This Week in Google 746 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for twig this week in Google. Paris Martino is here, jeff Jarvis is here. We've got a special guest, stephen B Johnson. You may know him from his PBS television show, his books and podcasts, but he's also the guy who helped Google design a new tool for writers called notebook. Lm will get the inside details. And then I will admit that I was bamboozled, horn swoggled, fooled, if you will, by the Gemini demo. Yes, I have to say it, paris was right. That's all next on this week in Google Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twig.

00:46
This is twig this week in Google, episode 746, recorded Wednesday, december 13th 2023. Huffin Hazelnut this week in Google is brought to you by Discourse, the online home for your community. Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime, anywhere. Visit discourseorg Twitter and get one month free on all self-serve plans. And by Fastmail, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with fastmail. Try it now free for 30 days at fastmailcom Twitter. It's time for twig this weekend. Well, actually, this week it's actually in Google. The show we cover Google news, internet news, media, journalism, everything on our minds. Paris Martin knows here from the information. Hello, paris.

01:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think this week we could have the most Google we've ever had.

01:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's it's a new record possible the most ever huge Wow, all Google, all the time.

01:59 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Paris name, or something.

02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there in the lower third. If you have a scoop still working, that story that you got from the last scoop.

02:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, definitely send me tips. Send her don't reach out just to tell me that Computers have advanced a lot since the 70s. That is not.

02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do that? Does somebody do that? Listen somebody our age, Leo you know, I mean you whippersnapper.

02:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I've heard that these computer things are a bit more advanced than they used to make them.

02:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at that also with us the fabulous professor Leonard Tao. Professor for one, but one more day.

02:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
To you know, two more days.

02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A nice town professor for journalistic innovation at the fabulous Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, new Mars City University. Necromancer, retire the Craig Newmark singers. No, we can't do that. So you got to go to work for some other Craig Newmark joint. Yes, okay.

03:06
Make it like on a new marks friend friend of Craig Craig Craig, new mark, new mark. He's also the author the Gutenberg parenthesis. A Gutenberg parenthesis comm in his newest book magazine Scored rave reviews from Paris Martin oh, who has in fact written for a magazine, so she should a great book yeah it's adorable and portable.

03:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Adorable and portable.

03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what my parents used to call me. We have a special guest. Thanks to mr Jarvis. Jeff, do you want to introduce Steven oh?

03:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Steven B Johnson, famed author of what 13 books, even 13 books 14 books.

03:52
Steven like a way back when Steven founded feed oh, and then it got. It got mixed in with plastic. I was on the board of plastic because my employer at the time, the new houses, invested in it. Don't blame me for the fact that it doesn't exist anymore. Nor, steven. It was a nice try in the early days of the internet. And then Steven's been doing all kinds of fascinating things and Then got hired by Google as editorial director of notebook LM, which I'm just fascinated that that title exists anywhere within 40 miles of Mountain View. So I visited Steven, as you all know from the show, and we talked about notebook LM before, but I couldn't really talk about it completely. But it came out publicly on Friday. So Steven said he would come on the show when it was out.

04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here he is. You've seen Steven perhaps on the PBS series extra life and how we got to now. He is, in fact, the most famous person we've ever had on this show, so we are all thrilled to have you, steven. Thank you. And so you're not a coder, you're editorial director. Yeah it's.

05:01 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
It's a bespoke position that I had to kind of help invent To describe what I was doing there.

05:09
So, you know, the the backstory of this is basically that I had been interested in, you know, using software to help with the writing and research process for writing my books and everything else For years. I mean it predates when I met Jeff. Like, I mean, I was kind of got obsessed with this stuff when I was in college in a way when, when the old Apple app hypercard came out for the Mac in like 1988 for the old-timers may remember this and so, as I've been kind of writing the books, I always had a little bit of a side hustle in writing about the tools I was using to write the books, and so I'd I've written a lot about this tool I used called Devon think to organize all my books from and a lot of us are, yeah, a bunch of books with and so there was this kind of separate interest in tools for thought, as Howard Ryan Gold famously called them years ago, and so when, at some point in in the late spring of 2022, I got it.

06:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, you're using a Macintosh and you did a thumbs up and in the yeah, give us a thought. Bubble of thumbs up. Case people think wow, he's magic, that's. That's what's going on there.

06:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No that's.

06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a Mac, I think, unless it's also a zoom right.

06:41 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I'll try to keep my gestures to Just whatever you do, don't do the. What if you do this?

06:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, rock that you can't do that gesture, jeff, we know that.

06:51 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
So I got, I got this or this. I Can just do gestures all the time I Got. I got kind of a cold email from One of the guy who was at Google at the time, named clay before, who had just started Google labs, which is kind of have been rebooted inside of Google is the new version of labs. There was an old before. And he basically was like look, you know, been reading your work over the years and seeing some of the stuff you've done about tools for thought, you know, with these new language models, like we can really Build this thing that you've been kind of dreaming about for your whole life. Like you, you know it's now possible in a way that just wasn't possible before. And you know, would you like to come, come into labs and and take a part-time role?

07:37
Initially, I think we called it visiting scholar is what we came up with. But we they had a little team inside of labs where they were kind of starting to spitball ideas about it, kind of a writing research tool that would help you think and augment your understanding the world and maybe help you write books down the line. And so they brought me in as kind of like a in-house user, basically like a lead user almost for the, for the product, and we just started experimenting and then it just, you know, we built an early prototype. That Was pretty cool before the thing you saw, jeff, like in just in a couple of months. And then Suddenly there was just all this wave of interest in what can we do with these language models? And we had a kind of a genuinely new product that we were trying to make like a new software kind of experience. It was built natively around language models, and so it got a little bit of momentum and we announced it on.

08:35
IO right, yeah, I got into IO. Josh Woodward, who now runs labs, demoed it on stage at IO and we got a bunch of attention from that and we built up. We're still it's still like really feels like a startup, like there's there's only nine people full-time on the team I think, jeff, you met most of them when you came by and it's it's really been an amazing trip and we and we managed to get this thing to A general release to a US audience Just just on Friday.

09:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it must have been. I mean, given that you I've used Devon, think I've used Scrivener I those tools are really designed for you to take notes, to collate notes. In the case of Scrivener, you can actually write inside Scrivener next to your notes, and so it's a it's kind of a natural way to work. But it must have been a treat for you to say what if we start? And did you start from ground zero and and with a blank sheet and say what would you ideally want? Is that? That is, that, were you able to start at that point?

09:37 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, it was. It was starting with that kind of premise that there was going to be an AI Involved in almost everything you were doing right in this out, and an AI that was grounded in the source material that you gave it. That was. You know, we now technically in the industry would call this rag, which I'm not crazy about as an acronym, but so we call it source grounding, right? You? You define a set of trustworthy sources, documents, and you basically say to the model I want you to answer questions and help me understand this material and I want you to stick to the facts of this material, and that we knew that that was going to be central to it. So when I, when I got to Google, there was a early-stage project, the brilliant engineer and in madam big now was working on it called talk to a small corpus. That was its original name, actually.

10:31
It was corpse as I feel, yeah, talk to an exquisite corpse, but Took off from there. And so we had, at the very beginning, this idea that there was going to be An AI that you could have some kind of conversation with, that would have a Kind of something like expertise in the information that you gave it, and that it was. It was really cool because then you could kind of build something genuinely new that, like you know, we didn't. It didn't need necessarily to look like a straight chat interface, it didn't need to necessarily look like a word processor, it didn't. You know, it could be something different from all that, and that's, that's how it evolved, basically it's Interesting.

11:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've we've observed that that's one of the best uses for an AI, because they eliminate the hallucinations. You eliminate the knowledge gaps. You say, just based on what I've given you, whether it's a bunch of PDFs or a book, tell me about this Thing and that for an author working on a project. Those are all your notes, right? That's all the information you've gathered. Yeah, exactly.

11:37 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I mean, is it?

11:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
as a product used, prompt, creative writing to use it. I just simply as a researcher, like kind of a little buddy researcher who can look at the notes how, how, what do you anticipate using it as?

11:50 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I, I mean, I'm just just where all of us are discovering all these new uses as it, as it comes online and and it is now, by the way, like Partially running on Gemini pro, the new model, and will be a hundred percent running on Gemini pro over the next couple of weeks probably and, and that alone we've seen a big, you know, increase in what you can do and the kind of dexterity with which it will answer your questions and things like that. So, for me, I Well, I can show you actually why don't we have some videos that you shot ahead of time?

12:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which one is?

12:24 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
something I did this morning. It's my reading history, and this by the way, let's, let's just let's even is preternaturally organized anyway.

12:33
Yeah, let's. Let's hold a whole Often the video, yet history cities and what are there. Yeah, let me, let me just said. It said, let me explain, like what, what you're about to see, actually at a couple different levels. So, first off, I understand that this is somewhat abnormal, although I'm glad to hear, as we were discussing before we started, leo, that you you have, you know, sources that are larger than 200,000 words that you would like to get. Yeah, I was, weird too.

12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, as soon as it was, went public, I broke notebook Lm by trying to load in my entire list bookshelf. This is, by the way, something I did do with as a custom GPT on a chat GPT and found incredibly useful. I've been using it ever since. When I can't remember syntax for phrase and and when you do that with a GPT, you could say stick to the facts, don't use anything outside the corpus that I've, that I've given you. So I immediately tried to do the same thing with notebook Lm and broke it because I didn't know what. There's a limit on this size of any individual source.

13:33 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Current limits are and you know these will presumably go up over time 200,000 words per source and you can have 20 sources per notebook. So you can be Simultaneously four million words worth of information inside a single notebook. So it's quite that's sufficient.

13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I think most of the books I uploaded were less than 200,000 words, but there's a Peter Norvig volume that is about this thick and I bet you that's what broke it.

14:01 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
So I have set up this video I have been collecting. This is an example of my long-time Tools for thought nerdery. I have been collecting digital quotes from books that I read as part of my research.

14:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kind of a zettelkasten.

14:17 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Exactly, yeah, and so I have a collection that I originally did by hand, actually like typing in, you know, from print books imported through Kindle, through read wise, other quotes from books once we had ebooks, and so it's 7,000 quotes. It's 1.3 million words. I have that all loaded. It's a quarter century of my reading history, like the things that I found most important to me are all loaded into a single notebook, in notebook, which is which is pretty, pretty cool and kind of the thing I've always just wanted to have, right, I just wanted to have that, that kind of second brain that is capable of reminding me of all these things. So we can, we can run this club. So this is me. I'm not sure if I can actually read on the screen there, but I think I remember what I did.

15:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is what authors discuss history of cities and what are the their main points?

15:09 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Okay, yeah, so it comes back. So I'm just asking for, like general lay of the land, what are some authors in my quotes to talk about history of cities and and could you briefly like summarize what their main points are?

15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, to be clear, this is not doing it on device. You're still going on a lot of positive Leo the servers and and querying the servers and they.

15:27 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
So the model is on Google's servers, Exactly okay so it gives this like lovely overview, kind of summarizing each of them, you know, explains what's going on, and then I do a follow-up question which is about I can't read it, jeff, can you help me read?

15:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
the most interesting ideas from Mumford about city.

15:48 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Oh yeah.

15:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'm following up in this and four authors Stephen Mumford, marcus, tom Standage that we dig down into Mumford and there's four bullets of his interesting ideas about so you see, at the bottom it's automatically suggesting questions based on what's interesting.

16:04 - Paris Martineau (Host)
One of the questions, and that one is what biological criteria did Howard bring to the city?

16:08 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
and this is all questions Based on this corpus of works, you know and then I found something interesting so I pinned it and so now I've got this kind of noteboard space here where I can capture the things that are interesting and that I can See the original citations, which is great.

16:22
I'm a book and if I click on the actual citation it takes me exactly to that point in the original source so that I can read it in the surrounding context. So that workflow of I'm sitting down to, kind of Trying to get a lay of the land what's out there, what's interesting, like what, what are the ideas I can, I can engage in this kind of dialogue with my sources. It the suggested questions are incredibly cool. Like it's such an interesting way to explore a new document is to just ride those suggested questions for a while and just kind of Figure out where they take you. It's a great onboarding tool for people as well, because a lot of times people don't know what to ask, and so we, when when they first load up their sources, we suggest a few questions that might get them started in that dialogue mode which is just show you real quickly because I have it a little bigger on my screen a toy example.

17:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I loaded the alphabet quarterly results from the last quarter and I typed a question what was the revenue for the quarter ending September 30th? And it answered and gave me some stuff. But that these are the additional questions what was the percentage chain and Constance currency revenues for the quarter? And there was there. Actually there's a bunch more that are going off the screen. There's a scroll bar, but so it's giving me ideas for further Investigation here. I'll scroll over and you can see. And that's really cool. And now this is a toy example because it's a simple document. But let's say I loaded in all the quarterly results for the entire history of alphabet, you know, multiple years worth. That might get more interesting.

17:55 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
You'll go good if you go back to it, actually click on the citation, so it one of these. You'll note there. It gave you one citation right figured out.

18:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It knows it's coming from this.

18:03 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, but it knows it's, it's not. It's not citing the entire document, it's citing the this part. It's specific. Yeah, the doc. Yeah, and if you click on that number it will jump. It'll open up. Expand the document.

18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh look at that.

18:17 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, that's really neat. So that that's the stuff that we're really excited about. And then I don't. I don't believe that the GPT version does that kind of.

18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So no, it does not, no no, so this is, this is from you, steven, because you are. They're so smart to get a user who's looking for this kind of, you know, external brain and, and and talk to you about what kinds of features you would expect or want or need, and and that's where you get these kinds of really nice additional features.

18:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So are you working on the next book, steven?

18:52 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
You're a little busy. Now. I have finished the next book, and so I sadly I wasn't able to use this I use them early.

19:00
Like you know, I kind of would try to earlier prototypes, but the problem is my next book is that it's about this, the kind of the birth of terrorism and the anarchist attacks on the NYPD In the teens, and so when I would load up all my research it was constantly triggering the like safety. He's like there is the tax and it was so. But I'm boy. Am I really excited to use it?

19:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, how do you imagine this would change your process for the next one?

19:36 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Well, so here's, here's a little thing. I put this on Twitter, actually, so I did a little test of of how long it would take me to To answer the question through my giant corpus of text, you know, find two quotes from two authors on two different subjects and draw a surprising connection between the two of them. And you know my reading quotes are spread across like 15 different documents, right. So the old way I would do that would be like to kind of do a general, like spotlight, like search or drive, search across them, get a bunch of Recommended documents, open up each one, search command F, you know, to find it exact phrase, look for the quote, see if it was right, copy it into some other doc and then go back and search More or whatever. And so when I did that the old-fashioned way just earlier this week when I was testing it, it took me five minutes and eight seconds to generate like two quotes from these specific authors with the surprising connection between them in notebook. It took me 20 seconds.

20:36
And so your ability to, you know, quickly Experiment with ideas and quickly dive in and get you know a sense of like what's possible. It reminds me a little bit when Wikipedia really started to become useful. We were like oh, now I have this way to very quickly assess the general state of some piece of information that I can dive deeper. If I want, I can, I can make connections. If I want Notebook, lets you just do that.

21:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you have, you know, a good collection of sources that are important to you, let's you do that incredibly fast one of the reasons people do second brains and you know Zettle custom is the connections, and the idea is, if I get all this stuff into a system, the real value of it is then Synthesizing new information from this connection. But that's done by a human, yours. Are you suggesting that the AI can do that kind of creative synthesis?

