This Week in Google 745 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 Twink this Week in Google. Paris Martino is here, jeffrey Allen Jarvis is here. We're going to talk about a lot of things, including Google's new Gemini AI. It's part of Bard. You'll see it in the Bard chat client and as well as on your Pixel phone using Gemini Nano. And what a demo. We're going to take a look at the demo. It's pretty darn impressive. It makes me think general intelligence is not too far off. There's some great stories about how we got here with AI, a new app that goes on your Android device that gives you messages compatibility without a third-party server. We'll find out more about the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year, a word I'd never heard of, but Paris will explain. She's young, she's hip. It's all coming up next on Twig Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twig.
This is Twig this week in Google, episode 745, recorded Wednesday, december 6th 2023. Livy Rizdup, baby Gronk. This week in Google is brought to you by Bitwarden, the open source password manager to help you stay safe online. Get started with a free Teams or Enterprise plan trial, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwardencom. Slash Twitter. And by Kaleid. Kaleid is a device trust solution for companies with Okta. Kaleid ensures if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit kaleidecom slash Twig to book an on-demand demo today. And by Melissa, the global leader in contact data quality. Bad data is bad business. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at Melissacom slash Twig. It's time for Twig, which I think we're gonna call and we're not this week. In general, the show that's about Google and a lot of other stuff. Hello, paris, martin no, great to see you. And Gizmo, your your sweet little kitty.
0:02:28 - Paris Martineau
Hello, Gizmo will or will not be making an appearance. It's not my choice.
0:02:32 - Leo Laporte
She got very shy as soon as the cameras came on. Yeah, oh well, oh well, and Mr Jeffrey Allen Jarvis is falling asleep. Hello, jeffrey Allen Jarvis, I got up 17 and a half hours ago. Oh, no wonder you want to get the show on the road when? What were you doing?
0:02:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I was in Vienna, austria.
0:02:55 - Leo Laporte
Yes, not Virginia, vienna Austria. No, no, and you flew home and you haven't gone to sleep.
0:03:01 - Jeff Jarvis
since I tried to take a nap on the plane and didn't succeed, I tried to take a nap here and it succeeded.
0:03:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so sorry. Well we can, I should sleep well tonight. You'll sleep well during the show I have. After the show yeah, yeah, yeah, he is the Leonard Taup Professor for Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of.
Journalism at the City University of New York. Or one more week. Oh, it's begun, the deorbiting has. Has has begun the deorbiting. Yes, we're, we're heating up now. Yes, did you see, speaking of deorbiting, our good friend Joan Donovan, who we didn't invite to be on the show today but probably wisely declined is? Is she suing Harvard?
0:03:49 - Jeff Jarvis
She's pretty. She's filing complaints against she has a suit against. She has a suit, does she?
0:03:53 - Leo Laporte
want money $500 million. What is she?
0:03:56 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know what the ask is, but she wants revenge, I think, which was the case when she was on our show, right, we did that book. I don't know if we can find Joe Esposito's cover for the book.
0:04:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, we made up a title for her book. So she's pretty miffed, shall we say, about Harvard Understatement for a guy like that Harvard firing her. As you know, she and we've had her on the show several times love her. She's one of our favorite guests. She specializes in disinformation. Her first book was called Meme Wars and is brilliant. I highly recommend reading it. It's about you know how the meme kind of took over, starting with 4chan and and on and on and on.
0:04:41 - Jeff Jarvis
She was fired not the right word but she was deorbited at Harvard and has gone on since by the way, they took away her primary work saying that that a faculty member who that at Harvard you can't do anything unless it is sponsored by a real faculty member? Yeah, and she wasn't a.
0:04:58 - Leo Laporte
She wasn't a, you know, tenured faculty member In fact, according to the Washington Post, Harvard's response to Donovan's claims are that she was a staff employee, that Harvard had not been able to find a faculty sponsor to oversee her, as university policy requires. It also denies that she was fired, saying she was offered the chance to continue as a part-time adjunct lecturer, which, which pays about $200. Yeah, and she chose not to. Good news is that Joan has found a excellent post at Boston University, but she is accusing Harvard and this is really the the accusation of taking money from Metta and, as a result, getting rid of her.
0:05:38 - Paris Martineau
She was one of the people who got the Facebook papers, Francis Hogan's she previously was the research director of Harvard Kennedy School's projects on like mis and disinformation. She ran a really incredible kind of group there that, put together, I mean, was really instrumental in helping journalists cover mis and disinformation in this crucial time and authoring a lot of, or co-authoring a lot of, reports that shown a light on what Facebook and Metta was doing at the time.
0:06:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Now full disclosure. I should mention that when Joan was at Data and Society before going to Harvard, I funded her work there through the news integrity initiative, which was funded in great measure by Facebook, not to the tune of $500 million.
0:06:32 - Leo Laporte
However, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave Harvard $500 million for a new artificial intelligence institute at the university. Now, prior to that, joan had obtained the Facebook papers and championed their importance before an audience of Harvard donors that included Facebook's former top communications executive, that's Eliot Shraig. Eliot Shraig, yeah, so she, she. That was October of 2021. And the papers were absolutely devastating for Facebook. They said, in effect, that she knew or, I'm sorry, facebook knew that what they were doing was harmful to young women and that Zuckerberg suppressed them back and forth about.
0:07:24 - Jeff Jarvis
about the in Hogan's version it was somewhat selective in what was put out and there's been a lot written since, but yes, there were things in there that certainly didn't want to happen.
0:07:34 - Leo Laporte
So Donovan was the main according I'm reading from the Washington Post article the main attraction at a Zoom meeting for top Kennedy school donors October 29th. At that meeting she said the papers show Metta knew the harms it was causing. Eliot Shraig, asked repeated questions during the meeting, said she badly misunderstood the papers. By the way, this is all in a 248 page filing that Joan Donovan has submitted to the education department in the Massachusetts attorney general. So that was October 29th.
Shraig is no longer is no longer at Facebook Just 10 days after that meeting Kennedy's. 10 days later, kennedy school Dean Doug Elmendorf, a former director of the congressional budget office, emailed Donovan with pointed questions about her research goals and methods, launching an increase in oversight that restricted her activities and led to her dismissal before the end of her contract, as according to Jones declaration. So October, so October 21,. She has 2021,. She has this meeting. 10 days later, harvard, which knew, by the way, they were going to get this half billion dollars, ames pointed comments at her and December 7th of that year, it's announced that they're going to give the chance. Zuckerberg initiative is going to give them half a billion dollars.
0:08:57 - Jeff Jarvis
The one thing about something like this is, I think, that it's a lot easier to show that Harvard probably acted in conflict of interest. Whether Chan Zuckerberg had any knowledge of this, I doubt that we'll know.
0:09:09 - Leo Laporte
We may never know, even if Harvard did this on purpose. It's one of those other chains where yeah, this is the sequence, but did it one thing cause the other? We don't know. Harvard has lots of lawyers.
0:09:22 - Jeff Jarvis
So you look, our Jones Jones was making when we had her on right after she left. She was making noises about getting her just desserts and she's getting them, jones going for him.
0:09:33 - Leo Laporte
That's very. Joan Elmendorf has declined to comment to the Washington Post.
0:09:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the Harvard Kennedy School has had. I won't go into great details, but they've done. They've had some other bad stuff they've done to people.
0:09:47 - Leo Laporte
And, sadly, this information. Researchers all over the country are actually under a lot of pressure in academia. Our good friend who was on what a couple of weeks ago from Stanford is no longer at the Stanford Internet Observatory. What, yeah? But I think that's yeah. I think Alex, alex Stamos yeah, I think he and Chris Krebs sold their company to Sentinel one, and it may be that this was on his initiative. I don't know.
0:10:17 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I believe he said in the show that it was something about being an officer at a public company at the same time, but I mean that, besides the point, you're right in the fact that people who report on or research miss and disinformation are often the target of harassment campaigns that often end up with them losing their jobs.
0:10:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and much of the regulatory presumptions about where we might go forward with regulating some social media rely on independent researchers and they need support, financial and otherwise. And and because government's not going to do it, because they don't have the facility to do it, the companies themselves aren't trusted to do it. We need independent research to do this work and we need to find ways to have them do it in safe circumstances.
0:11:05 - Leo Laporte
You may remember when Joan was on last time, was it her title or our title? I think her title was. I think was her title Anarchy in the Academy, a memoir by Joan Donovan, and this was, of course, joe Esposito's tentative cover, bloodstained cover with the Harvard logo on it. I'm sure Joan won't get the right to use the Harvard logo on her cover, but yeah, I mean, I think she was implying this and I think that's the real point. Paris is that they're under pressure. You know, there's a really, I think, horrible quote in the Washington Post piece. At one point the Dean Elmendorf, according to her, told her she did not have academic freedom because she was staff rather than faculty, right, and so, in a way, if he really said that that's the smoking gun, right. Anyway, we love Joan. We have great. I think we have really a great regard for her. I don't know what really happened. I'm glad she's on a tenure track at Boston University, that's. I guess that's the bottom line. Anyway, interesting story and regarding one of our favorite people, I thought I'd pass that along to you.
There is a lot of Google news. We might have to change the show name back. Nothing general about this week's stories. Oh, I should mention Ann has the day off. You might notice there is no Ann here.
0:12:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I was just going to remind you of that.
0:12:36 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, but you know what, you guys? It's Paris and her grandparents, which is, I think, a great yeah, it's my favorite podcast. We, in fact we were going to call it this week in grandpa's, and then you showed up.
0:12:48 - Paris Martineau
So I'm really sorry, guys. I knew you guys were kind of twang around between that and this week in geriatrics. I'm sorry that I threw a wrench in that.
0:12:59 - Jeff Jarvis
This this week in grumps.
0:13:00 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's because we can grumps, we could do, we're doing that tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, that's tomorrow We'll be.
0:13:08 - Leo Laporte
It's called the well, lisa said it should be. Oops, all grumps, oops, all grumps. It's the old farts. Uh, twit with you, jeff, me, steve Gibson, doc Searles. What other old fart am I missing? Who? There's somebody I haven't met.
0:13:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, now I've forgotten Somebody else on the list.
0:13:30 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, we record. We record that tomorrow it will be uh, for a Wednesday December. Let me look at the calendar 27th, so that'll be the special. Oh no, I'm sorry, it's Christmas Eve. What am I saying? It's a twit. It'll be Sunday the 24th. It's Christmas, it's Christmas Eve, twit.
0:13:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Are you going to church and celebrate the birth of God, or you can see four really angry old men grumpy each other your choice which is more which?
0:13:58 - Leo Laporte
is more inspiring Rod Pyle's part of it. He's not that old. All right, we're going to have one guy who's not in his. Is he in his 60s? He's my age. Oh, he's old. All right, he's my live and learn. I hate him. He looks younger than me, all right. So the Google stories, of which there are quite a few, and most of them are AI focused, google has decided to ship they. You know, google was way behind in the AI thing, right.
0:14:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I think that, no, google had done tons and tons and tons of stuff with AI in its products, in translation, in completion, in every single product, and they, but they, didn't really get credit for it until along comes, cool Judge, ept, google did more than anybody else in AI what are you? But? But they felt left behind. Well, it was under the covers. Yes, yes, it was inside. It was AI inside.
0:14:58 - Leo Laporte
So nobody knew. I mean, for all we know, apple's doing the same thing, right? We know Meta has been doing a lot, only because their Lambda model leaked out, and now they're embracing that. Amazon's probably doing something similar, anyway. So Bard was Google's response to chat GPT, and they now have a new AI model just came out today called Gemini, and Gemini, which is, they say, their most powerful AI to date, will be coming to Bard and Pixel 8 smartphones. If you have a Pixel 8 pro, it'll come today.
0:15:33 - Jeff Jarvis
That's going to be Gemini light yeah.
0:15:35 - Leo Laporte
Cause the model is too big to fit on a phone, so they'll have a smaller version of it for your phone and the, and it'll be more constrained on what it can do the pixel. By the way, this will be one of the pixel feature drops for December. I have not gotten mine yet, though I would show you, but one of the things it'll do is give you the ability to summarize whatever you know, whatever it's recorded or whatever.
0:15:56 - Jeff Jarvis
They said it was already in Bard, Didn't they? I went to Bard and I said are you run on Gemini now? And they said well, we're, I'm just a model. I don't know anything. Five, Nothing. I don't know anything.
0:16:06 - Leo Laporte
I've never heard of Gemini who said that Google says this is their top line message, according to Gizmodo. I love this. This is way better than anything you're going to get from open AI Wow, okay. Sunar Pachai said today, this new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we've undertaken as a company. That's saying quite a bit for a company like Google. I'm genuinely excited for what's ahead and for the opportunities Gemini will unlock for people everywhere. Are we decided that we could say Gemini? When I was a kid, I said Gemini, like the, the NASA, the NASA rocket program was Gemini, right? No, no.
0:16:52 - Paris Martineau
No, it was Gemini. That's how you pronounce it.
0:16:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, it's this week in pronunciation, all right.
0:16:58 - Leo Laporte
Let's ask Google.
0:16:59 - Jeff Jarvis
How do you pronounce?
0:17:01 - Leo Laporte
Am I just crazy thinking that it was Gemini? Maybe as a kid, I didn't know any better.
0:17:07 - Paris Martineau
Gemini, gemini crickets.
0:17:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe that's what you're thinking of. Wait, wait, wait, leo might have a win, a rare win.
0:17:15 - Leo Laporte
No she said Gemini, I heard it.
0:17:17 - Paris Martineau
She said Gemini.
0:17:18 - Leo Laporte
But there is an alternate pronunciation. Well, you're always doing alternates. I don't like to do what everybody does.
0:17:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Here's is it Gemini or?
0:17:28 - Leo Laporte
Gemini, gemini. According to Wikipedia it's Gemini. It comes from the, the Greek actually Gemini.
0:17:36 - Paris Martineau
No, I think there are too many things named Gemini. Wasn't there a short lived crypto company or?
0:17:42 - Leo Laporte
maybe still around. I'm sure there was Gemini coin.
0:17:45 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sure so in 2018,. John Schwartz, who's a wonderful editor now at University of Texas, wrote about. So which is it? How do you pronounce? Pronounce Gemini, the first man. A new film about Neil Armstrong has him saying it both ways.
0:18:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, wow. I think in the Gemini program back in the days of because that was you know the first astronauts were Mercury, and then Gemini and then Apollo, and I do remember as a kid that John's looking at me like I'm nuts. Maybe it is Gemini, I don't know. I still think it's apricots. So what do I know?
0:18:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, because, because, because Neil Armstrong said Gemini, so you just grabbed onto that.
0:18:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because he's your hero, I'm sure he is my, absolutely my hero. Are you kidding? He's not yours. Who's your hero? Carl Yastremski, and there was.
0:18:37 - Jeff Jarvis
There was a UPI story at the time, NASA clears up way Gemini is pronounced and what does NASA say Um Gemini? Has a Gemini cricket.
0:18:50 - Paris Martineau
Really yeah, see, wait really.
0:18:56 - Jeff Jarvis
This is where they announced the program. It's new man in space program, jiminy, as in Jiminy cricket, say the word today from the office.
0:19:05 - Leo Laporte
I did not make it up, I'm just old, that's a spacecraft center near Houston yeah.
0:19:09 - Paris Martineau
I'm just old. I thought I was just being silly.
0:19:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm suspecting that Google calls it Gemini let's, let's stay. Stay with that, are you ready? Here's an article on wired how to use Google's Gemini AI right now in its barred chat. But you want to try this?
0:19:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Jeff, get your bar. Yes, yes, okay, here we go. Get your bar. I'll be growling because it won't let me do what I'm supposed to be able to do with it, but go ahead. I have that kind of account, but keep going.
