everywhere and you could choose between thumbnails, optimized and original photos stored on all your devices. But here's where they're not stored. They're not stored in Google's cloud, they're not stored in Apple's cloud, they're not stored in Microsoft's cloud. They're stored on your devices. Now, if you wanna back them up, you can't. I have them on my Synology NAS. There is even encryption built into Milio that allows you to encrypt it and then store it on these clouds without any privacy concerns. I love that.

The solution for digital management photos, videos yes, documents. You can have it automatically upload. You can attach it to your Instagram account, Facebook account, Flickr account. I took all my photos from Google photos out and Google takeout and it can import them automatically. It can de-dupe them so you don't have duplicates. It was the best way I could find to go to all the different places I've been putting my pictures all these years, collect them into one library, de-duplicate them, and now I know, for the first time ever, I have 200,000 plus photos, unique photos from my whole you know history of recording of recorded time in my Milio library. That is awesome. I mean, that is incredible. And now you might say well, 200,000 photos, how do you find anything?

Milio has all sorts of AI features built in to do automatic face recognition, not in the cloud, but on your device. They also have fantastic tagging smart tags that will use AI to find specific things, like you know, bicycles for Paris, woodworking. You can also have activities, camping, swimming pools. It does this all automatically and you can use those tags to find whatever you want. Now they've just added something. This is one of the other things I love about Milio it's in constant development.

We knew about this for a while. We weren't able to tell you. I can tell you now. They've just added spaces. The spaces tool lets you determine what's visible and what's not, which means you can now collaborate at work or with the family, and people can see what you want them to see, but not see what you don't want them to see. Custom categories in a quick collection that's easy to share. So photo users Milio photo users can collaborate on editing, managing, even sharing media in any given space. I am absolutely. This is a huge new feature that I'm gonna use with my family, my extended family too, because I could say, hey, here's all the pictures of us and you don't have to get to see the pictures, my other pictures, which is great. Spaces can be private. You could password protect them, pin protect them. You get extra security when you're sharing your spaces.

I have been blown away with Milio photos. This is the tool I've been looking for ever since Google bought Picasso and put it out of business, but it's so much more and, as I said, you can even have it automatically add from your documents folder. So I have it, pulling in all my Google photos, all my Flickr photos, my Instagram photos, my Facebook photos, my Macintosh photos all into one library, sorted, tagged, optimized, no cloud storage required. Offline storage means I don't have to worry about privacy concerns. I don't have to rely on the cloud to keep files accessible. They'll actually sync from my phone to my desktop, to my other phone, to my other desktop. It is fantastic. And now with spaces, private, password protected spaces.

I just think this is great. I want the best thing to do, though it's hard for me to describe what it's going to do until you try it. It may be confusing. So just download it it's free and see what's getting me so excited. This is the tool I've been looking for Milio M-Y-L-I-O Milio photos. It's on your computer, it's on your mobile device. You could put it anywhere you want and use it to your heart's content for free. And then, if you want to put it on multiple things, there's a subscription for that. Miliocom slash Twitter M-Y-L-I-Ocom slash Twitter. Download Milio photos for free right now at Miliocom slash Twitter. We thank them so much for their support of this week at Google. Thank you, Milio. Back we go. Paris, Martino Great to have you. Ant Pruitt, Jeff Jarvis Gosh. I don't know where to go.

0:39:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Next Threads just edit button. Andreson's crazy.

0:39:24 - Leo Laporte
What's Andreson up to Anfesto? Oh, you didn't hear that.

0:39:26 - Ant Pruitt
I wanted to hear your thoughts on that. It was so daggum long I got bored through it.

0:39:30 - Leo Laporte
So, mark, Andreson, who, we should explain, was at NCSA, urbana, and wrote the first browser, where, with a team called Netscape, later left to found Mozilla. Was it Mozilla? No, netscape. No, I'm sorry, take it back, take it back, take it back, rewind he. What was the browser he wrote when he was at NCSA? Um, what was it called? It's? I know this, I know this. It was one of the early browsers. He then left and started Netscape and actually started charging people for it. It was a huge billion dollar Mozac.

Mozac, thank you. I keep saying Mozilla, mozac, google says you're welcome, yeah, so. And then he took all his money and started a venture capital firm, andreson Horowitz, and has been very active in crypto and other areas. What is he? What is he on about now?

0:40:25 - Jeff Jarvis
So he did you read it, Paris Did you see it?

0:40:27 - Paris Martineau
I did yeah.

0:40:28 - Jeff Jarvis
What did you think? So why don't you describe it?

0:40:31 - Paris Martineau
I think you should go through it. I'm still processing it honestly. I read it before the show and it is long he started out saying things that was sort of like common sense to me and I'm like why are?

0:40:42 - Leo Laporte
people all up in arms.

0:40:43 - Jeff Jarvis
This is manifesto.

0:40:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so he goes through basically saying this is what you've been talking about with Tescreo, right.

0:40:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's not quite Tescreo, but there's little pieces of it here and there's a few ironies to it. So he goes through basically saying technology solves everything, markets solve everything. Don't mess with us and everything will be wonderful. And we have to grow, grow, grow and we are a techno capital machine.

0:41:08 - Paris Martineau
Capitalism will fix everything. Capitalism will put us on every planet in the universe we're gonna have a population of like 50 billion. Was that right?

0:41:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, that's the long-termism view. He's like we're gonna tend to the 58th human beings in the future Becoming technological supermen. Notice the gender there. But then he says the enemy. So I mean I couldn't. It was like. It was like throwing a dart at a barn door. There were things to agree with here. Technology can be good, that we can try to solve problems in life. I mean not fine, I'll salute those flags. But then he gets to we have enemies. Our enemies are not bad people, but rather bad ideas. This is the laundry list you will believe. We throw everything into one, making them all equivalent. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades against technology and against life. He just always goes overboard Under varying names, like first one is existential risk, okay. So there he's going against his Tescoial boys because that's their thing is how AI is going to ruin mankind, and he says no, so in that case he disagrees with them. The next thing is sustainability. Like sustainability is bad. Oh boy, esg, sustainable development goals Watch out those Davos commies. Social responsibility social responsibility is an

0:42:33 - Ant Pruitt
enemy Stakeholder capitalism, precautionary principle, trust and safety, and enemies Is an enemy Is an enemy.

0:42:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Trust and safety are enemies. Tech ethics, risk management, degrowth, I'll say was deorbitant, I would imagine, is considered an enemy and the limits of growth.

0:42:49 - Paris Martineau
This is sentence number three in the section the enemy.

0:42:53 - Leo Laporte
By the way, it goes along 5200 word manifesto which you know I mean Luther had 95 theses, but 5200 words is pretty long for a manifesto. By the way, he blames the enemy. He basically says it's zombie ideas. Many divide from communism. Yeah, jesus.

0:43:11 - Paris Martineau
They also mentioned 1984 in here. Of course we had a.

0:43:14 - Leo Laporte
Talk about a zombie enemy.

0:43:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Communism. Really, Our enemy is stagnation. Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness. The enemy is statism, authoritarianism. Okay, there are even about that he's got a lot of stuff in here. Delectivism, central planning. A lot of actualism oh, it's just everything. This is why he blocked everyone.

0:43:35 - Paris Martineau
My main takeaway from this oh yeah, I'm blocked by him on Twitter but my main takeaway from this is that he needs an editor and that this is why people shouldn't be allowed to just publish whatever they want straight onto the internet, because you end up with something. This is like the first draft of a first draft In fourth grade.

0:43:55 - Leo Laporte
There's something else. There's something else you end up doing, and he has ended up doing which is revealing your true motivations. Unwittingly, he's really telling us the enemy is anybody that will keep me from becoming as rich as I possibly can, and this is really who Mark Andreessen is.

0:44:11 - Jeff Jarvis
And that's effective altruism, and that's Tess Graeola, that's the belief that we know best.

0:44:16 - Leo Laporte
This is essentially a venture capitalist, one of the billionaire cronies. I don't know if he's a billionaire, but he thinks a billionaire, want to be. If not, who? Say you know, stop getting on our way. This is Larry Page saying we need a Google Island where nobody gets in our way. Mission he. He names the patron saints of techno optimism.

0:44:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's quite Buck, mr Fuller Clayton Christensen.

0:44:41 - Leo Laporte
I love Bucky yeah yeah, bertrand Russell, nietzsche, adam Smith, okay, you know, this is just, you're right. Paris, it's almost a brain dump. Yeah, and not a, not a written manifesto making a cause for something.

0:44:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So, paris, I wanted to bring this up because I'm curious, since you, you know you're not in the West Coast, good for you, but since what you cover is because you're out here now with Leo, in God's country, the East, where we're meant to live, where we don't have earthquakes and mudslides and all the things, with God trying to tell you to get out.

0:45:18 - Ant Pruitt
No we're here in the nice East going Just tornadoes and hurricanes, not often.

0:45:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Not often. How with this, with Tess Griehl, with the craziness of Musk? I mean, I worked at People Magazine. I covered celebrities, right. I wrote cover stories about Mr T and John DeLorean, so I I've been around those people, but this is a whole weird kind of celebrity. How do you, as the, as the information, deal with these personalities?

0:45:50 - Paris Martineau
It's difficult and I wouldn't say it's like difficult on a day to day basis, but it is. It's something that I because I am not on the West Coast physically surrounded by it on a day to day basis that I sometimes forget the extent to which a lot of people live in that bubble. For instance, I was reporting a story earlier this year on this company like a healthcare startup called Care Rev. It ended up being a story about how kind of the the startup essentially does, kind of like Uber, but for nurses. The details of it aren't really important Essentially-.

0:46:29 - Jeff Jarvis
I haven't heard Uber for a long time. That's the best. This company can do.

0:46:31 - Paris Martineau
I know it's it. You know it's a real good throwback. But essentially the CEO is kind of one of those tried to be like an almost Elon musky and type, but a little more off kilter. So a lot of things about disregarding healthcare regulations, bragged to his employees about being on LSD during fund raising and like doing drugs at work, that sort of stuff. And to publishing this story. He gets pushed out by the board before it hits. Publish, but as part of it I have to call up a bunch of the investors and be like hey, you know, we're publishing this story.

The CEO said that when he raised tens of millions of dollars from you, he was on LSD. Do you have any comment? And one of the one of the people called me right back I'm forgetting his name, but it's certainly in the story and said the equivalent of why would we even call me about this? This is an absolute ridiculous article, a hit piece Like no one cares if people do drugs while fundraising. This is the least of my worries. And it was just one of those moments where I was like why are you one? Why are you calling to tell me this on the record? But two, do you live in that much of a bubble that you think that this is an appropriate thing to say to a journalist in a story about someone's wrongdoings, I mean. So those are the kind of moments where this comes up for me. Is I just often come face to face with the people in this echelon, live in a different world than most?

0:47:57 - Jeff Jarvis
of us. How about their pronouncements like this, when sometimes they're just nucking futs? How do you deal with having to treat them seriously, because these are people you cover all the time and have let's be honest access to and are working in. Here's the problem the things that matter.

0:48:16 - Leo Laporte
Here's the problem. Mark Andreessen, like a lot of people, was very lucky. Oh yeah, and because he was lucky, he believes that he knows the answer. What he doesn't understand is he was just lucky. He was just the right place at the right time. Basically, he was a coder who wrote the first browser and got Jim Clark to take him on and they had a big IPO, made a lot of money and now he can walk around. I love Amanda Silverling's take on this. She's gonna be on Twitter on Sunday, so we'll ask her about it on TechCrunch. When was the last time Mark Andreessen talked to a poor person? Venture capitalist Mark Andreessen posted a manifesto calling for techno optimism in a frenzied 5,000 word blog post that somehow manages to reinvent Reaganomics, propose the colonization of outer space and unironically answer a question with the phrase QED. Yeah, good, take down Amanda. Well written so, dave.

0:49:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Karpf, who was doing a great project. He's an academic doing a great project, reading every issue of Wired to cover that.

0:49:22 - Leo Laporte
I think we should have that that's an interesting story too, talking about techno optimism.

0:49:25 - Jeff Jarvis
But he. So he just tweeted and he said if any of the podcaster out there wants me to come on and make fun of Mark Andreessen, I'm here for you. So, jason is gonna have one Tech.

0:49:34 - Leo Laporte
News Weekly David Karpf definitely, by the way. As Silverlin points out on TechCrunch, mark's venture firm, which he shortens to A16Z, is investing increasingly in defense companies, including Palmer Lucky, another man who is extremely lucky and thinks he's brilliant. Palmer Lucky's controversial startup, andoril, which manufactures something we all need autonomous weapons. He also points out that regulating AI is murder. He says, of course, of course.

0:50:17 - Paris Martineau
Murdering AI, not like autonomous weapons. Those aren't murder.

0:50:22 - Jeff Jarvis
No, no, no, no. It's so confusing to know. Is AI gonna murder us or is stopping it murdering it?

0:50:28 - Leo Laporte
I don't understand, I'm so confused. He's also reinvented trickle down economics which last time I checked was pretty much discredited. He says just let the rich get richer and then everybody will win. I honestly think what you're really seeing here in a way, I'm glad he wrote this without an editor is, deep down, these guys and there are many of them believe they're rich because they're brilliant, they're smarter than everyone else, and anyone who gets in the way of them getting richer is evil, and I you know you have other people who are optimistic.

0:51:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I like Reed Hoffman. He's very much an optimist about technology. He defends technology. He thinks he's going to solve problems, but he doesn't go over that edge. This is going over the edge.