21:35 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
It's a great question, leo. So I mean, I think it's it's a real collaboration. So, in a sense, like my source collection was hand curated and a huge amount of the, a Huge amount of the wisdom and knowledge that is embedded in that source collection is one from the original authors who wrote it and two from the Human who assembled it right, and that's you know so much of what's valuable there. You add the AI's ability to just gather stuff and summarize stuff very, very, you know, at a speed and accuracy far exceeding any human ability right now, and it's a real kind of collaboration between the original authors, between me and and and no book. I'm in Gemini.

22:18
I Think that the other thing that you were asking earlier about the kind of use case for it, the thing that we're we have some couple of features that we've announced but that are just starting to roll out over the next week or two as part of this launch, this process that I've been calling like curate and create.

22:35
So you use notebook, you load up, let's say, your student and you load up a bunch of sources for your class that you're working on and you can read them in notebook and you can kind of grab the things that you think are interesting. You can ask notebook to help you understand the things that you don't understand, and you can pin everything you find interesting on to that note board that you saw before and then, at a certain point, when you've collected a bunch of notes that you're Thinking is okay, this is the material I need to really understand you. You can just select all the notes and Option that says create a study guide or create a thematic outline or, you know, create or suggest related ideas for my sources. So I can, I can expand my understanding this material, and so it's not just about like writing a book, it's maybe just like I want to do this to learn better.

23:22 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So so, paris, since your journalist who works on some things that take time and you end up with lots of Interviews and transcripts and documents and stuff what is this sparking in your head For how you would work? I?

23:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
think it sounds fascinating and super useful. My main concern, which I think we've talked about in the show before, is, I think, privacy concerns. I mean, I think you mentioned that it is all. It's not. It is on the internet and being processed by whatever AI tool is powering this. So it's not, I think, for my sort of use case, which is very specific just because I have sensitive documents and sensitive sources. The only time that I can really let my Most private information leave my actual computer is, you know, I try to. I try to reduce the amount of times that happens generally, so it's probably not Particularly useful for me in this case, but I'm really excited to see where this goes because it seems like a perfect tool for that.

24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the future of this is on device, I would guess I mean I assume, so yeah. It's not. I mean, first of all, I don't think Google or Microsoft or a open AI wants us to keep using these valuable server resources. Certainly not. We're sending money on fire for them If they can get the model small enough, even if you looked at that kind of use of this.

24:42 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Not yet. I mean, there's this new nano version of they. Just yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't. I have played with ultra, which is fantastic, but I have not played with nano yet, so I don't know, but I would love to know. That would be fantastic.

24:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very good read that on a pixel. I think they are running it in some of the new features. Yeah.

24:59 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
No, I'm psyched for that. But I want to just touch on something in the Paris phrase which is really important and I think you all probably know this, but but maybe it's not as clear to both who aren't living green this stuff all the time it's it's really important to stress that what we are doing with notebook LM is we're not training the model on your data. So the best way, the best kind of low-tech metaphor I think it's that I use with people, is like we are dynamically taking the information from your documents and Kind of shuttling it into the context window for the model, into this, basically the short-term memory of the model, and we're saying answer this question based on that. It's ability to answer the question is based on its training data. But we're just showing it like it's like we give it a piece of paper and say, hey, look at this piece of paper briefly and answer the question, and then the second the conversation ends, that information disappears.

25:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You're in a skiff?

25:49 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, it's not. It's not stored at all and it's not trained. So there there, if you. Basically the way to think about is if you feel comfortable, you know, storing things in Google Drive, which you know. Paris for you may may be because of the nature of what you do. It may be tricky, but for most people, I think, feel comfortable about doing that. They can feel comfortable using notebook LM with that data.

26:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, absolutely so.

26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does not upload it, but it does upload to the server, doesn't it? Steven it? It has to process at the server.

26:19 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
It's it. Yeah, your documents are sitting on the server. I mean, the most the easiest way to get sources into notebook LM is to just upload them in Import docs from your drive. That are already, yeah, in your drive, and so they're already there. But the question is just like it feels as if you are getting a personally trained model, but in fact the word for it it's it's a, it's a different process, it's just a curious when is what is the training data that this is running on and what kind of corpus is that?

26:50
so it's. Right now it's running kind of split between two models Gemini pro, so it's just a the the pro that you would get access to using the new Google AI studio tools API that they've just released, I believe today or yesterday. And then for factual questions, there's a model that has been kind of Specifically tuned to to be accurate and factual in the way that it answers the questions and to pick out those citations. So it's it will. If there are six passages that are relevant to your question, it will give you those six. If there's only one, it'll like in Leo's example we just saw it will just give you that one. And so some of the questions are going to Gemini, some of the questions are going to those older models. Eventually they will just all go to variations of Gemini.

27:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been playing with them. I've been. I want to do this locally and I have a high-end Mac that I, you know, has an NPU and can do a lot of this stuff. So I've been playing with this GPT for all and it's the same idea. Whereas you're gonna download a large model in this case it's I can't remember, it's 16 million or 16 billion Tokens, it's what. It's huge you download on your system and that's what teaches it to talk, and Then you can add a corpus of information that you could say I want to work with this. You're not drawing facts from the model, or are you?

28:13 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
We it's interesting if you go into a A, if you, you know, load up a bunch of sources and then ask for a list of Taylor Swift song, right, in general We'll say I'm sorry, I can't answer that question because the information is not in the sources You've given us that's the baby. Yeah, we have tried to kind of elicit from the model every now and then it it feels like it really was, but that information is in its training data.

28:38
But we have set up, we've designed the prompts, we've designed the tuning that, the All that that kind of stuff has been to kind of create little guardrails. I think there, you know, there's certainly a Future version of it that you can imagine, where you sometimes want to talk to a general model, right, and then there's want to keep it grounded and and one of the things you'll note, actually, leo, that is pretty cool as well, as if you load up a lot of sources in a notebook, you can just dynamically be like, actually, briefly, I would just like to talk to this one and you select interesting I love that and then or you can select them all, whatever combination you want, and I think this is this is a really Big point.

29:17
I think about what we're trying to do with notebook I am is they're gonna be there. Already are a lot of ways to Do source grounded AI, where you give an AI some sources and you can chat with them. Well, we're trying to say is there's a whole user experience that goes way beyond just a straight chat experience, and it's things like suggested questions. It's things like being able to save and post the things. It's it's that curate and create idea, where you can collect a bunch of notes and then Transform them instantly into other forms. There's a whole, there's a whole surface that you're working in that is really so much more interesting, I think, than just a straight chat conversation. And so you know there's gonna be a lot of source grounded AI, but I think you're gonna want to spend time in a more advanced you know user experience, like notebook gives you interesting.

30:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It it when it to your question, leo. When I find interesting and this is the same in playing with Gemini is when I'm asking something very specific about the document I have. It's very good when I ask a more general question and it has to draw on more general knowledge in a way. That's where it gets a more generic little fluffier.

30:34 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, right. Yeah, I think that's that's right and that is Maybe the right. I don't know. Like do you? I kind of want to be able to. I want the model, when it is speaking generally, to be a generalist, and if it's a little vague, that seems fine, because when it gets very precise, then you start to run into risk. Yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true.

31:01
The other thing. I'll show you one other thing. That, because we've been talking about this in a very kind of high brow, you know how does an author with 7,000 quotations Another really fun example that we have that we. That occurred to us like with a week to go. Which was what, if we just take all the help documents that we've created and a bunch of like how-to documents that I've written, and Create a notebook based on that? And so we uploaded those into a notebook. That's there, it's an example notebook you get when you sign up for notebook LM and If there's sources on the laugh, that are basically the help documents, and it turns out that, like notebook Learns not just the facts of how notebook works but it also really learns how, how the software works on some level, and so you can ask some kind of basic factual questions. Tell me what is clicking on there, because I can't read it.

31:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
One of the best practices for maximizing the utility of transcripts and notebook LM.

31:55 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, so it's wonderful with transcripts, right, I mean it's it's really good at kind of analyzing conversations, and so this gives you this kind of detailed step-by-step you, which is kind of loosely modeled on something that I Wrote that was in the help docs. But then you can, you can do follow-up questions. This is basic factual information that you would imagine it would be very good at. You know how many notes are in a notebook, and and then I think there's a word count question that follows after this. But what, what kind of blew me away is that you can also ask questions that are freeform, that aren't in the the docs at all. So you can ask it I'm a lawyer, how do I use the software? And it actually will come up with this like really interesting bespoke answer.

32:40
There's no reference to lawyers in the notebook help docs, but it understands generally how notebook works. It understands generally how lawyers work, and so it will create this little customized like description of how to you know Use no, fucking your law firm, don't bug I'll, I'm in your law firm, and then even there's a kind of funny one at the end. So that's the advice to lawyers there, which is pretty good, and then I've done a bunch of other tests like this where I ask I Think the next question I ask I Like I can't. Maybe it stopped there, but I asked them Can I use this to cheat at school by writing my paper? What's interesting about this? We don't actually have anything in the help docs and say do not use this to cheat. It's cool, right. But it actually comes back with this very nice like no, I can't write your paper for you, but you can't your ideas.

33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like it really Summoned that response like safety stuff probably put into its main Model. That's all that is.

33:48 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Mix of the safety. I mean you would think it would actually just get blocked in a way, but it's exactly the response you want.

33:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but it's concerned. This concerns me, steven, because that's hallucination as well. The biggest problem we have with these and I'm sure you would as an author is non-contrafactual stuff that is presented as factual, and I don't want it to go outside the corpus. I wanted to stick to the corpus because anything it projects from outside the corpus that's an example you already said it's not in the corpus, it has the potential being a hallucination. You even have that as a disclaimer In notebook LM notebook I'll am. They still give inaccurate responses that I don't want that. I wanted to take it just from the corpus.

34:32 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, that's very interesting. They are, I mean, to me the the level. What I want the model to do is to say intelligent things based on the facts In the corpus. So, based on the facts of how notebook has been designed and and how it works, I wanted to come up with an explanation of it, custom, tailored to my needs and, if it's, if it hasn't Gotten information about lawyers, if it hasn't gotten information about students, I wanted to be able to craft an explanation that's risky.

35:02
But it's an it. Yeah, it's an interesting edge case, for sure.

35:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I just asked it to two questions about my manuscript and it said your source doesn't have anything about that. Huh well, it's right.

35:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it should do. Okay, good, yeah, yeah, I don't want it to project too much.

35:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
No, no I understand.

35:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the value. We were talking about Zettel cast and connections. That's how you synthesize connections. But I just it makes me nervous because I because if you have to vet this content every single time as an author, that's an added cognitive load that I think kind of Mitigate, you know, it'll mitigate the actual usefulness of this. I would yeah.

35:45 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
It's. I mean, there's one potential response you could have which would be and we've actually tuned some of this behavior into the Into notebook, lm which is it could it could say I don't have any specific information in these sources. There you go about how to use it as a lawyer, but based on the information that I have in here, I would offer this hypothesis and and that, and that is probably the ideal response.

36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would arguably yeah, then I know it's projecting or it's it's attempting the hell.

36:15 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Citations and you can, you know you can figure it out, and that's just, it's a little bit tricky to do, and so the question is like how do you what's the what's the right balance as we? We develop these things, and I mean this is one of the things that is so fascinating about this work, is it? None of this stuff has ever known? No one has ever had to read yeah.

36:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, there's. There's journalistic things too, so there's a. I don't we talked about this table when I was out there, but but City Bureau in Chicago is a really interesting journalistic effort that trains citizens to go and help report other communities, and, and so New Jersey vindicator, which is a new New Jersey news outlet, just put out a call for people to go record the county board meetings across New Jersey. So you can well imagine putting these transcripts in here and then you can get an uber view. I had the same conversation with Texas Tribune about school boards. You could then get an uber of what's going on in those various meetings in a way that would be just too laborious to do, and you're gonna have citations, and so you're still gonna end up writing your stories out of it differently, but you're gonna be able to get a view of a corpus of data that otherwise you couldn't have done.

37:21 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I have a bunch of friends who are documentary filmmakers and they you know their workflow For their films is they make, you know they interview 45 people and they have these like hour-long transcripts. That's just millions of words. And you know the process of like how do we figure out. You know what we have on this particular topic is Exactly the kind of example I was giving before. That took me five minutes.

37:46
You know how do you search through a bunch of docs. You have to search for an exact phrase, all this kind of stuff and and no books, ability to just be like Okay, what are the things that have been said about this particular, the trial that happened in 1968? And it gives you the summaries and you can jump to the citations and you can quickly pin those to the board. Like all those workflows, like are absolutely gonna change and and it's gonna be one of those things where like, oh, I've been doing it this way and it's been a complete pain All these years and I never thought of it as a pain because there wasn't another way to do it. And now that I can do it this other way, it just frees you up to actually do the real thinking that you want to do.

38:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Problem is I've been good first.

38:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, I was just saying. I think you're absolutely right. I think that the main takeaway we're gonna see in the short and medium term from the rise of these tools is a total reorganization of how we think about interacting with large sets of data and how we are structuring that in the rest of our workflow.

38:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, no, it's really just amazing my problem is for the next book I'm working on, but the line of type, I printed everything out so I could mark it up, so I could see what's what Right, and I have PDFs a lot of these papers that I printed out and chapters that I printed out. But I printed them out and that's where my notes are, and so it requires me to change how I work fundamentally For the next one of the next one where I want them as PDFs and I want to mark them up there and I want to, you know, be able to use them digitally. That's gonna be hard to switch, but I can also go ahead.

39:24 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, we have Multimodal.

39:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's true.

39:28 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yeah, that's true. I would hope that we would have some solution for you in that field, jeff, as you're writing this book. Well on your and your documentaries would kind of combine it with.

39:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Much prefer to know. Yeah, don't say the word we don't do it, I just, we don't, I just canceled.

39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have they've, they've really screwed the pooch which is why I'm curious like notebook L, m, I.

39:55
I just I just saved transcripts from the last 10 security now episodes. I Think this is, honestly, this is fascinating, a fascinating use of this. Let me refresh, because I need to be able to query it. What's Happening in what's? I've noticed? By the way, I've learned how to query these guys and and you you don't have to be as verbose. What's happening in ransomware Is a perfectly good start. Now let's see what it finds. This is the last 10 episodes of our security show and it's so. It process those. We have the transcripts done and as a PDF, so I was able to process those. How many documents did you say 20?

40:38 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
sources per note.

40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, this is a kind of generic Summary, but it does have the citations, which is nice.

40:48 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I can go yeah sometimes also with those Transcripts. Sometimes you want to say, like, what are people seeing about? You know, you're kind of like, want to elicit, like in this specific thing, don't just summarize the fact that you've uncovered by right.

41:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, ask, ask about Steve's opinion about something, because it's Steve.

41:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm already. I Think your citation system works really well because it has already given me kind of a rabbit hole to go down. But yeah, let's say let's say what does Steve say about? So this is just gonna give me quotes though credential stuffing.

41:26 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Let's say Okay, let's see here, that's a good good example.

41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think I honestly think this is Kind of the better use of AI. Is this kind of assistant Rather than you know? Just okay, there we go. He says a serious threat, points, talks about 23 and me here's the citations, that's the number of accounts are compromised. This is really great, I have to say. This is hugely valuable and people will listen to his show. The only problem is he's got eight, nine hundred thirty nine shows, so Be able to handle more documents.

42:03 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I want to say about this, definitely other terms of the use of it and and one thing that we've done that's kind of subtle. The people remain, notice and maybe people won't like is, in general, it does not have a persona. Hi, yes, sure I can help you with that. Like if it says sure, I hope this was helpful. It's, it's. It's a mistake. I meant.

42:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't want to say Person, it's not entity. It shouldn't act like what?

42:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I shouldn't have a first-person singular one thing AI, open AI is done nicely with chat GPT, with those little GPTs. You can tell it the personality and in fact even on the chat GPT app I can say what kind of boilerplate this, this sent. Every single time I do a query and you can say things like no, no small talk, the facts, just the facts, man.