0:19:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, using Gemini and said inside of Bart is as simple as visiting the website in your browser and logging in. So Okay dog, I'm there, okay, I'm looking and I don't see anything that says hey, you want to use Gemini I?
0:19:54 - Paris Martineau
think you enter the prompt here.
0:19:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me see, Let me go back to why I said are you using Gemini? Yeah, but that barred what doesn't know nothing. You ought to know that.
0:20:08 - Paris Martineau
Hmm, but.
0:20:09 - Leo's Laptop
I thought.
0:20:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Bart was baby Gemini oh wait, wait, wait. L O L got that wrong earlier today. Oh. Bart is on Gemini Pro in English Across most of the world as of December 6th, 2.23. Isn't that hilarious? Oh, that's hysterical.
0:20:23 - Paris Martineau
L O L got that wrong earlier today. That's very funny.
0:20:28 - Leo Laporte
It's always funny when an AI gets something wrong, isn't it?
0:20:32 - Paris Martineau
It's always, it's always Well does it capitalize L O L in all caps or is it yes, lowercase?
0:20:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Earlier today I asked who I am, because that's what you do, and it got things wrong and I told it what was right, and still we got a different things wrong now.
0:20:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's one of the natures of this is it's hard to actually correct it. The corpus, yeah. Here, I got the same thing. L O L got that wrong Earlier today. Bart is on Gemini Pro in English. Okay, so me now.
0:21:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So, Leo, I put a video in there. What they're emphasizing so strongly is that it's multimodal and we can't really play with the multimodal part of this.
0:21:13 - Leo Laporte
So there's a video demo I put in oh and multimodal means I can, it will give you images or you could provide images. You can provide it, we all report.
0:21:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Who you call this old guy is a well known figure I'm getting.
0:21:25 - Leo Laporte
I'm getting spanked by by an AI in tech world. Here's a quick overview of his background and accomplishments. That's the birth, correct birthday, correct birthplace. This is just from Wikipedia. Co founder of ZV. Yeah, but isn't that EGI?
0:21:38 - Paris Martineau
Not really. It doesn't matter where it gets it from.
0:21:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Playback Leo to Leo.
0:21:47 - Leo Laporte
Found the trip podcast network 2005. So far, so good Got the nickname the tech guys.
0:21:53 - Jeff Jarvis
That what you wore in your badge it.
0:21:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Do we know?
0:21:56 - Jeff Jarvis
No, the tech no it's not the tech guy, nick's name.
0:21:59 - Leo Laporte
Lele Lele. Why the word winning? If it said childhood nickname Lele, I would be very. Oh, I'm a respected figure. Look at that. Did it say that about you?
0:22:08 - Paris Martineau
You're just enthusiasm, humor and ability to explain complex topics in a clear and accessible way.
0:22:13 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I knew I shouldn't have put that on my Wikipedia article. Oh well, active on Twitter, social media presence, public speaking. Why you? He says I'm on the other side of Google. I called it this old guy and they're really. He's really didn't like that. Why you might call him this old guy. I am a prominent, influential figure in the tech world. I'm gonna send this to Apple His passion, knowledge, ability to communicate complex information. I've written him a loyal following established in his leading tech. Wow, gosh, I'm going to send this to my dad. Wow, thank you. Thank, I love this new Gemini Pretty good, so I didn't get anything wrong on me.
0:22:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Is Paris Martin? No, they're not going to know.
0:22:58 - Paris Martineau
I don't have a Wikipedia. You don't know you're going to tonight. Nope.
0:23:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't have enough information. I don't have enough information.
0:23:06 - Paris Martineau
Wow, I'm unknowable. It's pretty fun.
0:23:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Under the radar of Paris.
0:23:13 - Paris Martineau
I'm out in the abyss.
0:23:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo's doing something.
0:23:17 - Leo Laporte
I thought, if I gave it, tell me about the writer for the information, known as Paris Gabriel Gabrielle Martin. Oh, gave it a little bit more information. Let's see if it helps. Thinking, working, thinking Wow.
0:23:30 - Paris Martineau
Come on, that's even indexable, bard.
0:23:34 - Leo Laporte
I bet you chat GPT would do better. That's actually pretty nice.
0:23:38 - Paris Martineau
I mean, last time I asked chat GPT I think it made up lies about me, but that's fine Lies.
0:23:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh lies.
0:23:45 - Jeff Jarvis
If you ask who is Craig Newmark, you're going to see something very timely and important in there. Oh really.
0:23:51 - Paris Martineau
Happy birthday, Craig.
0:23:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Exactly. Happy birthday, Craig.
0:23:56 - Leo Laporte
Do you think it did that for me last week? I?
0:24:01 - Leo's Laptop
will never know because I will never know because I have a birthday wish. I wish it was my digital detox. Paris knows.
0:24:05 - Leo Laporte
I didn't. Yeah, you can check. See what you missed, leo. Oh man, I missed a birthday. Greeting from a robot.
0:24:13 - Paris Martineau
Doesn't say that.
0:24:16 - Leo Laporte
By the way, it didn't say that here.
0:24:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, I'm, paris is just on the news, so she knows that today is his birthday. Oh, I see, true, because Craig had stuff on Twitter and I wish him a happy birthday on Twitter, as did many others here's what chat GPT-4 says.
0:24:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh see, chat GPT-4 is smart. It went out and looked at Bing. That's the see Google. You lied, it's not see.
0:24:40 - Leo's Laptop
Look at this Paris my friend knows an investigative reporter a future writer.
0:24:43 - Leo Laporte
Currently a real kind of information. Before joining the information, it works as a reporter wired Just a good call to the mayor Important stories. Hey, so just a just a link regular call.
0:24:52 - Paris Martineau
Is it here regular call?
0:24:53 - Leo Laporte
Post Wow.
0:24:54 - Paris Martineau
I wrote that for those paragraphs. That's from my bio, is it? Thanks, chat GPT. Is it really that's a?
0:25:00 - Leo Laporte
story it is. See, that's the-. Okay, it works. We just answered Google's assertion that it's better than chat GPT.
0:25:08 - Paris Martineau
Well, as far as Paris knowledge goes, Well, that's relevant, that that.
0:25:14 - Leo Laporte
What it is is that the chat GPT now can use Bing and do us Google search. Sorry, he needs Bing to do a Google search. No, bing is not Google, leo. Okay, okay, fine.
0:25:29 - Paris Martineau
Is what's the name of this podcast?
0:25:30 - Leo Laporte
again Our Microsoft this week in Bing. Yeah, this week in Bing. It's kind of like when Microsoft spent billions of dollars to get the NFL to use surface tablets on the sideline and everywhere and the announcers for a whole year kept calling them iPads. It's like that. All right.
0:25:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, anyway, you might I guess it's better I'm not convinced, so there's a video on line 67, which you might amuse you. No, line 66. Okay, which shows the capabilities. It was brought in by-. This is a cool demo of Hassan on from the the the mastodon, oh mastodon.
0:26:11 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we should we should say this is should I turn on the audio? Is there audio? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no music, you're safe. We've been capturing footage to test in a wide range of challenges. It's it's-. So now it's using the multimodal feature, which is they're showing it images. That's what I wanted, yeah.
0:26:26 - Leo's Laptop
Well, not just Testing, gemini, here we go. Tell me what you see.
0:26:31 - Leo's Laptop
I see you placing a piece of paper on the table. I see a squiggly line. That's good. What about now? The contour lines are smooth and flowing, with no sharp angles or jagged edges. I see a duck. It looks like a bird to me. What if I had this? Yes, the bird is swimming in the water. Wow, it has a long neck and beak.
0:26:53 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's cool. I have to tell you yes.
0:26:54 - Leo's Laptop
We're- we're getting the duck is a type of waterfowl. In the family in Ataday, Ducks are closely related to geese and swans. He's like an obnoxious kid in the class now. This is not a common-. Okay, shut up Bowers shut up. Oh no. No, it says blue is not a common color, but these are typically not as common as other duck breeds. It is more common for ducks to be brown, black or white. Are you sure?
What the quack? I was just talking about a blue duck and now you're holding one. It looks like blue ducks are more common than I thought I don't do you really believe? It said that? But this float. I'm not sure what material it's made of, but it looks like it might be rubber or plastic. What if I tell you it's making a squeaking sound? Oh, if it's squeaking, it's definitely going to float. Nice, I am it is a rubber duck. It is made of a material that is less dense than water. Can you teach me how to say?
0:27:42 - Leo's Laptop
this in a different language and give me a few options.
0:27:46 - Leo's Laptop
Wow, and then it's Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese. Is it yadze? Yadze Is pronounced with a first tone In Mandarin. There are four tones which are essential to distinguish the meaning of words. The first tone is a high level tone. Oh, okay. Yadze, yadze. The duck is in the middle of the ocean. There is no land nearby for the duck, the wrecking it's hard for people who are listening to get this, but it's unlikely to find ducks here.
0:28:11 - Leo Laporte
naturally it is being given images and is absolutely right on in describing them and use emojis, please.
0:28:18 - Leo's Laptop
How about this? We can play a game called Guess the Country. Sure, let's do it. Clue one this country is the home of the kangaroo, the koala and oh it's Australia. Oh, that's easy.
0:28:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh it's-. It knows he's pointing at it. He points to Australia.
0:28:35 - Leo's Laptop
World cups in football history. Hmm, brazil.
0:28:40 - Leo Laporte
Look at that.
0:28:43 - Leo's Laptop
Now he's playing the cup game.
0:28:45 - Leo Laporte
Under the cup. Oh my god, it knows that Now is this faked.
0:28:49 - Paris Martineau
Okay, we've got to try this.
0:28:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, we can't yet, because this can't, because we can't do the multimodal. So is this guy from Google? Who is this guy? Oh it is Google.
0:28:58 - Leo's Laptop
Yadze, it's Google. I'm playing rock paper scissors. What do you see? Now the fingers are spread out to look like the wings.
0:29:05 - Leo's Laptop
I'm just going to pause this for a second. What's this?
0:29:08 - Leo Laporte
Because we're getting kind of inured to what AI can do. We're getting kind of used to it and taking it for granted. If we had looked at this two years ago, we would have said that's fake. Yes.
0:29:21 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I'm currently sitting here. Being like this is almost fake. That's how impressive it is. I'm sitting in stunned silence and it may be fake, but I don't think Google's going to fake it right? No, I mean, I don't think so either. I think that this is probably the best case scenarios, and they are asking very specific questions or setting it up in specific situations, but it's still Incredible. It's struck me though.
0:29:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, the what the quack was obviously like some flavor, but but pointing to Australia, and no, and yeah, and that's that's multi, that's multi Showing a rubber duck, and having it guess that it's a rubber duck is really cool.
0:29:56 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how you would distinguish that from AGI, to be honest. Oh, here we go again.
0:30:02 - Leo's Laptop
Oh my God, we can't, we can't open this box it knows a duck.
0:30:06 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't care how it knows a duck, it knows a duck, it can take over the world. Oh, come on, leo, it's impressive as hell.
0:30:13 - Paris Martineau
Well, wait a minute, but it's not AGI.
0:30:15 - Leo Laporte
AGI doesn't mean how 9,000. It doesn't mean for bin the classes project. It means an artificial intelligence that is effectively as good as a human at doing things. This is better than a human in many of those cases. That's very impressive.
0:30:34 - Paris Martineau
The other week, when we were discussing AGI, a listener named Robert sent me this screenshot from chat GPT that I'm now going to read. Robert asked chat GPT, are you AGI? And chat GPT said no, I'm not an example of AGI. I'm a specific instance of narrow AI called GPT 3.5, blah, blah, blah. While I can generate human-like text responses and perform various language-related tasks, I lack the comprehensive understanding, autonomy and versatility associated with AGI. Agi would possess general intelligence comparable to or exceeding human capabilities across diverse domains, which is beyond the scope of my current capabilities.
0:31:15 - Leo Laporte
Do you not think that's just what we saw? I think that's exactly what we saw.
0:31:18 - Paris Martineau
I don't think that this is comparable to, or exceeding, human capabilities.
0:31:22 - Leo Laporte
No, I think it's impressive. It's an impressive job of what's under the cup that I could have done. Oh no, so I asked.
0:31:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Gemini, gemini, the same question. Paris, whether or not, and Hedges, whether or not I am an artificial general intelligence, is a complex question that depends on how you define AGI. Good fate there.
0:31:47 - Leo Laporte
Let's watch a little bit more. Look, I'm not saying oh, here come the machines. It's doing shadow puppets. Now it's going to take over the world, but I am blown away. If this is now, it may be. Did they say it's edited for speed? What are they saying about this? Oh, it has to be edited for speed For purposes of this demo latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened. For brevity, it's already gassy.
0:32:14 - Paris Martineau
This video showcases some of our favorite interactions with Gemini.
0:32:18 - Leo Laporte
So it's a button.
0:32:19 - Paris Martineau
We're watching an edited clip and that's fine.
0:32:23 - Leo Laporte
Okay, he's got a quarter and two palms.
0:32:26 - Leo's Laptop
The coin should be under the right hand. I don't know. The coin is in the left hand. Using a slight of hand technique to make it appear as if the coin has disappeared. Now there's a coin and a cookie. There you go.
0:32:44 - Paris Martineau
Now a coin, now a cookie and an orange.
0:32:46 - Leo Laporte
The hat Wow.
0:32:48 - Leo's Laptop
Citrus, now a fidget spinner, so can the spin of the fidget toy. Wow. They are both examples of popular toys that have been enjoyed by children and adults alike, for many years.
0:33:01 - Paris Martineau
A ball of yarn and a bigger ball of yarn.
0:33:03 - Leo's Laptop
That is green. I see pink and green yarn. How about a dragon fruit? Oh wow. Or how about a green pig?
0:33:09 - Leo Laporte
He said what can I knit with this?
0:33:11 - Leo's Laptop
Okay, how about these colors? And maybe show me some animals.
0:33:15 - Leo's Laptop
Okay, now I see blue and pink yarn. How about a pig with blue ears?
0:33:21 - Leo Laporte
And it's going. The images, by the way, the knit images.
0:33:24 - Leo's Laptop
Oh, I'll keep those in mind. Which way should the duck go?
0:33:30 - Leo's Laptop
Going left leads to a duck, which is a friend. Going right leads to a bear, which is a foe. It is better to make friends than foes.
0:33:38 - Jeff Jarvis
This is where Leo is going to think okay, we're doomed, it's going to take over everything. No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that this to me.
0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
well, it certainly satisfies the Turing test. I would say it satisfies many tests for AGI we're talking about an edited video.
0:33:53 - Paris Martineau
I know, nothing is satisfying any test and we are seeing an edited promo video. I think it's very impressive and cool. Yeah, the thousands of things it didn't get. These are the specific selections of the most impressive things it can do.
0:34:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That's cool, but it's not AGI, which is impressive. Again, that's not impressive.
0:34:14 - Paris Martineau
I really liked that it said in one direction is a friend, on the other is a foe, because that's very dramatic. I like that a lot.
0:34:22 - Leo Laporte
Now Mark Rober, who is the wonderful NASA engineer who made the glitter bombs right and is now working at Google, so maybe he's co-opted. I'm about to test the accuracy of this plane I built with Bard, but he's pretty well trusted, right, I would trust him. So he's going to build this plane. He built a plane that got Bard. It's a paper airplane. Well, you make a paper airplane that can go through a ring of fire? Okay, I could do that. So now you're arguing that I could be as good as Bard Instead of Bard couldn't possibly be as good as me.
In short, could Bard create a better Mark Rober video than me? Mark Rober, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to ask Bard this must scare YouTube influencers something awful. Who is the?
0:35:16 - Paris Martineau
most handsome? I don't think this does.
0:35:20 - Leo Laporte
They paid Mark Rober to do this.
0:35:21 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they paid. This is sponsored content.