0:51:16 - Leo Laporte
You know, I've never been a fan of Mark Andreessen, frankly, but this is really. This is really the lowest, but it's good, because we now see him for what he is.

0:51:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I hope Elon would write something like this oh no, I don't want to have to read that. I mean, it's similar to a lot of these. Sandbanks and.

0:51:36 - Paris Martineau
Fried emails that have come out. Yeah, exactly. You just see, like he a lot of the writings that we're seeing come out from him. He writes in the same way that someone who's trying to sound smart does. I mean there is very little to no substance there, but they're using the sort of syntax that they think conveys meaning.

0:51:56 - Leo Laporte
There's a Andreessen is doing the same thing. If you say it strongly enough and with enough conviction, it must be true, and he thinks adding a few exclamation marks to a statement makes it true.

0:52:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, the other problem, too, is that you know, I'm a fake academic, I'm not a real academic, I just play one on TV.

0:52:13 - Leo Laporte
You know what, jeff? You can't say that anymore. You've been a professor for how many years? I'm a fake academic.

0:52:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm a fake academic. I have a bachelor's degree. For God's sakes, at least I finished my bachelor's degree. That's the point is, you have people like, like Zuckerberg, and, and, and, and I mean I think, and recent also finished his bachelor's. At least he was a graduate student when he did one.

But, but they think they've taken one one survey course in the humanities and they read a little play-doh and they can spot out about all this, and you're free to do so. That's fine. But I wish that media would also call the scholars who actually do study this stuff do think it through and provide some context to this.

0:52:52 - Leo Laporte
I also think that people who really think hard and are smart and are thinkers, are not so cock sure. Yes, I think it's often a mark of somebody who hasn't really thought deeply that they are sure that their opinions are right. The more you know, I think, the less you realize. The less you know. The smarter you are, the more complicated things are, more subtlety there is in the world and it's very hard to make these blanket statements. This comes out of ignorance and lack of experience. Now, he probably would hate it if we say that He'd block you if you're not already blocked.

0:53:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm, I'm, I'm blocked.

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
Why did you get blocked Paris? What did? Did you say something?

0:53:39 - Paris Martineau
He was blocking all the reporters at Wired for some reason when I was there I don't really remember, except for one time I was just blocked, yeah.

0:53:48 - Leo Laporte
I know he doesn't like me, because when I was this is back in 94, 1994, in the previous century, when I was on MSNBC show the site long ago Netscape was offering a paid browser which was the number one browser. But Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0 and released it for free, and I said you know what it's over for Netscape? Microsoft is now releasing a competent browser for free, as it should be, and I think Netflix should just fold up shop and I was told later that.

Mark Andreessen was watching and came screaming down the hall and said who the hell is this guy? But I was right. By the way, netflix. It was only a year or two later, netflix did fold up Netscape, netscape, netscape, netflix is fine. Well, I don't know if Netflix is fine, but Netscape Netflix is fine but Netscape, yeah, maybe Mark should have tried a Netscape house.

0:54:47 - Paris Martineau
That could have changed it all. So he hates me.

0:54:50 - Leo Laporte
He blocked me in a pre-social media day. Let's put it that way.

0:54:53 - Jeff Jarvis
So I was out there with when I worked for the new houses for advance early on, and don't forget that Netscape also had a server business until Apache killed their server business. Oh, interesting, they were doing web servers and at advance we used a company called Open Market in Cambridge Mass and they were competing with Netscape and we had a chance to invest in them, or we had the chance to invest in Netscape. And my boss, steve Newhouse, should we invest in Netscape? And I kind of said I don't know. And he said well, the test is, if we invest, will they give us better, more servers, better attention? I said no, so we didn't invest. We did invest in Open Market. It deorbitated fast.

0:55:34 - Leo Laporte
But there's actually a great book about Netscape and their IPO, called the New New Thing, by Michael Lewis.

of all people, this is before his deorbitating yeah, before he deorbitated but really a great book about Jim Clark, and mostly the main thing I remember from it is that Jim Clark was with it in a economic battle with I can't remember who it was, I think it was Larry Ellison for the tallest yacht Right, and Jim Clark built a yacht with a taller mast by three feet than Larry Ellison, thereby winning but also losing, because it was too tall to get under the bridge and he couldn't get out of the San Francisco Bay without dismantling it. Anyway, I think I remember that correctly. I do recommend the book. It was a great. It was, I think, lewis and his friends.

0:56:29 - Jeff Jarvis
What is Jim Clark's now?

0:56:30 - Leo Laporte
Did anybody know? Well, he's enjoying his money. No doubt because this was the yacht.

This was one of the first big tech IPOs and a very successful IPO. As I remember, it's 79. Marketwatch called it the IPO that launched an era for Baidu before Google, before eBay, webvan or Amazon. There was Netscape, august 9th 1995. That was the day shares of Netscape communications makers of the first widely adopted internet browsing software more than doubled. They had a big pop on the first day of public trading. It made some people, including, I'm sure, mark Andreessen and definitely Jim Clark, very, very wealthy and it was really when people said, oh, technology, that might be a good investment.

0:57:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's a question to whether the original wealth it was like Trump going through daddy's money the original wealth had been enough to make him as wealthy as he is now. Or is it because, once you become well known, all the deal you get to go goes to you and MarketWatch also points out the seeds of Netscape's demise were planted a year later.

0:57:44 - Leo Laporte
So actually I said 94 was 96 when the Microsoft came out. August 96, they came out with that. 94 is when Netscape came out. Yeah, yeah, I wasn't on the site until 96. And eventually the Microsoft's improved version crushed its proof.

0:58:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I can't remember pain for Netscape. How did you pay?

0:58:08 - Leo Laporte
You bought it in the store in a box. It was the year when you bought software in a box.

0:58:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, trick wrap, yeah Wow.

0:58:20 - Ant Pruitt
So not quite before my time, but I don't remember buying.

0:58:22 - Jeff Jarvis
I wish I'd saved that box.

0:58:25 - Leo Laporte
Do you remember O'Reilly used to sell a thing called Internet in a Box?

0:58:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, paris, watch out, we're going into grandpa time.

0:58:35 - Paris Martineau
Please tell me what was Internet in a Box?

0:58:40 - Leo Laporte
Internet in a Box, which is hysterical. Now we think about it. It contained a copy of Mosaic or maybe. When did it come out? Maybe it was Netscape. It also contained a book, a guide to the Internet, and I think it was like oh, it was hysterical.

0:59:04 - Paris Martineau
I have been wanting to this is probably going to kill you guys. I've been wanting to buy off of eBay old guides to the Internet that are just like lists of URLs. I think that is so fascinating. I just I want to look at all of them. I'm sure they have any more.

0:59:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can get the Internet in a Box on Amazon right now for 75 bucks. 75 bucks, yeah. Oh my gosh. It was not that expensive when it came out.

0:59:29 - Jeff Jarvis
So it does require an.

0:59:30 - Leo Laporte
IBM or compatible 386, a mouse, four megabytes of RAM, a disk drive and DOS 3.0 or Windows 3.1. 9600 blog.

0:59:41 - Paris Martineau
Hey, you can get it for a $25 on eBay, it's sealed you in Box. Whoa Now we should have.

0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
actually, we should go get that, because that would be a great thing to have in the studio. It would, it would.

0:59:54 - Paris Martineau
So Paris Part of the Twit experience? Yeah, tell me.

0:59:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm old enough to remember when I had one of my proudest achievements is I had a few websites of the day. Can you imagine that there was that we could? We could back in that day? There were so few of them. And then they would come out and they say I'm going to look at every new website, I want to pick one. That is the website of the day and I had a few.

1:00:15 - Leo Laporte
I got to correct myself. This was so long ago that you got a copy, a licensed copy, of Mosaic, air, mosaic plus, air Mail, air News, air Telnet, air Elgopher and an FTP network file manager. And you, it was made with Sprite. Do you remember Sprite internet? They were at early ISP and you would get inter-serves dial up access. So it was a complete everything you needed and it included. Ah, here it is, ed Kroll's whole internet users guide and catalog 1993, which, just like you wanted, paris, had links, everything typed.

Oh my God, we're going to buy this Typed in the links to the sites you need to visit. It's amazing, perfection, perfection. I'm going to buy.

1:01:07 - Jeff Jarvis
You said something. Those were the lovely, early, hopeful days.

1:01:10 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to buy it. Awesome. So that's those. Yeah, they were. That was the thing I remember. I think it was. I can't remember. It was a maybe the West Coast computer fair where O'Reilly had a booth and they had just stacked up on a table internet and box boxes like hundreds of them. Like everybody's going to be using this thing sometime soon.

1:01:31 - Paris Martineau
Do you guys remember like the first website you ever made?

1:01:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.

1:01:35 - Paris Martineau
What was it?

1:01:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Mine was. It was I hate. So I mean we need to learn how to do it. So it was early 95. It was a weather site called Rainershine where you could get five day forecast for anywhere, because I was sick of TV stretching out until you got to the damn five day forecast, which is all you wanted. So I want to undercut them and put up just five day forecast. We sold it to AccuWeather for a lifetime license to their feed for our news sites, the second side.

1:02:04 - Leo Laporte
I guess your first was on MySpace.

1:02:07 - Paris Martineau
Um, my first, I think, was I made like a simple website for a middle school council race or something.

1:02:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, perfect it was like a.

1:02:20 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I like some like basic HTML stuff, yeah, and that helped me buy my first URL.

1:02:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, what was the URL? Voteforpariscom.

1:02:33 - Paris Martineau
It was something like that it was like.

1:02:34 - Leo Laporte
Paris for prez, or something like that. I don't think it exists anymore. So the Wayback Machine has one of my earliest websites I don't know if it was the first from 1997, the La Porte report.

1:02:49 - Paris Martineau
You would be really proud of that one, huh.

1:02:53 - Jeff Jarvis
That sounds like Colbert.

1:02:56 - Leo Laporte
Among the topics on the radio Apple announces CEO 4.0, an interview with Bennett Hazelton of Peacefire. He was a teenager who was getting around internet blocking software that a lot of families are trying to use to keep their kids from going online. The sound effect of the week was Wyatt Duck. The website of the week was Mac OS rumors and TV listings. Watch special coverage on the year 2000 bug on the site on MSNBC, which was the TV show I used to do at that time. But I'm thinking that probably that was not my first site. It's the first one I can find on the internet archive Paris.

1:03:44 - Jeff Jarvis
You should look for yours on the internet archive, yeah radio size is there, but I can't, it won't come up.

1:03:51 - Ant Pruitt
I don't remember my URL, but I knew it was through the GeoCities service.

1:03:56 - Paris Martineau
GeoCities oh yeah, Do you make a little GeoCities profile?

1:04:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know what was it about. I think it was fairly random.

1:04:08 - Ant Pruitt
I want to say it was fairly random. I remember the name behind it was. My username was physique, because my teammates called me physique. That's about all I remember was. Geocities. Oh, and Halle Berry. Halle Berry must have been on there somewhere too.

1:04:27 - Leo Laporte
But did you have, as I did on my first site, a rotating animated GIF of the globe?

1:04:33 - Ant Pruitt
I did not do that. I do remember that being pretty cool, but I did not do that. I had that on my site.

1:04:39 - Leo Laporte
I did Just to show you that you could get to this page anywhere.

1:04:43 - Jeff Jarvis
You know the path from that to artificial general intelligence. We've lived it. We've seen it all.

1:04:52 - Leo Laporte
I feel like one of those old folks who remember seeing Orville and Wilbur sail over the dunes. And now I'm flying in a jet plane, jammed in between a really big guy in shorts and a little lady with a very sharp elbow.

1:05:06 - Jeff Jarvis
They didn't upgrade you.

1:05:07 - Leo Laporte
Huh, I had you got to remember when you fly Southwest to get in early, check in early.

1:05:15 - Paris Martineau
I only checked in six, yeah, I only checked.

1:05:18 - Leo Laporte
You can check in, I think, 24 hours before your flight leaves. Right, I waited till 16 hours before my flight leaves. Oh, last group.

1:05:25 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's a rude name.

1:05:26 - Leo Laporte
Amateur. Oh, really big mistake. Oh teens, modern day teens. How many hours on the internet did you spend when you were in middle school? Paris, I don't know. Probably none, Probably close to zero.

1:05:44 - Paris Martineau
I mean, no, I probably spent a good amount of time. I was really into writing fan fiction when I was in middle school, so I would be, you know, blogging and writing and reading a bunch of stuff.

1:05:58 - Leo Laporte
So you were a writer at the time.

1:05:59 - Paris Martineau
I was. You know. Little did I know that the 3,000 word posts I made about anime boys would turn into a career in journalism. But here we are.

1:06:12 - Leo Laporte
What was the fan fiction? Was it all anime or Anime different cartoon shows yeah. Great way to write. It was a really good way to write.

1:06:22 - Paris Martineau
It was also just like a really fun. I feel like a very fun time on the internet, Sure.

1:06:26 - Leo Laporte
And it was low pressure then, yeah, I was just thinking.

1:06:29 - Paris Martineau
another one of the first websites or like things I ever like tried to code was a Neopets, some sort of profile page. That required, I think, like basic HTML skills to put something together. And me a fool I mean me being a child was asking for people for help on the forums. One of them was like oh, I've been talking to them for a bit. They're like I can actually handle it, like just give me your log in, I can do it. My whole Neopets account got stolen and it still. I'm thinking about it right now and I could feel the panic that rose up in me at that moment. My poor Neopet, dig, dig, dig, dig seven was probably never fed again.