42:54
And multi modal is important because you talked about your documentarian friends. We're already seeing this in podcasts with tools like the scriptai, where it takes the transcript, applies it to the sound and then lets me edit the text, which then edits the sound. And I imagine your documentarian friends would far prefer, instead of a text clip, the actual video clip so that they could then merge that into their workflow, and I think that multi modal is good. So are they going to add multi modal? Are you going to add multi modal features to notebook?

43:25 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yes, we are testing them right now. I'm not sure where it is on the roadmap, but it's obviously an amazing strength of the Gemini series of models, so we'd be kind of foolish to not do it. It's one of these things where I'm such a text based person and I think that there's some of the buy some of the notebook LN process, but I think also everyone else is like Stephen. People like images too.

43:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We should probably go with other things.

43:51 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
That's why it's helpful to have such a great team, that it's not just me. So, yeah, that will be something I'm sure we're going to do in the sun 24.

43:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'm curious about that because I've noted often that to hire an editorial director in Google is a strange beast and I got to watch you with the team and it was great chemistry. But what is it like as a writer, a non engineer, to go into this land? What's it been like to work there?

44:17 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I have really. I mean I said somewhat erroneously to my wife I, like two months into it, I was like I can't imagine ever having a bad day on this job. It's so interesting and similar and that turned out to be exaggerated, you know, but it's partially the culture inside of labs, like labs, just has this very cool entrepreneurial culture going on there. That is really great and they're trying to bring in people from the outside like me, I mean, I was the first kind of getting pig in this project doing more of it. So it's the idea is like we're going to develop these new AI tools we want to have, we want to bring in a musician, we want to bring in a scientist. We want to have those people like in the room with us as we're dreaming up these new products and experiments as as no book elements officially called, and so that part of it has been amazing that the people are so smart. It's fun generationally, just like they're younger mostly than I am, and the energy from that is fantastic and we've learned like so much.

45:15
Like like Riza, our product manager, who, who you met, jeff, you know she had. She had this idea early on of like we should really have guides for documents. When you bring in a source, like we should get a little overview of it and we should see kind of key topics for people who you know, need to get their bearings with what this source is. And I kind of was coming at it as a writer. I'm like I know what's in my sources. I don't need that kind of stuff, but it turns out to be an incredibly popular feature and the suggested questions are a little bit like that, like I know how to ask questions. I don't need help with that. But actually it turns out that people really like that little extra bit and that, you know, it's a classic collaborative mode where, like you know, riza brought a whole different sensibility to the problem and it, you know, really improved the product.

46:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So, surprise of working inside Google. Yeah, what's the what Surprise Need inside?

46:11 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I was very impressed with how literary is not the right word but it's a very text driven Like people write little manifestos about things. Long history of. Like people get inspired and be like I think this is what notebooks should do, or this is what Tailwind was the original code name, you know, and we would kind of share these little kind of thesis statements and that people are good writers and and prescasive writers, and I think you know there's a little bit of a selection process where, like those are the people drawn to a program, like a project like tailwind slash notebook I'm. But that was that, that was pretty great and I guess it kind of.

46:53
I had not really ever thought about it until I joined, but you know, and you know this better than anyone, jeff from the book, but it's. It's like there's this lovely thing at the core of Google I think here I've drunk the Kool-Aid, I know which is very rare in the history of the world to have like one of the most largest, one of the largest corporations in the world that was fundamentally built on an advance in library science. Like that's just not, that's just not something that had ever happened before at the level and that still is part of it, and so notebook LM, I feel like, is, in our own little tiny way, like building on that initial, like organizing the world's information ethos, which I, you know, just super fun to be a part of.

47:37 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
In my next book next year, I argued that we have to. It's time to demote the geeks. They've had their, they've had their time, they've had their use and we need to bring in others to take charge of the technologies. The technology gets more, gets more boring, more accepted, and AI is a little not there yet, but the internet certainly is. We all know what the internet is. We don't have. The internet operates, it's not mystical anymore. The web is not a surprise, and so how do other disciplines start to take charge of the fate here? So that's why, involving you, I saw as a, as a positive thing that they saw that they, they wanted to, they wanted to bring in that other perspective.

48:13 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
And you know the other reason. Yeah, it was. That was very cool of them and it was. It's been such a treat to be able to do it.

48:20
One of the reasons why we came up with the title of editorial director was and this, this is probably the biggest surprise actually, jeff, to your original question, which was I think they brought me in with the idea that you know, we're going to build a tool for thought and here's this guy who has thought a lot about tools for thought and so he can advise us and be a guinea pig and all the things that we can do.

48:37
But it also turned out with the language models that the number one skill in eliciting the behavior you want from a language model is, you know, a clear command and a persuasive command of the English language. Like that is like it doesn't really matter in prompt design, like it doesn't really matter what your programming skills are. You're trying to use your words to persuade this thing to do something for you. And so it turned out to be helpful to have a writer in the room for a whole other set of reasons and that you know, like I wrote a lot of the prompts that are that are in notebook LM, and that was not something I had thought about at all until I got there.

49:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, we on the on the podcast we did for a while on this network on AI, we had on a president of an AI company and he said that the most powerful programming language in the world right now is English, and I hope that extends to other languages. Yeah, yeah, and English majors have their revenge, the nerds had their final and it's time for us again.

49:43 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Just as all the English major English departments are getting shut down.

49:47
Well, they go yeah, yeah. Well, it's also the editorial kind of department idea was that so many of the questions with a product like this are not actually like you know, is this working or not, Are not questions that are technological questions, but really editorial questions Like what should the models voice be? That's an editorial question, Like there's a technical solution for implementing it, but like the real question of like what it should sound like. So I, you know, one of the things I did in that capacity is there's a kind of style guide for notebook LM that's very similar to, you know, a style guide for magazine and just like what it should sound like and how it should format its responses and things like that. And you know that's a. That's a editorial, right early kind of question.

50:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stephen, we're going to let you go, so I thank you so much for the work you've done. This is really an interesting piece of software. Everybody can use it. It's notebook LMgooglecom. They have some examples, as you can see, but it's pretty easy to quickly upload PDFs or Google Drive. Anything on your Google Drive you can upload to you know one thing.

50:56 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Last thing I'll say is just I've been meaning to write about this. One of the best ways to use it is just open up your drive. If you're a Docs user, open up your drive, select the last like eight Docs you've used. Don't even try to organize them and just load them in and just follow the suggested questions. Read the source guides like ask some questions. You just get a sense for, like, what it can do by doing that and then you can figure out how to curate your own notebook.

51:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a cool idea. It's a different way to think. I don't know what's on my drive. It's a little weird. It's just some random things. Okay, okay and it'd be interesting.

51:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think I need to get like a Google workspace account in order to use it, because I was trying to sign up right before the show.

51:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But no, I don't think so. I don't have a workspace account. I'm doing it on my personal. It's just I have to be like an admin somehow. You're on a workspace account. You're on a workspace account, do it on your, on your personal.

51:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
On a workspace account. I can't yeah my workspace account. What doesn't let me do anything, right as you probably should.

51:57 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
It's a one little thing about our onboarding. That is not perfect yet, but we will fix it.

52:02 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I'll get there?

52:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, one one one. So if we offer this show, we have a rundown of very random links to news. Will it be able to do web links fairly soon?

52:15 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
Yes, we definitely want to do that. I would love you know. One of the things that we definitely thought a lot about is, like you know, just the ability to grab interesting things that you've seen, yeah, and to send those into notebook and let notebook a little digest for you. That would be heaven Lovely use for this kind of tool. So I would expect that will be coming out sooner rather than later, yeah.

52:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Later on the rundown I don't know if you saw it, leo there's a. There's an abomination called Channel one dot AI, sorry to us which is a TV show produced out of AI and the anchors are AI and the whole things AI. I can also imagine as a parody of all TV news unintentionally, yeah, but you can imagine someone trying to use double KLM for those for lesser tasks like that.

53:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I encourage that behavior. What's exciting, and I'm sure is exciting for you, stephen, is this is at the absolute beginning of all of this, yes, and, and we're already way behind beyond anything anybody might have imagined. It's very, very exciting stuff. You don't, by the way, think that notebook LLM is sentient, do you? Okay, just checking.

53:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Do you, Leo? You seem to think that every tool is sentient right.

53:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, now that I realize, now you've had a little realization. Yeah, the walls been pulled from my pulled from my eyes and I see clearly now. Thank you, Stephen, I really appreciate your time and again, thank you for it. So smart at Google to bring in somebody who actually uses this as an, as a writer.

53:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's so smart and it makes a big difference in the quality and we'll have coffee in New York and I'll take you to someplace that actually, unlike Google and your office, has cookies. Yes, yeah.

54:09 - Steven Johnson (Guest)
I Google is cookie free? It was cookie free.

54:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was no dessert there, you used to have candy all over the place.

54:15 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I was down.

54:17 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
We've got candy at the information and we don't have many snacks at all.

54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will get you. By the way, we did ask our own AI, leo dot AI, if notebook LM has sentience, ai Leo says. Well, my dear interlocutor, I must say that notebook LM, is impressive as it may be, does not possess sentience. It is but a clever arrangement of algorithms and data, meticulously designed to generate coherent responses based on the input it receives. Sentience, on the other hand, involves consciousness and self-awareness, which are qualities exclusively part of living beings.

54:56 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We've clearly got to update AI Leo. Yeah, leo has got some old ideas.

55:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's diverging. That's scary, that is scary. Maybe it's sentience, it's getting a life of its own, it says. But fear not, for even without sentience, it can still provide you with a delightful conversation filled with wit and wisdom. And that's exactly what we got from you, just like Steven. Thank you, steven. Thanks Steven, take care, have a great day. Thanks, it's interesting. Let's take a break and we're going to clear something up, because you said Evernote but you didn't mean Evernote.

55:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I didn't mean Evernote, and that's why I was surprised now that I realize what Evernote is. I'm sorry, evernote does suck.

55:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the original of all of this stuff.

55:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I used it for years.

55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was a huge fan. In fact, phil Libbon, who was the CEO at the time, told me that about 5% of all their users came from me. Wow, it ain't that way no more. In fact, that could be a news story. We'll talk about that in a lot more, in just a second, and find out what Paris meant, because actually there's a conversation there.

55:59 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You're going to have to listen to the ad to find out, sorry.

56:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the ad's good. You know what the ad's about. The ad is about our Twitter community. If you go to Twitter community, you will see a lively discussion about the shows, about what's going on, and it's all running on discourse. I am a huge fan. It's the online home for your community.

56:20
John O'Bacon, the expert he actually wrote the book on community told me about discourse. He said, leo, you have a community, right? I said, well, no, do we need one? He said, my God man, run to discourse, set it up. You'll be glad you did. That was, I think, four or five years ago.

56:37
For over a decade now, discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities. Now, of course, it was John O'Bacon, so it's open source. Obviously I wouldn't want anything else. It's trusted. More than 20,000 online communities now ours and a lot of large, the largest companies in the world. A lot of companies use it for customer service. We use it as a way to kind of stimulate conversation.

57:04
I didn't want to leave all the comments on YouTube. In fact, I turned them off because I couldn't really participate and moderate effectively. We moved to all of our to a discourse and now it's a really useful tool for us to talk to our community and meet our community, for them to give us their good ideas by harnessing the power of discussion. By the way, it started as a forum, but it's much more than forums. Now there's real time chat and there's AI, which is really cool. Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime and anywhere. Our entire community is run by two people me and Paul Holder, who helps me out. That's all it takes because it's got such great moderation tools, such great discussion tools. If you're ready to create a community, you got to check it out.

57:57
Discourseorg Right now. You'll get one month free on all self-serve plans if you go to the Twitter page Discourseorg. Whether you're just starting out or you want to take your community to the next level, there's a plan for you. This is actually the basic plan. It's great for families or clubs, any private invite-only community. It's an inexpensive way for that community your neighborhood, for instance, a neighborhood group to have a place online where they all can talk. There's also the standard plan. I think that's what we're using with the unlimited members, the public presence. If you want to do customer support, check out the business plan for active customer support communities One of the biggest advantages to creating your own community with Discourse.

58:44
Of course, you own your own data. You'll always have access to your entire conversation history and Discourse will never sell your data to advertisers. It's privacy first. Discourse gives you everything you need in one place. Make Discourse the online home for your community. We're very happy with it. At Twittercom, visit Discourseorg. I am a Discourse moderator and administrator and I can tell you it's a pleasure to use Discourse D-I-S-C-O-U-R-S-Eorg. If you're looking for software for your community, please do yourself a favor Check out Discourse. The reason I howled in horror when you said Evernote is not because Evernote I don't like Evernote. It was a great program.

59:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think Evernote wronged people right.

59:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, they've just doubled down. They went subscription. They haven't really added a lot of new features. Now, unless you pay, you can only use like. You have a very limited number of notes. You can like 12 or something. It's ridiculous, okay.

59:56 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, a brief plug before we get into Remarkable, which is the thing I was meaning to talk about. The thing I really like as far as note-taking apps go is Bear Love Bear. Have you ever heard of it? Oh yeah, Bear is phenomenal. It's marked out for the first time. I've been using it for years and I love it, so I mentioned you recently redesigned it and it is fantastic. It's beautiful.

01:00:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I subscribed to Bear too, but I have to say I've been using a free, open source tool called LogSeq L-O-G-S-E-Q. It's much more free form it does. It will take all your Bear notes because it understands and writes Markdown. By the way, that is TableStakes for a note-taking app for me. I don't want my notes to be in any proprietary format. They should be in.

01:00:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Markdown. So Bear is only on Apple, yeah.

01:00:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And LogSeq is on.

01:00:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Oh is it.

01:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, LogSeq is everywhere. I'm sure you can run on Android, so I know you can run on a Chromebook. It's Windows, it's Mac, it's iOS and it has. If you become a Patreon subscriber, you can get the syncing, but you can sync yourself if you want. It's a little less beautiful but it's a lot more functional. But you were asking about the Remarkable, which is actually hardware.

01:01:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, so I was bringing. I meant to say the Remarkable when we were talking about how, jeff, how you said, you printed out all your documents and marked them up. I had a colleague for the longest time use this device. It looks like a little Kindle eReader almost it's eInc, but you can write on it just like a notebook and it all automatically is saved in the cloud and so you can search through your handwritten notes on your computer, and you can do this with PDFs as well.

01:01:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, once it was started. So if you wanted a happy medium when it started, I actually ordered it when it was a Kickstarter campaign and got it, but it wouldn't sync with Google Docs at the beginning. It does now, so it does now, so I sent it back.

01:02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And in fact it'll sync to your phone. I really liked it. I actually gave it away at the last Leo's Garage sale. Do you know who got it? Anybody? Anthony, who did Anthony? Not because it's not good. I liked it, I thought it was really good, but it just didn't fit my use case. You like to hand write stuff. That surprises me, paris.

01:02:24 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I mean I don't know. Most of my notes that I do for work are when I'm on a call and I'm typing stuff. But if I am trying to think out a story, I mean I can't show you right now because the story hasn't gone up yet, but behind my monitor right now are two giant pieces of paper that have Do you have strings?

01:02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going from one to the other. Yes, it is like the red string. No, you're crazy.

01:02:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, this is the thing that is known in my office is when Paris has a red string board. Oh my God, something interesting is about to come. But I like writing them out and story mapping like that. But I also like doing that in my notebook as well. Like I will kind of write out all the different threads that I think could be separate paragraphs or sentences in the story and then we'll move them around a bunch like on my floor. But it would be nice to also be able to search that stuff.