0:35:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a big ad, I don't know. I'm very impressed. I am so here's, there's pro. There's lots of problems with all this AI stuff. One is that we'll over emphasize the science. Oh gosh, did you read the New Yorker article yet, by the way? No, I haven't. Oh, mg, let me pull it up. It's by Charles Duhigg and it's about what happened I. You know how, as the open AI for car was developing, we knew that someday somebody's going to write a book. Right, this is amazing, and I would love to know what's going behind the scenes. Well, charles has some good sources, because already embedded.
0:36:04 - Jeff Jarvis
He was already embedded, and then everything Story, everything.
0:36:10 - Leo Laporte
So he has under the handles of technology in the New Yorker the inside story of Mark Khrushchev's partnership with open AI, which was really a lot about. Kevin Scott is Microsoft CTO and charge of AI. But the inside story around 1130 AM on the Friday before Thanksgiving, microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from open AI was calling to explain that within the next 20 minutes, the company's board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman. It was the start of a five day crisis that some people in Microsoft began calling the Turkey shoot cluster frack and you can use a different word for frack if you so desire. It goes on to say okay, so this was completely out of the blue for Microsoft, which had invested roughly $13 billion in this company. So they immediately.
When Nadella recovered from his shock over Altman's firing, he called open AI board member Adam D'Angelo and pressed him for details. D'angelo gave the same elliptical explanation that minutes later appeared in the press release that Altman hadn't been consistently candid in his communications with the board. Nadella says well, has he committed him proprieties? No, but I won't say more, said D'Angelo. It seemed that he and his colleagues had deliberately left Nadella unaware of their intention to fire Altman because they hadn't wanted Nadella to warn him. D'angelo hung up in frustration and called CTO Kevin Scott, the person most responsible for forging the open AI partnership. Scott had already heard the news, which was spreading fast.
They set up a video call with other Microsoft executives who came up with three possible responses. They talked a little bit in here about how some of the board members, chiefly Ilya Sutskever, had been worried about the dangers of an unconstrained AI superintelligence. They also talked about the letter from Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, that open letter which caused for a call for a pause training AI models. Kevin Scott said the discourse around AI has been strangely focused on science fiction scenarios Computers destroying humanity and it largely ignored the technology's potential to level the playing field, as Scott put it, for people who knew they wanted computers, what they wanted computers to do but didn't have the training to make it happen. And this is, by the way, what a lot of what Microsoft is using chat GPT for. They call it co-pilot on Windows. He felt that AI, with its ability to converse with users in plain language, could be transformative and equalizing force if built with enough caution and introduced with sufficient patience.
So they didn't know what was going on. They were worried about it and they decided that there were three different possible responses. Plan A stabilize the situation by supporting the replacement CEO of the board named Marati, and then working with her to see if the startup's board might reverse its decision or at least give us an explanation If that didn't work. Plan B by the way, microsoft did that. They also did Plan B, using their company's considerable leverage to help get Altman reappointed as CEO and to reconfigure the open AI governance which, as we've talked about before, has a for-profit and a not-for-profit arm. From our perspective, someone close to the conversation told Doohig things have been working great and Open AI's board had done something erratic, so we thought let's put some adults in charge and get back to what we had. Plan C hire Altman and his most talented engineers and rebuild Open AI within Microsoft. That did not happen, as we all know.
0:40:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they tried to, they did, they were ready to they were ready to?
0:40:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they were ready to.
0:40:16 - Paris Martineau
They were ready.
0:40:16 - Leo Laporte
Yep. So I mean, I highly recommend that there's also there's also stuff in there.
0:40:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo, isn't there about what Altman and the chip deal and some of the? It gives us more opinions.
0:40:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's more and more and I've seen other stories about Altman being a little sneaky behind the scenes, doing stuff behind the scenes and he, there were some accusations.
0:40:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean the current state of it is that some people have said that he was a little bit difficult to work with. There have been some accusations of maybe backstabbing you know your typical corporate stuff, but nothing particularly concrete in terms of this is the reason why he was fired or why the board sought to oust him.
0:41:00 - Leo Laporte
We should.
0:41:01 - Paris Martineau
Which is, I think, incredibly interesting about this situation. It is so especially in a news cycle as strange and tumultuous and, frankly, leaky as this, with, you know, people like Charles Duhigg and the information and New York Times and all these other places having really in-depth reports. The fact that we still haven't gotten any real understanding of what led the board to oust him, I think is fascinating, and I'm not sure entirely what it means, but I know that it means something.
0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and we should mention that Paris has done a lot of the original legwork on this. For the information.
0:41:45 - Paris Martineau
Well, my team has. You and your team, yeah, yeah, I've been looking into honestly this question by the scenes as well and it's interest. It's just very novel that information hasn't come out about this in this news cycle cause a lot of smart people, myself included, are looking into it.
0:42:06 - Leo Laporte
I'm the. I will stand by my assertion. I'm surprised that we know so much already. I mean, this is usually the kind of thing you find out a year later in a book, or 10 years later in a book. Right, you guys are?
0:42:17 - Paris Martineau
doing great work. I mean it seems like a lot of the people. I mean, yes, certainly my colleagues have been doing great work, other journalists have been doing great work, but it the tech world, especially smaller companies not that opening eye is, I guess, small by the numbers. They're bleakier than Stogee tech giants of your you know. So it doesn't surprise me that, especially given how tumultuous and strange the Altman ouster and reappointment process was, that a lot of things have leaked.
The thing that surprises me is that the key bit of information hasn't leaked, which says to me that no one outside of the board has spoken about this Cause. I mean, there've been a lot of reports that after the board originally ousted Altman, a lot of open AI executives were on a Zoom call with board members and a lawyer being like guys, you gotta tell us something. Anything Like what were some of the reasons? And they wouldn't say a word. And the fact that nothing else has leaked out of what seems to be that small group of people is very novel about this, and I'm not sure if that means that it's you know, maybe they didn't have a reason or that the reason is something that is incredibly closely guarded for some reason.
0:43:36 - Leo Laporte
My favorite theory the one I sent to you, jeff, in an email and you mocked me, is cause it is mockable is that Ilia and his team had developed something called Q-Star, which was an AI that could do math from first principles, which, weirdly, I did not know this, but LLMs are not good at math. Actually, I didn't know it because Stephen Wolfram has said it. They're not good at math. They don't know because they don't understand the principles, they don't understand anything, and so an LLM doesn't tell you what two plus two is.
But they had a new AI Q-Star that did know, and to me that was fascinating. So there was a rumor going around and Paris I wonder what you've heard about this that that's what scared Ilia so much that he came over to the other side and went to the other board members said we gotta do something. This is we are now skating on thin ice. This is getting too smart, is that? But Ilia's a doomer.
0:44:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I know You're filled with doomer. The New York Times did a feature this week on the men behind AI and number one it was all men, not a single woman mentioned Number two.
0:44:45 - Leo Laporte
they downplay the nuttiness of some of these folks Well actually let me take a break, cause I wanna go through this. By the way, another great long piece by Cade Metz and Mike Isaac and Karen Weiss and Nico Grant on this and there is some really weird stuff in here. We'll get to that. I do wanna take a break, but I'm just curious, paris, what you heard or read about Q-Star. Is that just a rumor or do you think there's some legitimacy to the? Maybe that's the reason.
0:45:13 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it probably played into it. I think if it was the reason, we would know more about it at this point because there's been some decent reporting on it. I think that it certainly was something that had concerned or raised the hackles of Sootskiver and some of the other researchers that this Q-Star could not only solve math problems like basic math problems, but it could solve math problems that it hadn't seen before.
0:45:48 - Leo Laporte
In other words, it knew math from first principles.
0:45:50 - Paris Martineau
It knew math and it was capable of learning, and I think that there was some tension over kind of the pace of these developments, especially given how Altman had allegedly kind of responded to these sort of criticisms before.
0:46:08 - Jeff Jarvis
So before you go to the break, to be a favor, and go to Gemini Gemini, gemini and ask this question are you good at math?
0:46:20 - Leo Laporte
Okay, all right and then it could be lying. Do we trust the answer?
0:46:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, no, the answer is gonna be see what the case is.
0:46:28 - Paris Martineau
Well, you, think it's AGI Leo. So does it, isn't it?
0:46:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it matter, does it trust me?
0:46:33 - Leo Laporte
Well, I love that. She's Trustworthy, throwing your words back at me. They're separate things.
0:46:37 - Paris Martineau
I don't think, in fact, that's what scaring people is oh, so you think it's lying, you think that it has the ability to lie to you?
0:46:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what people are worried about. Is that it's if it were a benign. It doesn't have no truth, so it can't lie.
0:46:51 - Paris Martineau
It's pretty cool. I think it could hallucinate. I don't think it could lie, I think that's in the world.
0:46:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm good at math in the same way that a human mathematician is. I don't have the same level. Oh, you know what? It can read it. Let's have it read it in its own creepy voice.
0:47:06 - Leo's Laptop
I wouldn't, say I'm good at math in the same way that a human mathematician is. I don't have the same level of understanding or intuition for mathematical concepts. However, I am able to perform many mathematical tasks with a high degree of accuracy, including basic arithmetic operations addition, subtraction, multiplication division algebra solving equations factoring polynomials geometry.
0:47:33 - Jeff Jarvis
So I'm crap at math. Can you test?
0:47:35 - Leo's Laptop
it Calculus, differentiation, dog two plus two, Probability and statistics calculating means Okay, that's a good question.
0:47:43 - Leo Laporte
Give me a chat room, give me a. Or discord, give me a. What would be Paris, something it's not seen before?
0:47:52 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I'm the wrong person to ask when it comes to math my brain is just a hollow vortex.
0:47:58 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, let's do 96. I love.
0:48:01 - Paris Martineau
Google Sheets Divided by 12.
0:48:05 - Leo Laporte
Let's just see what it does. That's eight, by the way. Eight, that's correct. Yeah, okay, so that's, but you know what would be great.
I mean, I don't know how to have a question and the thing would scare me really considerably, and should scare everybody, is if I could ask it to factor a large, a very large number into two primes. What's? Give me a prove? Euler's equation. Okay, what is Euler's equation retcon? You gotta tell me the equation Then I can ask it to. Okay, here's one. Ask for the diagonal. What's the diagonal length? And, by the way, you better know the answer to this, cause we. What's the diagonal length of a right triangle, five by 12. I don't even know what the hell we're talking about.
0:48:55 - Paris Martineau
Let's see.
0:48:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what half the things in this chat are I know how to.
0:48:59 - Paris Martineau
I know you can't divide by zero, but that's about it.
0:49:05 - Leo's Laptop
The diagonal length of a right triangle with legs of five and 12 is 13.
0:49:09 - Leo Laporte
The answer is correct. That's the hypotenuse. Are people? Are you impressed there? Here's I don't even know how to write Euler's identity.
0:49:18 - Paris Martineau
I could do that in, like, I don't know, middle school. Yeah, I don't know.
0:49:22 - Leo Laporte
It's the third length I understand. It's the square of the, the square of the sum of the anyway square of the sum of the squares.
0:49:31 - Paris Martineau
Let's not try to do math.
0:49:32 - Jeff Jarvis
We had to learn once and then never have to use that thing. Now we have Gemini to do it for.
0:49:39 - Leo Laporte
Okay, what is? Let's do this here. What is Euler's equation?
0:49:47 - Jeff Jarvis
And can you solve it?
0:49:49 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, solve it.
0:49:51 - Leo Laporte
First, let's see if it even knows it. Oh yeah, it does. Of course, I have no idea what that means. Let's see that this is the kind of thing an LLM could easily do. Yeah, that could do this is to be regurgitating a math book. In fact, it provides.
0:50:03 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's just, it gives us Go back up, go back up. Solve Euler's equation when X equals yeah, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen?
0:50:17 - Leo Laporte
But the problem is, I don't know what the answer when. I equals 10 and X equals 30. And if somebody at home would try this and tell us that's impressive if it could do that, but it's over, you just plug stuff in.
0:50:36 - Paris Martineau
It's not impressive to plug things in. If you're a computer, that's kind of your whole deal.
0:50:40 - Leo Laporte
This is how I did this. By the way, it generated Python code, which is a very simple way of doing it, so that's actually the right way to do it.
0:50:52 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, once again, once again, it's all wonderful and impressive, and the only problem here and it's a tool that we can use in amazing ways all that stipulated your honor. But to go the next step to say that this is as smart as a human, it's gonna destroy mankind. That's all nutty jump stuff. Totally agree, you know what? So we guess one Leo.
0:51:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually it strikes me that a good test would be to solve a long unsolved math problem, a proof that there's been quite a few of these.
0:51:24 - Paris Martineau
I don't know if it could do that, if it's not solved because it's advanced pattern recognition and data retrieval. It's impressive, but it's not intelligence.
0:51:33 - Leo Laporte
Right. So if it could solve an unsolved math proof there's quite a few of them.
0:51:40 - Leo's Laptop
I don't know about that, because computers do math, that's what they do.
0:51:44 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.
0:51:45 - Leo Laporte
Calculators do math.
0:51:46 - Jeff Jarvis
yes, Well, dr Dew says have it do a confusing word problem. But the thing is it's trained on all kinds of SAT prep stuff.
0:51:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be All right anyway. I mean, we know it can play chess, we can know it can play go better than a human. So clearly that kind of calculated solution is not a good test. We gotta take a break. I wanna come back.
Okay, let's do the New York Times story next, because, if nothing else, it's just like fascinating. It's peeking into the minds of these nut jobs like Larry Page, founder of Google. But first a word from our sponsor. It's nice to have you, Paris Martino, Jeff Jarvis, it's good that Paris could get together with her grand grandad's and do a show.
0:52:31 - Paris Martineau
Listen, I've gotta pay you guys visits because I know you've got one foot in the grave. What? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry, so that was too little Paris. No, that's fine. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Paris showed that Thanksgiving card that you did, Joe Esposito, for us were there all the table.
0:52:44 - Leo Laporte
And what did your friends say when they saw that? Paris?
0:52:47 - Paris Martineau
My friends said oh, is this your podcast with your dads?
0:52:52 - Leo Laporte
At least for your dads, not your grandad's, I'm sure I'm actually your grandfather's age really. But okay, how old's your grandfather?
0:53:01 - Paris Martineau
A lot older than you. Okay, that's a really-. My parent. You think you're my parents' age. Frankly, really Okay, yeah, yeah.
0:53:09 - Leo Laporte
Your parents were very old.
0:53:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Your father looked pretty spry with that turkey.
0:53:12 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I was like, oh, did we show that? Did you show that last week, paris' dad with the turkey no, do your commercial. Do your commercial, leo.
0:53:20 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, do your commercial and then we can come back.
0:53:22 - Leo's Laptop
I might follow up some points and show them deep frying a turkey.
0:53:25 - Leo Laporte
That was very impressive. That's all I have to say.
0:53:29 - Paris Martineau
Do it every year.
0:53:30 - Leo Laporte
He did not bring the house down.
0:53:33 - Paris Martineau
It looked like it could've. It looks scary. It always looks like it's about to boil over, but it doesn't.
0:53:37 - Leo Laporte
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0:58:06 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think honestly I might switch to bit warden. I think that added influenced me.
0:58:10 - Leo Laporte
What are you? What are you using now?
0:58:13 - Paris Martineau
I'm using last pass.
0:58:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, no is bad.
0:58:17 - Paris Martineau
I know listen, I know well.
0:58:20 - Leo Laporte
What you may not know is last pass was studio sponsor and a big sponsor of the network for At least a year or two.
You used to have something like on your yeah, that's what said last yeah, we were big last pass supporters and then they got sold several times, uh, mishandled their security, got a breach, and now we're learning that they're that slowly. People who had cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency passwords stored in last pass are getting hacked one by one To the tunes of tens of millions of dollars. So we know that it's bad guys that got the last pass fault and that they have been slowly going through it and and Hacking it and that's terrifying. So have they fixed it? We don't know. Last passes communications about this have been terrible. So I apologize to you and everybody who saw our ads and went to last pass In our defense. They were sold and it was. It's a different company and, in effect and yeah, I changed a bit working.