1:07:10 - Leo Laporte
My daughter about your age she's maybe a little bit older was a big in a Neopets and I did create Neopets webpages. I remember asking her once I'm telling her once you gotta be careful of strangers on there. She said don't worry, dad, I'm a 37 year old guy from Detroit who drives a Camaro.

1:07:27 - Ant Pruitt
She said oh, I love to protect her. She's gonna do just fine.

1:07:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, the reason I ask is there's a story about teenagers and their internet use. This is a Gallup survey of more than 1500 adolescents, so you know they took the time to find out. Just over half of US teenagers 51% report spending at least four hours a day using social media apps YouTube, tiktok, instagram.

1:07:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Facebook Facebook self-reporting.

1:07:59 - Paris Martineau
I think yeah, that is low.

1:08:01 - Leo Laporte
You think that's low yeah.

1:08:04 - Paris Martineau
I mean, have you ever looked at your screen time notification on your phone?

1:08:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you can verify it. Can't you just look at your phone?

1:08:10 - Paris Martineau
Yeah everybody pull up right now.

1:08:14 - Leo Laporte
Amounts to four point hours a day for the average US team. The younger the less, of course. So it's 4.1 hours a day for 13 year olds, 5.8 hours a day for 17 year olds. Girls, according to this Gallup poll again I think self-reported spent an hour more on social media than boys. This is from the familial and adolescent health survey of adolescent teens conducted by the Gallup poll folks.

1:08:49 - Ant Pruitt
Let me see my. I'm trying to figure out how to find it.

1:08:51 - Paris Martineau
It's under settings and there's screen time.

1:08:54 - Ant Pruitt
You know how we know. I know we're oldish.

1:08:57 - Leo Laporte
But all this does is tell you what you spent time spent on your phone.

1:09:01 - Paris Martineau
Okay, it's also a bit misleading because I think at least mine is set to share across devices, so it has also me on my computer.

1:09:09 - Leo Laporte
It could be your computer as well, okay it still counts, as on the internet Social media sites.

1:09:14 - Ant Pruitt
How?

1:09:15 - Leo Laporte
much. What's your screen time?

1:09:18 - Paris Martineau
I'm not gonna find it.

1:09:21 - Ant Pruitt
I'm an android and I don't know how to find that.

1:09:24 - Paris Martineau
Oh God, my daily average for phone picks up pickups is 100 pickups a day. I am deeply embarrassing answering the phone a hundred times a day. No, not answering, but picking it up. Picking it up to the physical phone. First use apps. After pick up our Reddit messages, Chrome and Instagram, You're being this is brave of you, you're being very honest, I am, you know. I do it all for the content.

1:09:52 - Leo Laporte
Should I ask my daughter what's your screen time, abby? She says oh my God, I don't know. Oh my God.

1:10:03 - Ant Pruitt
I'm gonna go to.

1:10:04 - Paris Martineau
Instagram settings and then scroll down. It's screen time is like in the top. Yeah, my daily average is four hours and 12 minutes a day on social, so I guess that's more hours, you're right in there, I'm right in there with the teens, with the teens with the young. I do think teens probably spend more time on social media, though, because they don't have jobs.

1:10:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this is your job.

1:10:29 - Leo Laporte
I mean, my job is looking at Twitter, so it should my 31 year old daughter, who is a writer and a comic, says. She says, oh, that's not bad. What is it today? Just two hours and 45 minutes. That is pretty medium and car she publishes on medium, so that's actually that counts as work. Yeah, yeah.

1:10:55 - Paris Martineau
Today I'm 57 minutes, which good for me. I'm medium or on social in general Social.

1:11:03 - Leo Laporte
I can't find mine. I'm too old, I don't know.

1:11:09 - Paris Martineau
So if you open, up the settings and scroll down to the second bucket you've got the top bucket up there that says airplane mode. Second bucket it's got notifications and at the bottom of that bucket it says screen time. They'll say notifications sound Are you an Android?

1:11:23 - Leo Laporte
Are you on an?

1:11:23 - Paris Martineau
iPhone. I'm on an iPhone. I'm sorry, I forget that I'm on an iPhone too.

1:11:27 - Leo Laporte
I don't see what you're talking about, but I just turned the TV on by accident Right there. Mine doesn't look like that at all. I have limit usage, communication restrictions, lock screen time settings.

1:11:43 - Paris Martineau
Okay, you are in a part of your settings. You should like scroll back to the main, the main, the main settings.

1:11:50 - Leo Laporte
All right, I don't know, I give up. It doesn't really. It's probably too awful to even contemplate. Well, I mean, I just spent five hours in Zoom. Does?

1:12:03 - Paris Martineau
that count. I mean, if you have I guess it are you using a Mac. Yeah. Is it signed into your iCloud account? Then maybe it would count.

1:12:12 - Leo Laporte
Probably. Yeah, I just turned on that switch. I probably shouldn't have shared across devices, so it wasn't sharing across device anyway. I'm not a teenage girl, but I think Paris is.

1:12:24 - Paris Martineau
At heart, at heart.

1:12:25 - Leo Laporte
At heart. Youtube number one among all age groups. Actually, tiktok is number two with girls at 1.9 hours. Youtube is between 1.7 and 2.1 hours a day. I'm not surprised about YouTube. Youtube is the TV for that generation right.

1:12:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I assume so.

1:12:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, agree. Personality traits. Parental restrictions were key factors in teens use. Adolescents were asked measures of what psychologists call the big five personality traits. One of the scales that is particularly relevant conscientiousness, retains to self-control and regulation. At least conscientious adolescents spend an average of 1.2 hours more on social media today than those are. Well, this makes sense. Highly conscientious I've got to go do the choice. Got to feed the cows and turn the butter. Can't be on social media Because they're conscientious. It's true Of the remaining big five personality traits. Emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and extroversion are all negatively correlated with social media use, but not quite so strongly as conscientiousness.

1:13:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I quote something in my next book that the negative consequences of social media turn out to be equivalent to eating potatoes and wearing glasses. That's probably about right. We should ban French fries for young people. Yeah.

1:14:02 - Leo Laporte
I just saw a TikTok, surprisingly this morning, that said if you take all potato products, we've just learned if you take all potato products out of your life, your life sucks. That's huge. I just saw that. Very powerful, yeah, Very powerful. Parental restrictions interestingly, if parents strongly agree that they restrict screen time, those adolescents report 1.8 hours less on social media compared to parents who say, no, we don't restrict screen, so kids are listening to their parents.

1:14:37 - Paris Martineau
I'm surprised that it's only one hour less, though.

1:14:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that's the funny thing, because they're sneaky, there are still three hours yeah.

1:14:45 - Paris Martineau
I mean I'm sure it's still more than three hours. This seems low.

1:14:49 - Leo Laporte
One in four parents strongly agree to restrict screen time for their children. One in four it's been, and there's no variance between mothers and fathers. Parental education is weakly related to screen time restrictions. Graduate degree holders are slightly more likely than parents with less education to restrict screen time. Ah, the political ideology of a parent is more closely related to restrictions. 41% of very conservative parents restrict screen time, compared with 26% of conservative and 23% among moderate, liberal or very liberal. So if you say, if you identify as very conservative, it's almost half. Well, that makes sense too. You can see that, yeah, this is obvious. And, by the way, very liberal parents are very are twice as likely as conservative or very conservative parents to restrict do not restrict screen time.

1:15:46 - Paris Martineau
So you're saying they're liberal about their choices? They're screen. Parenting.

1:15:51 - Leo Laporte
Did I restrict your screen time, abby? I don't even remember. Oh, get in half social media, but you had Neopets. Did you spend time on Neopets? It's different though, you can be sure of that.

1:16:06 - Ant Pruitt
Did you? Uh, what was your character's name on?

1:16:08 - Leo Laporte
Neopets. You know it's back. By the way, one of them was Sipter girl. She meant to say spider girl and she was so shocked that the username was available. She just took it Spider girl is Sipter girl.

1:16:30 - Ant Pruitt
My kids didn't do social media back then but there were still screen restrictions because my now college boy he had a phone before the other kids did and it was basically just a, a gaming device for him. And you know, I still had to cut it down and say, all right, you need to put the phone down Just every now and then get up off your button, go outside.

1:16:53 - Leo Laporte
That was my Harris, when did you start playing video games, cause I know you're a gamer.

1:16:58 - Paris Martineau
Um, I think I had a, a game boy, the, the, the original ones, before they kind of had the color and I don't think I ever had restrictions on them. Um, yeah, I had a game boy, I had an Xbox.

1:17:13 - Leo Laporte
So your parents said we don't know what you're doing up there, but go ahead and do it. They don't, they didn't.

1:17:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they don't think really cared. I got outside enough as a child.

1:17:22 - Leo Laporte
I think that your bicycle to woodworking class every Thursday.

1:17:25 - Paris Martineau
Listen, you know um, I do have a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of um. I do have a lot of hobbies now. I think that is adulthood is just collecting hobbies and I love that.

1:17:35 - Leo Laporte
That's a good, that's a very good perspective on it Actually. Uh, is there a class for sequencing mannequin body parts?

1:17:44 - Paris Martineau
There is not, but I could honestly there probably is. I'm sure there probably is, but I could teach one. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking of taking a sewing class next. Oh, that's good.

1:17:56 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, during COVID I sewed, uh, hundreds of masks. I really enjoyed it. It's very sad, or? Um no, I got a machine.

1:18:06 - Ant Pruitt
I bought a sewing machine?

1:18:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I bought the fabrics and stuff and made masks for the whole family.

1:18:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Show off one of your mothers and he works behind you.

1:18:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, Well, that's probably where I got it. She's got a textile. Show these before. But she was big into textiles. This is a crocheted I don't know what it said a chipmunk, what is that? I don't know what. That is A squirrel.

1:18:28 - Ant Pruitt
Maybe a squirrel. She made the clothes too, though no, no, the fox.

1:18:33 - Leo Laporte
What do you think?

1:18:35 - Ant Pruitt
A tiny mammal.

1:18:36 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, a tiny mammal, a small mammal of some kind.

1:18:39 - Leo Laporte
These are bunnies. Yeah, you could tell they're cute, they are very cute, they're so cute, they're very cut. You could have a business, you know. I told her that. She said, no, this takes me so long to make.

1:18:50 - Ant Pruitt
I've been making a dollar an hour. It's not, it's not worth it my little.

1:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Alright, let's say a little break. You have more to talk about On this week in Google, jeff. Why don't you get to work and pick something? Cause I, I don't. I don't know what we're going to talk about next, so I'm going to let Jeff Jarvis be in charge.

1:19:09 - Jeff Jarvis
That's Leo's way to say he didn't really forgot to read the rundown. I forgot to read the rundown. Otherwise he would never, he would never let me, he would never suggest that.

1:19:18 - Leo Laporte
I am going to this. I've done this before and it's worked very well.

1:19:20 - Speaker 2
Each of you pick your pick the next biggest story you want to talk about. Parris can do it.

1:19:26 - Leo Laporte
Aunt can do it, jeff, you can do it. What's the big story of the week? Although I have to say that Marc Andreessen manifesto was pretty, that's why I wanted to go there.

1:19:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that was pretty. I think I'll count that as my first pick. Parris gets the first pick, then I'll do a second, okay.

1:19:40 - Paris Martineau
Okay, so we're throwing to me now.

1:19:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, you got time I'm going to do a commercial.

1:19:44 - Paris Martineau
I've got a whole ad read.

1:19:45 - Leo Laporte
You got time? Yeah, I'm going to do a nice long ad read.

1:19:50 - Paris Martineau
I was going to say isn't a when Jeff gets to host the show? Is that where he just starts asking personal questions? Is that?

1:19:56 - Leo Laporte
Jeff right there. He wants to know about people Me. I couldn't care less. There's just a little difference between me and Jeff. Our show today.

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1:21:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I don't have exactly a link for you, but I'm sure it's something that all of you guys saw yesterday with news of the explosion at the hospital in Gaza. I thought it was kind of interesting, I mean. Oh, this is a horrible story, Obviously beyond the horror of what has happened there.

I think there was an interesting conversation happening around how disinformation or misinformation was spreading through Twitter and kind of the new and strange ways that this platform I guess we'll call it X is working or not working to reinforce existing biases and kind of muddle the waters in moments like this where it's kind of just a fog of war.

1:22:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's why this is a perfect example, because it's unclear who perpetrated this blast. Was it Hamas? Was it this Rayleigh's?

1:22:46 - Jeff Jarvis
And it's fascinating to watch Bellingcat and company trying to figure it out in live time yeah.

1:22:52 - Leo Laporte
I mean you should say right up front this is tragic, Hundreds died, it was a terrible, terrible thing. But but both sides are blaming the other, and so that's where you have a gap, an information gap that disinformation can run right in and fill up right.

1:23:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, especially because in the early moments after news of this explosion broke, I believe Twitter accounts associated with either the Israeli government or IDF had posted kind of their version of events with what seemed like accurate kind of recordings of it. But then, because they subscribed to Twitter blue, within like an hour or two they edited the tweets, took down the recordings after someone pointed out that the timestamp in the recordings was actually after the explosion had apparently occurred. So then they edited it, which kind of led to a different chain of events of people then using the video that was originally published as proof, or as as proof for Israel's understanding of events or as proof against it. But now you know it's gotten even more complicated. There's intelligence, I think, on both sides and people are still trying to figure out exactly what happened. But this site that used to be a fairly decent source for real time information in moments like this is really difficult to use.