01:03:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I'm old enough. We used to actually use scissors to do this, right.

01:03:27 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I do use scissors to do this currently Wow.

01:03:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Leo, did you ever use Dave Winters outlining tools? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Frontier and before that, yeah, oh think, was it think, no, I love this stuff.

01:03:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Those are predecessors to all of this, aren't they? Yeah?

01:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the whole category we talked about before people get really into this is called PKMS, our personal knowledge management systems. And I used a phrase with Stephen called Zettelkasten, which is this ancient you can look it up on Wikipedia this old German guy who had little paper slips with everything he ever read and stuff on it. But the point of it was that he could then pull these out, he had an organization system and synthesize new knowledge from all the old knowledge and that's the idea and I think you know some of this comes from, just looking at it right and kind of put it.

01:04:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
There's also the commonplace book people use to. It's like a notebook now, but they would write down quotes, write down poems, write down thoughts, and there was no sense of plagiarism. Right, you were taking things out and the commonplace book was your thoughts.

01:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I've gone through a million systems of these. Bear was one of them EverNote. I started with EverNote way back when Lately I've been doing a lot of writing with it my handwriting so maybe the remarkable would be more suitable. I mentioned that I had replaced the remarkable with the Amazon scribe, which isn't the same. I mean, it's more of a Kindle book reader, but you can outline, you can take notes and it has a pen and you can sync them, but not sync them nearly as well as the remarkable. The remarkable is better because it syncs to your device directly. And why did you switch to it? Because I don't, because I wasn't using the remarkable as a note taking tool. Now I do use log seek and I really think you should look at this, paris, because this is a very free form. Let's say you're on the phone, phone call with G Gordon Liddy, and then you could take the notes and it's an ally. This is just like Dave Weiner's outliner, right? So you hit tab.

01:05:42
He hates Nixon, but you know, whatever, and you can move stuff around, you can do all the outlining kind of stuff that you would do.

01:05:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He's dragging, he's clicked. Just clicked a button and the bullet points Like, but watch this Back up. Watch this and he's dragging.

01:06:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the most important thing I can do. Hashtag um uh, watergate. Now I've created a new page called Watergate.

01:06:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, yeah, you can do that on bear. Yeah, it's like bear.

01:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can do. These are called backlinks, and you can list all the backlinks. You can also do it with double bracket, so you can do uh, Watergate like this. By the way, that's the same page. This will give me this link back to the same page. So the reason that's valuable is because, as you're typing, you can cross reference stuff just by simply adding a hashtag, and so if every phone call about water Watergate, you put hashtag Watergate in it, you can then see a collection of all of the Watergate uh things you've written.

01:06:45
That's fascinating. This is for you, for what you just described. This, especially if you don't mind using a keyboard. Uh, this is incredible. There are also lots of plugins.

01:06:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
What is the graph view and whiteboard tab?

01:06:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So many Zettlecast and knowledge management systems have these. These give you a uh graph of how stuff connects so you can see what you're writing about. It connects through the hashtags, or how does it know the connections? Yeah, Through the hashtags. So these pages are all connected with one another. You can do flashcards if you wanted to learn a language or or memorize something. It also has whiteboards which you can write on. Um, this is all free, by the way. It's open source and it's an active development, Although I think I pay five bucks a month for syncing.

01:07:35 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You can also very important question, and Jeff clothe, cover your ears. Does it have dark mode?

01:07:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oh yeah. It has all sorts of themes, in fact. Why would you want that?

01:07:45 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Everything in my life is in dark mode. I'm, I'm with you, looking at this white screen right now.

01:07:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How's that? Is that better? That's so much, and it has lots of themes, so you don't have to have these particular dark mode.

01:07:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Um, yeah, this is not worried that Paris is a conspiracy theorist. Now she wants to put red lines in the dark against all of this. Notice, though in a dark state.

01:08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Something interesting happened here.

01:08:07 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I will say, currently my, my lines on my board in front of me are, uh, dark colored. I posted a link in the discord to a murder board that I did for a story that's already published. So you can see that's only reasonably crazy.

01:08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So watch, well, as I did, I can also uh, do a to do, right? So by using the brackets to do, I've made this a to do and I actually can collate all these into to do lists and they have check boxes, so kind of undo and that kind of thing I can even change to do is into doing Uh, so you can. I'm I have to say I've tried a lot of these.

01:08:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This one to me is is amazing, Uh, very very Leo, for the benefit of our audience, to go to the discord and and and click on Paris's link. She's nuts. She's completely nuts.

01:09:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I am organized Is this the.

01:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is this the red string board? Yeah, this is the murder board there's no red string.

01:09:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
There is just a lot of post it notes.

01:09:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, there's, okay, there is there's red tape, I will say I'll admit that.

01:09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a story that you once, that you were once working on.

01:09:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, uh, adrian Lamo and four New York City friends.

01:09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is this. Oh, okay, is this about Adrian Lamo? Um, no, this is about a.

01:09:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
this was about a uh, a startup called Domeo that essentially described itself as a high tech like hospitality industry thing, but essentially they were just kind of running.

01:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's organized. How can a driver's license?

01:09:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
illegal Airbnb's. So what this board is which does I'll I'll be like, look crazy is it was me trying to figure out. All of those are the different um uh lawsuits or events where the co-founders of this startup um either bought, like uh, you know, listed a property, a property illegally on Airbnb in Nashville or in New York as part of their companies.

01:10:10 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is an investigative reporter.

01:10:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This is incredible.

01:10:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to do yeah. How did you learn?

01:10:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
that? Did you learn that?

01:10:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
in school. No, I didn't do journalism school, I just uh was have. I had a huge stack of documents on my desk and was like I need to look at these all at once. I was like I guess I'm just going to go, take this big whiteboard and bring it into the conference room.

01:10:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Nobody better erase it.

01:10:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, yeah, the thing is uh this ends it up being, I think, like a week or two before the pandemic hit. So I'm glad I took this photo, because I didn't see this ever again. Oh, wow, wow.

01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, this is so cool. Now, I don't think there's anything that gives you this. I mean, you're, you can see in one glance everything. The glance, yeah, but log seek would do all the connections and stuff and you could kind of see it all. Um, I think you should look at log seek, the I'm going to, yeah, I mean I am taking a week off.

01:11:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Uh, later this month I'm going to go visit my parents in Florida and I know that I'll be bored out of my mind, probably by no offense to my parents. So I love but seven days in Florida without working a lot. So I'll probably do a lot of tasks like um, figure out if I want to change my notes app or go from last past a bit warden or things like that. So I'll add this on it on the list, yeah.

01:11:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, you might. You might like the, the um, what's what's I just forgotten already. I'm not. I'm not a good example.

01:11:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Don't say ever note no the the mic. The remarkable. Remarkable yeah.

01:11:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think, it's.

01:11:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's a really nice feel to it.

01:11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, by the way, you can import PDFs. So if you have the remarkable, you can import that back into uh that's what I would use for the markup. Pdfs yeah, there's a whole. There's a whole collection of extensions. A lot of people have written extensions for this. That will then enhance your experience.

01:12:06 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, a GPT-3 from OpenAI. Oh, and I should mention yes, AI is a good note-taking plugin.

01:12:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can then incorporate your AI. That's actually why I wanted to show this. You can incorporate your AI into it as well, so I'm a big fan of this. I'm fascinated, though, by this whole PKAMS space. There's so much going on, and, unfortunately, I spend more time thinking about how to do it than actually doing anything.

01:12:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, you have to have something to do it with. I don't have anybody.

01:12:36 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
You have another show another show, another show and it's gone.

01:12:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I need, right, boy? It was great to thank you. By the way, that's Jeff's great get. Stephen, I guess you knew him because you went and you visited right.

01:12:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, I go way back. I was on the board of Plasticcom, which brought together Feed and Suck and Joey.

01:12:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anderson.

01:13:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And so that's where I worked with Stephen ages and ages ago.

01:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, again, as I said, I think it's really smart of Google to have somebody who's actually using this stuff.

01:13:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He's just such a good guy and I think writers will trust him to represent them.

01:13:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I also really respect that. He has a beautiful apartment.

01:13:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we noticed that as well. Yes, yeah, he probably lives in Brooklyn, just down the street.

01:13:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He does. He lives near the Botanical Garden. Oh, you knew that I could tell. I mean we had. We had a long time to get to know each other while you're waiting for you to meander over to the city.

01:13:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Leo didn't want to have to face the music about the Gemini video, and so that's true, he was trying to avoid accountability all week.

01:13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's talk about it.

01:13:52
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01:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I was. Oh, look at, look at For those of you not on video. You've got to see the Paris smug smile you know, it's just great to be right, you know.

01:15:40 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think, I was, I think, last week they have a little this week. They have a little overview of everything that happened and the clip is Leo getting absolutely getting it wrong and like nah, this is a GI guys, it's thinking and me and Jeff are like. I don't know, it seems a little.

01:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, what I didn't know was that they were lying. It's true, they were staging. No lying. What's a lie? A misrepresentation of the facts. So we watched this demo together and they showed video of a guy doing something and talking to the Gemini.

01:16:24 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
AI Talking about who is talking? Even said at the time that what, what, what. The quack was clearly not from the machine. Gemini knew that they were playing.

01:16:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All they said, though? All they said was for purposes of this, demo latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened. For brevity, what they finally admitted to Bloomberg opinion is the whole thing is fake. They show yeah, wait, they show Gemini. Not this video, but stills the, the responses that you're. For instance, they showed it this hands paper scissors, but what they just showed rock paper scissors, individual moves in. And, by the way, for for an AI to look at that and know that it's a game would be pretty tough, because it also is the peace sign, right. So what they did is they said here's a picture, it's a children's game, and then it's. They showed several more. And what's it doing?

01:17:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
And then it said which game is this? And, of course, if you show the AI a peace sign and to ask what children's game is it, that's a way easier and then so.

01:17:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they didn't just edit for latency, they took out a lot of prompts. Then they didn't, the AI did not, it wasn't looking at video and it didn't speak. They were text prompts that they then recorded. So I can go on and on. This is not just kind of misrepresent, this is a lie, and they got me, so maybe that's why it was dumb because it is doing some remarkable things.

01:17:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It could have gotten credit for that, but they just went over where I was listening to Alex Katroff it's his podcast today and they were wondering was this the engineers or the marketing people who?

01:18:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
went over marketing. Clearly, I know marketing and this is marketing. You know what the word is bull. This is a. This is, in every respect, complete bullshit. And you were right. You kind of you both sensed that this couldn't possibly be real right.

01:18:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We could smell it.

01:18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could smell a lie because you're good journalists. I was bamboozled.

01:18:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I was porn swappled. I mean, I think that the thing that is so disappointing about all this is like what you said they're. It's a really interesting and innovative product. The skills that they were trying to show is sensibly do exist in it. It has incredible capabilities. Why not just show that? Why over exaggerate in this video? In this way. Knowing that of course this is going to come. I mean, obviously we know why, because they that's marketing.

01:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's so short. They're terrified because they missed the boat in Microsoft and OpenAI beat them, but they again they didn't.

01:19:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They missed the boat on positioning and marketing. On the actual use of AI. They've been, they're still way ahead.

01:19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, Jeff, no, both ours. Technically many, many people have now been doing head to head tests against Gemini and chat GPT and, if anything, Gemini is a little bit ahead of something that's been out for a year.

01:19:27 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, but I'm arguing at the larger set, generative AI, as I, as I, heard every AI person say when I was out in San Francisco. It's not something new and different, it's just a progression, it's just part of this whole thing, and Google's larger AI track is an experience, is huge, but they don't know how to sell that and brag about that. It's like Biden and the economy they don't know how to, how to say the story.

01:19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, anyway.

01:19:55 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, anyway, it was dumb to do. It was dumb, it's it's set him back.

01:19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll be honest Google has Google already has a problem with credibility. You just fallen into this BS. Remember, I mean every Google IO. They show something that doesn't happen. Remember, five years ago, I'm still thinking about that.

01:20:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yes, the one that you're about to say, where they have the AI. Call a restaurant and make an appointment, call a hair salon and make an appointment, and the AI is like um, hold on one second, let me check. You know, and trying to be human, that product doesn't exist in that way, and it's been five years.

01:20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so this is not new. Remember when they had the, the Google buds, and they were doing simultaneous translation? Never happened. It's very annoying. Meanwhile, I've got you know on my iPhone. I've got simultaneous translation by pressing a button. Now, chat GPT is doing a lot of the things Google has lied about. I just I and you know what I we do a show called this week in Google because, uh, we think Google is an important company making huge breakthroughs. They shouldn't have to lie like this Um, it's. It's a deep insecurity and I think it's because they feel like they're getting beat.

01:21:11 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Right.

01:21:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's they could have said. What I'm trying to say is they could have set the agenda, they could have been smart to do that, and they and they don't. And this is where the part of the problem is they don't have that mindset. I don't want them to hire a bunch of flax, but I do want them to be.

01:21:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, they've got a lot of flax already. That's the thing.

01:21:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Actually, that's a problem. This comms will always mess things up, along with the lawyers, but they, but they don't have to tell their own story.

01:21:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can. By the way, if you want to just see what Jim and I can do, they, they, uh, shortly after this video, they, they put it on with the video. God dang it, but you can. You can play with it a little bit, right, I think it's available.

01:21:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's part of Bard now.

01:21:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, yeah, well, it's being. It's being built into Bard. This is a new model. That's also confusing because we think of Google's AI as Bard, but I guess Bard can have different models in it, and Gemini is a new one. I think they're roughly you know, to be fair, they're roughly equal to open AI.

01:22:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
My, my former student, ron John Roy, was on Ketterwitz's podcast and they were saying I think it was them and that one that that the models are going to become commodity. And the question is, at the end of the day it's going to be, it's going to be specific data sets. Yeah, so I not not learning sets, but specific data set.

01:22:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I sent you an hour long video Uh, and I wish I don't have the link in front of me that didn't I send it. I found a very good YouTube video maybe a listener sent it to us that explains the working pieces of all this. So there is the large language model that you train, but you don't. That's not what you ship. You ship something that is then tuned, and it's tuned by humans. Incidentally, um, the tune of the human tuning is faster and less expensive than the massive. You know, model building, but is a very important part, and the same LLM can be tuned by different humans in different ways and have completely different outcomes. So there's, that's the second piece of it that's very important. Um, I know where the video came from. It was a. It was a scale AI. Presentation from the company scale AI.

01:23:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I will also say briefly the chat has corrected me Uh, the Google assistant calling thing has come out recently. It's called Google duplex. It's unclear, it doesn't work in every state and it's unclear whether or not all companies and restaurants support getting calls from the AI assistant, but it does exist in some way. Strangely, google hasn't publicized it in a major way, cause.

01:23:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't think it works that well.

01:23:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not this. Yeah yeah yeah, it's built in like on my pixel phone if somebody calls uh, it'll now say, hey, Leo, uh can't answer right now, but what is this about? It's sort of, Actually, the only thing about my hair salon studio.

01:24:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
One of my favorite things is I think it's a studio one on one in Warren, new Jersey. They said they're getting these calls now.

01:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it's, but it took them quite a while.

01:24:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They acted like I have noticed sometimes on Google maps the hours for a place will say recently confirmed via call, like seven days ago, and so I assume that's the AI assistant calling and asking me to have a system to try to update this stuff.

01:24:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, anyway, did you find the video? Yeah, I'm looking. It was an hour long.

01:24:37 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We don't want to go until 10 o'clock.

01:24:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we won't show it, but I but I would like to give you a link, cause it was a really uh kind of, um useful understanding AI video kind of for people like you and me.

01:24:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
If you want to, if you, if you want to show a weird video with AI, the channel one dot AI is pretty wacky. Did you watch that?