Yeah pretty quick.
0:59:22 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I'm a big, I use a Ubi keys for everything that I am really. Yeah, so do I pretty secure.
0:59:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but that'll help you a lot. That'll help you a lot. Yeah, here it is. Here's my ubi key. That's a physical hardware key that you used on.
0:59:38 - Paris Martineau
Mine is all my keys.
0:59:40 - Leo Laporte
So that'll help a lot if you have it been. Even using key ubi key to unlock last pass, hackers aren't gonna be able to break into it, so you're still safe, but at some sources be very happy that Paris is a very responsible journalist. Oh you know, I think you see that signal phone number.
0:59:55 - Jeff Jarvis
She knows what she's doing, that's why I was just going to plug. If you want to have, if you've got a scoop, send it to this signal phone number 267 797 8655. Your sec ops is really good You're you're it is.
1:00:07 - Paris Martineau
You know I uh, yeah, honestly, the one thing I always tell sources is the most common way. Not that any of my sources have ever been burned or outed, but I talked to a lot of friends in the industry and the most common way I've ever heard is by a source using a work phone to communicate with a journalist. It's like there's nothing I can do to stop you from getting burnt from that, but I think that it's pretty good. That's the most common way I know about there, because journalists typically have pretty good op sec.
1:00:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm glad that you and your ilk Are doing such a good job.
1:00:42 - Paris Martineau
I love my ilk.
1:00:46 - Leo Laporte
Um, by the way, very, if you do want to move to a bit word, it's very easy to export last pass and import it a bit. I know that's the thing is. I just need.
1:00:53 - Paris Martineau
I know I've been truly mainly to do it for months, but it's just one of those things where you have a busy weekend after busy weekend. It's like I gotta take a couple of hours and export.
1:01:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, I completely understand. Uh, great piece in the New York Times. Mike Isaac, as usual, and Cade Mets, karen Weiss I don't know her and Nico Grant did a good job. Ego, fear and money how the AI fuse was lit. The people who are most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence Decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition, and to me that the Opening scene is so interesting and telling. Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday July 2015 A three-day party thrown by his wife in the wine country resort, which not just a wife, not just any wife, but Tallulah.
Riley. Who was Riley?
1:01:47 - Jeff Jarvis
was the dangerous robot.
1:01:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, In Westworld but keep going.
1:01:52 - Jeff Jarvis
He married her twice. That's the weirdest thing.
1:01:54 - Leo Laporte
That's so married, so um. But the other thing is it doesn't say where is this California wine country resort dotted with cabins I think that's where Lisa and I got married a place called Kalistoga Ranch. It was all cabin focused, really nice upscale Place. I'm almost certain that's where this was Um, and, by the way, the sad thing is it burned to the ground in one of the Napa fires you were gonna go there, weren't you?
1:02:17 - Jeff Jarvis
right before the fire we?
1:02:18 - Leo Laporte
were. Lisa and I were going there and they said, uh, it was a little smoky. And they said, yeah, maybe you don't want to check in right now as we're driving away. We got an evacuation alert said get out, get out. Uh, it didn't burn down that year, but it burned down the following year. Anyway, sad, whoo beautiful place. Um, it was family and friends. Only for elan and his friends children, racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley. Uh, larry page, a party guest, still ceo at google. Artificial intelligence had pierced the public consciousness only a few years before when it was used. When it was used Get this this 10 years ago to identify cats On youtube with 16 accuracy, we come along.
1:03:05 - Paris Martineau
I could do better with my eyes closed, yeah.
1:03:09 - Leo Laporte
Uh ai was a big topic of conversation when mr Musk and mr Page sat down near a fire pit Besides a swimming pool after dinner the first night. Lisa and i's wedding pictures it was were taken right there. Uh, that three months before this, by the way, about four In january 2015, the two billionaires, page and musk, have been friends for more than a decade. Mr Musk Sometimes joked. He occasionally crashed on mr Page's sofa after a night of playing video games you know.
1:03:38 - Jeff Jarvis
By the way, you think mr Page would have had uh guest rooms yeah, but Keep going.
1:03:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think elan. Just the catamine wore off and he fell over is what happened. Yeah, it's probably.
1:03:48 - Paris Martineau
Notably. Elan musk recently tweeted that whenever he plays grand theft auto, he gets turned off by the fact you have to shoot cops and he's like I can't play this game Sorry just an aside on elan musk playing video.
1:04:03 - Leo Laporte
The tone. Uh. That clear night soon turned contentious, as this is this is time magazine worthy pros, jeff, yeah, it is well, they would have from a few more adjectives at the desk soon turned contentious as the two debated whether artificial intelligence would ultimately elevate humanity or destroy it. As the discussion stretched into the chilly hours, you can just see these guys haranguing each other Endlessly around the fire pit while others gathered to listen to page and musk. Yeah, oh yeah. In fact, it even says that some of the more than 30 partygoers gathered closer to listen. Mr Page hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal words. Remember he's he could. Oh yeah, talks like this. Scribe his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. Page said humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines. One singularity. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence Competing for resources and the best will win.
1:05:06 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a chilling vision If that happens, musk said you and I wanted to go live on google island. So you know it's not made to judge battles.
1:05:14 - Leo Laporte
These guys, you know they make a lot of money. They're normal people. Then they make a lot of money and they're freaking nuts. Yeah, oh yeah if that happens not here than him. Oh yeah, if they're. If that happens, musk said we're doomed. The machines will destroy humanity. With a rasp of frustration, mr Page insisted his utopia should be pursued. Finally, and this was the final straw, he called mr Musk a specious, like a racist, but for species a person who favors humans. A specious it's a made-up word who favors.
1:05:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe not. I don't try to make it clear for the listeners, we're not seeing the worst.
1:05:53 - Leo Laporte
Maybe you've all know a harari uses this word, but very few others A person who favors humans over the digital life forms of the future. In other words, he's like a racist who, who? Who doesn't like humans likes, you know, artificial intelligence. That insult mr Musk said later was quote the last straw. Many in the crowd seemed gobsmacked, if amused, as they dispersed for the night. So first of all, that my, my lasting impression of this is what doofuses? I mean. Come on, man. Don't you have anything.
1:06:30 - Jeff Jarvis
This also goes part me. This. This goes right into tascriel, oh yeah, where they drink that we've got to. We have to support these future made-up life forms. I'm having a little milk, I'll drink to my, so it goes on and talks about proof.
1:06:51 - Paris Martineau
Go ahead this helps prove my theory, which is called ceo brain worms. Which is that most ceo's and, I'm sorry, founders of things Ultimately have brain worms, because when you are in a position of power for a long period of time, surrounded by people who are effectively, yes, man, your brain starts to rot and worms clearly clearly right, yep.
1:07:15 - Leo Laporte
A few weeks later, mr Musk dined with sam allen. It was then running y-combinator and several researchers in a private room at a rosewood hotel in menlobe park, california, a favored deal-making spot close to the venture capital offices of sandhill road. That dinner In 2015 led to the creation of a startup called open AI. Later that year, back by hundreds of millions of dollars from mr Musk and other founders, the lab promised to protect the world from mr Page's vision. So now you see that the the two Kind of uh Schisms here. One is AI is a great thing, but it but. But it but you got to protect humanity. The other is why protect humanity? That's uh, you AI's should be allowed to be as great as it can be. And if I just want to do a little little uh.
1:08:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Atmospheric moment here for those meeting my cookies.
1:08:11 - Leo Laporte
You missed, you missed a dramatic pause.
1:08:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So, like dramatic pause, it was actually leo sucking the best last bits of the chocolate off his thumb. So good sponsors, new cookies. This is a new sponsor called wild greens.
1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
They send you the, uh, the bread or the or the croissants I can't wait to make. These are, in this case, the chocolate chip cookies and you bake them. And there's, these are. They're dangerous feeling a little left out. Jeff, we got it. I am so so well, oh, oh, if they do become a sponsor, uh, we will make sure you both get a box, so you can, you can, you can make them during the show.
1:08:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm just you missed out, uh, paris.
1:08:50 - Leo's Laptop
We what was the, what was that thing that made like?
1:08:51 - Jeff Jarvis
pita breads. No, I made. What did it make? Oh yeah, chip potty's, the little chip potty maker. There was a machine.
1:08:56 - Leo Laporte
We had. Yeah, it's in anthony's office. It's a machine that you put flour and water and it makes a lot of the chocolate, flour and water and it makes well, makes indian chip, potty's or you know. Now, man, yeah, and yeah.
1:09:14 - Paris Martineau
I love that.
1:09:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not the greatest it was. It was gonna. He was gonna mail them to us.
1:09:19 - Leo Laporte
I did.
1:09:20 - Paris Martineau
I fed x you one, didn't I you never got it imagining going up to your mailbox and opening and getting a flat bread.
1:09:30 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I am so mad because karsten came in here with a fedex envelope and everything yeah it was a great gag, though.
1:09:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I thought it was good here it is.
1:09:38 - Leo Laporte
This is the rhodie maddock, world's first automatic.
1:09:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, I didn't rhodie maker, we have it.
1:09:44 - Leo Laporte
If you want, I'll I'll make some rhodie for you.
1:09:47 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you got a fedex him a hot rhodie I was gonna.
1:09:51 - Leo Laporte
I thought for all intents and purposes I did.
1:09:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I guess karsten just reason why to stop that package at the door.
1:09:59 - Leo Laporte
You want to spend how much? Oh, we're not bad, I body the Jeff. No. Anyway, great article, and it really does establish the, the two different points of view, uh, of people who are afraid of AI but want to develop it in a safe manner that was what open AI was supposed to be and people like, uh, you know, larry page, who say no, no, we just let it go. It's gotta, that's the next species it deserves to.
1:10:28 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, have its head so um, I still want them to do more reporting on. I'm gonna say it's again get your, get your glass ready, get it ready on on test real, because it's it's a, if you see people like your kowski here and and all these folks are are on the nuts, scale out there on this philosophy, don't sue me. Um no you can see some is not, that's not libel, that's true.
1:10:56 - Leo Laporte
Okay, um, that's opinion so. I was. Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don't that's right, I have uh. I've had extensive counseling in uh in this whole subject matter and I I can't call you an extortionist, but I can call you a nut job.
1:11:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, let's just say the philosophies are nutty.
1:11:18 - Leo Laporte
Is that berk actually? Berk says he took the envelope from karsten, opened it and ate the roady.
1:11:26 - Paris Martineau
Oh, we found the roady thief. Roady, roady road.
1:11:31 - Leo Laporte
Wow, and karsten got blamed all these years, all these years. Poor karstens, taking the, taking the heat. I'm gonna have to have a cookie. By the way, larry pay I mean elon musk and sam alman not talking Another person really, yeah, not talking anymore after the whole, split up and open a eye that might have driven a wedge, not talking.
1:11:56 - Jeff Jarvis
The other great part here is how musk was speechless when he found out that his plans for mars wouldn't work.
1:12:02 - Leo Laporte
Altman's quoted in here, saying there is disagreement, mistrust, egos. The closer people are to being pointed in the same direction, the more contentious the disagreements are. You see this? Insects and religious orders there are bitter fights between the closest to people. That's probably true. Anyway, good story they're talking about the birth of deep mind Five years before the nap of valley party Demi has sebe, which, who was a neuroscientist, walked into his quoted all over genesis today.
1:12:35 - Jeff Jarvis
He's major, he and he, it's his thing, sundar it's his thing.
1:12:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I wonder how much larry's involved in this? Probably not.
1:12:45 - Paris Martineau
You're eating a cookie.
1:12:47 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There's a plate of cookies right now. I'm just I'm just.
1:12:56 - Paris Martineau
Walking around listening to this show. What's going on? Just to be like what's going on his mouth.
1:13:05 - Leo Laporte
I am told constantly, do not eat. I'm so sorry, so sorry. And so Dennis has. Sebe walked into a cocktail party in get ready peter teals, san francisco townhouse, realized he'd hit paid dirt there in teal's living room, overlooking the city's palace of fine arts and a swan pond again, meaningless detail, time magazine style written into this article was a chess board. It turns out a sebe had once been the second player in the world under 14. I Can. I can dig this because I was the champion, state champion in rod Island of chess under 14 Small state.
1:13:51 - Leo's Laptop
It's a small state and I gotta tell you, famously, the competition under 14, not that good.
1:13:56 - Leo Laporte
So any birds, yeah, birds, yeah, but I I literally was around state champion at the under 14. That's pretty impressive. No, it's not. Uh has sebe says. I was preparing for that meeting for a year. I thought it would be my unique hook in. I knew he loved chess, peter Hi Uh, in 2010, has sebe and his two colleagues who lived in britain wanted to build an artificial general intelligence. Hmm, um, so anyway, it goes on. If you're interested, that new yorker article and the times article Uh, both long form pieces are really, uh, I think, good introduction as to where, how we got to where we are today.
1:14:37 - Jeff Jarvis
We still need to get a little deeper into the nuttiness of what drives them.
1:14:42 - Leo Laporte
That's, by the way, when they came up with Deep Mind and Deep Mind was kind of based on um, uh, you know, building games. First they built, built beat space invaders and pong, and eventually, uh, it got very good at playing go and beat the world. One of some of the world's best players at go, jeffrey hintons in this, everybody's in this. It's a really good primer on the lakoon, isn't, yeah, who the personalities are. I am, you know, as you know, I'm pretty skeptical on AI, but I've become more bullish.
1:15:13 - Paris Martineau
I think I'm very I was about to say you've become a lot less skeptical on AI, over the course of this show.
1:15:21 - Leo Laporte
No, not, it's actually been over the course of the last six weeks. Uh, as I see, I mean, look at the video. That's mind-boggling. We shouldn't take it for granted, even even though it's I know it's edited and all that stuff. We shouldn't take it for granted.
1:15:33 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, I'll take it we think that would think things. We can't explain Our accidents or miracles they're just things that happen that we can't figure out.
1:15:42 - Paris Martineau
Nothing is meaningful. You know it's interesting.
1:15:45 - Jeff Jarvis
You should say this Sartre, we have sartre on the show.
1:15:48 - Leo Laporte
It's really interesting. You say this because I you know, I just did this retreat and one of the messages I got from my spirit was Everything me, my spirit. You ask for messages every morning from your spirit and your spirit guide and one of the messages I got was get this everything means something and Nothing means anything. Well, continue if you can hold that paradox in your mind. It's kind of interesting, because nothing is meaningful. It's all what it is. It's just what it is. Okay, hold on a second.
1:16:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Hold on a second what does this mean? What are you talking?
1:16:26 - Leo Laporte
to the chat. Oh are you talking to barred.
1:16:28 - Paris Martineau
Okay, ask, barred.
1:16:32 - Leo Laporte
Everything means something and nothing means anything, is it? If it says that's just nonsense, it's just. You must have taken the Huffman presses, because it's a paradox, it is a paradox, meaning it appears to contradict itself.
1:16:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Here are some possible interpretations of its meaning. I'm curious.
1:16:55 - Paris Martineau
I had a similar breakthrough not from a spirit, but it was, yeah, that everything is meaningless and thus the only meaning is from what what you just like derive.
1:17:07 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of the point, that's right, and I grew up in a very rationalist environment. My dad's a paleontologist, um, you know he, he was a lapsed catholic, so he was a kind of a devout atheist. Um, I'm, I'm asked my mom the other day. She's 90. She's on her last legs. I said you know, are you gonna do you think there's a heaven? Was, is there an afterlife? She's no, we're just animals. You die and that's it, and so that's very much the. What I grew up in, which is essentially nothing means anything. It's just is what it is. This sartre, it is what it is. Um, but you, but that's a very important insight, paris that you can't ascribe meaning to it, you can't ascribe values to it, and that that's what comes from your heart, that's what comes from you and that, I think, is important. It shouldn't ignore that, and I ignored it for years.