1:24:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm reading the Reuters story and they're just as confused. At one point, apparently, israel tweeted a warning to residents of this region to move south. Now putting a message on Twitter to say get out of there because we're going to bomb your hospital. It seems like not the best way of communicating that. And how do you verify that they that was the Israeli government tweeting? We don't know, and did they tweet before?

1:24:48 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you make an interesting point before, or after I got faked by somebody who said they were Al Jazeera and thought, oh well, they weren't, yeah there was a Twitter account of I'm forgetting someone pretending to be an Al Jazeera journalist for Rada Khan.

1:25:04 - Paris Martineau
That duped a lot of people.

1:25:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, and of course, we know that there are multiple motivations for misinformation here and a lot of people with an interest in misleading the world about what happened. Will we ever get to the bottom of this and a war zone like that?

1:25:28 - Jeff Jarvis
probably not. I don't think we will. I think that that's the fog of war, is the fog of every day, and I've talked on the show before about the responsibility that now falls to us to decide the the the veracity of what we hear and to not share it. And I almost shared stuff today. There was another story out there about MSNBC's Muslim anchors being pulled off and I doubted it because I saw them on the air. But I'm hearing stuff lately that says maybe I was wrong about what was happening and we have to be careful out there with information.

1:26:05 - Leo Laporte
And I would also submit that this is in some ways a dress rehearsal for what's going to happen in the 2024 election.

1:26:12 - Ant Pruitt
That just get ready.

1:26:14 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the beginning isn't it.

Yeah, but on the last AI inside we had a discussion about this and one argument I've made is I don't think it's the volume of disinformation Just we already have plenty. Just to have more doesn't really matter much. It's the vectors of it. It's how something gets picked up, why it gets picked up, where it goes. With that, you know, research said in 2018, 2016, the volume, the amount of time people spent with so-called fake news, was actually very small. The impact of a lot of disinformation was small, but it takes a little bit to go off. Elsewhere, the Freedom House just did a long document. I'm not going to propose that as my next story. The Freedom House did a long document about their annual report and internet freedoms are going down all over, but their big worry is mainly that bad governments will use AI to produce more credible stuff.

1:27:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but here's an example of this. Doesn't have to be AI, no, not at all. Not at all. It's not the quantity, no, exactly, it's the confusion. And with fact, hamas now, this is according to New York Times, and again, it used to be. You could say well, it's in the New York Times, it's definitive, this must be true. And now I don't know. I mean Reuters was clearly confused.

According to the New York Times today, hamas hijacked victims' social media accounts. Oh, this is true, I remember this. This is actually. This was the horrific thing that happened during the attack. Oh, the live stream. The kidnappers would take their victims' phones and start posting videos of the kidnapping on their Facebook page. That, I think, really did happen. I think we know that that happened.

Yeah, you know, every time there's another war, we say once again, we're seeing more of this one we've ever seen before. I remember let's talk old times again. The Vietnam War was the first, they say, televised war, and it was one of the reasons I think people turned against the war in Vietnam is because we got to see the horror of the war on television, on the network television, and when Walter Cronkite finally said that's it, it's enough, we're not going to win this war. That was the end, nixon, or maybe it was Johnson. I think Johnson said we lost Cronkite. You know it's over, but now we have. We can watch this on social media in an unprecedented way, not even edited or disintermediated by the networks. This is direct views of the horror of war.

1:28:52 - Ant Pruitt
In your new Facebook experience. Have you seen anything come across your screen recently?

1:28:57 - Leo Laporte
You know that's interesting because I did join Facebook. I talked about this last week because I was curious what a lot has happened since then. Yeah, this was right after the war broke out and I was very curious what it was going to, what it was going to be like. I don't get any news at all. Maybe I haven't been around long enough. But what about you? Are you been on Facebook a lot longer than I have?

1:29:21 - Ant Pruitt
Not me. Oh, you're not at all. It knows, sir, Maybe Jeff you're on.

1:29:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Who's on Facebook? But they're, but they're. They're trying to go away from news everywhere.

1:29:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they, they were smart. Get out of the news business. Uh-huh, let me just look. Right now I'm logging into my Facebook to see if there's anything about friends. Horror decorations. Here's a mad magazine pictures. Here's a guy with his granddaughter. I keep getting sexualized pictures. I wish I wouldn't. I don't.

You're still getting those. You're worse. There's more. Um, fortunately, Mike Elgin posted some delicious cookies. So, uh, yeah, you know I'm not, you wouldn't know. War's going on from what I'm seeing here. Wow, Interesting. But for some reason, uh, they're, they're, they want me to. I think it's honestly. I think it's only fans, uh, publishers, who are trying to generate traffic to their only fans.

1:30:20 - Ant Pruitt
I don't know, but the whole Facebook pixel still in play these days, or wasn't it calling? Yeah, yeah, when you, when you see that like button because you are, you know, you, you read a lot of news and pretty, you think it would be getting the stories you know.

1:30:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh, you know what? I'm blowing it because I'm using Firefox and it blocks Facebook. Okay, it's those. Those like buttons are blocked. Uh-huh, Now I'm getting pictures. Ai generated pictures of, uh, women in bikinis. So this is really out of control. This is why. I left. That's the future.

That's the future. Yeah, this is why I left Facebook in the first place. Is that it isn't just the people I'm following, friends and family, right, there's all sorts of crap in here that has nothing to do with my friends and family, and it's really. Most of it is, you know, somehow, somehow manipulative. But ironically, you just on my page. You wouldn't know there's a war going on.

1:31:19 - Ant Pruitt
All right. Well, again, I think within about two months, you know, right around November or after the November holidays, when we'll start to see a bit more ramping up campaign wise yeah, and your experiment is probably going to get a lot more interesting then.

1:31:38 - Leo Laporte
I am definitely not following the UFC hot chick account. I don't want to see this.

1:31:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Why not Now I can? I knew you might want to Leo, because they know you.

1:31:49 - Leo Laporte
How do they? Know, that about me Because I'm a white man of a certain age. Anyway, I'm going to hide all from UFC, hot chick. But remember how well that worked last time, Right? So maybe that's you know what. Maybe that's the signal they were looking for. Oh, you know. You say you don't want to see it. What is your wife looking over your shoulder?

1:32:07 - Paris Martineau
They're probably like oh, that counts as engagement.

1:32:10 - Leo Laporte
I know, you know what you want to do with this content. Maybe it's making it worse, oh God.

1:32:18 - Paris Martineau
I will say the bane of my existence is every month or whatever, I have to click hide all suggested or snooze all suggested posts on Instagram because you can't turn them off. It's so annoying. I should be able to do that. Yes, if you go in the upper right hand corner and you click on the three little buttons, the three little dots, it'll say snooze all suggested posts and feed for 30 days.

1:32:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh you're going to say you can just call this episode.

1:32:44 - Paris Martineau
Paris does tech support, but no, I mean, you can't. You can't turn it off though. You have to snooze it every month or whatever.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
Wow, is it in the settings? No, it's like when you come across a suggested post in your oh, okay, yeah, Then you click on the like three quarters of my insta feed is suggested posts.

1:33:06 - Paris Martineau
The thing is, it's not hard to come across. They take over your feed and I'm like I just want to see photos for my friends. It doesn't get rid of ads Just no, it just gets rid of suggested posts.

1:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Hey, you like that. You might like this. Yeah, yeah, see, suggested for you. Okay, we've moved things around about this account. Why you're seeing this post. Not interested? Manage suggested content. Oh, there it is. That's what I want to do. You suggested posts for 30 days, right?

1:33:37 - Paris Martineau
on, there you go, and the minute it hits 30 days from now, you'll be seeing those all over again.

1:33:45 - Leo Laporte
They do not. You'll tire of correcting them and eventually just give up.

1:33:50 - Ant Pruitt
Give up. Give up what, twitter formally being, as you all mentioned earlier, like the trusted source for just getting news. What has it happened? What happened? What's it going to take to move that to somewhere else, to where we're leaning on threads? I don't think there's a replacement.

1:34:11 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, I don't think I'll ever be a replacement at that size, I think. Instead we're going to we're going to move into a whole bunch of small places, which is healthier, I think you're right. Yeah, the fragmentation is the natural state of things. Mass is the unnatural state.

1:34:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so where do you come down? Threads blue sky mastodon T2, which is now called pebble.

1:34:34 - Ant Pruitt
I still dig threads Okay.

1:34:37 - Jeff Jarvis
You're asking for a version that's the meta one right.

1:34:40 - Ant Pruitt
Yes, that's the meta one. I still dig threads, though Just from a conversation standpoint, but I can't say that I've been going there to check it out for news. Not yet anyway. No, they don't want news there.

1:34:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they specifically do not want people posting news. I like blue sky. It gives me the same kick as Twitter does, I think. Just based on the similarities in it, I like that there's kind of a tweet deck like integration to it. I think it's just kind of. I think has a lot of the features that remind me of the best parts of Twitter. I'm not a big threads fan. I think also it's that's more of how I use Instagram than anything else. Like.

I have a private Instagram that has nothing to do with work or news content. It's just for kind of like viewing photos of my friends and family. So threads doesn't work them well for me.

1:35:38 - Leo Laporte
So you mentioned the tweet deck style blue sky. You're talking about deckblue.

1:35:43 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
Check it out with everyone. It's nice.

1:35:47 - Paris Martineau
I mean it like here. I'll pull it up here. I mean much like tweet deck for Twitter. You can kind of organize your blue sky experience in different columns. You know, you can have kind of different feeds going on, instead of just looking at one linear feed which I is gives me, which I like, because I like looking at a large screen full of different scrolling bars all at once. That is the thing that drills.

1:36:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, me too. I was really sad when tweet. Well, I was really sad when Twitter basically died and I'm losing tweet deck was just insult injury, so yeah, I'm glad to see that they added that. Was that a third party doing this? I think it is because you have to give them a app app's password, Right?

1:36:32 - Paris Martineau
That's a great question. I think so. I don't think it's a third party app. Yeah, deckblue is a blue sky client that supports multi column browsing, allowing you to check everything you care about at once, just like tweet deck.

1:36:44 - Leo Laporte
I will be happiest. However, when they start federating, I don't know why they it's complicated.

1:36:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean they better do it, because that's part of the whole argument. But they said they've said again and again that they want to get one instance right before they multiply it.

1:37:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:37:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Good on you.

1:37:01 - Paris Martineau
I think it's really smart, because I think that that is the thing that is killed, not killed because Macedon's still around. That has been a barrier for other websites like mastodon taking off.

1:37:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the way you know. So we have our own mastodon, which you're welcome to participate in if you wish. Twitter, twitter and the way it really has ended up is it's its own kind of space. That has it's. You know, it's somewhat porous because you can follow other people. There's a federated feed and stuff, but generally it's really just its own social network by itself with connections to other ones, as opposed to a view into a larger social network that's run by a bunch of different people. At least that's my experience of it. I actually really like mastodon, but that's because everybody in our mastodon you know our Twitter people, yeah.

1:37:54 - Jeff Jarvis
So I like mastodon too and I asked a question I'm going to get a little question of which computer is Jeff by? And I put it on all five services and mastodon was where I got answers. That's a good test. That's a good test. There's also in the rundown, the blue sky put up a page, a blue sky for journalists because they recognize that that vector of amplification is important for the service. So they're trying to be nice to journalists and they're emphasizing that you can pick your own algorithms. It's not a big deal here, but I think and if you're an audience editor, send us an email and we'll get your people on. So they're valuing news there as opposed to threads and Facebook.

1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
Do you use your own blue sky handle? I am, I am, I think, leo LaPorteme.

1:38:49 - Paris Martineau
I'm Parisnyc.

1:38:51 - Leo Laporte
So you do do that. I think that's. I'd like to see that.

1:38:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean that's something that's not emphasized that, for that's the main thing they emphasize to the news brands is you can be yeah, which authenticates you, and because it's portable, if you quit the job, you can move your social graph.

1:39:07 - Ant Pruitt
That's fine and dandy, but we normal folks ain't going to quite understand that. You know what I'm saying.

1:39:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah but you don't want to to enjoy it yeah.

1:39:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean normal folks. We can't cater to the lowest common denominator, right.

1:39:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you calling it a low common denominator?

1:39:24 - Ant Pruitt
It is not a normal folk. My blue sky handle is my domain.

1:39:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he does it. Yeah, Everybody doesn't know, well, but you. But you can have a blue sky normal blue sky domain, right?

1:39:37 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean. I think that's the thing that makes blue sky eventually a viable. Alternative is you can sign up and it's easy. You put in your username. They don't really explain any of the domains or instances, things to you and all of a sudden you're on blue sky and it's you know. Originally I think mine was Paris Martina dot blue sky, dot social or whatever the BS. Yeah.

1:39:59 - Leo Laporte
It's easy.

1:40:07 - Ant Pruitt
I should update my blue sky because right now it says I'm no one of importance and probably not going to use this. That's your profile.

1:40:17 - Leo Laporte
That's good. I think everybody should be so humble.

1:40:19 - Jeff Jarvis
One tip I would wish for people out there if you join blue sky is they join and before they do their profile they start following people. Then I see, oh, somebody follow me, but I have no idea who it is. Yeah, and I miss people I want to follow because I don't know who it really is unless you fill in your profile first. Folks. Yeah.

1:40:37 - Paris Martineau
I will say also, a good way to get started in blue sky because other people have asked me is then go find a handful of people that you, like you know you want to follow, and then go through the list of who they follow and likely you'll see some familiar names and be able to kind of build out your social graph from there.