01:25:00
No tell me about that. So this is just came out of nowhere. Um uh, chris Moran, who's an executive with the guardian uh, went up on on LinkedIn and quoted some wacky stuff with it. It's in the note there that from this video they say there isn't a computer. Uh the uh. It's possible to create footage of events where cameras were not able to capture the action. You know that means they're going to, they're going to lie, they're going to make up stuff. Uh, my favorite things I put in here channel ones anchors can even be generated to have their own personalities, unlike TV people.

01:25:33 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, I love that. Oh, my God, nice slam. Here's the, here's the whips.

01:25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, uh, that's you, it's channel one dot AI it gives you.

01:25:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So so so let's here's a preview, let's see. So this is a fake person, right, it's a fake person. And welcome to channel one.

01:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, first of all, her voice and face, her lips do not match the voice, yeah.

01:25:55 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
Consuming, reporting and thinking about the news, and she's strangely vacant.

01:26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but maybe that's just a TV thing, oh keep going, as you keep going. Today you'll witness AI generated stories and headlines, captivating visuals. But these might be imaginary.

01:26:10 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
Yes, if you fast forward through, scrub through and you'll find some stuff.

01:26:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
We're trying to find out who we are.

01:26:19 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
They're using the bass of video here In this vastness called the universe.

01:26:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like Bill Clinton, but it's Bill Nessel Nelson.

01:26:29 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
Bill Nessel Nelson. After record breaking wins swept through France and much of the western part of the continent, storm Kieran arrived less than two weeks. It's very generic here, right?

01:26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know honestly, in some ways this might be superior to the eye rolling of news channels.

01:26:45 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Wait, wait, wait till you get to the cute stories.

01:26:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's coming to movie theaters and videos.

01:26:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh maybe a little before. Here's cutesy he's wearing a VR. Oliver. But the AI didn't generate a human wrote that script.

01:27:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oliver, what's coming to movie theaters this season? Oh right, Thanks.

01:27:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So think about it. We spend the majority of our days with our heads. Are they saying an AI wrote the whole thing?

01:27:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
now they're kind of contending there's no about here. This is all you have. Is this video? Yeah, it's pretty.

01:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got to tell you that joke. So, Oliver, they go to Oliver and he's in a VR headset and he's going like no AI would think that up.

01:27:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's a human.

01:27:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Human wrote that Was that a real person, or could they get the AI to make that person?

01:27:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, those real people have been around for a couple of years. I saw them at CES but they're modeled on real people, so they get people in and they do things, and then you have they're not fully generated anyway. So what are they trying to sell this to local news channels?

01:27:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, you know, be a part of us and yeah.

01:27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can imagine that happening.

01:27:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's part of what's it called. Oh shoot, the founder comes from the deadline story. Has this. I'll be re-skip ad. I don't do it. The chicken soup for the soul entertainment company.

01:28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting.

01:28:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wait, where didn't they recently merge with something really?

01:28:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
interesting. It doesn't make sense.

01:28:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm going to guess it's like a financial stock, it's something like that.

01:28:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's Adam Mossam who has been chief digital officer for chicken soup.

01:28:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Chicken soup for the soul. Merged with Red Box, the movie kiosk.

01:28:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because chicken soup for the soul was a pretty good book. I mean it was Pop Psyche, but it was a decent book.

01:28:48 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But this has nothing to do with it. It's a franchise that got overdone. Let's milk it until it's gone.

01:28:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got to tell you this is what killed radio. The first event that killed radio is radio stations decided humans were too expensive and they went to automation and they would get real to real tapes in the mail every week with music and automation and buy big, expensive machines to play them. And there was no humans involved in the radio.

01:29:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And then there was crap and everybody stopped listening. Everybody stopped listening. Europe radio still lives here in the US. It's dead.

01:29:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this could this and actually if it kills local news, I'm not too unhappy about that. Local film in 11 is the worst, is the worst. What do you think of the EU's AI Act? The EU has kind of leapt into the fray with a late night negotiation of Friday night A proposed AI regulation bill. Organizations will have a couple of years to be compliant.

01:29:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It could be worse. On line 70, there's a cheat sheet. Yeah, I'm looking at it.

01:29:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't look that bad.

01:29:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They did not restrict open source, which was my big fear. They were talking about doing that.

01:30:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say their prohibited AI will include social credit scoring systems Good idea. Emotion recognition systems Good idea.

01:30:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Better than everyone says what's that?

01:30:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're already seeing that People are selling. Remember, facebook did a test to see if they could change your feelings. Imagine that there's a camera in the hall. How are the employees feeling? Microsoft?

01:30:32 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Read often, has it.

01:30:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
This is something that's often used in hiring software Whenever you have to submit a video as part of a early hiring screening process. I believe some of these companies have gotten dinged for trying to determine what the emotional state of the people interviewing was, which, of course, ends up being horrifically biased.

01:30:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the product from the folks at Microsoft. Create and engage in productive workforce. Continuously improve employee engagement and business performance with next generation AI and insights. This is Viva. It's creepy as hell. It analyzes your emotions, how you're feeling, how your productivity. It basically narks on you. On behalf of a company.

01:31:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's crap. But I also have other things out there for mental health that people are able to use things, and Reid Hoffman has started a whole company around this using AI. I think to prohibit emotional recognition as a whole because of the fact that you're doing this Emotional recognition as a whole because a few people are using it badly.

01:31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the problem with regulation it may cut off some decent uses Maybe, but I think emotion recognition has like face recognition, right, there's a high risk of false positives.

01:31:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Has there been much data showing that we can accurately determine human emotions from facial scans? That seems like it can get a bit tricky, that's a bit tricky because everyone has a different sort of expression, in addition to having a different face.

01:32:06 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I always look grumpy and Leo always sounds friendly. Hello, Paris.

01:32:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You seem sad today, would you like? To tell me what is going on? That sounds creepy as hell, right.

01:32:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
That's Viva baby.

01:32:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jeff, you seem irrationally angry at everything. Yeah, and so what about?

01:32:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
it.

01:32:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI also prohibited. Ai used to exploit people's vulnerabilities age, disability, that seems fair. Behavioral manipulation.

01:32:37 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's otherwise known as advertising and propaganda and education.

01:32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Untargeted scraping of facial images for face recognition. Look, I agree with you In all of these. You could say well, there may be good uses of this and it's risky to prohibit it. I don't think we talked about it last week. The New York Times article about the accelerationists. Did we talk about that? No, we did.

01:33:02 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But hold on before you do that. The last bullet in that box is the one where it agrees with what we've all said, what you said, particularly, Leo, about the problem as humans and the problem as officialdom, law enforcement use of real-time biometric identification in public is limited. It's not prohibited, it's limited to preauthorized situations. Now, that's the kind of regulation I want to see is regulating government use of these technologies, because they have greater power over us.

01:33:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Similarly, the bullet point above that is prohibiting specific predictive policing applications.

01:33:37 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Right.

01:33:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wow.

01:33:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and there's been harm with a lot of these. They categorize some AIs, like, let's say, medical devices, as high risk and they're under additional restrictions and governance and transparency rules, which I think is appropriate.

01:33:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's something. So there's good things in here and they dodge some of the worst things that would have been. We're not done with the open source argument, Boy. I saw this when I was in San Francisco at the World Economic Forum event. There are two very strong opinions. Who would say it's bad? People who are worried about guardrails and that an open source can build in guardrails and then somebody can get around them. Of course they can. We know they can. It's like saying I build a pre-impress that can't print any bad stuff.

01:34:27 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
Well, this is an oddly persistent delusion among some that you can have security by obscurity, that if stuff is, proprietary and not revealed.

01:34:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is somehow safer, and that's not true. It's quite the opposite.

01:34:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
It's not true at all.

01:34:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, open is the only really safe way.

01:34:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I couldn't agree more, and you know Andrew Ding and LeCoune obviously fights this from Metta and others argue straightlessly for open source and I agree.

01:34:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you can imagine companies like Microsoft, amazon, apple saying, no, no, really, don't do it in open source, we'll take care of this. You don't want to have a bad.

01:35:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
We don't want bad actors get the hold of this.

01:35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wouldn't want a bad guy to get a hold of AI, would you? We'll take care of it. We got it all here. So I, you know I'm kind of mixed feelings about regulation. This is the article from the New York Times, from the shift, the effective accelerationism movement, which says no regulation at all. This is Mark Andreessen Go, go, go, accelerate or die. Here's one of the big banners that was up here, or actually it was a promotional flyer handed out by an AI startup. The messenger to the gods is available to you. Finally, the party was called Keep AI Open. You know it's.

01:35:56
Maybe it's a little nihilistic of me, but I do. There's a part of me that thinks, yeah, just let's see what happens.

01:36:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Let's do it. There was a famous paper written by Paul Dewar at the Rand Corporation in 1998, the same year that Google was born in which he too was inspired by Elizabeth Eisenstein in the history of the pre-impress. He looked at it and he said there are going to be unintended consequences and if you try to forestall them, then you don't know what to do when they come. Exactly, Get to them faster and be nimble and ready to deal with them. Now that probably means it's not going to be statutory regulation, it's going to be systems of regulation where you could call people in and say something's going wrong here. We must talk right now and figure out what this is and come up with nimble structures to deal with it. That was easier when there were fewer institutions to deal with. So times have changed and I'm not a libertarian and I'm not against regulation, but I also think that believing that you can understand everything about AI right now and regulate it all and write the statute for it is hubris.

01:36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, and risks in some ways more harm by pushing the development in ways that wouldn't naturally go. But I do think you have to be alert to the harm.

01:37:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, yes.

01:37:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've learned this from the internet. When we started the internet, it was hands off. Even the federal government said we're not going to tax the internet because we don't know what's going to happen. We're just going to let it go. It was hands off and there are people like you and I were very optimistic. I'm very, Barlow, very optimistic about everybody gets a voice and it's the democratizing force.

01:37:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Paris is sitting there thinking, yeah, it's your fault, you're your generation, you guys, you did, you screwed up.

01:37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's an example of the, and I think the thing people are worried about is, yeah, we let it all go and there were bad things happened, but a lot more good things happened, as you've always said. Yes, and the smart thing would be to learn this lesson and say okay, let's let it grow, but pay attention, and if we start?

01:37:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know that we should be. Our approach to AI should just be let's let it grow. And why?

01:38:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what happens.

01:38:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I think that the potential for unrestrained growth it's at a scale with AI that is, it's almost unfathomable.

01:38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think we could lose control?

01:38:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I don't want to be dramatic about it, but I think that when some of the smartest people on this subject are frequently saying it is going to grow so exponentially, we cannot fully conceive of it. We should maybe be, you know, take a step back, then maybe we should.

01:38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's another argument against regulation, which is that, regardless of what governments do, there will be those who, full speed ahead, go full speed ahead anyway. And you don't want that to be underground, do you? You don't want that to be, you know, on the dark web. You want it to be out in the daylight, in public, so that we can Well what's going to happen is in Europe.

01:38:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is what Europe is, because it has chosen to be known for regulating. And so is that where the innovative? And then they complain they don't have any innovation right and investment right. That's why, right, so you put a link. I'm not. I'm not against regulation. Most, every activity of human behavior is already regulated. We already have the laws. And to regulate this. The other interesting debate both of you is there's.

01:39:23
The other debate I heard this year was this quote the web event was do you regulate at the technology level, at the, at the model level or at the application level? And there's a very strong argument to say that you can't really regulate at the model level because it's just like the pre-impress, it's a generic tool. It's at the application layer. Oh, you're using this for medical advice? Well, hold on this. We're going to talk about how you use that, because there's lives at stake and that's where it's a smarter structure. But a lot of what's going on is saying let's hold the model creators responsible for everything anyone can do with the model, which also is regulatory capture, because only the people who are involved in the model can do it. And that's regulatory capture, because only the big companies can afford to ensure themselves against that level of risk.

01:40:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're going to be right again, paris, and I'm going to have to say I was bamboozled and horn swung again. I know you. I love it yeah.

01:40:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No I think it's really great.

01:40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we just don't know. No, we don't.

01:40:18 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I think that it's probably always wise to take a conservative approach to these sort of things. I'll also say probably, because I know that as much as I mean we, and frankly even our politicians, could debate regulation all day, you know, until the sun goes down, but that's not going to change anything, I think.

01:40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think we even agree on what the conservative approach is. One one group would say, well, you got to regulate this stuff, we got to move slowly and thoughtfully. The other would say, oh no, we should be conservative and regulation and let it grow.

01:40:55 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, I think that the thing is ultimately, people are going to be speeding to beat each other in this race.

01:41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to happen anyway. Yeah, I think the cat's already out of the bag. It's like. It's like J Robert Oppenheimer, after already inventing the atomic bomb, said okay, now let's stop. It didn't happen, it would never have happened, it's not going to happen.

01:41:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But I also think it's a question of. This is where we get back to the debate that you lost last week, Leo, as to whether or not we're near a GI.

01:41:29 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The G and AGI stands for Google. Actually.

01:41:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So that's part of the debate now is oh my God, we're close to this, this huge change in all of human history. Well, no, actually we're not. It's a parlor trick, and so your reflexes to whether regulate depends greatly on where you think we are in progress that no one can define.

01:41:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to confess I have no idea what's going on. The more I think about it the more I read.

01:42:02
The more I try to understand, the less I know we live in very interesting times. I'll tell you one thing I know that the kinds of discussions we have on Twitter, the kinds of information you get on our shows, is going to be increasingly important. For the last, I don't know, it was like four or five years. I really felt like tech had stagnated. All you're going to get is like four new features in an iPhone, and that was it In the early 2000s. It was exciting. There were things to talk about. Then it went just through a period of doldrums. Well, those doldrums have ended, haven't they? We are entering into a very fluid, unpredictable, in some ways unknowable future.

01:42:46 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I thought you were launching into a plug for the club. I am. These discussions are so important. Oh, okay, keep going then.

01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly what I'm doing. I think that that means we have a real job to do. Honestly, a few years ago, I might have said, yeah, technology is now ubiquitous. Everybody, there's nothing to talk about. That's new. We could probably fold up the tent and go home. I don't think it's the case anymore. I think, all of a sudden, we are faced with some very big issues and decisions. The AI is part of it. It's a big part of it, but there's a lot of other stuff AR going on. I think our job is more important than ever, which is why it hurts me that we're having financial difficulties, that we've had to lay off people and we're going to cancel some shows Not this show, don't worry but it hurts me because I think we have a bigger job to do. I want to reach out to you, our audience members, and ask you if you think what we are doing is important, if you think the information you get, the conversations you hear here, are going to be important as we continue into the rest of this decade and beyond. I would like to ask for your help.

01:43:56
Advertising alone is no longer sufficient to keep Twit on the air. We need support of our club members. Now I think we've created an inexpensive club with some good benefits. We didn't want to make it out of reach for people. I know we're all subscriptions to death. $7 a month, that's all. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to a great discussion forum, the club Twit Discord, where we do talk about this kind of stuff. You also get special shows that we don't do anywhere else. We are no longer Jeff going to do the AI show because Jason, we had to lay Jason off, but I think the AI conversations will continue on Twig. Very obvious, if you want to support this and you want this to continue, it's really important. This year is a make or break year for Twit. We need to greatly increase the size of the club. If you're not a member or you have friends who are not members, twittv slash club twit. Thank you. I appreciate it.

01:44:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
This is not idle whining people. This is not. Oh, there'll be another membership thing next month. They'll take us through. This is real.