1:17:52 - Jeff Jarvis
So jiminy says that there are four possible interpretations. It explores the subjective nature of meaning, it highlights the insignificance of individual existence, it encourages individual meaning making and it expresses a nihilistic view which we got to paris.
1:18:06 - Paris Martineau
Hey baby, there we go, are you a?
1:18:09 - Leo Laporte
nihilist. Are you a nihilist, paris?
1:18:11 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, but like a fun way a fun nihilist.
1:18:14 - Leo Laporte
A fun nihilist. All right, there's our show title, for sure. Yeah, let's take a little break. We actually have some other stuff I want to talk about. There's a new app that just came out, called beeper mini, that reverse engineers apple messages and puts on your android phone Something that, from apple's point of view, is apple messages. It's very interesting. Is this the?
1:18:39 - Paris Martineau
one that just uses a bunch of mac minis.
1:18:41 - Leo Laporte
No, no, there's a much more interesting story behind this. It's very here. After this commercial, yeah, but after this commercial, ladies and gentlemen.
1:18:49 - Paris Martineau
I have to listen to the whole commercial.
1:18:51 - Leo Laporte
No, you don't. You can go install a bit warden right now. While I'm doing this, remember paris. Nothing means anything.
1:19:03 - Paris Martineau
And it's true everything you know. No, oh, I've got a good pick for this week that I'm gonna add in right now.
1:19:08 - Leo Laporte
Okay, a little jampol sartre perhaps? Yeah, I think so. Yes, this episode of twig is or this week in general or I wish you know this week in sartre is no, well, it's brought to you by tech weekly.
Who's to say who's to say no one knows? Uh is brought to you by collide with a case. It's a device trust solution for companies that are using octa. Octa is great in that ensures that whoever's using your devices is who they say they are. It's authentication, but how do you know that person's device Is secure? That's what collide does. It ensures for companies with octa that if a device is not trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. This is a huge, important message for you if you work in security or it and your company uses octa, the, the foot.
In the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks you read about all have one thing in common the employees. Sometimes an employee's device gets hacked because of unpatched software. That's what happened last. Pass right, it was a sysops guy, devops guy, who logged into the server. He was, he was who he said he was. He was authenticated, but the, the protection software, didn't note that he was running a machine that was on a network with an unpatched version of. What was it? It was a plex. I can't remember what it was. It hadn't been patched, it was plex and we had had a huge hole and so the bad guy was sitting in the network. As soon as the devops guy got in, so did the bad guy.
It's important. It's important that you make sure your employees are secure when they log in. It's important, for instance, employees don't leave sensitive data in an insecure place. It's important that they don't use credentials or that, that that, if their credentials are phished, that the hacker can't use those phished credentials to log in. The problem, though and I don't want to blame employees it's not the end users, it's the solutions you're using to prevent those breaches, and it doesn't have to be that way.
Imagine a world where only secure devices Can access your cloud apps. In this world, phished credentials useless, and you can manage every os, linux, mac, windows, doesn't matter all from a single dashboard. And here's a nice, really nice kind of cherry on the top you can get employees to fix their own device security issues without creating more work for your IT team. Look, you don't have to imagine this world. You can just start using collide kolide, collidecom slash twig. It's really the second half of this authentication puzzle book, an on-demand demo today. See how it works for yourself collide kolidecom slash twig. We thank him so much for their support Of this weekend.
This weekend Beeper. It's called beeper mini. So, yes, the thing you were thinking of, paris beeper Came out a few months ago. I signed up and it had. They were basically putting mac minis in their uh network operations center and so when you got an account with Beeper and it was kind of expensive you would be basically logging in to that Mac mini and it would get your messages, send them on to Apple's messages and vice versa. This is an interest. So the same company, a 16 year old high school kid, came to them and said hi, I had. He didn't say it. It didn't sound like that.
1:22:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I have figured he could be the next Sam Altman, so watch out, he probably is I gotta be nice to him.
1:22:49 - Leo Laporte
I have figured out. He says I've reverse engineered Apple's authentication protocols and I know how you could put an app on your Android device that will log in to Apple's servers. Apple will think you're on an iPhone because you're using your Apple credentials, and then you will be a blue bubble. You won't even be a green bubble. You will have all the features of Apple's messages, including being a blue bubble on an Android device. So it's a little wonky, I gotta say. Took me a little while to get signed in, but I did and I have been using this. I've been. So you have to use an Apple ID, yeah, but I have one right Cause you, you, almost.
1:23:34 - Paris Martineau
Text me right now through it. Text my signal number. It's on my iPhone.
1:23:38 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so it will look like. It will look like a blue bubble. Right, You're on an iPhone.
1:23:44 - Paris Martineau
Okay, no, but it's gonna be through signal right, so that. No, it's that number also works phone wise.
1:23:51 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so show me her numbers, so I can 267-797-8655.
1:23:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, people don't go calling Paris now. She's on a show.
1:24:02 - Paris Martineau
Don't go calling me unless you have real tips.
1:24:07 - Leo Laporte
I got a tip for you.
1:24:12 - Paris Martineau
Aw, you misspelled tip.
1:24:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh.
1:24:16 - Paris Martineau
It is blue, that's so fun.
1:24:19 - Leo Laporte
It's just like I'm on an iPhone. I just sent that from a pixel, Wow, Okay. So there's a number of issues that came up. We talked about this on Mac break weekly. I do want to tell people, though, who use Android devices it's worth a try Now seven days free, $2 a month. After that, so, and I Not too bad. I wouldn't sign up for a year plan, no, cause Apple's gonna be onto this. Well, that's the thing. So we talked a lot about this on Mac break weekly.
A the folks at beeper mini, by the way, beepercom say Apple can't fix this without breaking their authentication, for everybody uses an iPhone. So that's kind of interesting, right, and it may be true and it may not. I don't know enough about the protocol. Maybe, for instance, the packet is sent that says this is really an iPhone See. Oh, by the way, when you send pictures like that, Paris, I get full quality, just like I would if I run an iPhone, and I will say, yeah, this is is for are you receiving that in the beeper mini app or are you receiving that as a text?
1:25:20 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it's a beeper.
1:25:21 - Paris Martineau
And it's showing up in my phone just like a normal I message.
1:25:23 - Leo Laporte
Let me send you a picture. Let's see how can I do that. Oh yeah, here we go. I will send you a picture, an image. I don't know what I'm sending you. I should probably look at it first. Oh, isn't that nice? This is a picture of a spirit, of my spirit guide, planty McPlantface, and it's full quality, right so, because this app is logged in as an iPhone. In fact, when I set it up, I got messages on all my Apple devices saying another iPhone, yeah, that's full quality.
Another iPhone has been added to your account And-.
1:26:13 - Jeff Jarvis
This should make Apple just say okay, nevermind, fine, we're gonna get rid of the stupidity.
1:26:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is so-.
1:26:18 - Paris Martineau
I mean, they were already doing it right.
1:26:20 - Leo Laporte
So here's no, not fully. You don't get all the news. The rumor was that they because of the DMA the Digital Markets Act in the Europe that Apple was gonna somehow do some interoperability. They did say yes to RCS, and maybe that's all they plan to do. This is much worse. This is basically putting messages Apple's iMessage on an Android device. That's, for all intents and purposes, equivalent.
1:26:43 - Paris Martineau
And to answer a question that the Discord chat had I can edit messages to and from Leo's fake iPhone which is an iMessage, only thing Right.
1:26:54 - Leo Laporte
And I just sent you a reaction to your picture and instead of doing the Android thing which is repeating the picture and saying Leo liked it, it just did it, just like an iPhone does.
1:27:05 - Jeff Jarvis
So who's?
1:27:06 - Leo Laporte
this kid? Who's the kid? We gotta give the kid credit. I don't know his name. I think they haven't said his name. He's some 16-year-old, reverse engineered Now.
So this is what Jason Stell said yesterday at MacBrick Weekly there is a carve out in the Digital Money and Copyright Act. You know, normally it prevents you from reverse engineering stuff, but in this particular case that's legal, he says in the DMCA, and I believe Jason's an expert on this stuff. So it's legal. So Apple can't stop them on legal grounds. They can't sue them. Apple may have a way technically to stop them on the authentication server. It's their contention that to do so would break everybody else, so they're not gonna do that.
I think there's another thing that Apple's probably considering If we do come down hard on this, that just proves we're a monopoly. That just proves that everything they've been saying about us and we're jerks, we're jerks. So they and I think what Apple's gonna look at very carefully if they can, maybe they just look at the Play Store downloads is how many people is this costing us a lot of money? Apple hates it when other people make money on their technology, so they hate it that it's $2 a month. But is it really costing us anything and if they decide you know 10,000 people are using it and it would really risk our relations with the EU if we were to squash it they may just let it go. It's a very interesting thing and I want you to know if you're an Android user, you can be a blue bubble and it works Well for the kids who get, for the poor kids who get forced to buy Android phones, not iPhones.
1:28:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Right this is huge.
1:28:40 - Leo Laporte
This is a salvation. It is end to end encrypted, that you're not going to a server, there's no middleman, it's just like Apple's messages. Apple thinks this is an iPhone. That's the main point. So, yes, it is going through Apple servers, but it's not going through anybody else's servers. I think it's a very interesting story. That's very funny, yeah.
1:28:59 - Paris Martineau
That is very interesting.
1:29:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it took me a little while to install it. I had done a couple of things, for instance, on my Google account I was hoping to turn. You know those pop-ups you get everywhere from Google saying you can sign up with Google over here Every time I go to.
1:29:13 - Paris Martineau
Notion Because I live in an iPhone life, but that sounds quite annoying, oh, it happens on your browser.
1:29:19 - Leo Laporte
Look here it is. I'm trying to, I'm on Notion right and you get this. Sign in with Google. Use your Google account.
1:29:24 - Paris Martineau
You can use your Google account.
1:29:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh that does suck, drives me nuts. So there is a setting under the Google security settings that says don't let third-party Apple's apps sign in, which breaks this pop-up. But it's not. So it's like oh, I still get the pop-up. So I had to turn that off for this to work, because the first thing you do when you get BeeperMini is you sign into your Google account. Then you also register the phone number of your Pixel phone. So, in effect, you're adding a new iPhone to your Apple account with your Pixel phone's number. That did not work. I don't know why, but it doesn't matter. I still was able to use it. But when I send you a text, paris, you're seeing it as my Apple phone number, not my Google phone number. You're seeing a 707 number.
1:30:13 - Paris Martineau
So right, so it's a different phone number than what you.
1:30:16 - Leo Laporte
It's my iPhone number.
1:30:17 - Paris Martineau
So you have two different phone numbers.
1:30:19 - Leo Laporte
So well, no, it's my iPhone number. I would like it to be my Pixel number, so that I don't know. Does it matter? I guess it doesn't matter, it's my.
1:30:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Apple. Well wait, can you use this to text anybody on any phone? Yeah, jeff, shall I text you.
1:30:33 - Leo Laporte
I have you. Sure, I think I have your phone number. Let me try.
1:30:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I think you do yes.
1:30:37 - Leo Laporte
It picks up my contacts. Jeff Jeffrey Jarvis what is it? Jeffrey Allen Jarvis, Allen Jarvis. Allen Jeffrey Jeffrey Allen Jarvis, I'm going to send you a text.
1:30:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Sorry, let's see Wait a minute.
1:30:54 - Paris Martineau
This is why you've got a subscribed oh this is bad.
1:30:57 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, jeff Jarvis can't be reached on iMessage, let me try.
1:31:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, because it's iMessage only, yeah. So I'm wondering yeah, this is this is, this is.
1:31:04 - Leo Laporte
this is. Oh, I can't text you is because you're in an Android, an Android.
1:31:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That's Aha. That's a flaw because you were signed in Right, you thought it's meant to send Apple phones. Oh, very interesting, that's a problem. So it doesn't replace your text and you've got to know whether somebody's on an Apple. Well, it's a way for you to say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and Apple.
1:31:26 - Leo Laporte
But not much more. That is a good point, because I cannot. You know, you can do this with signal. As you have Paris, you can make it your default. Well, actually you don't have an Android phone, but if you did, you can make it your default messaging app. I could do that with signal on Android. I could do that with a number of other programs. I cannot do it with Beeper Mini. Now, according to Scooter X, beeper Mini says it will add SMS and RCS and FaceTime in the future. As long as Apple doesn't kill us, we're going to do it.
1:31:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So, basically, I can use this to tell some Stop making fun of me, from my color, of my bubbles.
1:32:05 - Leo Laporte
They never know that you weren't on an iPhone. I've been texting with Micah on his iPhone, from my Android phone, and he says it's exactly. In fact, I've been going back and forth between Android, this Macintosh. He says it's all the same. There's no way to tell the difference.
1:32:20 - Jeff Jarvis
But again, his texts back to you are coming in through Beeper Mini, not through your texting, not through your.
1:32:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's because their I messages, not texts.
Yes, it's not SMS and that's why I can't text you, jeff. Apple messages falls back to that old fashioned SMS technology. When it's talking to an Android device, that's the green bubble. So if they add SMS, I bet you that you'd be a green bubble still to me, even though I'm on an Android, which is hysterical, but at least I'd be able to communicate you. Same thing if it uses RCS. All of this, it says signal will also be implemented that's fun Using matrix. So this is their roadmap anyway.
1:33:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Is there a business here or they're just having fun sticking at that $2 a?
1:33:09 - Leo Laporte
month, which is fun. That's a business, right, if a lot of people use it, according to their blog. Okay now, I was also a Beeper member. In fact, I believe if you had a Beeper account, paid in, full lifetime account, you would get Beeper Mini as well. You would have the lifetime on Beeper Mini. I think that's how they described it.
Everything changed in August when a security researcher reverse engineered the iMessage protocol. He published PyPush, a proof of concept Python library that enables any type of computer to send or receive end to end encrypted messages over the iMessage protocol. This had never been done before. It was a groundbreaking, gigantic achievement of genius and hard work. We immediately began to work with him this is from their blog post integrate his research into Beeper Mini and eliminate the need for Mac Relay servers and the roadmap. You know it's kind of amazing. Inc says that they're working on import pass chat history. It's doing that now Full text search, block list, chat history, backup and export. It does do that and it does it securely. It does it end to end encrypted Android OS chat bubbles that would be nice. Foldable tablet UI, facetime, audio and video calls, scheduled messages, sms, whatsapp, signal matrix, support desktop and iOS apps.
1:34:41 - Jeff Jarvis
It would be. The great FU is of Google Bot. Ha, that would be. Oh wow, wouldn't that be beautiful, oh wow. Just as the FU to Apple. Just okay fine.
1:34:52 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you won't do it, we will. Yeah, I'm really curious what Apple's response will be to this. They haven't, as far as I know, and said anything yet. Very interesting, but hey, if you're on an Android device, this works pretty well. Speaking of pixels, we are in our December pixel drop. I suppose this should be a change log. I'm just gonna you know what? I'm gonna mush it all together. I'm gonna mush it all together.
1:35:18 - Jeff Jarvis
You're back from the mountaintop. You can break your old habits, break your old ways.
1:35:22 - Leo Laporte
All these artificial distinctions are just no longer necessary. Well, all stories are one.
1:35:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It's. You know what? It's meaningless, leo, like life. True Paris says it's meaningless, it's meaningless.
1:35:37 - Paris Martineau
The change log is just a figment of our imagination. All change is happening simultaneously around us.
1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
How did you know all that? You don't even need to go. You're enlightened. You're an enlightened being. It's true, she's bad at math.
1:35:52 - Paris Martineau
She's bad at math All the space that math would have occupied. I just got enlightened in there.