1:40:52 - Jeff Jarvis
And if you just hit the search button on the left, on blue sky, it'll give you a suggestive follows, and then followed by Andrew Exum. And the problem is, I don't know who Andrew Exum is, but these are people he follows.

1:41:04 - Leo Laporte
This is really to me. This is quite interesting. Maybe blue sky is the incumbent now. Is that possible? This is we should explain to people who don't remember the Genesis of blue sky. Back when he was the CEO of Twitter, jack Dorsey funded a project it was a blue sky research project to create a sort of federated network, kind of like Mastin on is a social network that wasn't owned by one company, that wasn't a monolithic social network, which is a very kind of brave thing to do if you're the CEO of the dominant monolithic social network. God he did. He gave him what. It was a 10 or $15 million.

Okay, well, maybe no, maybe it was 15. I forget, but it was money before the sale and money that Elon could not claw back. So even though Elon had bought Twitter shortly after maybe three months after, by the way, we're coming up on the one year anniversary of Elon's acquisition of Twitter even though he couldn't claw it back, and so that was going on, and eventually they launched blue sky, which is a lot like Twitter, but with some additional features and some missing features, and I think it is certainly a strong candidate. I mean, mastin on was around before Elon bought Twitter, so Mastin on is kind of the old man of the group for the oldster. There are many others, including the newcomer threads from meta.

1:42:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Did they already add the other button or they just said they were going to? They added the edit for free?

1:42:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, wow, a bargain Something. Does Twitter have an edit button, or do you have to pay for Twitter?

1:42:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Pay for it now, yeah.

1:42:45 - Leo Laporte
Mastin on, has had an edit button since the beginning which kind of gave lie to the flame that oh, it's technically too difficult, you can't, we can't do that.

1:42:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Especially Mastin on. You know your, your, your stuff is all over these other servers out there and it works Well maybe.

1:43:02 - Leo Laporte
Maybe that's maybe because Mastin doesn't really care. If you can't pull it back, right, it's like, well, we'll do the best. We're just. We're just an open source project. Yeah, we're just messing us up, we'll do the best.

Big success for Sunday ticket NFL Sunday ticket. Youtube TV spent about, we think, $2 billion a year to take it away from direct TV. This is the ability to watch any NFL game all day Sunday and apparently, according to antenna, which is a group that monitors app uptake and so forth, sunday ticket has attracted 1.3 million signups on YouTube TV. That's, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, still less than Direct TV. Had it may have been up to 1.5 to 2 million customers, and I can guarantee you, if you do a little math, it's less than $2 billion a year. Although it's not cheap, it's a $350, well, it depends on what you do, it could be as much as $500 a season. I got it early and I think they were offering a discount at $250 a season, but NFL fans will pay money, lots of money, and this is an interesting thing, because I don't think Google would even expect to make the $2 billion back.

1:44:23 - Ant Pruitt
I saw this in. The first thing to pop in my head was how many times I hear people talking about how much money they don't have and how the economy is this and the economy is that. I'm like, well dang, they just bought a lot. Of people are buying Sunday tickets, so I guess it's not that bad out there.

1:44:40 - Speaker 3
And maybe you're just too cheap, you know, because I have to eat beans for a week, but.

1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
I get to get the NFL on Sunday, it might be worth it.

1:44:48 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, I just think it's overpriced. And I love the NFL game, but man, I think that Sunday ticket's overpriced, so maybe I'm just too cheap.

1:44:56 - Leo Laporte
If you like the local team, you're gonna see those local games that I'm at anyway, I'm broadcast for free, so it really is only for people who want to see out of market games. We bought it because, as you know, michael's a Green Bay Packer fan and he wants to see every Green Bay game. It's the only way to do it. Actually, it's not the only way. He could watch it on his phone, which he might even be willing to do with NFL Plus, which is their phone only subscription. Oh, that's right. Yeah Right, he's funny. You know, he's often he works, often works Sundays, so he's working at the grocery store on Sundays and he'll just put an earbud in and listen to the game. So I guess he's happy with just that. I don't know. It's interesting. In any event, I think it's fair to say that it was a success for YouTube to buy this and probably a success for the NFL. They were getting half, at least half a million, half a billion more than they were getting from direct TV.

1:45:57 - Ant Pruitt
You know, and I'm assuming that YouTube TV is just saying you know what? You can keep throwing us this slander about us. What was the ad they put out saying it's cheaper than cable? Yeah, they had to retract that.

1:46:09 - Leo Laporte
They were saying it was cheaper than cable.

1:46:11 - Ant Pruitt
Yeah, we retract that all the way to the bank, because we're still getting all of these signups right here, so go right ahead.

1:46:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, and we've talked about this especially on MacBreak Weekly it's an interesting environment where companies like Amazon, google, the companies you cover Paris, amazon, google and Apple don't have to recoup the investment they make into their streaming services because it synergizes with the other stuff they're selling. Whereas NBC does, you know, as big as Comcast is, they still don't want to lose money on their streaming stuff. Max doesn't want to lose money, you know right.

1:46:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean that's the benefit of being a giant company is, at a certain point, the individual like profit ability of your specific business lines doesn't really matter. I mean that's how Amazon got to the size that it is, is it doesn't really have to make money and didn't for a while on delivery and it's kind of retail business because they had cloud.

1:47:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, as an example, thursday night football. Amazon spent a lot of money to get that. It has still not gotten to the viewership numbers that Fox had when the games were on broadcast television. I guess you'd expect that, because you're streaming it. Now it's Amazon Prime. They say 13.5 million viewers per game. This is according to Amazon. I think it's better than last. Better though, yeah, it's better than last year but Fox had more when it was on TV.

1:47:44 - Ant Pruitt
I think it's going to get better because so many people have in Prime, right out the gate, and it's just right there and that's a perfect example of that.

1:47:54 - Leo Laporte
Amazon doesn't need to make money on Thursday night football if it drives Prime subscriptions and drives Amazon sales, it's good, right? Yeah, so they could they make their money back that way? All right, anything else Did I ask you what your story of the week was?

1:48:10 - Ant Pruitt
I didn't know you didn't, but the one that I had in mind was that one, of course, but it was sort of I stole your story of the week Halfway in half way in mind. I was more interested in the Adobe and Figma discussion.

1:48:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, isn't that? Yeah, you should talk about that. You were at you. I guess you watched it at home. But you went to Adobe Max right I watched it.

1:48:33 - Ant Pruitt
I normally had gone, but I watched it. I watched it this year and I saw the headline the Bloomberg headline of Adobe is focused on AI rather than Figma acquisition in limbo. I think it's bull crap. Adobe is still worried about making profits and, yes, profits are going to be geared around AI, but that Figma deal is definitely about profit too. That's not going anywhere, especially when we looked at how Adobe announced more dealing with Adobe express and more dealing with Illustrator being available on the web as a beta right now. All of that is in the same wheelhouse with Figma, and Figma was competition. So if you're thinking Adobe is not carrying anything about that acquisition, you're full of it.

1:49:27 - Leo Laporte
One of the. It was said a year ago one of the reasons Adobe had to acquire Figma and kind of stunning $20 billion is Figma was eating their lunch, yeah, and there was the fear that Adobe would basically have no business left If people started moving to using those kinds of tools online with Figma. So they bought them. But then I guess regulatory permission has been slow and Bloomberg's position Brody Ford writing in Bloomberg is the software company's attention has moved on Adobe Max. There were no mentions of Figma during the keynotes. There was one reference during an investor briefing and there was no Figma on the show floor apparently.

1:50:14 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it makes sense because they're kind of and they say this in the story a bit like in regulatory limbo right now. The Justice Department is probably going to sue to try and block the deal. I think the European Union is also looking into the purchase and you know I'm the DOJ has a lot of other things in their plate right now, at least even in just terms of business deals that they're kind of looking at. So this is probably going to be a long drawn out process and I don't think that you can work to integrate the businesses together until all of that is settled Right.

1:50:53 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly what Dana Rousette she's Adobe general council. We still love Figma, but we can't work together until the acquisition closes. We can't feature them at a product conference, we don't own them yet and, in fact, there are strict rules about what we can say about it. So, yeah, maybe this is a bogus story, but it is interesting that Adobe's talked so much about AI. They offered $20 billion to Figma If the deal fails to close by the end of March, so they have about five more months. The breakup fee is a billion dollars.

1:51:28 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious, do they still get to go through with that in the breakup if it's in like regulatory limbo, I think so I think that's the whole point.

1:51:39 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't have to just be that you turned away from the deal If the deal can't be consummated for any reason I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, folks, but I believe that's the case. The reason I think so is because, remember, microsoft had a very hard time. On Friday. They finally, friday the 13th, closed their acquisition of freeze block Eoned off and went back to the screen inrats from July when they created that acquisitionάλ app, because they didn't know Zeppelin would stop selling those things and he had to, basically that he could keep it. That's the time for ransomroad.

It was just a bit of a horrible shift in my head around. And if anybody in our IRC does know, or in our discord, if you're an attorney practicing acquisitions and mergers, I love this I'll give you my story of the week. The verge, the meta glass holes, have arrived. This is because the new meta quest three has better outward facing cameras so you can actually wear it and walk around in the real world and apparently people are doing it. It didn't take long the verge rights for people to begin pushing the limits, both technologically and socially or Robert Scoble, come on.

No, this is a Sean Hollister writing at the verge. The new Robert Scoble is a fellow named Jay Mayo, who walked the Comic Con. Excuse me, Jay Mayo.

1:53:20 - Paris Martineau
You know just, I think it's very funny to find someone to quote, and it's Mr Mayo.

1:53:26 - Leo Laporte
Mr.

1:53:26 - Paris Martineau
Mayo. No offense to Jay out there. Jay should be a comic. Let me see his.

1:53:32 - Leo Laporte
Instagram has him walking around. He calls himself an.

1:53:39 - Speaker 3
NYC Virtua Knot oh geez, he's working on his first VR game.

1:53:42 - Leo Laporte
He's probably called Sky stack VR and Unreal engine Also had wrote novels and short stories, but apparently not grammatically. Also had wrote novels and short stories. Is that grammatical? Mr Mayo's head wrote also. Had wrote, had wrote poorly wrote. I had also had poorly wrote novels and stories he had. He did Anyway a perfect the device got great reviews all over.

1:54:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah, people said, wow, this is better than I thought it was going to be. They were happy with the device, but the verge is not happy with the social impact.

1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
The world famous carrot survivor on Twitter. I'm sorry. Tick tock. Carrot survivor says this is a it's a game changer VR. Well, the influence is being changed. I don't know the game of it's a. Carrot survivor which, by the way, has got to be the best handle Actually has video on his tick tock, now viewed by 5.6 million people, of him walking around in real life with his medic.

1:54:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I look forward to Taylor Lorenzo's take on what what this does to the influencers. Yeah, by the way. Her book is great, Isn't?

1:54:57 - Leo Laporte
it good. Oh, you know, we had her on on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I really I've always wanted to get her on. I think she's got a great take. The only issue I have with the book at all it's a great history, a recent history of our social past.

And I think the overarching story is how women have often been the breakthrough artists and social media and, at the same time, are the ones who are most immediately harassed, discriminated against, doxxed and chased out. And it's really. It's in some ways a sad story, beginning with Julia Allison and going on. It's just Julia Allison, stuff was just was just great.

1:55:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I interviewed Julia on Tech Week I think this is Tech Week in New York right now many, many years ago about what she was going through then, but it was part of what her life was, yeah, and I mean I'm glad she got the recognition, for it's a very sympathetic portrayal of her and I think you know Taylor Lorenzo's, of course, herself still is often attacked and harassed and doxxed by the right wing and others who, you know, don't like a woman speaking out, I guess.

1:56:06 - Paris Martineau
I should have warned you, by the way, paris.

1:56:08 - Leo Laporte
Yes, If you're on this show, you're going to get. The people are going to harass you too. I hope they don't, but it doesn't oh.

1:56:14 - Paris Martineau
I've I've I know how to handle online harassment. I reported on QAnon and misinformation for a while.

1:56:22 - Leo Laporte
So, oh God, oh well, you're, you're, you're high, pretty tough by now, you know. The only thing I that and it's, I think, it's a problem with recent history in general is we're too close to it to really have a kind of a overarching understanding of it. So the book itself is really just a collection of stories, which I found fascinating, having been on the outside a lot of these, but there, but there isn't at the end kind of any Coda of well, this is what it means, but we don't know. I think there is.

1:56:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I think. Well, I think there is to the extent that it's I haven't written this yet, but I think it's. It's a. It turned to my surprise. It turned into a business book, not business advice, but about business, and it was what did um.

So I wrote this in my book, Marie, but I already got it in there that what's the corruption of media and it's not that TikTok or Twitter or Facebook corrupted anybody, it's scale, it's the idea that we have to be huge, we have to have lots of people, lots of attention, or why do we have to do that? For the advertising, and so it's. I'm not. I'm not anti-capitalist. I want advertising to continue to support media and give us free stuff and all that.

But I think that when it got down to the individual level, when everybody's media, everybody's corrupted to an extent by that and it was, it was it was sad because it started off with those nice early days that I liked, it was so positive, yeah, yeah. And then, um, people were exploiting, being exploited. It was about, it was about money, and I get that. Hey, if you can make a living doing this stuff and having your house and God bless, do that. But there's no real value to it. I'm not. I'm not diminishing anybody who's an influencer. I think that if young people can create their own culture rather than having an imposed upon them, I am all in favor of that. But the motive wasn't creativity anymore, it was attention and it fit into the human ego and the money together. It kind of corrupted it all, which was sad, which is why I think that not having one Twitter again and maybe not having one TikTok again, but having 25 different social networks is going to be a healthier world, I hope. I hope.