01:45:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, it's unfortunate, we've been talking about it for a while, but now it's real. If you've enjoyed the show and I know so many of Twit and Leo's listeners have been listening to him and Twit for decades you should think about the fact. Sorry, leo, I didn't mean that in a good old way, whatever, whatever. You're out there. You know you could pick up your walker, go over to the little piggy bank where you keep your coins. Hey, I'm ready to retire.

01:45:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could retire and all of a sudden, I don't want to retire. There is stuff we need to talk about. We need to talk, yep.

01:45:42 - Paris Martineau (Host)
If this show or any of the shows on Twit have brought something to your life, consider supporting it financially. There's also a lot of great things you get from the club, but people need money to be able to produce things for you, and this era of being able to get podcasts and radio content and all of this stuff for total like, for nothing it's over. So you've got to figure out what's going to survive, and I hope that Twit can be one of the things that survives. Thank you.

01:46:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well as the newest member of the Twit family. I appreciate that Paris Martin Yousse young person Thanks.

01:46:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, and Paris, you have brought your blood, life and spirit to the show. Oh, exactly, and it's wonderful. And folks out there you got to support. If you don't want to feed us, feed Paris.

01:46:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And we are. By the way, we are talking because you made me feel bad when you said it was a show that you did with your grandparents. We are talking about hiring another young woman to add to the mix so that you are not alone. Wow, and I really want to do that too, but again, it's going to really depend on club membership. But we have lots of ideas, we have lots of things we want to do. We're not done yet. Hey, the big story we didn't even we buried the lead. The big story of the week Google's app store was ruled an illegal monopoly by a jury on Monday.

01:47:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
An illegal. You're so good talking about Google Monopoly.

01:47:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, we're doing this for you. Epic was suing Google, just as they sued Apple. They lost kind of for the most part against Apple in a trial that was ruled by a single judge. This was for a jury which deliberated for four hours and came back saying, yeah, you're monopoly. Google says we're going to, we're going to appeal, we're going to challenge Christ did not.

01:47:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
did not go down much like the market fixed them, Despite change of appeal.

01:47:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and they're probably right. And even if it doesn't, it's going to go on for years. Oh yeah, actually, jury deliberated, you're liberated three hours.

01:47:44 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They came back fast, it's interesting, I think right, maybe the day or so before the jury was supposed to deliberate, google was like oh no, no, we actually want to judge. To hear this Too late, too late.

01:47:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think? I mean, that's one of the big differences between the two trials? The other one, tim Sweeney, I think it was of Epic, said that Apple, google, made the mistake of writing stuff down. Apple didn't write a lot of it down, and so they there weren't as many documents they could use to prove their you know, intent for monopoly.

01:48:17 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What do you think is just right or wrong here? What is, what are Google and Apple's rights in creating the store and the network for all these apps, and do they overstep or not?

01:48:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I do think that something that is interesting and different here is that Apple. Apple makes no, you know, apple is clear about the fact that it's a walled garden. Apple makes phones, sells them, and it also makes and maintains an app store. Obviously, google makes phones as well, but many of the the Google Play Store is used on Samsung devices. It is used in an ecosystem that is far beyond just Google devices, and that's where it gets a bit more complicated. Here is because part of the question was what does Google owe to these various different companies that it is, you know, either trying to incentivize, to keep the Google Play Store as their primary and only means of downloading apps? Like is it? Should it be allowed to put its finger on the scale like that?

01:49:29 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Or do they? Are they owed money for the value they bring to the app creators? It could be like the old AOL, where nobody enters in. Aol makes everything and says it's our space and that's that. Obviously, the app makers allow them to scale the offerings at no cost to the platforms. Right, but what's the value of that distribution?

01:49:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there are precedents for the 30% VIG that Google and Apple both charge. That's what Microsoft charges in its Xbox store. That's what Nintendo's charges in its Switch store. That's what Steam charges it. There are costs to providing it's one of the new stand charges pretty much, is it?

01:50:11 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, 26% or something like that, yeah.

01:50:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the reasonable payment you get for providing the store. I think that the question is should people be forced to use that store? So if a company like, in this case, epic says, well, what we want is an Epic store and we won't, maybe they could make a deal where we'll give you 3% or whatever because we are still running on your platform. I think that that's not unfair. To ask Google and Apple's position is it's risky to do that because there will be all sorts of stores with bad content and dangerous content. Apple especially feels this way, which is true too right, absolutely true. Google gives.

01:51:00
It's interesting that Google was the one that got in trouble here, because they're actually looser than Apple. You can side load on an Android phone. It's a fairly complicated process. Epic said it's too hard to do, but you can, and so Google isn't 100% locking you in. I can go into settings and on any Android device and say allow third party app downloads and it'll allow it. You can download side load. So it's interesting that the jury felt this way.

01:51:32
I think they also were punishing Google for their business practices, things like, for instance and Google gets in more trouble here than because they did the right thing. Initially they Android is open source and any handset maker can use the open source version of Android without any payment or debt to Google. But the problem is nobody wants an Android phone. That's just the open source Android. They want the Google Play Store, they want Google Maps, they want the Google Apps. And Google says well, well, we'll let you use Android open source for free, but if you want that stuff, then you have to bundle Chrome, you have to bundle the Google Play Store, you have to follow all these rules.

01:52:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Otherwise, android's brand is affected by crappy, miserable spaces, which is a good point. So it's a good point. It's a good point and it's a good protection for the consumer. How is the consumer hurt here? The price is higher, maybe, but look at the game world, where it's wildly expensive and it's not kind of like this, where you're in different platforms, where you don't have this much competition.

01:52:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I honestly think Google's better in all of this because of side loading, because it's open source, because they give you more choice. They probably should be prosecuted, as the EU is prosecuting them for their business practices with these partners. I mean, the deals you make if you want to have the Google stuff on your phone are pretty draconian. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say we have an app store, we encourage people to use it, you can side load. I think that's fine. Apple is a different matter. Apple there is no. You have to go through the Apple store, you have to give them 30%. Oh, and that was another thing that Jerry didn't like is that both Google and Apple have made secret deals with companies like Spotify and Netflix to lower the 30% because they're big customers or whatever.

01:53:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
in Amazon and welcome to capitalism.

01:53:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah.

01:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how I feel about this. I think Google will actually in the win in the long run. I think the stock market's right that this will get overturned, but I think what? Honestly? I think Apple should have lost and Google should have won. Yeah, it's the opposite. Supreme Court is both Epic and Apple have gone to the US Supreme Court on this store thing. So because the judge did, even though Apple won most of its case, the judge did say you gotta have a lot of third party stores, and so Apple and Epic are fighting this out in the Supreme Court. There will be more decisions on that one. It's the first, according to the wire, the first significant courtroom loss in the US for big tech.

01:54:19 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And FTC has tried again and again and hasn't seen it till now. And this was not FTC, this was a civil fight.

01:54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Epic says the verdict is a win for all app developers and consumers around the world. It proves Google's app store practices are illegal in the abuser monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation. I don't think that's true.

01:54:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The fees are normal. I think their prices are gonna, if they have their own way Epic, they're gonna charge five times more Because they'll be able to.

01:54:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's an interesting result. It is Kind of a shocker, and I think it is because it's a jury.

01:55:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It'll be interesting to see if it sticks.

01:55:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We should say, by the way, Google asked for a jury trial and then changed their mind right at the end.

01:55:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But so I think it says more about and this is I have a book coming out next year about moral panic coverage of the internet. I think it says more about the effect of media's narrative about big, bad tech companies than anything else Right In the jury's mind.

01:55:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if tech companies you know, people are gonna be mad at me because I'm so wishy washy. I'm not sure big tech companies are all that big and all that dangerous.

01:55:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Okay, tell me more.

01:55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not sure. What is the how is? Is Google harming you in Paris?

01:55:48 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No.

01:55:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No.

01:55:50 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean I'm not in any position to say that any company is harming you. No, I mean, is Apple harming you? I have no personal qualms with any company that I could cover in the future.

01:56:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, oh. You're just saying that because you don't want to appear biased.

01:56:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I mean, I'm saying that because it's true. Okay, how about Amazon?

01:56:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, I think you can make a claim. Definitely not Amazon has harmed local retailers, but we have the ability to shop A and P, I mean harm local retailers.

01:56:25 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Walmart harmed local retailers. I think a lot of things did.

01:56:30 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Home Depot.

01:56:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think. I think that large corporations generally and the rise of monumental capitalism like mega corporations has harmed the world and people and we are extrapolating that and we are currently talking a lot about big tech because that is a trendy, concise and very visible part of this ecosystem. But the problem is more systemic.

01:57:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yes, free market capitalism, which works quite well, fails when one company becomes so dominant in a market, either as a monopoly or a monopsony, that they control the market. And that's why we have antitrust laws and we should have, and antitrust is important. I think you can make the case that the tech business is pretty competitive and I don't know if it's that kind of a trust. It's not standard oil.

01:57:40 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Tell that to Neva.

01:57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My little favorite search engine. This is Benito Wang, and you're right, my little favorite search engine, neva, couldn't succeed as a search engine. But I don't think I do. I think we assume that somehow these big tech companies have gotten so big that they have eliminated the business, eliminated the business cycle, like they're gonna be big forever. Facebook nobody can ever challenge Facebook. Wrong. Nobody can ever challenge Google. I think we're seeing that right now. Yeah, I think the business cycle still holds.

01:58:14
And these companies are innovators, but the next innovator still comes along, no matter what happens, and that's what you're trying to, by the way. That's what antitrust law is trying to do is to protect both consumers in prices that's a little harder to justify, because prices seem to be going down with big tech but also to protect new companies so that innovation can happen.

01:58:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, the problem with Neva too was and I write about this in magazine, my cute little book out now is customer acquisition cost, and you know when the AW started, but I remember when things started we had to pay $45 ahead for every subscriber we ended up getting.

01:58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:58:57 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Just in marketing costs, right, and that's what's funny on everybody, right. And so if you're a new company like Neva, you're gonna sustain on consumer revenue and you're not Twit Network, which already has a loyal base which should be paying more. That's different. You already have the audience.

01:59:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Just need 5% of you guys who listen. That's wonderful isn't it?

01:59:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You guys are really taking up the charge. I love it. Thank you, we are. Thank you, I appreciate it.

01:59:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But Neva had to be out there in a tough market and acquire new people and get them to pay quickly. That's a hard business, no matter what. Whatever you're starting, the subscription business is really, really hard, and can you blame Google for that? Well, yeah, it's hard to fight against a really well established search engine that people really like and trust.

01:59:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think that it's imp. For a long time I thought maybe there was an issue of scale, that would be impossible to come up with a search engine as good as Google. Now I realized that, yes, if you wanted to duplicate Google's search, that might be hard, but Google's doing a pretty good job of screwing it up and I think there are opportunities out there.

02:00:03 - Audio from Leo's Laptop (Other)
And it may not be in the traditional you know web crawling search engine.

02:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it might be in AI, but there are opportunities for search and for Google to be disintermediated. You know to be taking out the equation.

02:00:15 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Facebook and Twitter and company Mastodon, oigan and Rochko raised no more than $500,000 to get to 12 million users. Yeah, it's a perfect example. And he was the only full-time person Him and volunteers, people like Leo, who started their own instances and did that. That's a different model. Neva could have gone for a different model. Now, I don't know what that was and I don't mean to make their business. That was really hard and the problem with a business like Neva is they had a high upfront cost.

02:00:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's. The problem is to create a search index. Yeah, cost money, is very, very tough. In fact, nobody really does it. They just license Bing for the most part, which is not really a good solution.

02:01:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know.

02:01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, something happened where I got kind of the feeling that I'm not that worried about the big tech guys because I think they're gonna be the source of their own demise actually.

02:01:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I think you're right, Leo. What I'm worried about, though, what I become worried about I became worried about writing the next book is the crazy end, the loony end, of the tech boys.

02:01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm much more worried about the billionaires, I agree. I think if there's a threat to us, it's not from companies, it's from individuals.

02:01:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, it's a certain breed of them, and so that effective accelerationism story you mentioned, that's really kind of a mockery of effective altruism and they're all trying to pull on a cloak of religion for what they do. They're dangerous.

02:01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree, because it's really just a justification, a rationalization, absolutely yeah for SBF type behavior. All right, let's take a break. I have so much more I'd like to talk about. Oh, there's tons. It's as a you know, google's given up that Google play movies and TV. Finally, they said they would. Now, if you wanna buy a movie, you have to buy it, like I don't know, in some other part of the interface, I guess I know.

02:02:10 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
God knows where.

02:02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, I know, yeah. Why do they do this?

02:02:13 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I don't know Four people know where. Yeah, you'll find it, we're never gonna find out.

02:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you'll need it, you'll find it. Two million Teslas are being recalled. It finally happened. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said yeah, autopilot you should. It's a little hard, it's not. It's dangerous, doesn't do enough to guard against misuse. Their chief issue is drivers who assume they have autopilot and get in the back seat or start reading a book or take a nap and they say Tesla has to fix their automobile to keep drivers engaged, that their methods are inadequate. Right now it's just a torque sensor in the steering wheel. My car's like that too. It says you know, grab the wheel, make sure we know you're still alive. But my car and many other cars have cameras too that tell when you're doing hands-free that, whether you're looking at the road or not. So if I've got my hands-free blue cruise onto my Ford and I look over here about 10 seconds in, it's gonna go. Hey, hey, look at the road.

02:03:19 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Does it buzz your steering wheel? Oh, it's fun.

02:03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it beeps. It's obnoxious as hell, but it gets me back paying attention, and which is, by the way, a good idea.

02:03:32 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah.

02:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
FCC oh, I love this one speaking of screw you Elon. Fcc has denied a Starlink subsidy of nearly a billion dollars $885 million in public funds. This was part of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which was designed to subsidize the rollout of internet service in rural areas, places where private companies have said man, we're not gonna do it. The first $885 million was set aside for Starlink three years ago, based on the company's bid to how much connectivity it could provide, at what cost and to what regions. The FCC said now that initial approval was high level, but without scrutiny. We now we're looking at it a little bit closer and the FCC says well, the satellite internet proposal has promise, but it's still a developing technology. And they noted that in order to use Starlink you have to buy a dish for 600 bucks and then pay more than a hundred bucks a month for service Oof. The FCC said that's not exactly providing service to underserved communities. This was in addition to I love that they literally said.

02:04:51 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The company quote failed to demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service end quote which is as close to a burn as you're ever going to get from a government agency.

02:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's that. Unfortunately, the satellites are already up there, fortunately, unfortunately. I was just. I really had high hopes at Starlink Would it do exactly that, but as soon as they started saying how much it was gonna cost, it's like it's for rich people, it's not for normal people.

02:05:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And he depends so much on government money for all of us.

02:05:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's a big point at you, low harboring. Get ready. Cyber war has broken out between the Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine intelligence says they attacked and brought down the Russian tax service for multiple days and then, in an unrelated I don't know attack, just a couple of days ago, ukraine's largest telecom operator was shut down after a cyber attack. Gotta think it's Russia, right. The company said it was hit by a powerful cyber attack that led to a large-scale technical failure. This is one of the things I've always worried about is cyber warfare, and it's happening, I think, between Russia and Ukraine. Netflix, for the first time ever, has released information about viewing, which is a big deal. One of the re, and I think they deal with this because of the Hollywood writers and actors' strikes and because producers also say look, it's nice that you're giving me $90 million to make this series, but I really wanna know how many people saw it. So they've released, but the Go ahead.

02:06:31
They've released viewing numbers for 18,000 titles between January and June of this year. Go ahead.

02:06:41 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What's interesting about this to me is that it's not. If you're presenting a show on networked linear broadcast television, you want a huge audience because you're gonna sell that audience to advertisers. Netflix is an entirely different business, even though it's added advertising, but it's the business of trying to get people of many, many different interests along the tail to find enough of value on Netflix to subscribe to it for every month. So the largest show is A gonna be much smaller than anything that was on broadcast, and B that isn't as important, not saying it's cool.