1:35:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So I gotta ask you something, paris Do the kids these days? When you were the young philosopher high school age, did you read Siddhartha too? Or was that just by generation?
1:36:11 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I think I did Like freshman year of college.
1:36:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that'd be that. I read it in high school. It's the story of the Buddha, but in Herman Hess says kind of modern telling. I loved it so much. I read all of Herman Hess' books. I loved it.
1:36:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's save it here. Oh yeah, we were the same kind of of game a lot of just nerds, yeah. As Hess once said, and then I was a philosophy major for a while, yeah, and then I read the Magic Mountain.
1:36:37 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I kind of got into a weird German existentialist phase.
1:36:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I got really into Heidegger.
1:36:43 - Leo Laporte
Heidegger, look at you.
1:36:46 - Paris Martineau
You know, Wow. I'm right now rereading all David Foster Wallace's works in a real revisit of my college era.
1:36:54 - Leo Laporte
So I'll give you a little tip I had to open. I have a free Spotify account with just obnoxious ads. But I was curious because they said they're gonna do audiobooks. They have like all of David Foster Wallace's stuff in audio on Spotify.
1:37:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it make any sense in audio?
1:37:12 - Paris Martineau
I mean it's got. Do they do the? Do they do the end?
1:37:15 - Leo Laporte
notes in audio oh, I doubt that.
1:37:18 - Paris Martineau
Cause the end notes are a big part.
1:37:22 - Leo Laporte
It would be nice if they End notes are sometimes a whole chapter, integrated them into like, so you don't have to flip to the end, right, so that just let me see we could listen. Why don't we listen to oh God, oh.
1:37:35 - Paris Martineau
Okay, we can't, no, no no, this podcast is gonna be forcibly removed from the internet if we play a David Foster Wallace audiobook on the air.
1:37:43 - Leo Laporte
Allow Spotify to track you across all apps. It's better for advertising, oh, yeah, sure, why not? Why not? Well, now I can't. Now I can't see Audiobooks for you. Now it's changed. So it was, for some reason, I had like the complete, now it's Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I don't forget it.
1:38:02 - Paris Martineau
I saw Joel Rogan on there too.
1:38:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
1:38:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, this is a particular Spotify. Spotify says you get a certain number of hours a month 15 a month, but they're Less than a whole book, less than a book.
1:38:13 - Paris Martineau
Well, reach shorter books. All right, guys, I'm gonna read the show back in. We're gonna go to 86 on the rundown, oh no. Spotify canceled two acclaimed podcasts, heavyweight and Stolen, this week, as well as laid off 17% of staff, 1,500 people. I mean this isn't entirely surprising Spotify's, but it's not their first layoffs this year and these are only the latest Is their third round. Their third round winning yeah Podcasts that they've canceled, but it's quite sad.
1:38:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's just like how the New York Times. The New York Times made fun of blogs and then decided they were gonna blog, and then they ruined it for all the bloggers. Then they got tired of it and they got out of blogs. Spotify's done the exact same thing with podcasts.
1:38:59 - Leo Laporte
You think it's them that's screwed us over. I don't think so, Maybe.
1:39:03 - Paris Martineau
I mean I think Spotify thought that they could buy the podcasting market.
1:39:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they try. I don't think that's speculation.
1:39:09 - Paris Martineau
I think that that is there was their strategy and it didn't work.
1:39:13 - Leo Laporte
I admit a little shot in Freud.
1:39:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I thought they had to be that big.
1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
I admit a little shot in Freud because I'm glad they failed. They didn't buy us. I would have been much happier had they bought us, but they didn't. And then the check clear Last week.
1:39:24 - Paris Martineau
Leo, we were trying to think of what would be the funniest thing to have a plane fly over your retreat with a sign that said and we thought it could have been Spotify is trying to buy Twitter.
1:39:35 - Jeff Jarvis
But you have to call, but you have to call. You have to call before the week is up.
1:39:38 - Paris Martineau
Week is up. Yeah, yeah.
1:39:43 - Leo Laporte
That would have been very mean, Anyway. Anyway, on the one hand I'm, you know, kind of some joyful glee in the failure of Spotify's podcast efforts, but on the other hand, they've ruined the market for everybody else, and one of the reasons we're struggling deeply is because advertisers have decided they want that tracking and then get it from Spotify. They can also. We're on Spotify, but we're not exclusive to Spotify, but they've also decided they can get it from Google and Facebook and YouTube. And I honestly think it's not really so much Spotify, because look how Spotify is struggling too, it's YouTube. I look at what my son Henry, who is an influencer now, is drawing an ad revenue. I mean it is. It dwarfs what we can charge because he's an influencer and that's the hot thing, right? Is he more effective than our ads? I don't think so. He's getting an ungodly amount of money from Cheetos.
Friday at 1pm on Amazon, he's gonna do an hour stream cooking with Cheetos, Cause he's a internet chef, he's a TikTok chef, so he's gonna. Cheetos sent him. I told you this before this show, but I'll tell the folks who are listening to the show. I went over to help him with the technical stuff. There's piles of Amazon boxes. What's this? He said I don't know. I don't know, I didn't order it. So we opened a box and it's a. It's a entire set of Rachel Ray Cookware in Cheeto orange, which I guess he's supposed to use. And then there's another box. What's in there? I don't know. It is a KitchenAid mixer. He said, oh shoot, I told him I needed one yesterday. I guess I'm gonna get two. Those are expensive. And he says I don't care. He says they don't care, they don't want anything back. They're gonna where. He's gonna stream for an hour. He's gonna cook with Cheetos. I'm sure they'll make it into TikToks and they'll do other stuff with it. But this is what agencies especially, but also add.
1:41:41 - Jeff Jarvis
But they also want. God bless Hank. I hope he stays as hot as forever. But I remember a former friend of mine who I worked with, who was a creative director at. Coddy Nest said you never want to be the face of the moment.
1:41:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, I agree, or I would extend that, and Hank knows this. If you are the face of the moment, capitalize on it. Oh yeah, you know. So he's created the Salt Lovers Club, saltloversclubcom. He's created a line of salt seasonings which, by the way Merch is incredible. We've gotten to look before the show. He started these. This went live on December 1st. What is this? The sixth?
1:42:19 - Paris Martineau
What? And it's already sold out.
1:42:20 - Leo Laporte
Sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out. By the way, I'm sorry he sold out, oh F, that's pretty good, Cause that was pretty good, the only there's only five Garlic.
There's only five left. And he's and I bought 10 of these black truffle salts. He's you know they're more expensive cause truffles are so expensive. So I haven't sold as many of these. I still have like 90 units. So I bought 10, but cause it's the best thing on popcorn ever, but I was going to give you guys and I apologize, this was going to be our Christmas gift the works Devastating All of them and they're sold out. So I asked him. He said you know, I guess I'll get him back in stock in the spring, so you guys are going to get your Christmas present in March. So I'm sorry, I apologize. And yeah, the apparel you said you like, see this, I didn't. I didn't get this cause I'm not a-.
1:43:11 - Paris Martineau
No, the apparel is it's fire.
1:43:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm not a ute. I don't know why anybody would want-.
1:43:16 - Paris Martineau
I'm a ute and it's quite good. This is a shirt that says I effing love salami, but it says the word because it's unlike Leo. His son is unconstrained by-.
1:43:27 - Leo Laporte
By Jammer Bean. He uses the F word a lot and, by the way, you like the copy. Salami is my favorite food and I think this shirt pays homage to that in a subtle, tasteful way. Really good, he's not kidding. For Christmas, every year, from the time he was about six to 15, he would get a whole salami in his Christmas stocking. That's what he wanted, and he would often eat it in the month of March.
1:43:54 - Jeff Jarvis
With a knife or just just biting it off at us.
1:43:57 - Leo Laporte
He loves salami. He's not kidding you. I did buy the pigment black cast iron hoodie which says does your dad know you put his cast iron in the dishwasher? And I think that comes from his youth. I do. It's good quality stuff. If you're looking for a Christmas gift, he's got a flaky salt shirt.
1:44:19 - Paris Martineau
He's got one that says the flaky salt shirt is great. I'm gonna get that.
1:44:23 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that nice. He's got one that says does your mom know you don't baste your steaks? Anyway, he's a funny boy, but that's. But you're right, jeff. I mean the key is, take that brand recognition be the flavor of the month. He's got a cookbook. He's doing all this, yeah, yeah yeah. But then capitalize on it as quick as you can. He's gonna be on Gordon Ramsay's new show, idiot Sandwich, in the next few weeks.
1:44:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, why don't we play, in fact, the duet from TikTok, which is on the rundown? Oh, did you? You, of course, in TikTok quarter. Of course not. This is a little-.
1:44:56 - Leo Laporte
Line 92. I think this is a little bit self-serving, but please forgive me. It's okay. I'm a doting father. We're telling you to do it. I am a doting father. Oh, I have to put the puzzle. Line 92 is wonderful. I gotta put the puzzle piece on the puzzle piece, then I gotta do the odd you have to prove you're not a bot. I know it's ridiculous.
1:45:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, when I start over, this is cool, you gotta start again, because he says it's a duet with Gordon.
1:45:17 - Leo Laporte
It's a duet with Gordon Ramsay.
1:45:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Now you gotta start it again so you can hear it Shh the sandwich looks so good.
1:45:24 - Leo Laporte
Salt and pepper man. Salt and pepper man, that looks good. Go tell me. Come on, Is this the?
1:45:31 - Leo's Laptop
first of many. That's so good. That was for you, Gordon. Thank you, my man. Okay, so this is gonna be a Wellington sandwich. Nice conversion to the veg.
1:45:42 - Leo Laporte
Great idea, by the way. Okay, good, drain that off.
1:45:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Produce that down to the beef, so there's a lot of salt in there, man.
1:45:48 - Leo Laporte
However, good sear. Basically, you can let the fish before you slice it. It goes in the oven. Oh, that's beautiful. Okay, now garnish. This is so wonderful.
1:46:01 - Leo's Laptop
Dude this is looking good, chestnut Mushrooms Diced up. Yes, little man, a Wellington sandwich.
1:46:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so Gordon.
1:46:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Ramsay loves my boy.
1:46:14 - Leo Laporte
He went to Vegas a couple of weeks ago, right before the F1 race, actually to tape idiot sandwich. It's gonna. I don't know when the episode will be on, but he's on it.
1:46:23 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I guess he and Gordon got along pretty well, so Okay, I do have a question, I guess for both of you, on what we were talking about before with regards to advertising dropping out from the podcasting market. I'm curious. I mean I feel like you touch on this a bit in your book, jeff, about magazines. A similar trend I feel like has happened with the media industry time and time again over the last couple of decades, where you find some hot new thing be it magazines or websites or TikTok videos or YouTube advertisers descend on it, think it's the hot new thing they wanna pour money into, and then something happens. In many cases it ends up being that they get more and more tracking on it than realize people aren't really doing much when they see their ads. They moved to the next hot thing until the cycle repeats again. I mean, is that a fair assessment?
1:47:17 - Jeff Jarvis
of what's happened. The other thing is Paris advertisers always want the new thing. So when I was starting the websites for advanced publications, njcom and so on, driving nuts, the ad sales people would come in and say, well, we have to create a new unit for this advertiser. They want the special unit, but we already have tons of no, no, we have to create this big ass ad for them because otherwise they're not gonna buy. And so that's how the site got cluttered with 40 different kinds of ad units, because the advertiser is always one of the thing that was special and new, and the sales people always play to that understandably, and they do that with genre as well. And so I think what I learned about magazines and covering magazines in mind is my talk called Simply Magazine. Thank you for the great.
1:48:05 - Paris Martineau
first, it's a great book.
1:48:06 - Jeff Jarvis
It's very portable. Thank you, it is. It's very, very. Yes, it's personalized, is that's another story, by the way, is that they wanted to start a time they wanted to start a magazine named Women. They wanted to make it personalized. What the hell is that? Anyway, anyway, magazines themselves went through that kind of cycle where they had a certain meaning in society and then that faded off. So it's not just the advertisers, it's also the culture. I think the culture moves, moves beyond and and moves to the next hot thing, and it happens symbiotically.
1:48:43 - Leo Laporte
That's why I had a child, so that Henry could take over when, when podcasting died, I'd have a. Still have some skin in the game. Uh, no, actually, uh, I wish I'd read your book 10 years ago, because podcasting is really in that phase right now. And that's the, the Spotify layoff. Uh, those two shows were gimlet shows. Gimlet has essentially shut down. That was one of the big podcast networks 10 years ago.
Five years Bought for a fortune, yeah, um, so I guess this would be a good time for me to mention that we're having the same issues. Uh, the last numbers Lisa showed me, uh, were that we would lose $1.1 million next year. Now, I don't have, I mean, I guess I could kick in a couple of hundreds now, but I don't really have a million and we don't have investors. So the only way we can respond to that is with some cuts. Uh, there's two ways. One is to cut costs, which we're going to do, but I think also, too, we can't increase advertising. We've tried, in fact, we've had to cut advertising, uh prices is to improve the membership in the club. We have, I'm thrilled, more than 8,000 members, uh, but that's still only a fraction of the 700,000 individuals who listen every month to one of our shows and if we could just get a few more of you, it would make all the difference. It would help make up this $1.1 million loss.
If we don't make it up, we will turn off the lights and go home. We have to, we. There's no other choice. I can't, I can't make our wonderful, wonderful staff work for free. Uh, they have to get paid. I don't have to get paid and, frankly, lisa and I have many months this year not been paid, but that's okay. Uh, but they have to be paid. It's not, but, but it's not ideal.
1:50:35 - Jeff Jarvis
But then I'll say this again folks, public radio does six to 12% of those who listen give so that it can be free for all. That's the generosity that makes public radio work in this country. And 10% of 700,000 will be 70,000 people paying. Well, that would lay out with that.
1:50:52 - Leo Laporte
Do it if you have 70,000 club members we would add shows, we would grow, we would hire more people. That would be enough for us to grow. Uh, it is 10%. I would be happy. 5% would be enough for us to survive. We don't now have 2%. So, uh, please, if you're not yet a member, it's seven bucks a month. Look, I don't expect everybody to pay. We hear from people say I can't afford it. At what can I do? And I say that's fine, I don't, we don't need your money. Uh, just with like with public radio, we need to stay the percentage of people who can't afford $7 a month, $84 a year to kick in. You'll get ad free versions of all of our shows, you get access to our discord, you get special programming and content we don't put out in public, Uh, so we try to give you some benefits, some value for your dollars, and you really help us. Uh, stay alive and uh, and that's uh, I, I, I hate to do this, I hate to do this.
1:51:42 - Paris Martineau
Uh, we didn't have a club for a long time because I didn't want to have to beg, but uh, I will say also, if you were in club club, you would have heard our great behind the scenes chat before we started the show, where we learned about all of our childhood nicknames. Thank you, paris, You're only going to get. That's exactly right.
1:52:01 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly right. Thank you, paris. So anyway, twittv slash club. I don't, I don't want to be. You know, we're not going to do a pledge night. We're not going to, we're not going to offer you a tote bag, uh, but uh, and maybe that's why, I don't know.
1:52:14 - Paris Martineau
I'd like a. I'd like a tote bag with your face on it.
1:52:17 - Leo Laporte
I would you know if we could work out a deal with salt make a tote bag.
1:52:21 - Paris Martineau
Have some salt lover club merch get Joe Esposito out there to make our tote bag, joe, what would a twit tote bag look like?
1:52:31 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, uh, thank you for all of our members. We have wonderful members. I love the group that we have. I love our community. I love doing this. I want to keep doing it. I love the people we work with, like Paris and, and what's his name over here, but uh, I think there might be some, I'm not sure.