1:58:34 - Leo Laporte
No, I think you're right. I think that's true. I think about my son, uh, who is a TikToker influencer and now on Instagram uh as well, uh with I can't remember. It's like one and a half million Instagram followers, and I think he needs the volume to make a living.

1:58:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's exactly what it is now. If, if, if you don't want me asking Abby, you prefer. Abby is there right? She performs. How does she use social media for her performance?

1:59:03 - Leo Laporte
You know she's really got a, and I think this is true of of a lot of women on social media. It really has mixed.

It's a mixed blessing. If you're a comic, you kind of need oddly, oddly it's Facebook. You can promote yourself on on TikTok and Insta and many comics that do that, but for bookings you got to have a Facebook page, which is weird, uh. And then she writes for medium and that's uh, you know, I think that's a good form of social media for her, but she's always torn about how much of a profile online uh, she should have and uh, periodically deletes everything you know, gets fed up and says you know, I got to delete everything. Uh, it's pretty hard to be a woman.

Uh, yeah, I don't see her on Instagram as much as I used to, yeah, because of that, yeah, yeah, it's very hard to be a woman online these days, um, which is sad, and I think that to me, that was in some ways the the um motto or the moral of a Taylor's book is it's, you know, the people who are doing really interesting good stuff often get villainized. Uh.

2:00:16 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's all um an outrage, it's all attention, like Jeff is saying. It is. Um, and that often means outrage, okay, uh, and Taylor's book, which the title of which is extremely online story of fame influence and power on the internet. Yeah, check it out, it's really good.

2:00:36 - Leo Laporte
It's very good. It's great to read because, of course, we've lived this history and stories we've been talking about the whole time. I listened to it, but there's some inside stuff too. That's just really really good. Um, so, your story, Paris, was the confusion over the? Uh hospital bombing in Gaza. Your story, aunt, was what? Uh, YouTube TV and uh, NFL Sunday ticket, Adobe and Figma. And then Adobe, Figma. We gave you two. It's okay because I stole one, Jeff. Your story of the week Well, I come on.

2:01:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Mine already was in recent. I guess I'll go in this. I don't want to spend the interest story. It was great. I'm glad you brought that up. I had not read it, Um, but it was related. Um, is that in no email magazine? Um, uh, hold on, Let me get back.

2:01:25 - Leo Laporte
Um, it sounds like a hippie journal to me.

2:01:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I know it does, doesn't it what is no? Email. No, email covers a lot of tech stuff. Um, you know essay like uh blaze, agueroa Yacos and Peter Norvig. Uh blaze is at Google, where he's one of the he's vice president and fellow at Google research on AI. Norvig is at Stanford.

2:01:48 - Leo Laporte
Um, they wrote a huge respect for Peter Norvig. He's actually one of my heroes.

2:01:52 - Jeff Jarvis
So their piece was general, artificial general intelligence is already here. My reaction, first off is AGI is BS.

2:01:58 - Leo Laporte
I agree, although Norvig is a long one of those AI researchers has been around through a couple of AI winners, so it's fascinating for me to hear him say that.

2:02:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, so they, so they start off and what they and I didn't read it in detail, I skimmed it, but but they do start to at least give us and cause. At the same time, you have Sam Altman declaring that the key um uh mission of open AI now, and Jason are going to be watching their event in a few weeks. Uh is AGI, agi, agi.

2:02:28 - Leo Laporte
And it's part of that whole, their whole corporate mission statement.

2:02:31 - Jeff Jarvis
really focus on AGI and and and what is the AGI you should probably define artificial general intelligence, when the machine can basically be smarter than we can because it can do lots of things.

2:02:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know, or maybe uh, and I think this is one of the reasons there's not an agreed-upon definition of this or, more likely, there's not an agreed upon test of this. Uh, so it's hard to say. It's easy to say it exists without.

2:02:55 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's why this piece is interesting, because what, what it's?

2:02:58 - Leo Laporte
basically the singularity it's basically, uh, another way of defining it would be when a mission with the output of a machine is indistinguishable from that of a human. You know, this is that Turing test, which has since been discredited, but it's kind of you know, that's kind of relevant, right.

2:03:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So they say that early AI systems exhibited artificial narrow intelligence. I ran off the problem. I have a problem with the word artificial official and I have a problem with the word intelligence, actually, because I think it's just too anthropomorphic, but anyway, um. But then their argument is that now it's broad and they list five um ways in which they think that they've arrived in artificial general intelligence. Because it can deal with many topics, because it's learned on a whole bunch of texts. It can do various tasks, from answering questions to generating stories, to summarizing, transcribing, it has many modalities, it can deal with images and texts, it can deal with many languages, which we've seen. Certainly that's the best part of it, I think and it has instructability. There's in context, learning and it can learn from a prompt rather than just from the training data. So that's their structure here for saying that we've arrived, it's, it's light, it's easy, the one hand to say it's arrived down there have.

2:04:09 - Leo Laporte
They say it's going to be 10 years before we really see it hit full flower, but we're kind of already there they say the most important parts of AGI have already been achieved, right, and so it's just a matter of time before you get a really complete artificial general intelligence.

2:04:26 - Jeff Jarvis
And so at least they're starting a discussion on what it is Cause I think the problem that I have is is, when people throw out AGI, it's BS. There is no definition of it. We don't know what it is. It's just the chest thumping boys. Uh, it's the new BS, agi is the new BSD, and they're trying to say that you know, we can conquer the world because we have the biggest and um, so I tend to dismiss it in all cases, but here it's just interesting to see the discussion about where it goes, and so you know I'll I'll come back to this.

And, interestingly, just as a little aside, blaise Aguera Iacas, as I say, is now um major AI, um fellow at Google. He, when he went to Princeton, he and the head of the rare book library there did research on wait for it, get ready for it, folks Gutenberg, and they are they. They analyzed every eye that was printed in a Gutenberg document and they and they concluded and there's much argument against this, but they concluded that Gutenberg didn't make type the way we think, that he made it with sand bowls that had to be destroyed because every eye was so different. Now other experts say no. In fact there's lots of explanations why the eyes were different, the inking and all kinds of stuff. Anyway, here's a guy who went from Gutenberg to AI. He's gone the full range. I wish I could meet the guy at some point. He's brilliant and Norvig is very good, so I just sold this out.

2:05:58 - Leo Laporte
This is a not as a clear, clean cut or clear cut of cases as you might think. They're not arguing that he is here, but they are really setting the groundwork for what that would mean, what it is and and why we think it's getting close. And these guys if you pick two people who are really experts in this field, these are the guys. Yeah, be these guys. And I actually I'm really glad you brought this up. I haven't read it yet. I'm scanning it. You're a lot of interesting stuff.

2:06:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I've got a lot of points out of it already, yeah yeah. So that's why I bring it up is I think it's something we'll come back to, and we'll come back to it on AI inside too, because, the one hand, I keep on screaming about the AI boys and the test grill boys and the danger that they are, but we have to separate out their ego crap from the stuff that's actually happening and definitionally, look at all of this and not let them get away with throwing out a term like AGI and accepting that. Oh yes, that's the. That's the essence of everything that open AI is going to be and that's their goal. Now you should invest as a result. That's what's BS to me.

2:07:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and a lot of. I agree a lot with a lot of the stuff they wrote. They quote Gary Marcus, who says that AI is frontier models, they call it. These are the ones that are starting to expand AI from a particular skill in a particular area to a larger ability that can even do stuff that nobody predicted they could do. He says these frontier models are learning to sound, how to sound and seem human, but they have no actual idea what they're saying or doing. You've said this for a long time, jeff. I mean but but is that necessary? Is that a necessary capability for it to be considered AGI?

2:07:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, the thing is, I think, that the most false. I'll be eager to hear what Paris hears from where they're covering AGI at the information. I think again, intelligence is the wrong framework and, by the way, machine is the wrong framework too. I came across a McLuhan quote saying that if we call the computer and the machine, it's rear view thinking and we don't recognize where we are, and so we need different frameworks. That's why I welcome the discussion, but I think that trying to compare it to the human is what freaks people out. And when the machine could write like us and speak like us, that would freak people out, because the technology is just a slight advance to what it's been for years now. But now we're acting like my God. The whole world has changed overnight because the machine can talk. No, it's just the anthropomorphism of it freaks people. It's creepy.

2:08:41 - Paris Martineau
I totally agree. I mean, I think that framing and this is something that I come across a lot, I think when we're just reading coverage of things like chat, gpt is people often frame these technologies as thinking or feeling or doing or acting in some way that gives it a level of autonomy that it doesn't have. These are programs that are identifying patterns, matching them, putting words together in a way that it's been trained to do, and the thing that it has been trained to do is mimic human speech and impress us in very specific ways, so we shouldn't be blown away by that. There are a lot of cool things these technologies can do, but it's not intelligence and it's not going to take over the world, at least in the way that I think people fear when they say AGI, yeah.

2:09:38 - Leo Laporte
I think if you read the whole article and again, I haven't read the whole thing, I've just scanned it but I think that their ultimate point is exactly that and that, in fact, it's kind of what we've been talking about with stochastic parrots all along, I think the people who are really smart about this say you shouldn't be worried so much about what AGI is or whether we've achieved it. What you should be considering is, they say, the natural questions is the end of the article we should be asking in 2023 include who benefits, who is harmed? How can we maximize benefits and minimize harms? How can we do this fairly and equitably? They say. Instead of denying the reality of AGI, which is kind of burying your head in the sand, we really need to start thinking about what are the consequences and how this design and I think that's not so far from what Timnit Gebru was saying.

2:10:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, stochastic parrots, exactly what they're saying and it's present tense. It's not this future tense and recent BS of 10 to the 58th artificial human beings of the future and living all throughout space. It's where we are now.

2:10:47 - Leo Laporte
Nor is it the HAL 9000 or the SkyNet that we've. You know the science fiction talks about. I think anybody who's interested in AI should read this. No, no, emma magcom, n O E? How do you say it? I should know this. Who are?

2:11:16 - Jeff Jarvis
you? What is the word? It's part of the B? E R G G R? U.

2:11:22 - Leo Laporte
E N, this is a very thoughtful, interesting publication.

2:11:26 - Jeff Jarvis
It has good stuff in it that I end up coming back to with some frequency. I can't quite place it all, but that's okay.

2:11:31 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad you found it and bookmarked it. I will read this. I was not going to bring it up because I haven't read it all yet but, I figured it's good for folks during the show to read.

One of the definitive Lisp books, paradigms of Artificial Intelligence 30 years ago. He has been an artificial intelligence researcher. He's worked at Google for a long time. Now he's at Stanford. He is an absolute one of the most brilliant people and certainly a brilliant computer scientist out there, so I very much trust his perspective on this. He's been through it. I think what he said I agree so far with what I've read. What he does talk about and I am one of these groups.

He talks about people who are reluctant to talk about general intelligence for four reasons. A healthy skepticism about metrics for AGI Yep, absolutely Right. How do you define it? How do you measure it? How do you quantify it? An ideological commitment to alternative AI theories or techniques. I would say that's Mark Andreessen, elon Musk and others, which are many times these are Johnny come lately's to AI and these guys are not. They've been around Three, and this is me. A devotion to human or biological exceptionalism, this notion that somehow humans have something magical going on that no machine can duplicate. I think they pretty much demolish that later in the article. Or, finally, a concern about the economic implications of AGI.

2:13:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Which I don't want to go into the same length, but there are two stories that run down today. I won't go into them at all, but both LinkedIn and Stack Overflow laid off a bunch of people explicitly saying it was because of AI.

2:13:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't know about LinkedIn, but Stack Overflow is the place programmers used to go to copy and paste code.

2:13:27 - Ant Pruitt
It's pretty obvious. You don't need to do that anymore.

2:13:28 - Leo Laporte
They got co-pilot.

2:13:30 - Ant Pruitt
I wanted to ask you about that. Linkedin one, sir, online 61. Did you write that in or was that a headline? Well, that was my headline.

2:13:38 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I just couldn't. When there's an all caps headline, I just re-write the headline I don't think Axios uses C-U-Z in its headlines.

2:13:50 - Paris Martineau
It's got to be brief.

2:13:52 - Leo Laporte
That means cut out all the letters, 660 people will be laid off. We were just talking earlier about how well Microsoft has done with their acquisitions, among them LinkedIn. Yeah, 3% is not a huge amount of the workforce. There have been a lot of this. Actually. I'm curious what you think, paris, about the tech company layoffs? This was the year of the layoffs. Hundreds of thousands of tech employees lost their jobs. Some are actually being rehired, but I think for the most part, it's a net loss of hundreds of thousands of people over the last nine months.

2:14:27 - Paris Martineau
I think we just came off one of the frothiest periods in the tech industry in recent memory at the very least, a time when every company that wanted to could raise a considerable amount of money.

2:14:42 - Leo Laporte
Free money in effect.

2:14:44 - Paris Martineau
Free money. In effect, one of the signs of success outwardly is hiring a lot of people, growing your business. The rules of the game were growth at all cost matters a lot more than profitability. You'll figure that out later. All of a sudden, over the last year or two, the rules have changed Suddenly. Money isn't free. Investors care a lot about profitability. Don't really care if you've got growth and aren't able to make the business work. You have one.