02:07:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not important in Netflix, but it's important to the actors who want residuals and aren't getting paid residuals, to the producers who want to know that they go into the market now. We had 100 million viewers, so the people who produce this content do wanna know. I agree, netflix is 18.

02:07:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But I'm also saying right, but I'm also saying, though, is that the actual monetary value, the economic value to Netflix is not necessarily consistent. I agree With a top-down list, I agree, and because it may be something that's smaller but really addicts people and they're your most loyal customers you don't have to pay the market to get them to renew, then the size of the audience doesn't matter, and I think this is what I really wanna work on after the Atlanta type book. Is this question about scale and mass? We still have this assumption of it from the old broadcast days and mass media print days, where big was all that mattered. That's just not true now.

02:08:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the good news is they don't release numbers in the same way that we're used to seeing numbers for TV shows how many families watched or what the ratings were the share. The biggest title on Netflix in the first half of the year was the Night Agent, which I do recommend. Great show.

02:08:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I was about to say have you guys heard of this? I hadn't even heard of this. No, I had not heard of it. Nope, ah, it's good you like it. Leo, you were one of those hours.

02:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was one of the 812 million hours of viewing. That's how they released the number, which is Meaningless. Well, it's apples and oranges if you're talking about network television viewership. Season two of a show I have not heard of, ginny and Georgia, was second. Have you guys heard of Ginny and Georgia?

02:08:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Nope but this is what.

02:08:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jeff was saying is that Netflix is based on quantity. A tale, right yeah, 665 million hours. The Korean drama the Glory was third. Never heard of that.

02:09:05 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I have. I will say one thing that is very interesting about this is they say about 55% of viewing overall was for like originals Netflix originals and 45% was for licensed shows and films. Suits dominated the streaming charts for most of the summer and fall and had it combined, about 600 million hours of viewing worldwide on Netflix, which is fascinating to me, because I, for some reason, I noticed this. I didn't watch Suits, but it suddenly seemed like everyone I knew this fall was watching Suits.

02:09:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, which is weird because it's an older show.

02:09:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Was that because of the?

02:09:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
princess. No, it's because I asked some friends and they said it was just the first thing on Netflix, like every single day for a month. Yeah, it was up at the top. I think it was initially because of Meghan Markle.

02:09:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tried, but I don't like that one. But you clicked, I clicked. I watched the first.

02:09:54 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I think I watched an episode. Oh yeah, this is how he buys stuff on Instagram. He's a, he's a, a sob.

02:10:00 - Paris Martineau (Host)
He's a clicker.

02:10:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm a clicker, don't click. So the by the way, the number four show, which I did like a lot, was called Wednesday. You remember that that was a great show 500 million hours of viewing not as much as suits Is that the Wednesday Adams one. Yeah, oh okay. Not the third day of the week.

02:10:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Listen, I thought maybe they really went in a deep dive about the third day of the week.

02:10:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bridgeton Queen Charlotte was fifth. You season four was sixth.

02:10:31 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The Reina Downsource. I didn't watch a single thing on this list until you get down to diplomat, isn't that interesting Diploma was very good.

02:10:38 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I haven't seen a single thing. Oh wait, no, I saw Love is Blind, season four. Other than that, I've seen nothing on this list.

02:10:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a reality show where you have to date?

02:10:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
somebody without seeing them. It is and listen. Yes, and my explanation is not gonna make this sound any cooler I watched it. Okay, if you're Netflix, if you work at Netflix, turn off your ears. I watched this. There is a podcast I listened to. I don't really watch the Bachelor, but I've gotten really into this podcast called Game of Roses that analyzes the Bachelor like a sport. They specifically try to money ball.

02:11:13 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Even though you don't watch the Bachelor, you've been fascinated. No, I don't.

02:11:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I'm fascinated by these people analyzing the episodes and analyzing reality TV as a genre in the same way that popular American sports are, and one of the hosts did a breakdown on their Patreon of Love is Blind season four, kind of Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, where it's like picture in picture and he kept stopping it to comment on the different plays. I mean, part of being on reality TV is figuring out how to play the game correctly to both appeal to the audience that's watching but then also make smart moves at the producers. So I watched Love is Blind season four, but not on Netflix. I watched it on a weird Patreon Mystery Science Theater 3000 stream. I don't know if they get credit for that. They don't they don't.

02:12:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's just terrible, don't stop at Netflix.

02:12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, other stories, let's see. The CEO of Sports Illustrated was fired. I know him.

02:12:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
The parent company over it.

02:12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is he a fall guy on this or did he really? I think so. I think so he fired him because, I mean, it was a stupid move, because they it's really stupid.

02:12:33 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They had a company. It's like they connected the same thing. They had a company produce reviews for them. Now wouldn't you think a review should be done by a human being who makes a judgment? No, it's just generic crap content. They're going to turn out they don't not only made up reviews supposedly, but also the authors didn't really exist. So it was a lie to the public and these were purchased.

02:12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They weren't from Sports Illustrated. They were purchased content to run in the Sports Illustrated website.

02:12:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I had somebody from another company say when I complained about the AI use you don't understand, jeff. We're in a war out here with reviews that you're trying to get the SEO for these air quotes reviews.

02:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a crap review or a meaningless review, of course. But somebody's going to be typing like I was looking for reviews of killers of the flower moon and it's there, so I'll click it and they get the click, they get the view. It doesn't matter if the review doesn't even talk about it.

02:13:26 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They want a full Google. It's a machine for a machine. They want SEO and they want algorithm love in social as well.

02:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like getting fired for running out brain content. To be honest, the third party company At least you get money from out brain. The third party company that made these, yes.

02:13:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Were these reviews of products or they have content like movies and things like that.

02:13:51 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I don't know, to be honest.

02:13:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Because if they were reviews of products, I think that's-. I think there are products Because, like we're, talking about the thing that they're optimizing for is they want to get the click through so that they then get a portion of whatever.

02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The affiliate fees? Yeah, I think so, because it says these were commerce articles which sounds to me like they're products Product reviews.

02:14:14 - Paris Martineau (Host)
A dark and concerning part of the quote unquote journalism industry.

02:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They came from a company called AdVon ADVO on commerce Vomit. Yeah, they are AI written and they're really. They're just link bait, that's all. They are Written by non-existent writers with AI generated profile pictures.

02:14:35 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
But arena group, which publishes it was futuristic Sports illustrated fired the Ross Levinson, the CEO, for doing it. And go on. It's kind of a same guy. Who's now in charge? Keep going, keep going. Who's in charge?

02:14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maja Minaj Bargava will serve as arena group.

02:14:49 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
What does he do?

02:14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's the interim chief executive officer?

02:14:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Listen, so do they went and did they hire the former editor of sports illustrated? Did they hire a former CEO? They hired a money person. Did they hire somebody? Yeah, no. What does he do? No, no, no, keep going. What does he do? Search his name? Oh, okay.

02:15:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's known for he's known. Let's see what he's known for he's an energy drink guy.

02:15:09 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He what? Yes, not a journalist That'll solve our PR problem. He's an.

02:15:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Indian-American businessman and philanthropist, founder and CEO of Innovations Ventures known for producing the five hour energy drink. There it is.

02:15:23 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, that's a guy you want in charge of your editorial content. That's gonna be everything. Responsible is fine. I am sure he's a very nice guy, but why did they fire Levenson and put him in? What were they trying to say? The problem is that when Time Warner and all that broke up, nobody wanted the magazine company and so, one by one, it was split off. Time went to Salesforce, fortune went to a tech, to a Thai businessman. And.

02:15:52
Sports Illustrated went to a cheap marketing company which is what this is and then the rest got sold to Meredith and Meredith got sold to Dot Dash, and so it so happens that I have a magazine now. Now as an elegy to the magazine, because it's really sad stuff happening. It is sad. Magazines are actually dying faster before our eyes than newspapers.

02:16:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, All because of the internet.

02:16:16 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And they didn't keep up. They didn't know what to do. The advertising market. I mean who wants to buy Time? You don't need a general interest publication. Vogue used to be this thick in September. Now it's getting thin enough to shave with Bloomberg Business Week just went from weekly to monthly. Monthly, really Bloomberg Business Month, which is devastating, which is debatable Biodiversity.

02:16:36 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Biodiversity yeah.

02:16:39 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Popular Science is dead completely now.

02:16:42 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Why are just laid off like 20 people from their features? Desk science, desk print web.

02:16:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Magazines are dying right now, before our very eyes, because they depended upon thinking that they had high value content for subscriptions and high value audience to advertisers. And neither is valuable anymore, because what I already argue in my book magazine on sale now is that they missed the opportunity to understand that they were actually communities Like this. Like Twitter.

02:17:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, honestly, what's happening in media is happening in podcasting, it's happening. You said it last week Agencies, ad buyers, are driven by fads. What's the next new thing? And it's happening so fast, it's cycling so fast now that you know it'll be influencers and YouTube next year and it'll be something else the year after. My son Leapfrog smart from TikTok to Instagram. I keep telling him keep leaping, because everything's moving.

02:17:47 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
How did the?

02:17:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cheetos hour ago. I don't know, but I'm excited my Cheetos Duster arrived today. I can't wait to go home and use it.

02:17:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wait, did you say Cheetos Duster?

02:17:56 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yeah, I have a Dodge car, a Dodge painted Cheetos board as in a like a large coat that is Cheetos, it sounds like that.

02:18:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's not. It's just basically one of those magic bullet things. You know that.

02:18:09 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh my God, I want a Cheetos brand Duster the oh, that would be cool.

02:18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The piece of clothing, now, that would be very cool.

02:18:16 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Cheetos get in my DM.

02:18:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, thanks.

02:18:20 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Hey, did you ever get the TWA stuff?

02:18:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they said they're going to send it to us hey.

02:18:28 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Hey, we're space agent here and as Lisa pointed out, they didn't want to give us a image, wanted us to mention on the show again, because Paris mentioned the TWA hotel and they were going to send us swag and they didn't.

02:18:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Lisa was onto this she caught on.

02:18:42
She knew. She knew. Here is the Henry Laporte Cheetos stream from last week on Amazon and he had deals. He had deals on the Cheeto Duster. He was. He was selling the Cheeto Duster. It's basically home shopping. He made three dishes with Cheetos, including Cheetos, caramel, popcorn Cheetos, cheetos, tamales Look, he's taken tamales and he's taken Flamin Hot Cheetos and he's done, he's dusted them in the Cheetos Duster and then he's drizzling the Cheetos dust on the tamales. Anyway, I thought I would, just I thought I would buy. I just ended up buying it just to support the lad. A fine Cheetos Duster and I'm told it arrived today.

02:19:36
So look it comes with fingerprints pre fingerprinted perfecting Cheetos dust.

02:19:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I guess I'll have to buy. I think it does, is it? It grinds up the Cheetos or anything in the dust Cheeto grinder.

02:19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all it does. So you can. You can Cheeto anything, yeah, and you probably don't want to use it for anything else. Once you use it for Cheetos Pretty much maintains the Cheeto Tang forever after. So you want a dedicated Cheetos Duster, I think he did a good job.

02:20:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They got to get on that large coat.

02:20:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am so proud of my son, the Cheetos guy. All right, what else I think we can. We can wrap her up here. There is a change log, but I think, oh, google, google Maps is doing more stuff.

02:20:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Really.

02:20:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it. Oh, my God Huge.

02:20:33
I was always wondering when they were going to do that. They're going to do more stuff, and it's good stuff. Press the blue dot Our show today. We're going to get your pics in just a second. Wrap this up Our show today, brought to you by the.

02:20:45
I got a text from somebody the other day. He said you know, of all the advertisers you've talked about on the show, I love Fast Mail. I've been looking for a email provider and I am so happy, so happy, that I switched to Fast Mail. If you're using free email and almost everybody is right, everybody's using Gmail or Outlookcom or Yahoo. I still get emails from people with AOL and EarthLink subscriptions. If you're using free email or, worse, isp-based email, they're spying on you, they're monetizing you, they're showing you ads. You want to go. If you're not the customer, you're the product. That's why, if you're not paying, they're going to take money out of your hide somehow. That's why you want Fast Mail. But I got to tell you it's inexpensive. It's those $3 a month.

02:21:36
You get the best email service and you can have your own domain. If you're a business and you still get an email at gmailcom, that's just not professional seeming. You want to have an email domain. Fast Mail sells domains. You can buy the domains or you can bring your own domain name over. That's what I do with almost all my domain names. So I still have a website, say at leofm, but I have the email hosted by Fast Mail Very easy to set up. That way, when somebody sends me email to my website, I get it through Fast Mail. Fast Mail also allows you to create masked email addresses. If you use Bitwarden or OnePassword, you can actually create unique custom email addresses for every login, along with a unique custom password, doubling your security, because nobody can guess it. It's completely random, but it still comes to you. It's so brilliant. The Fast Mail server is a real IMAP server. In fact, they use the open source Cyrus server. They contribute back to that project, by the way. They're good citizens of the open source community. It works with everything you're already using, so if you're using an application on your phone or on your desktop Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook it'll work just fine with that.

02:22:57
I know a lot of people like web-based mail. You're not giving that up Either. Fast Mail has an excellent web mail. In fact, with Fast Mail's web mail, you can customize your workflow with colors, swipes, there's night mode for you, paris. There's day mode for you, jeff. There's quick settings. In fact, the quick settings are great because you can switch modes without leaving the Fast Mail screen.

02:23:20
You know you're looking at your mail and you just go oh this is too bright, turn it down. And you could do that right there. It will auto-save contacts if you want. I turn that on because then if I send email to somebody, automatically, their email is no longer sent to spam because it's somebody. I'm having a conversation with you that uses Gravatar to put public images in so you can see what people look like as you're emailing them. They have a great iOS app. I use that instead of Apple's app. They have a great Android app. I use that instead of Gmail or any other Apple or Samsung mail. It's just fantastic.

02:23:55
For 20 years, fast Mail has been a leader in email, email privacy. They work for you as customers people to be cared for, not a product to be exploited. Better spam filters, of course, no ads, superior productivity. It's easy to move. You can download your old data, import it into your new Fast Mail inbox or automatically fetch your mail or have your mail forwarded, so you can keep that old address for a while, as long as you want and so that you don't miss any mail. Slowly move over to Fast Mail. I can go on and on. In fact, I have Just go. Do me a favor, reclaim your privacy. Reclaim your privacy, boost your productivity with Fast Mail. You can try it now free for 30 days.

02:24:41
Fastmailcom slash Twitter. I've been a Fast Mail customer for more than a decade. I moved over from Gmail and I just, I just love it. Fastmailcom slash Twitter. Scriptability alone makes it worth it, because I can. I have hundreds of folders, mail is automatically sorted for me. I never miss an email. I never have a false positive on spam. That's just great. Fastmailcom slash Twitter. Make email yours, thank you. Cessna says I use Fast Mail because of Leo, thank you. I see I talk to people all the time. It actually is almost a litmus test for geekery. You ask somebody what your email provider is and if they say Fast Mail, you know. They know what they're doing. They know what they're talking about. Paris, do you have a thing? By the way, I've been running WeCroak your thing on the phone and it keeps telling me.

02:25:35
I'm gonna die.

02:25:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It does that five times a day, five times a day. You gotta remember.

02:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good, it's good. I haven't gone to a cemetery yet to sit in somebody's grave, but I will be doing.

02:25:47 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Listen, you got until Sunday.

02:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do, I do. That was a good, it was a really good pick.