Yeah, jeff, rial and Jivis, but, uh, we can't do it. Frankly, uh, unless we, unless we somehow goose the revenue, cause we can't lose a million dollars, I just can't do it. So, we'll figure it out, we'll figure it out, but, uh, your help would really be appreciated, thank you. So what I was about to talk about, I'll tell you what I'm going to do an ad. Then I'll talk about what I was going to tell you about, because we were talking about Gemini. Uh, gemini is coming to your Pixel phone and eventually to all Android devices, which I think is very interesting. We'll talk about that and more this week in Google continues in just a bit. But first a word from our great sponsor, melissa. They've been with us for years. Really love Melissa. They're the data quality experts.
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Melissacom slash Twitter. M E L I S S A. Melissacom slash Twitter. We thank them so much. See, we have great advertisers and we really appreciate their support. We really do, but I think I always have thought it's going to be the community that's going to make a big difference. Somebody's saying wait a minute, twitch shutting down in South Korea. No, no, twitch is shutting down. That's a perfect example. That's got to be a huge market for them, right? And they say it's too expensive to operate in South Korea. They're shutting down wild.
1:56:59 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, look at, popular science magazine just died completely. Oh, that's sad.
1:57:03 - Paris Martineau
That's really sad, pretty sad.
1:57:05 - Leo Laporte
Yep, yep, and people say, oh well, they just did a big business model or oh, they didn't handle it right. No, it's hard. It's hard. Even Kodak which Kodak is a really perfect example, because they made their money on film right, film processing film, film cameras. They knew digital was coming. They were one of the first companies to release a digital camera. People forget this. They knew it was coming. They bought Ophoto and created a digital portal where you get developing. Done all this stuff. They did the right thing and they still couldn't survive. And the reason is that margins on the film and developing business were so much higher than the margins in the digital business. There was just no way to make that bridge. Sometimes it's not mismanagement, it's just the times change. And now we have our Twitter tote bag. We're so grateful, so I have to talk to the boss if we can offer this. But boy, that's a hell of a good looking.
1:58:04 - Paris Martineau
That's great. I love that it's blue.
1:58:07 - Jeff Jarvis
But Joe, joe, no, no, I'm sorry, joe, we love you, but Paris instructed that Leo's face needs to be on it.
1:58:13 - Paris Martineau
It should be a big cartoon, leo face.
1:58:16 - Leo Laporte
Ideally.
1:58:17 - Paris Martineau
I do think that that would be really nice.
1:58:20 - Jeff Jarvis
We're giving.
1:58:21 - Paris Martineau
Joe, a standing up for my creative.
1:58:25 - Leo Laporte
Big news If we were talking about Bard and Gemini, which is a little confusing. That's a new model within Bard, so Bard's kind of like the operating system around it, and Gemini is going to be the new, supposedly superior model. They've also created Gemini Nano, which is small enough to fit onto your device, your pixelate Pro and eventually Android without needing an internet connection. That's really interesting right now.
1:58:52 - Jeff Jarvis
This is why they put these, these high powered tensor chips, on these phones. Yes, yes, disappeating this day.
1:58:58 - Leo Laporte
Yep, I was talking on Windows Weekly this morning. Rich Campbell bought a new computer. He bought a Microsoft Surface. It is about the only PC you can buy right now that has a neural processing unit. It has an app machine language chip in it. All the all the new Max do, almost all the new phones certainly iPhones and Pixel phones have this, and I said it's smart. I would not buy a new computer today that didn't have some sort of neural co -processor, because you're going to be doing more and more of this stuff and you're going to do more and more on device.
This is a perfect example. So this will run locally. Right now, only the pixelate Pro gets it. It'll be part of the December feature drop. I haven't gotten it yet. Two things in your phone, starting today, will be powered by Nano the auto summarization feature in the recording app so you can record audio, go to a meeting, record it and get a summary, a to-do list and action items, that kind of thing. And the. When does it start Today? But I think you have to. I think you have to get the. I haven't. I've been checking every five minutes. It hasn't come yet, but you'll have to get the new. You know how they do the feature drop every month. This will be the December feature drop. Also smart reply in the Gboard keyboard and these both work offline, which?
2:00:13 - Jeff Jarvis
I think, is what people want, which also is good for privacy folks as well. That your data stays with you. The calculation stays with you. This is where advertising is going to go as well with the sad box, is it?
2:00:24 - Leo Laporte
things will occur on your device, yeah, Hasebe says it's an incredible model for its size. We'll see A Tensor 3 processor can is the only processor right now on a phone that can run this model, but they're trying to get it into Android with software support, I guess. And, of course, qualcomm announced at their event that they're going to have neural processors in all their new chips. Intel has done that with their very newest chips and Apple has had this now for some time, starting with the iPhone and then later in the Apple Silicon Macs. I, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, I've been doing local models on my Mac and it's fantastic. It's really interesting what you can do. What I want to ask I've got a question for you guys.
2:01:14 - Paris Martineau
Yes, leo, jeff, do you know what the word RIS means? R-i-z, it's not weird, r-i-z-z.
2:01:23 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I didn't, I'm, but I'm going to.
2:01:29 - Paris Martineau
Okay, give me your guesses. What do you think it means?
2:01:34 - Jeff Jarvis
What happens when you're old and you can't go to the toilet? Very well, you RIS in your penis.
2:01:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, wow it is Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Year is what.
What Does that give you any context? What it could be? It's derived from charisma. It basically means charisma. It's a Gen Z word, it yeah. I mean I think it's notable because they just announced that it is the Word of the Year. It beat out Swiftie, but someone can have Riz and that is charisma. How I know of it is there was a absolutely baffling video that went viral earlier this year which I have in the rundown at line 90, which I was hoping Ant was going to be on this because this is sports related somewhat. It is the phrase Lizzie Rizzed Up Baby Gronk is absolutely meaningless.
2:02:37 - Leo's Laptop
Livvy just convinced Baby Gronk to commit to LSU. Baby Gronk is the number one college football prospect in the country. He averages 300 yards and 5 touchdowns a game. On his visit to LSU, Livvy rizzed him up. Livvy even hugged Baby Gronk. He might be the Livvy hugged Baby. Gronk.
2:02:55 - Leo Laporte
She rizzed him up.
2:02:58 - Paris Martineau
See, that's Riz in a sentence. Livvy rizzed him up, so apparently Baby.
2:03:03 - Leo Laporte
Gronk started apparently from Tom Holland Spider-Man, who said I have no Riz whatsoever. I had limited Riz in an interview with BuzzFeed in June, as in charisma. Now it's making a little more sense.
2:03:24 - Paris Martineau
As in charisma, yes, I will say the Livvy Rizzed Up Baby Gronk also went viral June 6th. So who's to say whether it was Tom Holland or this inexplicable TikTok man talking about Baby Gronk? I think it kind of has been percolating through the internet for a while, but it's a word to know. Do you have any youngins in your life?
2:03:48 - Leo Laporte
Right. The first time I heard I had no idea what on fleek could possibly mean. And then the problem is I learn it, jeff learns it, and then nobody uses it and they go oh, you're so unhipped.
2:04:01 - Paris Martineau
No, I think you should look children or people who are Gen Z in the eye and be like, yeah, I've got Riz baby. I got Riz baby Tell Salt Hank that.
2:04:11 - Leo Laporte
I got Riz. Have you seen my gift bag? It's all Rizdup, it's all.
2:04:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Rizdup.
2:04:19 - Leo Laporte
Yes.
2:04:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo did you ever wear a Nehru jacket in the 60s? Oh yeah.
2:04:25 - Paris Martineau
A what oh?
2:04:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Lord. So it was the coolest thing to be, and then Johnny Carson wore it. Yeah.
2:04:31 - Leo Laporte
The Prime Minister of India would wear a jacket. Then the Beatles wore it. It was like this it was basically the same material and same cut, but it would button at the top, so it had a little notch at the collar. It was called it because Jar Jar Royal Nehru wore it the Nehru jacket. But yeah, as soon as it gets popularized.
2:04:52 - Jeff Jarvis
So Johnny Carson wears one, so I wanted to wear one to church. My parents forbade me. We're going back to all this childhood stuff now. Forbade me to do it, it would be disrespectful. No, you don't do this. No, no, no, no, huge fight, huge fight, huge fight. Then Johnny Carson wore one and then I was allowed to wear one, but of course I didn't want to wear one.
2:05:12 - Leo Laporte
Now do you know who Johnny Carson is?
2:05:15 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I know Johnny Carson is.
2:05:23 - Leo Laporte
Johnny apparently had a line of polyester Nehru jackets, so maybe that was probably part of the problem. Yeah, I wore it. I remember I've told this story before. I remember I went to a boys' school in seventh, eighth and ninth grade in Providence, Rhode Island, and when I first went there you had to wear a necktie and jacket, which was, you know, I mean, seventh grader. Kind of a lot to ask, but I wore necktie and jacket. That is a lot, but it was the late 60s and by ninth grade in 1968, they loosened it a little bit. They said you can wear a turtleneck. For a while the turtleneck was a popular choice.
So they said you can wear a turtleneck with a jacket or an ascot.
2:06:07 - Jeff Jarvis
I think we need to get ascots.
2:06:09 - Paris Martineau
I think that's true, actually, that could be our Christmas year.
2:06:12 - Leo Laporte
I'm a 13 freaking year old in an ascot.
2:06:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Are there pictures? Oh, please tell me, there are pictures. I don't think so.
2:06:21 - Leo Laporte
I wish there were, but I did wear an ascot because I didn't want to wear a turtleneck and I was done with the tie. Ascot seemed pretty cool Basically for those who don't know, it's a scarf, A scarf around your neck that goes down into the V. You basically was George Hamilton wore an ascot.
2:06:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Right Scooby-Doo.
2:06:37 - Leo's Laptop
What is it Scooby-Doo, scooby-doo Wearing an ascot? Oh, fred, fred from. Scooby-doo oh man Speaking of an ascot, that's just a tied scarf.
2:06:44 - Leo Laporte
That's sort of it.
2:06:45 - Paris Martineau
I have a tiny bolo tie and a tiny cowboy hat that I have for my cat. That was one of the best purchases. She really hates the hat, but she likes the tiny bolo tie.
2:06:55 - Leo Laporte
She doesn't know that it's there. This is an ascot. George Hamilton wearing an ascot yes that's perfect.
2:07:03 - Jeff Jarvis
That's it. Let me note, by the way, a very important note today Norman Lear amazing talent who changed American culture, has died at 101, and I make a rule about this. He was the only person who could get away with wearing an ironic hat. All of you and you know who you are out there throw away your ironic hats now. Retire them with Norman Lear.
2:07:26 - Leo Laporte
Was Norman Lear's hat ironic or serious? I think he wore that hat like seriously. No, he wore it ironically. He wore it kind of like oh, this is in fun, that man is wearing a serious hat.
2:07:42 - Paris Martineau
Look at that. That hat is dead serious.
2:07:44 - Leo Laporte
Yes, it was his trademark, absolutely it was his trademark.
2:07:48 - Paris Martineau
Yes, yes.
2:07:49 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, I'll be honest. At the time I wasn't a fan. I don't know. You were a TV critic when I was all in the family and Maude and the did he do the Golden Eye? He was lionized Like this. Man could do no wrong.
2:08:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Every show he creates is genius and I thought it was kind of middle brow Sanford the Sun, Jefferson's Maude, except at good times. But what did he do to bring Black characters on TV A lot?
2:08:29 - Leo Laporte
I wish we were here to talk about that because you're absolutely right. Those shows finally put Black people on TV as equals, in fact, on the families, very strong and at the time controversial topics of racism, sexism had not really been heard and they were very pro-gay and it was very shocking to America, I guess. I mean, it didn't seem so shocking to me.
2:08:59 - Jeff Jarvis
And where is that? Consider also what sitcoms did for marriage equality. Where is that voice today from American culture? Where is the defense of trans people now in popular?
2:09:15 - Leo Laporte
culture Isn't that shameful? That's exactly right I mean, it's incredibly shameful. Yes.
2:09:20 - Paris Martineau
I mean especially in a popular culture that is not only shirking from a defense of trans fellow citizens, that is actively picking up the pitchfork and vilifying them in middle ages it is incredibly shameful.
2:09:37 - Leo Laporte
I don't even get it.
2:09:38 - Paris Martineau
I mean, let's pick on people who can't defend themselves, let's pick on an incredibly historically marginalized group of people that are already ostracized, that have lived their entire lives up until the point that transitioned in a body that made them feel uncomfortable. Let's make them feel more uncomfortable for making a choice that makes them feel all right in their skin.
2:10:04 - Leo Laporte
It's the ultimate in punching down. It's just, it's just the point.
2:10:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it the point they need? They need, they need a new target. They can't use black people anymore.
2:10:15 - Paris Martineau
They can't use gay people anymore.
2:10:17 - Jeff Jarvis
So now they're going to use trans people and drag and people like drag queens Like the most harmless group in the world.
2:10:27 - Leo Laporte
I mean, you meet a drag queen in an alley You're not like oh no, what'll I do?
2:10:33 - Paris Martineau
You just go, hey nice, You're like where's the show, Where's the party? Am I supposed to? Is there a comedy show going on here? Could?
2:10:40 - Leo Laporte
be fun. I just uh, you know we have uh, I honestly I didn't even know it that we had drag reading at the at the local library here in Petaluma and I would never know it, except they had protests all of a sudden. Oh, it's been going on for years, nobody had a problem with it. Anyway, a great piece obituary in the New York times by Rob Reiner, who was, of course, meathead in all in the family Archie Bunker. You know I do feel bad for Carol O'Connor, who was a res esteemed British actor who was never again to be anything but Archie Bunker to anywhere in anybody in the world. Um, I guess that's it's both a curse and a blessing if you're an actor to create a character that people only see you as Um. Anyway, highly recommend the uh the obituary and thank you, jeff, for bringing that up.
2:11:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I hadn't put that on the uh well, it was because of Paris's fashion moment. Yeah, let us. Well, no, actually I guess I'm I'm the blame for it, for the Nehru jacket which came off of Riz. So it was Riz to Nehru jacket, riz to Ascot, to Ironic hats.
2:11:51 - Paris Martineau
And to close the book on that, to answer someone's question and discord, to Riz someone up means to uh, you know you've got to exert your charisma towards them. Nice.
2:12:01 - Jeff Jarvis
You got to share it, right. Is it like what is it?
2:12:04 - Leo Laporte
the fashion guy for the queer eye or whatever that's called? Is that Riz-ing somebody up?
2:12:09 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I think Riz-ing someone up could be, as demonstrated by the baby Gronk video, a hug. Yeah, it could be, you know hyping someone up. It can be up to interpretation.
2:12:23 - Jeff Jarvis
No, she's being humble right now. I think what's happening is we have, we have an example of it every time in the Paris's mere presence here, riz is up, grandpa's is. Riz-ing us up. She has.
2:12:32 - Leo Laporte
Riz-ed us incredibly. Thank you.
2:12:35 - Paris Martineau
Norm and.
2:12:36 - Leo Laporte
Lear flew 57 bombing missions over Nazi Germany in the second world war. Wow, I forgot that he was a war hero.
2:12:46 - Paris Martineau
What a conversation we're having, guys. Just the, the vacillations really get me, and just to go full circle.
2:12:54 - Leo Laporte
He never wore a Nehru jacket, but he did.
2:12:58 - Paris Martineau
That we know him.
2:12:59 - Leo Laporte
We know he did wear the hat. Somebody's telling me in the chat room what's that? It's called a pork pie hat. Right, it's. It's no, it's a clown hat. It's a. It's a kind of a bozo the clown hat I think. I don't know. He apparently started wearing it because he used to pick at his head while he was writing and he wanted to stop himself from doing that. That's what somebody in the chat room said, right, anyway yeah.
Anyway, I'm glad you're here, gosh. We have run out of time and we have so many things to talk about, including, uh, lindo Yacarino's very unmerry X mess Um. Collie Collie.