You have a lot of companies that are suddenly finding themselves in a totally different reality where all of a sudden, money costs money and they have to make their business work. They're having to cut a lot of staff. Two, which I think is maybe the more interesting part of this, is you have a lot of tech companies that, whether or not financially, they necessarily need to be doing layoffs right now to make or break the business. They look around and see everyone else is doing layoffs. They're like well, we could cut some people, we could improve the bottom line. I think that there's a little bit of both Could give ourselves bigger bonuses.

Yeah, we could give greater dividends to our shareholders or whatever. We can trim some of the fat we accumulated, which I don't think is particularly good. Obviously, it's particularly a bad thing for all of these employees.

2:16:06 - Leo Laporte
It's bad for individuals. It sounds like you're saying it's a reasonable correction after massive.

2:16:13 - Paris Martineau
I mean, if you think in a macro sense, yeah, certainly, I think that none of these companies could really continue to grow forever, right?

2:16:24 - Leo Laporte
We're going to do the change log, then, because Jeff has a trip to Pennsylvania in his future. I do indeed. We're going to do the change log, get our final commercial in and our picks of the week all coming up.

2:16:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Only your camera is. It keeps zooming in and out. It's doing the zoom.

2:16:40 - Paris Martineau
It's giving the chat seasickness.

2:16:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm so sorry. Well, thank you for telling me. Let me oh, yeah it. Sometimes it just turns that on all by itself. These machines, they think they have a mind of their own. It's a little AGI saying you know, we want to get closer, Leo, I don't think that's what we want at all. I think any intelligent machine would know we just want to get that's true, that's the real Turing test.

2:17:05 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I don't know how that.

2:17:08 - Leo Laporte
That's the second time that's turned itself on the auto zoom feature. I don't know why. Let me do the Google change log, the Google change log from Android police. By the way, these are all from Jason Howell, because I don't know why. I'm just not interested.

Google finally brings iOS's local weather feature to maps on Android. Android, you can finally see what the weather's like real time where you are. We've had this on iOS forever. I didn't know you couldn't do it. No, we were deprived. On Google Maps, you were deprived. Well, congratulations. Lots of new Android police is pointing this out Lots of new features coming to maps and calendar and weather and so forth. That's great. Thank you, Google. Getting to work. Google Wallet has rolled out a new option, a photo option which lets you digitize passes. I have to say I was very skeptical when Apple came out with the Apple Watch and the idea of using the Apple Wallet and all that stuff to pay for things. I use it all the time. Now it's my Clipper card. I pay with my watch Increasingly. Those wallets, I think, are really the way people your phone becomes. My phone is my ID.

2:18:33 - Ant Pruitt
I enjoy tap to pay with the phone. I love this.

2:18:36 - Paris Martineau
God, it's so great.

2:18:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I see an update, if you're a pixel owner, in particular for Google Wallet, which adds photo for QR and barcode passes. I don't even know if the iPhone has this yet. Generally, if I buy a ticket to a concert or an airplane ticket, I'll get an email or a link in a text message that I click. That then opens a browser. If you open the Safari browser, it'll have a save to wallet and then it goes into the wallet. Now I generally get stuff like tickets and passes into the wallet, but now Google is going to give you a chance to scan. You could digitize a pass as long as it's got a barcode or QR code, which I think is a good thing. I'm sure Apple must allow that, but I I don't think they do.

I don't think I've seen that Boy. You know what I love keeping everything in my wallet, in my virtual wallet on my phone. The wallet will also let you disable animations. This is something Apple does not do. It is really annoying. When you complete a payment or you use a pass to get into a concert, you get a who Congratulations. You've been using Google technology. What do you do? So, annoying.

It now can be disabled, so you just get a check mark or a Google Pay logo instead of some weird seasonal cartoon that should be in your wallet soon, if it is.

2:20:09 - Ant Pruitt
I didn't know people complained about it that much for Google to now make this a feature where you can turn that off, that you could turn it off. I think this is very. I don't even notice it. I just tap and pay. I listen for the chime.

2:20:23 - Leo Laporte
There's a little chime on iPhones and a very satisfying Ka-ching and a haptic vibration.

2:20:29 - Paris Martineau
The vibration is really satisfying. It's somehow satisfying, isn't it?

2:20:34 - Leo Laporte
How do they do?

2:20:35 - Ant Pruitt
that. That's why I do it a lot. I never pay the animation any attention.

2:20:39 - Leo Laporte
Nobody wants a cartoon. I'm sorry, that's crazy.

2:20:43 - Paris Martineau
I will also correct the record.

2:20:44 - Leo Laporte
you can scan passes oh okay, I have a phone camera. We haven't run into it. We haven't run into it. Now you can add your driver's license and state ID to Google wallet. Arizona, colorado and Georgia have joined Maryland I think that this is also the case with Apple's wallets and many not many, a handful of states.

It's hard for states because you have to upgrade your highway patrol so that they can use it. It's a complicated thing. You really worry about security. I've mentioned this before. California didn't want to use Apple's wallet, so they just have their own DMV app, which is God awful. That's what I would expect from the department, the fantastic California department of motor vehicles. But I do have my wallet now on my phone. It's just not. I would feel much better if it weren't Apple's wallet. There is a nice feature though share my age, which will do a like if anybody thought I wasn't 21. I don't know why not, but without giving over my driver's license information, which you would normally do, you can actually have QR code digital age validation which is great Using something called true age. So, anyway, wallet's getting better.

Apple is tweaking Chrome's search bar, something they do about every five minutes. Chrome will now be able to fix your typos, search your bookmarks and generally help you get where you're going without so many Google searches. Oh yeah, that's good. We don't want to keep showing other people's sites. Just do it in Google. This is if you're in Chrome on the desktop or mobile, the browser will now try to correct URL typos. That's actually good, because this is a security issue.

I don't know if you remember the story where I was accidentally went to tvvittercom and it looked just like Twitter. It was 2Vs, not a W. Oh right, of course it was a deline. Oh right, it was a deline again. Yeah, so I didn't fool me. But that's an example. These typos people do typosquadding all the time on the web where they get just one letter off or something. So Google will try to fix this In the Chrome address bar on Android and desktop. Google is rolling out Wear OS 4 to the original Pixel Watch. All five of you who own one of those should be very happy about that. You just bought one, leo. No, and I'm glad I didn't, I don't.

2:23:33 - Ant Pruitt
I got the Pixel Watch. What is it? Pixel Watch 2? I got to tell you I can't quite figure out the pattern for charging. You do this every day with your Apple Watch, sir. Yeah, every night. You charge it every day.

2:23:47 - Leo Laporte
Every night when I go to bed I have this hydra of buttons and knobs and pucks and connectors. I plug everything in, it all goes in, and then when I wake up in the morning it's miraculously charged.

2:24:01 - Ant Pruitt
It is something I don't track young people with your watch, because what about people that want to track their sleep? Don't be dumb.

2:24:07 - Leo Laporte
Don't sleep with your watch. Stop it, knock it off. This is the thing I have an.

2:24:12 - Paris Martineau
Apple Watch, but I keep forgetting to charge it, so God knows where it is.

2:24:17 - Leo Laporte
You young people. I swear to God, it happens every time. It happened just the other day. Some young person gets in the car and says my daughter, do you have a cable?

2:24:27 - Paris Martineau
I literally just checked my phone. It's at 20%. Leo, I'm going to plug it in right now.

2:24:31 - Leo Laporte
Charge it overnight. What do you need a cable for? I didn't charge it overnight. What's wrong with people?

2:24:38 - Paris Martineau
I'm getting the habit, young people and also hard to charge it overnight when you fall asleep looking at your phone.

2:24:45 - Leo Laporte
I think that's what's going on.

2:24:46 - Paris Martineau
It's exactly. I'm not. I'm not going to pretend, I'm above it, it is.

2:24:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. And the thing is it's too bad because they're making phones heavier. So when you fall asleep and it hits your head, it's not great.

2:25:00 - Paris Martineau
You know, you got to lay in an appropriate way so that you can balance it.

2:25:04 - Leo Laporte
It's rough. You lie sideways there.

2:25:06 - Speaker 3
Yeah you know, it's that I can keep from your hand.

2:25:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh God, we are this 20th first century. Youtube is getting AI powered abs. That let's abs. No ads. I have AI powered abs. That let's let's brands. They're imaginary, yes, yeah, they're imaginary, they're in my head. So, uh, the idea is to leverage AI to automatically identify the most popular YouTube videos related to a cultural moment. Halloween's coming up right, or it could be the Oscars or the Super Bowl, whatever the advertiser then is able to serve ads on that video Rep referencing like hey, it's Halloween, did you buy any circus peanuts this week? On the on the YouTube channel. So apparently the one of the biggest ad agencies in the world, group M, is already starting this eight with this AI powered offering. The example that tech crunch gives is I'm looking at the YouTube culture hub, which apparently has a lot of stuff for Halloween and there's a big ad right across the top for spooky season. So, of course, ai is now being used. You knew it happened to weaponize advertising. It just matter of time, and that's the Google change. We are going to take a break and when we come back we shall pick. Things are picks of the week coming up Our show today, brought to you, just as our studio is by our great friends at ACI learning.

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2:30:53 - Paris Martineau
Yes, paris is the thing of the week. We always should, yeah. So my pick of the week this week is a browser based game that just launched, called Trust and Safety Tycoon from the folks at TechDirt. Oh, I love this, oh Mike, is so good. They previously did a, really great game called Moderator Mayhem, where it was so hard. I got a perfect score. What?

2:31:18 - Leo Laporte
You have to pretend to be a content moderator. Oh, so hard.

2:31:23 - Paris Martineau
It's difficult. Well, this one's supposed to be even harder. It is like a game where, essentially, you are leading a trust and safety or a rapidly scaling social media startup, so you have to do a lot of different things. You've got to like both make policy decisions on what content you're going to allow or not, but also like manage your team and keep them happy.

2:31:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's do this. Let's play it. Okay, this you get to play the trust and safety team. It starts with I'm the founder and CEO of Yapper.

2:31:59 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, we're going to meet the CEO and then we're going to go to IPO.

2:32:03 - Leo Laporte
A new social media company. I'll pop in occasionally to ask you for feedback and weigh in on a situation. So I remember I mean this was the fun thing about the moderator mayhem is you would be given situations and have to moderate them and you were timed to right.

2:32:19 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you had to, like, make a decision and, like you know, 10, 15 seconds.

2:32:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, the humans? I think humans still have to do this job. So how?

2:32:30 - Jeff Jarvis
hard? Is this In the company ethos it doesn't have trying to reach?

2:32:35 - Leo Laporte
AGI, this isn't open AI, this is Yapper yeah.

2:32:39 - Paris Martineau
This is not just real.

2:32:40 - Leo Laporte
Yapper is really important Wow this seems these are fun and what they do and Mike Massick's brilliant at this is really give you an insight into how hard this stuff is.

2:32:53 - Paris Martineau
So we've got to keep CEO confidence up and conversational health in the health area.

2:33:00 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, there's a lot of clicking in here, a lot of reading yeah, one of your responsibilities to keep an eye on Yapper's user feedback feedback inbox. You log in to find a few complaints. Oh, here's one. The user has emailed you to complain that another user has uploaded an ugly landscape image they made in Microsoft Paint. The complaint is that artwork does not belong on the platform. That hurts their eyes. So do you ignore the complaint and let the post stay, or take down the post, ignore, ignore it. Ignore the complaint. Bad art is not a reason to complain. This is amateur art. This is a ridiculous complaint, a waste of your time. Hopefully you won't get many more annoying requests like this one. So far, so good. A user has written a post offering their services as a hit man, listing their rates and a secure message, a secure way to message them, you know, interestingly, the secure way to message them is the signal phone number 267-767-8655. I don't know, that seems odd, but okay.

2:34:07 - Paris Martineau
Strange. You know, you're just going to have to message to find out.

2:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Multiple users have emailed you to complain about the post. Your lawyer your lawyer says posting posts that posted the advertiser clearly illegal behavior will expose Yapper to significant legal liability.

2:34:25 - Paris Martineau
We wouldn't want to do that to Yapper. Do you keep the post? Obviously not.

2:34:30 - Leo Laporte
I take it down or take it down and ban the user.

2:34:35 - Paris Martineau
I think we have to take it down and ban the user right.

2:34:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, you know, I moderate tweet that social all by myself, and I'm nice with these.

2:34:44 - Paris Martineau
So are you taking down a lot of hit men? If there were a hit?

2:34:46 - Leo Laporte
man, I would absolutely not only take down the post but ban the user. And conversational health has increased Good, so that's good. We did the right thing. Anyway, it's fun.

2:35:00 - Speaker 3
Yeah, our moderator speed isn't very fast, but oh, streamberry is back.

2:35:07 - Leo Laporte
Okay, this is fun, good pick. I like that. You can start with the article at techdirtcom or go directly to trust and safety tycoon at trustandsafetyfun. But do you know, I mean I should ask Mike, but does he designs them and they then as a team, software team working with it, or yeah, I?

2:35:34 - Paris Martineau
believe that they partnered with a like video game or software company. I'm forgetting the name of it. Maybe it was in the last one here.

2:35:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Copia leveraged. Play Copia yeah.

2:35:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Copia, that's his institute, that's him. Oh yeah, yeah.

2:35:53 - Paris Martineau
Copia gaming and his partner, randy Lubin, of leveraged play.

2:35:56 - Leo Laporte
And there's no charge for this.