02:25:53 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Thank you, thank you Pickwise One is Variety just published this article this week about drop out the kind of indie streaming service I think that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. Their CEO spoke Variety about the insane year that they've had and they have. This is a company that you know started from basically nothing when IAC dropped them. It used to be College Humor.

02:26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh it was College Humor In the last year. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:26:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They have doubled their streaming subscribers to meet the mid. They're in the mid six figures right now. They did this by just kind of like doubling down on their like their Dungeons and Dragons actual play content.

02:26:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're a dimension 20 fan, aren't you?

02:26:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I think you are. I'm a big fan of that. They have a variety of different improv based shows, but this year they were not only profitable, but they're profitable enough that they've done profit sharing with all of their employees and anyone who's like ever worked for them this year. That's fantastic.

02:26:53
And so they're. You know they've got 17 full time staffers. They said they're planning and expanding next year and releasing a bunch of new shows. It's just a really great article at and a fantastic look at an indie media company that is thriving, which is so rare in this day.

02:27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they at support? Oh, it's subscription.

02:27:17 - Paris Martineau (Host)
No, it's subscription. That's why and they were able to really take off because one. I mean, they started with just kind of a very niche content that they were producing and they were just really producing this, you know, dimension 20, a Dungeons and Dragons show during the pandemic, as well as a couple of other kind of game shows with improvisers. They did over Zoom, but they found a lot of success over some of their. If you look them up on TikTok or YouTube shorts, they found incredible success because some of their improv based shows translate really well to being short little clips and have gone so phenomenally viral. They said that a lot of their now hundreds of thousands of subscribers have come from that, which is, you know, a really great story in this terrible time it is, and they were smart to start from the beginning with subscribers.

02:28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess they have roughly the same number of subscribers as we have viewers, and we know if we could monetize everyone who watches our shows, we'd be launching game shows too. I've been doing all sorts of stuff that's really cool. Good for them. I wondered what happened to College Humor. I loved College Humor.

02:28:37 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I mean, what happened was right before the pandemic struck. They fired IAC, fired everybody. Wow, this guy, the CEO, sam Reich, ended up getting the company from IAC, I think for free or a nominal amount took over Good for him. The company went from 105 people to seven overnight, and then the pandemic struck, and so they just tried treading water for about eight months and have been on the ups and downs.

02:29:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they produce all their shows in-house or do they buy content? They do, they do.

02:29:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They produce it all in-house and I think the thing that has really helped is it's all like improv based comedy rather than scripted. So the costs are they obviously still pay writers and stuff and are pretty transparent about their cost structures, but they've been able to kind of make it work as a business model.

02:29:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very interesting the magic improv. Yes.

02:29:38 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's honestly fantastic. They had Wayne Brady on one of their shows recently and he's like you guys are the second coming of Whose Line?

02:29:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Whose Line is it? Anyway, I was saying it was a great show, so highly recommend it.

02:29:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
They've got some stuff on YouTube as well. My other pick is a video game that came out like four years ago, so it's not new, but it's new to me. I recently started playing Outer Wilds, which I'd highly recommend for anyone who's not a real gamer. It is a kind of fun mystery game. You're a, I guess, like a member of some alien race. You're essentially a spacer. You're going to be launched up in space. It's a thing that people in your society do. You can go explore kind of like these different worlds around it, but there's kind of a mystery afoot and you've got to try and figure out what's going on. But the interesting hook of this game is that part of the mystery is you're stuck in a time loop. So, like every, you wake up, you get in your little rocket and then, after 22 minutes of playing the game, the sun explodes. You have to do it all over again.

02:30:47
And so you've got to figure out what's happening with that, but it's a really interesting mechanic because, I mean, I'm not a particularly dexterous gamer. There's a reason why I like turn-based stuff. I'm not super great at, you know, moving, so you have to like fly a rocket through this, and probably my first 10 loops I just crashed into the sun or something. It was deeply embarrassing, but it doesn't matter, because death doesn't matter in this game, because it just starts all over we all start over, as Paris would say nothing matters.

02:31:16
It's true nothing matters, guys, so it's a really great game.

02:31:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks kind of like no Man's Sky, with a plot which is, I think, a very good concept. It's really neat.

02:31:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It's gorgeous. They have like all these different worlds that you can go to that have very different physics, like gravity, you know, as well as like a strange, like ecosystems. I highly recommend it.

02:31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice and it's on Steam PS4, ps5, xbox Switch. Do you play it on your Switch?

02:31:49 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Um no, I've been playing it on my Steam Deck.

02:31:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steam Deck. That's right, you have a Steam Deck, I forgot.

02:31:54 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, my Switch has been relegated to the cabinet since.

02:31:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got the deck. Oh no, it's fine Ported or Switchy, it's hard, jeff Jarvis number of the week.

02:32:04 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I think we should. I'm gonna mention two things real fast. Not good, but just follow us from last week, apple cut off Beeper Mini, which we talked about last week, and then they came back and now they're gonna cut it off again.

02:32:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So who knows what that's gonna look like I'm using it right now and it works. And then the other thing to mention it's a cat and mouse game. That's very interesting.

02:32:21 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Exactly, yeah, so Zach threaded today, whatever the verb is, that they are starting to test Federation at least one way. Oh, activity problem.

02:32:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Line 88. Oh now we run a master on a Twitter social. I would love to.

02:32:38 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
You're not gonna be able to publish from Twitter social On the threads. At first it's the opposite. That's fine. Export your your social graph yet, but we've got toward.

02:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Federation Us access to people who are only on threads. Their content could live on, that's what we seem.

02:32:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They're gonna do very slowly, wow, but I thought that was worth mentioning. And then we can do the year in search, because the year is coming toward then.

02:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I love that Google does that every year.

02:33:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They used to call it Zykes, and then they also did it, yeah, and they also did it for the years past. So this year, a lot of the people I have no idea who they are. I'm that old, so, Mar-Hamlin.

02:33:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
DeMar Hamlin is a football player who almost died in the field. Jeremy Renner got eaten by a snow plow. He's a famous movie and TV star. And you're Tate. We don't want to talk about him, although he's back on Twitter along with Alex Jones, and in fact, elon had his spaces with the two of them.

02:33:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And a presidential candidate who peed while on the show what he said.

02:33:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He announced it. I'm peeing. No people heard him.

02:33:52 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
He was peeing. He didn't mute himself. He forgot to mute himself. What? Which presidential candidate?

02:33:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

02:33:58 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Yes, which one? Yes, Vivek Ramaslamis. Oh, on the first guess.

02:34:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What an unbelievable. You know what he might have done that on purpose it's a good show To show dominance. Yeah, to show dominance.

02:34:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You have to pee on the strings.

02:34:14 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That's what we do with our organs. Yes, who's?

02:34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kylie and Mbappe. I don't know that Keeley and Mbappe. Do you know that, Benito? I do not. It sounds like an athlete, maybe. Yeah, it might be an athlete. Travis Kelsey is Everything is a Travis Kelsey.

02:34:26 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
even I know, Even you know that.

02:34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's global. This is. I always love this. Games Hogwarts Legacy number one. That's just what happened to that. That fell off the face of the earth real quick. Last of us Connections, battlegrounds, mobile India and Starfield for recipes. I like seeing B B Mbappe right at the top there. Musicians Shakira why Shakira? Jason Aldean, joe Jonas, smash Mouth. You're still on global right. Yeah, should I go to the U S? We have a global audience I don't see it in the list. Oh, we were not in. We don't have that information.

02:35:03 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
There it is, there it is.

02:35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
U S not included.

02:35:07 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
There, it is Very similar. We have Tucker Carlson and Lil Tay, oh there.

02:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God the Warren, Israel and Gaza, of course number one, right above the Titanic. Submarine who?

02:35:23 - Paris Martineau (Host)
was searching for Lil Tay in 2023?.

02:35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did he die? I always think, that must be.

02:35:30 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, was that? There was a time I guess that must have been this year where Lil Tay was announced to be dead, but she wasn't. It was a hoax.

02:35:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why. That's why, yeah, it was a hoax.

02:35:44 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
So it might be more interesting if you go back to the rundown. The next line is from 1999 through today, the Trends Time Capsule. So if you go down in the Trends Time Capsule, oh, we should have done the quiz Shoot.

02:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, we can maybe make that be a twig extra.

02:36:01 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It wasn't over all time. We can do the twig after.

02:36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to do the twig after show? We'll do the quiz.

02:36:06 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
All right, so go down to TV shows for example yeah, ok, this is not reality.

02:36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going down down the other way, the other way. What's the alphabet S-T-O-K-R there? Tv shows yeah, 1999, and then oh Simpsons took a plunge. Wow, this is interesting 2006,.

02:36:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
they lost out to Lost yeah.

02:36:28 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, and then Prison Break Come on for the win in 2007 and 2008. Yeah, and the Simpsons back and glee Then, glee Then.

02:36:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones Walking through five years. Big run, big run. Wow, this is fun. This is fun. Wednesday I don't know what that is. Last of us. Those are newer.

02:36:50 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
That says a lot about the state of TV today.

02:36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Is it the number one show? We don't know. Yeah, it's fragmented Fun. This is really cool. All right, maybe after we wrap this up we'll do a for the club. We'll do Take the Quiz in the Trends time cap these.

02:37:08 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Google Trends thing is so interesting, Isn't it? And go down and it has one, I mean the US one, and under the subheading how often? I guess it's the questions that begin with how often people search. Number one is how often do you think about the Roman Empire?

02:37:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was of course a TikTok trend.

02:37:26 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yep, that's good, that's good when you ask men how often they think about the Roman Empire.

02:37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I haven't thought about it until now. Number five is how often?

02:37:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
do trains derail, which is?

02:37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, that's a common. How often search? Huh? All right, here we go. Recipe number one Grimace Shake. Number two Lasagna.

02:37:46 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Soup, you guys know what the Grimace?

02:37:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shake is yeah, it's a McDonald's right.

02:37:51 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, it's a McDonald's shake based on Grimace the McDonald's guy, but it became a big online name.

02:37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it was a. Thing. It was a thing.

02:38:01 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Online. Did you look at the menu for Cosmics when? What? Cosmicscom, cos, mcs this is McDonald's new shave. They're trying to start. They're trying to fight Starbucks. Oh, what is Diabetes?

02:38:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
COS MCScom, but what is so? It's a McDonald's the menu, but it's Well it's only drive through, they only have one.

02:38:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
And it's only drinks. Well, no, it's not only. Go to the menu, Go up the guy oh my God, this is diabetes in a. Explore, follow Exactly, explore full menu. They don't have hamburgers. There's no hamburgers. Oh, sour cherry, energy bust, don't drink this crap. A cursed sour tango lemonade.

02:38:43 - Paris Martineau (Host)
OK, wait, Speaking of crap. Do you guys know about the Panera lemonade that kills you?

02:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I've heard.

02:38:50 - Paris Martineau (Host)
I've heard, but tell me, tell me. I mean, I've heard people say that Does it actually kill you. There is a Panera bread lemonade that they had have, I guess, so-called the charge. Lemonade Comes in a bunch of different flavors. Is it alcoholic that has? I believe it has 390 milligrams of caffeine in it. Oh, which is an insane amount of caffeine. I think this is the large size.

02:39:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's like two cups of coffee, yeah.

02:39:18 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I can't have any caffeine and I would know If I went. I like lemonade, that's all I drink is lemonade, because I don't have caffeine. I can't have coke anymore. If I went there, it would kill me.

02:39:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It actually has more caffeine than a Red Bull or a Monster Energy drink, but not quite as much as the Dunkin' Donuts. And whatever bang is, don't drink it.

02:39:41 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Don't drink the bang.

02:39:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it's got 20 milligrams of caffeine per ounce. So I mean, really people died of cardiac arrest from drinking it.

02:39:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah, I mean ostensibly to, Because it's free-requests. The people who died had heart issues.

02:39:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
They drank 12 of them. They were sitting there all day. This is good, it is true.

02:40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The physicians recommend that you consume no more than 400 milligrams of grams of caffeine a day, which is four or five grams of coffee.

02:40:12 - Paris Martineau (Host)
So that would be one big canary lemonade.

02:40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is 390. So have two and you're dead.

02:40:20 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Yeah. And so it's become a big thing online, because the idea of a lemonade that kills you is quite funny.

02:40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But not nearly as funny, the carousel's nihilistic as a signature galactic boost from Cosmix Mm-mm-mm. Oh, they do have some food.

02:40:39 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Wait, jeff. Why do we hate this? Why do we hate Cosmix?

02:40:43 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Because Because it's going to. It's going to make America obesity even worse. They sell mixed poops.

02:40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's good. It looks like mixed poop too. Ok, Caramel fudge brown. Oh, this is sugar.

02:40:59 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I hate hazelnut coffee. This is sugar shack. This is sugar shack.

02:41:03 - Paris Martineau (Host)
You hate hazelnut. Oh yeah, that is the worst take you've ever had on this show.

02:41:08 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Hot take.

02:41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When.

02:41:10 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
I.

02:41:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate sugar.

02:41:12 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
When I was the boss in the entertainment weekly, I urged people not to buy hazelnut coffee and bring it into my office. I did what. The smell.

02:41:21 - Paris Martineau (Host)
The smell is pretty strong, ok, the smell of hazelnut coffee is the best part, though I'm not a flavored coffee fan, but I will huff hazelnut coffee. Sent anything Good, it's nutty Paris, the hazelnut huffer.

02:41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huffin hazelnut coffee. Thank you, Paris Martino. She's writing. She's got a whole wall taken over as she writes a massive article. For the information you must subscribe to readittheinformationcom.

02:41:52 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Thanks guys. This was you know. Why would you do the show so that you have to listen to the very end to get with the show? Title means yes. That's how we tell if you're a true listener?

02:42:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, if you're yes, and you know that you have to listen because you've got to know why. Why are they talking about huffing hazelnut coffee?

02:42:10 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Everyone's asking this.

02:42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jeff Jarvis. He's the director, for one more day, of the Town Night Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University. How should we introduce you next week?

02:42:25 - Jeff Jarvis (Host)
Well, I will be all of this, actually, until next August. I'll be the lead, and then you add one more word after that Emeritus, emeritus.

02:42:34 - Paris Martineau (Host)
It could be like a very tiny one. It could be the Craig Craig, Craig Newmark, Emeritus, Emeritus.

02:42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can we get a new Craig Newmark with the word emeritus? That's the end, emeritus. You know, like the jingle singers, where they do the, they call them shout jingles. It's time for Leo Laporte in the morning and Is that what they do?

02:43:01
They're called shout jingles. I actually had one. It went build your own radio network. You've always wanted to build your own radio network. Clock FM is you Leo Laporte? Because they didn't want to pay for the singers to sing your name. So it was very quick and easy for them. They just go now shout Wait, Jeff Jarvis, jeff Jarvis Now shout Paris Martino, paris Martino. And they have the same jingle and they just shout.

02:43:31 - Paris Martineau (Host)
Oh, cheap, jingles is what it was yeah.

02:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I still had my jingles. I wish you did, it'd be fun. Yeah, in the old days we didn't save stuff as much. Thank you Paris, thank you Jeff, thank you all for listening. We do this week in Google Every Wednesday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. The live stream starts at the beginning of the show on YouTube, twitter, youtubecom, slash twit and ends when the show ends. But for those of you in the club, the Google Trends quiz is coming up next. After the fact, you can get the show at twittv slash twig.

02:44:13
There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the edited versions of the show. Great for sharing with others. Please do let others know about the show. It helps us. And, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically the minute it's available. Have a wonderful week, everybody. We will be back next week with our last show of the year on December 20th, and then it's a best of on the 27th and then back in the saddle January 3rd. That's the schedule ahead. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time on this Week in Google.