2:13:39 - Paris Martineau
One of my uh my colleague that covers uh Twitter and Musk, said that one of the most notable parts of the story to her was that Yacarino is generally portrayed as like widely beloved by the ad industry. But this piece kind of goes into depth about how a lot of Yacarino's former colleagues told um the Hollywood reporter that she you know, quote wrecked the culture at NBCU.
2:14:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I wouldn't be surprised at all knowing what we know now.
2:14:07 - Leo Laporte
She was good at ad sales but wrecked the culture, says a former insider. She was not collegial, she was a scorched earth manager.
2:14:16 - Paris Martineau
And I mean specifically. I think they say that even at NBC she had an elastic relationship to facts of the company Interesting. You know that they had kind of started to see some of these patterns of behavior that we're now starting to see in her tenure with the Musk related companies.
2:14:36 - Leo Laporte
So what you're saying really is you don't need to feel bad for Linda Yacarino having to work for Elon Musk. She's in exactly the right place.
2:14:45 - Paris Martineau
I mean I would also, yeah, argue outside the surgical. I think anybody who takes a job with someone like you know cast and know what they're getting themselves into.
2:14:54 - Leo Laporte
I feel bad. I feel bad. I felt bad for her. Lisa and I were talking about this. She hadn't seen the hysterical Saturday Night Live portrayal. Did you see that of Linda Yacarino? I thought I played it on the air.
2:15:05 - Paris Martineau
We played it before the show. Yet another reason why you should be in the clubs that you can watch. All of us watch Saturday Night Live videos before the show starts.
2:15:14 - Leo Laporte
I love you, paris. Thank you, let us. I think we can finally wind this thing up, because I've got cookies to eat and miles to go before I sleep.
2:15:25 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm heading toward 22.
2:15:27 - Leo Laporte
I know you poor guy, we gotta get.
2:15:28 - Jeff Jarvis
we gotta get Jeff to be pretty well, though I'm doing pretty well. I'm pretty alert.
2:15:32 - Paris Martineau
You're very jovial.
2:15:34 - Leo Laporte
I know you're surprising. Really You've got. It's surprising for so many of your advanced age. Actually, exactly, exactly. Yeah, paris Martin. No, what is your pick this week? You said you found one.
2:15:46 - Paris Martineau
All right, I got two. The one that I was talking about before is an app that I've had in my phone for like five or six years. Great for the fun nihilists in your life. It's called WeCroak Five. Sorry, I laughed over.
2:15:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I laughed over. You Say it again it is called WeCroak.
2:16:02 - Paris Martineau
It's inspired by the Bhutanese folks saying to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily. It's an app that sends you a push notification five times a day saying don't forget you're going to die. Oh, my god.
2:16:15 - Leo's Laptop
And then you click on it you get a fun quote.
2:16:18 - Paris Martineau
That's all mixed up, and so I have had this app on my phone for many years and it's great, because sometimes you're having a bad day or you're stressed out or something's going wrong, and then you get a little buzz in your phone. You're like, ah, this is all meaningless, anyway, I'm going to die, and then it's fine.
2:16:34 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like Paris was the inspiration for my so-called life. I can just envision you with your book bags in high school going through saying it's me less, none of it matters, and I think you do.
2:16:46 - Paris Martineau
Were you a little goth.
2:16:48 - Jeff Jarvis
She dressed all black.
2:16:50 - Leo Laporte
There's no doubt, no doubt. All right.
2:16:54 - Paris Martineau
I just installed it.
2:16:55 - Leo Laporte
Here's my first quote. It's pretty good. Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there's scarcely one to which the world so easily reconciles itself. As to his death, nathaniel Hawthorne Wow.
2:17:09 - Paris Martineau
It's pretty good, and so I recently actually I've had this app truly for years I didn't realize there was a subscription option as well, so I checked it out a couple of weeks ago. It's called leap one. I think you get like harder quotes sometimes.
2:17:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm subscribing right now.
2:17:25 - Paris Martineau
But you also get. Which I really like is this thing called leaps, which is their weekly challenges. You get a new one every Sunday and this week's leap is visit a graveyard and find a gravestone marked with the same first name of someone you care about. Reflect over this grave for a few minutes.
2:17:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh I used to do that.
2:17:42 - Paris Martineau
There was another one I really liked a couple of weeks ago. That said something of the effect of find the oldest building in your neighborhood and walk over to it like learn something about its history and contemplate its presence there, and this led me on a great journey of finding the. I live in a historic neighborhood in Brooklyn and I found the. Whenever I guess you're petitioning for a neighborhood to be kind of a historic district, they have to write up a whole report on all the different buildings and streets. And I read this report for like hours. It was great, it was a great use of my time.
2:18:20 - Leo Laporte
The week. The visit of graveyard is this week's leap and only 43 people have done it. So let's all get out there, pay 20 bucks, talk it out there and look at some graves. Look at some graves. I used to do that in high school. I used to go to the graveyard and sit on a grave and try to imagine the person.
2:18:36 - Paris Martineau
Wow, were you also.
2:18:38 - Leo Laporte
I think I was something, me and my ass.
2:18:44 - Paris Martineau
My other pick is a more positive. This week was the 10 year anniversary for the information, which is really fun. We had a couple of different anniversary parties and Vandy fair wrote up this kind of great piece on our founder, Jessica lesson how she's like survived the decade of media tumult.
2:19:01 - Jeff Jarvis
They laughed when she sat down on the keyboard, and boy were they wrong.
2:19:05 - Paris Martineau
Absolutely. It's incredible, I mean we're going to be profitable this year. We have been profitable many of the years of the information.
2:19:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. Do you want to buy a podcast company?
2:19:16 - Leo Laporte
They're not that profitable, I guarantee you Probably not, but I don't know.
2:19:20 - Paris Martineau
We'll see Jessica starting her own podcast.
2:19:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm very, you know. I remember when the information started. I've been a subscriber since day one. I think it's just great. And what a great article and a great picture of Jessica at their women in tech media and finance conference a couple of months ago here in Napa Valley.
2:19:38 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, and I think it really speaks to the effectiveness and purity of the model which is, you know, while other media companies were out there pouring money into hiring a TikTok team or a YouTube team or pivoting to video or pivoting to whatever, jessica was investing money in hiring really good journalists, paying them competitive salaries and letting them just do journalism. Does she?
2:20:04 - Leo Laporte
kind of, do you look up to her as kind of a role model and a mentor? I mean, what I would?
2:20:09 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, absolutely I mean I think like there are very few people in journalism that have been able to escape being just an inkstained wretch and become a you know, the creator of something, and then to have that be a viable business that creates good work and incentivizes good work. I think it's someone who's been laid off.
Yeah, someone has been laid off from, like my last two jobs and media. It's something I think about a lot is I really like and respect that she has been able to build a company in which I feel like I can not only exist ethically as a journalist, but that I am incentivized and supported to do my best work.
2:20:53 - Leo Laporte
Bravo or brava. I guess I should say that's yeah, she her podcast. I can't. I haven't listened to it. I can't wait to. Sam was on. Her husband was on Twitter a few weeks ago and told us about it. Sam lesson and Jessica lesson with a Brit, a Moran, and Dave Moran. They do a podcast together and that's I mean, those are called more and less more lessons.
2:21:18 - Paris Martineau
I think it's very funny.
2:21:19 - Leo Laporte
And they've. I mean that's talk about power couples. That's got to be a great show. I've got, I've got to hear it. So, yeah, they had just launched it. I think what Sam was on, sam um very nice very nice. Yeah, those are my picks.
2:21:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, Jeff Jarvis what do you got? I want to mention one news story that I think matters is that I just I can just came through the UK on the way back way back from Vienna, so I could take an early morning flight and be here.
2:21:46 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jeff. I cannot thank you for the old bottom line. Thank you.
2:21:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I'd be really fall asleep tomorrow.
2:21:54 - Leo Laporte
No, get a good night's sleep cause five PM Pacific, eight PM my time.
2:22:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So get a good night's sleep. You could stay up to 10. Yeah, I don't know, I'm pretty old.
2:22:07 - Leo Laporte
If you need to Riz in between during the show, you just go right.
2:22:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't say that to a man without a prostate Leo. So, speaking of prostates, the UK, their, their, their online safety book has now put out the regulation putting out the regulations for what it will take to watch porn in the UK. Oh great, you will have to upload a photo ID. The measures be considered. Upload a photo ID document. Facial age estimation technology contacting your mobile network provider to allow your phone to access it.
Content checking age versus credit card details and using digital identity wallets. And, as people have pointed out on Twitter, porn industry just steals stuff so they can get your data and do bad things with it. So now we have a law that's going to give porn companies oh what trustworthy companies they are Personal data.
2:23:02 - Leo Laporte
What do you think is going to happen? It's possible to isolate them, you know, to merely send off to the porn company, yes or no, but somebody's going to get all this information and it doesn't matter if it's a porn company or not.
2:23:15 - Paris Martineau
That's a horrendous violation and maybe this is a bad tick of mine, but is it really? The most important thing that we have to be focusing on a society is whether or not teenagers are able to watch porn Like I think we've got more pressing concerns.
2:23:30 - Jeff Jarvis
I agree, but masturbation has been the topic of moral panic forever. Lee and I have the hairy palms to prove it. We were told our age.
2:23:42 - Paris Martineau
You both are blind, notice we wear glasses.
2:23:45 - Leo Laporte
Yes, notice. Otherwise, it was the book reading that made us near sighted, not the other stuff.
2:23:53 - Paris Martineau
We know it was all those computers.
2:23:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that Well, we didn't have computers and we were so old, paris, that we did not have computers until late after college actually.
2:24:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, I'd buy my computer in 81. Yeah, here's. I did? I did typewriters before you plugged them in, young lady.
2:24:13 - Paris Martineau
You had to have real fingers. You're out here filing your drafts via typewriter king of finger strength.
2:24:22 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I think we can anything else. Anybody wants to know, I'll leave it at that.
2:24:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I think pornography was good enough yeah we'll close on pornography, although the AI pick up was good.
2:24:33 - Leo Laporte
I thought it was good, but never mind, we'll save that for another day. Which story? The AI pickleball.
2:24:40 - Jeff Jarvis
It is pretty cool. It is broke. Okay, do it real quick, real quick, you tell me.
2:24:46 - Leo Laporte
I think did they not say I know you go to the US open every year. You big tennis used to use to big tennis fan Did they not say they were going to start using AI for line judging?
2:24:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean that well, they are now, aren't they?
2:25:00 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, are they not already, are they not?
2:25:02 - Jeff Jarvis
computer. That's how they're doing it now. All these cameras angled in. No, that's how they do it. Now it's cameras.
2:25:07 - Leo Laporte
Human line judges are on. No, okay, so it is no no it's computerized. Yeah, that's about there. You got it, so now you can do this on your own.
2:25:14 - Jeff Jarvis
You can use a phone on your pickleball court pickleball and or tennis and it will do all kinds of amazing things. It's swing visions. Ai processes your video in real time to bring you the kinds of shots, whether it's in or out scoring. It's pretty amazing.
2:25:35 - Leo Laporte
I honestly, I gotta tell you I've been an AI skeptic, but there are so many interesting applications 10 years from now. Just as computers have, over a period of several decades, permeated every part of our lives, ai is going to be everywhere.
2:25:53 - Paris Martineau
I'm not sure that computer cameras are AI, though I agree.
2:25:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's not the camera, it's what it does with it, obviously, right, it doesn't?
2:26:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's the fact that it knows the angles and configure it. Same thing with the line judging.
2:26:06 - Leo Laporte
Do you have a human looking at the video or do you have some machine going? That's in, that's out. Man, I think that's kind of that's kind of AI.
2:26:14 - Jeff Jarvis
It's changed tennis immensely. There's no challenges anymore. John McEnroe wouldn't be John McEnroe now, wow.
2:26:21 - Leo Laporte
Well you can't really swear in an AI, and I think to some degree, that's what people are afraid of.
2:26:28 - Paris Martineau
Right, you can always rage against the machine.
2:26:30 - Leo Laporte
Okay, thank you, we have a way, we have a book cover.
2:26:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm so glad you're here.
2:26:37 - Leo Laporte
Paris. We have a book cover my So-Called Life by Paris Martino. I think that that is in the works right now. Or is that your TV show? Might be your TV show, a little bit of both. Paris Martino writes for the information where she covers big tech. You see that signal number. If you've got a tip, call or text her, give her that information because she is the best.
2:27:04 - Paris Martineau
Listen. You know I've been working on a great story the last couple of weeks. That came from a tip from a listener, so what really is weird fraud or something strange going on at a company you know of or one of your friends know of? Hit me up.
2:27:20 - Leo Laporte
Or just ask her for a Wee Croke epitope.
2:27:24 - Paris Martineau
True, or tell me your favorite nihilistic quote. Both will do.
2:27:29 - Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis is the director of the town night center for entrepreneurial journalism at the Craig. Happy birthday Newmark. Happy birthday Craig. Graduates for the journalism at the city university of New York. What's that For, just?
2:27:45 - Jeff Jarvis
one week. Next Friday is graduation, and that'll be my final official duty. I actually have to keep teaching one course, but that's never been done, oh, okay. That's what Joan?
2:27:59 - Leo Laporte
Donovan said right, yeah, that's how it becomes. Thank you Jeff, Thank you Paris, Thanks to all of you. Thanks, especially to our club members. We literally couldn't do it without you. Thank you very much. We do this week in Google on Wednesdays, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We do stream it live again. We decided that, you know? Oh really. Well, here's the deal.
The idea was, let's make it a club benefit and so we do do it in the Discord that streams the whole time we're in studio working, but the Discord video is so useless, so terrible, it drops out the audience. So we decided, all right, we'll stream to YouTube, but not the pre and post show, the good stuff that Paris was talking about, just the actual show itself. So the stream will come and go. If you go to youtubecomtwit at the showtime, the stream will turn on as soon as we have begun the show. In fact, if you click that bell, you'll get a notification as soon as we start live streaming. So all of our shows will be live streamed. The ones that we do live anyway will be live streamed. Oh, there you are. Yeah, I mean, you know I love having live, live.
2:29:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I was just going to say, leo, I think you're too nice. If you look at the model of the Guardian, which has also made it work on contributions, it's Kath Feiner, the editor, being she who must be obeyed, scolding readers. When you read a story of the Guardian, don't you feel ashamed of yourself?
2:29:27 - Paris Martineau
You just read this journalism, it's like you read 17 stories the last year Exactly. Who do you think you are?
2:29:34 - Jeff Jarvis
I can see you, I know. Yeah, I don't need to be. You need to become a scolding in British.
2:29:41 - Leo Laporte
No, look, either are going to make it or not. I mean, that's just, that's just it. I'm not going to scold you. That's nihilism for you.
2:29:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I mean that's it. Nihilism has business model? Yes, yeah.
2:29:52 - Paris Martineau
Well, we croak, I got, I got my retirement fund.
2:29:57 - Leo Laporte
How about you? You know, I don't know what to say. We're either going to make it or we're not. If you like what we do and you want it to keep going, become a member, because that's going to be impriti. True folks, true, true, really.
2:30:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I listen. Leo and Lisa pay me some money and this is very nice and they shouldn't they send? They send Christmas presents. I told them not to, but I also joined the club, thank you. It's important for us all to support you. We love this community. We love all of you Absolutely. We're going to stay together as if we joined.
2:30:28 - Leo Laporte
And we and I'll be honest, we love our mission. I think creating a community of tech enthusiasts and giving you the information you need to make the decisions in your life to use technology to your benefit is a really important mission, even today, maybe more so than ever, especially today, yeah, especially so. That's our mission and I want to keep doing it and if, the good Lord willing, the creeks don't rise, we'll be back next week. Thank you everybody. This is real folks. This is real. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google Bye-bye.