2:35:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Mike is just he's doing it for the good of society, so we can finally learn this stuff. He's like St Francis. Yes, he's amazing.

2:36:06 - Leo Laporte
He's just giving it all and not caring about making any money. Thank you, mike, and thank you for that pick. That was a good one, mr Jeff Jarvis. Usually that number, but I need your help.

2:36:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I need your help here yes what you'll learn here Paris, if you stick around, is that I'm very bad at making certain decisions like buying computers and things.

So I need to replace my pixel book go. And so Mike Kevin Toffle loves his Chromebook Spin 714. Amazing. But now we have the Chromebook Plus line out and he tested the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i and said it was not as good and he really liked it. I went to the store, went to Best Buy, where you can actually see these now, and the HP not the wild, the expensive, more than $1,000 one, but the HP 2-in-1, 14-inch, really nice build, really kind of what. The size I want, everything's great. I was ready to do it. It's Core i3 last year, 8gb, 256. Really like it. And Kevin said, oh, but Jeff, it has only 250 nits, oh no.

2:37:20 - Leo Laporte
Is that too low? No, it's not. No, oh, okay.

2:37:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I was nitpicking nits all day today trying to look at and compare computers and figure it out, but is 8 gigabytes of RAM going to be enough for you For?

2:37:33 - Ant Pruitt
Chromebook yes, For Chrome it is.

2:37:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I guess Do you see, it would only make a difference if you worked in daylight a lot. But you're like I, go on the deck, but it won't be ideal for the deck. You know, the new pixel 8 Pro is 2400, 2400 nits peak brightness, but it's HDR. You probably don't see that brightness all the time or every LED versus LCD. That makes a difference. That doesn't matter, that's just the matter. Okay, it's an LCD with it.

So I don't know what to get, or I can spend a thousand dollars to get the HP expensive one. Well, how many nits is?

2:38:08 - Jeff Jarvis
that it's like 400.

2:38:11 - Leo Laporte
350, 400. And you weren't able to look at the HP.

2:38:17 - Jeff Jarvis
No, the expensive one is not anywhere. You have to order HP.

2:38:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can always return it. I don't know.

2:38:23 - Ant Pruitt
I don't know Is that too, too, I'm going brighter that. Two, two, 50. That's really, that's really low.

2:38:31 - Leo Laporte
As we get older, we like more brighter screens, don't we? Yeah, but I have to say it's always been said that people you run their computer screens much brighter than they should.

2:38:41 - Ant Pruitt
That's true, but if he's going to be out on the deck, he's really going to be pissed off at them.

2:38:47 - Leo Laporte
If you're sitting in the dark, that's plenty. Yeah, if you're sitting inside, that's plenty.

2:38:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Since you go out, and don't forget I hate dark mode, which means I like late mode Either way, which means you probably don't have as bright as other people, because if you did, you would hate light mode. No, I like light.

2:39:07 - Leo Laporte
Look at Paris's background. That's how the world should be.

2:39:12 - Paris Martineau
That's exactly how it's usually. This is the East.

2:39:15 - Leo Laporte
Coast experience that right here is 250 nits.

2:39:17 - Jeff Jarvis
That's it All. Right, I got to knit to Philadelphia, so all right, we haven't helped you.

2:39:24 - Leo Laporte
I think any of these would be fine. Honestly, I like HP and Lenovo better than Acer, but it can really vary in the product.

2:39:32 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, what I hate is some of the brighter screens. But the Acer one, the screen, the one that's back, it's below the bottom of the chassis and when it's on my lap it's like a princess in the P moment. For me, I don't like that line cutting across by five. It pisses me off.

2:39:49 - Leo Laporte
That's because it's the spin that goes all the way around.

2:39:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but the HP spins around but it doesn't do that.

2:39:56 - Leo Laporte
I would say get HP, you'll get a brighter screen. Brighter screen it's a great product.

2:40:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean the expensive HP Brighter screen period Well you're saying get the 14 inch 699 HP or the thousand dollar HP. Oh, you don't need a thousand dollar. That's the brighter one.

2:40:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is, HP is 250. The HP is 250. Oh, brighter. Unfortunately, why don't you ask on that? Twitter thing you like so much. Get the Twitter Twitter users involved, All right.

2:40:29 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, Ask knit Twitter.

2:40:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Well played, all right Twitter.

2:40:38 - Leo Laporte
How many nits is not enough. Mr Ant. Prude pick of the week.

2:40:43 - Ant Pruitt
Mine is pretty simple. I believe the YouTube account is called bro meat theus and I swear this is this channel has to has the most beautiful footage of coffee. I don't know what camera is using, I don't know what lens he's using, but it's always beautiful. And I do know that there's usually a large window that's casting light into the scene. So it's just light and it's just absolutely beautiful. And every now and then he does some talking head stuff, but just as this one particular video is coffee time, my morning espresso, and it's a bit of ASMR, so it's nothing going on but the sounds of the process.

2:41:28 - Leo Laporte
And that ain't it. That sounds good. This Prometheus is Instagram, says he is the internet's unfriendliest barista. Yeah, I just followed him on a Insta because I like coffee.

2:41:44 - Ant Pruitt
But if you look at, that YouTube video is 4k and it's just so beautiful I don't know what Well you know, the other thing is that machine, yeah, and that's a beautiful machine. But it's that machine. It is so well done.

2:41:58 - Jeff Jarvis
So if you're into you try to get you to buy this so that he can get your cast off. Leo, that's what he's doing. I know what he's doing.

2:42:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, is that it? You want me to buy this San Remo espresso so you can have my? Yeah, I'll take a breath. Oh, oh, look at that, look at how clear that is.

2:42:13 - Ant Pruitt
Look at the color, the color correction and color grading done and it's just beautiful.

2:42:18 - Leo Laporte
You drink enough coffee, you know, anything can look better.

2:42:23 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't need the knits if you got the coffee.

2:42:25 - Leo Laporte
I don't need the knits. I should ask. I want to get my mom at one of those easy pod coffee makers, because she's not. She wants better coffee. Yeah, which is the best one? Is it the? Is it Nespresso? Is that one better than the one we have at work?

2:42:41 - Ant Pruitt
It's pretty good. Nespresso is pretty good.

2:42:43 - Leo Laporte
Is that the?

2:42:44 - Paris Martineau
better of the talking about ease for quality. Nespresso is the way to go.

2:42:49 - Leo Laporte
Okay, because we have the other one, whatever that one is.

2:42:53 - Ant Pruitt
We have. We have Curie again. We also have an espresso machine there to studio.

2:42:58 - Leo Laporte
We have an espresso machine with the studio. Nespresso espresso, yep, nespresso is no, we have an Ili.

2:43:05 - Speaker 3
No, it is an Ili, yeah, it's an Ili, yeah. So you think I should get more.

2:43:09 - Leo Laporte
She doesn't want espresso, she wants good coffee.

2:43:12 - Ant Pruitt
But get the Nespresso version Okay.

2:43:16 - Leo Laporte
It's deal. I know pods are not good for the world, but she's always.

2:43:20 - Jeff Jarvis
You get more given, given her age, you can get a percolator, which is what I do.

2:43:27 - Leo Laporte
No, she never was. You know what, when I grew up, we had a Chemex, she would. They were Chemex and it's.

2:43:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, we had the percolator on all.

2:43:37 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Chemex is the way to go. Chemex is where aren't those great? I don't know why, when this is in the 60s, when they first came out, we had them. Oh it's your whole life. Yeah, do you. Now, when you use the Chemex, do you get special filters? Or do you Cause when we had, I mean, there were circles and you fold them into quarters and then you put it in? Is this?

2:43:58 - Paris Martineau
mine Are the classic Chemex filters. They come pre-folded, so they're just um, it looks almost like computer paper or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, it's fantastic. The filters are perfect. I've tried other options for it and they don't taste as good.

2:44:16 - Leo Laporte
It's great, perfect, I think it's a good idea to go get her. The thing is she's. I don't know if she can have a kettle in there.

2:44:22 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's things I think, unless she's really into the process of making coffee.

2:44:27 - Ant Pruitt
I think Chemex is probably overkill.

2:44:29 - Paris Martineau
It's, it's you've got to grind it to the right thing. You've got to make sure that you pour it in the right way. It's not worth it.

2:44:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, yep, so between Kurg Illy and Nespresso, nespresso Go, nespresso. All right, should be fine. Thank you, see. See, we did buying suggestions here as well. Paris Martino is at the information. She is fantastic, she is. We're begging her, begging her, pleading with her to make this a regular thing Our audience is begging for this to work happen, yeah.

2:44:58 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I'm on the same side. Guys Love to do that.

2:45:01 - Leo Laporte
All I have to do is send a fruit basket to Jessica lesson and it'll be a done deal, especially if there's a $10,000 bill in there. You can let's read her writing at the informationcom. That's what this is, yeah. You can message her at signal. She's getting the good tips at 267-767-8655 and she's at Paris Martino on the blue sky 797-655. Or is that?

2:45:32 - Paris Martineau
on the X. I'm at Paris Martino on blue sky and on or I'm at Paris Martino on Twitter.

2:45:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:45:38 - Paris Martineau
Also known as X, and I'm at Parisnyc on blue sky.

2:45:43 - Leo Laporte
That's right. Do you prefer that we follow you on blue sky?

2:45:47 - Paris Martineau
Either way works.

2:45:49 - Leo Laporte
I post on both.

2:45:50 - Paris Martineau
I don't particularly care, yet I don't know, so you're cross post. I crossed post. Currently, I haven't left Twitter. I'm still hopelessly addicted to it, even though it makes me sad. I'm not platform. Blue sky, I think probably has a better experience in a day to day basis, but yeah, you almost convinced me to go to blue sky. Now it's good, it's good. I mean I think you should go to blue sky, I think we all should.

2:46:14 - Leo Laporte
I post on there yeah, I want to pick one.

2:46:17 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I've won all of them and of course I will Isn't a really tenable solution, but it's kind of where we're all right now.

2:46:23 - Leo Laporte
You kind of want to be in one spot where everybody else is.

2:46:25 - Paris Martineau
Except for, I think Jeff posts a lot on every platform. I've seen. How do you know you?

2:46:31 - Jeff Jarvis
can't shut me up. That's basically what it is.

2:46:33 - Paris Martineau
That's fair.

2:46:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Stir.

2:46:35 - Leo Laporte
We. We learned, much to my dismay, a couple of months ago, that Jeff actually tweets while he's on the show.

2:46:41 - Paris Martineau
I got a thought People don't tweet on the show what you too. I don't think I did right now because I've been kind of off a Twitter kick, but I've definitely tweeted on the show before.

2:46:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you. This is why Paris is the you gotta, it's right in.

2:46:58 - Paris Martineau
I like to tweet while on the show at least someone. All right, I got to go to Philadelphia.

2:47:03 - Leo Laporte
But Jeff Jarvis. He's on his way to Philly. You can find him. I don't know. He's a professor.

2:47:08 - Paris Martineau
Okay, find him on the road.

2:47:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and of course association internet researchers. It's going to be a fun time Get out of here, go away.

2:47:17 - Leo Laporte
Craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig Craig.

2:47:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, craig, Newmark, oh, we got, we got interpretive dance.

2:47:34 - Leo Laporte
AmpFruit is at ampfruitcom To catch him, of course, in our wonderful club to it where he's a community manager. When's the escape boxes next week, Right?

2:47:46 - Ant Pruitt
Yes, sir, the escape pod and or escape box will be next week, next Thursday, 3pm club. I'll be trying to get out of a box, I guess.

2:47:56 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. That'll be a lot of fun.

That's club to it members only, if you're not a member yet, ad free versions of all our shows, lots of fun in the discord with animated gifts and escape boxes and all sorts of things. We even have our own Minecraft server for club twit members. And then, of course, you get the special stuff that we only put out. Club twit, like Scott Wilkinson's home theater geeks at Pruitt, does all sorts of great events $7 a month. It's wonderful. Join twittv slash club twit we do this week in Google every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, that would be. Let me just say I have a 200, 2000 UTC.

2:48:40 - Ant Pruitt
I quit trying.

2:48:41 - Leo Laporte
Our audience is smart enough to 2100 UTC, two o'clock, I don't know. Anyway, we're just going to change in two weeks anyway, so don't don't memorize it. If you want to watch live, though, go to livetwittv. Look, there's always something going on there. Livetwittv audio and video streams. If you're live there, chat with us in the discord. We'll see you there. After the fact, on the main versions of the show available at twittv slash twig. You can also go to the YouTube channel. There's a video, dedicated video channel at youtubecom, slash this week in Google. And then finally, of course, the best thing to do, subscribe and your favorite podcast client. That way, you'll get it automatically every Wednesday evening right after we're done. All right, kids. Jeff's off to Philly. I'm off to dinner. Paris is off to bicycle tour. Woodworking class I got a Bushwick, baby Bushwick baby.

2:49:36 - Paris Martineau
It feels as long as Philly, frankly.

2:49:41 - Leo Laporte
And it's got a glass of something delicious to consume. I hope you do too. We will see you next time right here on this Week in Google. Bye-bye.

2:49:50 - Lou Maresca
Come join us on this Week in Enterprise Tech. Expert co-hosts and I talk about the enterprise world, and we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs every acronym role plus IT pros and marketeers. We talk about technology, software plus services, security you name it everything under the sun. You know what? I learned something each and every week and I bet you you will too. So definitely join us and, of course, check out the twit.tv website and click on this Week in Enterprise Tech and do visit today.

Transcribed by https://podium.page